THE MIDNIGHT VISITOR
That stealthy touch brought Arlee half upright, shot with ghastly
alarms. Her heart stopped beating; it stood still in the cold clutch
of terror. The breath seemed to have left her body.
Once more she felt the hands gropingly upon her. It came from the
back side of her bed, reaching apparently from the very wall. And
then she heard a voice whispering, "Be still--I do not hurt you. Be
still."
It was a woman's voice, soft, sibilant, hushed, and the frozen grip
of fear was broken. She was trembling now uncontrollably.
"Who is there?"
"S-sh!" came the warning response, and then, her eyes staring into
the shadowy recess, she saw the curtains at the back side of the bed
were parting as a figure appeared between them.
"Give me a box, a book--somethings to put here in this lock,"
commanded the voice peremptorily, and in a daze Arlee found herself
extending a magazine across the bed toward the half-seen figure, who
turned and busied herself about the curtains a moment, then came
straight across the bed into the room beside Arlee.
"Now you see who I am," said the astonishing intruder calmly.
Mutely Arlee shook her head, seeing only a figure about her own
height clad in a dark negligée. Dumfounded she stood watching while
her visitor deliberately lighted a candle.
"So--that is better," she observed, and in the light of the tiny
taper between them the two stood facing each other.
Arlee saw a girl some years older than herself, a small, plump,
rounded creature, with a flaunting and insouciant prettiness. Her
eyes were dark and bright, her babyish lips were full and scarlet,
her nose was whimsically uptilted. Dark hair curled closely to the
vivid face and fell in ringlets over the white neck.
"You don't know me?" she said in astonishment at Arlee's eyes of
wonder. "He has not told you?" Incredulity, impertinent and mocking,
darted out of the dark eyes. "What you think then--you what got my
room?"
"Your room?" Arlee echoed faintly. She flung a quivering hand toward
the bed. "How did you get in here? I locked the door----"
"You see how I came--I came by the panel," She waited a moment,
watching the wide blue eyes before her, the parted lips, the white
cheeks in which the blood was slowly stealing back, and incredulity
gave way to astonished acceptance. "You don't know that, either?
That is very funny."
"Did you lock it?" was Arlee's next breathless question. "What was
that you said about putting in a magazine? Did you leave it open?"
The other girl reached quickly and caught her arm, as Arlee turned
toward the bed. "No, no, if it goes shut we cannot open it inside,"
she warned. "It does not open this side unless you have the key. It
opens from without. But he will not come in now--he is at the
Khedive's palace. We are all right."
"But I want to get away," cried Arlee. She turned upon this other
girl great eyes of pitiful entreaty, eyes where the dark shadows
about them lay like cruel bruises on the white flesh. "I must get
away at once. Won't you help me?"
"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 passionate 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.
[Illustration: "'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 passed 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 passed 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, God, 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 rôle--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, God, 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
amusement 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 glass. 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 glass 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."
After a pause, "Oh, why did I come!" said Arlee in choking
bitterness.
The little dancer turned, and, sitting there cross-legged on the
couch like a squat little idol, her chin sunk in her palm, her dark
eyes staring unwinkingly at Arlee, gave the girl a long, strange
scrutiny.
"You do not like him?" she said.
"I hate him!"
"But you came to tea?"
"To meet his sister. To see the palace."
"His sister? Did he show you one?"
"Yes--a woman with red hair. A Turkish woman. She spoke French to
me."
"Ah--that would be Seniha!"
"Seniha? I don't know. She played the piano. Has he more than one
sister?"
But as she put the question a sudden flash of intuition forestalled
the dancer's mocking cry of "Sister!" And as Fritzi hurried on, "He
has no sister--not here, anyway," Arlee's thoughts ran back to the
beginning of that very evening which seemed so long ago when she had
plunged wildly into those unknown rooms, and saw again that
painted, jeweled woman with her outstretched arms.
"She is his wife," the Viennese was saying.
"I--I did not know that he was married."
"Oh, Turkish marriages." The other shrugged, with a contempt a
trifle droll in one who had dispensed with every ceremony. "She was
his second. The first was a little girl, he said. The match was made
for him. She is dead. This Seniha was her cousin, a cousin who was
divorced and she lived with the wife. And our pretty Hamdi made love
to her, and she was mad about him and so, presently, it happens that
he must marry her, for it would be terrible to have disgrace upon
the wife's family. Besides the first wife had no children. So he
married her. But _she_ had no children. It was all one fairy story."
Fritzi laughed under her breath in great enjoyment. "So Hamdi was
cheated and he has been a devil to her. The first little wife dies
and he shut the second up here, teasing her sometimes, sometimes
making love when he is dull, but forcing her to his will for fear he
will divorce her.... How she must have hated you, when she had to
play that sister. Except that she was glad that _I_ was being put
aside," the dancer added with quick spite. "I think she would put
poison in my meat if she did not fear Hamdi so.... And always she
hopes that he will come back to her. I have seen her waiting, night
after night----"
And Arlee thought of the jewels and the silks ... and the long,
long, silent hours.... Slowly she put out her hand and snuffed out
the smoking wick, then raised her eyes to where the painted bars
stretched black across the starry square of sky. "Won't _she_
help?" she asked.
