Aye! Not that I
care for siller--but feefty thousand pun'! Eh, sirs!"
VI
Dr. Haustus knew that the Chevalier had again visited the Princess,
although he had kept the visit a secret,--and indeed was himself
invisible for a day or two afterwards. At last the doctor's
curiosity induced him to visit the Chevalier's apartment.
Entering, he was surprised--even in that Land of Mystery--to find
the room profoundly dark, smelling of Eastern drugs, and the
Chevalier sitting before a large plate of glass which he was
examining by the aid of a lurid ruby lamp,--the only light in the
weird gloom. His face was pale and distraught, his locks were
disheveled.
"Voila!" he said. "Mon Dieu! It is my third attempt. Always the
same--hideous, monstrous, unearthly! It is she, and yet it is not
she!"
The doctor, professional man as he was and inured to such
spectacles, was startled! The plate before him showed the
Princess's face in all its beautiful contour, but only dimly
veiling a ghastly death's-head below. There was the whole bony
structure of the head and the eyeless sockets; even the graceful,
swan-like neck showed the articulated vertebral column that
supported it in all its hideous reality. The beautiful shoulders
were there, dimly as in a dream--but beneath was the empty
clavicle, the knotty joint, the hollow sternum, and the ribs of a
skeleton half length!
The doctor's voice broke the silence.
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