"Help you? I would help myself, if I could. But there is no way out.
It is no use." The unknown girl spoke with a bitterness that brought conviction. Piteously the flare of hope and spirit wilted.
"You are sure?" she questioned faintly. "There is no way out?"
"No way, no way!" The other shook her head impatiently. "Do I not know? Let us talk of that again. Now I came to see you, to see what pretty face had sent me packing!" She laughed, but there was ugliness in the laughter, and catching up the candle she held it before Arlee, her face impudently close, her eyes black darts of curiosity.
"Well you are pretty enough," she said coolly. "Hamdi has always the good taste. But do you think you will keep my room from me--h"m?"
"I do not want your room," said Arlee with pa.s.sionate intensity.
"I do not want to stay here. I want only to go away. Oh, there must be a way. Please help me--please." She choked and broke down, the tears hot in her eyes.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""I do not want to stay here""]
The other girl abruptly drew her down on the couch and settled herself beside her among the cushions. "Here--be comfortable--let us be comfortable and talk," she said. "Do not cry so--What, you are so soon sorry? You want to be off?"
Desperately Arlee steadied her shaking voice. "I must go at once."
"You got enough so soon?"
"Enough!" was the quivering echo.
"What you come for then?"
"Come for? I did not know what I was coming into. I thought--but tell me," she broke off to demand, "tell me about the plague. Was there any quarantine at all? How soon was it over? What is really happening?"
"Quar--quar--what you mean?"
"The plague? Has there been a plague here? Have people had to stay in the palace on account of it?"
"Oh--h!" The indrawn breath was eloquent of enlightenment. "Is that somethings he said to you?"
"Yes, yes. Isn"t it true? Wasn"t there any plague?"
With eyes of dreadful apprehension she saw the other shake her head in vigorous denial. "No plague," she said decisively. "My maid--she know everything. No sickness here."
"Then it was all a lie." Arlee"s eyes fixed themselves on the dancing candle flame, swaying in the soft night air. She tried to think very coolly and collectedly, but her brain felt numb and fogged and heavy. The sight of that tortured candle flame hypnotized her. Faintly she whispered, "Then it was all--an excuse," and, at that, sharp terror, like a knife, cleaved her numbness. She turned furiously to her visitor.
"But he would not dare make it all up!"
She saw the callousness of the shrug. "Why not--he is the master here!" Her own heart echoed fearfully the words. She stammered, "But--but I wrote--I had a letter--there must----"
"What in all the world are you saying?" demanded the other. "What is this story?" and as Arlee began the quick, whispered narration she listened intently, her little dark head on one side, nodding wisely at intervals.
"So--you came to have tea," she repeated at the close, in her quaintly inflected, foreign-sounding English. "And you stay because of the plague? So?"
"But I wrote--I wrote to my friends and----"
"And gave him the letters!"
"But I had a letter from my friends--or a telegram rather." Arlee knitted her brows in furious thought. "And it sounded like her."
"Does he know her, that friend?" questioned the other and at Arlee"s nod, "Then he could write it himself--that is easy on telegraph paper. He is so clever, that devil, Hamdi."
"But my friends knew where I was going"--slowly the mind turned back to trace the blind, careless steps of that afternoon. "At least he said he"d leave a note--Oh, what a fool I was!" she broke off to gasp, seeing how that forethought of his, that far-sighted remark, had prevented her from leaving a note of her own. And she remembered now, with flashing clearness, that upon her arrival he had carelessly inquired if she, too, had left a note of explanation. How lightly she had told him no! And what unguessed springs of action came perhaps from that single word! For so cleverly had the trap been swiftly prepared that if anything had gone wrong, if anyone had become aware of her intentions, it could have pa.s.sed off as a visit and she would have returned to her hotel prattling joyously of her wonderful glimpse into the seclusion of Turkish aristocracy!
"But the soldier with the bayonet," she said aloud. "There was one on the stairs."
"A servant."
"Oh, if I had pa.s.sed him!"
"You could not--he would run you through on a nod from Hamdi. They watch that stairs always--day and night."
Day and night--and she was alone here, in this grim palace, alone and helpless and forsaken.... What were her friends thinking about her? Where did they think she was? Her thoughts beat desperately upon that problem, trying to find there some ray of hope, some promise that there were clues which would lead them to her, but she found nothing there but deeper mystery and fearful surmise. He was clever enough to cover his traces. No one had known of his connection with her departure.... Perhaps he had sent them some false and misleading message like the one he had sent her.... What were they thinking? What did they believe? This was Friday night, and she had been gone since Thursday afternoon.
