CHAPTER III
A DISAPPOINTMENT AND A DRAGOMAN
It was a blow not to see Anthony on the quay. And other blows rained thick and fast. My two consolations were that I was actually in Egypt; and that in the confusion Rechid Bey with the veiled figure of his silent bride had slipped away without further incidents. Their disappearance was regretted by no one save Monny, unless it was Neill Sheridan, and he was discreet enough to keep his feelings to himself. The girl was not. She protested on principle, although she had the Asiut address. But where all men, black and brown and white, were yelling with the whole force of their lungs, and pitching and tossing luggage (mostly the wrong luggage) with all the force of their arms, nobody heard or cared what she said. For once Monny Gilder was disregarded by a crowd of men. This could happen only at the departure of a boat train! But if I was not thinking about her, I was thinking about her fifteen trunks, and Cleopatra's sixteen and Biddy's and Miss Guest's two. The maids were worse than useless, and I had no valet. I have never had a valet. I clawed, I fought, I wrestled in an arena where it was impossible to tell the wild beasts from the martyrs. I rescued small bags from under big boxes, and dashed off with a few samples to the train, in order to secure places. All other able-bodied men, including Sheridan and the artist sculptor Bailey, were engaged in the same pursuit, and our plan was to "bag" a whole compartment between us in the boat-special for Cairo. But we never met again till we reached our destination. One expects Egypt to warm the heart with its weather, but the cold was bitter; so was the disappointment about Anthony. Both cut through me like knives. Darkness had fallen before I was ready to join the ladies—if I could. In passing earlier, I had shouted to the maids where to find the places, grabbed with difficulty, for their mistresses. Whether they had found them, or whether any of the party still existed, was the next question; and it was settled only as the train began to move. The compartment I had selected was boiling over with a South American president and his effects; but as I stood transfixed by this transformation scene, Cleopatra's maid hailed me from the end of the corridor. Les quatres dames were in the restaurant car. Why? Ah, it was the Arab they had engaged as dragoman, who had advised the change in milord's absence. He said it would be better, as of course they would want dinner. He himself was looking after the small baggages, except the little sacks of the hand which the maids kept.
What, the ladies had engaged a dragoman! And they had trusted him—a stranger—with luggage? Then it was as good as gone! But no, mildly ventured Cleopatra's handmaiden. The dragoman came recommended. He had a letter from a friend of milord.
My thoughts jumped, of course, to Anthony. Yet how could he have known that I was travelling with ladies? And if by some Marconian miracle he had heard, why should he, who prided himself on "not bothering" with women, trouble to provide a dragoman at Alexandria?
I hurried to the dining car, and found Monny with her satellites seated at a table, three of them looking as calmly innocent as if they had not upset my well-laid scheme for their comfort. Biddy alone had a guilty air, because, perhaps, I was more important in her eyes than in the eyes of the others. "Oh, dear Duffer," she began to wheedle me: "We hope you don't mind our coming here? We thought it a good idea, for we're starving, although we're perfectly happy because we're in Egypt, and because it's such a quaint train, so different and Eastern. The dragoman who——"
"I think he came from your friend Anthony with an 'H,'" Cleopatra broke in. "He seemed providential. And he speaks English. The only objection is, he's not as good-looking as Monny and I wanted our dragoman to be. We did hope to get one who would be becoming to us, you see, and give the right sort of Eastern background. But I suppose one can't have everything! And it was I who said your friend Anthony's messenger must be engaged even if his face is—is—rather like an accident!"
"It's like a catastrophe," remarked Monny, looking as if she blamed me.
"Where is it?" I wanted to know.
"It's waiting in a vestibule outside where the cook's cooking," Biddy explained ungrammatically. "I told it you'd want to see it. And it's got a letter for you from some one." "Did the fellow say the letter was from Fenton?" I inquired.
"No. He only said, from a friend who'd expected to meet you; and Mrs. East was sure it must be from the one you were talking about."
Wasting no more words, I marched off to the fountainhead for information. Near the open door of the infinitesimal kitchen stood a fat little dark man with a broken nose, and one white eye. The other eye, as if to make up, was singularly, repellently intelligent. It fixed itself upon me, as I approached, with eager questioning which melted into ingratiating politeness. Instinct warned the fellow that I was the person he awaited. At the same moment, instinct was busily whispering to me that there was something fishy about him, despite the alleged letter. He did not look the type of man Fenton would recommend. And though his face was of an unwholesome olive tint, and he wore a tarbush, and a galabeah as long as a dressing-gown, under his short European coat, I was sure he was not of Arab or Egyptian blood.
"Milord Borrow?" he began, displaying large white teeth, of which he was evidently proud.
I assented.
"My name is Bedr el Gemály," he introduced himself. "I have a letter for milord."
"Who gave it to you?" I challenged him.
The ingratiating smile seemed to flicker like a candle flame in a sudden puff of wind. "A friend of my, a dragoman. He could not come to bring it. So he give it to me. The gentleman's name was Fenton. My friend, he was sent from him at Cairo." As the fellow spoke, in fairly good English, he took from a pocket of the short coat which spoiled his costume, a colourful silk handkerchief. Unwrapping this, he produced an envelope. It was addressed to me in the handwriting of Fenton, but before opening it I went on with my catechism.
"Then the letter doesn't introduce you, but your friend?"
The smile was practically dead now. "I think it do not introduce any ones. It is only a letter. My friend Abdullah engaged to carry it. But he got sick too soon to come to the ship."
"I see," said I. "You seem to have used the letter, however, to get yourself taken on as dragoman by the ladies of my party. How the devil did you find out that they were travelling with me, eh?" I shot the question at him and tried to imitate gimlets with my eyes. But he was ready with his answer. No doubt he had prepared it.
"I see you all together, from a distant place, before I come there. A gentleman off the ship, he pointed you out when I ask where I find Milord Borrow. I see you, and those ladies. When I come, you was away already, so I speak to them, and say if I could help, I be very pleased. When I tell one of the ladies I was from a friend of milord's with a letter, she say, is the friend's name Captain Fenton, and I say 'yes, madame, Captain Fenton, that is the name; and I am a dragoman to show Egypt to the strangers. I know it all very well, from Alexandria way up Nile.' Then the lady say very quick she will take me for her dragoman. I am pleased, for I was not engaged for season, and she say if I satisfy her she keep me in Cairo and on from there." "H'm," I grunted, still screwing in the gimlets. "I see you're not an Egyptian. You have selected the name of an Armenian famous in history. Are you Armenian?"
