“It throbs a little if I move it. That’s all. It’s nothing.”
“I’ll dress it again to-night,” she said, sleepily, and almost immediately she fell asleep. She slept so deeply, that a muffled roar, which shook the house, did not even trouble her dreams. Paul smiled as he heard that sound. “That’s one of the seventy-five,” he reflected. The guns from the camp at Dar-Debibagh were coming into action.
He left Marguerite sleeping, and climbed again to the roof. The guns were firing to the south of the town, and were still far away. But no man who had fought through the Chaiouïa Campaign could ever forget the tribesmen’s terror of the guns.
Paul counted up the stages of the march of Moinier’s column from Meknes. If only he was quick, so that the tribesmen could not mass between him and Fez! There were houses alight now in Fez-el-Bali. The work of massacre was going on. But let General Moinier hurry, and the guns over there at Dar-Debibagh talk insistently to Fez! Moreover, at five o’clock the rain began again. It fell like javelins, with the thunder of surf upon a beach.
Marguerite drove her two trembling negresses out of the corners into which they had flown when the house was invaded, stood over them while they cooked the dinner, and strictly ordered that it should be served with the proper ceremonies. She dressed herself in her European clothes and with even more, to-night, of the scrupulous daintiness which was habitual to her. Paul watched her with a great pride and wonderment.
“How in the world do you know at once what we have to learn?” he asked. “When people are rattled, routine’s the great remedy. Just doing the ordinary things at the ordinary hours lifts you along with a sort of assurance that life is going to be as sane to-morrow as it was yesterday. But we have men to watch, and they teach us these things. Where do you get them from?”
“From myself,” answered Marguerite, with a blush upon her cheeks, which her lover’s praise never failed to provoke. “I had to keep my own little flag of courage flying if I could.”
At half past nine they heard Selim’s three knocks upon the outer door, and Paul let him in and brought him to Marguerite in the room opening on to the patio. He brought with him a budget of black news. A couple of officers had been dragged from their horses and butchered in the streets. An engineer and his wife in Fez Djedid had been shot down as they sat at their luncheon. There had been an attack upon the Hôtel de France, where the managress and a priest had been slain.