She
terrified; since, say what she might in explanation, the sight
was an uncanny one—for her explanations were beyond the grasp of
our finite minds, and when they were stripped from the mists of
vague esoteric philosophy, and brought into conflict with the
cold and horrifying fact, did not do much to break its force. For
there, stretched upon the stone bier before us, robed in white
and perfectly preserved, was what appeared to be the body of Leo
Vincey. I stared from Leo, standing _there_ alive, to Leo lying
_there_ dead, and could see no difference; except, perhaps, that
the body on the bier looked older. Feature for feature they were
the same, even down to the crop of little golden curls, which was
Leo’s most uncommon beauty. It even seemed to me, as I looked,
that the expression on the dead man’s face resembled that which I
had sometimes seen upon Leo’s when he was plunged into profound
sleep. I can only sum up the closeness of the resemblance by
saying that I never saw twins so exactly similar as that dead and
living pair.
I turned to see what effect was produced upon Leo by the sight of
his dead self, and found it to be one of partial stupefaction. He
stood for two or three minutes staring, and said nothing, and
when at last he spoke it was only to ejaculate—
“Cover it up, and take me away.”
“Nay, wait, Kallikrates,” said Ayesha, who, standing with the
lamp raised above her head, flooding with its light her own rich
beauty and the cold wonder of the death-clothed form upon the
bier, resembled an inspired Sibyl rather than a woman, as she
rolled out her majestic sentences with a grandeur and a freedom
of utterance which I am, alas! quite unable to reproduce.
“Wait, I would show thee something, that no tittle of my crime
may be hidden from thee. Do thou, oh Holly, open the garment on
the breast of the dead Kallikrates, for perchance my lord may
fear to touch it himself.”
I obeyed with trembling hands. It seemed a desecration and an
unhallowed thing to touch that sleeping image of the live man by
my side. Presently his broad chest was bare, and there upon it,
right over the heart, was a wound, evidently inflicted with a
spear.
“Thou seest, Kallikrates,” she said. “Know then that it was _I_
who slew thee: in the Place of Life _I_ gave thee death. I slew
thee because of the Egyptian Amenartas, whom thou didst love, for
by her wiles she held thy heart, and her I could not smite as but
now I smote that woman, for she was too strong for me. In my
haste and bitter anger I slew thee, and now for all these days
have I lamented thee, and waited for thy coming. And thou hast
come, and none can stand between thee and me, and of a truth now
for death I will give thee life—not life eternal, for that none
can give, but life and youth that shall endure for thousands upon
thousands of years, and with it pomp, and power, and wealth, and
all things that are good and beautiful, such as have been to no
man before thee, nor shall be to any man who comes after. And now
one thing more, and thou shalt rest and make ready for the day of
thy new birth. Thou seest this body, which was thine own. For all
these centuries it hath been my cold comfort and my companion,
but now I need it no more, for I have thy living presence, and it
can but serve to stir up memories of that which I would fain
forget. Let it therefore go back to the dust from which I held
it.
“Behold! I have prepared against this happy hour!” And going to
the other shelf or stone ledge, which she said had served her for
a bed, she took from it a large vitrified double-handed vase, the
mouth of which was tied up with a bladder. This she loosed, and
then, having bent down and gently kissed the white forehead of
the dead man, she undid the vase, and sprinkled its contents
carefully over the form, taking, I observed, the greatest
precautions against any drop of them touching us or herself, and
then poured out what remained of the liquid upon the chest and
head. Instantly a dense vapour arose, and the cave was filled
with choking fumes that prevented us from seeing anything while
the deadly acid (for I presume it was some tremendous preparation
of that sort) did its work. From the spot where the body lay came
a fierce fizzing and cracking sound, which ceased, however,
before the fumes had cleared away. At last they were all gone,
except a little cloud that still hung over the corpse. In a
couple of minutes more this too had vanished, and, wonderful as
it may seem, it is a fact that on the stone bench that had
supported the mortal remains of the ancient Kallikrates for so
many centuries there was now nothing to be seen but a few
handfuls of smoking white powder. The acid had utterly destroyed
the body, and even in places eaten into the stone. Ayesha stooped
down, and, taking a handful of this powder in her grasp, threw it
into the air, saying at the same time, in a voice of calm
solemnity—
“Dust to dust!—the past to the past!—the dead to the
dead!—Kallikrates is dead, and is born again!”
The ashes floated noiselessly to the rocky floor, and we stood in
awed silence and watched them fall, too overcome for words.
“Now leave me,” she said, “and sleep if ye may. I must watch and
think, for to-morrow night we go hence, and the time is long
since I trod the path that we must follow.”