"I am the same thing as Egyptian, I bin here for dragoman so many years. I am Mussulman in faith. But I was born Armenian," he admitted.
"You speak English with an American accent," I went on. "Have you lived in America?"
"One time a family take me to New York and I stay a year or two. Then I get homesick and come to Egypt again. But I learn to talk maybe some like American peoples while I am over there."
It sounded plausible enough, the whole story. And if Mrs. East had snapped the dragoman up under the impression that he came from a man she had determined to meet, the fellow might be no more to blame than any other boaster, touting in his own interest. Still, I had an uneasy feeling that something lay hidden under Armenian plausibility. Bedr el Gemály was perhaps a thief who had courted a chance for a big haul of jewellery. Yet if that were all, why hadn't he hopped off the tram, as it began to move, with the ladies' hand luggage? He might easily have got away, and disappeared into space, before we could wire the police of Alexandria to look out for him. He had not done that, but had waited, and risked facing my suspicions. And he must have realized, while in charge of Monny's and Cleopatra's attractive dressing bags, that he was missing an opportunity such as might never come to him again. This conduct suggested an honest desire to be a good dragoman. Yet—well, I resolved not to let the gimlets rust until Bedr el Gemály had been got rid of. If Mrs. East had really promised him a permanent engagement, she could salve his disappointment by giving him a day's pay. I would take the responsibility of sending him about his business.
Without further parley I opened the letter. It was short, evidently written in a hurry. Anthony had scribbled:
Horribly sorry, dear old Duffer, but I'm wanted by the Powers that Be in Cairo. No other reason could have kept me from Alexandria. I was afraid a wire wouldn't reach you, so I sent a decent old chap by the train I meant to take. He's pledged to find you on the quay, and he will—unless some one makes him drunk. This seems unlikely to happen, as he won't be paid till he gets back, and having no friends on earth, nobody will stand him drinks. Beastly luck, but I shan't be able to see you to-night even in Cairo. Tell you all to-morrow—and there's a lot to tell, about many things.
Yours ever,
A.F.
The messenger had "no friend on earth," according to Fenton. Then the friendship stated to exist between him and Bedr el Gemály must have come readymade from heaven, or—its opposite. I guessed the nature of the "decent old chap's" illness. But I should have been glad to know whether it had been produced by design or accident.
When I went back to the ladies, Bedr went with me, at my firm suggestion, and gave them their handbags to use as footstools. Dinner was ready, and a seat had been kept for me at a table just across the aisle, but before beginning, I explained the real circumstances governing the dragoman's arrival. "Whatever else he may be, he's a shark," I said, "or he wouldn't have traded on a misunderstanding to grab an engagement. You owe him nothing really, but if you choose, give him a sovereign when we get to Cairo, and I'll tell him that I have a dragoman in view for the party. He'll then have two days' pay, according to the guide-books."
With this, I slipped into my seat, thinking the matter settled. But between courses, Monny leaned across from her table (she and I had end seats) and said that she and her aunt had been talking about that poor dragoman. "Aunt Clara raised his hopes," the girl went on, "and now Rachel Guest and I think it would be mean to send him away, just because he's hideous."
"That won't be the reason!" said I. "It will be because we don't know anything about him, and because in his sharpness he's over-reached himself."
"But we do know things about him. He showed Aunt Clara letters from people who'd employed him, lots of Americans whose names we've heard, and some we're acquainted with. The tragic thing is, that he finds difficulty in getting engaged because of his face. I've felt guilty ever since I called it a catastrophe. Of course it is; but I said it to be funny, which was cruel. And we deserve to punish ourselves by keeping the poor wretch a few days, or more, if he's good."
"I thought you wanted a becoming dragoman?" I reminded her.
"Oh, that was just our silliness. I do like good-looking people, I must say. But what does it matter whether a brown person is handsome or homely, when you come to think of it? Besides, we can have another dragoman, too, for ornament, if we run across a very picturesque one."
I laughed. "But you can't go up the Nile on a boat with a drove of private dragomans, you know!"
"I don't know, Lord Ernest. And why don't you call them dragomen? You make them sound as if they were some kind of animal."
"Dragomans is the plural," I persisted.
"Well, I shall call them dragomen. And if this poor thing can't get any one else to drag, he shall drag us up the Nile, if he's as intelligent in his ways as he is in that one eye, which is so like a hard-boiled egg. You see, Lord Ernest, we're going to have a boat of our own. A steam dahabeah is what we want, so we won't be at the mercy of the wind. And we can have all the dragomen we choose, can't we?"
"I suppose you can fill up your cabins with them," I agreed, because I felt that the Gilded Rose wished me to argue the point, and that if I did I should be worsted. As I should not be on board the dahabeah in question, it would not matter to me personally if the boat were entirely manned by dragomans. Except that there would in that case probably be a collision, and I should not be near to save Biddy—and incidentally the girl Biddy wished me to marry.
After that, we went on eating our dinner and talking of Egypt, Miss Guest doing all the listening, as usual. When we had finished, we kept our places because we had no others. Cleopatra was curious about my friend's failure to arrive, but I put her off with vaguenesses; and said to myself that, for Anthony's sake, it was well that mysterious business had kept him in Cairo. Still, I wondered what the business was: why he would be unable to see me that night: and what were the "many things" he had to tell.
CHAPTER IV
A MAN IN A GREEN TURBAN
I shall never know for certain whether or not our future was entirely shaped by Monny's resolve to breakfast on the terrace of Shepheard's Hotel next morning.
A great many remarkable things have happened on that historic site. Napoleon made the place his headquarters. General Klèber was murdered in the garden. Half the most important people in the world have had tea on the terrace: but, according to a German waiter, there was one deed yet undone. Nobody had ever ordered breakfast out of doors.
