Part 37 (1/2)
”What an idea!”
”No, I thought so. It is therefore out of pure cruelty that you incited me to ravish them at the price of the three crimes with which the whole town resounds to-day. Well, you are going to wear them.”
”What?”
”You must go into the little enclosed garden where the statue of the Stygian Hermes is. This place is always deserted, and you will run no risk of being disturbed. You will take off the G.o.d's left heel. The stone is broken, you will see. Then, in the interior of the pedestal, you will find Bacchis's mirror, and you will place it in your hand; you will find the great comb of Nitaoucrit, and will place it in your hair; you will find the seven pearl necklaces of the G.o.ddess Aphrodite, and you will put them on your neck. Thus adorned, beautiful Chrysis, you will go about the town. The crowd will deliver you to the Queen's soldiers, but you will have what you desired, and I will go and see you in your prison before sunrise.”
V
THE GARDEN OF HERMANUBIS
Chrysis's first impulse was to shrug her shoulders. She would not be so ingenuous as to keep her word.
The second was to go and see.
A rising curiosity impelled her toward the mysterious place where Demetrios had hidden the three criminal trophies. She wanted to take them, to touch them with her hands, to make them gleam in the sunlight, to possess them for an instant. It seemed to her that her victory would not be quite complete so long as she should not have seized the booty of her ambitions.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
As for Demetrios: she would find the means of recapturing him ultimately. How was it possible to believe that he had emanc.i.p.ated himself from her for ever? The pa.s.sion she attributed to him was not one of those that die out in a man's heart irrevocably. The women one has once greatly loved form a family of election in a man's hearts and the meeting with a former mistress, even though hated or forgotten, excites an unexpected disorder of the soul whence the new love may burst forth.
Chrysis was not ignorant of this. However ardent she might be herself, however anxious to conquer the first man she had ever loved, she was not mad enough to buy him at the cost of her life when she saw so many other methods of seducing him more simply.
And yet . . . what a blessed end he had proposed to her!
Under the eyes of an innumerable crowd, bear the antique mirror into which Sappho had gazed, the comb which had held in place the royal hair of Nitaoucrit, the necklace of marine pearls that had rolled in the sh.e.l.l of the G.o.ddess Anadyomene . . . Then, from the evening till the morning drink madly of all the sensations with which the wildest love can inspire a woman . . . and towards the middle of the day, die without effort . . . what an incomparable destiny!
She closed her eyes . . .
But no: she would not allow herself to be tempted.
She crossed Rhacotis and mounted the street which led in a straight line to the Great Serapeion. This road, constructed by the Greeks, seemed incongruous in this quarter of angular alleys. The two populations mingled oddly, in a promiscuity from which hatred was not absent.
Amongst the blue-s.h.i.+rted Egyptians, the unbleached tunics of the h.e.l.lenes made splashes of white. Chrysis mounted rapidly, without listening to the conversations in which the people discoursed of the crimes committed for her sake.
Before the steps of the monument, she turned to the right, took an obscure street, then another, the houses of which almost touched, crossed a little star-shaped square where two swarthy little girls were playing in a sunny fountain, and finally she stopped.
The garden of Hermes Anubis was a little necropolis long ago abandoned, a sort of no man's land to which parents no longer brought the libations to the dead, and that the pa.s.sers-by avoided. In the midst of the crumbling tombs, Chrysis advanced in the greatest silence, quaking with fear at every stone that clattered under her feet. The wind, always charged with fine sand, blew her hair over her temples and sent her veil of scarlet silk floating towards the white leaves of the sycamores.
She discovered the statue between three monuments that hid it on all sides and enclosed it in a triangle. The spot was well chosen for the concealment of a mortal secret.
Chrysis forced her way as best she could through the narrow, stony pa.s.sage; on seeing the statue she paled slightly.