The Tunic
“Marguerite, you must go to bed,” said Paul. “I’ll rouse you if there’s any danger.”
It was very near to the dawn now. There was a freshness and an expectation in the air; a faint colourless light was invading the darkness; in the patch of sky above their heads the bright stars were swooning. For most of this last half hour Marguerite’s head had lain heavy upon his shoulder, and if she opened her eyes it was only to close them again with a sigh of content. Paul lifted her on to her feet and led her up the stairs.
“And you, Paul?” she asked, drowsily.
“I shall be within call. I shall sleep for a little on the cushions below. Good-night.”
Marguerite noticed that the voice of the last mueddin ceased whilst she was still preparing herself for her bed; and after she had got into it, she heard a kettle singing cheerfully in the court below as if Paul were brewing for himself some tea. Then, with the doors of her bedroom open upon the little gallery above the court she went fast asleep.
Hours afterwards a shattering noise awakened her. She lay for a few moments deliciously poised between sleep and consciousness, and vaguely thinking her long and troubled vigil to have been a nightmare which the light of day had happily dispelled. The sunlight was falling in a sheet of gold through the open roof. “It must be very late,” she reflected, lazily, and thereupon sharply and crisply two shots from a rifle split the air. Marguerite sprang up in her bed with a hand to her heart, as though one of those shots had wounded her. It was just the same noise which had broken through her slumbers. The nightmare was true, then! She listened, resting upon one arm, with her face turned towards the open doors. A clamour of voices was borne from a distance to her ears. The new Terror had begun.
“Paul!” she cried loudly. “Paul”; and a tall man dressed in the robes of a Moor stood beside her bed. She shrank away with a little scream. It was not until he smiled that she recognized her lover.
“You had better get up, Marguerite,” he said, and bending down he kissed her. “You have slept well, thank the Lord.”
One of the negresses brought her a cup of tea and Marguerite, slipping on her dressing gown, sat upon the edge of the bed and thrust her feet into her slippers.