One
last time her eyes opened and she looked at him. The frenzy of despair
was gone. He felt that she was looking beyond him to a future he could
not see.
"Go back!" she whispered. "Go back!"
He pressed her to him, seeking to pour something of his own seething
vitality into her dying frame. With her life the threads of his fate
seemed to be slipping through his fingers.
"Help me!" he implored. "Do not leave me!"
But he knew that she would never answer. She lay heavy in his arms,
and the hand that clasped his relaxed and fell with a soft thud upon
the marble. He rose to his feet and stood looking down upon her. It
was not the first time he had seen death. In these last weeks he had
met it in all its most hideous, most revolting forms; but none had
moved him, awed him as this did. He knew that she had once been
beautiful. Who had made her suffer till only a shadow of that beauty
remained? What had she endured? Who was she? What did she know of him?
Why did she call him by a name which rang in his ears with a vague
familiarity? What was it in her poor dead face which stirred in him a
memory which had no date nor place in his life?
Outside he heard the uneasy stirring of the thousands who awaited him.
He looked up and through the open windows, saw the camp-fires and that
one dark spot which was to be swept clear of all but death. What had
she said? "Go back! Lay down your arms! You must--you know you must!
To turn traitor is to inherit an endless hell!" A traitor? A traitor
to whom--to what? To some blind instinct that had called him in those
English voices, that had beaten out an answering cry of thankfulness
from his heart when their cheers proclaimed his own defeat?
A soft step roused him from his troubled thoughts.
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