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Page 17
Dreaming, she turned and in silence retraced her way after her
hostess, loitering by the window in the anteroom to watch a veiled
girl drawing water at the old well in the center, an old well rich
in arabesques.
How much happier, thought Arlee, were these serving maids in the
freedom of their poverty than the cloistered aristocrats behind
their darkened windows. She wondered if that strange figure beside
her, half Moslem, half modern, envied the little maid the saucy jest
which she flung at a bare-footed boy idling beside a dozing white
donkey. As she watched the old-world quiet of the picture was
broken. Some one, the doorkeeper, she thought, from his vivid robes
and yellow shoes, came running across the court, shouting something
at the girl which sent her flying to the house, her jar forgotten,
and another man, an enormous Nubian with blue Turkish bloomers,
short red jacket and a red fez, hurried across the court toward the
_haremlik_.
The lady stepped toward the screening and called down; the man
stopped, raised his head, and shouted back a jargon of excited
gutturals, waving his arms in vehement gesturing. His mistress
interrupted with a brief question, then with another, then nodding
her head indifferently to herself, she called down an order,
apparently, and turned away.
"One of our servants is dead," she murmured to Arlee in explanation.
"They say now it is the plague."
"The plague?" repeated the girl absently. She was thinking what a
hideous creature that great Nubian was. Then, more vividly, "The
_plague_?"
"You have fear?" said the negligent voice.
Arlee nodded frankly. "Oh, yes, I should be terribly afraid of it,"
she averred. "Aren't you?" And then she reflected, as she saw the
inscrutable smile playing about the older woman's lips, that she
must be witnessing that fatalistic apathy of the East that she had
read about.
But there was nothing apathetic about the Captain. He followed on
the very heels of the announcement, his sword clanking, his spurs
jingling, as he bounded up the stairs and hurried through the long,
dim drawing-room toward them.
"You have heard?" he cried in English as they came to meet him. "You
have heard?"
"Of the plague!" Arlee answered, wondering at his agitation. "Yes,
your sister just told me. Is it really the plague?"
"So say those damned doctors--pardon, but they are such imbeciles!"
He made an angry gesture with his clenched hand. His face was tense
and excited. "They say so. And there is another sick ... _Dieu_,
what a misfortune! Truly, there was illness about us, a little, but
who thought----"
"I shall run back to my hotel," said Arlee lightly, "before I catch
one of your germs."
"To the hotel--a thousand pardons, but that is the thing forbidden."
The young man made a gesture, with empty palms outspread, eloquent
of rebellion and despair. "Those doctors--those pig English--they
have set a quarantine upon us!"
CHAPTER IV
A SORRY GUEST
"A quarantine?" said Arlee Beecher, in a perfectly flat little
voice.
Again the young man exercised his power of gesture, his dark eyes
seeming to plead his own helpless desire to mitigate his words.
"Truly a quarantine. It is tyranny, but what can one do? They will
hear nothing--they set their guard and it is finished--_bien
simple_. We are their prisoners."
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