When the scream died away, one-eyed Hadj was standing at the entrance to the arbour. Madame Lemaire felt that he was there, turned round, and saw him.
“I’d go with him if he was an Arab,” she said, but almost muttering now, for her voice had suddenly failed her, though her passion was still red-hot. “Even the Arabs—they’re better than you, absinthe-soaked, do-nothing Roumis, who sit and drink, drink——”
Her voice cracked, went into a whisper, disappeared. She thrust out her hand, swept the glasses off the table to follow the bottle, turned, and went out of the arbour softly on her slippered feet.
And one-eyed Hadj stood there laughing, for he understood French very well, although he was half mad with keef.
“She’d go with an Arab!” he repeated. “She’d go with an Arab!” And then he saw his master.
The two Frenchmen sat staring at one another across the empty table under the shivering vine-leaves, which were now stirred continually by the wind of night. Lemaire’s large face had gone a dusky grey. About his eyes there was a tinge of something that was almost lead colour. His loose mouth had dropped, and the lower lip disclosed his decayed teeth. His hands, laid upon the table as if for support, shook and jumped, were never still even for a second.
Bouvier was almost purple. Veins stood out about his forehead. The blood had gone to his ears and to his eyes. Now he leaned across to Lemaire.
“Beat her!” he said. “Beat her for that! Hadj heard her. If you don’t beat her, the Arabs——”
But before he had finished the sentence Lemaire had got up, with a wild gesture of his shaking hand, and gone unsteadily into the house.
That night Madame Lemaire suffered at the hands of her husband, while Bouvier and Hadj listened in the darkness of the court.