At any other time Fleda would have laughed at the idea of using the exorcism; but all the ancient superstition of the Romany people latent in her now broke forth and held her captive. Standing with candle raised above her head, her eyes piercing the space before her, she recalled every word of the exorcism which had caught the drippings from the fountains of Chaldean, Phoenician, and Egyptian mystery.
Solemnly and slowly the exorcism came from her lips, and at the end her right hand made the cabalistic sign; then she stood like one transfixed with her arm extended towards the Thing she could not see.
Presently there passed from her a sense of oppression. The air seemed to grow lighter, restored self-possession came; there was a gentle breathing in the room like that of a sleeping child. It was a moment before she realized that the breathing was her own, and she looked round her like one who had come out of a trance.
“It is gone,” she said aloud. “It is gone.” A great sigh came from her.
Mechanically she put down the candle, smoothed the pillows of her bed, adjusted the coverings, and prepared to lie down; but, with a sudden impulse, she turned to the window and the door.
“It is gone,” she said again. With a little laugh of hushed triumph, she turned and made again the cabalistic sign at the bed, where the Thing had first assaulted her, and then at that point in the room near the door where she had felt it crouching.
“Oh, Ewie Gal,” she added, speaking to that Romany Sage long since laid to rest in the Roumelian country, “you did not talk to me for nothing. You were right—yes, you were right, old Ewie Gal. It was there,”—she looked again at the place where the Thing had been—“and your curse drove it away.”
With confidence she went to the door and unlocked it. Going to the window she opened it also, but she compromised sufficiently to open it at the top instead of at the bottom. Presently she laid her head on her pillow with a sigh of content.
Once again she composed herself to sleep in the darkness. But now there came other invasions, other disturbers of the night. In her imagination a man came who had held her in his arms one day on the Sagalac River, who had looked into her eyes with a masterful but respectful tenderness. As she neared the confines of sleep, he was somehow mingled with visions of things which her childhood had known—moonlit passes in the Bosnian, Roumelian, and Roumanian hills, green fields by the Danube, with peasant voices drowsing in song before the lights went out; a gallop after dun deer far away up the Caspian mountains, over waste places, carpeted with flowers after a benevolent rain; mornings in Egypt, when the camels thudded and slid with melancholy ease through the sands of the desert, while the Arab drivers called shrilly for Allah to curse or bless; a tender sunset in England seen from the top of a castle when all the western sky was lightly draped with saffron, gold and mauve and delicate green and purple.
Now she slept again, with the murmur of the Sagalac in her ears, and there was a smile at her lips. If one could have seen her through the darkness, one would have said that she was like some wild creature of a virgin world, whom sleep had captured and tamed; for, behind the refinement which education and the vigilant influence with which Madame Bulteel had surrounded her, there was in her the spirit of primitive things: of the open road and the wilderness, of the undisciplined and vagrant life, however marked by such luxury as the ruler of all the Romanys could buy and use in pilgrimage. There was that in her which would drag at her footsteps in this new life.