Of course, Monny got what she wanted. Not by storming, not by putting on power-of-wealth airs, but simply by turning bright pink and looking large-eyed. At once that waiter rushed off, and fetched other waiters; and almost before the invited guests knew what to expect, two tables had been fitted together, covered with white, adorned with fresh roses, and set forth with cups and saucers. I was the one man invited, and I felt like an actor called to play a new part in an old scene, a scene vaguely, excitingly familiar. Could I possibly be remembering it, I asked myself, or was my impression but the result of a life-long debauch of Egyptian photographs? Anyhow, there was the impression, with a thrill in it; and I felt that I ought to be handsomer, more romantic, altogether more vivid, if I were to live up to the moving picture. It seemed as if nothing would be too extraordinary to do, if I wanted to match my surroundings. I thought, even if I burst into a passionate Arab love-song and proposed to Monny across the table, it would be quite the right note. But somehow I didn't feel inclined to propose. It was enough to admire her over the rim of a coffee cup. In her white tussore (I heard Biddy call it tussore) and drooping, garden-type of hat, she was a different girl from the girl of the ship. She had been a winter girl in white fur, then. Now she was a summer girl, and a radiant vision, twice as pretty as before, especially in this Oriental frame; still I was waiting to see myself fall in love with her, much in the same way that Biddy was waiting. And there was that Oriental frame! It belonged to my past, and perhaps Monny Gilder didn't belong even to my future, so it was excusable if I thought of it more than of her.
It was hardly nine o'clock, but already the wonderful coloured cinema show of Cairo daily life had begun to flash and flicker past the terrace of Shepheard's, where East and West meet and mingle more sensationally than anywhere in Egypt. Nobody save ourselves had dared suggest breakfast; but travellers were pouring into the hotel, and pouring out. Pretty women and plain women were sitting at the little wicker tables to read letters, or discuss plans for the day with each other or their dragomans. Officers in khaki came and talked to them about golf and gymkhanas. Down on the pavement, close under the balustrade, crowded young and old Egyptian men with dark faces and wonderful eyes or no eyes at all, struggling to sell painted post-cards, strings of blue-gray mummy beads; necklaces of cornelian and great lumps of amber; fans, perfumes, sample sticks of smoking incense, toy camels cleverly made of jute; fly whisks from the Sudan with handles of beads and dangling shells; scarab rings and brooches; cheap, gay jewellery, scarfs from Asiut, white, black, pale green and purple, glittering like miniature cataracts of silver, as brown arms held them up. Darting Arab urchins hawked tame ichneumons, or shouted newspapers for sale—English, American, Greek, French, German, Italian, and Turkish. Copper-tinted, classic-featured youths in white had golden crowns of bananas round their turbans; withered patriarchs in blue galabeahs offered oranges, or immense bunches of mixed flowers, fresh and fragrant as the morning; or baskets of strawberries red and bright as rubies. Dignified Arabs stalked by, bearing on nobly poised heads pots of growing rose-bushes or arum lilies, or azaleas. Jet-black giants, wound in rainbow-striped cottons, clanked brass saucers like cymbals, advertising the sweet drinks in their glass jars, while memory whispered in my ears the Arab name "sherbétly." Across the street, clear silver-gold sunshine of winter in Egypt shone on precious stones, on carved ivories, silver anklets, Persian rugs, and embroideries, brilliant as hummingbirds' wings, all displayed in the windows of shops where dark eyes looked out eagerly for buyers. Everything was for sale, for sale to the strangers! The whole clamouring city seemed to consist of one vast, concentrated desire on the part of brown people to sell things to fair people. They shouted and wheedled and besought on the sidewalks; and the roadway between was a wide river of colour and life. Motor cars with Arab chauffeurs carried rich Turks to business, or to an audience of State. Now and then a face of ivory glimmered through a gauzy veil and eyes of ink and diamonds shot starry glances from passing carriage windows. Erect English women drove high dog-carts. Gordon Highlanders swung along in the kilt, more at home in Cairo then in Edinburgh, the droning of their pipes as Oriental as the drone of a räita, or the beat of tom-toms. A wedding party with a hidden bride in a yellow chariot, met a funeral, and yashmaked faces peeped from curtained windows, in one procession, to stare at the wailing, marching men of the other, and to shrink back hastily from the sight of the coffin. Tangled it would seem inextricably with streams of traffic, surging both ways, moved the "ships of the desert," loaded with emerald-green bersím; long, lilting necks, and calm, mysterious eyes of camels high above the cloaked heads of striding Bedouins, heads of defiant Arab prisoners, chained and handcuffed to each other; heads of blue-eyed water buffaloes, and heads of trim white, tasselled donkeys.
None of us talked very much, as we sat at the breakfast table: the novelty and wonder of the scene made the actors forget their words: and if we had been able to talk, we could not have appreciated each other's rhapsodies, over the shoutings of men who wanted us to buy their wares, and harangues of dragomans who wished, as Monny said, to "drag" us. These latter, especially, were persistent, and Bedr the One Eyed, having been forbidden to come till ten o'clock, was not on the spot to give protection. Our method at first was to appear oblivious, but presently in my wickedest Arabic, I would have ordered the troop away if Monny had not interfered.
"Don't!" she said, "they're part of the picture. Besides, they've more right here than we have. It's their country, not ours. And they're so interesting—most of them. That tall man over there, for instance, with the green turban. He's the only one who hasn't opened his mouth. Just to show him that virtue's its own reward, I'm going to engage him. Will you call him to us, please, Lord Ernest?"
Sitting as I sat, I could not see the person indicated. "What do you want him for, Miss Gilder?" I obeyed temptation, and asked.
"Why, to be a dragoman, of course," she explained. "That's what he's for. I told you, I'd have a picturesque one for ornament. This creature's a perfect specimen."
I stood up reluctantly, and looked down over the balustrade. "A man with a green turban?" I repeated. "But that means he's a Hadji, who's been to Mecca and back. I never heard of a dragoman—"
I stopped short in my argument. My eyes had found the man with the green turban.
He stood at some distance behind the pavement-merchants and self-advertising dragomans who pressed against the railing. In his long galabeah of Sudan silk, ashes of roses in colour, he was tall and straight as a palm, gravely dignified with his folded arms and the haughty remoteness of his expression. Dark and silent, half-disdainful, half-amused, he was like a prince compared with his humbler brethren; but there was another resemblance more relevant and intimate which cut my sentence short.
"By Jove," I thought, "how like he is to Anthony Fenton!"
He was looking, not at me, but at Miss Gilder, quite respectfully yet hypnotically, as if by way of an experiment he had been willing her to find and single out the one motionless figure, the one person whose tongue had not called attention to himself.
