For a full hour or more she slept, then there crept through the fantasies of sleep something that did not belong to sleep—again something from the wakeful world, strange, alien, troubling. At first it was only as though a wind stirred the air of dreams, then it was like the sounds that gather behind the coming rage of a storm, and again it was as though a night-prowler plucked at the sleeve of a home-goer. Presently, with a stir of fright and a smothered cry, she waked to a sound which was not of the supernatural or of the mind’s illusions, but no less dreadful to her because of that. In some cryptic way it was associated with the direful experience through which she had just passed.
What she heard in the darkness was a voice which sang there by her window—at it or beneath it—the words of a Romany song.
It was a song of violence, which she had heard but a short time before in the trees behind her father’s house, when a Romany claimed her as his wife:
“Time was I went to my true love,
Time was she came to me—”
Only one man would sing that song at her window, or anywhere in this Western world. This was no illusion of her overwrought senses. There, outside her window, was Jethro Fawe.
She sat up and listened, leaning on one arm, and staring into the half-darkness beyond the window, the blind of which she had not drawn down. There was no moon, but the stars were shining brightly, relieving the intensity of the dark. Through the whispering of the trees, and hushing the melancholy of a night-bird’s song, came the wild low note of the Romany epic of vengeance. It had a thrill of exultation. Something in the voice, insistent, vibrating, personal, made every note a thrust of victory. In spite of her indignation at the insolent serenade, she thrilled; for the strain of the Past was in her, and it had been fighting with her all night, breaking in upon the Present, tugging at the cords of youth.
The man’s daring roused her admiration, even as her anger mounted. If her father heard the singing, there could be no doubt that Jethro Fawe’s doom would be sealed. Gabriel Druse would resent this insolence to the daughter of the Ry of Rys. Word would be passed as silently as the electric spark flies, and one day Jethro Fawe would be found dead, with no clue to his slayer, and maybe no sign of violence upon him; for while the Romany people had remedies as old as Buddha, they had poisons as old as Sekhet.
Suddenly the song ceased, and for a moment there was silence save for the whispering trees and the night-bird’s song. Fleda rose from her bed, and was about to put on her dressing-gown, when she was startled by a voice loudly whispering her name at her window, as it seemed.
“Daughter of the Ry of Rys!” it called.
In anger she started forward to the window, then, realizing that she was in her nightgown, caught up her red dressing-gown and put it on. As she did so she understood why the voice had sounded so near. Not thirty feet from her window there was a solitary oak-tree among the pines, in which was a seat among the branches, and, looking out, she could see a figure that blackened the starlit duskiness.