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64
The Serpent
"He has sworn a podvig never to close his eyes until he sleeps upon your grave !" cried a mocking voice.
It was enough. Her cup of bitterness was flowing over. Vania, whitelipped and sick, told the driver of the droshky to take her to the railroad station, ten miles north. Glad of his rich fare, the man whipped his animal with fresh vigor. "We'll be there before sundown," he assured her.
In St. Petersburg that night, Vania
"You see the s u o w said Audrey. "It glitters and looks beautiful,
but it is cold and full of death, just lik(
swore a terrible oath to the effect that henceforth she would devote her life to ruining men. Serpent, her father had called her, and serpent she would be, in truth. Lest her own poison, generated by her hate, act upon herself, she would inoculate those beastly men who sought her as their prey. A year proved her purpose and her venom. For her, or because of her, three men had died violent deaths, two were banished to the salt mines, and one ruined financially. Strange to remark, her
beauty thrived and increased on her ghoulish fare. But eventually her trail of ruin and death resulted in official orders to leave Russia. They said she was otchainy, which, in Russian, means "past praying for."
To Paris, that mecca of sophistication and dalliance, Vania went. Within a month, she was the talk of town; within a year, its demimonde sensation. Several men of genius were in her train. A great author fell her victim, and blew out his brains because she chose a cabinet minister for a new lover. The cabinet minister lost his position in three months on her account ; she ignored him, and he went to the depths of degradation. Then she tried the stage, calling herself "La Serpent." All Paris flocked to see her. More men w ere lured and lost.
Five years
passed. Vania was
in the very zenith
of her dreadful ยป
basilisklike beauty. She w as only twenty-three. Then the European war shook the Old Wrorld to its foundations. When the wounded filled Paris, it was her whim to give free performances for them, not out of charity, but out of vanity. By this time her heart was dead. Even when she heard from a soldier of Strielna that Andrey had been killed on the field of battle, she was unmoved. One day her eyes were drawn to a young fellow's face in her audience. It stirred a dormant memory. She asked about him. He was Prince Valonoff, and had been shot in an engagement, she learned. Yes, though a mere boy of twenty-one, she