Yes, I thought again, he was an Arab copy of Anthony, but more as Anthony had been years ago before his moustache grew, than as Anthony had become in late years. Still, there were the aquiline features, the long, rather sad eyes shaded with thick, straight lashes, the eyebrows raised at the bridge of the thin nose, then sloping steeply down toward the temples; the slight working of muscles in the cheeks; the peculiarly charming mouth which could be irresistible in a smile, the stern, contradictory chin marring by its prominence the otherwise perfect oval of the face. I wondered if Anthony had as noble a throat as this collarless galabeah left uncovered, reminding myself that I could not at all recall Anthony's throat. Then, as the sombre eyes turned to me, drawn perhaps by my stare, I was stunned, flabbergasted, what you will, by realizing that Anthony himself was looking at me from under the green turban.
The dark face was blankly expressionless. He might have been gazing through my head. His eyes neither twinkled with fun nor sent a message of warning; but somehow I knew that he saw me, that he had been watching me for a long time. "You see the one I mean, don't you?" asked Monny. "Well, that's the one I want. I'll take him."
She spoke as if she were selecting a horse at a horse show.
Anthony had brought this on himself, but I was not angry with Anthony. I was angry with the girl for putting her finger into our pie.
"That's not a dragoman," I assured her. "If he were, he'd come and bawl out his accomplishments, as the others do. He's a very different sort of chap."
"That's why I want him," said Monny. "And if he isn't a dragoman, he'll jump at being one if I offer to pay him enough. He's an Egyptian, anyhow, by his clothes, or a Bedouin or something—although he isn't as dark as the rest of these men. I suppose he must know a little about his own city and country."
"It doesn't follow he'd tell travellers about them for money," said I. "He looks to me a man of good birth and distinction in old fashioned dress. Why he's lingering on the pavement in front of this hotel I can't explain, but I'm certain he isn't touting. Probably he's waiting for a friend."
"He's the best looking Arab we've seen yet," remarked Mrs. East. "Like my idea of an Egyptian gentleman."
"Pooh!" said Monny. "Just test him, Lord Ernest."
"Sorry, but I can't do it," I answered, with a firmness which ought to have been tried on her long ago. "And I wouldn't discuss him in such a loud tone of voice. He may understand English."
"We have to yell to hear ourselves speak over all this row," Biddy apologized for her darling; but she need not have troubled herself. Miss Gilder had been deaf to my implied reproach.
"I'm glad I'm an American girl," she said. "When I want things I want them so dreadfully I just go for them, and surprise them so much that I get them before they know where they are. Now I'm going for this dragoman."
"He's not a drag—" I persisted, but she cut me short.
"I bet you my hat he will be one! What will you bet that he won't, Lord Ernest?"
"I'll bet you his green turban," said I.
"How can you get it?"
"As easily as you can get him," I retorted. "It's a safe bet."
Monny looked excited, but firm. Luckily, as she does it so often, it's becoming to her to look firm. (I have noticed that it's not becoming to most girls. It squares their jaws and makes their eyes snap.) But the spoiled daughter of the dead Cannon King at her worst, merely looks pathetically earnest and Minerva-like. This, I suppose, is one of the "little ways" she has acquired, since she gave up kicking and screaming people into submission. As Biddy says, the girl can be charming not only when she wants to be, but quite often when she doesn't.
The man with the green turban was no longer engaged in hypnotizing. He had retired within himself, and appeared oblivious to the outer world. Yet nobody jostled the tall, straight figure which stood with folded arms, lightly leaning against a tree. The colour of his turban was sacred in the eyes of the crowd; and when Miss Gilder, leaning over the terrace railing beckoned him, surprise rather than jealousy showed on the faces of the unwanted dragomans. As for the wearer of the turban, he did what I expected and wished him to do: paid not the slightest attention to the gesture. Whatever the motive for his masquerade, it was not to attract anything feminine.
I smiled sardonically. "That's a nice hat you've got on, Miss Gilder," I remarked.
"Do you collect girls' hats?" she asked sweetly. "But mine isn't eligible yet for your collection. Let me see, what did you say he was? Oh, a Hadji!" And she shrilled forth sweetly, her voice sounding young and clear, "Hadji! Hadji! Effendi! Venez ici, s'il vous plait. Please come here."
I could have been knocked flat by a blow of the smallest, cheapest ostrich feather in the hands of any street-merchant. For he came. Anthony came! Not to look meekly up from the pavement below the railing, but to ascend the steps of the terrace, and advance with grave dignity toward our table. Within a yard of us he stopped, giving to me, not to Miss Gilder, the beautiful Arab salute, a touch on forehead and heart.
"You devil!" I was saying to myself. "So you walk into this trap, do you, and calmly trust me to get you out. Serve you right if I don't move hand or foot." And I almost made up my mind that I wouldn't. But I was interested. I wanted intensely to know what the dickens Anthony was up to, and whether he would have been up to it if he'd known the sort of young woman he had to deal with.
"It was I who called to you, not this gentleman," said Monny, when she found that Green Turban did not look at her. "Do you speak French or English a little?"
"A little of both. But I choose French when talking to Americans," replied Anthony Fenton, with astounding impertinence, in the preferred language. "I do not know you, Madame. But I do know this gentleman."
Good heavens! What next? He acknowledged me! What was I to do now? What did the impudent fellow want me to do? Evidently he was trying an experiment. Anthony is great on experiments, and always has been. But this was a bomb. I thought he wanted to see if I could catch it on the fly, and drop it into water before it had time to explode.
"Why didn't you tell us, Lord Ernest?" asked Monny, with a flash in her gray eyes. "I thought you hadn't been in Egypt since you were a child."
"I haven't, and I didn't recognize him at first," I answered, trying for the coolness which Anthony dared to count upon.
"You remember me now?" he inquired politely.
"I—er—yes," I replied, also in French. "Your face is familiar, though you've changed, I think, since—er—since you were in England. It must have been there—yes, of course. You were on a diplomatic mission. But your name—"
"You may have known me as Ahmed Antoun," said the wretch, not dreaming of that slip he had made.
Cleopatra, who has little French, nevertheless started, and fixed upon the face under the turban a stare of feverish interest. Brigit and the unobtrusive lady with the slanting eyes both showed such symptoms of surprise as must too late have warned Fenton that he had missed his footing, skating on thin ice.
"Antoun!" exclaimed Mrs. East. "Why, that's what you said you called your friend Captain Fenton."
