"What you see and hear need not disturb you," she said, looking at Benton out of brilliant eyes. "There is no G.o.d but G.o.d; and His prophet has been called by many names." And to Yulun: "Have I not told you that nothing can harm our souls?"
Yulun"s expression altered and she turned to Benton: "Say it to me!" she pleaded.
As in a dream he heard his own words: "Nothing can ever really harm the soul."
Yulun"s hands fell from her tunic collar. Very slowly she lifted her head, looking at him out of lovely, proud young eyes.
She said, evenly, her still gaze on him: "I am Yulun of the Temple. My heart is like a blazing pearl which you hold between your hands. May the four Blessed Companions witness the truth of what I say."
Then a delicate veil of colour wrapped her white skin from throat to temple; she looked at Benton with sudden and exquisite distress, frightened and ashamed at his silence.
In the intense stillness Benton moved toward her. Into his outstretched hands her two hands fell; but, bending above them, his lips touched only two white hibiscus flowers that lay fresh and dewy in his palms.
Bewildered, he straightened up; and saw the girl standing by the mantel beside Tressa, who had caught her by the left hand.
"Tokhta! Look out!" she said distinctly.
Suddenly he saw two men in the room, close to him--their broad faces, slanting eyes, and spa.r.s.e beards thrust almost against his shoulder.
"Djamouk! Yaddin-ed-Din!" cried Tressa in a terrible voice. But quick as a flash Yulun tore a white sheet from the bed, flung it on the floor, and, whipping a tiny, jewelled knife from her sleeve, threw it glittering upon the sheet at the feet of the two men.
"One shroud for two souls!" she said breathlessly, "--and a knife like that to sever them from their bodies!"
The two men sprang backward as the sheet touched their feet, and now they stood there as though confounded.
"Djamouk, Kahn of the Fifth Tower!" cried Tressa in a clear voice, "you have put off your body like a threadbare cloak, and your form that stands there is only your mind! And it is only the evil will of Yaddin in the shape of his body that confronts us in this room of a man you have doomed!"
Yulun, intent as a young leopardess on her prey, moved soundlessly toward Yaddin.
"Tougtchi!" she said coldly, "you did murder this day, my Banneret, and the Toug of Djamouk has been greased. Now look out for yourself!"
"Don"t stir!" came Tressa"s warning voice, as Benton s.n.a.t.c.hed his pistol from the pillow. "Don"t fire! Those men have no real substance! For G.o.d"s sake don"t fire! I tell you they have no bodies!"
Suddenly something--some force--flung Benton on the bed. The two men did not seem to touch him at all, but he lay there struggling, crushed, held by something that was strangling him.
Through his swimming eyes he saw Yaddin trying to drive a long nail into his skull with a hammer,--felt the piercing agony of the first crashing blow,--struggled upright, drenched in blood, his ears ringing with the screaming of Yaddin.
Then, there in the little rococo bedroom of the Ritz-Carlton, began a strange and horrible struggle--the more dreadful because the struggle was not physical and the combatants never touched each other--scarcely moved at all.
Yaddin, still screaming, confronted Yulun. The girl"s eyes were ablaze, her lips parted with the violence of her breathing. And Yaddin writhed and screamed under the terrible concentration of her gaze, his inferior but ferocious mind locked with her mind in deadly battle.
The girl said slowly, showing a glimmer of white teeth: "Your will to do evil to my young lord is breaking, Yaddin-ed-Din.... I am breaking it.
The nail and hammer were but symbols. It was your brain that brooded murder--that willed he should die as though shattered by lightning when that blood-vessel burst in his brain!"
"Sorceress!" shrieked Yaddin, "what are you doing to my heart, where my body lies asleep in a berth on the Montreal Express!"
"Your heart is weak, Yaddin. Soon the valves shall fail. A negro porter shall discover you dead in your berth, my Banneret!"
The man"s swarthy face became livid with the terrific mental battle.
"Let me go back to my body!" he panted. "What are you doing to me that I can not go back? I will go back! I wish it!--I----"
"Let us go back and rejoin our bodies!" cried Djamouk in an agonised voice. "There are teeth in my throat, deep in my throat, biting and tearing out the cords."
"Cancer," said Tressa calmly. "Your body shall die of it while your soul stumbles on through darkness."
"My Tougtchi!" shouted Djamouk, "I hear my soul bidding my body farewell! I must go before my mind expires in the terrible gaze of this young sorceress!"
He turned, drifted like something misty to the solid wall.
"My soul be ransom for yours!" cried Yulun to Tressa. "Bar that man"s path to life!"
Tressa flung out her right hand and, with her forefinger, drew a barrier through s.p.a.ce, bar above bar.
And Benton, half swooning on his bed, saw a cage of terrible and living light penning in Djamouk, who beat upon the incandescent bars and grasped them and clawed his way about, squealing like a tortured rat in a red-hot cage.
Through the deafening tumult Yulun"s voice cut like a sword:
"Their bodies are dying, Heart of a Rose!... Listen! I hear their souls bidding their minds farewell!"
And, after a dreadful silence: "The train speeding north carries two dead men! G.o.d is G.o.d. Niaz!"
The bars of living fire faded. Two cinder-like and shapeless shadows floated and eddied like whitened ashes stirred by a wind on the hearth; then drifted through the lamp-light, fading, dissolving, lost gradually in thin air.
Tressa, leaning back against the mantel, covered her face with both hands.
Yulun crept to the bed where Benton lay, breathing evenly in deepest sleep.
With the sheer sleeve of her tunic she wiped the blood from his face.
And, at her touch, the wound in the temple closed and the short, bright hair dried and curled over a forehead as clean and fresh as a boy"s.
Then Yulun laid her lips against his, rested so a moment.
"Seek me, dear lord," she whispered. "Or send me a sign and I shall come."
And, after a pause, she said, her lips scarcely stirring: "Love me. My heart is a flaming pearl burning between your hands."
Then she lifted her head.
But Tressa had rejoined her body, where it lay asleep beside her deeply sleeping husband.
So Yulun stood a moment, her eyes remote. Then, after a while, the little rococo bedroom in the Ritz-Carlton was empty save for a young man asleep on the bed, holding in his clenched hand a white hibiscus blossom.
CHAPTER XII