"Not she! Hamdi would find her out.... Not through her can you get
word to your friends. For you have friends here? And they will help
you? And then you will help me?"
"Oh, yes, if I can get help," promised Arlee. "But I am afraid my
friends have gone up the Nile--and there are just--just one or two
left in Cairo that would help. And I must get word to them _at
once_. What is the best way? Couldn't I push a note through the
windows on the street? Someone might see that!"
"Yes, the doorkeeper. No, that is not safe.... If only that girl
were sure----"
"Mariayah?" cried Arlee.
"No, the other--the little one with the wart over her eye. Have you
seen her? Well, watch for her, then. She has an itching palm--she
may help. But only in little things, of course, for she is afraid.
And I have no money left and she is afraid to take a jewel."
"I have almost no money," said Arlee blankly. "Only a letter of
credit----"
"A letter of nothing here! But promise her your friends will give
much."
"Would she mail a letter?"
"Have you stamps? No? She is so ignorant that is an obstacle. And
the post is distant and she dare not go far. But sometimes the baker
sends a little boy, and if you had money to give she might get a
note to him to carry--though, maybe, she burns the note and keeps
the money," the Viennese ended pessimistically.
"But I must get help _at once_," Arlee iterated passionately.
Before----"
"Before?" the other repeated curiously, "He makes love to you--h'm?"
"He--is beginning."
"Only beginning?"
"Only--beginning." Arlee felt the girl's strange, hard scrutiny
through the dark. Then she heard her draw a quick breath as if her
eyes on Arlee's flower-like face had convinced her of something
against all her sorry little reason.
"Well, that is good then," she said. "Try to keep him off. What does
he promise you?"
"Promise me? He does not promise anything."
"But he must say something--what is between you--what?" demanded the
other impatiently.
Briefly, her shamed cheeks grateful for the shadows, Arlee told of
that walk in the garden, of the flowers and the letter, the scene
after dinner. And the other girl's eyes grew wider and wider, and
then finally she burst into a smothered little laugh.
"Oh, he is mad, that Hamdi!" she whispered. "He is a monster of
vanity--'conquest of the spirit'--h'm, I comprehend. That young man
has a pride beyond all sense. You dazzle him--he is in love again
like a boy. And he must dazzle you. His pride demands a victory not
of force alone.... Some men are like that.... Well, that is your
chance!"
"My chance?"
"Play with his vanity--fight his force with that!" said this strange
initiator into terrible secrets. "He will believe anything of his
fascinations--I know him. And if he is so mad for you that he dares
all this trouble to have you here, then he is so mad that you can
fool him and make him hold back in hopes to gain more from you. Make
him think you are coming, as he wishes, heart and body, but still
you would wait a little. So you gain time.... Oh, you must be
careful! If he loses hope, if you anger him, why the game is over.
But if you are careful you can gain a few days----"
"A few days," said Arlee in a tense little voice.
"Well, that is something--since you hate him so!"
"Yes, that is something." Arlee drew a shivering breath, her head
drooping, her lashes on her cheeks. Then suddenly, amazingly, her
chin came pluckily up, her soft lips set with desperate decision,
her eyes turned on her counselor a look of flashing spirit. She was
like some young wild thing at bay, harried, defiant, tensely
defensive. Something of the pathos of her innocent presence there,
in that evil palace, utterly alone, hopelessly defiant, penetrated
for an instant the callous acceptances of the little dancer and her
eyes softened with facile sympathy, but the impression dulled, and
she only nodded her head encouragingly.
"Good! That is the way! Women can always act!" she murmured,
slipping off the divan and drawing her fluttering robes about her.
"But it is very late and I must go--it is not safe to stay so."
"Where is your room? Could I get to you?"
"No--for you cannot open that panel on the inside--unless you can
steal the key from him as I could not! My room--for this present,
little one," and her eyes laughed suddenly in challenge, "is up on
the top--a little old room all alone. My doors are locked, but there
is a panel in my room, too, a panel at the top of tiny stairs, and
the lock on that panel is so old and rusty that a knife make it
open. So I pushed it open and came down the tiny stairs that end out
there in the passage way, and I opened your panel. Now I must steal
back, but I shall come again, and we must plan."
"But where does this secret passage go?" Arlee had followed over the
bed, and held aside the heavy draperies while the little Baroff was
pushing the panel softly and carefully open. Eagerly Arlee peered
out into the darkness beyond. "Where does it go?" she repeated.
"It runs above the hall of banquets and into the _selamlik_,"
whispered the Viennese. "It opens into Hamdi's rooms, he says, and I
know that a servant sleeps always at his door and another is at the
foot of the stairs. So it would be madness to try that way."
But Arlee stared thoughtfully into the secret place. "I am glad I
know," she said.
"Well, good-by, little one." The Viennese was standing outside now,
softly closing the door. For a moment her face remained in the
opening. "You will not tell Hamdi that I came--no?" she demanded
sharply, and then on Arlee's quick reassurance she nodded, whispered
good-by again, and drew back her little face.
The wall rolled into place and a gentle click told of the caught
lock. The curtains fell back over the wall. And Arlee was left
huddling there alone, feeling that it had all been a dream, but for
the heavy scent that lingered in the air and the wild fear beating
in her heart.