I glanced at Anthony. His profile had no more expression than that of an Indian on an American penny, and, indeed, rather resembled it. If he were blaming me for letting anything out, I had a right to blame him for letting himself in. He was silent as well as expressionless. He left it all to me—diplomat or duffer.
"'Antoun Effendi' was the nickname my friend Fenton got at school," I explained to Cleopatra, "because it sounded a bit like his own name, and because he had—er—because he had associations with Egypt. He was proud of them and is still. But Antoun is a name often heard here. And every man who isn't a Bey or a Prince, or a Sheikh, is an Effendi. I quite remember you now," I hurried on, turning to Anthony once more. "You are Hadji as well as Effendi."
"I have the right to call myself so, if I choose," he admitted. "I am pleased to meet you again. I was waiting for a friend when you beckoned. If you did not recognize my face at first, may I ask what it was you wanted of me?"
There was no limit, then, to his audacity. He had not learned his lesson yet, after all, it would seem.
Monny could not bear tamely to lose her hat, though she must have felt her hatpins trembling in the balance. "I told you before," she repeated, "that it was I who beckoned you." He looked at her, without speaking; and somehow the green turban and the long straight gown, by adding to his dignity, added also to his remote air of cold politeness. How could she go on? Had she the cheek to go on? She had; but the cheek was flushed with embarrassment.
"I—er—I am anxious for a guide, some one who knows Egypt well, and several languages," she desperately blurted out, looking like a half-frightened, half-defiant child. "I thought——"
"There are plenty of dragomans, Madame," Green Turban reminded her. "I can recommend you several."
"I don't want a regular dragoman," she said. "And I'm not 'Madame.' I am Miss Gilder."
"Indeed?" Chilling indifference in the tone. (Monny's hat was practically mine. I thought I should rather value it.)
"Yes. But of course that can't matter to you."
"No. It cannot, Mademoiselle."
"What I want to say, is this. You're a Hadji, which means you've been to Mecca; Lord Ernest Borrow's just told us. So you must be very intelligent. Are you in business?"
"I am interested in excavations."
"Oh! And are you allowed to make them yourself?"
"Not always."
I glanced at him quickly, wondering if he meant that answer more for me than for the girl. But his face told nothing.
"Would you be able to, if you were rich enough?"
"It is possible." "Well, I'd be willing to give you a big salary for showing us about Cairo, and perhaps going up the Nile."
"You do not know who I am, Mademoiselle. Ask your friend Lord Ernest Borrow. Perhaps he may remember something about my circumstances now he has recalled my face."
I was honestly not sure whether this were further deviltry, or an appeal for help. In any case, I thought it time for the scene to end. "I told you," I said to Monny in English, "that he was a man of importance, not at all the sort of person you could expect to engage for a guide. You must see now that he's a gentleman. And a—a—an Egyptian gentleman is just the same as any other."
"Surely not quite!" she answered in the same language, and I realized my foolish mistake in using it, as if I meant her to understand that Antoun Effendi knew it too little to catch our secrets.
"An Egyptian man can't have the same feelings as a European? Why, for hundreds and hundreds of years they've been an enslaved race, like our black people at home. We'd never think of calling even the fairest quadroon man a gentleman, though he might be wonderfully good looking and nice mannered."
Literally, I was frightened. Anthony Fenton is fiercely devoted to the memory of the beautiful princess-mother, for love of whom his father's career was ruined. Her mother was a Sicilian woman, and her father was half Greek, so there is little enough Egyptian blood, after all, in the veins of General Fenton's son. He is proud of what there is—proud, because of his mother's fatal charm, and the romance of her story (it was on the eve of her wedding with a cousin of the Sultan that the famous soldier Charles Fenton ran away with Princess Lalla and married her in Sicily): but he is sensitive, too, because, great name as Charles Fenton had made in Egypt, he was asked to resign his commission on account of the escapade. Anthony, sent to England to a public school, had fought bigger boys than himself, who, in a certain tone, had sneeringly called him "Egyptian." I imagined now that through the dark stain on his face I could see him turn pale with rage. He thought, perhaps, that the American beauty was revenging herself for his impertinence, and maybe he was right, but that did not excuse her.
"Be careful, Miss Gilder!" I warned the girl. "This man understands English better than you think. He comes of a princely family and he's got only to put out his hand to claim a fortune—"
"You seem to remember all about me now, Lord Ernest," broke in Fenton, looking dangerous.
"Yes," I said. "It comes back to me. You must forgive Miss Gilder."
"There is nothing to forgive," he caught me up. "I am not a dragoman, to be sure, but I'm enough of an Egyptian to have a price for anything I do. I may put myself at this lady's service if she will pay my price, though I'm not a servant and can't accept wages, even for the sake of pursuing my excavations!"
He continued to speak in French, lest my companions' suspicions should be further roused by the English of an Englishman; and Monny, pale after her blush, answered in neat, schoolgirl French, with a pretty American, accent. "What's the price you wish to name?" she inquired, looking a little afraid of him and ashamed of herself, now that talk of princes and fortunes was bandied about. "Of course," she went on, when he did not answer at once, "if I'd known—all this, I shouldn't have asked you to be a dragoman. At least, perhaps I shouldn't. Anyhow, I shouldn't have made a bet—"
"A bet that I would have a 'price,' Mademoiselle? Then you may win your bet, for I've just told you; I have a price. But I think it unlikely you would be willing to pay it."
"Good heavens, is he going to try and marry the girl?" I asked myself. It would be the last thing to expect of Anthony Fenton. However, he had already done the last but one; the thing I had bet his green turban he would not do. After all, he was a man, and a reckless man, as he had proved on more than one wild occasion. He was in a strange mood, capable of anything; and the Gilded Rose could never have been prettier in her life than at this minute. She had made him furious, and I had imagined that his acceptance of her overtures was the beginning of some scheme of punishment. Now I was almost sure I had been right, yet I could not guess what he would be at. Neither could Monny. But here was the dangerously picturesque Arab who "must be a prince or something," as Cleopatra had expressed it. And he was even more dangerous than picturesque.
"You—you said you wouldn't take wages," she stammered (I enjoyed hearing the self-willed young person stammer): "so I can't understand what you mean. But even though you are all those things Lord Ernest says you are, your price can't be so terribly high as to be beyond my power to pay—if I choose to pay."
