which she had prepared years ago with her own bloodless hands, and no
doubt scientifically tested its effects on others. The cobra di capella
is gone at last! "/Souviens-toi de ta Gabrielle/," O Jasper Losely! But
why Arabella Crane should thus continue to watch over him whom she no
longer professed to love, how she should thus have acquired the gift of
ubiquity and the power to save him, Jasper Losely could not conjecture.
The whole thing seemed to him weird and supernatural. Most truly did he
say that she had cowed him. He had often longed to strangle her; when
absent from her, had often resolved upon that act of gratitude. The
moment he came in sight of her stern, haggard face, her piercing lurid
eyes; the moment he heard her slow, dry voice in some such sentences as
these: "Again you come to me in your trouble, and ever shall. Am I not
still as your mother, but with a wife's fidelity, till death us do part?
There's the portrait of what you were: look at it, Jasper. Now turn to
the glass: see what you are. Think of the fate of Gabrielle Desmarets!
But for me, what, long since, had been your own? But I will save you:
I have sworn it. You shall be wax in these hands at last,"--the moment
that voice thus claimed and insisted on redeeming him, the ruffian felt
a cold shudder, his courage oozed, he could no more have nerved his arm
against her than a Thug would have lifted his against the dire goddess of
his murderous superstition. Jasper could not resist a belief that the
life of this dreadful protectress was, somehow or other, made essential
to his; that, were she to die, he should perish in some ghastly and
preternatural expiation. But for the last few months he had, at length,
escaped from her; diving so low, so deep into the mud, that even her net
could not mesh him. Hence, perhaps, the imminence of the perils from
which he had so narrowly escaped, hence the utterness of his present
destitution. But man, however vile, whatever his peril, whatever his
destitution, was born free, and loves liberty. Liberty to go to Satan
in his own way was to Jasper Losely a supreme blessing compared to