Page:Weird Tales volume 42 number 04.djvu/40

 speaker apparently had a slight foreign accent.

At last, puffing a little, I found myself in a tower room—a small chamber whose round stone walls were slitted with just windows enough to make the outlines of objects mistily visible. The place was without furniture, except for a bare table and several chairs near the further wall; but what drew my attention, what held me galvanized, were the human occupants.

So as to see them more clearly, I flashed on my cigarette lighter—at which they drew back in a wide-mouthed startled sort of way, as if they had never seen such a device before. But in that glimpse of a few seconds, before I let the flame die out, I clearly saw the faces; the fat, stolid-looking man, with double chins and a beefy complexion; the alert, bright-eyed boy of seven or eight, and a girl of fourteen or fifteen; and the two women, the younger of a rather commonplace appearance, but the elder of a striking aspect, almost regal in the proud tilt of the shapely head, the lovely contours of the cheeks and lips, and the imperious flash of eyes that seemed made to command.

"Oh, monsieur," she exclaimed. "Thank you, sir, thank you very much."

All at once it struck me that there was something unutterably sad about the tones; something unspeakably sad, too, in the looks of the two women and the man, something bleak that seemed to pervade the atmosphere like a dissolved essence, until I caught its contagion and felt as if a whole world's sorrow were pressing down upon my head.

Now, as never before, I wanted to flee. But something held me rooted to the spot. I was like a man in a dread dream, who knows he is dreaming and yet cannot awaken; repelled and at the same time fascinated, I watched the elder woman approach with outflung arms.

II

HERE was, let me not deny it, a seductive charm about her glowing femininity. Although she was no longer young—I took her to be somewhere in the nether years just beyond thirty-five—there was something extraordinarily appealing and sweet in the smile which she flashed upon me, a plaintive smile as of one who looks at you from depths of unbearable suffering. At the same time, there was something that drew me to her; held me spellbound with a magnetic compulsion. I could have imagined men easily and willingly enslaved to that woman.

"Monsieur," she pleaded—and for the sake of convenience I give the English equivalent of her words—"monsieur, they have ringed us around. What are we to do? In the name of the good Lord, what are we to do?"

"They permit us not even a newspaper, monsieur," rumbled the heavy voice of the man, as his portly form slouched forward.

"They stand over us all the time. We have no privacy except in our beds," put in the younger woman, with a despairing gesture of one bony hand.

"They inspect all our food—every bit of bread and meat, suspecting it may contain secret papers," the elder woman lamented. "Worse still—our doors are all locked from outside. We can hardly move a step without being trailed by a guard. We cannot read, we can hardly think without being inspected. Oh, was ever any one tormented with such vile persecution?"

"Was anyone ever tormented with such vile persecution?" the second lady took up the cry, in a thin wailing voice that sent the shudders again coursing down my spine.

As if by instinct, I was backing toward the door. I wondered if I were not the victim of some frightful hallucination.

"But what do you want me to do?" I blurted out, as with one hand I groped behind me for the doorknob.

"Do? What do we want you to do, monsieur?" groaned the elder woman. "Speak with them! Plead with them! Beg them to treat us like human beings—not like beasts in cages!"

"But who am I to speak to? Who are they? What do you mean, Madam?"

"Who but our persecutors—our oppressors?"

"Who but our persecutors—our