"First, Mademoiselle, I must decide whether I choose to be paid."
"Oh!" Monny exclaimed, taken aback. "I thought it was a question of price."
"Not only that. 'I may put myself at the lady's service—for a price,' was what I said. I didn't say, 'I will.' I shall not be able to tell you until to-night." The patronizing tone in which Anthony spoke this sentence was worth to me everything I had gone through in the last half hour.
"But—I want to settle things this morning or—not at all," said Monny, reverting to type: that of the spoiled child.
"I am sorry," replied the man of the green turban. "In that case, it must be not at all." And he made as if to go.
The Gilded Girl could not bear this. I and the others would see that she was fallible; that there were things she wanted which she could not get. "Why can't you tell me now what your price is?" she persisted.
"Because, Mademoiselle, I may not need to tell you ever. It depends partly on another than myself." He threw a quick glance at me. "I expect to meet that other at Abdullahi's Café in an hour from now at latest. Everything will depend on the interview. In any case, I will let you know to-night what I can do."
"I may not be in," said Monny. "But if I'm out, you can leave a note."
"If I must refuse to serve you, yes, I can leave a note. If I am to accept, I must see you in person. Should you be out, I'll take it for granted that you have changed your mind and do not want"—he smiled faintly for the first time—"so expensive a guide."
Monny hesitated. "I am not stingy. I'll stay at home this evening," she volunteered at last.
"Bravo Petruchio!" I said under my breath. But if Biddy's plot were to succeed, it was my business to play the part of Petruchio to this Katherine. Let the masquerading prince find a Desdemona who would suit his Othello!
CHAPTER V
THE CAFÉ OF ABDULLAH
"Well—you got away from them all right?" began the man with the green turban when, according to his roundabout instructions, I met him an hour later at the café he had named, one of the principal resorts of Cairo, where Europeans can consort with natives without attracting remark.
"The real dragoman came and took them off my hands—at least the realer one than you—a dreadful creature with a game eye, who murdered your messenger last night, and gave me your letter and induced the ladies to engage him on the strength of it. No wonder they want a 'looker' to take the taste of him out of their mouths. And you certainly are a 'looker' in that get-up. Now kindly tell me all about it, and everything else."
"That's what I'm here for," said Anthony, running a match-box to earth in some mysterious Arab pocket. "But hold on, Duffer. Something you said just then may be important. Is it true that my messenger didn't give you the letter?"
"If you'd hung about Shepheard's Hotel ten minutes longer, you'd have seen the fellow who did give it. Bedr el Gemály he calls himself —Armenian Mussulman, a sickening combination, and an awful brute to look at—said your messenger was taken suddenly ill; pretends to be a dragoman."
"What is he like?"
"Rather like a partially decayed but decently dressed goat."
"Don't rot. This may be serious."
I described Bedr el Gemály as best I could, feature by feature. When I had polished them off, Anthony shook his green-turbaned head. "No portrait of him in my rogues' gallery. Just now, I'm sensitive about spies—over-sensitive rather. Of course, you've spotted my game?"
"I confess I was conceited enough to think you'd given yourself all this trouble with the costumier in order to take a rise out of me. But when you speak of spies, I begin to put two and two together—your business in Cairo—the powers that be, keeping you from me last night, etc. I suppose it's an official job, this fancy dress affair?"
"Yes. In my own capacity, I'm not in Cairo. I turned up day before yesterday, jolly glad to get back from Adrianople—though it was good fun there, I can tell you, for a while; and I looked forward to wallowing no end in the alleged delights of civilization. I reported myself, and all seemed well. I took a room at Shepheard's where you and I had arranged to meet, and when I'd scrubbed, I strolled over to the Turf Club to see what the gay world would have to say to a fellow in disgrace."
"Only silly asses swallowed that newspaper spoof! Every one in London who knows anything about you was betting his boots that the story had been spread on purpose to save our face with Turkey." I couldn't resist interrupting his narrative to this extent. But Anthony merely smiled, and watched a long-lived smokering settle like a halo over the head of an Arab at the nearest table. He was not giving away official secrets, but I was sure and always had been sure that he was a martyr, not a rebel, in the matter of the Balkan incident, just closed. What the public were led to suppose was this: that Captain Fenton had asked for two months' leave from regimental duty at Khartum, in order to spend the time with a relative who was seriously ill in Constantinople. That instead of remaining at his relative's bedside, he had used his leave for a dash to the Balkans. That this indiscretion might have been kept a secret had he not capped it with another: a flight with a Greek officer in an army aeroplane which had ended by crashing down in the midst of a Turkish encampment.
What I and friends who knew him best supposed, was that the "leave" had been a pretext—that Fenton had been sent on a secret mission of some sort—and that he was bound to take the blame if anything went wrong. Aeroplanes have the habits of other fierce, untamed animals: they won't always obey their trainers. Thus Anthony and his plan had both been upset. (Or had it really been premeditated that he should fall into that camp?) The remainder of his "leave" was cancelled, in punishment, and he had been "recalled" to Egypt, to be scolded in Cairo before proceeding to Khartum.
"Queer how many silly asses one knows!" Anthony said. "Still, considering what a mess I seem to have made of things, fellows were jolly kind, at the Turf Club. Nobody cut me, and only a few let me alone. Maybe there'd have been still fewer if there hadn't been a hero present who claimed attention: an American chap, Jack Dennis, who knows Miss Gilder and was telling the good news that she was on her way to Egypt. He called her the Gilded Rose and said it was going to be a good flower season in Cairo and up the Nile. All the men with one exception seemed to have heard a lot about her and to find her an interesting subject, and to want Dennis to introduce them."
"I can guess the 'one exception'!" said I.
"Can you? Well, I don't read newspaper gossip about heiresses. Thank heaven, I've something better to do with my time. But the others wanted to meet her, or pretended to, perhaps to chaff Dennis, rather a cocky youth, though I oughtn't to say so, as he was nice to me, according to his lights. He got Sam Blake to introduce us, when he happened to hear my name, and went out of his way to pay me compliments, which I daresay he thought I'd like. When there was a lull in the discussion of what could be done to make Miss Gilder enjoy herself in Egypt—chaps suggesting trips in their motor cars or on their camels and a lot of rot, Dennis remarked that I was the only man who hadn't chipped into the conversation. And hadn't I any ideas for entertaining the Golden Girl? Naturally I said that I didn't know who she was and had never heard of her, and even if I had, entertaining girls wasn't in my line. They all roared, and Dennis wouldn't believe at first that I didn't know of such an important person's existence; but the other men rotted a bit, and described me to him according to their notions of me. So he let me alone on the subject; and having plenty of other things to think of, I forgot all about it till the lady in question introduced herself this morning. Then—well, it struck me as rather amusing at first that I, the only one in the crowd who hadn't made plans to get at her, should have her trying to get at me. That was partly why I came up on the terrace when she beckoned."
