Part 3 (1/2)
”What was it--a dagger--a staff?”
”A serpent.”
Renfrew could not repress an exclamation.
”Very large and striped. Its skin was like shot silk in the moonlight.
It writhed softly between his hands, and turned its flat head from side to side. It seemed to be trying to bend down towards where I lay. Its tongue shot out like a length of riband out of one of those wooden winders that you buy in cheap shops. I should think its body was quite five feet long, and its colour seemed to change as it turned about.
Sometimes it was pink, then it looked dull green and almost black. Once it wriggled down so near to the ground that I could see two fangs in its open mouth like hooks, and the roof of its mouth was flesh colour.”
”How abominable!” said Renfrew, softly.
”I didn't feel it so at all,” Claire said. ”I wanted it to come to me,--back into the gra.s.s where such things are safe. But the man wouldn't let it go. He thrust it into his breast. He wanted to have his hands free.”
”Good G.o.d, Claire--what for? Did he--?”
She smiled at his sudden violence, which showed his interest.
”When the snake was safe, he drew out, still smiling and listening, a little pipe that looked as if it were made of straw, very common and dirty. He held it up to his black lips, and began to play very softly and sleepily. Desmond, the tune he played was charmed. It was a tune composed--for--for--”
She broke off.
”You know the Pied Piper had his tune,” she said; ”the rats had to follow it. Well, this tune was for the serpents.”
”To charm them you mean?”
”Wisely--dangerously--almost irresistibly, perhaps in time, Desmond, quite, quite irresistibly. There is a music for all creatures, all reptiles, birds,--everything that lives; this was for the snakes.”
”Well, but, Claire, how did you know that?”
She looked at him with a sort of dull amus.e.m.e.nt and pity in her half-shut eyes.
”Shall I tell you?”
”Yes.”
”I knew it, because the tune charmed me, Desmond.”
”Ah, you are acting! I half suspected it from the first,” Renfrew exclaimed almost roughly.
He sat up as a man who has been lying under a spell stirs when the spell is broken. Now he knew that his pipe was out, and he felt for his match-box. But Claire still kept her eyes fixed on him, and laid her hand on his arm gently.
”No, I am not acting,” she said. ”The tune charmed me. You see I am a woman; and there are many women who feel at moments that what attracts some special creature, thing, of the so-called world without a soul, attracts them too. Some men can whistle a woman as they would a dog, can't they?”
”Perhaps.”
”Yes, and some men can charm a woman as they could charm a serpent.”
”I don't understand you, Claire.”
”You don't choose to. The animal is in us all, hidden deftly by Nature, the artful dodger of the scheme of creation, Desmond; and we know it when the right tune is played to summon it from its slumber in the nest of the human body. Only the right tune can waken it.”