“Wait!” she said mysteriously, and they waited, taking the opportunity of gathering their possessions together in view of the return to Bir-ul-Malik the next day. They had been in their room about an hour, when the jingling of anklets along the passage, and a hurried knock at the door, announced a visitor. Rahah opened the door cautiously, and Khadija entered and walked up to Georgia.
“Give me the medicine,” she said abruptly, and taking from her bosom a small phial, half filled with a clear colourless liquid, she emptied the powder into it from the box, shook up the resultant mixture, and closing the phial, handed it back to Georgia.
“Take it, O doctor lady,” she said. “But for the curse, thou shouldst never have had it. But truly God is great, and He is good to the accursed English, so that the old spells and the magic of our fathers cannot stand before theirs. And now come and take away the curse from my Rose of the World, for I cannot see her fade and die before my eyes.”
Followed by Rahah, Georgia returned to Zeynab’s room, where they found the child tossing restlessly on her bed.
“O my nurse, take it away!” was her cry. “I feel the curse; I know it has come upon me. I cannot sleep. There is a weight on my heart and a fire in my bones, and it is thou that art killing me.”
“The curse is gone, my dove,” said Khadija. “I have given the rest of the medicine to the doctor lady.”
“But how can I believe thee? I feel no better,” moaned Zeynab.
“O doctor lady, wilt thou still kill my child?” cried the old woman in a frenzy. “I could give thee no more if she were dying at this moment. Take away from her thy curse and thy evil enchantments.”
Sitting down beside the bed, Georgia took the hot little hands into one of hers, and with the other smoothed back the tangled hair from the child’s brow. It was more than an hour before all her stories and her talk could banish the haunting horror from Zeynab’s mind, and induce her to close her bright eyes, and her doctor was nearly worn out when she was at last able to leave her. Sheer fatigue made Georgia sleep soundly, in spite of the excitement of the past day, and she and Rahah were not disturbed again that night. In the morning Fitz flashed an inquiry as to the time at which she would like to be fetched from Bir-ul-Malikat, and about eleven o’clock she saw the cavalcade she was expecting enter the courtyard. There was a hurried collecting together of packages, a hasty farewell to Zeynab, who wept copiously, and would not be comforted even by the promise that she should receive every picture-paper Georgia could lay her hands on, and then, accompanied by Khadija, the visitors went down to the courtyard. To Georgia’s surprise and disappointment, it was Stratford and Fitz who came eagerly to meet her as she appeared at the door shrouded in her burka.
“Where is Dick? He is not ill, is he?” she asked anxiously of Stratford, remembering Fitz’s message of the night before.