Rebecca stood beside her, studying Marianne. Suddenly she smiled.
"The noble lady is right. You had better rest for a while before I make my first examination. Lie back on those cushions and relax. We will go into the next room for a moment while we decide what is to be done. Meanwhile, try and tell yourself that no one here wishes you harm, quite the reverse. You have only friends here—more friends than you know. Trust us, and rest."
Rebecca's voice had a strangely persuasive power and Marianne, soothed as by a miracle, did not even try to resist. She stretched herself out meekly on the silken cushions, from which came a scent of ambergris, and let comfort steal over her. Her body no longer felt heavy, and her fears of a moment ago had fled so far away that she could hardly believe they had been real. She watched Bulut Hanum's green ferej and the Jewess's gleaming headdress melt into the shadows at the far end of the room and spared the sultana a grateful thought for sending her to Rebecca…
Before going out, Rebecca had opened the three small windows which lighted the big room during the day—no doubt just as feebly as the bronze lamp was doing now. But they let in the scents of the garden, and Marianne breathed them in with deep delight. They spoke to her of the earth, of life and all the quiet happiness that she had been seeking for and never found. Could it be that this frightful house was after all the harbor and refuge where all her troubles would melt away and the chains fall from her at last? When she left it again she would be free, freer than she had ever been, relieved of all her fears and the threats hanging over her.
In place of the hanging lamp, extinguished by Rebecca so that her patient could rest more easily, a small oil lamp had been set on a low table at the foot of the divan. Marianne found herself fascinated by its tiny flame and the night-flying insects that were already being attracted to it. She looked kindly at the brave little flame, fighting gallantly against the surrounding darkness and driving it back.
The scents of the garden, the darkness and the slim, bright flame moving above the brass bowl of the lamp came together in Marianne's mind to form a symbolic portrait of her own life. But the flame especially seemed to her the embodiment of her own tenacious love and it held her eyes while the rest of her body melted formlessly into the insidious softness of the cushions. It was a long time, months even, since she had felt so comfortable.
Then, little by little, the wonderful feeling of well-being became a great languor. The eyes that watched the lamp closed very slowly—and then, just as she was on the point of sinking into sleep, Marianne saw a white shadow detach itself gradually from the darkness filling the greater part of the room.
It was like a ghost, draped in snowy white or veiled in smoke, which grew and grew until it filled all her vision—something huge and terrifying.
Marianne tried to cry out. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. It was as though she were already in the grip of a nightmare. She fought desperately to keep her eyelids open against the weight that was on them. And still the phantom went on growing. It was bending over her… She made a frantic effort to escape from the power of the drug that paralyzed her and to tear herself from her couch, but the deep cushions held her as if she had been welded to them. Then, softly, the shadow began to speak.
"Don't be afraid," it said. "I mean you no harm. Far from it. I am your friend and you have nothing to fear from me."
The voice was low and toneless and infinitely sad, yet even through the mists that enveloped her Marianne seemed to remember, through some tenacious thread of memory in her brain, another voice, very like it, heard once from behind a tarnished mirror, the voice of a man without a face, a shadow like this. Could it be the same? Could the ghost of the husband who had died in his tragic loneliness have followed her here, to the very edge of Asia?
Then the power of thought, like that of movement, deserted her. Marianne's eyes closed and she sank into a curious, almost trancelike sleep that left her not wholly unconscious of her surroundings. Voices were speaking hurriedly nearby in some foreign tongue and she thought she recognized Bulut Hanum's high-pitched tones, sounding very much alarmed, and the Jewess's lower ones, alternating with the deep voice of the phantom. Then she felt arms around her, lifting her strongly and surely without even a jolt. There was a pleasant smell in her nostrils of the Turkish tobacco called latakia mingled unexpectedly with the fresher smell of lavender, and her cheek was pressed against some fine, soft, woolen material. Half-consciously, Marianne understood that she was being carried away…
Once again there was the fragrance of the garden, the cool night about her, and then a slight dipping motion as the arms which held her set her down on some kind of mattress. By the sort of violent effort of will that a sleeper will make in an unconscious effort to escape from the grip of a nightmare, she managed to open the dragging curtain of her eyelids and saw a man holding a long pole that could have been an oar silhouetted against a starry sky. But then the dark mouth of a tunnel loomed up ahead, with the points of a raised grille hanging down like monstrous teeth, and the smell of the willow trees gave way to a stench of mud and refuse. A bird trilled briefly from a tree nearby but the faint, mocking sound was lost at once, smothered by the sheer weight of the walls that imprisoned the Nightingale River, on whose bosom Marianne was now being borne away, a captive like itself. The stream was no longer free to run beneath the open sky since men had decreed it so, the stream…
In the thick blackness enveloping her on all sides, Marianne gave up the struggle at last and let herself slide down into the abyss of sleep.
She awoke from it as suddenly as a cork popping out of a bottle to find herself in a strange room filled with sunshine. It was a magnificent bedchamber decorated with flowered silks in tones of blue and mauve, and but for the flood of sunlight, which took away any suggestion of the mysterious, might easily have been mistaken for a chapel, from the collection of gold and silver icons covering the whole of one wall.
Candles, a petrified forest of them, were burning before the holy images, their flames swamped by the brightness of the room, and standing in their midst, engaged in replacing the burned-out stumps with fresh ones, was a figure dressed in black.
Marianne took it for a priest at first, but then she saw by the long hair coiled beautifully under a lace veil that the figure was that of a woman, and a remarkably impressive one.
This was due less to her height, although she was tall and slim and very upright despite the years that showed in her gray hair and lined face, than to the erectness of her carriage and the strong, autocratic features which, for all the determined set of the chin, were entirely Hellenic in form.
When the last candle had been renewed and the old stumps put away in a leather bag, the unknown woman took up the gold-headed cane which had been propped against one of the candlesticks, crossed herself rapidly in the orthodox fashion from left to right, and then, turning her back on the shining icons, came toward the bed, her gait making light of what was evidently a pronounced limp. A yard or two away from it she stopped and, leaning both hands on her cane, studied Marianne gravely.
"In what language would you like to converse?" she asked in a lilting but otherwise faultless Italian.
"This one will suit me very well," Marianne replied in her best Tuscan, "that is, unless you would prefer to speak in French, English, German or Spanish?"
If she had been hoping to impress the other woman with her accomplishments she was quickly disappointed. The stranger only chuckled.