She by H. Rider Haggard (read an ebook week .TXT) 📖

“Nay, he lives,” I answered. “She hath saved him. Enter.”

She sighed deeply, entered, and fell upon her hands and knees, after the custom of the Amahagger people, in the presence of the dread She.

“Stand,” said Ayesha, in her coldest voice, “and come hither.”

Ustane obeyed, standing before her with bowed head.

Then came a pause, which Ayesha broke.

“Who is this man?” she said, pointing to the sleeping form of Leo.

“The man is my husband,” she answered in a low voice.

“Who gave him to thee for a husband?”

“I took him according to the custom of our country, oh She.”

“Thou hast done evil, woman, in taking this man, who is a stranger. He is not a man of thine own race, and the custom fails. Listen: perchance thou didst this thing through ignorance, therefore, woman, do I spare thee, otherwise hadst thou died. Listen again. Go from hence back to thine own place, and never dare to speak to or set thine eyes upon this man again. He is not for thee. Listen a third time. If thou breakest this my law, that moment thou diest. Go.”

But Ustane did not move.

“Go, woman!”

Then she looked up, and I saw that her face was torn with passion.

“Nay, oh She. I will not go,” she answered in a choked voice: “the man is my husband, and I love him—I love him, and I will not leave him. What right hast thou to command me to leave my husband?”

I saw a little quiver pass down Ayesha’s frame, and shuddered myself, fearing the worst.

“Be pitiful,” I said in Latin; “it is but Nature working.”

“I am pitiful,” she answered coldly in the same language; “had I not been pitiful she had been dead even now.” Then, addressing Ustane: “Woman, I say to thee, go before I destroy thee where thou art!”

“I will not go! He is mine—mine!” she cried in anguish. “I took him, and I saved his life! Destroy me, then, if thou hast the power! I will not give thee my husband—never—never!”

Ayesha made a movement so swift that I could scarcely follow it, but it seemed to me that she lightly struck the poor girl upon the head with her hand. I looked at Ustane, and then staggered back in horror, for there upon her hair, right across her bronze-like tresses, were three finger-marks white as snow. As for the girl herself, she had put her hands to her head, and was looking dazed.

“Great heavens!” I said, perfectly aghast at this dreadful manifestation of human power; but She did but laugh a little.

“Thou thinkest, poor ignorant fool,” she said to the bewildered woman, “that I have not the power to slay. Stay, there lies a mirror,” and she pointed to Leo’s round shaving-glass that had been arranged by Job with other things upon his portmanteau; “give it to this woman, my Holly, and let her see that which lies across her hair, and whether or no I have power to slay.”

I picked up the glass, and held it before Ustane’s eyes. She gazed, then felt at her hair, then gazed again, and then sank upon the ground with a sort of sob.

“Now, wilt thou go, or must I strike a second time?” asked Ayesha, in mockery. “Look, I have set my seal upon thee so that I may know thee till thy hair is all as white as it. If I see thy face again, be sure, too, that thy bones shall soon be whiter than my mark upon thy hair.”

Utterly awed and broken down, the poor creature rose, and, marked with that awful mark, crept from the room, sobbing bitterly.

“Look not so frighted, my Holly,” said Ayesha, when she had gone. “I tell thee I deal not in magic—there is no such thing. ‘Tis only a force that thou dost not understand. I marked her to strike terror to her heart, else must I have slain her. And now I will bid my servants to bear my Lord Kallikrates to a chamber near mine own, that I may watch over him, and be ready to greet him when he wakes; and thither, too, shalt thou come, my Holly, and the white man, thy servant. But one thing remember at thy peril. Naught shalt thou say to Kallikrates as to how this woman went, and as little as may be of me. Now, I have warned thee!” and she slid away to give her orders, leaving me more absolutely confounded than ever. Indeed, so bewildered was I, and racked and torn with such a succession of various emotions, that I began to think that I must be going mad. However, perhaps fortunately, I had but little time to reflect, for presently the mutes arrived to carry the sleeping Leo and our possessions across the central cave, so for a while all was bustle. Our new rooms were situated immediately behind what we used to call Ayesha’s boudoir—the curtained space where I had first seen her. Where she herself slept I did not then know, but it was somewhere quite close.

That night I passed in Leo’s room, but he slept through it like the dead, never once stirring. I also slept fairly well, as, indeed, I needed to do, but my sleep was full of dreams of all the horrors and wonders I had undergone. Chiefly, however, I was haunted by that frightful piece of diablerie by which Ayesha left her finger-marks upon her rival’s hair. There was something so terrible about her swift, snake-like movement, and the instantaneous blanching of that threefold line, that, if the results to Ustane had been much more tremendous, I doubt if they would have impressed me so deeply. To this day I often dream of that awful scene, and see the weeping woman, bereaved, and marked like Cain, cast a last look at her lover, and creep from the presence of her dread Queen.

