The Keepers of the People

1708The girl shrank back, terrified and trembling, casting her eyes this way and that for a way of escape.

1709“Obey, fool!” cried the Princess, shaking her furiously, and striking her with the other hand. The girl shrank and cowered from her violence. There was no help for it; she rapped the secret knock on the gate; it opened; and the Princess drew her swiftly through.

1710“Which way? Which way?” said the Princess in a fierce whisper.

1711The girl led her to the right. Two more gates opened at the secret knock, and let them through; they came down a scented alley in the third garden, and stood before the lighted Pavilion.

1712Latchimi lay on a divan in a chamber lighted very brightly by wax tapers: she loved all the light possible. She was watching, in a sadness sprung from the sense of impending calamity, the great eyes of her baby: like those of all the silent children they seemed greater than other children’s eyes: when, of a sudden, there came the sound of hasty, strange footsteps, the curtains were wrenched roughly apart, and the Princess Agnes stood in the doorway — the Princess Agnes her eyes ablaze with anger, and triumph at having won her way to her rival. In one swift movement, a panther could not have been swifter, Latchimi thrust the child behind her on the divan; sprang to her feet; and the two women stared at one another.

1713Latchimi was no sight for jealous eyes: she wore nothing but a broad girdle; and her admirable figure, the wonderful golden lustre of her skin, her splendid eyes, and above all her superb air of intense life struck pang after pang out of the heart of Princess Agnes. She had come resolved to scathe with her cold scorn, as she phrased it to herself, this abandoned creature; but this insolence, it seemed no less to her, of beauty dashed her from her self-control, and she burst into a storm of passionate invective, mingling English and Varandal, her voice rising and falling in jerks.

1714Latchimi gazed at her in scornful wonder, a savage hatred gathering slowly in her heart, a hatred of this creature, the living embodiment of all those malign influences which had, as she felt it, prevented Prince Ralph growing wholly her own; and when breath failed the raging Princess, she said slowly in Varandal, “It is no wonder that the Prince grew weary of his wife.”