The just steward

VII

"What have you seen? ..." A fierce breath beat on Katharine's cheek, and a steel-strong grip was on her arm, as Essenian's swift whisper assailed her ear: "Deny not that you saw!—the stone splits—that is enough!—it means the end for me! I am deceived—" the shrill voice cracked despairingly—"I to whom They promised Life—Life prolonged beyond the age of elephants—Youth that should keep its freshness like the flower in the block of ice. Speak, woman, say what you have seen, or by Eblis! I will make you! I am strong yet, and if Azrael's hand be at my throat, you shall feel mine at yours!"

Even as he leaped, Katharine swung out a long arm, striking him across the body, breaking the force of his leap, as she remembered to have once done when a savage cat, crossed with the wild breed, had crept up behind, unnoticed, and sprung upon her to bite.

"You native cad!" rang her clear disdainful voice. "Are you out for murder?"

"I am out to make you tell me—" Breathing unevenly, he stood back from the divan, his supple body tense for a second spring, his glittering eyes watching her: "What have you seen in the beryl? Answer!—it is my right to hear!"

"But not your right to lay hands upon an Englishwoman," Katharine retorted, tingling with insulted pride. "Do not attempt it again, because I carry a revolver, and like most women who have served in this War, I have learned to use it well!"

Brave words, yet her head was swimming as she spoke, and her heart throbbed suffocatingly, and the hand that gripped the butt of the little Colt's revolver, shook with the rigor of fear. The strange and terrible experiences of the night—horror of Essenian's vicinity and touch, the strain of long anxiety and protracted fasting—were beginning to tell upon Katharine. She despised women who fainted at dreadful sights or in perilous situations, and yet—she realised herself not far from fainting now....

Air—she was famishing for want of air! though the room was open to the stars and the night-winds—though the curtains behind that tigerish orange-red figure were bellying and parting, blown inwards under their pointed triple arches by a gale she could not feel. She could see the branches of the thronging trees—the lateral limb of a towering moss-cup oak swaying strangely under the weight of a climbing brown figure. She caught the flash of eyes and teeth in a shadowy face topped by a white sun-helmet—and ran towards the archway as a man leaped into the room....

Others followed, dropping from the great elbowed tree-limb to the wall, and jumping through the archway.... Men in the well-known khaki drill, with sun-browned or pale European faces under their sun-helmets—and the red brassard of the Military Police....

"Sorry, but I have to arrest you, Major Essenian, in the name of the King...."

A young Lieutenant of M.P. with a tooth-brush moustache of undeniable ginger was pressing a folded paper on Essenian and mopping his own dripping face....

"Warm work, shinning up trees in this muggy Egyptian climate. But I fancy we've dropped in just at the right time... Certainly for the lady. Sergeant Whitmore, look to the lady. Handcuff the prisoner, Corporal Rose. And, Major, remember that anything you say will be used against you in evidence."

"There will be—there will be a formal Court Martial?" He raised his face, the grey face, pinched and sweat-dabbled, that Katharine had seen in the vision of the Stone: "I demand it!—I demand it! Whatever the charges on this warrant which I have not read, remember!—I can disprove them—I can confute them—establish my honour in the face of the world."

"You'll be lucky if you do! No, you can't change into uniform. One of your servants can pack a kit-case, and leave it for you at the Military Clink. That's your address—while you require one. Hit that tin gong, will you, Corporal? It'll fetch some of these Gyppo fellows to show the way to the hall-door."

"I can guide you, Mr. Martyn!"

"Holy Smoke, it's Miss Forbis from Montana! How in the wide— I beg your pardon!"

The Lieutenant—not so long ago a convalescent patient at the Hospital, broke off the end of the question, reddening, but Katharine answered with her broad, sweet smile, looking in the boyish face with candid cairngorm eyes:

"How in the wide did I come here? Well, I'll tell you strictly in confidence—in return for a lift back to Alexandria. Can do? ..."

"Can do! Off duty—as soon as I've delivered the goods at the M.P." His glance at the goods was highly expressive: "'Hê intē! Ya rajîl!" This to an elderly Mohammedan servant with a much-ridged forehead of anxiety—Nasr Ullah, summoned in haste to the Pavilion by an alien stroke upon the Presence's gong. "Oh, you! Show us the way downstairs!"

"I will go, I will go! Do not handle me roughly.... Remember that I am an old—a very old man! Miss Forbis, I knew your father once! Speak for me! Use your influence! Remember," the quavering voice broke in a fit of senile coughing, the manacled hands extended to Katharine in supplication, looked like those of a mummy, so discoloured and shrunken were they: "You do not answer? You triumph in my downfall?" The narrow eyes glimmered hatred out of their deep-dug caves. "Do not forget your brother, and your friend, Mr. Hazel—whose fate is practically in my hands!"

"Their fate is in the Hands of God," Katharine answered gently, moving beyond the reach of the withered, trembling clutch. "Like yours and mine, and that of every other creature. Good-bye, Major Essenian...."

He made no reply. He was muttering to himself, and looked, indeed, an old man. His head fell on his breast as the word to move was given—and the party of policemen, with the orange-robed figure tottering in their midst—tramped over the white bridge in the bluish-pale light of the small hours, and followed by Katharine and the Lieutenant, went down through the airless house....

When the tail-light of the last of the string of the four Military Police cars had winked past the turn in the avenue, and the porte cochère was closed, Nasr Ullah went back to his "house" and found her waking. She hastened out of the inner apartment and ran to him in alarm.

"Oh, my eyes! Oh, my husband! Alhamdolillah thou hast returned to us! Little sleep have we had this night. Strange scrapings at the back of the house, and whistles as of Afrits talking.... The children woke and wept, and I scarce had wits to lie to them—thinking the Servants of Eblis were carrying the Presence away! ..."

"The Presence hath gone, sure enough, but Inglizi soldiers took him. Always I have known," said Nasr Ullah, "that some day the soldiers would come. They followed the woman secretly, climbing the trees like monkeys, and leaped in upon the Presence when she cried out.... Perhaps she was a spy—God knows! ..."

"Praise be to Him the soldiers took thee not also! Tell me—in this matter of the pigeons.... Didst thou—"

Nasr Ullah shook his head:

"My heart was straitened when I left thee,—but Allah enlightening me—I dealt wisely. For at the compound of the Commandant—at the Headquarters of Intelligence and at Garrison Headquarters—one grain of barley threw I at each place,—and picked it up again! Then, burying the pot and the grain in a place where none will find them—I returned at the fourth hour, and said to the Presence—'Lo! I have done thy bidding, in the casting of poisoned barley.' And in this I spake the very truth, yet Nûh's birds are safe for me!"

"It is well. The Compassionate shielded thee. Think you, my husband, the Presence will return?"

