He leaned suddenly toward her.
“Why do you think that?”
“You talked about the evil eye and the dark of the moon; the others, Nels and Dorothy, thought you were joking or talking in riddles, but I didn’t. The night of the show, when you were first stricken, I saw George performing incantations before a horrible snake—a black cobra, I think; a month later he worshipped the snake again and your illness increased. He has come here because Angela wants him to entertain us with his music hall magic. I am afraid that he will use the snake. You say you are to lose your life tomorrow; if George is the cause of your illness, then that is true.”
He was still leaning toward her, searching her face in the waning light. He spoke slowly as if his words were but a surface ripple over a deep lake of thought.
“It is true that my illness is mind-born—I have known that from the beginning—and that it is not of myself, and I have tried to discover who could have thought it on me. It may be, as you suggest, that George has done it. It is an answer, but why?”
“Because of Gloria,” she said. With another man it would have been difficult to tell her beliefs, but for the moment it seemed as if they two were hanging suspended in the dusk-blue bowl of mountain and sky, and the soul, eager yet indifferent of life, that looked out of his eyes, commanded absolute truth.
“George loves her—he is a Hindoo, and for no other reason would he have been her servant all these years. At first he understood the prejudices of a Western woman and realized that he couldn’t marry her, but I think if you will look back perhaps now you can see how he separated you and Gloria. I have never seen the two men who followed, but I think he must have hypnotized her into marrying them, and then himself broken the marriages, and now she is going to marry this horrible Prince Aglipogue. George is forcing her to do that. He boasted that it was so to me. It will ruin her career and make her poor, and break her heart with shame when she wakes to what she has done. Then George will claim his reward. He did not mention your name when he talked to me, but he said, ‘There is only one other fit to walk beside her, and he is slowly dying of an unknown disease.’ You see there is only one link gone from my story and that is how you let Gloria go at first. Why did you, why did you?”
In the retelling of the story that had occupied her mind all these weeks, putting all her fears into words, it seemed that the danger she told had grown fourfold. When she had tried to tell Terry his very attitude of uncomprehension had made her story sound unreal, but when she told it now, she saw belief and understanding in Pendragon’s eyes, and something else—a resignation that maddened her. It was as if he watched Gloria being murdered and made no movement to protect her.
“Why, why?” she demanded again, grasping his arm with tense fingers. She could almost have shaken him.
He seemed quite unmoved by her excitement.