“She will taste all I eat and drink,” he reminded Buro Sitt. He motioned to her to taste it.
Staring at him defiantly, she raised it to her lips, and Vetter snatched it away and threw it on the floor.
“So soon?” he laughed. “And willing to drink too! But there is a mirror on the wall, my dear. I saw you drop a little white powder in it. We would have died together, eh? But it is much better to live.”
He sat down and laughed while I saw Buro Sitt quivering and almost—almost leaping for him. But two soldiers came rushing in. They’d heard the crashing glass. And they led Buro Sitt away, with more despair on his face than I thought any human being could show.
I waited for a signal from the doctor, but he looked on composedly. Vetter turned to us, laughing.
“One needs to be omniscient, eh? To know their secret thoughts. There is no other woman. That was for you. So that when I died of poison you would report that I and—she”—he jerked his thumb negligently at the white-faced girl—“were poisoned by a jealous woman.”
“I see,” said the doctor dryly. So did I. It fitted in nicely. Buro Sitt’s call of the night before and his talk of another woman would make us into witnesses that Vetter had been poisoned through jealousy. And it was quite clear that Buro Sitt was ready to see his daughter die too if it were any way necessary.
But Vetter believed he was all powerful, and the events of the last five minutes had given him extra proof. So he grinned and nodded a farewell and pushed the girl—shaken and shivering now—before him and left us. For all the world it was like a king or something dismissing his attendants. Vetter’d only wanted us for an audience, and now the show was over.
But Cary was raving. He turned to the doctor, his fists doubled, wanting to go and half kill Vetter. And I wasn’t any too peaceable myself. Not heroism, you know. Just ingrowing dislike of Vetter. He didn’t act like a white man should.
“We can’t interfere,” said the doctor coolly, “only when we’ve got proof that will stick in the teeth of Vetter’s say-so. And we haven’t.”