Mashâllah! how the gipsy hugs. All the breath is squeezed out of the Baba. What is this that coils about him, binding down his arms? Not a rope? Chok! chok! He opens his jaws to expostulate—and a gag of oiled camel-hide is deftly slipped between them—and strapped uncomfortably tight at the back of his bull-neck. Swiftly his knees are bound, and then his ankles, and he is tenderly lowered to the bottom of the sentry-box.
The love affair of the Baba and the gipsy has ended with dramatic swiftness. Now the dark figure of a man steps out of the sentry-box, picks up the Mauser and resumes the beat of galloping hoofs coming along the Shechem road, and gleam glints on the bandolier taken from the victim, it shows the face of Namrûd under the khaki enverieh. And caught in some stray backwash of the sickly breeze that carried it, the tiny thing like a withered leaf, flits down the road again.
XIII
Whether John Hazel dreamed or not, things have happened as he has seen them. Conscious thought returns to him, sitting on the box of bombs. His lungs fill with a deep breath. He yawns hugely, blinks his eyes, squares his shoulders and looks about him. The constellation Orion blazes over Gilead, the Pleiades are hidden from sight by sombre clouds. There is a strange glare in the sky over the crest of Gerizim.
In mid-song the bulbuls have fallen silent. Even the pariah-dogs and the jackals are still. There is something abroad upon the air to-night, that weighs upon the spirit of humanity, and daunts the creatures, soulless as we imagine, with the sense of evil, nameless and unseen, but dominant and powerful to harm....
And now the man who listens at his post hears the quick beat of galloping hoofs coming along the Shechem road, and thrills with expectation:
"That's them!" In moments of keen excitement John's grammar is apt to fail. "Them, for a quid! Or the Colonel hasn't pulled off the snatch, and has had—"
He breaks off as the horsemen round a curve of the road. Where a patch of the grudging moonlight whitens the ground, he makes out that there are only three of them. No! Four—! Three riders in ample, flowing Arab dress, and a fourth in the close-fitting kit of a European—who reels and sways unsteadily in his saddle, and would fall—but for the help that another gives—with a hand that is sometimes at his back, and sometimes at his bridle.
"By God!—"
With a great exultant throb, John swings himself down from the lorry upon the road, as the riders check the gallop of their eager, snorting horses.... And the hot, white limestone dust of Samaria rises in pungent clouds.
Now through the dust an immense hand finds, grips and wrings the priest's, and a deep resonant voice, not like any he has heard before, and yet not strange, says rapidly:
"Thanks be to the Most High, my lord is delivered! Now, from the servant of his house, let him take this. It comes from the Sister of my lord" (a crumpled envelope is thrust into Julian Forbis's palm), "by the hand of John Hazel!"
"A letter from my sister.... Sir, may God reward you! You must be John Hazaël, I think! Though I never heard that name until to-night, while I live I shall always bless it!"
The voice sends an electric shock volting through John. It is like the voice he loves, as a man's may resemble a woman's, deeper, stronger, and hollow with fatigue. He returns:
"My lord is right. I am the man John. Youngest and last of all Hazaëls of the line save one only.... But all the Hazaëls, from the first to the last, do battle for my lord this night in Samaria. Now let my lord ride hard for Kir Saba. Though his enemies pursue they shall not pass here! For, God so willing, I, thy servant, will keep this road barred!"
"My cousin John! ..."
He hears a timid call he knows, and turning towards the quarter whence it comes, traces it to its source in a small rebellious bundle, held on the front of an Arab's saddle.
"O John my cousin, dost thou hear me! Entreat the Most Excellent One to set me on the ground!"
"Mr. Hazel, with your good leave, I mean to take this lady to Kir Saba." It is the voice that spoke to him last in the chintz drawing-room at Kerr's Arbour. Dimly seen in the hazy moonlight, the eyes shaded by the silken kuffiyeh meet John's, and although they are blazing with the fierce joy of the successful raider, he recognises the eyes of Edward Yaill.
"Nay, nay! I would remain here with John Hazaël," the little creature pleads in her distress.
"Thou wilt go with my lord and be his handmaid. When he needs thee no longer, then return to me. Hearest thou, woman?" the deep voice says, and Ummshni, bowing her veiled head, humbly answers:
"O Head of our House, I hear! ..."
"Farewell then, little Brave One!"
In the dark John reaches out, and pats her small cold hand.
"Not in this world, nor in the next will this that thou hast lone go unrewarded. What is that? ... Cavalry on the road!" His hearing, in this strange exalted mood of his, being even keener than Namrûd the Hunter's,—has warned him that a body of mounted men, coming from the direction of Shechem, are pushing along the road. He relapses into his ordinary, natural tone, as he says with a slap of his heavy hand on the flank of Fadl Anga's thoroughbred: "Ride for Kir Saba, Colonel Yaill, and all good luck to you!"
"Thanks, Mr. Hazel, and good-bye. Though I would prefer your coming with us. You could take Namrûd's horse—and he and I would ride and run by turns. Not the first time we've covered distance that way!"
There is an unalterable decision in the answer:
"Much obliged, Colonel, but I've arranged to stay."
"Good luck, then, and good-bye. You will shake hands at parting? ..."
The huge hand of the big Jew, and Yaill's leaner, slenderer, smaller hand, meet and grip hard, then John steps backwards.
"Ride like old hell, the lot of you. I stop—to carry on!"
A clatter of hoofs and they are away, in a cloud of the dust of Samaria, flavoured with the chamomile and wormwood of the desert, the acrid sweat of man and horse, tobacco, attar of roses, and leather tanned by Bedwân with bitter laurel-bark. John Hazel looks about him, fills his lungs with deep breaths and calculates his powers. How if one man were able to move the lorry across the road!
He frees himself from his Arab head-cloth and mantle, ties the ends of the long sleeves of his kumbas together, slips the knot Fellah-wise over his head, and pulls up the camel-hair shirt to mid-thigh. Even as the lean, tanned Prophet girded himself for the long race from Carmel up to Samaria, before the King in his ivory chariot—and the rainstorm hurtling on the heels of the King....
Now he swings himself to the driver's seat, manipulates the steering wheel, and lifts the starting-lever. Now he gets down, spins the crank, and heaves at the near fore-wheel. The lorry shakes, the ponderous armoured wheel moves—and the sweat pours off John Hazel. He sets his teeth, and braces himself again, using the sound, uninjured leg as fulcrum of the lever. With a sound like the dumping of a load of ancient iron on the scrap-heap—the Turkish ammunition-lorry moves across the road....
Just in time, for the clink of cavalry chain-bridles and scabbards, and the clatter of hoofs come nearer with every instant.... John fills the breast of his Arab shirt with bombs, and stands up on the lorry, in the straddling but purposeful attitude attributed to the Colossus of Rhodes.
"Old Harris and the chaps of my platoon used to call me a dirty fighter," he thinks, reverting to the vernacular of his adoptive land. "Well, this is going to be the dirtiest fight I ever put up. O all you old Hazaël men, back to the very oldest, help me to keep the road that leads to Kir Saba, for to-night! ..."
Rattle and clink. The creak and wheeze of straining leather. Half a squadron of Turkish Mounted Police spur round the bend in the road.
Well armed, well mounted, big and bearded Turks, the pick of the Bey's squadrons of mounted gendarmerie. The darkness hides the crimson fez and the smart Hussar uniform of dark blue with red and orange braiding. But what light there is is caught and given back by long shiny jack-boots—and the barrels of Winchester repeating-rifles—and eyes that glitter in swarthy faces that are ablaze with the hope of a reward.