Another dream that troubled me originated in the huge pyramid of bones. I dreamed that they all stood up and marched past me in thousands and tens of thousands—in squadrons, companies, and armies—with the sunlight shining through their hollow ribs. On they rushed across the plain to Kôr, their imperial home; I saw the drawbridges fall before them, and heard their bones clank through the brazen gates. On they went, up the splendid streets, on past fountains, palaces, and temples such as the eye of man never saw. But there was no man to greet them in the market-place, and no woman’s face appeared at the windows—only a bodiless voice went before them, calling: “Fallen is Imperial Kôr!—fallen!—fallen! fallen!” On, right through the city, marched those gleaming phalanxes, and the rattle of their bony tread echoed through the silent air as they pressed grimly on. They passed through the city and clomb the wall, and marched along the great roadway that was made upon the wall, till at length they once more reached the drawbridge. Then, as the sun was sinking, they returned again towards their sepulchre, and luridly his light shone in the sockets of their empty eyes, throwing gigantic shadows of their bones, that stretched away, and crept and crept like huge spiders’ legs as their armies wound across the plain. Then they came to the cave, and once more one by one flung themselves in unending files through the hole into the pit of bones, and I awoke, shuddering, to see She, who had evidently been standing between my couch and Leo’s, glide like a shadow from the room.

After this I slept again, soundly this time, till morning, when I awoke much refreshed, and got up. At last the hour drew near at which, according to Ayesha, Leo was to awake, and with it came She herself, as usual, veiled.

“Thou shalt see, oh Holly,” she said; “presently shall he awake in his right mind, the fever having left him.”

Hardly were the words out of her mouth, when Leo turned round and stretched out his arms, yawned, opened his eyes, and, perceiving a female form bending over him, threw his arms round her and kissed her, mistaking her, perhaps, for Ustane. At any rate, he said, in Arabic, “Hullo, Ustane, why have you tied your head up like that? Have you got the toothache?” and then, in English, “I say, I’m awfully hungry. Why, Job, you old son of a gun, where the deuce have we got to now—eh?”

“I am sure I wish I knew, Mr. Leo,” said Job, edging suspiciously past Ayesha, whom he still regarded with the utmost disgust and horror, being by no means sure that she was not an animated corpse; “but you mustn’t talk, Mr. Leo, you’ve been very ill, and given us a great deal of hanxiety, and, if this lady,” looking at Ayesha, “would be so kind as to move, I’ll bring you your soup.”

This turned Leo’s attention to the “lady,” who was standing by in perfect silence. “Hullo!” he said; “that is not Ustane—where is Ustane?”

Then, for the first time, Ayesha spoke to him, and her first words were a lie. “She has gone from hence upon a visit,” she said; “and, behold, in her place am I here as thine handmaiden.”

Ayesha’s silver notes seemed to puzzle Leo’s half-awakened intellect, as also did her corpse-like wrappings. However, he said nothing at the time, but drank off his soup greedily enough, and then turned over and slept again till the evening. When he woke for the second time he saw me, and began to question me as to what had happened, but I had to put him off as best I could till the morrow, when he awoke almost miraculously better. Then I told him something of his illness and of my doings, but as Ayesha was present I could not tell him much except that she was the Queen of the country, and well disposed towards us, and that it was her pleasure to go veiled; for, though of course I spoke in English, I was afraid that she might understand what we were saying from the expression of our faces, and besides, I remembered her warning.

On the following day Leo got up almost entirely recovered. The flesh wound in his side was healed, and his constitution, naturally a vigorous one, had shaken off the exhaustion consequent on his terrible fever with a rapidity that I can only attribute to the effects of the wonderful drug which Ayesha had given to him, and also to the fact that his illness had been too short to reduce him very much. With his returning health came back full recollection of all his adventures up to the time when he had lost consciousness in the marsh, and of course of Ustane also, to whom I had discovered he had grown considerably attached. Indeed, he overwhelmed me with questions about the poor girl, which I did not dare to answer, for after Leo’s first awakening She had sent for me, and again warned me solemnly that I was to reveal nothing of the story to him, delicately hinting that if I did it would be the worse for me. She also, for the second time, cautioned me not to tell Leo anything more than I was obliged about herself, saying that she would reveal herself to him in her own time.

Indeed, her whole manner changed. After all that I had seen I had expected that she would take the earliest opportunity of claiming the man she believed to be her old-world lover, but this, for some reason of her own, which was at the time quite inscrutable to me, she did not do. All that she did was to attend to his wants quietly, and with a humility which was in striking contrast with her former imperious bearing, addressing him always in a tone of something very like respect, and keeping him with her as much as possible. Of course his curiosity was as much excited about this mysterious