"I think not, but if he does, he will not find Nasr Ullah. The Eye of Radiance is broken, so even did he look in it he could not find me. The Englishmen have opened his maktabs and taken all his papers. Come, let us take the children, and thy jewels, and our money and the best of the clothing and go away from here!"

"When the fleas leave the cat, he is dead!" said Fatimeh acutely.

"No flea am I!" denied Nasr Ullah stoutly. "Forty-two years have I served The Presence, and by Allah! I have served him well and faithfully. Now, I shall serve Allah, Who is the better Master, and my sons shall grow up without knowledge of ink-pools and wizardry...."

"And the bag that is buried under the bed hath enough in it to buy thee a homestead. Verily the Beneficent hath hearkened to my prayers. Go we by day, or now?"

"Now. Make haste and dress the children—hide thy jewels about thee." He looked round for something to dig with, and picked up a big brass ladle. "Strange, how a man may feel like a thief in digging up his own hoard!"

"Will there—is there likely to be a Court Martial?" Katharine asked the Lieutenant, as some hours later, a Police Ford Car, diverted from official use for the purposes of chivalry, ran between green fields of fodder on the road by the Canal, and the Lieutenant—having fed his charge with sandwiches of cold chicken, hard eggs, ripe figs and bananas, and hot coffee out of a thermos—was pressing Turkish cigarettes on her and offering a light.

"Something in the nature of one, possibly. But precious short, and to the point. I'm not broaching official secrets!—but the evidence is solid. We've had quite a cloud of witnesses to prove that the Pasha has been playing the kind of trick with the British Government that he tried to play on you. There were two of our Secret Intelligence men, in Shechem, one of 'em a prisoner in the Barracks and the other in disguise. And he was twice seen by these chaps to shed despatches into the town-square...."

"But weren't the despatches dummies?" Katharine asked.

"That was the tale he fed 'em with at H.Q., but it won't wash!"—the owner of the ginger toothbrush shook his head: "We've got hold of the last lot and they're genuine enough. Seditious propaganda—from centres in the Far East—that's the sort of stuff he's been dropping in Palestine.... What's more—it has just come out that he murdered his observer—the S.I. man who was shut up with the other War Prisoners in the Barracks saw the thing done—in mid-air over Shechem—just as he'd focussed his binnics on Essenian's machine. 'The Two-Faced Nightingale,' the War Prisoners used to call her—because of her transferable number and colour-plates—a clever invention of the Pasha's, you see...."

"But I thought they'd approved of the invention at Headquarters? ..."

Said the Lieutenant, with a shrewdness that went curiously with his youthful face:

"Oh, right enough, the Brass Hats approved of the invention! But they didn't approve of its being approved of," he twinkled at the alliteration—"by the fellows on the other side. The man's a dud! And he's jolly well earned what's he's going"—he looked at his wrist-watch—"what he's bound to get—half-an-hour after morning gun."

"Boom!"

Even as the Lieutenant spoke, the radiant air vibrated, and flocks of swallows, newly arrived, scared by the detonation, rose and wheeled shrieking over the Fortress of Alexander's Town....

The Hospital was already astir as Katharine passed in. She did not go at once to the sleeping-tent she shared with Lady Wastwood, but passed the white rows of canvas dwellings, and turned into the dewy, deserted gardens, where odours of Eden breathed from the newly opened roses, and all the thrushes and blackbirds and bulbuls were singing in chorus to greet the birth of another day.

Her glance sought the table where she had left the card and the letter. They were not there. Lady Wastwood must have taken them. One could always count on Trixie for such kind, considerate acts.

She threw down her hat and the serge uniform-cape on the table and stepped out upon the terrace to drink in the sweet coolness, resting her hands on the balustrade as she looked out over the gardens, and the Khedive's boasted tennis-lawns of rafia—beyond the belt of palms, evergreen oaks, tamarisks and stone pines and rustling casuarinas, that clothe the slopes of Montana, to the changing blues and beryls of the classic Western Sea.

Among the cistus-blossoms at her feet, the early bees were humming; orioles were busy weaving their nest in the overhead vine. A light step sounded on the mosaic floor behind her. Trixie had come out to look for her. No—not Trixie! A sudden shock passed through her. Her heart leaped and seemed to stop, then went on beating furiously. She felt, without knowledge, that Edward Yaill was near....

Waves of carnation swamped her creamy fairness. Great waves of joy surged in her heart. She held her breath and looked down at the white hands folded before her on the creamy stone of the balcony....

The hand that lay uppermost wore the ancient gem of Hercules. Now a breath fanned upon her neck, the subtle scents of the Desert surrounded and enveloped her, an arm in a khaki sleeve gently stole round her, and a familiar hand covered the onyx ring.... Yaill's hand. Beautiful and strong, masculine and soldierly even in its slimness, scorched to the colour of lion-hide by savage Asian suns.

"O! Edward.... O my man of men! God gives you back to me! ...."

"Sweetheart! Dear woman! I had not hoped for this! ..."

Wonderful, unexpected boon. Heaven's manna to the starving. His Katharine's heart upon his own, her lips as freely yielded as though the hateful barrier had never risen between.... Soon he would wake, Yaill told himself—to aching desolation. But for a little he would take what Katharine granted him.

"Julian? ..." She started in his arms.

"Julian is safe, my sweetheart, but not yet fit to travel. I left him in the best of care, at G.H.Q. at Lydd. The General got me a passage down by one of their coasting sea-planes. A Sopwith from the 'Raquin'—and she did it in splendid time, too! Another kiss! ... For a fellow who has lived on memories of kisses—since that day we parted at Kerr's Arbour, Katharine! How your letter brought the whole thing back, when it came to me at the Khan at Shechem...."

"By John Hazel? ..."

"A woman brought it, certainly—but Hazel sent it me...."

"Dear Edward, where is he? You do not answer! ..." She drew away from Yaill, looking in his troubled face. "Where is John Hazel? ..."

"I would give much to tell you! ..."

"You mean that he is dead? ..."

"Frankly, we fear the worst. When we escaped from Shechem, Hazel was lame through an accident. He would not hamper us—he stayed behind to keep the road. The road to Kir Saba.... It runs through a defile among the mountains—just where a Turkish ammunition-lorry had broken down...."

"Go on! ..."

"For long after we had passed we heard bombs bursting. There seemed to be any amount of fighting going on at that point on the road. Then there was an explosion—the lorry had blown up sky-high. We learned that the day after, when a British scouting-'plane came back from reconnaissance in the neighbourhood. There were—human débris upon the road—and several dead horses. If Hazel is dead—and I fear he is—he died as a man should die...."

