The siesta was past. The sun was tilting towards the west and shadows were beginning to jut out across the blazing sands.
Over the mounds of rubbish the bearers had resumed their slow procession, a picturesque frieze of tattered, indigo-robed, ebony figures, baskets on heads, against a cloudless cobalt sky, and again the hot air was invaded with the monotonous rise and fall of their labor chant.
A man with a short, pointed red beard and an academic face beneath a pith helmet was stooping over the siftings from those baskets, intent upon the stream of sand through the wire screens. Patiently he discarded the unending pebbles, discovering at rare intervals some lost bead, some splinter of old sycamore wood, some fragment of pottery in which a Ptolemy had sipped his wine—or a kitchen wench had soaked her lentils.
Beyond the man were traces of the native camp, a burnt-out fire, a roll of rags, a tattered shelter cloth stuck on two tottering sticks, and distributed indiscriminatingly were a tethered goat, a white donkey with motionless, drooping ears, and a few supercilious camels.
The camp was in the center of a broken line of foothills on the desert's edge. North and south and west the wide sands swept out to meet the sky, and to the east, shutting out the Nile valley, the hills reared their red rock from the yellow drift.
Among the jutting rock in the foreground yawned dark mouths that were the entrances of the discovered tombs, and within one of these tombs was another white man. He was conducting his own siftings in high solitude, a lean, bronzed young man, with dark hair and eyes and, at the present moment, an unexhilarated expression.
It had been two weeks since Jack Ryder had returned to camp. Two interminable weeks. They were the longest, the dullest, the dreariest, the most irritatingly undelighting weeks that he had ever lived through.
But bitterly he resented any aspersion from the long-suffering Thatcher upon his disposition. He wanted it distinctly understood that he wasnotlow-spirited. Not in the least. A man wasn't in the dumps just because he wasn't—well, garrulous. Just because he didn't go about whistling like a steam siren or exult like a cheer leader when some one dug up the effigy of a Hathor-cow.... Just because he objected when the natives twanged their fool strings all night and wailed at the moon.
The moon was full now. Round and white it went sailing blandly over the eternal monotony of desert.... Round and white, it lighted up the eternal sameness of life.... He had never noticed it before, but a moon was a poignantly depressing phenomenon.
He couldn't help it. A man couldn't make himself be a comedian. It wasn't as if he wanted to be a grump. He would have been glad to be glad. He wanted Thatcher to make him glad. He defied him to.
He didn't enjoy this flat, insipid taste of things, this dull grind, this feeling of sameness and dullness that made nothing seem worth while.... A feeling that he had been marooned on a desert island, far from all stir and throb of life.
Suppose he did dig up a Hathor-cow? Suppose he dug up Hathor herself, or Cleopatra, or ten little Ptolemies? What was the good of it?
Not Jinny Jeffries herself could have cast more aspersions upon the personal value of excavations.
When he was tired of denying to himself that there was anything unusual the matter with him, he shifted the inner argument and took up the denial that anything which had happened in Cairo those two weeks before had anything to do with it. As if that rash encountermattered! As if he were the silly, senseless sentimental sort of idiot to go mooning about his work because of a girl—and a girl from a harem with a taste for secret masquerades and Turkish marriages!
As if he cared—!
Of course—he admitted this logically and coldly now to himself, as he sat there in the ray of his excavator's lantern, on the sanded floor at the end of the Hall of Offerings—of course, he was sorry for the girl. It was no life for any young girl—especially a spirited one, with her veins bubbling with French blood.
The system was wrong. If they were going to shut up those girls, they had no business to bring them up on modern ideas. If they kept the mashrubiyeh on the windows and the yashmak on their faces they ought to keep the kohl on their eyes and the henna on their fingers and education out of their hidden heads.
It was too bad.... But, of course, they were brought up to it. Look how quickly that girl had given in. She was Turkish, through and through. Submissive. Docile.... And a darned good thing she was, too! Suppose she had taken him at his fool word. Suppose she had really wanted to get away!
Lucky, that's what he'd been. And it would be a lesson to him. Never again. No more masked young things with their stolen keys and their harem entrances. No more whispered tales of woe in a shady garden. No more—
Violently he wrenched himself from his No Mores. Recollection had a way of stirring an unpleasant tumult.
But it was all over. He had forgotten it—hewouldforget it. He would forgether. Work, that was the thing. Normal, sensible, every day work.
But there was no joy in this tonic work. Somewhere, between a night and a morning, he had lost that glow of accomplishment which had buoyed him, which had made him fairly ecstatic over the discovery of this very tomb.
For this tomb was his own find. It had been found long before by the plundering Persians, and it had been found by Arabs who had plundered the Persian remains—but between and after those findings the oblivious sands had swept over it, blotting it from the world, choking the entrance hall and the shafts, seeping through half-sealed entrances and packing its dry drift over the rifled sarcophagus of the king and over the withered mummy of the young girl in the ante-room. The tombs had been cleared now, down almost to the stone floors, and Ryder was busy with the drifts that had lodged in the crevices about the entrance to the shaft.