"Partly? For purely intellectual reasons I'm curious to know the rest. I suppose it had nothing to do with her looks?"
"As it happened, my cynical friend, it hadn't. I've got eyes in my head and I could see she was pretty, very pretty, though not my ideal type at all. That little sprite of a woman in fawn colour, the one with green eyes and a lot of black lashes, is more what I'd fall in love with if I were frivolous. But apart from the funny side of my meeting with Miss Golder, or Gilder, it popped into my head that I might make her a victim in a certain cause. Don't ask me to explain yet, because there are a lot of things that have got to be explained first, or you couldn't understand. You were right, of course, when you thought I'd stationed myself in front of Shepheard's to take a rise out of you. I gave up my room there yesterday, for reasons I'll tell you. But I knew you'd be in the hotel, and that you'd be bound to show yourself on the terrace, in order to go out. I wanted to see if you'd recognize me, and to have a little fun with you if you didn't. By the way, I'm not pleased that you did. It's a poor compliment to my make-up, which I may tell you has been warmly praised in high quarters!" "Well, you see," I apologized, "I knew you were a nailer at that sort of thing, or you would never have got to Mecca, and earned your green turban. I knew you'd been pretty often called upon to disguise yourself and go about among the natives for one thing or another. And besides, we were chums before you had the shadow of a moustache, so I have an advantage over the other Sherlock Holmeses! But even as it was, I couldn't be sure at first. You must have got some fun out of my expression."
"I did. I took revenge on you for recognizing me by tormenting you as far as I dared. Dear old boy, I knew you'd see me through to the end, bitter or sweet!"
"Which was it?" I inquired.
"Mixed. The girl riled me, rather, so much so that I definitely decided it would be fair play to make use of her as a cat's-paw. But it depends on you, whether she's to lose or win her bet."
"If she loses, I get her hat. If she wins, I've engaged myself to procure for her—your green turban."
"Did you think you could, without my consent?"
"No. I distinctly thought I couldn't. But I would have been willing to bet the head in the turban, served up on a charger, so sure I was that you'd refuse to come near her. I thought I knew you au fond, you see."
"You do. I haven't changed. But—circumstances have changed. And that brings me near to the stage of this business which concerns you and me. First, before I go further though, I'll tell you a part of the reason why I'm sporting the green turban. There's been the dickens to pay here, about a new street that had to be made; an immensely important and necessary street. Well, they couldn't make it, because the tomb of a popular saint or sheikh was in the way. To move the body or even disturb a saint's tomb would mean no end of a row. You remember or have read enough about Mohammedans to know that. What to do, was the question. Nobody'd been able to answer it till yesterday, when the sight of me reminded them of a trick or two I'd brought off some time ago, by disguising myself and hanging about the cafés. They wanted me to try it again. Consequently Captain A. Fenton received a telegram and had to leave Cairo at once on business. He gave up his room at Shepheard's, and the only regrettable thing to the official mind is, that the fellow'd been seen about town even for an hour. However, it couldn't be helped. Luckily Ahmed Antoun is not unknown in Cairo cafés. He's made quite an impression upon the public on several occasions since his pilgrimage to Mecca, two years ago. And since yesterday afternoon, he's been drinking enough coffee to give him jaundice, while casually spreading the story of a dream he had. Our friend the Hadji related how he had slept in the mosque of Ibn Tulun after the noon hour, and dreamed of the sheikh whose tomb is so inconveniently placed. In the dream, the saint clamoured to have his tomb moved on account of a bad smell of drainage which he considers an insult to his own memory. Also dogs have taken to howling round his resting-place at night, and you know that to the true believer a dog is an unclean animal. Except for hunting purposes, or watch-dogging in various branches, good Mohammedans class dogs and Christians together in their mind. Well, already the Hadji's dream is working like yeast. The news of it is being carried from one café to another; and I hope that a few more nights' work will do the trick. The votaries of the saint will get up a petition to have his body moved. When it has found another abode, the making of the new thoroughfare will be suggested."
"Very neat! I see it all, except the connection with Miss Gilder. What has your saint got to do with her?"
"Very little, I should say, by the look in her eyes. But though a green turban's as good as an heirloom, and extorts respect wherever it goes, even a Hadji may have jealous detractors. I have mine. Another green turban in this town, whose genuineness is doubted for some obscure reason or other, has sneered at my dream."
"I say! That sounds as if you might be in danger. If one man suspects you to-day, to-morrow———"
"Oh, it's only the dream he suspects—at present. I know all the little prayer tricks so well, and I've invented my own history so ingeniously, with a patois to match my province, that I shall get through this incident as I have through others of the sort. There's only one hole in my jebbah. Last night, when my rival sprang a sudden question as to what I was doing in Cairo (I'm supposed to be a Luxor man), on the spur of the moment I replied that I was acting as dragoman to a rich family of tourists. On that, the brute inquired with honeyed accents where they were staying. I said Shepheard's, because I expected you to be there, and thought if I were followed, you might be useful as a dummy."
"Ah, that's where Miss Gilder comes in? A gilded gingerbread lamb, ready for the sacrifice. Why didn't you accept her offer at once, as she seemed so providential?" "I'm coming to that. It sounds complicated, but it isn't. For one thing, though, it may be well to wait and find out a little more about that goat-eyed Armenian of yours."
"He isn't mine. He's—".
"I want to know for certain whose he is. If he has anything to do with my rival Hadji, there's more venom and wit inside that green turban than I've given it credit for. Is there a reason, by the way, except their riches, why one should want to 'get at' a member of the American party?"