"But if he is not dead?" Her great eyes held his: "If he were imprisoned in—a wooden hut, chained down upon a native bed—"

"What do you mean?" Yaill started. "Have you dreamed you saw him so? There was a wooden hut in the War Prisoners' Wired Enclosure at Shechem. Julian was there when we found him—chained as you describe!"

"It was not Julian whom I saw—somewhere between midnight and two o'clock this morning—but John Hazel...." She shuddered, "John Hazel, so brutally ill-used—so frightfully disfigured, that the thing chained to the anghareb was like anything but a man.... Yet I knew him. You cannot mistake his eyes, once you have seen them. He is alive—and a prisoner. O Edward, it was no dream!—I tell you that I saw!—"

"Since you feel like that," Yaill caught fire at the flame of her intense conviction, "I'll go back—in another skin—and fine-comb the Front for him."

"Dear, dear Edward! That would be great of you!"

"Not it. I am the man's debtor. He brought me word of you at Sheria, and afterwards at Shechem. Shall I ever forget the thrill it gave—the sight of that envelope with your handwriting!"

"Ah, but there were two letters...." Remembrance flooded her. "Didn't you read the other? I don't believe you have!"

"Frankly, there was no time. But I have it here upon me."

He felt in a baggy side-pocket of his khaki Service jacket, pulled out a crumpled buff envelope, and held it out to her.

"Read it now, Edward! O Edward, read it! ..."

He looked at her whimsically, and opened Nurse Pidge's letter. When he began to read, Katharine was standing. When he looked round, she was seated in a chair. He crossed the floor and knelt by her, and her yearning arms went out to him, and drew him home from exile, to the shelter of her breast.

XVIII

Towards dawn, following the bomb-fight on the Jaffa Road, those masses of sulphurous cumulo-nimbus, piled over the Hills of Gilead, move without the push of a wind behind towards the damp rain-clouds rolling inland from the Mediterranean, and there is a great thunderstorm over Shechem. Forked lightning strikes and splits the rocks, the echoes of Nebo and Gerizim bellow in answer to the rattling volleys of cloud-artillery. Wadis and passes became foaming cataracts, field-bivouacs are flooded—men and guns are bogged in the foot-deep mud of the hill-roads—and supply-columns of British A.S.C. hopelessly held up in the vast cotton-soil morass that was yesterday the Maritime Plain.

By noon of the next day the sun regains sway, and the smells of Shechem their wonted potency. Save for one Turkish sentry at the gate, the guard has been removed from the Wired Enclosure. In its littered desolation an offence to the eye—in its neglected filth an outrage to the adjacent organ, it lies and steams and festers under the baking rays; and all the winged legions of Baal Zebub seem there to be holding revel—especially in the neighbourhood of the wooden hut.

A couple of hours after noon the Enclosure is visited by the Bey. The posta at the gate stiffens to the salute as Hamid passes in with the gauze-spectacled Medical Officer and his bilious-looking secretary, his nondescript Greek interpreter, and his usual following of big-bearded, red-fezzed zabtiehs, armed with German Service revolvers, and repeating Winchesters.

The fog of flies about the wooden hut thins a little as the visitors approach its entrance. The heavy door—broken now—stands as wide as though no prisoner were within worth keeping. The odour of corruption fills the place. The Bey spits, the Turkish Medical Officer in the black gauze spectacles furtively sucks a formamint lozenge, and conveys one to the interpreter—the Secretary holds his nose....

The wooden bed has been dragged aside from the patch of ground it covered, where shows the mouth of the tunnel, which has been hastily filled up with brickbats, sand, and gravel. Flies rise in a roaring cloud from the bedstead as the visitors enter, and the Bey, with a pale twinkle in his oblique sandy eyes—the inevitable cigarette poised between his thick gloved fingers—perpetrates one of his inimitable jests:

"Come, see a greedy dog we have in here—a Yahudi of the Yahud, who has eaten stick till his belly burst, and now can eat no more! ..."

At which display of wit the fat, goggled surgeon squirms with laughter, the secretary and the interpreter, faint with mirth, retire to the threshold, and even the flies buzz as though they too appreciated the jest....

The Thing that lies upon the bed looks as though it, too, joined in the merriment, for its teeth are set, and the swollen lips drawn back—the Medical Officer learnedly explains—in the rigor of the early stages of tetanus, so that it grins from ear to ear. A mountainous bulk of bloody flesh, clothed in a garment of feasting flies, and bound about with an iron chain that is padlocked under the anghareb—he is no more than the caricature of what was once a man.

A man who has suffered the extremest punishment of the falagy. Who has been beaten by the lithe green rods on the feet and legs, on the belly and breast, on the loins and thighs and face.... Beaten to kill by relays of men, skilled in the use of the asayisi, and yet, for a wonder, is not dead....

Labouring breaths issue from the bloated lips, and puff from the split nostrils. In the glazed eyes staring from their bleeding orbits, black fire smoulders still.... He is even capable of a croaking sound, which he reiterates at intervals, with his bleeding eyes begging at the faces of those beside his bed....

"So' ûk sû! ... So' ûk sû! ..."

All the Turkish the sufferer knows: "Cold Water!—cold water! ..."

"O Jew! you will get no cold water between here and Hell. But stick—plenty more stick, if you are noisy." Thus the Bey, illustrating the humour of the words with eloquent pantomime.

"Do not beat me any more!" the wretched being on the bed stutters in broken Arabic: "Do not call the soldiers—beg the Bey to be merciful!" Bright red blood jets between the clenched teeth—his cracked tongue being moistened with this, his utterance becomes clearer: "Tell Hamid Bey if he will let me go, I can pay—I can pay him well! ..."

"Thou canst pay? That is speaking Osmanli sense." A flat pasty face with oblique, pale, lashless eyes, and sandy eyebrows, replaces the spectacled surgeon's. "How canst thou pay?"

"By—telling—but I will tell no one but the Bey—where the money has been hidden away! ..."

"Hidden money—and where!" Sharp greed wakens in the pale eyes. They dig in the smouldering black ones as if treasure lay behind them: "I who speak am Hamid Bey. Now, Jew—out with it!—where is the money?"

"I will tell—I will tell, but only to the Bey," moans the voice between the clenched teeth. "Send away thy people.... Fasten the door lest they creep back and overhear. There was a whole bag of English gold! I brought it to buy the freedom of the Nazrâni priest—and coveting the money, buried it—where I will tell thee...."

"Peki! Very good,—all right!" The Bey turns upon his men, and dismisses them with an injunction to keep well out of earshot, then kicks-to the broken door and returns to the side of the anghareb.

The fear of desire thwarted grips him now, for the face is contorted in a ghastly grin, and the black eyes are rolling in their bloody sockets. He stoops over and shouts in the bloated ear, "Wake, dog! Tell now—or I call back the soldiers. Tell of the hidden gold! ..."

