CHAPTER XXVI. A BATTLE ROYAL

I threw myself on the bed, and began to turn over in my mind the tale

she had told me. She had forgotten herself, and, by a single incautious

word, removed one perplexity as to the condition in which I found her in

the forest! The leopardess BOUNDED over; the princess lay prostrate on

the bank: the running stream had dissolved her self-enchantment! Her own

account of the object of her journey revealed the danger of the Little

Ones then imminent: I had saved the life of their one fearful enemy!

I had but reached this conclusion when I fell asleep. The lovely wine

may not have been quite innocent.

When I opened my eyes, it was night. A lamp, suspended from the ceiling,

cast a clear, although soft light through the chamber. A delicious

languor infolded me. I seemed floating, far from land, upon the bosom of

a twilight sea. Existence was in itself pleasure. I had no pain. Surely

I was dying!

No pain!--ah, what a shoot of mortal pain was that! what a sickening

sting! It went right through my heart! Again! That was sharpness

itself!--and so sickening! I could not move my hand to lay it on my

heart; something kept it down!

The pain was dying away, but my whole body seemed paralysed. Some evil

thing was upon me!--something hateful! I would have struggled, but could

not reach a struggle. My will agonised, but in vain, to assert itself.

I desisted, and lay passive. Then I became aware of a soft hand on my

face, pressing my head into the pillow, and of a heavy weight lying

across me.

I began to breathe more freely; the weight was gone from my chest; I

opened my eyes.

The princess was standing above me on the bed, looking out into the

room, with the air of one who dreamed. Her great eyes were clear and

calm. Her mouth wore a look of satisfied passion; she wiped from it a

streak of red.

She caught my gaze, bent down, and struck me on the eyes with the

handkerchief in her hand: it was like drawing the edge of a knife across

them, and for a moment or two I was blind.

I heard a dull heavy sound, as of a large soft-footed animal alighting

from a little jump. I opened my eyes, and saw the great swing of a long

tail as it disappeared through the half-open doorway. I sprang after it.

The creature had vanished quite. I shot down the stair, and into the

hall of alabaster. The moon was high, and the place like the inside of

a faint, sun-blanched moon. The princess was not there. I must find her:

in her presence I might protect myself; out of it I could not! I was

a tame animal for her to feed upon; a human fountain for a thirst

demoniac! She showed me favour the more easily to use me! My waking eyes

did not fear her, but they would close, and she would come! Not seeing

her, I felt her everywhere, for she might be anywhere--might even now

be waiting me in some secret cavern of sleep! Only with my eyes upon her

could I feel safe from her!

Outside the alabaster hall it was pitch-dark, and I had to grope my way

along with hands and feet. At last I felt a curtain, put it aside, and

entered the black hall. There I found a great silent assembly. How it

was visible I neither saw nor could imagine, for the walls, the floor,

the roof, were shrouded in what seemed an infinite blackness, blacker

than the blackest of moonless, starless nights; yet my eyes could

separate, although vaguely, not a few of the individuals in the mass

interpenetrated and divided, as well as surrounded, by the darkness.

It seemed as if my eyes would never come quite to themselves. I pressed

their balls and looked and looked again, but what I saw would not grow

distinct. Blackness mingled with form, silence and undefined motion

possessed the wide space. All was a dim, confused dance, filled with

recurrent glimpses of shapes not unknown to me. Now appeared a woman,

with glorious eyes looking out of a skull; now an armed figure on a

skeleton horse; now one now another of the hideous burrowing phantasms.

I could trace no order and little relation in the mingling and crossing

currents and eddies. If I seemed to catch the shape and rhythm of a

dance, it was but to see it break, and confusion prevail. With the

shifting colours of the seemingly more solid shapes, mingled a multitude

of shadows, independent apparently of originals, each moving after

its own free shadow-will. I looked everywhere for the princess, but

throughout the wildly changing kaleidoscopic scene, could not see her

nor discover indication of her presence. Where was she? What might she

not be doing? No one took the least notice of me as I wandered hither

and thither seeking her. At length losing hope, I turned away to look

elsewhere. Finding the wall, and keeping to it with my hand, for even

then I could not see it, I came, groping along, to a curtained opening

into the vestibule.

Dimly moonlighted, the cage of the leopardess was the arena of what

seemed a desperate although silent struggle. Two vastly differing forms,

human and bestial, with entangled confusion of mingling bodies and

limbs, writhed and wrestled in closest embrace. It had lasted but an

instant when I saw the leopardess out of the cage, walking quietly to

the open door. As I hastened after her I threw a glance behind me: there

was the leopardess in the cage, couching motionless as when I saw her

first.

The moon, half-way up the sky, was shining round and clear; the bodiless

shadow I had seen the night before, was walking through the trees

toward the gate; and after him went the leopardess, swinging her tail.

I followed, a little way off, as silently as they, and neither of them

once looked round. Through the open gate we went down to the city, lying

quiet as the moonshine upon it. The face of the moon was very still, and

its stillness looked like that of expectation.

The Shadow took his way straight to the stair at the top of which I had

lain the night before. Without a pause he went up, and the leopardess

followed. I quickened my pace, but, a moment after, heard a cry of

horror. Then came the fall of something soft and heavy between me and

the stair, and at my feet lay a body, frightfully blackened and crushed,

but still recognisable as that of the woman who had led me home and shut

me out. As I stood petrified, the spotted leopardess came bounding down

the stair with a baby in her mouth. I darted to seize her ere she

could turn at the foot; but that instant, from behind me, the white

leopardess, like a great bar of glowing silver, shot through the

moonlight, and had her by the neck. She dropped the child; I caught it

up, and stood to watch the battle between them.

What a sight it was--now the one, now the other uppermost, both too

intent for any noise beyond a low growl, a whimpered cry, or a snarl of

hate--followed by a quicker scrambling of claws, as each, worrying

and pushing and dragging, struggled for foothold on the pavement! The

spotted leopardess was larger than the white, and I was anxious for my

friend; but I soon saw that, though neither stronger nor more active,

the white leopardess had the greater endurance. Not once did she lose

her hold on the neck of the other. From the spotted throat at length

issued a howl of agony, changing, by swift-crowded gradations, into the

long-drawn CRESCENDO of a woman’s uttermost wail. The white one relaxed

her jaws; the spotted one drew herself away, and rose on her hind legs.

Erect in the moonlight stood the princess, a confused rush of shadows

careering over her whiteness--the spots of the leopard crowding,

hurrying, fleeing to the refuge of her eyes, where merging they

vanished. The last few, outsped and belated, mingled with the cloud

of her streamy hair, leaving her radiant as the moon when a legion of

little vapours has flown, wind-hunted, off her silvery disc--save that,

adown the white column of her throat, a thread of blood still trickled

from every wound of her adversary’s terrible teeth. She turned away,

took a few steps with the gait of a Hecate, fell, covered afresh with

her spots, and fled at a long, stretching gallop.

The white leopardess turned also, sprang upon me, pulled my arms

asunder, caught the baby as it fell, and flew with it along the street

toward the gate.