Part 41 (1/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: The hoplites carried her to the bed.]

She answered:

”No.”

He touched her knees and asked her:

”Do you feel anything?”

She made a sign to him that she felt nothing, and suddenly, with a movement of her mouth and shoulders (for her very hands were dead), seized with a supreme frenzy of pa.s.sion, and perhaps with regret, at this sterile hour, she raised herself towards Demetrios, but before he could answer she fell back lifeless, with the light for ever gone from out of her eyes.

Then the executioner covered her face with the upper folds of her garment: and one of the a.s.sistant soldiers, supposing that a more tender past had once united this young man and woman, severed with his sword the uttermost lock of her hair, and it fell down upon the paving-stones.

Demetrios took it in his hand, and in truth it was Chrysis in her entirety, the gold that survived her beauty, the very pretext of her name . . .

He took the warm lock between his thumb and his fingers, severed the strands slowly, dropped them to the-earth, and ground them into the dust under the sole of his shoe.

III

CHRYSIS IMMORTAL

When Demetrios found himself alone in his red studio, littered with marble statuary, rough models, trestles, and scaffoldings, he endeavoured to apply himself once more to his work.

With his chisel in his left hand and his mallet in his right, he resumed, but without ardour, an interrupted rough study. It was the breast and shoulders of a gigantic horse intended for the temple of Poseidon. Under the close-cropped mane, the skin of the neck, puckered by a movement of the head, curved in geometrically like an undulating marine basin.

Three days before, the details of this regular muscular arrangement had entirely absorbed all Demetrios's interest; but on the morning of the death of Chrysis, the aspect of things seemed changed. Less calm than he could have wished, Demetrios could not succeed in fixing his preoccupied thoughts. A sort of veil which he could not lift interposed itself between him and the marble. He throw down his mallet and began to pace about amongst the dusty pedestals.

Suddenly he crossed the court, called a slave, and said to her:

”Prepare the piscina and the aromatics. Bathe me and perfume me, give me my white garments, and light the round perfume-pans.”

When he had finished his toilette, he summoned two other slaves.

”Go,” said he, ”to the Queen's prison; hand the gaoler this lump of potter's earth, and tell him to place it in the death-chamber of Chrysis the courtesan. If the body has not already been thrown into the dungeon, charge him to take no action until he receives my orders. Go quickly.”

He put a roughing-chisel into the fold of his girdle and opened the princ.i.p.al door which gave upon the deserted avenue of the Dromos.

Suddenly he halted on the threshold, stupefied by the immense midday light of Africa.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The street was certainly white and the houses white too, but the flame of the perpendicular sunbeams bathed the gleaming surfaces with such a fury of reflections that the limestone walls and the pavements danced with prodigious incandescence in dark blue, red, green, raw ochre, and hyacinth. Great palpitating pillars of colour seemed to hang in the air and to be superimposed in transparent ma.s.ses over the s.h.i.+mmering, flaming facades. The very lines of the houses lost their shape behind this dazzling magnificence; the right wall of the street rounded off dimly into s.p.a.ce, floated like a piece of drapery, and in certain places became invisible. A dog lying near a street-post was literally bathed in crimson.