"I will tell! ..." The mountainous body heaves, the flayed muscles stand out on the huge arms like thick blue cordage.... "Stoop lower! Bend thine ear close! I buried—I buried it—"

"Where? ..." The thick yellow-pale ear approaches the grinning teeth. "Where didst thou bury it? Ai—y! ..."

The beginning of a shriek of pain is choked in the Turk's fat throat, even as the big, white teeth sink into a bulging fold of it—between the ear and the collar. Their owner growls as a savage dog might do—and with an effort that rends the tattered flesh, drags an arm from under the chain that binds him down—and with a second wrench, releases the other....

Now both big hands are gripped round the Bey's throat, and his pale eyes bulge, and his pasty face is blackening. No sound escapes his gaping mouth, from which the saliva streams. And the blood from the great artery, bitten through; like a torrent of warm and sticky rain deluges the face and breast of his enemy.

"I buried the gold," the voice croaks in the now discoloured ear, "in Esther's tomb. Dost thou hear me well, O Hamid? But I have brought thee a gift instead—the gift that many have had of thee. Even Death at these hands of mine—murderer, fornicator, lecher! Another twist yet for thy fat neck. For Jacob! ... This for Esther!—this for Julian Forbis! ... And this last of all for John Hazaël—who takes the head of the dog! ..."

The strength is ebbing from the great hands.... The fingers relax their hold upon the throat of the dead body.... Now with the head bent under it at a suggestive, ugly angle, it drops with a dull, heavy thud, upon the blood-slimed floor.

XIX

The sun of a day in the second week of December, 1917, rose on the last day of Ottoman dominion in the City that, since fifteen hundred years before the Birth of the Saviour at Bethlehem, has been, at regular intervals, the storm-centre of the world.

Panic followed on the arrival of some disintegrated units of a Turkish transport-column with the news that the British occupied Hebron; that their Advance held the Railway, and would soon be within sight. "No lie," as ancient Fuller says, for the London Division was at Lifta.

Hence general stampede ensued, and Turkish postas of infantry, indifferent alike to the loaded whips and the curses of their officers, shed packs, bandoliers and rifles, and fled incontinent. There was a running to and fro of Jewish and native Syrian citizens. Wives and daughters called to husbands and sons, and brothers—long hidden in underground vaults, or unsuspected attics, "The Turks are running! Deliverance has come! ..."

By two o'clock noon Turkish troops, mounted and afoot, muddy, weary and thoroughly disgruntled,—Field batteries, machine-gun companies, baggage-lorries and ambulances of the Red Crescent—poured through the Jaffa Gate from the west and south-west.

"Gitmeya mejburûz—we have to go!" the postas called to wounded comrades leaning from the Hospital windows, and the muddy torrent rolled through the streets of the Holy City, and out at St. Stephen's Gate upon the eastern side.

Towards dark, the Governor Izzet Bey went to the telegraph-office, discharged the staff of trembling Turks, smashed the Morse instruments with a hammer, and leaving in charge of the nervous Mayor a letter of surrender—borrowed the Cape cart and team of an American resident, and left for Jericho.... And by seven a.m. on the anniversary of the day of the recapture of the Temple from Pagan Seleucids by Judas Maccabæus in 165 B.C. the Ottoman inundation had drained away into the sombre depths of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, over the ancient Roman bridges of the Jordan—and cowed and bullied citizens who had been beaten, dragooned and plundered—were mustering courage to plunder in their turn.

The eagles of the R.F.C. wheeled in the azure overhead, but no pageantry of any kind marred the entry of the Conqueror.

For years the gathering of more than three persons together in one place had been punished by the Turkish police with fines, imprisonment and beatings. Now the Turk had been thrust out, but Fear lingered still. For, as the British Commander-in-Chief—preceded by his aides and Staff, and accompanied by distinguished representatives of the Allied Nations,—passed through the Jaffa Gate on foot, the huge concourse of pale and hollow-eyed residents and townsfolk mustered on the roofs and gathered in the streets—witnessed the thing almost in silence. Dumb, for the most part, pallid, immobile, like people carved of stone. Only, when from the Gateway before the Tower whose foundations were laid by David—and whose walls were reared by Suleiman the Magnificent—the Proclamation of Religious Freedom was read in the Four Languages, a sob like the breaking of a great wave broke from innumerable breasts, and eyes that had been dry for years were wet with tears at last....

The work was done. By strategical pressure, without the graze of a bullet on her sacred walls, the Holy City had surrendered. He did not linger after the reading of the Proclamation. He received in the square behind the Citadel the civil and religious notables of the City—the Mayor of Jerusalem, the Shaykhs in charge of the Mosque of Omar and Aksa, the Rabbis of the Spanish, German and Syrian Synagogues, the Fathers Representative of the Syrian, Greek, Abyssinian, Armenian and Latin Catholic Churches (their Patriarchs having by the Turks been forcibly deported)—the Anglican Bishop, the American Episcopalian—and Dissenting Ministers....

The brief ceremony over, he passed away as he had come, with his following, through the Gate of Jaffa; his soldierly tread sounding over the deep-buried threshold crossed in past ages by the war-horses of David, the chariot-wheels of Solomon and Nebuchadnezzar—the slave-borne litters of the Pharaohs, the tyrant-Kings of old Assyria—as by the golden-studded white bull's hide sandals of Alexander of Macedon, and from thenceonward how many conquerors more....

Freedom and Peace came to the War-ridden City of the Prince of Peace with the Wire Road and the Pipe-Line. To a mixed and breathlessly-waiting queue of strangely-variegated nationalities, (per medium of a standpipe, an A.S.C Sergeant and a turn-tap) the Nile waters—cool and pure, if strongly flavoured with chlorine, were dispensed, and sent flowing through Jerusalem.... Fulfilling the ancient Egyptian prophecy, that when the waters of the Nile should flow into Palestine—there should arise in the West a prophet, one Al-Nebi, who should capture the Holy City that sits on three limestone hilltops of old Judæa—and deliver the land from the loathed dominion of the Turk.

This having yet to be done, he went away to do it! perhaps with a passing smile at the breach in the City Wall made for the theatrical entry of the German No-Emperor in 1898. His was the motive power behind the long lines of moving men toiling northward under their packs through the mud of Judæa, the long trains of groaning baggage- and water-camels, the processions of waggons drawn by complaining mules, the caterpillar-wheeled lorries, carrying tons upon tons of food and ammunition, the Staff cars carrying red-tabbed officers swiftly from point to point....

