Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/357

 hands high above his head, around which now began to glow the rose of the dawn.

"I should answer then 'I am ready!' And I should never speak a falsehood again!"

The elder brother opened the trap-door.

"Come and look" he said, "it is an odd sight."

The young man leaned over the furnace far below.

The first landing of the great stair was blazing. The flames had encircled in graceful volutes the acanthus leaves of the little pillars of the staircase. The carpet, devoured step by step of the stair, boiled like a purple wine; a rosy smoke wound in a spiral, up, up along the balustrade, carried along by the air through the dormer-windows in the dome. The whole donjon was nothing more than a colossal chimney. Little sparks rose to the nostrils of Paul-Eric. He drew back, choking. Reutler shut the trapdoor.

"You understand now?" said the elder brother.

"I should say I did!" returned Paul-Eric carelessly. He. added, in his plaintive other voice. "It will teach us, big brother, to set up the kitchen-fireplace in the drawing-room! Hand me my fan—it's going to be warm here!"

He had become transparently pale, his young lips were trembling;, his quivering fingers, shaking like those of old age, brushed convulsively the stuff of his robe. But there was no cowardice in his eyes.

"Ah, Princess," exclaimed Reutler, "you are really worthy of all this apotheosis!"

But Paul-Eric was staggering now, and had fallen on the divan. Reutler fell down before those bared feet, contracted in terror.

"They cannot save us, no! We are up far too high for that! The joke goes pretty far!" faltered Paul-Eric, fanning himself mechanically. "And nobody down there who can climb up to us, either by outside or in! Your apotheosis, as you call it, is a pretty business! Nobody at all to admire it!" He hid himself in Reutler's arms. "When I think how you have come across all that—! You are a god! Only you must do one thing more—keep me from being burned alive. Where is your revolver?"

"I haven't it any longer. And to think it was you that made me throw away, just now, my very best poison—such a sweet one, that would have given you such dreams. A nice state of affairs!

"Big brother, I … That racket stuns me. Listen, listen—!"

The roaring of the fire was growing stronger. One could hear