Part 16 (1/2)

”By your destiny.”

”How know you that?”

”Because my destiny is interwoven with yours, Touni.”

”Is it my fate to die now?”

”It is your lot to die by my hand, on that bench.”

He seized her wrist.

”Demetrios!” she stammered, affrighted. ”I'll not shriek! I'll not call for aid! Only let me speak first!” She wiped the sweat from her brow.

”If death--should come from you--death will be sweet--for me. I accept it; I desire it, but hearken!”

Staggering from stone to stone, she led him away in the dark night of the woods.

”Since in your hands are all the gifts of the G.o.ds,” she continued, ”the first thrill of life and the final throb of agony, let both your palms, bestowing all they hold, be opened to my eyes, Demetrios. Give me the hand of Love as well as that of Death. If you do this, I die without regret.”

There was no reply in the vague look he gave her, but she thought she read the ”Yes” he had not uttered.

Transfigured a second time, she lifted towards him a new face, where desire, born again, drove, with the strength of desperation, all terror away.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Demetrios!” she stammered, affrighted.]

She spoke no more, but already between her lips that were never to close again, each breath she drew sang a soft song, as if she was beginning to feel the deepest voluptuousness of love before even being gripped in the conjunction she craved.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Nevertheless, she gained this supreme victory.

With one movement, she tore off her light tunic and rolled it up into a ball of muslin that she threw behind her, smiling with scarce a vestige of sadness. Her young and slender body was outstretched in such great and lively felicity that it was impossible for it not to be eternal, and as her preoccupied lover, who perhaps was merely anxiously hesitating, terminated the work of Love without beginning that of Death, she suddenly exclaimed:

”Ah! Kill me! Kill me, I say, Demetrios! Why do you tarry?”

He rose up a little, resting on his hands; looked once more at Touni, whose great eyes peered ecstatically in his face, from beneath him, and drawing out one of the long, golden hairpins that glittered behind her ears, he drove it deliberately home under her left breast.

IV

MOONLIGHT

Nevertheless, this woman would have given him her comb and her hair also, for love's sake.

If he did not ask for it, it was because he had scruples. Chrysis had very categorically demanded a crime, and not such or such old jewel stuck in a young woman's hair. That is why he considered it his duty to consent to bloodshed.

He might have reflected, too, that the vows one makes to women during the first heat of pa.s.sion may be forgotten in the interval without any great detriment to the moral worth of the lover who has sworn them, and that if ever this involuntary forgetfulness deserved to be excused it was certainly in a case where the life of another woman, a.s.suredly innocent, was also in the scales. But Demetrios did not trouble himself with this method of reasoning. The adventure upon which he was engaged seemed to him too curious to allow of his juggling away its violent incidents. He was afraid that, later on, he might regret having cut out of the plot a scene which, though short, was indispensable for the beauty of the ensemble. A feeble truckling to virtue is often all that is required to reduce a tragedy to the common-places of everyday existence. The death of Ca.s.sandra, he mused, is not absolutely necessary for the development of Agamemnon; but if it had not taken place, the whole Orestes Trilogy would have been spoilt.