The Power of Darkness | Page 3

seemed to
be relived. The rooms were lighted each by its own sun or lamp or
candle. The spectators walked among shadows that might have
oppressed a nervous person.
'Fine, eh?' said Vincent.
'Yes,' said Edward; 'it's wonderful.'
A turn of a corner brought them to a room. Marie Antoinette fainting,
supported by 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