"By Jove!" said I, as if I had been pinched—for there was a sharp nip in the thought Anthony's question jabbed into my mind. I had disliked and distrusted Bedr el Gemály, but I had associated my distaste for him with Fenton's affairs. It had not occurred to me that Biddy's fears meant more than a nervous woman's vague forebodings. During the few hideous years of hide-and-seek she had passed in trying to protect the traitor, Richard O'Brien, she had no doubt had real enough reason to dread a spy in every stranger; but I had cheerfully advised her "not to be morbid" when she spoke of herself as a dangerous companion, or stopped me with a gasp in the midst of what seemed an innocent question about her stepdaughter. Could it be possible that her alarms might after all be justified, and that the powerful association betrayed by O'Brien would visit his sins on his widow and daughter? That American accent of Gemály's! He admitted having been in New York. Of course, he had made acquaintances there. My thoughts flashed back to the meeting at the railway train. Could the fellow have found out in advance that I was with Mrs. O'Brien, [alias Jones] and her friends? It seemed as if such knowledge could have reached land ahead of us only by miracle. But there was always Marconi. Perhaps news of Miss Gilder had been sent by wireless to Alexandria, with our humbler names starred as satellites of that bright planet. If this were so, Bedr, instructed from afar to watch Richard O'Brien's widow, might easily have been clever enough to suborn a messenger waiting for one Ernest Borrow.
"What are you mumbling about?" Anthony wanted to know, when I forgot to answer. "Have I put some idea that you don't like into your head?"
"I was turning your question over in it," I explained, "and wondering what to answer. Of course, Miss Gilder's rather important, and I believe her father's obsession used to be when she was a child, that she'd be kidnapped for ransom. The 'little sprite of a woman' you admire so much, knew the Gilders in those days. She says that the unfortunate baby used to be dragged about in a kind of caged perambulator, and that some of her nurses were female detectives in disguise, with revolvers under their white aprons. No wonder the girl revels in emancipation and travel! I should think, now she's grown up to twenty-one years and five foot eight or nine of height, without being kidnapped, there's not much danger so long as she keeps in the boundaries of civilization. Still, one never knows, in such a queer world as ours, where newspapers live on happenings we'd laugh to scorn if they came out of novel writers' brains."
"That's the only incentive you can suggest for spying, unconnected with my affairs?"
I hesitated, for Biddy's secret was not my secret, and it seemed that I had no right to pass it on, even to my best friend. I must ask Biddy's permission before telling Fenton that Mrs. Jones was the widow of the informer Richard O'Brien; that she feared over-subtlety on the part of the enemy might confuse her girl travelling companion with Esmé O'Brien, hidden in a convent school near Monaco. "It's just credible that there may be other incentives," I said. "But I must confess, I'd rather believe that Armenian spies were on the track of Ahmed Antoun, who can take care of himself, than after poor Miss Gilder or—any of her party."
"What's the name of the laughing sprite?" suddenly asked Fenton.
"Mrs.—er—Jones. Brigit Jones."
"Where's her husband?"
"In his grave."
"Oh! Well, his widow looks ready to bubble over with the joy of life, so I suppose we can't associate spies or anything shady with her? That's too much to hope for?"
"Why to 'hope' for?"
"It would make her too interesting."
"Look here, my dear fellow, you can't have them both!"
The dark eyes of Antoun lit with a spark of surprise and laughter. "I don't want either, thanks. I admire flowers, but I never gather them. I leave them growing. However, you might tell me which one you want for your own buttonhole?" "Really, I don't know," I mumbled, taken aback. "All I do know is, it's not likely I can get either."
Anthony stared at me with a curious expression, then abruptly changed the subject. "You've heard of Sir Marcus Lark?" he asked.
"Of course," said I, surprised at this question sandwiched into our affairs. Sir Marcus Lark is a man who has had his finger in many pies, but I didn't see how he could poke one into ours. Everybody knows Sir M. A. Lark, given a baronetcy by the Radicals some years ago in return for services to the party—starting and running a newspaper which must have cost him fifty thousand pounds before it began to pay. He has financed theatres, and vegetarian restaurants; he owns cocoa plantations and factories, and a garden city; he has a racing yacht which once beat the German Emperor's; he owns two hotels; he has written a book of travel; his name as a director is sought by financial companies; he has lent money to a distressed South American government in the making; and though the success of his enterprises has sometimes hung in the balance for months or years, his wonderful luck seems invariably to triumph in the end; so much so, that "Lark's Luck" has become a well-known heading for newspaper columns, in the middle of which his photograph is inset. At the mention of his name, the oft-seen picture rose before my eyes—a big man, anywhere between thirty-six and fifty—good head, large forehead, curly hair, kind eyes, pugnacious nose, conceited smile under waxed moustache, heavy jaw, unconquerable chin, and prize-fighter's neck and shoulders. "What has Sir Marcus Lark to do with us?" "He's in Egypt—in Cairo just now; and—he's got our mountain."
"Good heavens!" I stared blankly at Anthony, seeing not his dark face under the green turban, but that everlasting, ever-smiling newspaper block portrait. Down toppled our castle in the air, Anthony's and mine—the shining castle which had been the lodestone of my journey to Egypt, the secret hope and romance of our two lives, for all those months since Anthony first read the Ferlini papers and began negotiations with the Egyptian Government.
"It's all up then," I said, when I felt that I could speak without betraying palsy of the jaw. "We're done!"
"I'm not sure of that," Fenton answered. "If I had been, I shouldn't have broken the news so brutally. It's on the cards that we may be able to bring the thing off yet."
"But how, if that bounder has got the place for himself? He must have found out the truth about it somehow, or he wouldn't have bothered. And if he knows what we know—or think we know—he certainly won't give up to us what he's grabbed for himself. A beastly shame we should have been let in like this, after being given to understand that it would be all right."
"Lark must have had a pull of some sort, I haven't learned what; but I will. The one hope is, that he hasn't stumbled onto the secret."
"What! You think he hit on our pitch by a mere coincidence—an accident?"
"No. There's not a shadow of doubt that he had a special motive for wanting our mountain and no other." "Have you formed an idea what the motive is, if not the same as ours?"
"I've heard his version from his own lips. It's rather astounding. And I want you to hear it from him, too."
"You've met him!"
"Yesterday at Shepheard's, before I went in for this dressing-up business. Lark heard I had wired for a room at the hotel, and was lying in wait for me on the terrace when I got back from the Agency. We had a talk. I'd heard just before, the news about the mountain. But he explained. Now he wants to see you. He's got something special to say, and I've made an appointment for you with him at two o'clock."