The Romance of the Harem

by Anna Harriette Leonowens

At last they reached Mariâ's chamber. She had just risen, and was now on her knees before the open window. The door was burst open, and she turned, still kneeling and holding her breath, her fixed and terrified gaze upon the intruders.

The chapel and the convent bells struck six. It was the hour when she usually set out to perform her small round of sacred offices and to open the church doors. But she had no power to move. She saw the padre dash aside her pillow and then her mattress, and with it her crumpled flowers. One of the men came towards her and demanded the key of the chapel. But she could not open her lips to speak; she knelt there petrified in the morning sunlight.

"To think that you should have connived at such an outrageous sacrilege upon the altar of God!" said the padre; and he ordered the men to handcuff her and carry her away to the prison at Tâmsèng.

She made no resistance, but let them do whatever they wished with her; she seemed even to have lost the power of comprehension. She sees the trees, the thatched roofs, the plantations, the fields, the tapering spires of the Temple of the Infinite, and a thousand small objects; she hears voices and cries that would have escaped her at another time, as she is dragged from the home of her parents to the prison cell of the doomed, but she cannot speak, or cry, or even think where she put the key. She knows that her mother is seated outside of the prison door, wailing and crying, and protesting that her child is innocent of the dreadful crime of which she is accused; and this is all that is clear to the stricken girl.

Twilight was falling just as I was coming out of the palace,—for I had been detained there all day helping the secretary to despatch the royal mail,—when Khoon Jethamas came running up to me, took both my hands in hers, and told me the story of her daughter's imprisonment.

What was to be done? The woman was frantic with grief, and I was almost as much confounded as she.

"You must come with me to-night, dear lady, this very evening. I cannot rest till I get her out of that dreadful place."

I at last persuaded her to come to my house and take a cup of tea, and when I had soothed her so that she could make herself intelligible, I thought the affair did not look quite so hopeless as she supposed, and I tried to make her take a more cheerful view of the matter. The only thing that seemed strange was that Mariâ could give no account of what she had done with the key of the chapel door.

Whoever robbed the chapel had got possession of the key. The locks on the chapel were of European manufacture, and there were only two keys that could open them, one in the possession of the padre Tomas, and the other in the keeping of the young wardens, who transferred it to the next person on duty after the morning service.

In a short time Khoon Jethamas and I were rowing against the tide for the village of Tâmsèng. On cross-questioning the lady, I discovered that the late priest Maha-Sâp had been seen prowling about the chapel when Rungeah, as the mother still called her, was at her devotions, and that on the following morning he was going towards the same spot when he was taken prisoner.