“Marguerite, you must go to bed,” said Paul. “I’ll rouse you if there’s any danger.” It was very near to the dawn now. There was a freshness and an expectation in the air; a faint colourless light was invading the darkness; in the patch of sky above their heads the bright stars were swooning. For most of this last half hour Marguerite’s head had lain heavy upon his shoulder, and if she opened her eyes it was only to close them again with a sigh of content. Paul lifted her on to her feet and led her up the stairs.
“And you, Paul?” she asked, drowsily.
“I shall be within call. I shall sleep for a little on the cushions below. Good-night.”
Marguerite noticed that the voice of the last mueddin ceased whilst she was still preparing herself for her bed; and after she had got into it, she heard a kettle singing cheerfully in the court below as if Paul were brewing for himself some tea. Then, with the doors of her bedroom open upon the little gallery above the court she went fast asleep.
Hours afterwards a shattering noise awakened her. She lay for a few moments deliciously poised between sleep and consciousness, and vaguely thinking her long and troubled vigil to have been a nightmare which the light of day had happily dispelled. The sunlight was falling in a sheet of gold through the open roof. “It must be very late,” she reflected, lazily, and thereupon sharply and crisply two shots from a rifle split the air. Marguerite sprang up in her bed with a hand to her heart, as though one of those shots had wounded her. It was just the same noise which had broken through her slumbers. The nightmare was true, then! She listened, resting upon one arm, with her face turned towards the open doors. A clamour of voices was borne from a distance to her ears. The new Terror had begun.
“Paul!” she cried loudly. “Paul”; and a tall man dressed in the robes of a Moor stood beside her bed. She shrank away with a little scream. It was not until he smiled that she recognized her lover.
“You had better get up, Marguerite,” he said, and bending down he kissed her. “You have slept well, thank the Lord.”
One of the negresses brought her a cup of tea and Marguerite, slipping on her dressing gown, sat upon the edge of the bed and thrust her feet into her slippers.
“What is the time, Paul?”
“A little past one.”
“So late?”
“I let you sleep. There was no disturbance. The first shot waked you.”
“I will be quick,” she said, or rather began to say. For the words, half-uttered, were frozen upon her lips. Such a din, so shrill, so menacing and strange, burst out above their heads that Marguerite cowered down under it as under the threat of a blow. She had never heard the like of it, she hoped never to hear the like of it again; yet she was to hear it now for days—the swift repetition of one strident note, swelling and falling in a p?an of wild inhuman triumph. Marguerite imagined all the birds of prey in the world wheeling and screaming above the city; or a thousand thin voices shrieking in a madhouse; you—you—you—you—you—the piercing clamour ran swift as the clacking of a mitrailleuse, and with a horrid ferocity which made the girl’s blood run cold.
“Paul,” she said, “what is it?”
“The women on the roofs.”
“Oh!”
Marguerite shuddered as she listened, clutching tight her lover’s arm. Such a promise of cruelty was in those shrill cries as made Marguerite think of the little automatic pistol in the drawer of her table as a talisman which she must henceforth carry close to her hand. She felt that even if she escaped from the peril of these days, she could never walk again in the narrow streets between the blind houses without the chill of a great fear. Her clasp tightened upon her lover’s arm and he winced sharply. Marguerite looked up into his face, and saw that his lips were pressed close together to prevent a cry of pain.
“Paul!” she said wonderingly. She loosened her clasp and turned back the sleeve of his djellaba. Beneath it, his forearm was roughly but tightly bandaged. “Oh, my dear,” she cried, in a voice of compunction, “what happened to you whilst I slept? You are wounded—and for me! Must I always do you harm?” and she beat her hands together in her distress.
“It was an accident,” said Paul.
“An accident?”
She ran to her medicine-chest, and making him sit beside her, unfastened the bandage. “An accident?” she repeated. It looked to her as if he had been stabbed. A knife had been driven right through the flesh of his forearm. Paul did not reply to her exclamations and she did not press her questions. She washed and dressed the wound and bound it up again.
“It must hurt terribly,” she said, her forehead knitted in distress.
“It is easier now,” he answered. “The knife was clean.”
“You are sure of that, Paul?”
“Quite.”
She made a sling of his arm and sent him away. She dressed quickly, wondering how that wound had been inflicted and why he wished not to explain it. Surely he had not gone out whilst she slept? Surely there had been no attack upon the house? No! But she was plunged now into a world of mystery and fear, and she wrung her hands in an impotent despair.
