Mahmoud prostrated himself, put the letter in his vest, stretched himself again on the ground in obeisance, then silently left her presence.
She had always found the child obedient and intelligent, the only person in all her household who would obey implicitly and in silence, without feeling any curiosity as to the purport of his errands or ever babbling of them in the servants’ hall.
When he had left her she remained long motionless, lost in thought, sitting alone amidst the dying roses, and the sunbeams broken and dimmed by the deep shadows from the veiled windows. She had a strange desolate sense of having given up the only thing which could have made life worth the living.
‘But I think in what I wrote there was no suggestion of regret,’ she mused, recalling all her written words. ‘I think not; I hope not. If he believed that there were any regret on my side, it would be of no avail to have written it. He would be here in an hour, and he would follow me all the world over.’
Then she summoned her women again:
‘I go back to Russia to-night to Zaraizoff,’ she said to them. ‘Tell Paul to have everything done that is necessary.’
CHAPTER LIV.
The boy Mahmoud, with the letter in his vest, took his way by the inland paths towards S. Pharamond; it was not more than three miles, following the tracks the peasants used. Mahmoud was almost always dumb, but he was ceaselessly watchful; he adored his mistress, but he was morbidly jealous of her. In the gay households of La Jacquemerille, of Zaraizoff, of the Hôtel Napraxine, his precocity had become familiar with all the corruptions of the world of white faces. Speaking little he was supposed to understand as little; but, in truth, the small listening dusky boy understood every word which went past him. He had heard them in Paris speak of Othmar; he had comprehended that Othmar was the lover of his mistress; he had heard Paul say to his friends, ‘If it have ever been anyone, it is that one.’ He had understood, and he had taken a hatred of Othmar into his silent, savage, volcanic child’s heart.