CHAPTER XXXII - THE MASK FAILS

Machanon’s anticipation was fully justified. Glarces, having fallen asleep, slept on till nature had taken a just revenge. Again and again did Petronius return, at ever shortening intervals, to assure himself that all was well; and also that he might be ready to discharge whatever service the Prince might require, but it was late in the afternoon before he could report to the Queen that his ward was awake.

Lais knew the announcement must come, however long it might be delayed, and that it would herald the interview between herself and Glarces from which she shrank. Events had now torn the mask from her face, and she must stand before him without a single redeeming quality to relieve the hideous deformity of the treachery to which he had succumbed.

She knew this with that same vague certainty a murderer contemplates the hour of doom. It must inevitably come, but deluding hope persists in the suggestion that something must occur to avert it; therefore the preparation for the crisis is thrust aside, and the blow falls with more crushing force when the fatal hour arrives.

Just so the unwelcome intimation of Petronius fell upon the guilty conscience of the Queen. Her heart stood still; all strength forsook her; with blanched cheeks, dry staring eyes, trembling and voiceless lips, she heard his words, and feared as she had never feared before. Her breath came in short hard gusts, and while her frightened gaze was rivetted upon the soldier, her cold clammy hand nervously wandered in search of that of Damophila if haply she might render some assistance in the extremity.

It was an awful instant in which an awakened conscience smote her guilty soul unmercifully, and if Teresh had beheld the sight he would have needed no other evidence to complete his case. The effect, however, was nothing more than a passing spasm - the nauseating reel caused by the unwelcome news - and by marvellous dexterity and presence of mind, she recovered herself, passing the incident off as a natural expression of grief.

“How is he?” she enquired, in a well-feigned outburst of tears.

“Like a man in a dream, O Queen. He neither hears nor notices anyone, but talks to himself as none can understand.”

“My poor, crushed, broken brother! O Damophila, what shall I do - what can I do? This is the hardest task of all! How can I see him - how can I comfort him? Oh, the cruel, cruel fates. They have taken my mother and my sister, am I to lose my brother also?”

“No, no! responded the sympathetic attendant, “the gods are not malignant; they will not ask for such a sacrifice. I grieve for you in that which you alone can bear, but I know how empty and less than useless words and professions are at times like these. I have passed through the bitter experience, and can well understand how Glarces fails to hear or recognise the presence of his friends; but go to him yourself - you need not speak to him; the voice of your fellow-suffering will reach him better than words, and you will be able to comfort each other.”

“No, no! I dare not go to him! He has fallen under the spell of some foul demon and I am afraid of him.” “That can never be,” she answered, with firm confidence. “The soul of Glarces is too pure to fall a victim to such a power! The cause of Vedrona's death is an awful mystery, but when the Prince recovers he will clear up all the doubt and then we shall understand.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I am certain of it; and all who know him are of the same opinion. Won't you see him and do what you can to bring about his restoration?”

“How can I help him when I am so prostrate myself.” “The gods will tell you how if you will make the effort; and the instinct of love will guide you better than even experience can suggest.”

“Ah, my friend, that is where I feel my loneliness and inability. What do I know of the strength and comfort of love? Oh, if I only had your faith.”

“Let not the darkness of your grief deceive you. In your effort to help the afflicted Prince you will find both solace and companionship. In cheering him you will also comfort yourself. I do not speak from faith, I know because I have passed along this way of solitude and sorrow. I know its bitterness and pain - still carry the sensitive scars of its cruel wounds upon me. Take my assurance for it, if you will go, in the companionship of grief you will each divide sorrow and increase your strength. Go, and comfort yourself in your ministry to him.”

“Oh, ye gods, how can I do it - how can I meet such grief!”

“Who, then, shall tell him of his royal mother's death? He must know. Will you let him also bear this alone?” The suggestion fell upon the tragedienne's ears as an opportune inspiration. She was weary of being on her knees, as she had thrown herself in her well-feigned expression of grief, and at the appeal rose in a tearless, half-defiant frenzy of despair, ready to make this last great sacrifice upon the altar of her affection.

“Yes, yes!” she cried. “I must tell him that. But, oh! what will it do - what will it do? I shall kill him as I speak the news. I know I shall! It will certainly kill him!

Then I shall be alone! In one accursed day mother, sister, brother - all slain! O ye cruel gods, what have I done to merit such a fate?”

