for every woman. It is the hand of Heaven which gives me to you.”
“Come closer—so! And here I have your head beside mine as God foredoomed. Listen! I have power to look through the dark and to see your eyes—how blue they are!—and to read your soul beneath them. We have scarcely spoken a hundred words and yet I see it all. Through a thousand centuries our souls have been born a thousand times and in every life we have met, and known—”
And through the utter dark, the merciful dark, the deep, strong music of his voice went on, and she listened, and forgot the truth and closed her eyes against herself.
* * * *
On the night which closed the third day the prince approached the door of the sealed room. To the officer of the secret police, who stood on guard, he said: “Nothing has been heard.”
“Early this afternoon there were two shots, I think.”
“Nonsense. There are carpenters doing repair work on the floor above. You mistook the noise of their hammers.”
He waved the man away, and as he fitted the key into the lock he was laughing softly to himself: “Now for the revelation, the downward head, the shame. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
He opened the door and flashed on his electric lantern. They lay upon a couch wrapped in each other’s arms. He had shot her through the heart and then turned the weapon on himself; his last effort must have been to draw her closer. About them was wrapped the chain, idle and loose. Surely death had no sting for them and the grave no victory, for the cold features were so illumined that the prince could hardly believe them dead.
He turned the electric torch on the painter. He was a man about fifty, with long, iron-gray hair, and a stubble of three days’ growth covering his face. It was a singularly ugly countenance, strong, but savagely lined, and the forehead corrugated with the wrinkles of long, mental labor. But death had made Bertha beautiful. Her eyes under the shadow of her lashes, seemed a deep-sea blue, and her loose, brown hair, falling across the white throat and breast, seemed almost golden under the light of the torch. A draft from the open door moved the hair and the heart of the prince stirred in him.
He strove to loosen the arms of the painter, but they were frozen stiff by death.
“She was a fool, and the loss is small,” sighed the prince. “After all, perhaps God was nearer than I thought. I bound them together with a chain. He saw my act and must have approved, for see! He has locked them together forever. Well, after all—le Dieu, c’est moi!”
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