“ ‘Come!’ he said, and he led her into the big room, closing the door behind him. I heard the clicking of the switches of the electric light; and a few minutes later a subdued clatter of people entering the room and taking their places.
“Meanwhile Robin Webster had stood like a figure of stone, with his eyes bent upon the floor. He raised his face with a sigh of relief. He slipped off his long coat, and I saw that he was wearing a priest’s cassock. He put on the surplice, the stole and the alb, slowly, like a man in a dream. He took something from the pocket of his coat, which he hid in his sleeve. Then he turned and looked at me. I had taken off my domino. He pointed to a table on which a censer of gold with golden chains was resting. It was filled with incense waiting to be kindled, and a box of matches stood upon the table beside it. I struck a match and lit the incense and took the censer in my hand. A smoke curled up from it black as pitch, and the fumes filled the room with an odour acrid, intoxicating. All the while his eyes were watching me. Every moment I expected a cry from him: ‘Who are you?’ But no cry came. I stood up and faced him, swinging the censer to and fro across my body and between us; so that I saw him only through a mist of smoke. Even so, I felt he must know me, he stood and stared with so set a face, and such unwinking eyes. Suddenly an intense relief came over me. For I realised that though he stared, he did not see. I was nothing to him. His thoughts were turned in upon himself. A slow smile flickered about his mouth, his tongue moistened his lips, and he felt his sleeve with his right hand—to make sure. I know now that he was savouring the moment which was to set him free from the tedium and the exactions of his mistress—savouring it with a voluptuous slow delight.
“ ‘Now,’ he said, and he opened the door. A blaze of light rushed in on us.
“I followed him, with a prayer on my lips and a terrible fear at my heart. But no longer a fear lest I should blunder and be discovered. I had passed beyond that. I suppose the fumes of the incense were making me drunk. But I was at that moment afraid as I hope I shall never be again—afraid that I should see Satan himself taking shape in that room in the midst of his worshippers, baleful and hideous, with death in the mere pointing of his finger. What protection would my disguise be then? I went forward dazed and stunned. The room was a blur to me. But in a little while my vision cleared. I saw the room about half full, and not a soul in it but was masked and wore some concealing wrap. But here and there beneath the wraps of the women I could see the sheen of white shoulders and the flash of jewels. And all of them were muttering and whispering so that the room was filled as with the hum of bees. Then as Robin Webster prostrated himself before the altar I took my position at the side and behind him. The altar was a living woman. Yes!
“A great lamp hung in the ceiling flung down a light golden and dazzling. It lit up the youth beautiful with the blue, sorrow-haunted eyes, and the two panels at the side, and it poured upon Evelyn Devenish, stretched naked upon her back on a black coffin-pall. Her eyes were closed, but her bosom rose and fell with her tumultuous breathing, and her arms were outstretched stiff and rigid to make with her outstretched body the form of a cross. I understood then what her words had meant in the little room:
“ ‘As she won, so shall I.’
“For just so Madame de Montespan once had lain as an altar for the Abbé Guibourg, that she might win back the wandering passion of her royal lover. And she had won it back.
“Robin Webster began the service of the Mass with the murmured Latin prayers and, as the ritual ordained, I changed my place from side to side, swung the censer and bent the knee. It was the true Mass, the Mass meant to deceive. For not until the Flesh had been made bread and the Blood wine, could begin the orgy of jeers and mockery, the frenzy of the adoration of Satan which in half an hour would make of that room a stew, a sty of animals met in a battle of lust. So the prayers to the true God followed one upon the other, and as I passed from one end of the altar to the other I saw my gold bracelet glittering upon Evelyn Devenish’s wrist and—yes—a smear of the varnish dark on the palm of her hand. She had called herself superstitious, I remembered, when she borrowed the bracelet. She had gone back to the most ancient superstition in the world. If she wore something of mine in this supreme crisis, she would draw into herself and out of me the innermost heart of me, and all that I had of power to attract. As the sacred climax approached, a great trembling took her body and limbs, her eyes opened and fixed themselves on the Adonis; cries, uttered low like the whimperings of an animal, broke continually from her lips. Robin Webster took the chalice and raised it above his head, and then placed it between her breasts and bent over her, fumbling
