第46章

"Good evening" said the latter, "I've lost my way in the fog and I'm very wet. Do you think I could have my shoes and stockings dried and get some tea? I...""A moment! I go to tell Meester Rass," said the woman with a very marked foreign accent and in a frightened kind of voice and slipped out by the way she came.

"Where have I met that woman before?" Barbara asked herself, as she crossed to tile stove to get warm. The woman's face seemed to be connected in her mind with something unpleasant, something she wanted to forget. Then a light dawned on her. Why, it was...

A shrill cry broke in upon her meditations, a harsh scream of rage. Barbara turned quickly and saw Nur-el-Din standing in the centre of the room. She was transfigured with passion. Her whole body quivered, her nostrils were dilated, her eyes flashed fire, and she pointed an accusing finger at Barbara.

"Ah! miserable!" she cried in a voice strangled with rage, "ah!

miserable! Te voile enrol."

A cold chill struck at Barbara's heart. Wherever she went, the hideous spectre of the tragedy of her father seemed to follow her. And now Nur-el-Din had come to upbraid her with losing the treasure she had entrusted to her.

"Nur-el-Din," the girl faltered in a voice broken with tears.

"Where is it I Where is the silver box I gave into your charge?

Answer me. Mais reponds, donc, canaille!"The dancer stamped furiously with her foot and advanced menacingly on Barbara.

An undersized; yellow-faced man came quickly out of the small door leading from the bar and stood an instant, a helpless witness of the scene, as men are when women quarrel.

Nur-el-Din rapped out an order to him in a tongue which was unknown to Barbara. It sounded something like Russian. The man turned and locked the door of the bar, then stepped swiftly across the room and bolted the outer door.

Barbara recognized the threat that the action implied and it served to steady her nerves. She shrank back no longer but drew herself up and waited calmly for the dancer to reach her.

"The box you gave me," said Barbara very quietly, "was stolen from me by the person who... who murdered my father!"Nur-el-Din burst into a peal of malicious laughter.

"And you?" she cried, "you are 'ere to sell it back to me, hein, or to get your blood money from your accomplice? Which is it?"On this Barbara's self-control abandoned her.

"Oh, how dare you! How dare you!" she exclaimed, bursting into tears, "when that wretched box you made me take was the means of my losing the dearest friend I ever had!"Nur-el-Din thrust her face, distorted with passion, into Barbara's. She spoke in rapid French, in a low, menacing voice.

"Do you think this play-acting will deceive me? Do you think Idon't know the value of the treasure I was fool enough to entrust to your safe keeping? Grand Dieu! I must have been mad not to have remembered that no woman could resist the price that they were willing to pay for it! And to think what I have risked for it! Is all my sacrifice to have been in vain?"Her voice rose to a note of pleading and the tears started from her eyes. Her mood changed. She began to wheedle.

"Come, ma petite, you will help me recover my little box, n'est-ce pas? You will find me generous. And I am rich, I have great savings. I can..."Barbara put up her hands and pushed the dancer away from her.

"After what you have said to me to-night," she said, "I wouldn't give you back your box even if I had it."She turned to the man.

"Will you tell me the way to the nearest station" she went on, "and kindly open that door!"The man looked interrogatively at Nur-el-Din who spoke a few words rapidly in the language she had used before. Then she cried to Barbara:

"You stay here until you tell me what you have done with the box!"Barbara had turned to the dancer when the latter spoke so that she did not notice that the man had moved stealthily towards her.

Before she could struggle or cry out, a hand as big as a spade was clapped over her mouth, she was seized in an iron grip and half-dragged, half-carried out of the taproom through the small door opposite the front entrance.

The door slammed behind them and Barbara found herself in darkness. She was pushed round a corner and down a flight of stairs into some kind of cellar which smelt of damp straw. Here the grip on her mouth was released for a second but before she could utter more than a muffled cry the man thrust a handkerchief into her mouth and effectually gagged her. Then he tied her hands and feet together with some narrow ropes that cut her wrists horribly. He seemed to be able to see in the dark for, though the place was black as pitch, he worked swiftly and skillfully.

Barbara felt herself lifted and deposited on a bundle of straw.

In a little she heard the man's heavy foot-step on the stair, there was a crash as of a trap-door falling to, the noise of a bolt. Then Barbara fainted.