The thought came to me that perhaps one of those sleeping men was George Seabrook.
He and I used to play tennis together and we knew each other like brothers.
He had a large scar on the back of his right hand; a livid star-shaped scar.
With that in mind, I walked carefully from sleeping man to sleeping man, looking at their right hands.
And I found a right hand with a scar that was shaped like the one I knew so well.
But that blind man, only a skin-covered skeleton, chained to a bed of stone!
That could not be my gay young tennis player, George!
The discovery nauseated me.
What did it mean? What could it mean?
If the Donna Marchesi was back of all that misery, what was her motive?
Down the long cave-like room I went.
There seemed to be no end to it, though many of the columns were surrounded with empty chains.
Only those near the door had their human flies in the trap.
In the opposite direction the rows of pillars stretched into a far oblivion.
I thought that at the end there was the black mouth of a tunnel, but I could not be sure and dared not go that far to explore the truth.
Then, out of that tunnel, I heard a voice come, a singing voice.
Slipping my shoes off, I ran back near the door and hid as best I could in a dark recess, back of a far piece of stone. I stood there in the darkness, my torch out, the handle of the revolver in my hand.
The singing grew louder and louder, and then the singer came into view.
It was none other than Donna Marchesi!
She carried a lantern in one hand and a basket in the other.
Hanging the lantern on a nail, she took the basket and went from one sleeping man to another.
With each her performance was the same; she awakened them with a kick in the face, and then, when they sat up crying with pain, she placed a hard roll of bread in their blind, trembling, outstretched hand.
With all fed, there was silence save for gnawing teeth breaking through the hard crusts.
The poor devils were hungry, starving slowly to death, and how they wolfed the bread!
She laughed with animal delight as they cried for more.
Standing under the lamp, a lovely devil in her decollete dress, she laughed at them. I swear I saw her yellow eyes, dilated in the semi-darkness!
Suddenly she gave the command,
"Up! you dogs, up!"
Like well-trained animals they rose to their feet, clumsily, but as fast as they could under the handicap of trembling limbs and heavy chains.
Two were slow in obeying, and those she struck across the face with a small whip, till they whined with pain.
They stood there in silence, twenty odd blind men, chained against as many pillars of stone; and then the woman, standing in the middle of them, started to sing.
It was a well-trained voice, but metallic, and her high notes had in them the cry of a wild animal. No feminine softness there.
She sang from an Italian opera, and I knew that I had heard that song before.
While she sang, her audience waited silently.
At last she finished, and they started to applaud. Shrunken hands beat noisily against shrunken hands.
She seemed to watch them carefully, as though she were measuring the degree of their appreciation.
One man did not satisfy her.
She went over and dug into his face with long strokes of those long red nails until his face was red and her fingers bloody.
And when she finished her second song that man clapped louder than any of them.
He had learned his lesson.
She ended by giving them each another roll and a dipper of water. Then, lantern and basket in her hands, she walked away and disappeared down the tunnel.
The blind men, crying and cursing in their impotent rage, sank down on their stone beds.
I went to my friend, and took his hand.
"George!
George Seabrook!" I whispered.
He sat up and cried,
"Who calls me?
Who is there?"
I told him, and he started to cry.
At last he became quiet enough to talk to me.