The Milner safe stood open, showing empty shelves, and she shuddered yet at the memory of the frightful scene which had followed her refusal to open it.
She loved jewels; wanted them for their beauty; had fought the negro for them; but there was one thing she clung to even more, and that was life, so that when the huge hands had slowly, so very slowly pressed upon her neck, she had given in and setting the combination, had swung the door slowly back.
And Qatim, grey-green with fright, thinking that it had been worked by the power of a djinn or devil, had flung her out into the night, and having scraped a hole in the foetid earth under the straw, with fervent prayers to whatever he worshipped, had withdrawn the jewels, hidden them, and called the woman back.
Yes! she clung to life. Strange is it how we do, even when youth and beauty and health have passed from us. How, crippled and unlovely, twisted of temper or limb, with failing senses, in bath-chair, or propped on sticks, we hang on to the last thread, when surely we ought to be so thankful to snap it and be away to whatever our lives here have prepared for us over the border.
"Were't not a shame, were't not a loss for him
In this clay carcase, crippled, to abide?"
Well might old Omar ponder upon this.
But Zulannah had a good reason for clinging to life, in spite of the greatness of her debacle.
The metal of which had been wrought the one love that had come to her in her short life had not been able to withstand the crucible of physical pain. For hours and days she had writhed in the agony of her physical injury, with no one to care if she suffered or starved, except the Ethiopian, who, when her senses had come back to her, had twitted her upon her failure in her love-affairs; had tormented and mocked and laughed, until a great wish for revenge had taken the place of her former love for the Englishman. Revenge, above all things, on the girl who had been capable of inspiring love in two such men; revenge on the white man who had really been the primary cause of her downfall, but a lingering, hellish revenge, if she could only think of one, for the man who had given the order to the dogs just because she had reviled the white girl, Damaris.
So she sat on the pile of cushions, smoking the cheapest cigarette of the bazaar, whilst her cunning brain wove plots around the astounding news Qatim had just imparted.
They were perfectly free from interruption. The door was barred and the small aperture which served as window was too highly placed in the wall to allow of eyes to peep; but it was superstition that really kept them safe and proved far more potent as a barrier against their neighbours' curiosity than any spike-crowned wall.