Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/90

Rh judge from the solicitous manner in which he carried out her commands.

The woman (I learned later that her name was Agathya) was much older than her mistress, who might have been any age from sixteen to forty, so vivid and strange was her exotic loveliness. Agathya looked about sixty. She had straggling gray hair, drawn tightly back into a bunch at the top of her head. Her face was deeply lined, her eyes roving, her manner shrinking and servile. She wore a dark brown one-piece dress, girdled by a brown silk cord, and was barefooted. Her stooped shoulders made her appear of medium height, but I think Agathya would have been a tall woman had she thrown back her shoulders and stood upright.

These two people approached their mistress with attitudes so entirely different that it was like watching a drama on a stage to look through that wide window and see them; the man with a proud kind of watchful anxiety to please, the woman seemingly half terrorized, trembling and shrinking every time the princess addressed her.

“Portia, I believe that poor old woman is ill-treated,” I whispered, as we saw Agathya shrink backward at a sudden motion of the Russian’s hand toward her.

I had hardly said it before something happened in the lighted room. The old woman, attempting to place a vase upon the tall mantel shelf, miscalculated, slipped, and to save herself let the vase go. It fell, crashing, to the tiled hearth. Agathya did not rise from the crumpled, shrunken heap into which she had huddled her body.

The Princess Irma rose, however. She flew out of the pile of cushions, her face transformed by fury. She ran over to that prostrate figure crouching there. She stood over it for a moment, saying something that we could not hear, nor could we have understood her Russian had we heard. Then she thrust out a small foot shod with a buckled shoe, the heel of which sparkled with brilliants, and gave that poor old woman’s form a harsh push that sent Agathya sliding across the hearth. Nor did it end there. The Russian snatched at something that had been lying on the mantel, and lifted one arm high over the poor creature who now began to struggle upward, with lifted hands and arms over her face.

From my reading I recognized the instrument that the princess wielded as a knout, and felt sick at what was apparently about to happen. But the man came springing across the room to her side. He leaned down with careless indifference to the princess’ rage and helped Agathya to her feet. Then he turned and began to talk to his mistress, who listened with head thrown back, eyes flashing redly upon him. Her arm dropped; she let the knout slip from her jeweled fingers, and laughed. Her begemmed hand motioned away Agathya, who slunk from the room, head bowed, shoulders bent, like one in mortal fear.

“Sergei! Sergei!” I could hear the princess cry out clearly, between trills of gurgling laughter that I rather saw than heard. She put out her hand to him, with an inimitably gracious gesture, and he caught it to his lips, sinking to one knee as he kissed it with passionate abandon. She withdrew it then, with a kind of indifference, leaned over, passed her cheek lightly across his upturned, adoring face. At that, he flung himself flat upon the rugs at her feet, and I could see that he was putting her dress to his lips as he almost groveled there.

had been the little drama that neither Portia nor I had a chance to interchange a word, but now Portia pulled at me, and I wakened to