“Now, enough words,” said her mistress. “I shall lock her up in her room and send for the police inspector. Perhaps in prison they may get the truth out of her.”
Mattina turned as pale as wax.
She knew what prison was. Even in Poros she had seen men with their arms tied back with ropes, taken to Nauplia[24] to the big prison of the “Palamidi”;[25] and she had heard tales of those who had returned from there!
“To prison!” she gasped. “To prison! I?”
“Of course,” said her mistress, enjoying her terror. “Did you think that you could steal and then stay in honest houses? Now you will see what will happen to you, you little thief!”
Mattina stumbled back against the wall. The sweat sprang out on her face, she kept wetting her lips, and her hands groped before her as though she were in the dark.
Her mistress seized hold of her arm and pulled her towards the open door of the room. For the first moments she struggled wildly, and then feeling how useless it was, she let herself be dragged out of the door and up the few steps to her little dark room. Her mistress pushed open the door with her foot and thrust Mattina in so violently that she fell upon the mattress in the further corner. Then the key was pulled out of the keyhole, and the door locked and double-locked on the outside; then Mattina heard her mistress’s heavy tread descending to the room below.
It was quite dark already. Mattina was never allowed a candle in her room, nor even a floating wick in a tumbler of oil. “As though,” her mistress had said, “it were necessary to burn good oil for a serving maid to pull off her clothes and tumble on to her mattress.” As a rule she was so tired and sleepy, she did not mind; but now she was very frightened indeed, and fear is always worse in the dark.
She lay there, where she had been flung, huddled up against the wall, her eyes hidden in the bend of her arm.
Prison! They would send her to prison! She had heard of a man in Poros, Andoni, the joiner, who had broken open the money box of Sotiro, the coffee-house keeper, in the night, and he had been kept ten years in prison! She did not know how much money he had taken; she had never heard. How long would they keep her in prison if they thought she had stolen twenty-five drachmæ; it was a great deal of money! And what would they do to her in prison? Was it a dark place under the ground? Oh, why was her father, her own “babba,” not alive to beat off the men of the police who would soon be coming to fetch her?