The next day when Armand Gervase went to call on the Princess Ziska he was refused admittance. The Nubian attendant who kept watch and ward at her gates, hearing the door-bell ring, contented himself with thrusting his ugly head through an open upper window and shouting-"Madame est sortie!"
"Ou donc?" called Gervase in answer.
"A la campagne--le desert--les pyramides!" returned the Nubian, at the same time banging the lattice to in order to prevent the possibility of any further conversation. And Gervase, standing in the street irresolutely for a moment, fancied he heard a peal of malicious laughter in the distance.
"Beast!" he muttered, "I must try him with a money bribe next time I get hold of him. I wonder what I shall do with myself now?-- haunted and brain-ridden as I am by this woman and her picture?"
The hot sun glared in his eyes and made them ache,--the rough stones of the narrow street were scorching to his feet. He began to move slowly away with a curious faint sensation of giddiness and sickness upon him, when the sound of music floating from the direction of the Princess Ziska's palace brought him to a sudden standstill. It was a strange, wild melody, played on some instrument with seemingly muffled strings. A voice with a deep, throbbing thrill of sweetness in it began to sing: Oh, for the passionless peace of the Lotus-Lily! It floats in a waking dream on the waters chilly, With its leaves unfurled To the wondering world, Knowing naught of the sorrow and restless pain That burns and tortures the human brain; Oh, for the passionless peace of the Lotus-Lily!
Oh, for the pure cold heart of the Lotus-Lily! Bared to the moon on the waters dark and chilly. A star above Is its only love, And one brief sigh of its scented breath Is all it will ever know of Death; Oh, for the pure cold heart of the Lotus-Lily!
When the song ceased, Gervase raised his eyes from the ground on which he had fixed them in a kind of brooding stupor, and stared at the burning blue of the sky as vaguely and wildly as a sick man in the delirium of fever.
"God! What ails me!" he muttered, supporting himself with one hand against the black and crumbling wall near which he stood. "Why should that melody steal away my strength and make me think of things with which I have surely no connection! What tricks my imagination plays me in this city of the Orient--I might as well be hypnotized! What have I to do with dreams of war and triumph and rapine and murder, and what is the name of Ziska-Charmazel to me?"