Slippers on my feet, flashlight in my hand and the key in the pocket of
my dressing-gown, I slowly descended the stairs. Loud snores from the
servants' room told, or seemed to tell, of their deep slumbers. Down
into the cellar I went and put the key into the hole of the lock. The
key turned easily--no rust there--the springs and the tumblers had been
well oiled, like the hinges. It was evident that the door had been used
often. Turning the light on the hinges, I saw what had made my hand
black with oil. Earnestly I damned the servants. They knew about the
door. They knew what was on the other side! Just as I was about to open the door I heard a woman's voice singing in
Italian; it sounded like a selection from an opera. It was followed by
applause, and then a moaning, and one shrill cry, as though someone had
been hurt. There was no doubt now as to where the sounds that I heard in
my room had come from; they had come from the other side of the door. There was a mystery there for me to solve. But I was not ready to solve
it; so I turned the key noiselessly, and with the door locked, tiptoed
back to my bed. There I tried to put two and two together. They made five, seven, a
million vague admixtures of impossible results, all filled with weird
forebodings. But never did they make four, and till they did, I knew the
answers to be wrong, for two and two had to make four. Many changes of masters! One after another they came and bought and
disappeared. A whitewashed wall. What secrets were covered with that
whitewash? A door in a cellar. And what deviltry went on behind it? A
key and a well-oiled lock, and servants that knew everything. In vain
the question came to me. _What is back of the door?_ There was no ready
answer. But, Donna Marchesi knew! Was it her voice that I had heard? She
knew almost everything about it, but there was one thing that I knew and
she did not. She did not know that I could pass through the door and
find out what was on the other side. She did not know that I had a key. The next day I pleaded indisposition and spent most of the hours idling
and drowsing in my chamber. Not till nearly midnight did I venture down. The servants were certainly asleep that time. A dose of chloral in their
wine had attended to the certainty of their slumbers. Fully dressed,
with an automatic in my pocket, I reached the cellar and opened the
door. It swung noiselessly on its well-greased hinges. The darkness on
the other side was the blackness of hell. An indescribable odor came to
me, a prison smell and with it the soft half sob, half laugh of sleeping
children, dreaming in their sleep, and not happy. I flashed the light around the room. It was not a room but a cavern, a
cave that extended far into the distance, the roof supported by stone
pillars, set at regular intervals. As far as my light would carry I saw
the long rows of white columns. And to each pillar was bound a man, by chains. They were resting on the
stone floor, twenty or more of them, and all asleep. Snores, grunts and
weary sighs came from them, but not a single eyelid opened. Even when I
flashed the light in their faces their eyes were shut. And those faces sickened me; white and drawn and filled with the lines
of deep suffering. All were covered with scars; long, narrow, deep
scars, some fresh and red, others old and dead-white. At last, the
sunken eyelids and the inability to see my flashlight and respond told
me the nauseating truth. Those men were all blind. [Illustration: "Looking eternally into the blackness of his life and
chained to a pillar of stone."] A pleasant sight! One blind man, looking eternally into the blackness of
his life, and chained to a pillar of stone--that was bad enough; but
multiply that by twenty! Was it worse? Could it be worse? Could twenty
men suffer more than one man? And then a thought came to me, a terrible,
impossible thought, so horrible that I doubted my logic. But now two and
two were beginning to make four. Could those men be the _masters_? They
came and bought and left--to go to the cellar and stay there! "Oh! Donna Marchesi!" I whispered. "How about those cat-eyes? If you had
a hand in this, you are not a woman. You are a tiger." *       *       *       *       *

I thought that I understood part of it. The latest master came to her
for the key to the cellar, and then, when he once passed through the
door he never left. She and her servants were not there to welcome me
that night, because she did not know that I had a key. 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 decolleté 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.