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.In the dark, she put up her own hands and touched the roughness of the scales, and the emerald eyesfloated, watching her, seeing her as she could not see, in the dark.He had not harmed her before.She had not been told what had been done, out in the City.Her imagesof those things were nebulous.Something swung across her face.It was the wicked beak, but she did not realise.Instead the questing,ugly, (invisible) tongue extruded, and sipped at the skin of her neck, strayed across her breastbone.Sinuous and serpentine, it described the mound of one breast.Lying on her, the monster from the myth made love to her in the blind dark, as in the blind dark theUnseen had made love to Psyche.Helise, who should have doubted, should have lit the lamp of her ordinary virtue and cancelled love withhowls and screams, clung to darkness, which had the arms, the muscled back, the thin pelvis of a man,and which filled her with the organ of a man.She must not cry aloud, even in ecstasy -Just at that moment, as she twined him with her limbs, on the crazy threshold of abandonment - just then,Psyche after all kindled her lamp.Beneath his body, some black filaments of clothes, her eyes dazzled - she was conscious the door hadbeen pushed wide, and the torch glare streamed into the chamber.Her silence, as maybe her screaming would have done, had betrayed them.Helise attempted to speak.To rouse her lover, to ward off the spurl of fires and men, the glint ofweapons that came pouring down on them.But the lover of Helise, he knew.He knew, and did not leave her.As his loins thrust on, frantically,against her and within, the head of the monstrous bird was turned, to look sidelong into the crowd ofassassins.A look.It stopped them.The men fell back.The weapons were folding over like blades of grass before ascythe.A sound came out of it, the thing that rode upon her, and turning again, it buried its fearful head amongthe pillows.Helise clutched at the shuddering muscles, cloth, silk, flesh, scales - the crowd in the room had nomeaning.Enormous beats began to echo through the core of her, and in the insanity of delight, she behelda woman like a long opaque shadow, push by the wilted kindred, the strengthless swords.In thecarnivorous hands of Lady d'Uscaret was a soldier's spear.Her eyes were all the face she had.Her eyeswere no longer black, but blazing green.The shock of the javelin, rammed into the body of her son by this woman, who thrust with death as hehimself thrust with the weapon of life, rocked both lovers like the quake itself.And Helise felt the point ofthe spear, tearing through his heart, prick out to graze her breast.She gaped her mouth to scream after all.And on a back-cloth of lights and shadows, where the womanseemed to topple away (like a flat figure in a church window), there was a spurt of blood, a falling, athroe, of generation and of terminus.Helise, between all the many gates of Hell, was thrown into the Hell of ecstasy.She shrieked and writhed and a spear seemed to enter her also.In this state she was, flailing and lurching on the bed like a broken snake, until they dragged the deadthing out of her and off her, on to the floor.Then, only then, the delirium guttered and extinguished.And she was left behind.She lay, covered in his blood, soaked by that, by tears and sweat, and the waiting-woman of the motherof Heros leaned over her and said, "Drink this."Helise drank.She had no choice, for they held her.Long after, she became convinced that all the people had gone away.When she sat up, it was so.The chamber was black and shut, as earlier.When she stumbled from the bed and pulled herself on hands and knees across the floor, sheencountered a bloody spear, but nothing else.They had taken their dead away.They had left her here with their poison in her to die in her turn.Already she could taste death, and in her arms and legs it stole like cool water.There was no pain.Sitting by the hearth, she attempted to perform a contrition.Would God hear? God had never heard her.Eventually she was in the fireplace.Still, she was not afraid.Her body was cold, but for her heart, andthen her heart was cold too.She felt it cease, she felt herself die.It seemed irrelevant, pointless.What happened was this:The Lady of d'Uscaret went to her own chamber, and there she hanged herself.She was buried in statein a family mausoleum near the Temple-Church.It was explained she perished of sadness, learning herson had been killed by robbers on his journey.His body had been lost in foreign lands.For the bride of Heros, who took her life at news of his death, there could be no holy ground.But out ofcompassion they made her a bed in the walled garden.Not much after that, a feud sprang up between the houses of d'Uscaret and Lyrecourt.Its foundationwas obscure, some insult or obtainment.Despite the stern jurisdiction of the Duke, the flower ofd'Uscaret's young men were soon mown down, and the lord himself was slaughtered like a pig on hisway from Mass.At least, his soul went well-prepared to Heaven.Inside a year, all the candles of d'Uscaret were put out.A few of the kindred, obscure relatives, oldwomen and men, lingered in the mansion with their elderly servants.A decade, and d'Uscaret had become little better than a lodging house.Though there were yet some who, passing it at dead of night on the street, would cross themselves underits walls, not knowing why.PART FIVEThe WidowBe a god and hold meWith a charm! Be a man and fold meWith thine arm!-BrowningAs if from the tomb, sleepily, he rose up from her narrative.(Which might be apposite enough.) She hadanyway bewitched him.He had seen what she said, in vivid pictures, masterful paintings come to life.Raoulin stirred, and stretched himself, as he would not have done so freely in the presence of a lady
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