“May that ever be far from the purpose of the gods, O Queen,” replied the captain, when he saw Damophila's inability to answer. “I would venture to repeat that the noble Prince, as yet, neither recognises nor understands anyone. If the news were now made known it would not disturb him, but the knowledge would be with him when he wakes - broken gently by the gods as he has power to bear it.”

“Thanks, my good Petronius, thanks!” she returned, as she appeared to grasp the relief afforded by the timely suggestion. “Your thoughtfulness is merciful. Go! Bring the Prince at once to his own rooms. Let no one speak to or see him lest he should awake, then may the gods give me assistance to discharge my task.”

The soldier at once departed, and Lais, splendidly sustaining her part, flung herself back upon the divan and wept. Escorted by a guard sufficiently strong to secure the Queen's command, Glarces returned, without question or opposition, to his own apartments, where, after a moment of indecision, he dropped into the soft cushions of the couch which formed the favourite seat of Vedrona whenever she came to visit him. He neither spake nor moved, but, burying his head in his arms and the cushions, lay as if asleep till the voice of Lais disturbed him.

He was, however, most painfully awake - struggling in the throes of the nightmare sleep had only power to interrupt because of its incompetence to continue. His long slumber had given a certain physical relaxation and recuperation, enabling conscience to string brain and nerve into more acute and accusing harmony with the condemnation he had passed upon himself. The nameless tortures of the black, impenetrable future were gradually closing upon him, and the gates of oblivion were for ever shut against even the hope of temporary relief.

Lais entered and waved the guard to leave them. Then, standing in the presence of the interview she feared, with all the cowardice of abject guilt, she paused, looked at the pitiable wreck of her victim, then anxiously towards the door as if doubtful whether to escape. But the words of the captain – “He is like a man in a dream” - occurred to her, and his appearance confirmed the report. This decided her course. She would go forward, brave the ordeal, and get it over. Her fear gave fleetness to her feet, and in an instant she was on her knees beside him, her trembling fingers running through his unkempt locks.

“Glarces! My poor brother!” she murmured with nervously-feigned affection.

He neither moved nor made any sign of recognition of her presence. At this she took courage.

“My poor, broken-hearted brother! Let me comfort you - let us weep together.”

He raised his head and turned his eyes upon her. With an exclamation of horror she scrambled to her feet and fled! The havoc of that night when he stood before the oracle was as a shadow to the substance compared with his appearance now.

“By all the gods, who are you?” she cried. “You are not Glarces.”

“No, I am not,” he replied quietly, in a voice as unfamiliar as his face, “I am only the suffering remnant of him. All that was good, and true, and manly has been taken away, and what is left can only suffer, hate, revenge! Are you satisfied with the result of your work? If so, go leave me! I am like a tiger who has tasted blood - I thirst for more! Go! Leave me; or I will kill you as - I killed her!”

He had stealthily risen into a half-sitting position as he spoke, but with the reference to Vedrona he dropped back again overcome.

“You must not heed these thoughts which tempt you in your sorrow,” she replied, venturing to return to his side now that she had conquered her first alarm. “Are we not both bereaved? Yet I have come to comfort you.”

She fled again at his sudden start.

“You comfort me? Have you not already done enough? Begone, I say! All my comfort died with Vedrona!” “No, dear, not all. Your mind, like mine, is over powered in the presence of her loss. But time will heal our wounds, and I will stay to help you bear your sorrow.” “No, you will not! Get away, before I kill you,” he hissed with emphatic menace.

“I am not afraid. I know my brother better, perhaps, than he knows himself just now.”

“Are you more to me than she was? Can you escape when she fell; or has your infernal witchcraft power to protect you as successfully as it murdered her?”

If this was the language of his dreaming it was as dangerous to her cause as his waking could be, and she nervously turned to see if they were alone. It was only the fear of guilt she betrayed, for strict precautions had been taken to command the guard to await her summons within the outer or second room that nothing might be overheard. Having satisfied this needless alarm, by one of those marvellous efforts of will she could so successfully employ, she composed herself, and quietly prepared the further development of her scheme of self-protection. Petronius had mistaken the true mental condition of his ward - she had no thought that he had deceived her - and she was relieved to know, now that the fact had been ascertained, that Glarces was fully conscious. It was also equally certain that in spite of the long sleep, he was physically in a state bordering on collapse. In this she found a compensating advantage of which she would not neglect to avail herself.