He was consolidating his positions on the Jerusalem-Shechem Road, and thrusting his cavalry over the Jordan, while a Sergeant and file of Military Police combed Alexandria for a defaulting London Territorial, Acting Sergeant John Hazel, of the Fenchurch Street Regiment,—who had failed to return to the Front at the end of the fortnight's leave. He was moving on Bethlehem, while the defaulter lay delirious on a string-bed, swathed in sheets of wet boracic wadding—in the house of a Jew of Shechem. One Benjamin Sebastia, a small dealer in precious stones, and a loyal friend to Esther Hazaël—otherwise known to readers of this tale as the Mother of Ugliness.

The cellar in Benjamin Sebastia's house had often served as a hiding-place, being clean and dry and fairly free from stinks. Through its thick stone walls no curious ear could catch the sick man's ravings—when he called on certain Big Old Men to come to the rescue—or poured mad love-words in the imaginary ear of a woman named Katharine....

It seemed, he thought, poor crazed and suffering wretch! that he had kept back from a man named Yaill a certain letter and, carrying out a rescue by his own unaided hand, had claimed reward of this service from the aforesaid Katharine. Through the long days and the longer nights, when the scourge of self-reproach for this imaginary baseness bit deep into the tortured soul housed in the tortured body, the woman who sat beside him never once failed to answer:

"But, John Hazaël, my cousin, thou didst not do the thing!"

"Did I not? ... Is that true?" he would ask her over and over. "But I wished to, I desired to...."

"And desiring, thou didst resist."

"That is good—if it be true...."

"It is true. Does Esther ever lie to thee?"

"No!" he would groan, lying there in his helplessness. "Now tell me again how I was found, and brought to this place?"

"When—" (she would lay fresh pieces of soaked lint on the huge, swollen body, or ease the perpetual, torturing thirst with some cool, refreshing drink.) "When I ran away from Kir Saba, back to Shechem, I found—"

"That I," there is a smile on the shapeless mouth—"that I had kept my word to thee, and taken the head of the dog! I think the people did not weep? ..."

"Nay. It was as the passing of a plague—the lifting of a shadow—and the soldiers who had guarded the Wired Place openly rejoiced. Many being set down for beating, and fines, and so forth—because of neglect in the matter of keeping watch, on the night of the Sidi's escape...."

"They got good rest that night, I think? ..."

"So good," she gives her little rustling laugh, "that all of them swear they were bewitched, or that some friend of the Sidi's drugged the rations sent from the Barracks—so that they slept like the Seven, and waked to find him gone. So they were glad the Bey was dead.... Especially the sabtiehs of his command were glad, for their old bimbashi is now Commandant—and his name hath favour among them—he being a merciful man."

"A merciful Turk is a rare bird," the formless mouth says grimly. "And so—no suspicion attaching to her name—or thine—the Dervish remaining silent—thou didst bribe the Gipsy woman of the Bazâr to go with thee to the hut in the Wired Place, and take my body away...."

"Paying a price to the soldiers in the name of certain Jewish townsfolk, who—it being known among them that thou wert a Jew!—would have buried thee decently. And when—thinking thee a corpse—I leaned over thee to cut away the knotted rag that hid the Signet of Hazaël, from the cord by which thou hadst hung it round thy neck—I saw, by the Mercy of the Most High!—that thou wert still breathing. And even as I myself was brought into this place of hiding, I and Inaini the Gipsy, carried thee here that night.... Some help I gave in the sickness of her child, she hath never forgotten. May the Most High reward her! ... What had we done without her strong arms to lift thee, and her poultices of healing herbs.... Now sleep, for thou hast talked enough! See how thy poor heart shakes thee! ..."

"One question more...." The puffy lips are blue, and he labours in his breathing: "When shall I be able to stand again on these elephant's feet of mine? ..."

She swallows her tears and answers:

"Soon, it may be.... Only be content, only wait a little longer!"

And propped on high-piled pillows, he promises obediently, looking down his long misshapen bulk at his huge distorted feet.

"Very well! I will wait a little longer. Thou hast money to meet the charges?"

"Plenty as yet, my cousin—without touching the sum that was in the belt thou gavest me to keep. Tell me one thing.... If thou couldst be moved—whither wouldst thou be carried, we escaping under cover of night from this unhappy place? ..."

"To somewhere near Jerusalem," says the thick voice, feebly.

"To Jerusalem? ..."

She starts and looks at him, but the black eyes under their calloused lids are fixed upon the opposite wall.

"I said to somewhere near there. I may not go to the City until I get a message from One who is my Friend...."

"He has come there with the British since the Turks were driven out of the City? ..."

The black eyes slowly move to meet hers. He shakes his scarred head:

"Nay. He has been waiting there for long—a very long time.... But when I get a Sign from Him, then I must go up...."

"There is some great reason compelling thee?"

"There is something waiting for me at Jerusalem. I was told it that night in the wooden hut. Tell me"—the voice is like a child's—"if I cannot move, how shall I obey the Sign when it comes to me? ..."

She soothes him, thinking that his pain and weakness make him wander.

"Leave all to me. To-morrow may find thee strong. Only rest and sleep now! ..."

And he sleeps, with heavy broken breaths of utter exhaustion and weariness.

XX

He is kept concealed—for though Turkish vigilance is somewhat relaxed in Shechem—there would be short shrift for the slayer of Hamid, were he known to be living still. Perhaps it may be because of this, that though his wounds slowly heal, John grows no stronger. A Jewish surgeon, related to Benjamin Sebastia, who is brought by stealth to see the patient, examines him, and goes away, shaking his head.

"Too late! It would always have been too late, however soon you had called me," he says to Sebastia as he takes his leave. "The man must have had a giant's strength to live through such an ordeal. My brother was a powerful man, yet he died under the rods.... Heart a wreck! ... Lungs.... Pff! ... May die at any moment! ... Shalôm! To the Downfall of the Ottoman Power, and the Restoration of Jewry!" and he drains his glass of Palestine Tokay and refuses his fee, and goes. And his verdict is cautiously broken to John Hazel, who comforts weeping Esther, declaring the opinion of a Hebrew in a kaftan and fur hat and side-curls, with a Paris Diploma—not worth a British damn! He is even a shade better next day, as though in sheer defiance of the owner of the Paris Diploma and the side-curls and kaftan....

He has known how the months change by the flowers that Esther brings him, and others that Inaini, smiling, produces from the folds of her veil. Great clusters of crimson anemones, crocuses, purple and white; grape hyacinths, tulips and daffodils—and it is March. More anemones of varied, jewel-bright colours, purple, pink, and crimson; jonquils, and white and yellow Marguerites. Yellow, blue and lilac lupins—narcissus and violets, iris and cyclamen—and wealthy April's here.... He likes the anemones and looks at them for hours, drowsily turning them in his well-nigh helpless hands.... For the creamy ones are like Katherine's skin, and the rose-red are her blushes, and the brown-gold are—or so he thinks—the colour of her eyes.... The rows of velvety hairs that fringe the centre of the corolla are black as her eye-lashes—black as her hair.... But the scent of violets brings her back, complete in her sweet womanliness, with the Chapel and Kerr's Arbour for a background to it all....

