“No, it will not be that—unless you prefer it.”
“In Allah’s name, what dost thou mean, then?” The tawny brown of Selim’s face had turned ashen with the horror of suspense.
“Thy death will be one which any true lover would envy,” said Abdur Ali.
Selim was powerless to ask another question. His nerves were beginning to crumble under the ordeal. The dead woman on the couch, the malevolent old man with his baleful half-hints and his obvious implacability, the muscular Negroes who would hew a man into collops at their master’s word—all were enough to break down the courage of hardier men than he.
He became aware that Abdur Ali was speaking once more.
“I have brought thee to thy mistress. But it would seem that thou art not a very ardent lover. Have you nothing to say to her? Surely there is much to be said, under the circumstances?”
“In the name of the Prophet, cease thy mockery.”
Abdur Ali did not seem to hear the tortured cry.
“It is true, of course, that she could not reply even if thou shouldst speak to her. But her lips are as fair as ever—even if they are growing a little cold with thy unlover-like delay. Hast thou no kiss to lay upon them, in memory of all the other kisses they have taken—and given ?”
Selim was again speechless.
“Come—you are not very demonstrative, for one who was so amorous only yesternight.”
“But… you said there was a poison which—”
“Yes, and I told thee the truth. Even the touch of thy lips to hers, where a trace of the poison lingers, will be enough to cause thy death.” There was an awful gloating in Abdur Ali’s voice.
Selim shivered and looked again at Zoraida. Aside from her utter stillness and pallor, and the faintly bitter expression about the mouth, she differed in no apparent wise from the woman who had lain so often in his arms. Yet the very knowledge that she was dead was enough to make her seem unspeakably strange and even repulsive to Selim. It was hard to associate this still, marmoreal being with the affectionate mistress who had always welcomed him with eager smiles and caresses.
“Truly, you are a fortunate young man,” said Abdur Ali. “She loved you to the end… and you will die from her last kiss. Few men are so lucky.”
“Is there no other way?” Selim’s question was little louder than a whisper.
“There is none. And you delay too long.” Abdur Ali made a sign to the Negroes, who stepped closer to Selim, lifting their swords in the lamplight.
“Unless thou dost my bidding, thy hands will be sliced off at the wrists, to begin with,” the jeweler went on. “The next blows will sever a small portion of each forearm. Then a little temporary attention will be given to other parts of your body, before returning to the arms. And I leave the rest to your conjecture. I am sure thou wilt prefer the other death, which will be quick and almost painless, apart from its other advantages.”
Selim stooped above the couch where Zoraida lay. Terror—the abject terror of death—was his one emotion. He had wholly forgotten his love for Zoraida, had forgotten her kisses and endearments. He feared the strange, pale woman before him as much as he had once desired her.
“Make haste.” The voice of Abdur Ali was steely as the lifted scimitars.
Selim bent over and kissed Zoraida on the mouth. Her lips were not entirely cold, but there was a queer, bitter taste. Of course, it must the poison. The thought was hardly formulated when a searing agony seemed to run through all his veins. He could no longer see Zoraida, in the blinding flames that appeared before him and filled the room like ever-widening suns; and he did not know that he had fallen forward on the couch across her body. Then the flames began to shrink with an awful swiftness, and went out in a swirl of soft gloom. Selim felt that he was sinking into a great gulf, and that someone (whose name he could not remember) was sinking beside him. Then, all at once, he was alone… and was losing even the sense of solitude… till there was nothing anywhere but darkness and oblivion.
THE FACE BY THE RIVER
It was after the commission of the deed, and during his nation-wide flight from its legal consequences, that Edgar Sylen began to develop an aversion for rivers, and a dread of women’s faces. It had never occurred to him before that so many rivers resembled the Sacramento; nor had he imagined that anything sinister could attach itself to the leaning willows and alders along their banks. Now, wherever he went, by some macabre coincidence he was always coming at afterglow of a sullen sunset to the edge of tree-fringed running waters, from which he would recoil with guilty fright and repulsion. Also, he saw resemblances to the dead woman everywhere, in the girls that he passed on the streets of unfamiliar towns and cities. He had never thought, even before he began to see her with the altered vision of enamorment, that Elise belonged to a frequently encountered type. But now, with observational powers that were morbidly sharpened in this one regard, he found that her short oval face with its pallor untouched by rouge, her high, faintly pencilled brows above eyes of deep violet-grey, her full, petulant mouth, or her slender but well-curved figure, were seemingly to be met on every pavement and in every train, street-car, shop, restaurant and hotel.
Sylen was not aware of any consuming remorse for his act, in the usual sense of the word. But certainly he had reason to regret it as a piece of overwhelming and irremediable folly, into which he had been driven by the goading of some devilish fatality. Elise had been his stenographer: the propinquity of business association had drawn them into a more intimate relationship; and he had loved her for awhile, till she became too exacting, too exorbitant in her demands. He was not brutal or cold-blooded, he had never dreamed of killing her at any time; and even when he had tired of her, and even in that last walk at twilight by the river, when she had threatened with bitter, hysterical reproaches to tell his wife of their affair, he had not really wanted to harm the girl. His feeling had been a mixture of alarm at the menace to his domestic security, and a sudden, mad desire to still the intolerable, shrewish clamor of her tedious voice. He hardly knew that he had gripped her by the throat, that he was choking her with ferocious fingers. Such an action was totally foreign to his own conception of himself; and when he realized what he was doing, he had loosed her and pushed her away from him. All he could see at that moment was her frightened face, her throat with the visible marks of his fingers—white as an apparition in the dusk, and appallingly distinct in every detail. He had forgotten that they were so close to the river’s edge, had forgotten that the water was very deep below the bank at that particular place. These things he had remembered when he heard the splash of her fall; and he had also remembered, with a numb sense of terror, that neither he nor Elise could swim. Perhaps she had lost consciousness when she felclass="underline" for she had sunk immediately, and had not risen to the surface again. The whole scene was dim and confused in Sylen’s mind, apart from that final glimpse of her face on the shore. His flight from California was vague to him also; and his first clear memory was that of a newspaper he had seen the next morning in a neighboring state, with pictures of Elise and himself above a lurid conjectural description of the crime. The horror of those headlines, in which he seemed to meet the accusing eyes of a vast multitude of people, was branded ineffaceably upon his brain. Henceforth it was a perpetual miracle to him that he could manage to evade arrest. Like most criminals, he felt that the world was pre-occupied with himself and his crime; and did not realize its manifold oblivion, its absorption in multiform pursuits and interests.
He was stunned by the consequences of the deed, by the break that it entailed with his whole past life, with everything and everyone he had known. His flourishing business, the respectable place he had won in his community, his wife and two children—all were lost beyond recovery through something which, as he had soon persuaded himself, was no more than a fatal accident. The idea of himself as a fugitive from justice, as a vulgar murderer in the eyes of the world, was alien and confusing to the last degree. He retained enough wit, however, to disguise himself with a touch of subtlety, and to double upon his trail in a manner that baffled the police. He bought some second-hand clothing, of the type that would be worn by a laboring-man, and disposed of his neat tailor-made suit by leaving it at night beneath a pile of old lumber. He allowed his beard to grow, and purchased a pair of heavy-rimmed spectacles. These simple measures transformed him from a well-to-do realtor to a socialistic carpenter out of work. In trying to conceal his furtiveness, his perennial fear of observation, he acquired a rough and fierce air that was quite compatible with the role of a discontented workman.