Part 9 (1/2)
”It is horrible!” she protested. ”And I tell you, once and for all, that I will have nothing to do with the affair.”
”You're a fool!” he cried roughly.
”True! I am, or I would never have fallen thus into the trap you and your friends baited so cunningly.”
”You are beautiful!” he answered, with a harsh laugh. ”A beautiful woman is always a safe trap for fools.”
”If men admire me I cannot help it; if they love me then it is against my wish, for since that day long ago, when the Spirit of Evil entered into me, love has known no place in my heart.”
”Well spoken!” he exclaimed. ”If you have no love for him the rest is quite easy.”
”Though all love within me is dead, I yet have a woman's heart, and womanly feeling,” she said. ”I know that my beauty is only a curse; I am well aware that men who have admired me have been drawn irresistibly to their doom. Ah!” and she shuddered in shame, ”it is terrible-- terrible!”
”Yet why should you regret?” he queried. ”You are not of their world; you have nothing in common with them. You have been given beauty, the most marvellous, perhaps, in all the world; diabolic beauty, which causes you to be remarked wherever you go; which has caused the downfall of the upright, and has wrecked the lives of those who trust in the guardian Spirit of Good.”
”Yes, I know,” she answered quickly. ”Yet I am tired of it all. I am aware that my power for the working of evil among my fellow-creatures is greater than that of any other person of flesh and blood; that at my touch objects held sacred are defiled and consumed, that sight of my face may cause a veritable saint to turn from his asceticism and become an evil-doer. All this I know, alas! All this is due to the influence of evil, which once I might have striven against, had I wished.”
”You possess the _beaute du Diable_,” he said. ”Are you not the daughter of Satan?”
”If I am I decline to commit any further crime at your bidding,” she answered, with indignation. ”You have held me enthralled until now, but I tell you that you have strained the bond until it will ere long break.
Then I shall be free.”
”I'm pleased that you have such pleasant antic.i.p.ations,” he replied. ”A woman who once gives herself over to the Evil One can never regain her freedom.”
”But she can refuse to increase the enormity of her sin by committing crime at the bidding of the man who holds her beneath his thrall,” she answered.
”You know what such refusal means?” he said in a threatening tone.
”Yes--death. Well, I do not fear it. Within me a new love has been awakened. I now love for the first time in all my life.”
”Yet you have already said that in your heart love knows no place.”
”I tell you I love him!” she cried. ”He shall not suffer!”
She was evidently referring to me. I held my breath, eager to catch every syllable. Perhaps this man was urging her to kill me!
”The power you possess to work evil is irresistible,” he said briefly.
”Alas! I know it,” she answered. ”Those with whom I am in daily contact little dream of who or what I really am, or they would shun me as they would shun a leper.”
”Why should they?” her bony-faced companion asked. ”Evil has been dominant in the world for all ages, and the Prince of Darkness has still the ascendency!”
”But is not mine the blackest--the foulest of all crimes?” she shuddered.
”Only one touch,” he urged. ”Your hand is fatal.”
”Ah! why do you taunt me thus?” she cried. ”Is it not enough that I should be degraded and outcast, overburdened by sin for which I cannot hope for forgiveness, and that my position should be irretrievably lost?
Is it not enough that in me all the evils of the world are concentrated, and that I am shut out from happiness for ever?”