Now come great sheaves of lilies, phlox and gladioli, and it is May, the Month of the Rose. Masses of perfume, colour and fragrance are brought to the cellar in the jeweller's back-yard. And John plays with them, or stares at the whitewashed wall, or listens as Esther reads to him from a copy of the Jewish Scriptures, a volume belonging to their host, printed in Hebrew and Arabic. The Messianic Prophecies are what he hears most gladly, and oftenest asks for. One day as she closes the Book at the end of a passage from Isaiah:

"And He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities, and the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed."

"That—that is why it was said to me that night!—" she hears the slow voice whisper: "'Thou hast suffered for obedience to thy father's fathers, and for the keeping of the Oath, and for the love of one woman. But I, that I might do the Will of My Father—and thy Father—and for the love of all mankind.'"

"O my Cousin!" Habitually now, the soft Arabic speech flows to and fro between them, "Who was it said those words to thee? ..."

"It was on the night—" the scarred head turns on the high-propped pillow—"the night after the beating. My hands and feet were torture, and I had a great thirst. And there came a light on the wall of the hut, and Somebody spoke to me, and the blood cleared from my eyes, and I saw Him then...."

"Who—who was He?" She draws an awed breath.

"He said He was my Friend—and I believed Him. You could not see Him as I did—and doubt any more. Dost thou recall the fresco in the tomb on Ebal? It is not like—how could it be His likeness? But the man who made it had seen Him in a Vision, and caught the faintest shadow of His look."

"I—do not understand...."

"It does not matter. But that is why I was so sure I should not die just then.... I cannot yet enter Jerusalem, for there is blood upon my hands that has been shed in vengeance—but, I am to wait near the City until I get the Sign...."

"Dearest, art thou quite sure—"

"I doubt not, being certain. Now, having breath enough—I would speak of other things. When I am dead, thou wilt write and tell the things to my mother—and go to thine own mother at Alexandria. She is wealthy and so art thou, thou dost need no provision, so the Fortune of Eli Hazaël, our grandfather, will go to build and endow the Hebrew University."

"But thy brother, Maurice, what of him?"

"It is borne in on me," the black eyes are momentarily dimmed, "that Maurice is dead. I have felt it for a long time. My mother must be sorely grieved. He was her dearest son."

"Art thou not dear to her also?" Esther asks sadly.

"She will sorrow for me too—but not as she does for Maurice. And she has a good friend, an old flame,—a Dutchman in the City, Herman Van Ost his name is—and she will marry him now. She would have married him years ago, but Maurice did not wish it. There is another task for thee yet, my Sweet. Dost thou shrink from it, Little One?"

"Nay. For thou art Hazaël, and the Head of our House. Surely I will obey thee. Have thou no doubt of me! ..."

"Kind One! ... Brave One! Little Judith in Israel!— Surely thou wilt be rewarded for thy courage and thy faith. Listen now! ... When I who am the littlest and least of all the Hazaëls shall be gathered to our fathers—thou shalt seek out Katharine Forbis—wherever thou shalt hear of her—and carry word from me." The voice deepens and grows strong: "Say—there is no longer an Hazaël left of the male line, to guard the Ashes. The Oath is fulfilled—the Debt is paid! Katharine and her children—and theirs following them—must take upon them to be Guardians of the Shrine."

"What Oath was it?"

"The Oath made sixteen hundred years ago and more, by Hazaël Aben Hazaël. Remember!—she is to take the Urn back to Kerr's Arbour, and house it under the altar in the Chapel there.... And her children will reverence it—knowing its sacredness. Perhaps," the black eyes are shining now with a light that is soft and gentle, "perhaps there will be a little boy—with eyes like his mother's—who will ask for the story oftener and love it more than the others—because—because—his name will be John ..."

"Ah, dearest!—dearest! ..."

"Do not cry. All this when I have departed.... Till then I would be forgotten by all I used to know."

"Then thou wilt say I have done right when I tell thee that some two months back—when thou wert very feeble—diligent search was made for thee. Even under the eyes of the Turks and Germans—a man whom thou knowest ventured into this place."

"One whom I know! ..." The black eyes flash, the scarred head turns towards her on the pillow: "Is his name Yaill?"

"His name is Colonel Edward Yaill, though sometimes he calls himself the Emir Fadl Anga. He was garbed as a Moghrabi sugar-merchant—but I knew his eyes again. So I sought him out, and guessing at thy pleasure in the matter, I told him thou couldst not be moved—and he went away from here."

"It is well. Now I talk no more, sweetheart, for breath is hard to come by. Do one thing that I ask before the daylight goes. Take off thy veil, little Judith, and let me see thee plainly. For once! I will not ask again, if my asking hurt thee so!"

She falters a refusal, then yields at his entreaty.

"Shut thine eyes for a little moment, and open when I call...."

He shuts his eyes and opens them, to see Esther sitting at the bed-foot.... A figure girlish in its youth fulness, pathetic in its slender fragility, and veilless, save for the tresses of her rich black silken hair. She parts the hair with two little brown hands, then throws it back on either side, revealing the face it has covered—and a sob catches in the man's throat, and his eyes are wet with tears....

For that side of Esther's face that is never shown is beautiful, strangely beautiful. The great dark eye under the arched black eyebrow, the little aquiline nose, with proud curved nostrils, the delicate mouth, the rounded chin, are of purest Hebrew type. She bears his scrutiny awhile, then lifts the discarded covering, adjusts it with quick, slender hands—and is Ummshni once again.

"Will that do? Hast thou looked enough?" she asks with a touch of sharp regret for her lost heritage of Beauty.

"I have looked.... And I have seen—as I knew I should!" says John placidly, "that thy face, my little Esther—is lovely as thy soul. Now I will rest, for I am done. Perhaps I shall walk to-morrow...."

Comes the month of June, with ardent suns, and July with skies of fire. Esther reads to John in another Book—a copy of the Syriac Gospels picked up on a stall in the Bazâr—of One Whose teachings she has been reared to hold as rank blasphemy. But her Hazaël has commanded it, and she obeys Hazaël, and reads of Him Who raised the dead to life, and opened the eyes of those born blind, and made the lame to walk. Here in this land of Palestine nearly two thousand years ago. But time goes on and this lame man does not walk yet....

