Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/609

Rh state to know the quality of the happiness she gave me. I had grown to think the thoughts she gave me: that was all.

"I simply told Céleste, my lady's maid, that I would go to her apartments; but Celeste, with the desire probably to save me a detested sight, ran up the polished stairs, her little slippers making a loud noise in the silent house.

"With a shriek Céleste staggered half-way down the stairs, her face like chalk, her eyes wildly staring.

Oh, monsieur! don't go in, if you value your life!'

"I pushed her aside, and entered Lady Harcourt's boudoir, hung with the pale-green silk curtains she had chosen because it would remind her of the jungle where we first met. The old overpowering indefinable odor met me at the threshold, but I stepped across her tiger-skin rug and felt every vein in my body congealing with horror.

"My wife's little gray silk bonnet and scarf lay on the floor near the sofa where she reclined, her hair, unbound, streaming in disorder over the mossy green carpet. She was quite dead, but had perhaps breathed her last only a moment before I found her.

"On the bosom which had pillowed my head so often lay the head of a monster boa. His loathsome body wrapped tightly about the luckless girl had squeezed her to death. In a fervor of gladness over her return or madness from hunger, he had killed the woman who fondled him when not with me.

"I managed to retain my senses somehow, and left the room, so permeated with poison. Down-stairs once more, I breathed freer than for many days. I leaned out of the window and looked at the old stars which had twinkled through every hour of my miserable misspent life. I realized all at once how base and inactive I had become, a dreamer; but was I to blame?

"The old butler kindly led me to my room, begging me to drink of the glass he forced to my lips, saying that all should be done well.

"I drank, and, throwing myself on the bed, I lost my mind in a dreary and dreadful maze which melted into a long sleep. I knew in that sleep that the python had been strangled and the rumor given forth that Lady Harcourt had fallen dead from heart-disease.

"The end of it all came, of course, and I went through it properly, I heard afterwards; but I think my body had acted without soul for once.

"I went to Switzerland,—a place happily free from snakes, where I recovered my old mental poise, and got back to a point where I could reflect upon all that fearful time which had seemed a sort of heaven to me while it lasted,—my strange irresponsible life with Zobeide, a charmer of serpents, a ruler of men!

"Now you know, Strahan, why I do not care to look on such sights. It unnerves me to look on a boa more than to meet a wild beast face to face. Don't laugh."

Laugh! I was never further from it at any moment of my life!

Harcourt's experience only strengthened me in my theory about the sympathy between snakes and—some people. It is always a woman who charms snakes, you know; never a man. I wonder why?