The idea of profit to come by the truce occurred to him in the same breath; and, crying loudly, again he bade the doorkeeper to open.
"Open, open!"
Twenty voices took up the cry. The gypsies vied with each other in shouting the summons. For they understood the signal. The rope was about their own necks, they said. The last chance was to open the gate to their prisoners. When the doorkeeper hesitated, trembling and afraid, they stabbed him to the heart and he rolled headlong to the foot of the bridge near by which his life had been lived.
But Gavin and Arthur Kenyon passed out to the mountain road, and looking down to the valley they perceived the flame of bivouac fires in the wood below; and they understood immediately that cavalry had been sent from Bukharest to their aid and that the hour of their peril had passed.
CHAPTER XXXIII
DJALA
Evelyn recovered consciousness after that which seemed a very night of evil dreaming, but which was in reality no more than a brief half-hour of insensibility. Greatly weakened by the struggle and the swoon attending it, she lay for some while unable to lift herself upon the bed where they had laid her or to take any notice of the room to which she had been carried. When her strength returned somewhat, and a sudden memory of the circumstances of her visit recurred to her, she sat up immediately, a great fear at her heart and a dread upon her such as she had never suffered before.
What house was it? Who was its owner? What was the meaning of the insult placed upon her? The questions raced through her brain so quickly that she found an answer to none of them. At one time she could almost believe that her own father was privy to the outrage and had led to this desperate course by his detestation of the rôle she played in London. Rejecting this immediately because of her love for him, she was then tempted to say that Odin relied upon his threats and believed that she would submit to him to save Gavin's life. This appeared the more plausible story. Was not the man from the East a Roumanian with but primitive ideas of a modern civilization and the son of a country wherein women were still little better than the silent victims of men's passions? Perhaps he believed that he could carry her out of England. It might be even that.
She was in a spacious bedroom, furnished, so far as the dim light would permit her to see, in a modern style and with many evidences of later-day luxury. A fresh fire, burning with a light flame in an open grate, cast flashing rays upon darkly-papered walls and the heavy pictures which ornamented them. A sofa had been drawn up before the fire and showed its pattern in the fitful beams; there was an electric chandelier above a dressing-table and a single reading lamp upon a little table by the bedside. Afraid of the darkness in a degree unknown to her, Evelyn tried to find the switch by which the lamp might be lighted; but her cold hands bungled it and, despairing, she rose from the bed and crossed the room toward the heavily-curtained window.