Nearer sounded the footsteps on the graveled walk and in frightened haste the girl drew out the key from the gate and slipped away into the shrubbery, grateful for the blotting shadows.
At the foot of a rose bush she crouched to thrust the key into a hole in the loose earth, covering the top and drawing the low branches over it.
"Aimée," came a guarded call. "Aimée!"
Still stooping, she tried to steal through the bushes, but the thorns held her and she stood up, pulling at her robes.
"Yes? Miriam?" she said faintly, and desperately freeing herself, she hurried forward towards the dark, bulky figure of her old nurse, emerging now into the moonlight.
"Alhamdolillah—Glory to God!" ejaculated the old woman, but cautiously under her breath. "Come quickly—he is here—thy father! And thou in the garden, at this hour.... But come," and urgently she gripped the girl's wrist as if afraid that she would vanish again into the shadows of the shrubbery.
Aimée felt her knees quake under her. "My father!" she murmured, and her voice died in her throat.
Had he discovered? Had some one seen her slip out? Or recognized her at the ball?
The panic-stricken conjectures surged through her in dismaying confusion. She tried to beat down her fear, to think quickly, to rally her force, but her swimming senses were still invaded with the surprise of those last moments at the gate, her heart still beating with the touch of Ryder's arms about her ... of that long, deep look ... that kiss, beyond all else, that kiss....
Little rivers of fire were running through her veins. Shame and proud anger set up their swift reactions. Oh, what wings of wild, incredible folly had brought her to this! To be kissed like—like a dancing girl—by a man, an unknown, an American!
How could he, how could he! After all his kindness—to hold her so lightly.... And yet there had been no lightness in his eyes, those eager, shining young eyes, so gravely concerned....
But she could not stop to think of this thing. Her father was waiting.
"He came in like a fury," the old nurse was panting, as they scurried up the walk together, "and asked for you ... and your room empty, your bed not touched!... Oh, Allah's ruth upon me, I went trotting through the house, mad with fear.... Up to the roofs then down to the garden ... sending him word that you were dressing that he should not know the only child of his house was a shameless one, devoid of sense."
"But there is no harm in a garden," breathed the girl, her face hot with shame. "To-night was so hot—"
"Is there no coolth upon the roof?"
"But the roses—"
"Can roses not be brought you? Have you no maids to attend you?"
"I am tired of being attended! Can I never be alone—"
"Alone in the garden!... A pretty talk! Eh, I will tell thy father, I will have a stop put to this—hush, would you have him hear?" she admonished, in a sudden whisper, as they opened the little door at the foot of the dark well of spiral steps.
Like conspirators they fled up the staircase, and then with fumbling haste the old nurse dragged off the girl's mantle and veil, muttering at the pins that secured it. She shook out the pale-flowered chiffon of her rumpled frock and gathered back a strand of her dark, disordered hair.
"Say that you were on the roofs," she besought her.
For a moment the girl put the warm rose of her cheek against the old woman's dark, wrinkled one.
"But you are good, Dadi," she said softly, using the Turkish word for familiar old servants.
With a sound of mingled vexation and affection Miriam pushed her ahead of her into the drawing-room.
It was a long, dark room, on whose soft, buff carpet the little gilt chairs and sofas were set about with the empty expectancy of a stage scene in a French salon. French were the shirred, silk shades upon the electric lamps, French the music upon the chic rosewood piano.
And then, as if some careless property man had overlooked them in changing the act, two window balconies of closely carved old wood, of solidly screening mashrubiyeh wood, jutted out from one cream-tinted wall, and above a gilded sofa, upholstered in the delicate fabric of the Rue de la Paix, hung a green satin banner embroidered in silver with a phrase from the Koran.
Tewfick Pasha was at one side of the room, filling his match case. He was in evening dress, a ribbon of some order across a rather swelling shirt bosom, a red fez upon his dark head.
At his daughter's entrance he turned quickly, with so sharp a gleam from his full, somewhat protuberant black eyes that her guilty heart fairly turned over in her.
It made matters no more comforting to have Miriam packed from the room.
She would deny it all, she thought desperately ... No, she would admit it, and implore his indulgence.... She would admit nothing but the garden.... She would admit the ball.... She wouldneveradmit the young man....
With conscious eyes and flushing cheeks, woefully aware of dew-drenched satin slippers and an upsettingly hammering heart, Aimée presented the young image of irresolute confusion.
To her surprise there was no outburst. Her father was suddenly gay and smiling, with a flow of pleasant phrases that invited her affection. In his good humor—and Tewfick Pasha liked always to be kept in good humor—he had touches of that boyish charm that had made him theenfant gâtéof Paris and Vienna as well as Cairo and Constantinople. Anenfantno more, in the robustly rotund forties, his cheerful self-indulgence demanded still of his environment that smiling acquiescence that kept life soft and comfortable.
And now it suddenly struck Aimée, through her tense alarm, that his smile was not a spontaneous smile, but was silently, uneasily asking his daughter not to make something too unpleasant for him ... that something that had brought him here, at an unprecedented midnight ... that had kept him waiting until she, supposedly, should rise and dress....
If it were not then a knowledge of her escapade—?
The relief from that fear made everything else bearable. She was even able to entertain, with a certain welcome, the alternative alarm that he had decided to marry again—that nightmare from whose realization the unknown gods (or more truly, the unknown goddesses of the Cairene demi-monde!) had assisted to save her.
There was a furtive excitement about him that fanned the supposition.