They took their breakfast in a room upon the first floor, Paul asking questions as to how far the house was provisioned, and Marguerite answering almost at random, whilst the cries of the women rang shrill overhead.
“Oh, yes, there is food,” she answered.
“We can always send Selim out,” he added.
Marguerite’s eyes lightened.
“We will send him out, Paul,” she exclaimed. “Do you know what has been troubling me? We haven’t a window upon any street. We are here at the bottom of a well with nothing but our ears to warn us of danger. We can see nothing.”
Paul looked at her anxiously. She was nervous, the flutter of her hands feverish, and her voice running up and down the scale as though she had no control over it. Paul reached across the table and laid his hand upon her arm.
“You poor little girl!” he said gently. “These are trying days. But there won’t be many. The wireless here will have got into touch already with Moinier’s column near Meknes. The troops, too, at Dar-Debibagh may do something,” and ever so slightly his voice faltered when he spoke of the troops, yet not so slightly but that Marguerite noticed it. “They have some guns,” he went on hurriedly, and again Marguerite noticed the hurry, the desire to cover up and hide that little spasm of pain which had stabbed him when he thought of his men. “Yes, the guns!” he said. “There will be an end to that infernal twittering on the roof tops when the guns begin to talk.”
“Paul, you should have been with your men,” said Marguerite, and he answered her with a kind of violent obstinacy which drew her eyes in one swift glance to his face. “I am on leave.”
He changed his tone, however, immediately.
“We will send Selim into the town for news,” he said cheerfully, “and we will go up on to the roof.”
Selim was bidden to knock twice, and, after a tiny interval, once more upon his return. Paul stood behind the door listening to make sure that the tunnel was empty before he opened it. Then he let him go, and locked and barred the door again.
“Come,” he said to Marguerite and, picking up some cushions, they went upstairs to the roof. Marguerite had followed Paul’s example, and was dressed in Moorish clothes; the house was higher by a storey than any which adjoined it, and the roof itself was enclosed in a parapet waist-high. They crouched upon the cushions behind the wall and cautiously looked over it.
A pack of clouds was threatening in the west, but just now the city glittered in the sunlight like a jewel, with its hanging gardens and high terraces, its white houses huddling down the hillside like a flock of sheep, and the bright green tiles of its mosques. Paul and Marguerite never tired of this aspect of the lovely city, shut within its old crumbling walls and musical with the rushing noise of its many rivers. But to-day they saw it as they had never seen it before. For the roofs were crowded with women in their coloured robes of gauze and bright scarves, who danced and screamed, and climbed from one house to another on little ladders in such a frenzy of excitement that the eyes were dazzled and the ears deafened. Paul turned towards the north. Upon the roof of one house men were breaking through with axes and picks, whilst others flung down rags and sticks which had been soaked in paraffin and lighted, through the holes into the rooms below.
“I think that’s the house of the French veterinary surgeon,” said Paul; and from all about that house rose a continuous rattle of firing.
“Look!” said Paul, and he nodded to the south. Here there was a gap between the houses, and Marguerite could see far below a tumble-down stone bridge built in a steep arch across a stream. As she looked, a wild horde of men swarmed upon the bridge, capering and yelling.
“There are soldiers amongst them,” said Marguerite. “I can see their rifles and their bandoliers.”
“Yes, the Askris who have revolted,” answered Paul, and suddenly he covered Marguerite’s eyes with the palm of his hand. “Don’t look!” But Marguerite had already seen, and she sank down behind the parapet with a moan. In the midst of that wild procession some rifles with bayonets fixed were held aloft, and on one of the bayonets the trunk and the limbs of a man were impaled. The head was carried last of all, and upon a pole taller than the bayonets, a head black with blood, like a negro’s, on which a gold-laced kêpi was derisively cocked.
Paul swore underneath his breath.
“One of my brothers,” he whispered. “Oh, my God,” and dropping his head into his hands, he rocked his body to and fro in an agony of remorse.
Marguerite touched him on the shoulder.
“Paul, there’s a carbine in your room.”
“It would be fatal to use it.”
“I don’t care,” Marguerite cried fiercely. Her face was alive with passion. “Use it, Paul. I don’t care!” and from far below there rose the sound of a loud knocking upon a door.
Marguerite’s heart fluttered up into her throat. She stared at Paul with her eyes opened wide in horror. T............