It was inevitable that the contest of his accusation and recrimination should be fought, and better far to get it over at once, while matters were in a simple stage, and she held a reserve in her own hand to use with overpowering effect as occasion demanded, than defer the meeting, with a possible chance of an accumulation of evidence against her, and the after knowledge of Vedrona's death failing in its peculiar service to her cause. Fortune had, so far, been almost altogether in her favour, and she was still in a position to make an attempt to win rather than coerce him, which latter was, as yet, far from her wish and intention. Still, having succeeded to such an extent, she was determined to carry her purpose to a finish and make him her own - if not as a free man then she would compel him as a slave.

With this object she was willing to humour him until she succeeded or discovered its futility.

“No, dear. I know I can never be to you all that Vedrona was,” she answered, with genuine regret, “but I will do my best to fill her place - “

“And so you killed her!”

“No, Glarces, no! You do me an injustice. The gods know how my heart is broken at her death; how all the joy has gone out of my life, and were it not that I have a sister's love for yourself - that I know you suffer even more than I do; that you need help and comfort and support; that, she if she could only speak, would ask me to do this for her dear sake - I believe that I should die from the weight of grief that crushes me.”

He had again buried his head deep within his folded arms in the cushions as if he would escape from the sight of her, but her words angered him; his muscles knotted with the restraint he had to put upon himself to prevent his hands administering the justice for which his soul clamoured. He lifted his head, turned his eyes upon her, full of the determination and strength of the old Glarces, but wanting the tempering softness and considerate assurance she had been wont to see. He was no longer a mediator anxious for reconciliation, but an avenger, eager for immediate and inexorable justice, and her guilty soul again took alarm, with nothing but fear of his damning and undeniable accusation preventing her from calling for assistance.

“May all the gods forgive me,” he began, with a suppressed indignation terrible by reason of its intense deliberation, “if the temptation of your lying hypocrisy proves to be more than I have strength to resist. If your black soul has not yet passed beyond the hope of all forgiveness, and if the gods can accept a gift so steeped with crime an treachery, I beg you kill yourself and rid the world of the poison of your presence. Do not misunderstand me, nor think I labour under some delusion born of my sorrow. I am at last awake, the spell of your deception has been broken, and I know you, shorn of all disguise, in your true character as hell's black forgery on womanhood. Perhaps it is well for all the generations that shall come after us that such a monstrous masterpiece of devilry as you represent should have been found incarnate; for your existence has made foulest fiends bankrupt in device of villainy, and earth has now nothing worse to fear. You have in this secured a certain immortality; your name shall be a well-known withering curse among all nations, and your pestiferous soul shall stand as the deep limit of hell's depravity. You need not tremble nor shrink away. If I can risk the vile contagion of your presence while I make known the character I read, I bid you make good use of this, your final opportunity, to catch a breath of some redeeming grace; and when you needs must seek for it in one so hopeless as myself, you may discover in what you see I am some trifling indication of the full reward which you have earned. Around your neck shall be hung every broken troth of womanhood, the sting of every temptation from virtue, the curse of every true love betrayed by passion. The souls of all who perish from lack of philanthropy, generosity or human kindness shall execrate thee; the homeless and the outcast shall effectually charge thee with their misfortunes ; the suffering of starving orphans shall be heaped upon thee, and all the damned in hell shall find some consolation in their torture as they rejoice to see thy punishment! Close not your ears, nor make attempt to shut out what I tell you; the most I can say is like the sound of sweetest music compared with the experience it so feebly outlines. The gods will see to it that, in their sentence, they will excel the inventive power of fiends as far as hell in thee has dragged the name of woman down to degradation. Thou cursed of all the brood of Cerberus, shunned of the three-faced Hecate, and supreme monstrosity of treachery, I know thee now! And if by tearing off thy mask I shall have saved the world from falling victims to thy base hypocrisy and heartless craft, I may in some vast distant future find a grain of comfort in the torture you have brought upon me. Now go, while I can hold my itching fingers in their leash, or I will send your perjured soul at once into its doom.”

It was no use to dissemble further or make attempt to evade the purpose he had formed if once the opportunity was found. All, however, was not yet lost. In his strict retirement lay her safety, and she would mind he should not be disturbed before he learned to know the arts she would employ to make him change his mind, if not his feelings towards her.

“Ah, ah! my clever and aspiring assassin,” she laughed, with ringing but enforced bravado, “do we at length so well understand each other? Ah, well, perhaps it is best. But still be generous enough to admit that I have won in our first encounter. Now, name your own opening in the second contest, for the move by right is yours.”

“Silence, or I will kill you, I say!”

“Are you sure you can do so? If I was best in the game we played last night do you think you would be the more successful now?”

