The Power of Darkness | Page 3

her ladies; poor, fat Louis by the window looking literally sick.
'What's the matter with them all?' said Edward.
'Look at the window,' said Vincent.
There was a window to the room. Outside was sunshine--the sunshine of 1792--and gleaming in it, blonde hair flowing, red mouth half-open, what seemed the just-severed head of a beautiful woman. It was raised on a pike, so that it seemed to be looking in at the window.
'I say,' said Edward, and the head on the pike seemed to sway before his eyes.
'Mme de Lamballe. Good thing, isn't it?' said Vincent.
'It's altogether too much of a good thing,' said Edward. 'Look here--I've had enough of this.'
'Oh, you must just see the Catacombs,' said Vincent; 'nothing gruesome, you know. Only early Christians being married and baptized, and all that.'
He led the way down some clumsy steps to the cellars which the genius of a great artist has transformed into the exact semblance of the old Catacombs at Rome. The same rough hewing of rock, the same sacred tokens engraved strongly and simply; and among the arches of these subterranean burrowings the life of the early Christians, their sacraments, their joys, their sorrows--all expressed in groups of waxwork as like life as death is.
'But this is very fine, you know,' said Edward, getting his breath again after Mme de Lamballe, and his imagination loved the thought of the noble sufferings and refrainings of these first lovers of the crucified Christ.
'Yes,' said Vincent, for the third time; 'isn't it?'
They passed the baptism and the burying and the marriage. The tableaux were sufficiently lighted, but little light strayed to the narrow passage where the two men walked, and the darkness seemed to press, tangible as a bodily presence, against Edward's shoulder. He glanced backward.
'Come,' he said; 'I've had enough.'
'Come on, then,' said Vincent.
They turned the corner, and a blaze of Italian sunlight struck at their eyes with positive dazzlement. There lay the Coliseum--tier on tier of eager faces under the blue sky of Italy. They were level with the arena. In the arena were crosses; from them drooped bleeding figures. On the sand beasts prowled, bodies lay. They saw it all through bars. They seemed to be in the place where the chosen victims waited their turn, waited for the lions and the crosses, the palm and the crown. Close by Edward was a group--an old man, a woman, and children. He could have touched them with his hand. The woman and the man stared in an agony of terror straight in the eyes of a snarling tiger, ten feet long, that stood up on its hind feet and clawed through the bars at them. The youngest child only, unconscious of the horror, laughed in the very face of it. Roman soldiers, unmoved in military vigilance, guarded the group of martyrs. In a low cage to the left more wild beasts cringed and seemed to growl, unfed. Within the grating, on the wide circle of yellow sand, lions and tigers drank the blood of Christians. Close against the bars a great lion sucked the chest of a corpse, on whose bloodstained face the horror of the death-agony was printed plain.
'Good heavens!' said Edward. Vincent took his arm suddenly, and he started with what was almost a shriek.
'What a nervous chap you are!' said Vincent, complacently, as they regained the street where the lights were, and the sound of voices and the movement of live human beings--all that warms and awakens nerves almost paralysed by the life in death of waxen immobility.
'I don't know,' said Edward. 'Let's have a vermouth, shall we? There's something uncanny about those wax things. They're like life--but they're much more like death. Suppose they moved? I don't feel at all sure that they don't move, when the lights are all out and there's no one there.'
He laughed.
'I suppose you were never frightened, Vincent?'
'Yes, I was once,' said Vincent, sipping his absinthe. 'Three other men and I were taking turns by twos to watch by a dead man. It was a fancy of his mother's. Our time was up, and the other watch hadn't come. So my chap--the one who was watching with me, I mean--went to fetch them. I didn't think I should mind. But it was just like you say.'
'How?'
'Why, I kept thinking, "Suppose it should move." It was so like life. And if it did move, of course it would have been because it was alive, and I ought to have been glad, because the man was my friend. But all the same, if he had moved I should have gone mad.'
'Yes,' said Edward, 'that's just exactly it.'
Vincent called for a second absinthe.
'But a dead body's different to waxworks,' he said. 'I can't understand anyone being frightened of them.'
'Oh, can't you?' The contempt in the other's