The Max Brand Megapack. Max Brand

and eager at once.

      She said: “You may do as you will.”

      His unmanacled hand went up, found her hair, passed slowly over its folds.

      “It is like silk to the touch, but far more delicate, for there is life in every thread of it. It is abundant and long. Ah, it must shine when the sun strikes upon it! It is golden hair, madame, no pale-yellow like sea-sand, but glorious gold, and when it hangs across the whiteness of your throat and bosom the hearts of men stir. Speak! Tell me I have named it!”

      She waited till the sob grew smaller in her throat.

      “Yes, it is golden hair,” she said.

      “I could not be wrong.”

      His hand passed down her face, fluttering lightly, and she sensed the eagerness of every touch. Cold fear took hold of her lest those searching fingers should discover the truth.

      “Your eyes are blue. Yes, yes! Deep-blue for golden hair. It cannot be otherwise. Speak.”

      “God help me!”

      “Madame?”

      “I have been too vain of my eyes, sir. Yes, they are blue.”

      The fingers were on her cheeks, trembling on her lips, touching chin and throat.

      “You are divine. It was foredoomed that this should be! Yes, my life has been one long succession of miracles, but the greatest was reserved until the end. I have followed my heart through the world in search of perfect beauty and now I am about to die, I find it. Oh, God! For one moment with canvas, brush, and the blessed light of the sun! It cannot be! No miracle is complete; but I carry out into the eternal night one perfect picture. Canvas and paint? No, no! Your picture must be drawn in the soul and colored with love. The last miracle and the greatest! Three days? No, three ages, three centuries of happiness, for are you not here?”

      Who will say that there is not an eye with which we pierce the night? To each of these two sitting in the utter dark there came a vision. Imagination became more real than reality. He saw his ideal of the woman, that picture which every man carries in his heart to think of in the times of silence, to see in every void. And she saw her ideal of manly power. The dark pressed them together as if with the force of physical hands. For a moment they waited, and in that moment each knew the heart of the other, for in that utter void of light and sound, they saw with the eyes of the soul and they heard the music of the spheres.

      Then she seemed to hear the voice of the prince: “You should be grateful to me. Trust me, child, I am bringing you that love of which you dreamed. Le Dieu, c’est moi!”

      Yes, it was the voice of doom which had spoken from those sardonic lips. The dark which annihilates time made their love a century old.

      “In all the world,” she whispered, “there is one man 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!”