“I will call the guard and soon determine that.” At this he sought but could find no chime.

“They will only answer my summons,” she replied gaily. “Then I will away to the Queen.”

“You cannot leave these rooms without my consent.” “Without your consent? We will soon put a stop to the test.”

“Stop!” she commanded. “Have you not heard that your beautiful dagger had a double edge last night, and that I am Queen to-day?”

“What do you mean?” he gasped.

“Mean! Ah, ha! Have you gone to sleep again? Only a moment ago you were boasting how much had been revealed to you in your murderous vision concerning myself. Has this sweet morsel in the feast of inspiration escaped you? Have you something yet to learn? I will ask you a riddle, Glarces - one from the black unfathomable depths of hell to which you have so confidently consigned me. No, no! Don't grow impatient. Be now as you have counselled me to be - attentive to all that I would say. You did most admirably when I was at your mercy! Now the balance swings in favour of myself, and I would answer you in even terms. I want you to understand how bright the light of your vision is; how true are all its revelations; how cunning and wise you have been in your outspoken judgments; and then I want to ask you whether you or I are better circumstanced! But to my riddle, Glarces; hear now and answer it, then you will know just what I mean: -

' When wine brought from the deep abyss.'

I mean the region where my ‘pestiferous soul shall stand as a limit of hell's depravity.’ Ah, ha! you see I heard all you said:

‘When wine brought from the deep abyss, In mystic fragrance fills the cup; When syren eyes with love-lorn looks First tempt a trusting fool to sup How many lives may he destroy Obedient to his new-found joy?

Canst answer that, my wise philosopher? If so I need not explain the meaning of your double-edged dagger.”

Her taunt was as deliberately playful as his denunciation had been intense, but from the difference of their positions the one was equally effective as the other. If she had writhed, he was crushed; where she shrank he was pierced! Long before she had finished - for she paused between each stroke to allow it to take its full effect - he had fallen back and hid himself as far as possible in the cushions. The effort he had made left him in a state of physical collapse in which he was unable to protect himself. Gladly would he have sought refuge from his mental torture in the arms of delirium, but the relief was denied him. He had reached the threshold of his self-conceived punishment, and at the hand of Lais it was ordained for him to receive the first bitter draught of his merciless sentence.

“Come, Glarces, answer my riddle; or is it too deep for you, and I must needs explain it?”

He only attempted to shrink further from her.

“Then I will make known to you the secret and interpretation thereof. In that one cup my love and wit suggested that you should drink in honour of Vedrona, I knew her downfall was concealed. Don't be so restless or impatient, and I will be candid with you. I did not know that it would prove her death - only that it would give me a long-sought victory over her, and that from thence you would be mine. But the gods were pleased to be more generous towards me than I had hoped. They nobly inspired you to clear her right away; and when our mother heard the news she gave the throne to me and died at once. Why do you tremble, Glarces? Are you not glad that I am Queen, with power to do with you as I will and none to come between us? You are mine now, and I am yours - that is if you will be reason able. Still, we will not speak further of these things now. You are always wise and thoughtful in all you do, and when your present weariness and nervousness are over, when we have disposed of the unpleasant reminders of the past by burial and the pyre, and I have forgotten the injustice you have done me in your very natural sorrow, we shall face our new life together and be happy. But you are not well now. You must rest, and in the meantime I will do everything that is required.”

“Lais!” he pleaded in broken utterances, in which there was no trace of passion or recrimination, “this is too much for me! I cannot tell if what you say is true or false - I only know that you can torture me beyond my power to bear it. But hear me this once, grant me one request, and then I will be satisfied - then you may do in all things as you will. When we were children, and I heard that you were motherless, I wept around my father's neck until he promised that you should come to us - should be our sister. Will you think back again to those first happy days, how in our childhood we loved each other, before we knew the difference of love and passion, as later years have taught us? Will you do this, and then in the strength of that pure love, take a knife-sharp and long - and kill me? Don't leave me to suffer all the untold agony of years to come. Be the means of granting my only wish, as I once was to you - kill me, and I will then forgive you everything!”

“For shame, Glarces! Is this the true spirit of the hero we always thought you? Men and women must not act like children, but we must face the penalties of our faults with courage. We have to gain our ends as best we may, and then accept the circumstances. I have loved you with a consuming passion you can never understand; but you were promised to another who was neither worthy of - “

“Stop!” he cried, leaping to his feet at abound. “Stop! or by the gods above us, if you attempt to say another word it shall be your last!”