Crash! ...
A bomb falls in the middle of the road in front of the squadron-leader, and explodes with a shattering detonation that calls loud echoes from the hills. The squadron-leader's jaw is torn away. He and his horse go down, the poor brute screaming in a pool of his own innocent blood and vainly struggling to rise upon his shattered forelegs.... Two of the other riders are wounded by flying splinters. Crash!—another bomb falls and detonates in the road....
"A Forbis! A Forbis! May Forbis foes fall! A Forbis! A Forbis! ..."
With this strange foreign slogan the Hills of Samaria ring, and a volley from the Winchesters of the Bey's men rattles back in answer. Bullets flatten on the rocks—pass through the sides of the lorry, shiver the lamps, rip the front hood, and dent the engine-bonnet. A second Winchester-volley clatters amongst the rocks—when a bomb, hurled by a phenomenally long arm, falls in the midst of the squadron. And the Bey's Mounted Policemen scatter and retreat in confusion, leaving dead men and horses behind them on the road....
John draws breath. A revolver cracks behind him—a bullet sings past his right cheek—and another, whistling through his hair, burns as it scores a furrow in the scalp at the top of his head....
"Bloody close! And fired from behind!"
He looks round, and is shot at from the original quarter to intimate that the retreat was only a feint. The baffled force of gendarmerie—trained scouts for the most part—mountaineers and hunters, has split into two parties; the hardier spirits—as the breaking of branches and the fluttering of birds scared from the coverts testifies—are scrambling down the steep face of the defile, from the northern side of the road.
Again a revolver-shot cracks out behind John. He slews his head and catches a glimpse of the man who fired, crouching behind a boulder, on the Jaffa side of the lorry.
Crash! crash! ...
Two bombs greet the renewal of the attack upon the Shechem side.... Three, hurled one after the other with dazzling rapidity, explode in the covert that clothes the cliff-face. Another hits the boulder by the road, and lessens its proportions. But the sharp brain behind it has foreseen that it would come.
Lying on his stomach, the Bey's man crawls to the opposite side of the highway. Crouching in the shadows, he waits unseen. The scene is handsomely illuminated now by bonfires among the brushwood. Bombs explode east and west, the arms of the giant on the lorry whirl like the sails of a windmill. It is at this juncture that John begins to sing....
Never did light of moon and stars shine on a grimmer spectacle. Foul with grime, whitened with dust, smeared and raddled with blood from his scalp-wound, the leaping fires on either hand show him black as a fiend from hell. The Bey's gendarme is a plucky child of Islam, but he shudders. What if no human, killable man, but one of the demon Sons of Iblis be he who is capering and dealing Death on the Jaffa-Shechem road to-night? Streaming with sweat, stricken with deadly fear, he gasps:
"Mashallah! I invoke the Protection of the Most High against Satan the Stoned! ..."
And springing up, sets a foot on the wheel, and leaps into the lorry. Next moment, locked in a wrestling-hug, two black shapes strive together, while the zabtiehs hold their fire for fear of hitting their own man.
The struggle is over in less than half a minute. The Turk is strong, but in those great and ruthless hands, he is dealt with easily. His foot slips in his opponent's blood, for the giant is bleeding freely from chips in various places. He yells as he is bent back.... Then his spurred feet are lifted. He is tossed out of the lorry, landing on his head—and as John continues bomb-throwing—loses temporarily, all interest in the fight....
Now comes from the Shechem side, a charge of mounted zabtiehs. John sings as he pulls pins,—pitches and proves the impotence of flesh and blood, human and equine, pitted against H.E. The police are shooting freely but wildly from behind and before him. Right and left he gives them the last sigh of No. 1 box—and is diving into the other—to rise up armed, when a bomb, that has fallen in the roadway without the customary explosion—is picked up by a plucky zabtieh and hurled back into the lorry....
John realises as the projectile falls amongst the boxed explosives that the fight is over. He leaps from the lorry on the Jaffa side, and knows no more. Miles away southward, as the huge detonation shakes the hills, and avalanches of débris tumble from the cliffs, a Gunner Officer of a Field Battery of the 52nd Division, holding the mud village of Mughar, says to his colleague indifferently, shutting his night-glasses:
"The Huns are having the time of their lives to-night in Samaria. Regular posh firework-display to-night on the Shechem-Jaffa road. Now they've exploded an ammunition-dump, or something uncommonly like it! Hope it's wiped out a few more Turks!—there are plenty of 'em to spare!"
XIV
For Katharine Forbis those two days of suspense, so fraught with fate for the two she held dearest, were ordeals of anguish only made bearable by the work that filled the daylight hours and the sleep, begotten of the work—that came to her at night. On the morning following the bomb-fight on the Shechem-Jaffa Road, the Base was ringing with the seizure of Junction Station; the sensational escape of Von Kressenstein's train, and the taking, by cavalry charges from the north, of the strong place of Mughar—a mud village on a hill, converted into a veritable wasp's nest by Turkish mountain-howitzers, Turkish machine gunners and Turkish riflemen.
The temper of the enemy stiffened. Resistance still was stubborn—difficulties of transport still held up the Expeditionary Army in full sight of the Jerusalem-Shechem Road. Yet it was the Day of the White Arm.... Three Captains' Crusaders of the Bucks Hussars and Dorset Yeomanry led the dazzling charges that cleared the way for the 52nd Division, and made of Mughar "not a sweet place to look at," as an English War Correspondent put it pithily—for many Turkish heads being cleft in twain after the approved mediæval method—the place wanted a lot of cleaning up. One of the glorious Three—son of a great English Statesman, himself an Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs and one of the Chief Whips of the 1915 Ministry—was shot barely twelve hours after the victory. And before sunset on this day, a distinguished Jew; financier, soldier, sportsman, philanthropist—met death almost within sight of the Colonies founded by his family on the Plains of Sharon, and south of Jaffa the Beautiful....
On this same date Maurice Hazel, piloting a Handley-Page bomber on a raid over the Hindenburg Line, was killed by a hit from German shrapnel.... And Lady Wastwood, reading the War News in the late edition of the Alexandrian Courier and crying over men who had been ancient flames, and boys who had been her dead boy's School-chums—came on this undistinguished item among the casualties, and recognised the name.
"'Maurice Benn Hazel' ... Kathy's huge Jew friend mentioned having a brother Maurice in the R.F.C. As I really want an excuse for a word with Kathy, I'll look her up and mention the thing. Though it seems rather like making use of the poor dear boy! How callous we're all getting. But I suppose we have to be, to carry on at all!"
With which conclusion, the day's work being over, Trixie removed the traces of emotion with powder, and betook herself in search of Katharine.
She found Miss Forbis in the rose-garden pavilion, reading letters from England that had come by the afternoon's mail. Time had not served until now to open them, and the first envelope had contained a type-written enclosure within, a communication from Sir Arthur Ely, appended here below:
HOLBORN COURT,
November 3rd, 1917.
"MY DEAR MISS FORBIS,
Knowing you to be working with the Red Cross at Montana Convalescent Hospital near Alexandria, and in the hope that Colonel Yaill—from whom I have not heard since he left England last February, may have communicated to you his present address—I have thought it best to send you the enclosed copy of a letter recently delivered at his Club, and opened by me as his solicitor—having authority from him, in his absence, to deal with his correspondence, and administer his business affairs. I am sufficiently old a friend of his and yours also, to add my heartiest congratulations to you both.
"Very sincerely yours,
"ARTHUR CAMERON ELY."