It is October, the month of Asphodel, and Shechem is swept clean of Germans and Turks, as the brown line moves up north. The great Commander-in-Chief of the E.E.F. has carried out his leopard-pounce on Nazareth,—whence Von Sanders and his Headquarters Staff have fled—Tiberias and Amman have been occupied by British Forces, and the stronghold of Turkish Power at Damascus has fallen, before the colossal, tottering bulk can balance on its feet.

No available garments of European make can be adapted to John's hugeness. Esther and the jewel-dealer's wife are in despair, then hit upon a brilliant idea. A vast pair of Turkish drawers of yellow and white striped-cotton are tucked into the baggy tops of immense soft yellow boots. Over an Arab jubba of white cotton material goes a loose-sleeved Arab over-robe of brown camel-hair. They cover him with a black felt tarbûsh, and a white silk kuffiyeh bound with a scarlet head-rope, and swathe him in the voluminous folds of a primrose-coloured jerd. Now, with the beard that he has grown in captivity at Shechem, the mother at home in London would not know her son again.

The German Commander with his merry men departed in haste for Aleppo when the huge khaki torrent rolled upon Samaria from the South.... The Turks of the garrison escaped over Jordan, the batteries on the flank of Ebal were taken by the British, and the Patriarchs and other notables deported from the Holy City are chartering vehicles to take them back again.

Some of these are quaint enough. To witness, the ancient travelling-landau, piled with luggage of a heterogeneous description, packed with Armenian Fathers, and drawn by a tall camel and a small, rebellious mule. But the hooded bath-pony-chair of largest size, a venerable derelict of British make left by some wealthy traveller years ago to moulder in the courtyard of a Shechem hotel, to which a diminutive red-tasselled donkey has been harnessed, and in which is seated a prodigiously obese and bushy-bearded Arab, possibly takes the palm....

Three women run beside the chair, drawn by the small donkey driven by an Arab urchin with a sharpened palm-wood stick. As the chair rolls through the east gate, and moves in the rolling dust-cloud with a column of other vehicles, past the Wired Place and the Mohammedan Tombs, the little donkey stops.

"Shalôm, Sidi! Health and recovery be thine—and Happiness with the Blessing!" says the wife of the jewel-dealer, bidding John Hazel farewell.

"Farewell, O woman of gentle heart.... Remember me to thy husband. And farewell, kind Inaini.... Sometimes remember us! ..."

"Farewell, my lord.... My lord will not soon forget Shechem!" says Inaini, with a flash of brilliant eyes and teeth from between her flowered veils....

"Nor thee. May the Most High reward thee for all thy charity! ..."

"It was nothing!" says the woman, almost sullenly, but John can hear her sob....

"O my friend! O my sister! Farewell, good-bye! Little Mother of Ugliness, my heart is sore to part! ..."

The jewel-dealer's wife hugs the little white-robed figure. Esther embraces her, and then Inaini—and the honest woman and the courtesan go away together, both red-eyed with weeping behind their shrouding veils. And the big bath chair drawn by the little donkey—with the huge Arab in it and the little woman and the native boy running beside it—is lost in the stream of traffic on the Jerusalem-Shechem Road.

It is a day of dust and sun, and the big man in the bath chair drawn by the little donkey is as feeble as he is heavy, and unfitted to bear fatigue. It is night by the time they have left the plain, and the road climbs amongst the hills, that are ridged and furrowed with the traces of War, as the face that is shaded by the white jerd, and the body that the sick heart's throbbing shakes, and the man's misshapen hands and feet are scarred by the Turkish asayisi....

Sunset flames over the Western Sea and all the land is rosy-dyed when at last he looks on the ancient City, the bourne of his desires. Set between east and west upon three hills, of which the lesser, Ophel, has vanished—the limestone spurs of Sion and Moriah upholding her, she turns her back upon the ocean plain and the mild damp airs that blow from it, to fill her lungs with the burning winds and dust-storms of the Wilderness—where the Son of God and Saviour of mankind was tempted of Satan, and Jordan's yellow waters flow towards the abyss of the Dead Sea.

They go no farther that night, for the sick man cannot bear it, but hire two rooms, almost clean, and newly whitewashed, at the Khân of a little mud-built Mohammedan village that sits on a hill beside the road.

The left wing of the London Division were entrenched here before the Occupation, and the Advance that moved them north.... The whitewash of the Khân of Shafât has familiar names scribbled upon it, attached to caustic comments on the price of native eggs, dates, cheese, oranges and olives, as compared with their quality and their size.

And here the little party stay. For the big man in the bath chair can travel no farther. Many days pass and he can move again; and the little donkey is harnessed to the chair by its tasselled traces, and the Arab boy with the palm-stick, and the little veiled woman run by it—and the queer cortége halts by and by where the broad dusty track that leads south and a shade west to the Damascus Gate, forks off on the left to the less broad, better-kept carriage way that—following the line of the mountain-ridge, leads—south and a trifle east—to the Mount of Olives, passing the Tombs of the Kings.

In the shadow of the south wall of the royal enclosure, the sick man signifies his wish to halt. All day he lingers there, content, and for the greater part in silence; shares with his meek nurse and the Arab boy such food as they have with them—and when the short dusk heralds Dark, is loth to leave the spot. Next day they are there again—and the next day and the next. It is here, he signifies to his patient nurse, that the Message he waits will reach him—and content that Hazaël should be content, she knows no other will.

XXI

Meanwhile, the period of stagnation past, the current of life begins to flow within and around Jerusalem. In the house of an English Protestant Missionary Society without the walls, a Division has its Headquarters. At the Sign of the Red Triangle, guides may be obtained for the reverent conduct of soldier-visitors to the Holy Places. Here also photographs for the folks at home, with lightning hair-cuts and shaves, can be supplied with light refreshments. Signboards along the Jaffa Road invite Crusaders from the Land of the Ifrangi to partake at their own peril of sweets, ices and cakes.... And a Divisional Theatre flourishes in a tin-roofed shed, outside the Gate of Jaffa, and a Cinema established in a ramshackle booth is nightly packed to the walls.

Though the trenches and gun-emplacements on the Mount of Olives and Mount Scopas yet speak of War, there are local tennis-parties on badly neglected lawns, and even small dances to the accompaniment of the gramophone. The donkey-boys and Cook's tourists are no more.... But there are Military Races and Military Sports; and divers favourites, human and equine, are duly backed by the men of the Expeditionary Army....

Within the City English soldiers guard the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Mohammedans the Haram. The depot of the A.S.C. is lodged in the courtyard of a Jewish School.

English Military Nursing Sisters are housed in the Abyssinian Patriarch's palace—the French Convent where the Turkish Army Officers were, now shelters French soldiers—though the Turkish Crescent and Star have not yet been obliterated from the Jaffa Gate; and the Arab police, in black sheepskin caps and dark blue drill uniforms, keep order as they used to under the Turkish régime....