Then, quite suddenly, the illuminating lightning cut the clouds.
"My dear child, I have news, really important news for you. If I have not been discussing your future," said Tewfick Pasha, staring with stern nonchalance ahead and determinedly unaware of her instant stiffening of attention, "I have by no means been neglectful of it.... To-day—indeed to-night—there has been a consummation of my plans.... It is not to every daughter that a father may hurry with such an announcement."
Her first feeling was a merciful relief. He knew nothing then of the ball! She could breathe again.... It was her marriage that had brought him.
No new danger, that, but the eternal menace that she had always to dread.... But how many times had he promised that she should have no unknown husband, imposed by tradition! How many times had she indulged dreams of Europe, of bright, free romance!
And now he was off on some tangent from which it would need all her coaxing wit to divert him. With wide eyes painfully intent, her little, jeweled fingers very still in their locked grip in her lap, the color draining from her cheeks, she sat waiting for the revelation.
What was it all? Had he really decided upon something? Upon some one?
Tewfick Pasha appeared in no hurry to inform her. He wandered rather confusedly into a rambling speech about her age and her position and the responsibilities of life and his inabilities to prevent their reaching her, and about his very tender affection for her and his understanding of all those girlish reticences and reluctances which made innocent youth so exquisite, while silently his daughter hung her head and wondered what he would be saying if he knew that she had broken every canon of seclusion and convention, had talked and danced with a man....
His astonishment would be so horrific that she flinched even from the thought.
And if he knew, moreover, that this man had caught her and kissed her—!
She told herself that she was disgraced for life. She had a dreamy desire to close her eyes and lean back and dream on about that disgrace....
But she must listen to her father. He was talking now about the powers of wealth, not merely the nominal riches of his somewhat precarious political affiliations, but solid, sustaining, invested and invulnerable wealth.
Unexpectedly Aimée laughed. "He must be very plain," she declared, her face brightening with mockery, "if you take so long to tell me his name!"
Not, she added to herself under her breath, that any name would weigh a feather's difference!
"On the contrary," and the pasha's eyes met hers frankly for the first time and he seemed delighted to indulge a laugh, "he has the reputation of good looks. He is muchà la mode."
"Beautiful and golden—did you meet him just to-night, my father?" Aimée went on, in that light audacity which he had loved to indulge.
Now he smiled, but his glance went uneasily away from her.
"Not at all. This is a serious affair, you understand—the devil of a serious affair!" and for the first time she felt she heard the accents of his candor.
But again he was back to voluble protestation. This man was really an old friend. He boggled over the word, then got it out resonantly. A man he knew well. Not a young man, perhaps—certainly he was not going to hand his only daughter to any boy, a mere novice in life!—but a man who could give her the position she deserved. Not only a rich man, but an influential one.
His name, he brought out at last, was Hamdi Bey. He was a general in the armies of the sultan.
It was a long moment before she could piece any shreds of recollection together.
Hamdi Bey ... A general.... Why, that was a man her father had disliked ... more than once he had dropped resentful phrases of his airs, his arrogance ... had recounted certain clashes with malicious joy.
And now he was planning—no, seriously announcing—
A general ... He must be terribly old....
Not that it made any difference. Old or young, black or white, general or ghikar, would mean nothing in her life. She would have none of him ... none of him.... Never would she endure the humiliation of being handed over like a toy, an odalisque, a slave....
What had happened? She could only suppose that her father had been overcome by that wealth of the general's on which he had made her such a speech. Or perhaps his dislike of Hamdi had been founded on nothing but resentment of Hamdi's airs of superiority, and now that the bey was condescending to ask for her hand her father's flattered appeasement was rushing into genial acceptance.
Anything might be possible to Tewfick Pasha's eternally youthful enthusiasms.
She told her frightened heart that she was not afraid.... Her father would never really fail her.... And she would never surrender to this degradation; for all her fright and all her flinching from defiance she divined in herself some hidden stuff of resistance, tenacious to endure ... some strain of daring which had made her brave that wild escapade to-night.
Was it still the same night? Were the violins still playing, the people still dancing in their fairy land of freedom?... Was that young man in the Highland dress, that unknown American, was he back there dancing with some other girl?
What was it he had said? To-morrow night, and another night, he would be there in the lane.... If she would come! As if she would demean herself, after his rude affront, to steal again to the gate, like a gardener's daughter—!
Her thoughts were so full of him. And now she had this new horror to face, this marriage to Hamdi Bey. Did her father dream that she would not resist? It was against such a danger that she had long ago stolen a garden key, a key to the outer world in which she had neither a friend nor a piaster to save her....
"My dear father," she said entreatingly, "please do not tell me that you really mean—that you really think you would like to—that you would consider—this man—"
He turned on her a suddenly direct, confessing look.
"Aimée, I havearrangedthis matter."
He added heavily, "To-night. That is what I came to tell you."
In the silence that settled upon them he finally ceased his effort to ignore her shocked dismay. He abandoned his airy pretense that the affair could possibly evoke her enthusiasm. He sucked at his cigarette like a rather sullen little boy.
"I have always indulged you, Aimée," he said at last, without looking round at her. "I hope you are not going to make me infernally sorry."
"I think you are m-making me inf-fernally sorry," said an unsteady little voice.
He looked about. His daughter was sitting very still upon the gilded sofa beneath the banner of Mahomet; as he regarded her two great tears formed in her dark eyes and ran slowly down her cheeks.
With a sound of impatience he jumped to his feet and began to pace up and down the room.
This, he pointed out heatedly, to her, was what a man got who indulged his daughter. This is what came of French and English governesses and modern ideas.... After all he had done—more than any other father! To sit and weep! Weep—at such a marriage! What did she expect of life? Was she not as other women? Did she never look ahead? Had she no pride, no ambition—no hopes? Did she wish never to marry, then, to become anold meeslike her English companion?
"I am but eighteen," she said quiveringly. "Oh, my father, do not give me to this unknown—"
"Unknown—unknown! Do I not know him?"
"But you promised—"
Angrily he gestured with his cigarette. "Do I know what is good for you or do I not? Have I your interest at heart—tell me! Am I a savage, a dolt—"
"But you do not know what it is to be unhappy. I beg of you, my father,—I should die with such a life before me, with such a man for my husband. I am too French, too like my mother—"
"Ah, your mother!... Too French, are you?... But what would you have in France?" he demanded with the bursting appearance of a man making every effort to restrain himself within unreasonable bounds. "Would not your parents there arrange your marriage? You might see the fiancé," he caught the words out of her mouth, "but only for a time or two—after the arrangements—and what is that? What more would you know than what your father knows? Are you a thing to be exhibited—given to a man to gaze at and appraise? I tell you, no.... You are my daughter. You bear my name. And when you marry you marry in the sanctity of the custom of your father—and you go to your husband's house as his mother went to his father."
Timidly she protested, "But my mother—and you—"
"Do not speak of your mother! If she were here she would counsel gratitude and obedience." He turned his back on her. "This is what comes," he muttered, "of this modernity, this education...."
He pitched away his stub as if he were casting all that he hated away with it.
She had never seen him so angry. Helplessly she felt that his vanity and his word were engaged with the general more than she had dreamed. She felt a surge of panic at the immensity of the trouble before her.
"But, my father, if you love me—"
"No, my little one, ifyouloveme!"
With a sudden assumption of good humor over the angry red mottling his olive cheeks, he came and sat beside her, putting his arm about her silently shrinking figure.
"I am a weak fool to stay and drink a woman's tears, as the saying goes," he told her, "but this is what a man gets for being good natured.... But, tears or not, I know what is best.... Come, Aimée, have I not ever been fond of you—?"
He patted her hand with his own plump one where bright rings were sparkling deep in the encroaching flesh. Aimée looked down with a sudden wild dislike.... That soft, ingratiating hand, with its dimples and polished nails, which thought it could pat her so easily into submission....
It was nothing to him, she thought, chokingly, whether she was happy or unhappy. He had decided on the match—perhaps he had foreseen her protests and plunged into it, so as to be committed against her entreaties!—and he was not stopped by any thought of her feelings.
After all her hopes! After all he had promised!
But she told herself that she had never been secure. Beneath all her trust there had always been the silent fear, slipping through the shadows like a serpent.... Some instinct for character, more precocious than her years, had whispered through her fond blindness, and initiated her into foreboding.
"Come now, my dear," he said heartily, "this is a surprise, of course, but after all you will find it is for the best—much for the best—"
His voice died away. After a long pause, "You may make the arrangements," she told him in a still, tenacious little voice, "but you cannot make me marry him.... I will never put on the marriage dress.... Never wear the diadem.... Never stir one step within his house."
A complete silence succeeded this declaration. He got up violently from beside her. She did not dare look at him. He was going away, she thought.
It would be the beginning of war. She did not know what he would do but she knew that she would endure it.
And the gossip of the harems would be her protection. Her opposition, bruited through those feminine channels, would not be long in reaching Hamdi Bey.... And no man could to-day be so callous of his pride or the world's opinion that he would be willing to receive such a revolting bride.
Did her father think of that, that poor, pale power of hers? He stood irresolute, as if meditating a last exhortation, and then suddenly turned on her the haggard face of a violent despair.
"Would you see me ruined?" he said passionately.
Sharply he glanced about the room, at the far, closed doors where it was not inconceivable that old Miriam was lurking, and strode over to her and began talking very jerkily and huskily, over her bent head.
"I tell you that Hamdi is making this a condition—it is the price of silence, of those papers back.... He came to me to-night. I knew that hound of Satan had been smelling about, but I could not imagine—as if, between gentlemen—"
At that, she lifted her stupefied head.... Her father, with the face of a cornered fox!... She caught her breath with the shock of it. Her lips parted, but only her mute eyes asked their startled questions.
Hurriedly, shamefacedly, with angry resentments and self-justifications, he was pouring a flood of broken phrases at her. She caught unintelligible references to narrow laws and the imbecile English, to impositions binding only upon the fools.... And then the wordhasheesh.
Sharply then the truth took its outlines. Her father had been smuggling in hasheesh. Hamdi Bey had discovered this, and Hamdi Bey, unless silenced, had threatened betrayal.
The danger was real. English laws were stringent. Vaguely the horrors loomed—arrest, trial.... Even if he escaped the scandal was ruin....
Small wonder that her father had come flying upon the wings of his danger and its deliverance, small wonder that his brow was wet and his lips dry and his eyes hard with terror.
Thrown to the winds now his pretense of affection for Hamdi Bey! He hated and feared him. The old fox had done this, he declared, to get a hold upon him, for always there had been bad blood.
And the bey had heard, of course, of the beauty of the pasha's daughter. Some cousin had babbled.... And undoubtedly the rumor of that beauty—Tewfick Pasha received his inspiration upon the moment, but that was not gainsaying its truth—had determined the bey to find some vulnerable hold.
He was like that, a soft-voiced, sardonic devil! And this accursed business of the hasheesh had served his ends. To-night, he had come with his proofs....
"So you see," muttered Tewfick Pasha, "what the devil of a serious business this is. And how any talk of—of unreadiness—if you were not amiable, for example, to his cousin when she calls upon you—might serve to anger him.... And so—"
Significantly his glance met hers. Her eyes fell, stricken. The color flooded her trembling face. She quivered with confused pain, with shame for his shame, with terror and fright ... with a hot, protective compassion that tore at her pride....
She struggled against her dismay, trying for reassuring little words that would not come. Her heart seemed beating thickly in her throat.
She never knew just what she said, what little broken words of pity, of understanding, of promise, she achieved. But her father suddenly dropped beside her, with an abandon reminiscent of theenfant gâtéof his Paris days, and drew her hands to his lips, kissing their soft, quiescent palms.... She drew one away and placed it upon his dark head from which the fez had tumbled.
For the moment she was sorry, as one is sorry for a hurt child. And her sorriness held her heart warm, in the glow of giving comfort.
She had need of that warmth. For a cold tide was rising in her, a tide of chill, irresistible foreboding....
For all the years of her life.... For all the years....
The remaining hours of Jack Ryder's night might be divided into three periods. There was an interval of astounding exhilaration coupled with complete mental vacancy, during which a figure in a Scots costume might have been observed by the astonished Egyptian moon striding obliviously along the silent road to the Nile, past sleeping camels and snoringdhurramerchants—a period during which his sole distinguishable sensation was the memory of enchanting eyes, of a voice, low and lovely ... of a slender figure in a muffling tcharchaf ... of the touch of soft lips beneath a gauzy veil....
This period was succeeded by hours of utter incredulity, in which he lay wide-eyed on the sleeping porch of McLean's domicile and stared into the white cloud of his fly net and questioned high heaven and himself.
Had he really done this? Had he actually caught and kissed this girl, this girl whose name he did not know, whose face he had never seen, of whom he knew nothing but that she was the daughter of a Turk and utterly forbidden by every canon of sanity and self-preservation?
In the name of wonder, what had possessed him? The night? The moon? The mystery of the unknown?... If he had never really kissed her he might have convinced himself that he had never really wanted to. But having kissed her—!
He looked upon himself as a stranger. A stranger of whom he would be remarkably wary, in the days and nights to come ... but a stranger for whom he entertained a sort of secret, amazed respect. There had been an undeniable dash and daring to that stranger....
During the third period he slept.
When he awoke, late in the morning, and descended from a cold tub to a breakfast room from which McLean had long since departed, he brought yet another mood with him, a mood of dark, deep disgust and a shamed inclination to dismiss these events very speedily from memory. For that shadowy and rather shady affair he had abandoned the merry and delightful Jinny Jeffries and got himself involved now in the duty of explanations and peacemaking.
What in the world was he going to say?
He meditated a note—but he hated a lie on paper. It looked so thunderingly black and white. Besides, he could not think of any. "Dear Jinny—Awfully sorry I was called away."
No, that wouldn't do. He could take refuge in no such vagueness. Unfortunately, he and Jinny were on such terms of old intimacy that a certain explicitness of detail was expected.
"Dear Jinny—I had to leave last night and take a girl home—"
No, she would ask about the girl. Jinny had a propensity for locating people. It wouldn't do.
His masculine instinct for saying the least possible in a matter with a woman, and his ripening experience which taught him to leave no mystery to awaken suspicion, wrestled with the affair for some time and then retired from the field.
He compromised by telephoning Jinny briefly—and Jinny was equally as brief and twice as cool and cryptic—and promising to take her out to tea.
He reflected that if he took her to tea he would really have to stay over another night, for it would be too late to regain his desert camp. But the circumstances seemed to call for some social amend.... And no matter how many nights he stayed he certainly was not going to lurk about that lane, outside garden doors!
He must have been mad, stark, staring, March-hatter mad!
That morning, during its remainder, he concluded his buying of supplies and saw to their shipment upon the boat that left upon the following morning. That noon he lunched with an assistant curator of the Cairo museum who found him a good listener.
That afternoon he escorted Jinny Jeffries and her uncle and aunt, the Josiah Pendletons, to tea upon the little island in the Cairo park, where white-robed Arabs brought them tea over the tiny bridge and violins played behind the shrubbery and white swans glided upon the blue lake, and then he carried them off in a victoria to view the sunset from the Citadel heights.
Not a word about the dance—except a general affirmative to Mrs. Pendleton's question if he had enjoyed himself. The Pendletons had not stayed to look on for long, and Jinny had apparently not worn her bleeding heart upon her sleeve.
But this immunity could not last. He could not hug the protecting Pendletons to him forever.
Nor did he want to. They waned upon him. Mrs. Pendleton's conversation was a perpetual, "Do look at—!" or dissertations from the guide books—already she had imparted a great deal of Flinders Petrie to him about his tombs. Mr. Pendleton was neither enthusiastic nor voluble, but he was attacking the objects of their travels in the same thorough-going spirit that he had attacked and surmounted the industrial obstacles of his career, and he went to a great deal of persistent trouble to ascertain the exact dates of passing mosques and the conformations of their arches.
The travelers had already "done" the Citadel. They had climbed its rocky hill, they had viewed the Mahomet Ali mosque and its columns and its carpets and had taken their guide's and their guidebook's word that it was an inferior structure although so amazingly effective from below; they had looked studiously down upon the city and tried to distinguish its minarets and towers and ancient gates, they had viewed with proper quizzicalness the imprint in the stone parapet of the hoof of that blindfolded horse which the last of the Mamelukes, cornered and betrayed, had spurred from the heights.
So now, no duty upon them, Ryder led them past the Citadel, up the Mokattam hills behind it, to that hilltop on which stood the little ancient mosque of the Sheykh-el-Gauchy, where the sunset spaces flowed round them like a sea of light and the world dropped into miniature at their feet.
Below them, in a golden haze, Cairo's domes and minarets were shining like a city of dreams. To the north, toy fields, vivid green, of rice and cotton lands, and the silver thread of the winding Nile, and all beyond, west and southwest, the vast, illimitable stretch of desert, shimmering in the opalescent air, sweeping on to the farthest edge of blue horizon.
"A nice resting place," said Jack Ryder appreciatively of the tomb of the Sheykh-el-Gauchy.
"I presume the date is given," Mr. Pendleton was murmuring, as he began to ferret with his Baedecker.
Mrs. Pendleton sighed sentimentally. "He must have been very fond of nature."
"He was very distrustful of his wives," said Ryder, grinning. "He had three of them, all young and beautiful."
"I thought you said he was a saint?" murmured Jinny, to which interpolation he responded, "Wouldn't three wives make any man a saint?" and resumed his narrative.
"And so he had his tomb made where he could overlook the whole city and observe the conduct of his widows."
"They could move," objected Miss Jeffries.
"The female of the Mohammedan species is not the free agent that you imagine," Ryder retorted, beginning with a smile and ending with a queer, reminiscent pang. He had a moment's rather complicated twinge of amusement at her reactions if she should know that to an encounter with a female of the Mohammedan species was to be attributed his departure from her party last night.
And then he remembered that he hadn't decided yet what to tell her and the time was undoubtedly at hand.
The timewasat hand. The Pendletons were too thorough-going Americans not to abdicate before the young. They did not saunter self-consciously away and make any opportunity for Jack and Jinny, as sympathetic European chaperons might have done; they sat matter-of-factedly upon the rocks while their competent young people betook themselves to higher heights.
Conscientiously Ryder was pointing out the pyramid fields.
"Gizeh, Abusir, Sakkara, Dahsur—and now here, if you look—that's the Medun pyramid—that tiny, sharp prick. If we had glasses...."
"Yes; but why didn't you like the ball?" murmured Jinny the direct.
"I did like the ball. Very much."
"Then why didn't you stay?"
"I—I wasn't feeling top-hole," he murmured lamely, wondering why girls always wanted to go back and stir up dogs that had gone comfortably to sleep.
"Did it come on suddenly?" said Jinny, unsympathetically, her eyes still upon the pyramids.
Something whimsical twitched at Jack Ryder's lips. "Very suddenly. Like thunder, out of China crost the bay."
"I suppose that dancing with the same girl in succession brings on the seizures?"
So she had noticed that!... Not for nothing were those bright, gray eyes of hers! Not for nothing the red hair.
"Well, I rather think it did," he said deliberately. "That girl was a child who hadn't danced in four years—so she said, and I believe her."
And Jinny received what he intended to convey. "Stepped on your buckled shoon and you felt a martyr?... But why bolt? There were other girls whohaddanced within four years—"
"I went into the garden," he murmured. "The fact is, I was feeling awfully—queer," he brought out in an odd tone.
Queer was a good word for it. He let it go at that. He couldn't do better.
Jinny looked suddenly uncertain. Her pique was streaked with compunction. She had been horribly angry with him for running away, and she remembered his opposition to the idea enough to be suspicious of any disappearance—but there was certainly an accent of embarrassed sincerity about him.
Perhaps hehadbeen ill. Sudden seizures were not unknown in Egypt. And for all his desert brown he didn't look very rugged.
She murmured, "I hope you hadn't taken anything that disagreed with you."
"H'm—it rather agreed with me at the time," said Jack, and then brought himself up short. "I expect I haven't looked very sharp after myself—"
But Jinny did not wholly renounce her idea. "Does it always take you at dances you don't want to go to?"
"That's unfair. I came, you know."
"You came—and went."
"I'd have been all right if I hadn't come," he murmured, and Jinny felt suddenly ashamed of herself.
"Do you suppose that you would stay all right if you came to dinner?" she offered pacificably. "It's our last night, you know, till we come back from the Nile."
"I wish I could." Ryder stopped short. Now, why didn't he? Certainly he didn't intend—
But his tongue took matters promptly out of his hesitation's hands. "Fact is, I've an engagement." He added, appeasingly, "That's why I was so keen on getting you for tea." And Jinny told him appreciatively that it was a lovely tea and a lovely view.
"We're going to be at the hotel, I expect," she threw out, carelessly, "and if you get through in time—"
Rather hastily he assured her that indeed, if he got through in time—
She was a nice girl, was Jinny. A pretty girl, with just the right amount of red in her hair. Sanity would have sent him to the hotel to dine with her.
Sanity would also have sent him to the Jockey Club with McLean.
Certainly sanity had nothing to do with the way that he kept himself to himself, after his farewells at the hotel with the Pendletons, and took him to an out-of-the-way Greek café where he dined very badly upon stringy lamb and sodden baklava.
Later he wandered restlessly about dark, medieval streets where squat groups were clustered about some coffee house door, intent upon a game of checkers or some patriarchal story teller, recounting, very probably, a bandied narration of the Thousand and One Nights. Through other open doors drifted the exasperating nasal twang of Cairene music, and idly pausing, Ryder could see above the red fezes and turbans that topped the cross-legged audiences the dark, sleek, slowly-revolving body of some desert dancing girl.
Irresolutely he drifted on to the Esbekeyih quarters, to the streets where the withdrawn camels and donkeys had left pre-eminent the carriages and motors of that stream of Continental night life which sets towards Cairo in the season, Russian dukes and German millionaires, Viennese actresses and French singers and ladies of no avowed profession, gamblers, idlers, diplomats, drifters, vivid flashes of color in the bizarre, kaleidoscopic spectacle.
It was quite dark now. The last pale gleam of the afterglow had faded, and the blue of the sky, deepening and darkening, was pierced with the thronging stars. It was very warm; no breeze, but a fitful stirring in the tops of the feathery palms.
The streets were growing still. Only from some of the hotels came the sound of music from lighted, open windows.
Jinny would be rather expectant at her hotel. He could, of course, drop in for a few minutes since he was so near.... He walked past the hotel.... Jinny would be packing—or ought to be. A pity to disturb her.... And his dusty tweeds and traveling cap was no calling costume....
He walked past again. And this time he paused, on the brink of a dark canyon of a lane, running back between walls hung with bougainvillea.
Quite suddenly he remembered that he had told that girl, whose name he did not know, that he would come. It was a definite promise. It was an obligation.
He could do nothing less. It might be unwelcome, absurd, a nuisance, but really it was an obligation.
He sauntered down the lane, keeping carefully in the shadow. He loitered within that deep-set door—and felt a queer throb of emotion at the sight of it—and so, sauntering and loitering, he waited in the darkening night, promising himself disgustedly through the dragging moments to clear out and be done with this, but still interminably lingering, his pulses throbbing with that disowned expectancy.
Very cautiously, the gate began to open.
Inch by inch the gate edged open. Warily he presented himself. The furtive crack gave him an instant's glimpse of a dark form within the shadows, then, in his face, it closed.
Ryder waited. In a moment it was opened wider, and he saw the dark-shrouded head and the veiled face of the Turkish girl, and out from the blackness the sparkle of young eyes.
"Is it—but who is it?" whispered a doubtful voice, and at his, "Why it is I—the American," quickly drawing off his cap, a little hand darted out of the darkness to pluck him swiftly within and the door was closed to within an inch of its opening.
Then the black phantom, drawing him back among the shrubbery, against the wall, turned with a muffled note of laughter.
"But the costume! Imagine that I—I was looking again for a Scottish chieftain with red kilts and a feather in his cap!"
"And instead—" Ryder glanced down at his tweeds with humorous recognition of his change of figure. Then his eyes returned to her.
"But you are the same," he murmured.
She was indeed the same. The same black street mantle, down to her very brows. The same black veil, up to her very eyes. And the eyes—! Their soft mysterious loveliness—the little winged tilt of the brows!
Apparently their effect was disconcertingly the same. He was conscious of a feeling that was far from a normal calm.
"So you were all right?" he half whispered. "Those steps, last night, you know, made me horribly afraid for you—"
"But, yes, I am all right."
As excitement gained upon him, a constraint was falling upon her. They were both remembering that moment, overlooked in the rush of recognition, when they had parted in this place, when he had had the temerity to clasp and kiss her.
Aimée was standing rigid and wary, ready for flight at the first fear. She told herself that she had only come through pride, the pride that insisted upon humbling his presumption. She would let him see how bitterly he had offended.... She had only come for this, she told herself—and to see if he had come.
If he hadnotcome! That would have dealt a sorrily humiliating blow.
But he was here. And reassured and haughty, repeating that she was mortally offended, her spirit alternating between pride and shame and a delicious fear, she stood there in the shrubbery, fascinated, like a wild, shy thing of another age.
"That was old Miriam," she explained constrainedly. "My father had come in—with unexpectedness."
"Lord, it was lucky you were back!"
"Yes, it was—lucky," she assented. "If it had been half an hour before—"
She broke off. There came to the young man a sobering perception of the risk she ran, of the supreme folly of this escapade to which they were entrusting themselves.
It was a realization that deserved some consideration. But, obstinately, with young carelessness, he shook it off. After all, this was comparatively safe for her. She was not out of bounds. At an alarm he could slip away and no one could ever know. What risk there might be was chiefly his own.
"When you asked who it was," he murmured, "it occurred to me that you did not know my name—nor I yours. My own," he added, as she stood unresponsive, "is Ryder—Jack Ryder. You can always get a letter to me at the Agricultural Bank. That is the quickest way. My friend, McLean there, always knows where my diggings are. When in Cairo I stop with him; or at the Rossmore House."
"I shall not need to get a letter to you, monsieur," she told him stiffly.
"But, if you did, how would you sign it?"
"Aimée.... That is French—after my mother."
"Aimée. That means Beloved, doesn't it?"
She was silent.
Surely, she thought with a swelling heart, if he were sorry he would tell her now. It was the moment for contrition, for appeasement, for whatever explanation his American ways might have.
She had thought about him all night. She had given his declaration a hundred forms—but always it had been a declaration.
Now she waited, flagellating her sensitive pride.
Ryder was conscious of the constraint tightening about them and in the dragging pause an uncomfortable common sense had time to put its disconcerting questions.
What did it matter what her name meant? What in the world was he doing here?.... And what did she think she was doing here?... Not that he wanted her to go....
And suddenly it didn't matter—whatever they thought. It was enough that they were together in that still, soft, jasmine-scented dark. He was breathing quickly; his pulses were beating; he had a feeling of strange, heady delight.
The crescent moon was up at last, sailing clear of the house tops, sending its bright rays through the filigree of tall shrubs. A finger of light edged the contour of her shrouded head.
He bent a little closer.
"Won't you," he said softly, "take off your veil for me?"
Appalled, she clasped it to her. He had no idea in the world of the shock of that request. It would be only a faint parallel of its impropriety to suggest to Jinny Jeffries that she discard her frock. Even Ryder's acquaintance with Egypt could not tell him how that swift, confident eagerness of his could startle and affront.
"I want to see you so very much," he was murmuring, and met the chill disdain of her retort, "But it is not for you to see my face, monsieur!"
"Who is to see it?" he demanded.
"Who but the man I am to marry," she gave distinctly back.
The word hit him like stone.
He was conscious of a shock. Did she intend to rebuke—or to imply—to question his intention? The steadiness of her low voice suggested a certain steadiness of design.... He had heard of girls who knew their own minds ... girls with unexpectedly far-sighted vision.... Perhaps, poor child, she looked upon him as romantic escape from all that was restrictive in her life. Secluded women go fast—when they start.
The devil take him for that kiss!
A somewhat set look upon his thin face guarded the fluctuations of his soul, but the blood rose strongly under his dark skin.
For a moment he did not venture upon a reply, and in that moment he was suddenly aware that she had caught his meaning from him—and that it was a horrible mistake. It was one of those instants of highly-charged exchanges of meanings whose revelation was as useless to be denied as powerless to be explained.
Then her words came in tumultuous, passionate refutation of his thought. "That is what my father had come to tell me—that he had arranged my marriage. It is a very splendid thing. To a general—a rich general!"
She had not meant to tell him like that! But for the moment she was savagely glad to hurl it at him.
He made no answer. His eyes were inscrutably intent. A variety of things were rearranging themselves in his head.
"You're—you're going to marry him?" he said slowly.
"What else?" But she felt the phrase unfortunate and plunged past it. "It is not for me to say no, monsieur. It is for my father to arrange."
"But his indulgence—? You were telling me, you know, that he was so fond of you. And that you were one of the moderns—the revolting moderns—"
Jack Ryder's tone was questioningly cynical and its raillery cut through her brief sham of pride.
"So I thought, too, last night." A tinge of infinite disillusionment was in her young voice. "But it is not so."
"Then you accept—?"
The shrouded head nodded.
"But you can't want to," he broke out with sudden heat. "You don't know him at all, do you—this general?"
"Know him? I have never seen his face nor heard his voice—and I would die first," she added with bitter, helpless fierceness under her breath.
The veil muffled that from him. "But why—why?" he repeated in an angrily puzzled way.
She made a little gesture of weary impotence. Out of the dark draperies her hands were like white fluttering butterflies.
"What can I do?"
"I should think you could do the Old Harry of a lot."
"Weep?" said the girl with a pale irony not lost upon him.
"Weep—or row. Or run," he added, almost reluctantly.
She turned away her head. "I know, I thought once that I could run. For that I stole the key to this gate. But where would I run, monsieur? I have neither friends, nor—nor the resources.... There have been girls—two sisters—who ran away last year—but they were already married and they had cousins in France. For me, my cousins do not exist. I do not know my mother's family. They disowned her for her marriage, my father says. And so—but it is not possible to evade this.... It is not possible. This marriage is required."
"Required—rot! Can't you—don't you—" he paused, looking down upon her in tremendous and serious uncertainty. The impulse was strong upon him to tell her that he would help her. The accents of her voice had seemed to tear at his very heart.
It was utter madness. Where, in the map of Africa, would he hide her? And how would he take care of her? What would he do to her? Make love to her? Marry her? Take home a wife from an Egyptian harem—a surprising acquisition with which to startle and enchant his decorous family in East Middleton!
And a pretty end to his work here, his reputation, his responsibilities—
It was madness. And the fact that the thought had presented itself, even for his flouting mockery, indicated that he was mad. He told himself to be careful. Better men than he had everlastingly done for themselves because upon a night of stars and moonshine some dark-eyed girl had played the very devil with their common sense.
He reminded himself that he had never set eyes on her until last night, that she might be the consummate perfection of a minx, that there might not be a word of truth in all of this.
This general, now! Sudden. Not a word about it last night. And now—
He had an inkling that even Mohammedan fathers do not rush matters at such a pace.
For all he knew the girl might be inventing this general—for some artless reasons of her own. For all he knew she might be married to him and desirous of escape.
But he didn't believe it. She was too young and shy and virginal. The accents of her candor rebuked his skepticism. He merely told himself these things because the last vestige of his expiring common sense was prompting him.
And after all these creditable and excellent exhortations, to the utter extinction of the last vestige of that common sense he heard himself saying abruptly, "But isn't there anything in the world that I can do—?"
"Nothing, monsieur."
"But for you to submit—like this—"
"It is not to be helped."
"But itisto be helped—if you really dislike it," he added jealously.
"I cannot help it, because—because my father—" She hesitated. The honor of her father and her family pride and affection were all involved, yet suddenly the sacrifice of these became more tolerable than to consent to that image of herself which she saw swiftly defining itself in his mind, that slight, weak creature, whose acquiescent passivity submitted to this marriage.
The thought was unbearable. She was burning beneath her veil. She would tell him.... And perhaps she was not averse, in her childish pride, to the pitiful glory of having him see her in the beauty of her filial sacrifice.
"My father has—has done something against the English laws," she faltered, "and Hamdi Bey, this general, knows of it, and will inform unless—unless my father makes this marriage. A cousin of his has seen me," she added, her young vanity forlornly rearing its head, "and told Hamdi that I am not—not too ill-looking a girl—"
Her essay of a laugh died.
Ryder's look deepened its sharp, defensive concentration.
"This is true—I mean your father is not just putting something over—telling you to get your consent?"
Her thoughts flew back to her father's haggard face. "Oh, it is true! I know."
"And he's going to hand you over—What sort is this Hamdi?"
"A general. Old. Evil enough to lay traps to obtain me."
"It's abomination." The anger in the young man surged beyond his control. "You must not do it.... If your father is clever enough to break a law let him be clever enough to mend it—by himself. Such a sacrifice is not required.... You must realize what this means to you. You must realize—Look here, I'll help you. I'll plan some escape. There must be ways. I have friends—"
She stifled the leap of her heart. She held her head high and made what she thought was a very noble little speech. "It is for my father, monsieur. You do not understand. It is to save my father."
He looked at her in silence. He was afraid to answer for a moment; he could feel the unruly blood beating even in the lips he pressed together.
"But don't you understand—" he blurted at last and broke off.
After all, he did not know this girl. If he swayed her judgment now, and dragged her away, what life, what compensation could he offer her? How did he know that she would not regret it? Would she be happier in a world unknown?....
She had been brought up to this sort of thing. It was bred in her.... Marriage was her inevitable game. This very charm she exercised, this subtle, haunting invasion of his senses, what was that but another proof of the harem existence where all influences were forced to serve the ends of sex ...
And she was so maddeningly resigned to taking this general!
A queer hot rage was gaining possession of him. "Oh, well, if you prefer this," he said brutally, with a youthful desire to wreak pain in return for that strange pain which something was inflicting upon him.
A girl who would let him kiss her one night—and on the next inform him that she was giving herself to an unknown—an old Turk.... If she could go like that, to some other's arms and lips ...
He wanted to take her fiercely in his arms and crush her lips against his and then fling her away and say, "Oh, go to him now—if you can!"
And at the same time he wanted to gather her to him as tenderly as if she were a flower he was guarding and tell her that he would protect her against all the world.
He was divided and confused and blindly angry. He felt baffled and frustrated. He was both aching and raging. And yet he was capable of reminding himself, in some corner of his uninvaded mind, that this was undoubtedly the best thing for them both.
What else? For him? For her?
And yet his tongue went on stabbing her.
"If this is what you are determined to do—" he heard himself saying hardly, yet with a hint of deferred finality.
It was as if he had said, "If this, then, is what you are like! If you are the soft, submissive harem creature, the toy, the odalisque—If you will endure undesired love rather than face the world—"
And she knew that was what he was saying to her. The injustice brought a lump of self-pity to her throbbing throat.... That he should not realize and honor the courage of her sacrifice.... That he should reproach, despise.... She had expected other entreaties ... protestations....
Her heart ached with a throb of steady dreariness.
But she did not stir. Not a line of her drooping draperies wavered towards him. And swallowing that lump in her throat, she achieved a toneless, "That is what I am going to do."
At the other end of the garden a sound came from the house.
Ryder seemed to rouse himself. "Good-bye, then," he said, uncertainly.
"Good-bye, monsieur."
He looked oddly at her. "Good-bye," he muttered again, and turned, and stumbled out of the gate.
A pool of moonlight lay without its arches, and he stepped into it as if coming out of the shadows of an enchanted garden. He stood and straightened himself as if throwing off that garden's spell. He put back his shoulders and took a quick step down the lane.
A slight sound drew his eyes back.
She had followed him to the gate; she stood there, in the moonlight, against the inky wells of shadow into which her black robe flowed, and in the moonlight her face, gazing after him, was an exquisite, ethereal apparition, like a spirit of the garden.
She had cast off her veil. He had a vision of her dark eyes shining over rose-flushed cheeks, of deeper-rose-red lips in curves of haunting sweetness, of the tender contour of her young face, fixed unforgettingly in the radiant moonlight—only an instant's vision, for while the blood stopped in his veins the darkness engulfed her, like a magician's curtain.
But he waited while he heard the gate closed. Still he waited while he heard her locking it. And then for all his hot young pride, he turned back and knocked upon it. He called softly. He whispered entreaties.
Not a sound. Not an answer.
In a revulsion of feeling he turned and made his way blindly from the lane.
She had heard his voice. Like a creature utterly spent, she had been leaning against the great gate from which she had withdrawn the key. But she uttered not a breath in answer, and after she had heard his footsteps die away she turned slowly back and groped among the rose roots for the key's hiding place.
Mechanically she smoothed it over and moved on towards the house. All was quiet there. That sound had been no alarm. Unobserved she slipped within the little door, and up the spiral steps.
She had not seen the dark eyes that were watching her, from the other side of the rose thicket. After the girl had gained the house, the old woman came forward and stooped before the marked bush, muttering under her breath at the thorns. After a few moments she gave a little grunt of satisfaction and her exploring hand drew out the key.
Smoothing again the rifled hiding place among the roses, she made her careful way into the house.