Into Melicent's bedroom, about two o'clock in the morning, came Ahasuerus the Jew. She sat erect in bed and saw him cowering over a lamp which his long glistening fingers shielded, so that the lean face of the man floated upon a little golden pool in the darkness. She marvelled that this detestable countenance had not aged at all since her first sight of it.
He smoothly said: "Now let us talk. I have loved you for some while, fair Melicent."
"You have desired me," she replied.
"Faith, I am but as all men, whatever their age. Why, what the devil! man may have Javeh's breath in him, but even Scripture proves that man was made of clay." The Jew now puffed out his jaws as if in recollection. "You are a handsome piece of flesh, I thought when I came to you at Bellegarde, telling of Perion's captivity. I thought no more than this, because in my time I have seen a greater number of handsome women than you would suppose. Thereafter, on account of an odd reason which I had, I served Demetrios willingly enough. This son of Miramon Lluagor was able to pay me well, in a curious coinage. So I arranged the bungling snare Demetrios proposed--too gross, I thought it, to trap any woman living. Ohé, and why should I not lay an open and frank springe for you? Who else was a king's bride-to-be, young, beautiful, and blessed with wealth and honour and every other comfort which the world affords?" Now the Jew made as if to fling away a robe from his gaunt person. "And you cast this, all this, aside as nothing. I saw it done."
"Ah, but I did it to save Perion," she wisely said.
"Unfathomable liar," he returned, "you boldly and unscrupulously bought of life the thing which you most earnestly desired. Nor Solomon nor Periander has won more. And thus I saw that which no other man has seen. I saw the shrewd and dauntless soul of Melicent. And so I loved you, and I laid my plan--"
She said, "You do not know of love--"
"Yet I have builded him a temple," the Jew considered. He continued, with that old abhorrent acquiescence, "Now, a temple is admirable, but it is not builded until many labourers have dug and toiled waist-deep in dirt. Here, too, such spatterment seemed necessary. So I played, in fine, I played a cunning music. The pride of Demetrios, the jealousy of Callistion, and the greed of Orestes--these were as so many stops of that flute on which I played a cunning deadly music. Who forbids it?"