Though the solemn boom of heavy guns still wakens all the echoes of the Hills of Judæa, though Turkish batteries and Turkish troops move in the neighbourhood of Jericho, and British motor-launches churn the waters of the Dead Sea, the Holy City is wakening from her torpor of years.... Kinder-gartens and boys' and girls' schools, Christian and Jewish, Homes and Orphanages—the Teacher's University, the Missionary Colleges, and the seminaries supervised by Catholic Religious—revive like the withered blossoms of the so-called Jericho Rose....

The Clothes-Market near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,—where skin affections and fleas could be purchased at exorbitant prices—re-opens. In the labyrinth of bâzârs under the shadowy arcades, the Jew and Arab pedlars set up their stalls of rosaries and medals, gaudy religious pictures, and common household wares. Sleek-haired Levantines and Syrians behind counters of modern shops, offer antiques and souvenirs in mother o' pearl and olive-wood; ostrich feathers, roses of Jericho, Syriac Gospels and Rolls of the Law. German stores miraculously become Dutch, offer for sale liqueurs, cigars, sauer-kraut in barrels, tinned sausage, pickles and chocolates.

And the People who Wait for Signs have come out of their various hiding-places. The haggard man who carries a heavy wooden Cross and wears a plaited Crown of Thorns, pants under his heavy burden from station to station along the Sorrowful Way.... And the other, long haired and wearing robes of white, waits again near the Jaffa Gate, carrying his brightly-polished lamp, well trimmed and filled with oil. He says he is one of the Virgins waiting for the Coming of the Bridegroom.... And again, there is another, a handsome, martial figure, in the panoply of a Knight of Malta, folded in a cross-embroidered mantle, girt with a Crusader's sword....

Who knows what compact these and many more have made with One Whom they acknowledge Master. They are content, for their belief in Him, to be despised as fools. Calm, reasonable Christians shudder at, or ignore, while the Children of Islam respect them. To their number another is added with the passage of the days....

December draws to its end again. Tea-parties and concerts are given, and the Representatives of the Three Great Faiths may be said to fraternise. The Red Cross and the Society of St. John of Jerusalem unite in splendid efforts for the good of War-ridden Humanity. The olives are grey-green, and the palms are yellowing, and the first pale mist of almond-bloom pinkens on the hillsides, above the hedges of tamarisk—and Christmas Eve is here....

The portly Arab in the bath-chair drawn by the tiny donkey sits in his accustomed place, from which fierce gales and heavy Winter rains alone may drive him, in the shelter of the south wall of the Enclosure of the Tombs of the Kings....

Two chaplains of the E.E.F. go by in their cross-badged khaki; accompanied by an elderly Armenian in flowing black kaftan and high square head-dress.

"There's the New Crank," says an Oxford voice. "And the little Syrian woman, and the bath chair and the donkey-boy—and the donkey possibly—all waiting as usual for the Sign that doesn't come!"

"'The Sign.' What Sign? ..."

The second khaki chaplain looks with interest at the Arab. The strong south wind has blown back the folds of his ample head-covering, and it is plainly seen what kind of man the drapery has concealed. His huge ears, swollen beyond all shape, hang down on the bulgy, turgid flesh of the neck-folds, his huge hooked nose, and long but shapeless upper-lip dominate an extraordinary acreage of countenance that is ridged and knobbed and crumpled like a new-dug potato-field. And his great hands and gigantic arms, wherever these are visible, present the same appearance, to the chaplain's curious eye.

"Would that be some obscure form of elephantiasis, do you think, now?" he asks the Armenian ecclesiastic who walks by his side.

"It is not disease of any kind," the Armenian answers in English. "The man has been beaten—nearly to death, and has lived—that is all! ... Many of my friends, condemned to the severest punishment of the Turkish asâyisi, have died under the infliction—as this man was meant to do...."

"Speak lower!" It is the second chaplain in khaki who is speaking. "That Arab understands you.... I saw it in his eyes...."

"Not he!" the first speaker returns. "He's an Arab pure and simple—and some of the Tommies have dubbed him 'The Father of Buffaloes.' The little woman with him has a nickname—somebody told me.... "Sabâh-el-kheir, Daddy Buffalo.... Khud!—and good luck to you! ..."

And a couple of Turkish beshliks clink into the Arab's lap.

"Thy day be happy and blessed!" says a deep bass voice in answer. The three pedestrians pass on, and the beshliks fall amongst the straw in the bottom of the bath-chair. Unseen save by the sharp glance of the Arab donkey-boy, who squats in the shadow of the wall of the Enclosure, playing, with lines scratched upon the smooth limestone, a game that is scored upon the walls and flags of old Pompeii, as upon the recently excavated guard-room of the Herodian Mercenaries, eighteen feet under the level of the Sorrowful Way. A brace of coppers thrown to a sick man sitting by the wayside are surely given in charity. Yet when the sick one dies, the Fund amassed to build and endow the Hebrew University (the foundations of which are being even now blasted in the rock of Mount Scopas) will be enriched by a legacy of three hundred and eighty thousand pounds....

"What does it matter, Essie? Sweet One, why dost thou tremble? Surely the gift was kindly meant!"

The speaker thinks that his companion has been hurt by the bestowal of the coins. But she has not even seen the gift made, or heard the giver's words....

A moment since, a grey Staff car, driven by a soldier-chauffeur with the Great Headquarters' brassard—coming from the direction of the station beyond the Montefiore Hospice, by the road that skirts the City wall, to debouch upon the Road of the Damascus Gate—has passed by the Tombs of the Kings. Driven at speed, it has flashed by, carrying strangers with it. But one face was not strange.... One voice; borne on the wind that blows from Samaria, has echoed in the ears of Esther-Ummshni, bringing memories that brim the heart....

"I did not hear.... I thought I saw.... What is it, what is it, Mabruk?"

For the Arab boy has run down the road to meet a messenger from the Khân.

"What says he? ..." asks the deep, slow voice.

"He says—Mabruk says—" Esther commences, shaking like a wind-blown reed of the Jordan behind her shrouding veils: "that strangers are at Shafât. He says—"

"O Shaykh!—" Mabruk, a lanky crow-necked youngster, son of the Mohammedan landlord of the Shafât Khân, importantly steps forwards: "Great ones have arrived at my father's Khân. Two lords of the Inglizi, and a lady, tall and beautiful. They have sent me in the horseless carriage to bring back thee and the Sitti. This letter also they have sent thee by thy servant's hands.—Behold! ..."

Mabrûk lifts the note to his eyes and forehead, and hands it over. A folded sheet of paper, sealed with an impression of a well-known onyx signet, and scrawled with some hastily pencilled lines in a beloved hand: