But Gavin and Arthur Kenyon passed out to the mountain road, and
looking down to the valley they perceived the flame of bivouac fires in
the wood below; and they understood immediately that cavalry had been
sent from Bukharest to their aid and that the hour of their peril had
passed.
CHAPTER XXXIII
DJALA
Evelyn recovered consciousness after that which seemed a very night of
evil dreaming, but which was in reality no more than a brief half-hour
of insensibility. Greatly weakened by the struggle and the swoon
attending it, she lay for some while unable to lift herself upon the
bed where they had laid her or to take any notice of the room to which
she had been carried. When her strength returned somewhat, and a
sudden memory of the circumstances of her visit recurred to her, she
sat up immediately, a great fear at her heart and a dread upon her such
as she had never suffered before.
What house was it? Who was its owner? What was the meaning of the
insult placed upon her? The questions raced through her brain so
quickly that she found an answer to none of them. At one time she
could almost believe that her own father was privy to the outrage and
had led to this desperate course by his detestation of the rôle she
played in London. Rejecting this immediately because of her love for
him, she was then tempted to say that Odin relied upon his threats and
believed that she would submit to him to save Gavin's life. This
appeared the more plausible story. Was not the man from the East a
Roumanian with but primitive ideas of a modern civilization and the son
of a country wherein women were still little better than the silent
victims of men's passions? Perhaps he believed that he could carry her
out of England. It might be even that.
She was in a spacious bedroom, furnished, so far as the dim light would
permit her to see, in a modern style and with many evidences of
later-day luxury. A fresh fire, burning with a light flame in an open
grate, cast flashing rays upon darkly-papered walls and the heavy
pictures which ornamented them. A sofa had been drawn up before the
fire and showed its pattern in the fitful beams; there was an electric
chandelier above a dressing-table and a single reading lamp upon a
little table by the bedside. Afraid of the darkness in a degree
unknown to her, Evelyn tried to find the switch by which the lamp might
be lighted; but her cold hands bungled it and, despairing, she rose
from the bed and crossed the room toward the heavily-curtained window.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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