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Updated: May 3, 2025
"On condition that you won't go in for any more hysterics, I'll go and settle with the Manager that you don't have to appear to-night. It's lucky there happens to be a new turn with those trapeze people. The audience won't miss you. Has Sobrenski given you anything to do to-day?" "I don't know. I can't remember. Oh, yes, I was to go to the Baroni's at two o'clock." "I'll see to that.
Here he stood doing nothing, he who would have been tortured to save her! The window was shut and one of the men said: "She's down all right after all. I thought by the look of her she would have fainted. She has some pluck, Mademoiselle Fatalité!" "Yes," answered Sobrenski. "Here's the coward and traitor." Vardri wheeled round, looking straight into the cold eyes of his leader.
No one could be long in a room alone with Sobrenski without being impressed by his overpowering personality. He affected her in a way that no one else ever did, in provoking her to futile outbursts of defiance and anger. She had never lost her head with anyone else, but he always made her incapable of reasoning, raging one minute, and cowed the next.
One by one the rest of the conspirators tramped heavily up the ladder, leaving her alone with Sobrenski, who stood with his back to the doorway, following her with his eyes as she moved to and fro in the shadows cast by the solitary lamps. Before he mounted the ladder in his turn, he came across the hut, took her by the shoulder and spoke to her.
Sobrenski had said little to anyone else of his suspicions. No need to declare anyone a traitor till it was proven. Such things had a demoralising effect, and treachery was an infectious disease. He descended the uneven rungs of the ladder, treading soft-footed as a cat. There was no noise of talking, so of course she was asleep. Sacré, these lazy women!
Hitherto Emile had always been there to screen and protect her, to stand between her and her enemy. She knew now why he had so often hoped to see her in her coffin. "I can't murder! I undertook to work for the Cause, but not that Mon Dieu! not that!" "We don't talk about murder," Sobrenski sneered. "We merely 'remove' those who have proved themselves untrustworthy.
Sobrenski caressed his beard with a narrow, bloodless hand, on the middle finger of which was a curious ring of twisted gold wire. He waited to see if she would make any further protest, but she set her lips firmly and refused to speak. There was nothing more to be said on her side. Evidently Sobrenski had found the letter, and when or where it had been found mattered not at all.
At the end of that time he knew that alive or dead he would never see Pauline Souvaroff again. The missive he had brought her from Sobrenski had probably meant a journey for her to one of the great centres of the movement Amsterdam, Geneva, or perhaps even London. Alphonse of Spain was now in England, having escaped two attempts upon his life in Paris, and in his own capital.
From the earliest moment he had seen Arithelli he had given her homage as a woman. The gamin, the "Becky Sharp" that Emile and the others knew, he had never seen, and he had always resented her numerous irreverent nicknames. He could do nothing, nothing! Get himself shot or strangled, perhaps, and what use would that be to her? "Come!" said Sobrenski, turning her towards the window.
He had died, and so had Morales, and both by the explosion of the bomb that had been launched by the hand of the former. Sobrenski held rightly that those who meddled with politics on either side must dispense with such useless things as scruples. The night was still and sultry, with a full moon hanging low in the sky.
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