Do you want to see me die?"
"Die?" she echoed.
"Can you die without me?
Die?
But you are young; and I love you!
Die?" she asked, in a deep, hollow voice. She seized his hands with a frenzied movement.
"Cold!" she wailed.
"Is it all an illusion?"
Raphael drew the little bit of skin from under his pillow; it was as tiny and as fragile as a periwinkle petal. He showed it to her.
"Pauline!" he said, "fair image of my fair life, let us say good-bye?"
"Good-bye?" she echoed, looking surprised.
"Yes.
This is a talisman that grants me all my wishes, and that represents my span of life.
See here, this is all that remains of it.
If you look at me any longer, I shall die——"
The young girl thought that Valentin had grown lightheaded; she took the talisman and went to fetch the lamp.
By its tremulous light which she shed over Raphael and the talisman, she scanned her lover's face and the last morsel of the magic skin.
As Pauline stood there, in all the beauty of love and terror, Raphael was no longer able to control his thoughts; memories of tender scenes, and of passionate and fevered joys, overwhelmed the soul that had so long lain dormant within him, and kindled a fire not quite extinct.
"Pauline! Pauline! Come to me——"
A dreadful cry came from the girl's throat, her eyes dilated with horror, her eyebrows were distorted and drawn apart by an unspeakable anguish; she read in Raphael's eyes the vehement desire in which she had once exulted, but as it grew she felt a light movement in her hand, and the skin contracted.
She did not stop to think; she fled into the next room, and locked the door.
"Pauline!
Pauline!" cried the dying man, as he rushed after her;
"I love you, I adore you, I want you, Pauline!
I wish to die in your arms!"
With unnatural strength, the last effort of ebbing life, he broke down the door, and saw his mistress writhing upon a sofa.
Pauline had vainly tried to pierce her heart, and now thought to find a rapid death by strangling herself with her shawl.
"If I die, he will live," she said, trying to tighten the knot that she had made.
In her struggle with death her hair hung loose, her shoulders were bare, her clothing was disordered, her eyes were bathed in tears, her face was flushed and drawn with the horror of despair; yet as her exceeding beauty met Raphael's intoxicated eyes, his delirium grew. He sprang towards her like a bird of prey, tore away the shawl, and tried to take her in his arms.
The dying man sought for words to express the wish that was consuming his strength; but no sounds would come except the choking death-rattle in his chest. Each breath he drew sounded hollower than the last, and seemed to come from his very entrails.
At the last moment, no longer able to utter a sound, he set his teeth in Pauline's breast.
Jonathan appeared, terrified by the cries he had heard, and tried to tear away the dead body from the grasp of the girl who was crouching with it in a corner.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"He is mine, I have killed him. Did I not foresee how it would be?"
EPILOGUE
"And what became of Pauline?"
"Pauline?
Ah!
Do you sometimes spend a pleasant winter evening by your own fireside, and give yourself up luxuriously to memories of love or youth, while you watch the glow of the fire where the logs of oak are burning?
Here, the fire outlines a sort of chessboard in red squares, there it has a sheen like velvet; little blue flames start up and flicker and play about in the glowing depths of the brasier.
A mysterious artist comes and adapts that flame to his own ends; by a secret of his own he draws a visionary face in the midst of those flaming violet and crimson hues, a face with unimaginable delicate outlines, a fleeting apparition which no chance will ever bring back again. It is a woman's face, her hair is blown back by the wind, her features speak of a rapture of delight; she breathes fire in the midst of the fire.
She smiles, she dies, you will never see her any more.
Farewell, flower of the flame!
Farewell, essence incomplete and unforeseen, come too early or too late to make the spark of some glorious diamond."
"But, Pauline?"
"You do not see, then?
I will begin again.
Make way! make way!
She comes, she is here, the queen of illusions, a woman fleeting as a kiss, a woman bright as lightning, issuing in a blaze like lightning from the sky, a being uncreated, of spirit and love alone.
She has wrapped her shadowy form in flame, or perhaps the flame betokens that she exists but for a moment.