“Thank you,” she said, with a sigh of relief. She sat on the edge of the bed, her hair tumbled about her shoulders, smiling at this little weapon which could make death swift and easy, like a child delighted with a new toy.
Things which make the flesh crawl and the spirit shudder have sometimes a curious and dreadful fascination. All through their luncheon these strident cries called to Marguerite, drew her like some morbid vice. She wanted to creep up on to the roof, to crouch behind the parapet, though she knew that her heart would miss its beats and her senses reel on the edge of terror. And when Paul Ravenel said:
“Marguerite, I shall lie down on my bed and sleep when we have finished,” she realized that it was her own wish which he was uttering. She was almost disappointed when he lit a cigar. A cigarette, yes; but a cigar! That needs a deal of smoking. “You’ll wake me if there’s need,” said Paul. “I think that I shall sleep soundly.”
Marguerite noticed the heaviness of his eyelids, and was filled with compunction.
“If I must,” she answered, determining that whatever happened he who had hardly slept at all for fifty hours should sleep his sleep out now.
Yet within an hour she had waked him.
Hardly, indeed, had Paul’s eyes closed before she climbed to the roof. The terraces of the houses were a very kaleidoscope of shifting colours. Orange, scarlet, deep waistbelts of cloth of gold over dresses of purple and blue and pink were grouped in clusters here like flower beds. There the women moved in and out with frantic gestures like revellers in Bedlam. And over all the shrill vibrant pæan like a canopy!
Marguerite watched and listened, shivering—until one house caught and riveted her eyes. Beneath her flowed the Karouein river. The farther bank was lined with the walls of houses, and about one, a little to Marguerite’s right, there was suddenly a great commotion. Marguerite lifted her head cautiously above the parapet and looked down. A narrow path ran between the houses and the stream, and this path was suddenly crowded with men as though they had sprung from the earth. They beat upon the door, they fired senselessly at the blind mud walls with rifles, they shouted for admittance. And the roof of that one house was empty. Marguerite was suddenly aware of it. It was the only empty roof in all that row of houses.
The shouts from the path were redoubled. Orders to open became screams of exultation, threats of vengeance. Marguerite, looking down from her high vantage point, saw the men upon the pathway busy like ants. A group of them clustered suddenly. They seemed to stoop, to lengthen themselves into line—and now she saw what they were lifting. A huge square long beam of wood—a battering ram? Yes, a battering ram. Three times the beam was swung against the door to the tune of some monotonous rhythm of the East, which breathed of deserts and strange temples and abiding wistfulness, curiously out of keeping with the grim violence which was used. At the fourth blow the door burst and broke. It was as though a river dam had broken and a river torrent leapt in a solid shaft through the breach.
For a few moments thereafter nothing was seen by Marguerite. The walls of the house were a curtain between her and the tragic stage. She could only imagine the overturning of furniture, the pillage of rooms a moment since clean and orderly, now a dirty wreckage, a pandemonium of a search—and then the empty roof was no longer empty. A man sprang out upon it, a man wearing the uniform of a French officer. He had been bolted like a rat by dogs.