In that moment she saw with merciless clarity the bitter straits that she was in.
"Oh, he is a devil!" her companion was reaffirming with an angry little half-whisper sibilant with fury. "Look how he treat me--me, Fritzi Baroff! You do not know me? You do not know that name? In Vienna it is not so unknown--Oh, G.o.d, I was so happy in Vienna!" She stopped, her breast heaving, with the flare of emotion, then went on quickly, with suppressed vehemence, "I was a singer--in the light opera. I dance, too, and I was arriving. Only this year I was to have a fine role--and it all went, zut, it all went for that man! I was one fool about him, and his dark eyes and his strange ways.... I thought I had a prince. And he worship me then, too--he follow me, he give me big diamonds.... So he take me here--it was to be the vacation!"
She gave a strangling little laugh. Arlee was listening with a painful intensity. She was living, she thought, in an Arabian nights.
"I stay at the hotel first till he make this like a private apartment for me," went on the little dancer, "and when I come here he do everything for me. I have luxury, yes, jewels and dresses and a fine new car. Then, by and by, I grow tired. It was always the same and he was at the palace, much. And he would not let me make acquaintance. We quarrel, but still I have a fancy for him, and then, you understand, money is not always so easy to find. Life can be hard. But I get more restless, I want to go back on the stage and I, well, I write some letters that he finds out. _Bang_, goes the door upon me! He laugh like a fiend. He say that I am to be a little Turkish lady to the end of my life. Oh, G.o.d, he shut me up like a prisoner in this place, and I can do nothing--nothing--nothing!"
She beat out angry emphasis on the palm of one hand with a clenched little fist. "I go nearly mad. I lose my head. He laugh--he is like that. He is a devil when he turns against you, and, you understand, he had somethings new to play with now.... Sometimes he seem to love me as before, and then I would grow soft and coax that he take me to Europe some day, and then when I think he mean it--Oh, how he laugh!" She drew in her breath sharply. "Sometimes I think he will take me again--sometime--but I cannot tell. And the days never end.
They are terrible. My youth is going, going. And my youth is all I have."
She looked at Arlee with eyes where her terror was visible, and all the lines of her pretty, common little face were changed and sharpened, and her babyish lips dragged down strangely at the corners.
A surge of pity went through Arlee Beecher. "Oh, you will escape,"
she heard herself saying eagerly. "And I will escape--or--or----"
"Or?"
"Or I will kill myself," she whispered quiveringly.
The little Viennese stared hard at her, and a sudden crinkle of amus.e.m.e.nt darted across the bright shallows of her eyes. "Come, love is not so bad," she said, "and Hamdi can be charming." Then as she saw a shudder run through the young girl before her, "Oh, if you do not fancy him!" she cried airily, yet with a keen look.
But Arlee"s two hands sought and covered up the scarlet shame in her face. She did not cry; she felt that every tear in her was dried in that bitter flame. Her whole body seemed on fire, burning with fury and revulsion and that awful sense of humiliation.
The other stirred restively, "Come, do not cry--I hate people to cry. It makes everything so worse. And do not talk of killing. It is not so easy anyway, that killing. Do I not think I will die and end all when my rage is hot--but how? How? I cannot beat my head out against the wall like a Russian. I cannot stick a penknife in my throat or eat gla.s.s. To do that one must be a monster of courage.
And I have no poison to eat, no gas to turn on.... Then the mood goes and the day is bright and I look in the gla.s.s and say, "Die?
Die for you? Kill all this beautiful young thing that has such joy to dance and sing? Never! Some day I will be out of this and laugh at the memory of such blackness." And so I practice my voice and my steps--and I wait my chance. When you came, yesterday, first I was furious to be pushed out, then I think it is the chance, maybe. I think you would be glad to help me to get out and not to stay to make you jealous. But if you are also in the trap----" Her voice fell dispiritedly. She drew a long, weary breath.
"But I shall not stay in the trap." Arlee spoke with desperate resolve, her eyes on the sputtering candle, her palms against her burning cheeks, her finger tips pressed into her throbbing temples.
"I shall not let him make me afraid like this. He must know he will be found out--he cannot play like this with an American girl! I shall face him to-morrow. I shall demand my freedom. I shall tell him that I did tell people at the hotel--that he will be discovered.
I will make _him_ afraid!"
"You cannot. He watches what happens on the outside--he knows."