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Page 76
"But you?" I asked.
"You have failed," she replied. "I must go back to him.
There is no other way."
Strangely sick at heart for a man who has just had a miraculous
escape from death, I opened the door. Coatless, disheveled figures,
my friend and I stepped out into the moonlight.
Hideous under the pale rays lay the two dead men,
their glazed eyes upcast to the peace of the blue heavens.
Karamaneh had shot to kill, for both had bullets in their brains.
If God ever planned a more complex nature than hers--a nature more
tumultuous with conflicting passions, I cannot conceive of it.
Yet her beauty was of the sweetest; and in some respects she
had the heart of a child--this girl who could shoot so straight.
"We must send the police to-night," said Smith.
"Or the papers--"
"Hurry," came the girl's voice commandingly from the darkness
of the cottage.
It was a singular situation. My very soul rebelled against it.
But what could we do?
"Tell us where we can communicate," began Smith.
"Hurry. I shall be suspected. Do you want him to kill me!"
We moved away. All was very still now, and the lights glimmered
faintly ahead. Not a wisp of cloud brushed the moon's disk.
"Good-night, Karamaneh," I whispered softly.
CHAPTER XVIII
TO pursue further the adventure on the marshes would be a task
at once useless and thankless. In its actual and in its dramatic
significance it concluded with our parting from Karamaneh.
And in that parting I learned what Shakespeare meant
by "Sweet Sorrow."
There was a world, I learned, upon the confines of which I stood,
a world whose very existence hitherto had been unsuspected.
Not the least of the mysteries which peeped from the darkness was
the mystery of the heart of Karamaneh. I sought to forget her.
I sought to remember her. Indeed, in the latter task I found
one more congenial, yet, in the direction and extent of the ideas
which it engendered, one that led me to a precipice.
East and West may not intermingle. As a student of
world-policies, as a physician, I admitted, could not deny,
that truth. Again, if Karamaneh were to be credited,
she had come to Fu-Manchu a slave; had fallen into the hands
of the raiders; had crossed the desert with the slave-drivers;
had known the house of the slave-dealer. Could it be?
With the fading of the crescent of Islam I had thought such
things to have passed.
But if it were so?
At the mere thought of a girl so deliciously beautiful in the brutal
power of slavers, I found myself grinding my teeth--closing my eyes
in a futile attempt to blot out the pictures called up.
Then, at such times, I would find myself discrediting her story.
Again, I would find myself wondering, vaguely, why such problems
persistently haunted my mind. But, always, my heart had an answer.
And I was a medical man, who sought to build up a family practice!--
who, in short, a very little time ago, had thought himself past
the hot follies of youth and entered upon that staid phase of life
wherein the daily problems of the medical profession hold absolute
sway and such seductive follies as dark eyes and red lips find--
no place--are excluded!
But it is foreign from the purpose of this plain record to
enlist sympathy for the recorder. The topic upon which, here,
I have ventured to touch was one fascinating enough to me;
I cannot hope that it holds equal charm for any other.
Let us return to that which it is my duty to narrate and let
us forget my brief digression.
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