Here is the enclosure:
"PARK AUXILIARY MILITARY HOSPITAL,
"HOODING,
"SUSSEX.
"November 2, 1917
"DEAR SIR:
"A friend of mine who you met under the name of Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw at the Convalescent Officers Camp, B—— Base in November 1915 has asked me to write you her hands being full at present and feeling herself unequal to the task.
"The fact is that while finishing her three years service as a Probationer at the County General Hospital Leam Somerset in 1913 she was married on the strict Q.T. at the Registrar's Office Leam to Private J. Didlick of the 5th Lancers a young man known from childhood and objected to by Lucy's parents on the grounds of his being the son of the local baker and too much given to drink. In August 1914 Private Didlick went to the Front with the First Expeditionary Army and his name duly appeared upon the list of Killed after the Battle of Mons. Nurse Burtonshaw regrets that she omitted to mention this at the time of your marriage her hands being so full just then.
"I will not detain you further except by saying that in April last on the eve of the Battle of Arras Private now Lance-Corporal Didlick with several other British prisoners escaped from the zone of fire where they had been kept by the Germans at forced work and very badly used Corporal Didlick particularly being covered with boils and weighing only 8st. 31bs. when drafted Home and later on sent to this Hospital I could hardly recognise him. Later I communicated with his wife and advised her to break the news to you her proper place undoubtedly being by her poor husband's side. Her hands being full she has put off writing up to the present. Now at her request us being old friends I have taken up the pen.
"Mrs. Didlick earnestly hopes you will regard bygones as bygones and requests me herewith to enclose your cheque received for her last quarter's allowance regularly forwarded since February by your Solicitor, Sir Arthur Ely to whose care this communication is addressed. In case of loss in the post things being so uncertain in War Time I have sent another letter similarly worded care of Miss Forbis, Kerr's Arbour, Nr Cauldstanes Tweedshire, N.B.
"I remain, Dear Sir,
"Truly yours
"DOROTHY PIDGE,
"Certified Nurse ——th Nursing Unit R.R.C."
"P.S. Excuse the liberty but I do hope you won't be hard on Lucy! She means well but hasn't a particle of moral backbone."
If Katharine perused this queer letter with mingled sensations, amazed joy and unutterable relief ruled predominant above all.
For it was over, the haunting day and nightmare of loss and separation. Her bosom rose upon a long breath of relief, as the burden passed away. The barrier dividing Katharine from all she held dearest, had vanished at the wholesome touch of loyal Nurse Dorothy Pidge.
"Thank God! and thank you—you honest-hearted woman! Now to tell Edward—if I knew where to reach him!" was her thought. And the claws of suspense fastened in her soul anew, and that moment's joyful lightening of her heart made the weight that burdened it even more intolerable to bear.
Not the cool sea-breeze that stole through the fretted sides of the Khedive's marble pavilion, the beloved haunt of her leisure, nor the fragrance of the November-blooming roses that climbed its walls, and wreathed the balustrade of its terrace with trails of pink and orange, cream and white and crimson; not the nightingales that sang in the moss-cup oaks, nor the orioles that built amongst the vine-trellises—where the fireflies would twinkle and gleam at dusk when the nightingales sang their sweetest—could bring soothing to her tortured mind, or rest to her overwrought nerves.
"I can't—stand—much more!" she said slowly, speaking aloud of purpose, for the sheer relief of speech. "We have all got a point beyond which we break, and this is my breaking-point. Oh! for some news of those three men of mine!"
Edward Yaill, Julian and John Hazel.... She saw them individually, each reduced to the size of a gnat, at the end of a long vista, striving, and striving desperately, yet unable to meet and touch. She saw them in the midst of a cloud of other human gnats, buzzing and stinging.... She saw them borne down by numbers—she saw them emerge triumphant. She saw—
"Darling Kathy, do unclench your hands and iron out your forehead," said the welcome voice of Trixie at this juncture: "Even a woman with your appearance cannot afford to go on, looking like Lady Macbeth, Clytemnestra and Antigone, rolled into one, for long!"
"Did I ... Do I?" Katharine asked absently....
"You both did and do," Trixie returned. She came and sat on the balcony near Katharine and touched her lightly on the shoulder with a long, thin but sympathetic hand. "You're rather a terrifying person when you look like this, but I have a reason for being venturesome. May I broach a subject I've avoided for ages? I need hardly explain, I fancy, that the subject is Edward Yaill?"
Such burning colour flooded the face now turned to hers, that Trixie experienced relief from forebodings that had haunted her. The colossal coffee-coloured Jew with the coarse black hair, Cockney accent and huge nose was nothing to Kathy! She always had had that wonderful look when you mentioned Edward Yaill. She was unchanged... It upset you to imagine that women like Kathy altered. It did you good to find out that she stuck to the old love....
The subject broached, Trixie told her tale. Faithful to the motto of the Liberal Ladies War Service League, "Do Anything, Go Anywhere, Stick at Nothing and Never Grouse!" she had, pending her return to active usefulness, been "rummaging out" cases in the General Hospitals who wanted extra visiting, letter-writing and bucking. And at No. 11 she had come across a Nice Man, newly convalescent from a collection of intestinal symptoms prevalent among the Expeditionary Forces,—assembled by the C.M.O. under the heading "Bilharziosis," and simplified to "Bill Harris," in the mouths of sufferers therefrom....
"A Sergeant of the 'Tweedburgh Regiment' transferred— Don't ask me how! to a Lowland Territorial Battalion, and perfectly devoted to Colonel Yaill. Nearly cried when he talked of him. Desperately keen to get a letter written and smuggled Home—for of course the Censor wouldn't dream of passing it!—to Yaill's sisters at his place in Cumberland, and another to Miss Forbis, 'her that the Colonel ought to have been married on—saying the Colonel is alive and serving with the Secret Intelligence Corps in the Front in Palestine.'"
"Dear Lady Wastwood—"
"My child, don't put me off with interruptions! Of course I explained to my poor sick man that the letter couldn't be properly engineered, and might do Colonel Yaill harm if the contents got out. But I told him you were out here, and should have his information. The man swears Edward to be an intrepid Scout, famous for making his way through the Turkish Lines, on foot or mounted on a swift horse, sometimes alone!—sometimes with two companions.... He has been seen in Cairo dressed as a French Staff Officer—we know he speaks the language perfectly!—and in Constantinople as a Greek Interpreter to one of the Embassies. And here in Alex, he has gone about disguised as an Arab—or a Gippy of the Labour Corps—"
"I know it, dear Lady Wastwood, I was almost sure of it before!—I have been certain since John Hazel came back from the Front four days ago, to tell me—"
Trixie's green eyes enlarged under their arched black eyebrows, that so much resembled musical slurs.
"Of course! I might have known. Do go on, like a Precious Person! If a sieve about my own affairs, I'm a tomb for the secrets of others!"
So Katharine, knowing this to be true, told Trixie the reason of her anxiety. Characteristically the long thin finger pointed to the doubtful spot:
"It's thrilling in the extreme. No wonder you're in tatters with anxiety. But I can't help seeing that it's rather fatal to have two different people plotting to save one man. Almost like a brace of dentists tugging at a single tooth, isn't it? Why couldn't they have Joined forces and worked it as a Syndicate? That's what your John Hazel will try for, I feel it in my bones. One thing I must say! I do wish the Basilisk hadn't anything to do with it! That oily-tongued little Egyptian Flying Pasha gives me the creeps! But the main thing just now is to buck up, and believe that everything will come off rippingly. And I have a feeling in my bones it will!"
"And if it doesn't—if the news is the worst that can be told, I hope that I shall be brave enough to bear it!" said Katharine. "I hope that I shall never swerve from the belief that Love—as it exists between clean-souled men and women—isn't only for this world! And that the pain of frustrated earthly passion may be so mingled with the Faith that looks forward,—forward and Heavenward!—that parting for this little life may be robbed of its bitterest sting!"
"My dear, I can't climb up to your level," said Trixie, blinking her green eyes and pursing her V-shaped, Pierrot mouth. "This world—when my husband and boys were in it—was good enough, I'm ashamed to say! And if they were back, I'm not going to pretend I should bother much about Heaven, and I do hope you've too much sense to believe that I should! But this business of yours will be pulled off all right. I feel it in my bones, and they never deceive me. Your brother Julian and your friend the Jew, and poor Edward Yaill—whom I treated so frightfully out of pure championship for you when he fell over my feet into the Express for Carlisle—that he fell out again!—All three will get safe out of the place with the name that reminds me of Sunday School examinations. And you and I will be standing here, like the heroine and her bosom-friend in the scene that comes just before the return of the hero in what American people call a four-mile-reel-scream, when a letter or a wire will bring the glad news. And you will read out the letter to me as they say the film people do it, keeping your features intelligently in play, and saying anything that comes into your head. Like this: 'Pepper, mustard, Cerebos, olive-oil and salad dressing! Piccalilli and catsup. O, Harrods! ... After all these months of beastly eating—tinned brawn for lunch again!'"
Trixie's well-meant nonsense served its end, for Katharine could resist no more and burst out laughing.
"You dear!" Miss Forbis's laughing eyes were soft as she passed an arm round the long narrow waist and warmly kissed the thin white cheek. She added, as Trixie returned the caress: "You're priceless to me, Commandant! When I feel down, or get the blues—with reason or without them—you're a better pick-me-up than all the Worcester sauce in the world."
"Horrible stuff!" Trixie made a grimace, "I've always loathed it. Once I had a dear old friend who drank herself to death on that. Her husband—lucky man! never suspected until she died—and they found the chimney in her dressing-room simply blocked with empty shilling bottles. Who's that? Di ê di? Have you a message there? ..."
A cautious footstep on the gravel path, badly neglected since the War, and overgrown with patches of rafia, had first reached Lady Wastwood's ears. Now a man—recognised by Katharine and her friend as the dapper French-speaking Italian chauffeur who had driven them from Alexandria three days previously, in the Daimler car belonging to Essenian, stepped from the trellised shade of a path into the light of the rose-wreathed doorway, and saluting the ladies without speaking, held out a letter to Katharine.
News....
Something in Katharine's bosom leaped.... She felt stifled, as though the fretted, sun-flecked walls of the Khedive's rose-pavilion were those of a brick-built prison, impervious to light and air. But with an effort she mastered herself, and took the offered letter—hoping the Italian did not note the trembling of her hand.
It was a square heliotrope envelope, violently scented with some clinging Eastern perfume that revolted Katharine. The address to "Miss Forbis, Convalescent Hospital, The Palace, Montana," was typed in vivid violet ink. Unwilling to open the letter in the presence of a stranger, Katharine hesitated, looking at the Italian:
"Is there any reply to this? ..."
Lady Wastwood had spoken. The Italian answered in his nasal French, looking at Katharine:
"The car is waiting.... If Mademoiselle would read!"
Katharine, conscious of the unsteadiness of her hands, opened the type-addressed envelope. The sheet of paper it contained bore this message:
"Come at once. Urgent! J. H."
The four-word message and the initials beneath were typed in violet ink. Underneath was an impression in coarse green sealing-wax of the onyx signet-ring....
Katharine was silent, mastering her deep excitement. That green seal seemed to burn through her eyes and sear her brain as she stared at it. Again she heard John Hazel saying:
"Suppose I were ever to send a line saying 'Come at once!' ... Well, don't come!—unless the paper bears an impression of this, in sealing-wax, or clay, or bread or mud.... And test it by the ring you wear, before you accept it...."
The test could be made at once. She glanced at the signet on her left hand and then at the Italian chauffeur. His round, black eyes were fixed on her, watching her eagerly. She spoke to the man in quiet, level tones:
"I will come in a few minutes. Be good enough to wait for me...."
"As Mademoiselle desires." The Italian's bird-bright eyes snapped excitedly. "I will go back and wait for her. But—" he shrugged and spread his olive hands, "we have a long way to go. Mademoiselle understands that, naturally...."
"I understand, and I will come in five minutes," Katharine said, with her tone of calm authority.
"My dear—" Lady Wastwood asked anxiously, as the Italian saluted, wheeled and went out of the pavilion: "You've had news!—I see it in your face."
"No news!" Katharine said. "But a summons, most certainly." Days previously, she had taken a careful impression in scarlet sealing-wax of the relievo head of Hercules upon her black onyx signet. Now she took from her cigarette-case the card bearing the impression, and laying the letter on the marble table the pavilion contained, placed the card face downwards over the green seal on the heliotrope paper. The surfaces of paper and card met and wedded, as the green relievo sank into the scarlet intaglio, and the two Hercules' heads became one.
"I'm fearfully impressed." Trixie's eyes were circular with interest and curiosity. "But what on earth is that for? ..."
"Just to make sure," Katharine said, turning away, "that the message that says, 'Come At Once. Urgent!' is really from John Hazel. Now I must go. I've a suit-case ready packed in our sleeping-tent, and the Commandant has been prepared against my being called suddenly away. As for the duty, Molly Lyne-Soames carries on instead of me. She's prepared—a regular brick of a girl!—and so—this until you next hear from me!" She caught the astonished Trixie in a warm embrace, kissed her thin cheeks and left a tear on one of them. "God bless you, you kindest of women!" she called, turning on the threshold of the rose-pavilion to wave her hand. "And so good-bye, until we meet again!"
And flushed and radiant, Katharine was gone, taking with her in her haste a trail of a thorny climbing rose that had clung to her as though to keep her, and leaving its crimson petals scattered on the stone. As her light hurried footsteps died away—a little puff of the westerly breeze swept the card and the heliotrope letter, with their green and red seals, off the marble table to the floor—and hurried them into a corner as though their work were done.
XV
Near where Ismailia sits amidst her flowery gardens and tasselled avenues, on the edge of the scorching Desert of el Jifar, is an arid rectangle of sand east of the Canal, above Lake Timsah, used at the time I write of as an Air Base. Beyond Essenian, there were no native officers serving at the Air Base, though the indomitable Gyppos of the Labour Corps were employed at the aërodrome in building hangars, and cleaning the machines. Here rows of 'buses, both B.C.'s and D.H.6's—used for reconnaissance on the Canal, along the shores of the Red Sea as far as Aden—and over the Front in Palestine—were ranged in readiness in front of their great hangars, and observers in double-breasted tunics of drill or serge, with shorts and forage-caps—or yet more simply and economically attired in flannel shirts, canvas shoes and sun-helmets—stood on the summits of wooden towers, combing the blue with high-powered binoculars for enemy aircraft, in watches, relieved at three-hour intervals....
Not without reason had the Pasha boasted of the beauty of his villa, a white marble palace of Arabian-Turkish architecture, standing well back from an avenue of casuarinas, embowered in trailing roses, clothed with imperial Bougainvillea and shaded with trees, rising from the green velvet lawns that carpet what was a rectangle of barrenness wrested from the Desert twenty-three years ago.
Within the palace, suites of rooms—used in the Oriental style as reception saloons or bedrooms—according to the needs of the moment—were furnished in luxury rivalling the most modern of Parisian hotels. Soft-footed, low-voiced servants, chiefly Mohammedans, dressed in speckless white, and moving like automata, waited upon the master's guests and did the master's will.
Here Nasr Ullah, the Pasha's elderly body-servant and confidential messenger, ruled with rigidity, taking it out of his subordinates when the Presence dealt hardly with him. In two rooms of the vast warren of rooms opening on a rearward court, his "house" and a small brood of sturdy boys were accommodated. A little dark Moslemah the wife of Nasr Ullah, well dressed and laden with solid silver jewellery. Plain, with projecting rabbit teeth, and shallow forehead; meek, dutiful, pious and greatly given to prayer. A grave for the secrets of her husband Nasr, who was occasionally burdened with a conscience, whose smarting called for soothing feminine balms.
He stood on the threshold of his outer room, in the mild, pale hour when the stars were flowering through the last glow of the sunset, and his tall white turban was pushed awry, and his high forehead was ridged with care.
"'Tis a tyranny to force a man of kindly heart towards God's creatures, to scatter poisoned barley for the birds," he said uneasily. "And the carrier-dove is the Bird of Nun, that went forth from the Ark and brought back the olive-leaf, and a dove was the bird that the Son of Mariam—when as yet but a babe of tender years—playing with others who knew not His holiness—wrought by the riverside of clay."
"And the boys laughed and mocked Him, because He had made one bird instead of many. And He was not angry, but said, 'Do ye then as I do!' And then He clapped His hands and the dove flew away. Did it not so, O my father?" a thready voice piped.
"Since when," asked Nasr Ullah with affected sternness, "have the babes permission to lift up voice when their elders take counsel?" His lined face softened into tenderness as the child clinging to the mother's skirts hid his head under her veil. "Remember, O woman!" he went on, "I have said the white powder is a deadly poison. If a speck, such as would lie safely hidden under the finger-nail—find a way into the child's milk-bowl, I were without a son."
"It is all in there.... I boiled the barley until soft, and drained the water away carefully—emptied the paper-packet of powder in among the barley and stirred the barley well with a little stick. Then I burned both the paper and the stick, as thou didst order. Remains for thee to break the pot to sherds when—when thou hast finished. O my misfortune! What a task! My lord, Nasr Ullah, who hath the pride of princes!—to creep about under cover of night—from the courtyard of the Commandant-Sahib to the haush where the Ifrangis keep their swallow-boats, scattering poisoned barley for pigeons with messages—"
"Hûs! ..."
She had raised her usually quiet voice somewhat indiscreetly, and the toddler, youngest save one of Fatimeh's brood of four, scared by the unusualness of this demonstration, lifted up his own voice in a lusty howl.
"Hus—sus! No one is vexed with thee, my joy!—nobody is angry! Run out and play with the little grey goat awhile before thy sleep-time comes!" And as the boy with a shrill joyful chuckle toddled over the threshold to seek his playmate, Nasr Ullah promptly clapped the door to and shot the wooden door-bolt, and not content with this, pulled the heavy leather curtains that kept out chilly winds and June and February samûms, over the doorway and the latticed window-screens.
"By the life of the Prophet—peace on him!—by thy head! speak lower. What Afrit hast thou vexed—throwing away the carrot-tops and the water that washed the dishes?" he demanded of his now hysterically-tearful wife. "Is this my house, whom I deemed discreet as Kadijah—peace be upon her! Raising the voice like a woman accustomed to go unveiled? Trumpeting secrets as it were on the very housetops! Wouldst be a widow? 'Nay?' Then shun the road to mourning! Wouldst die thyself, knowing thy four sons cast out—to whine for faddahs and broken bread at the doors of the khans and mosques.... 'Nay' again? ... Then even hold thy tongue. And, Fatimeh my beloved—" Nasr Ullah's lean, dark, muscular hand caressed the woman's small head, adorned with a smart black silk kerchief with a brightly coloured border, and a forehead-string of coins—all gold ones, though their value was but small,—"vex not thy soul overmuch about the doves and pigeons. Are not their numbers countless as the numbers of the flies? And tell me, my olive-tree, fruitful in bearing—my Garment of Comfort," his tone had become wheedling, "whether any of the veiled women serving about this house be one-eyed? Wallah! I jest not! It is a new order of the Presence that all such are to be dismissed!"
"How soon?" Another tempest seemed about to shake Nasr Ullah's fruitful olive. Her bosom under its many serried rows of solid silver necklaces began to heave again. Her heavy anklets clashed as her small, henna-stained feet shifted nervously on the whitened clay floor of the family living-room where the charcoal stove daily burned, and the cooking-pots stood against the wall. "How soon?"
"By Allah! no later than an hour after sunrise, and that delay is granted as an especial grace."
"And the mother of thy wife—the grandmother of thy children—the guardian of thy house's honour—what of her?" demanded Fatimeh; "Is she not one of the many decent ones upon whose eyes the flies have sat in childhood? Is—"
"Wallah! I had forgotten her," exclaimed the man in dismay. For the mother of Fatimeh, at that moment congenially engaged in crooning the latest new baby to sleep, in the inner room dignified by the title of the harîm, had suffered in early youth, like many other Egyptian women of the lower classes, the loss, through ophthalmia, of one of her eyes.
Now a faint grin showed on the face of her son-in-law, even in the midst of his perplexity, as he said:
"Rebuke is justly mine, wife, that I did not remember it. But by the border of thine usbêh I swear it! Thy mother sees more with her one eye than other women with two. Yet would I not part with her. She is wise in dealing with the teething-troubles of the lesser babes, and her slipper hath more sting in it than thine, for the ruling of the elder. We will send her away to thy brother at Kantara until this scare of one-eyed women is over and done. Meanwhile,—" he glanced over his shoulder at the door, and sitting on the hard-cushioned divan that ran round three sides of the whitewashed room, drew Fatimeh to sit beside him; "meanwhile I would speak to thee of Khalid thine eldest. Where is the boy to-night?"
"He is gone with his brother Amru to lay snares for fig-birds in the orchard. They must be set at moon-dark, for the birds to enter them at dawn."
"He is a born hunter. Seven years old this month of Safar, and witful as he is handsome—the praise be unto Allah Who makes them of all kinds! Wife, if I told thee that the Presence, seeing the boy so ripe for his tender years, and of goodly promise, had bidden—"
Nasr Ullah's tone had been studiously commonplace, but the ridges in his high forehead had deepened, and his eyes had an anxious stare. He winced as his wife without a word slid from the divan, and next instant lay prostrate on the white-washed floor, with her forehead on his feet.
"Nay, nay! ... My pearl, my joy! ... Take it not so hardly! ..."
"O Everlasting, spare me this! O husband, in pity, hear me. Hast thou forgotten Nasi, our joy and my firstborn? He would have been nine years old, this Nile-Rise.... Hast thou forgotten? Ay, ay, it was the old cry; 'This boy was stupid—that one showed fear. This must have known sin,—for he could see nothing at all in the ink-pools or in the Eye of Radiance.' So the Presence takes my Nasi, and gives him gifts and praises his excellence, and one day he comes home, crying 'My head, my head!' like the son of the woman who fed the Prophet El Jah, peace be upon him!—and three days later, thou, weeping bitter tears, dost hang my green-striped shawl over the shabid of his tiny bier."
"Peace, wife!"
Sweat broke forth and stood on Nasr Ullah's face. He wiped it with the sleeve of his white kaftan, repeating:
"Peace, woman! ... It was a fever the boy had caught.... Dost thou not remember what the hakim said? ..."
"Ay! But I had watched by the bed of my sick child, and shuddered at the visions he told of in his ravings. O, Husband, I have sat in the house one year, and thou hast said in thine heart, 'She is forgetting' ... Yet all the time—" She sat upright on the floor before him now, her strained eyes glued upon his worried face, and the swift words poured from her without his opposition.
"Peace! thou sayest. How can there be peace in this house where soothsayers and necromancers come and go, and the sand-tables are forever cast, and fresh boys are brought each new day to peer into the ink-pools.... Lo! I will speak my mind. Ten years I have been thy wife, and a duteous and a silent, but a mother in fear for her flesh and blood hath the courage to defy Shaitan...."
"Be not disturbed.... I will find some way. The boy shall be sent to El Kantara with thy mother."
"And when my Agib is of likely age, will not the ink-pools claim him? Will the Presence have bowels to spare a child, who in all these years hath loved no woman?"
"Nay," was the reply. "What need hath He of women, who is in love with Life? ..."
"'Tis true. Save when the Inglizi ladies come with their menfolk to see the house and gardens, and eat fruit and drink iced sherbets, and say 'charmin'—charmin'' and 'rippin'—rippin','" thus the better-half of Nasr Ullah rendered the English slang, "no woman ever comes here. What now?" for the knee on which she rested her arm had jerked slightly.
"I had forgotten. He hath said but now—that a woman comes here at midnight! No râziye of the Bazâr, or other of the shameless, but a lady-Sahib from the Palace of Montana at Iskanderieh.... The car brings her by the fifth hour.... The gates are to be open. When the car has passed in, the gates are to be shut and locked...."
"Ya rabbi!" The exclamation broke from the woman involuntarily. "After all these years—it may be that He changes.... How old is He, husband? Canst thou not even guess? ..."
"Perhaps He is less old than He pretends, but He is many years older than folks believe Him. Of that there is no doubt at all...."
"And it is done by devilry? Witchcraft and spells—and philtres?" The woman breathed quickly. "Say, is't not?"
"God knows! But from whomever the Presence buys his youth, He pays a heavy price for it. See how He lives! Even as one who carries in his breast a stolen jewel, and goes in fear lest it be snatched from him. The pleasures of the belly—He must shun them. The joys that are tasted on perfumed cushions—He must fly them one and all. It is tyranny. Yet He thinks He is envied. He is only wretched when Those I may not speak of, ask—too high a price for the magical drugs...."
"The drugs. The devil-brews that keep Him youthful, who else would be as dry and wrinkled as the mummies of the ancient Kings?"
"Verily. And—one thing I have seen of late—" Once launched upon the sea of Confidence, Nasr Ullah grew less fearful. "Whether Protection fails him, or the philtres lose their power, I know not—but—He grows old!"
"I too!—" Her eyes grew large with awe. "I have fancied He is somewhat changed...."
"Chut! Do not interrupt. It goes deeper than the skin—this change that I have seen in him. His moods vary like those of a pregnant woman; he frames designs and throws them aside as a monkey plucks, and bites, and casts bananas away. He does not even hate as He used to hate. Once—if an enemy rose up in the path, he removed that one with his own hand, and troubled no more about the affair. Or said to one he trusted, 'Kill!'" the tone was studiously smooth, the speaker's face expressionless—"and that man or that woman died—more quietly than the bowab's daughter who ate the nectarine. But now—since the killing of Usborn Sahib by a Turk in Palestine,—and the night he dined at Iskanderieh in the company of the big Jew Tomi—the Presence talks of nought but sprinkling poisoned grain for carrier-doves and dismissing of one-eyed females—and my heart is stricken with fear for my lord! Spells, and charms, and philtres bought from Those in the Distant Places will not avail forever against the day of Fate. Azrael will come behind my lord with a touch upon the shoulder. The Black Camel of Allah will tread upon his heel. Then—even at a breath—the House of Life will crumble!" Nasr Ullah started to his feet as a silvery sound, momentarily increasing in volume, rolled into the stuffy closed room, and hummed about their ears. "It is the gong from my lord's room. He calls, and I must go! ..."
He added, slipping the earthen pot of soaked and poisoned barley within the bosom of his embroidered vest: "Sleep well, my wife, if I see thee not ere morning. And call in the children—it is time they went to rest! ..."
XVI
This was another moonless night, with Orion glorious in the East, and the Great Bear blazing on the northern horizon, as the headlights of the high-powered Daimler car, driven by the Italian chauffeur, flashed on a high, wide porte cochère of white-painted wrought iron, and the horn sounded a well-known call.
The massive gates were opened and shut by a hand-worked windlass, over which ran an endless chain. Two white-clad negro porters worked the winch, the gate slid smoothly back in its groovings. The car rolled in, and the gate was shut as it passed up the avenue.
The Arabian-Turkish palace seemed to sleep under the starshine of the November night, wrapped in its royal mantle of roses and bougainvillea. Heavy drifts of perfume were carried on the languid air-waves that came from the south-west at intervals, swaying thick-foliaged branches and sighing amongst the leaves. Not a blue-white gleam of electric light or even the flame of a candle twinkled through the pierced lattices, as Katharine, alighting from the car, observed with some surprise.
The wide-leaved doors of the house stood open. On the steps and in the vestibule were drawn up a double row of native servants; lean, dark Mohammedans in high starched turbans, kaftans and baggy trousers of snowy muslin, displaying gorgeously gold-embroidered vests.
One elderly man stepped forward, salaaming low to the visitor, with the words:
"O lady, God give thee a happy night! His Presence awaits thee."
"Carry thy lord salutations from me," Katharine answered in her laboured Arabic. "Say that—that I have come in answer to the message. Is the Saiyid Hazel here in the house?"
The elderly man salaamed again and answered smoothly:
"Surely, O lady, the desire of thine eyes and thine heart shall be granted! With your coming a blessing hath entered these doors...."
The Italian chauffeur now appeared behind Katharine, carrying the suit-case. A servant stepped forward and took it, as Miss Forbis said to the chauffeur in French:
"I don't yet know whether I shall need that case. Leave it in the car, please, and let the car be waiting. I may return to Alexandria to-night."
"But, Mademoiselle!—" the Italian began, when a look from Nasr Ullah silenced him. He saluted, and muttering: "As Mademoiselle commands!" turned and went out and down the steps. But he left the suit-case in the servant's hands—and the hall-doors were shut and locked after him. And the fragrance of the jasmine and roses of the garden gave place to another perfume, heavy too, but sickly-sweet with sandal and henna, the fumes of burning pastilles, and all the strange suggestive odours of a shut-up Eastern house. And glancing at the now barred doors and the double row of gleaming eyes, and imperturbable dark faces, Katharine Forbis felt a little, chilly shudder creep over her and stir amongst the roots of her plentiful dark hair.
"A goose walked over my grave, then," she told herself, smiling bravely, fighting back the sinister sensation, as the elderly major-domo addressed her again:
"With permission, a message for the lady, from the Presence. The Presence took food, as is his wont, a little after sunset. It is now the fifth hour, and supper has been spread, Ifrangi-fashion, in readiness for the lady's coming. If the lady will deign to take of it, I pray her follow me...."
"Thank you, but I need nothing," Katharine answered, as the man prepared to lead the way down an interminable-appearing hall. "And—I prefer to stay where I am." She moved to a carved ebony seat, and spoke to the man again, this time in English. "Please ask Essenian Pasha and Mr. Hazel to come to me here. Unless—" She started as the thought occurred to her, and ended: "Unless they should happen to be engaged with—some one who is ill...."
"Aiyân...." The dark eyes under the much-ridged forehead were wonderfully observant. The nasal voice belonging to the eyes spoke in the English tongue: "Surely there is one here who is ill exceedingly. The Presence and the Saiyid Hazel have many fears for him," Nasr Ullah added as the colour ebbed from Katharine's cheeks and lips and her hand clenched involuntarily, "but by the Favour of Allah—he is not like to die...."
"Take me to him.... Now, please! ..."
Miss Forbis rose up, tall and impetuous, motioning to Nasr Ullah to lead the way, scattering her scruples and her fears to the winds like withered leaves. Which of her beloved Two lay in some darkened room of this strange house? Julian or Edward? Edward or Julian. Well, in another minute she would know....
It occupied several minutes. The elderly Mohammedan produced an electric torch, and by its radiance led her through a vast suite of apartments on the ground-floor, their Arabesque Ottoman elegance grotesquely overlaid with fashions imported from the West. A curious jumble of furniture of many different styles and periods was revealed by the blue-white torch-flare—overcrowding the wide and lofty rooms. French Directoire and the First Empire shouldered the Georgian Regency, Early Victorian tables and Berlin wool-work settees were reflected in splendid Venetian mirrors, and electric bulbs depended from cut-glass chandeliers. Later Rococo—overlaid with Art Nouveau and camouflaged with Futurism; Cubist pictures, Cubist draperies and cushions of Cubist designs, gibbered mockingly in Katharine's face as the electric torch led the way.... And the stuffiness bred of Eastern neglect hung heavy on the atmosphere, and dust rose in wreaths from the velvety carpets under the lightest tread.
The last door of the last suite led into a wide corridor paved with black and white marble. Midway down, the elderly servant stopped at the grille of a lift and switched on the electric light. He snapped off his torch, pushed back the sliding-door, followed Miss Forbis in, shut the grille and started the elevator—a costly thing in nickel and enamelled iron—conveying to Katharine the momentary impression that she was calling on a London friend in a Sloane Street or Mayfair flat.
The lift stopped at the top floor after traversing three storeys. The Mohammedan showed Miss Forbis out, and opened a latticed door at the end of a short passage. She drew a breath of relief as the night-air flowed about her, and the rose-scents of the dew-drenched garden rose up in delicious clouds.
She was passing over a slender bridge, connecting the roof of one of the wings of the Pasha's showy villa with that of another building, evidently much older, distant perhaps some forty feet from the ornate marble palace, and covering a considerable area of ground in its rear. Built in the old windowless Arabian way about an oblong courtyard, and crowned by an open court or pavilion of green and white marble, its outer walls were pressed upon by closely thronging trees. Casuarinas and moss-cup oaks, peppers and tamarisks and tall waving palms made coolth and greenness round it, and nightingales were singing from the trees that girt it round.
The bridge, of latticed iron, painted to dazzling whiteness, ended under a pointed trefoil arch where heavy curtains hung. The Mohammedan servant who showed the way was beckoning to Katharine—lifting a gleaming, gold-embroidered fold, signing to her to pass. She drew in a deep breath of fragrance from the garden, and the song of the bulbuls rose in a crescendo of sweetness as she glanced at the starry sky. Then the dark hand signed to her—she passed under the archway, and the curtain fell behind her with a soft, thudding sound.
She stood on the threshold of an oblong room, or rather, court, of pierced and latticed marble, covered and adorned with mosaic, running nearly the whole length of a side of the Arab house. Open to the sky overhead, and enclosed by curtains of thick gold-embroidered silk, hanging under trefoil arches between groups of slender pillars, it had a long divan of dark, rich brocade running along one side. Two silver lamps of antique design, swinging by chains from slender rods, mingled their mellow radiance with the starlight. At the farther end, closed curtains under a higher arch showed the entrance to another court—or possibly an enclosed apartment—beyond the pavilion that was canopied with the sky.
The floor was of ancient Arab tiles, wonderful in colour. Rare and beautiful prayer-rugs were laid on it here and there. A pedestal of serpentine supported a great porcelain bowl in which a little fountain played, and goldfish were swimming. Clusters of lilies of Amaryllis type, thick-stemmed, fleshy, purple and white and crimson, exhaling a heavy, languorous fragrance, stood in jars of ancient cloisonné upon inlaid ivory stools. In the centre of the room stood a broad divan, piled with great embroidered cushions. Beside the divan was a tripod of ebony, supporting something that looked like a green velvet jewel-case....
A slight man in Eastern dress, his black tarbûsh turbaned with snowy muslin folds, his long-sleeved kaftan of orange-red opening to reveal a longer-sleeved garment of white, a jewelled pen-case glittering in the folds of his green silk girdle, rose up from the divan as the curtain fell—and advanced to Katharine....
"Dear lady, my poor house is highly honoured—" he began:
"Is Mr. Hazel here, Major Essenian?"
In her surprise at finding the Pasha alone, Katharine's hurried query broke in upon the Pasha's formal welcome, scattering his elaborate sentences to the winds.
"Mr. Hazel—" He affected for a moment to search his memory. "Dear lady, I am sorry, but—" His shrug said "No! ..."
"Then why did your chauffeur bring me the letter from him?" Katharine demanded, looking down from her superb height upon the suave and smiling face.
"From Mr. Hazel?" Essenian asked with maddening blandness. "Did he bring you a letter? ..."
"You know he did! ..."
"Ah yes, of course, I know!" admitted Essenian, his long eyes narrowing as they encountered Katharine's. She mastered her anger, knowing its display incautious, and said with rather a poor attempt to smile:
"You must make allowances, Pasha, if I seem excited and nervy. But—I have been on tenterhooks since the day we met. The 15th—and—isn't this the 18th of November? ..."
"Certainly, going by your Western calendar. But in this house that lies hidden behind another that is full of barbarous Western inventions—Western customs do not prevail, and Western fashions are abhorred. You are in Egypt when you are here...."
"The room is perfectly beautiful. But I can't spare time to enjoy it. I can think of nothing but the matter that brought me here to-night. Last night, rather"—Katherine glanced at her wrist-watch—"because it is getting perilously near one o'clock in the morning. Once for all, I ask you where you got the letter that your servant brought me at the Hospital, nearly five hours back? ..."
"It was placed in my hands by Hazel, to be delivered in case of emergency."
Katharine's clear eyes questioned the dark face. Its narrow eyes met hers, glittering imperturbably. She resumed, with a little sickening thrill of hatred of the man:
"Then—the emergency has occurred? Be good enough to answer another question. Did you take Mr. Hazel to Shechem, as he told me you had arranged to do?"
"Certainly. We made the trip in record time." The long beryl eyes shone green in the mingling of lamplight and starlight, the smooth dark lips curved as Essenian smiled. "Following the old Pilgrim's Route at first. Doing the journey—about 195 miles, as the crow flies—in something under three-and-a-half-hours, and reaching Shechem just before dawn."
"And—when you got there—what went wrong? For something has gone wrong," Katharine said breathlessly—"I feel it in the air about me, though your face tells no tales."
"'The face that tells tales is a man's worst enemy. The face that hides secrets is a man's best friend.'" Essenian quoted the stale truism gently and suavely. "But will you not remove your outer wrap and take a seat on the divan?"