Accordingly we bowed, and left her.
As we passed to our own apartment I peeped into Job’s sleeping
place, to see how he fared, for he had gone away just before our
interview with the murdered Ustane, quite prostrated by the
terrors of the Amahagger festivity. He was sleeping soundly, good
honest fellow that he was, and I rejoiced to think that his
nerves, which, like those of most uneducated people, were far
from strong, had been spared the closing scenes of this dreadful
day. Then we entered our own chamber, and here at last poor Leo,
who, ever since he had looked upon that frozen image of his
living self, had been in a state not far removed from
stupefaction, burst out into a torrent of grief. Now that he was
no longer in the presence of the dread _She_, his sense of the
awfulness of all that had happened, and more especially of the
wicked murder of Ustane, who was bound to him by ties so close,
broke upon him like a storm, and lashed him into an agony of
remorse and terror which was painful to witness. He cursed
himself—he cursed the hour when we had first seen the writing on
the sherd, which was being so mysteriously verified, and bitterly
he cursed his own weakness. Ayesha he dared not curse—who dared
speak evil of such a woman, whose consciousness, for aught we
knew, was watching us at the very moment?
“What am I to do, old fellow?” he groaned, resting his head
against my shoulder in the extremity of his grief. “I let her be
killed—not that I could help that, but within five minutes I was
kissing her murderess over her body. I am a degraded brute, but I
cannot resist that” (and here his voice sank)—“that awful
sorceress. I know I shall do it again to-morrow; I know that I am
in her power for always; if I never saw her again I should never
think of anybody else during all my life; I must follow her as a
needle follows a magnet; I would not go away now if I could; I
could not leave her, my legs would not carry me, but my mind is
still clear enough, and in my mind I hate her—at least, I think
so. It is all so horrible; and that—that body! What can I make of
it? It was _I_! I am sold into bondage, old fellow, and she will
take my soul as the price of herself!”
Then, for the first time, I told him that I was in a but very
little better position; and I am bound to say that,
notwithstanding his own infatuation, he had the decency to
sympathise with me. Perhaps he did not think it worth while being
jealous, realising that he had no cause so far as the lady was
concerned. I went on to suggest that we should try to run away,
but we soon rejected the project as futile, and, to be perfectly
honest, I do not believe that either of us would really have left
Ayesha even if some superior power had suddenly offered to convey
us from these gloomy caves and set us down in Cambridge. We could
no more have left her than a moth can leave the light that
destroys it. We were like confirmed opium-eaters: in our moments
of reason we well knew the deadly nature of our pursuit, but we
certainly were not prepared to abandon its terrible delights.
No man who once had seen _She_ unveiled, and heard the music of
her voice, and drunk in the bitter wisdom of her words, would
willingly give up the sight for a whole sea of placid joys. How
much more, then, was this likely to be so when, as in Leo’s case,
to put myself out of the question, this extraordinary creature
declared her utter and absolute devotion, and gave what appeared
to be proofs of its having lasted for some two thousand years?
No doubt she was a wicked person, and no doubt she had murdered
Ustane when she stood in her path, but then she was very
faithful, and by a law of nature man is apt to think but lightly
of a woman’s crimes, especially if that woman be beautiful, and
the crime be committed for the love of him.
And then, for the rest, when had such a chance ever come to a man
before as that which now lay in Leo’s hand? True, in uniting himself to
this dread woman, he would place his life under the influence of a
mysterious creature of evil tendencies,[1] but then that would be
likely enough to happen to him in any ordinary marriage. On the other
hand, however, no ordinary marriage could bring him such awful
beauty—for awful is the only word that can describe it—such divine
devotion, such wisdom, and command over the secrets of nature, and the
place and power that they must win, or, lastly, the royal crown of
unending youth, if indeed she could give that. No, on the whole, it is
not wonderful that, though Leo was plunged in bitter shame and grief,
such as any gentleman would have felt under the circumstances, he was
not ready to entertain the idea of running away from his extraordinary
fortune.
[1] After some months of consideration of this statement I am bound to
confess that I am not quite satisfied of its truth. It is perfectly
true that Ayesha committed a murder, but I shrewdly suspect that, were
we endowed with the same absolute power, and if we had the same
tremendous interest at stake, we would be very apt to do likewise
under parallel circumstances. Also, it must be remembered that she
looked on it as an execution for disobedience under a system which
made the slightest disobedience punishable by death. Putting aside
this question of the murder, her evil-doing resolves itself into the
expression of views and the acknowledgment of motives which are
contrary to our preaching if not to our practice. Now at first sight
this might be fairly taken as a proof of an evil nature, but when we