A shadowy figure was silhouetted against the window out of which Cartaret kept his supplies, and the figure seemed to have some of them in its hands.
Cartaret’s anger was still hot. Now it flamed to a sudden fury. He did not pause to consider the personality, or even the garb, of the thief. He saw nothing, thought nothing, save that he was being robbed. He charged the dim figure; tackled it as he once tackled runners on the football-field; fell with it much as he had fallen with those runners in the days of old—except that he fell among a hail of food-stuffs—and then found himself tragically holding to the floor the duenna Chitta.
It was a terrible thing, this battle with a frightened woman. Cartaret tried to rise, but she gripped him fast. His amazement first, and next his mortification, would have left him nerveless, but Chitta was fighting like a tigress. His face was scratched and one finger bitten, before he could hold her quiet enough to say, in slow French:
“I did not know that it was you. You are welcome to what you want. I am going to let you go. Don’t struggle. I shan’t hurt you. Get up.”
He thanked Heaven that she understood at least a little of the language. Shaken, he got to his own feet; but Chitta, instead of rising, surprisingly knelt at his.
She spouted a long speech of infinite emotion. She wept. She clasped and unclasped her hands. She pointed to the room of her mistress; then to her mouth, and then rubbed that portion of her figure over the spot where the appetite is appeased.
“Do you mean,” gasped Cartaret—“do you mean that you and your mistress”—this was terrible!—“have been poor?”
Chitta had come to the room without her head-dress, and the subsequent battle had sent her hair in dank coils about her shoulders. She nodded; the shaken coils were like so many serpents.
“And that she has been hungry?—Hungry?”
A violent negative. Chitta bobbed toward Cartaret’s rifled stores and then toward the street, as if to include other stores in the same circle of depredation. She was also plainly indignant at the idea that she would permit her mistress to be hungry.