He added, as Katharine unfastened a cloak she wore, an ample double cape of Navy blue serge, lined with dark crimson silk, and dropped it from her shoulders, and moving with her supple grace to the divan, sat down:
"I returned here yesterday, arriving before sunrise. To remain in Palestine would have been useless. To be candid—"
"Oh, my God!" said Katharine in her anguished soul. "Does this man ever speak candidly?" But she looked at him and waited—summoning up all her reserves of self-command and patience, seeming a calm-eyed, superbly-moulded goddess, attired in a well-cut uniform of white cotton-drill.
"I had arranged to return to Shechem," he went on, "before sunrise on the 18th. There is still time to reach there while the day is yet young. But something unfortunate happened just before the landing. In fact, Mr. Hazel has had an accident—"
"An accident. Of what nature? ..."
Katharine's brows contracted and her colour faded. Essenian pursued in his suavest tones:
"Let me explain. To repose a confidence in you, which I feel will not be misplaced." Would the man never get to the point? "I employed at Shechem, a device of my own invention—which has been approved at Headquarters by my Chief. By a simple mechanical appliance—merely a spring-switch and lock-clip—I can change the number and colour-plates on the main-planes and tail of my machine. You understand? The Red, White and Blue is replaced by the Red Crescent. Imagine the advantage to the aviator of a simple device like this!"
"But the type of your machine. You can't change that!" Katharine spoke wearily.
"I cannot, naturally. But our captured 'planes are generally brought into use. And—I do not remain sufficiently long over an enemy stronghold to give time—" the speaker shrugged and ended—"for exhaustive scrutiny. Let me be brief—"
"I beg that you will! ..."
He recognised in her voice an accent of entreaty. It was what he had waited for.
"I dropped—in my strictly temporary role of Turkish aviator—a dummy despatch-bag into Shechem. Then I flew north, to a patch of level ground between Mount Ebal and Samata—where I had planned to drop my man. As I passed south of Mount Ebal, I saw"—he was telling the story plainly at last "there were enemy batteries upon it. Mountain Artillery of the Mustahfiz—machine-guns—a howitzer—the Mount had been converted into a fortress of defence! And, in my surprise at the discovery, I acted without due caution—or rather, I acted as I had arranged to act—without deviation from the first plan. I climbed, dived, and came down west of the Mountain—giving Hazel the agreed-on-word to jump, when I should touch the ground. But—as a result of the surprise, I suppose—I gave it prematurely—"
"And Mr. Hazel jumped—before you touched the ground!" Her voice was very stern and deep. Her wide gaze held him. "Answer my question plainly. Has he been killed? ..."
"No. But he has sustained some hurt. I do not know its nature. My military duty forbade me to remain."
"I—understand. You flew away, leaving your passenger in difficulties! ..."
The deadly contempt of the tone bit like frost at 15,000 feet, the splendid wrath of her cairngorm eyes told him that he, Essenian, was a creature infinitely mean....
"I flew away. As you remark." The glittering eyes met hers at last, and the lips smiled cruelly.... "What would you have?" He folded his slender, dark hands within the shelter of his sleeves. "Can men fight against Destiny?"
"Men can fight against the temptation to do base things, and sometimes fight and conquer. And now—" Anger and grief were in her tone, "what will become of him? ..."
"Of your friend? ..." He stood imperturbably facing her, his dark hands hidden in the sleeves of his orange-crimson kaftan, and the delicate mingling of golden lamplight and silvery starlight threw his shadow over the rich, pale carpets, and the exquisite Arabesque mosaics, of green and blue, and amber, that covered with their tracery the exposed spaces of the floor. "How can I say what has or will become of him! ... If you choose, it is for you to tell me...."
An almost insupportable sense of the speaker's insincerity went through Katharine's being like flame, and the agony of suspense long drawn-out, spurred her—as Essenian had calculated it would—to reckless utterance....
"How can I tell you? You play with me, Major Essenian, knowing as you must, that if I could find out what has happened to my—to my friend and my brother I would do so at any sacrifice! ..."
"Then," said the Egyptian, gently and mellifluously, "place yourself before the case that is on that tripod, open the case and look in the spherical beryl it contains. I will not touch it lest you should suspect me of some trickery. Indeed, I will remain at a distance while you look.... All I ask is—that you will tell me truthfully what you see—if Sight be vouchsafed to you! Judging by what I have witnessed I believe you will be favoured. No sacrifice is needed.... You have only to look! ..."
He lowered his voice almost to a whisper, yet every word came to Katharine's hearing with a distinctness that oppressed.
"After our meeting in Mr. Hazel's house at Alexandria, where I had witnessed such a striking manifestation of his clairvoyant powers, he dined with me at my Club, and after dinner—in my eagerness to pursue further the investigations that absorb me—I persuaded Hazel to look in the beryl that case contains. He passed with ease into the condition inseparable from Vision—but to my questions I received no satisfactory replies. Now that you are here," the voice was hurried, "the hour and the conditions alike being favourable, stretch out your hand, open the case and—look in the crystal ball!"
"Do you really think that I should see—things? Find out what is happening to—friends at Shechem?"
Essenian's orange-red draperies rustled as he moved nearer, saying:
"I do not 'think.' ... I know that you would! ..."
Holding his breath, he saw her white figure shift its position on the divan. Now her white hands hovered like wistful doves about the velvet case on the tripod—now the moony brightness of the great spherical beryl shone forth as though some lesser star of the innumerable hosts of heaven had fallen upon the tripod in the Arabian room.... Now he heard her say—speaking to herself rather than to him—with a fluttered laugh of nervousness:
"You know, I won't have anything to do with this if it's dabbling in magic. But—just to look in the beryl can't be much harm...."
"No, no! What harm could there be? But wonderful things are seen—sometimes—by gifted people. And you—I would stake half that I own on the certainty that you have the gift! ..."
He moved softly here and there in the background as Katharine, absorbed, bent over the beryl. Now he loosened a silken cord, and shades descended, covering the silver lamps. He moved his dark, supple hands among little brazen vases of Benares-work ranged upon a stand resembling a Hindu altar, and a slender column of incense, heavy and fragrant, rose up and climbed, spiralling and twisting, towards the great stars that looked down from Heaven's violet dome. Presently he heard Katharine whisper to herself as a woman speaks in dreaming:
"The Church forbids dabbling in spiritism and magic. But just—once to look—can't be so very wrong! ..."
And now Essenian spoke, seizing the appropriate moment, almost as he had spoken to Hazel at the Club:
"Wrong.... How should it be wrong? Do not touch the beryl—that is imperative. Neither bend so close above it that your breathing dims its light. Sit comfortably, rest your hands lightly on either side of the tripod. You are not afraid? Why should you be? There is absolutely no reason.... Only look steadily in the beryl, do not remove your eyes...."
If Katharine had seen Essenian's, as they narrowly observed her, she might have recalled a speech of Lady Wastwood's, made a few days previously. For they indubitably resembled the eyes of a cobra, and his soft noiseless movements were horribly tigerish. But she knew nothing but the cold, gleaming sphere upon its little cup-shaped metal pedestal—and the smooth twists and coiling folds, suggesting veil upon veil of mystery—that were beginning to reveal themselves beneath the pale-green, shining surface that at first had seemed opaque. There was a singing in her ears, and she heard her heart throbbing, but as though it were the heart of some one else beating a long way off. Edward's? ... Julian's? ... Neither of these, she thought.... The heart that called so far away was John Hazel's.... What was he doing? Where was he? What had happened to him? Summoning all her strength, she willed herself to see....
"Oh, oh! Take it away! ... Hide it from me! ..."