my hands over your face?’
‘You may do what you please, Madame,’ I said. ‘I would to God I could give you eyes.’
‘That is a pretty speech,’ she said. ‘You might be one of my own people.’ And I felt the light fingers straying over my brow.
I was so placed that I was looking into the red heart of the fire, the one patch of bright light in the curtained room. I knew what I was in for, and, remembering past experience, I averted my eyes to the dark folios on the lowest shelves beyond the hearth. The fingers seemed to play a gentle tattoo on my temples, and then drew long soft strokes across my eyebrows. I felt a pleasant languor beginning to creep down my neck and spine, but I was fully prepared, and without much trouble resisted it. Indeed my mind was briskly busy, for I was planning how best to play my game. I let my head recline more and more upon the cushioned back of my chair, and I let my eyelids droop.
The gentle fingers ‘were very thorough, and I had let myself sink beyond their reach before they ceased.
‘You are asleep,’ the voice said. ‘Now wake.’
I was puzzled to know how to stage-manage that wakening, but she saved me the trouble. Her voice suddenly hissed like a snake’s. ‘Stand up!’ it said. ‘Quick—on your life.’
I scrambled to my feet with extreme energy, and stood staring at the fire, wondering what to do next.
‘Look at your master,’ came the voice again, peremptory as a drill-sergeant’s.
That gave me my cue. I knew where Medina was standing, and, in the words of the Bible, my eyes regarded him as a handmaiden regards her master. I stood before him, dumb’ and dazed and obedient.
‘Down,’ he cried. ‘Down, on all-fours.’
I did as I was bid, thankful that my job was proving so easy. ‘Go to the door—no, on all-fours, open it twice, shut it twice, and bring me the paper-knife from the far table in your mouth.’
I obeyed, and a queer sight I must have presented prancing across the room, a perfectly sane man behaving like a lunatic.
I brought the paper-knife, and remained dog-wise. ‘Get up,’ he said, and I got up.
I heard the woman’s voice say triumphantly: ‘He is well broken,’ and Medina laughed.
‘There is yet the last test,’ he said. ‘I may as well put him through it now. If it fails, it means only that he needs more schooling. He cannot remember, for his mind is now in my keeping. There is no danger.’
He walked up to me, and gave me a smart slap in the face. I accepted it with Christian meekness. I wasn’t even angry. In fact I would have turned the other cheek in the Scriptural fashion, if it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be over-acting.
Then he spat in my face.
That, I admit, tried me pretty high. It was such a filthy Kaffir trick that I had some trouble in taking it resignedly. But I managed it. I kept my eyes on the ground, and didn’t even get out my handkerchief to wipe my cheek till he had turned away.
‘Well broken to heel,’ I heard him say. ‘It is strange how easily these flat tough English natures succumb to the stronger spirit. I have got a useful weapon in him, mother mine.’
They paid no more attention to me than if I had been a piece of furniture, which, indeed, in their eyes I was. I was asleep, or rather awake in a phantasmal world, and I could not return to my normal life till they bade me. I could know nothing—so they thought—and remember nothing, except what they willed. Medina sat in my chair, and the woman had her hand on his head, and they talked as if they were alone in the desert. And all the while I was standing sheepishly on the rug, not daring to move, scarcely to breathe, lest I should give the show away.
They made a pretty picture—‘The Prodigal’s Return’ or ‘The Old Folks at Home,’ by Simpkins, R.A., Royal Academy, 1887. No, by Heaven, there was no suggestion of that. It was a marvelous and tragic scene that I regarded. The fitful light of the fire showed figures of an antique beauty and dignity. The regal profile of the woman, her superb pose, and the soft eerie music of her voice were a world removed from vulgarity, and so was the lithe vigour: and the proud face of the man. They were more like a king and queen in exile, decreeing the sea of blood which was to wash them back again. I realised for the first time that Medina might be damnable, but was also great. Yes, the man who had spat on me like a stable-boy had also something of the prince. I realised another thing. The woman’s touch had flattened down the hair above his forehead, which he brushed square, and his head, outlined in the firelight against the white cushion, was as round as a football. I had suspected this when I first saw him, and now I was certain. What did a head like that portend? I had a vague remembrance that I had heard somewhere that it meant madness—at any rate degeneracy.
They talked rapidly and unceasingly, but the confounded thing was that I, could hear very little of it. They spoke in low tones, and I was three yards off and daren’t for my life move an inch nearer. Also they spoke for the most part in a language of which I did not know a word—it may have been Choctaw, but was probably Erse. If I had only comprehended that tongue I night there and then have learned all I wanted to know. But sometimes Medina talked English, though it seemed to me that the woman always tried to bring him back to the other speech. All I heard were broken sentences that horribly tantalised me.
My brain was cool and very busy. This woman was the Blind Spinner of the rhymes; No doubt of it. I could ‘see her spinning beside a peat fire, nursing ancient hate and madness, and crooning forgotten poetry. ‘Beside the Sacred Tree.’ Yggdrasil be hanged! I had it, it was Gospel Oak, Lord, what a fool I had been not to guess it before! The satisfaction of having got one of the three conundrums dead right made me want to shout. These two harpies held the key to the whole riddle, and I had only to keep up my present character to solve it. They thought they were dealing with a hypnotised fool, and instead they had a peculiarly wide-awake if rather slow and elderly Englishman. I wished to Heaven I knew what they were saying. Sluicing out malice about my country, no doubt, or planning the ruin of our civilisation for the sake of a neurotic dream.
Medina said something impatiently about ‘danger,’ as if his purpose were to reassure. Then I caught nothing for several minutes, till he laughed and repeated the word ‘secundus.’ Now I was looking for three people, and if there was a ‘secundus‘ there must have been a ‘primus,’ and possibly a ‘tertius.’
‘He is the least easy to handle,’ he said. ‘And it is quite necessary that Jason should come home. I have decided that the doctor must go out. It won’t be for long—only till midsummer.’
The date interested me acutely. So did what followed, for he went on:
‘By midsummer they liquidate and disband. There is no fear that it won’t succeed. We have the whip hand, remember. Trust me, all will go smoothly, and then we begin a new life… ‘
I thought she sighed, and for the first time she spoke in English :
‘I fear sometimes that you are forgetting your own land, Dominick.’
He put up an arm and drew her head to his.
‘Never, mother mine. It is our strength that we can seem to forget and still remember.’
I was finding my stand on that hearth-rug extraordinarily trying. You see I had to keep perfectly rigid,