It was really an important find. Although much plundered, the walls were intact, and the delicate carvings in the white limestone walls were exceptional examples. And there were some very interesting things to decipher. A scholar and an explorer could well be enthusiastic.
But Ryder continued to look far from enthusiastic. Even when his groping fingers, searching a cranny, came in contact with a hard substance his face did not change to any lightning radiance. Unexpectantly he picked up the sand-encrusted lump and brushed it off. A gleam of gold shone in his hand. But it was no ancient amulet or necklace or breast guard—nor was it any bit of the harness of the plundering Persians. It was a locket, very heavily and ornately carved.
He stood a moment staring down at the thing with a curious feeling of having stood staring down at exactly the same thing before—that subconscious feeling of the repetition of events which supports the theories of reincarnationists—and then, quite suddenly, memory came to his aid.
In McLean's office. That day of the masquerade. Those visiting Frenchmen and that locket they had shown him. Of course the thing reminded him—
And it was remarkably alike. The same thick oval, the same ponderous effect of the coat of arms—if it should prove the same coat of arms that would be a clue!
With his mind still piecing the recollection and surmise together his fingers pressed the spring. There was a miniature within, but it was not the picture of Monsieur Delcassé. Ryder was looking down upon the face of a girl, a beautiful, spirited face, with merry eyes and wistful lips—dark eyes, with a lovely arch of brow, and rose-red lips with haunting curves.
And eyes and brows and lips and curves, it was the face of the girl who had gazed after him in the moonlight against the shadows of the pasha's garden.
"It is no end of good of you, Jack, to take this trouble," Andrew McLean remarked appreciatively, looking up from his scrutiny of the packet which his unexpected luncheon guest had pushed over to his plate.
"Uncommon thoughtful. It's undoubtedly a twin to that locket, the portrait of the man's wife—whatever his name was."
"Delcassé," said Jack Ryder promptly.
Gratefully he drained the second lemon squash which the silent-footed Mohammed had placed at his elbow. It had been a hard morning's trip, this coming in from camp in high haste, and he was hot and dusty.
"You might have sent the thing," McLean mentioned. "I daresay that special agent chap has left the country, for I recollect he said he was at the end of his search.... And, of course, this isn't much of a clue—eh, what?"
"It's everything of a clue," insisted Ryder. "It shows where this Frenchman was working, for the first thing—"
"Unless it had been stolen by some native who lost it in that tomb."
"Natives don't lose gold lockets. Of course it might have been stolen and hidden—but that's far-fetched. It's much more likely that this was the very tomb where Delcassé was working at the time of his death. For one thing, the place showed signs of previous excavation up to the inner corridor, and there I'll swear no modern got ahead of me. And for another thing, it's a perfect specimen of the limestone carving of the Tomb of Thi which Delcassé wrote his book about—looks very much as if it might be by the same artist. There's a flock of hippopotami in a marsh scene with the identical drawing, and there's the same lovely boat in full sail—but there, you bounder, you don't know the Tomb of Thi from a thyroid gland. You're here to administer financial justice, the middle, the high, and the low; your soul is with piasters, not the past. But take my word for it, it's exactly the spot where an enthusiast of the Thi Tomb would be grubbing away.... Lord, they could choose their find in those days!"
"It's uncommonly likely," McLean conceded, abandoning his demolished cherry tart and pulling out his briar. "And if the locket proves the duplicate of the other it indicates that it's a portrait of Madame Delcassé, but it doesn't indicate what has become of Madame Delcassé.... Though in a general way," McLean deduced with Scotch judicialness, "it supports the theory of foul play. The woman would hardly have lost her miniature, or have sold it, except under pressing conditions. In fact—"
Ryder was brusque with his facts.
"That doesn't matter—Madame Delcassé doesn't matter. The thing that matters is—"
As brusquely he broke off. His tongue balked before the revelation but he goaded it on.
"That there is a girl—the living image of that picture."
"I say!" McLean looked up at that, distinctly intrigued. "That's getting on.... You mean you've seen her?"
Ryder nodded, suddenly busy with his cigarette.
"Where is she, now? In Cairo? That's luck, man!... And you say she's like?"
"You'd think it her picture."
"It's an uncommon face." McLean bent over it again. "I fancied the artist had just been making a bit of beauty, but if there's a girl like that—! Fancy stumbling on that!... But where is she? And what name does she go by?"
"Oh, her name—she doesn't know her own, of course." Ryder paused uncertainly. "She's in Cairo," he began again vaguely. "She'd be just about the right age—eighteen or so. She—she's had awf'ly hard luck." Distressfully he hesitated.
The shrewd eyes of McLean dwelt upon him in sorrowful silence. "Eh, Jock," he said at last, with mock scandal scarcely veiling rebuke. "I did not know that you knew any of that sort—the poor, wee lost thing.... Tell me, now—"
"Tell you you're off your chump," said Jack rudely. "She's no lost lamb. Fact is, she's never spoken to a man—except myself." He rather enjoyed the start this gave McLean after his insinuations. It helped him on with his story.
"The girl doesn't know her own name at all, I gather. She thinks she's the daughter of Tewfick Pasha. Her mother married the Turk and died very soon afterwards and he brought up this girl as his own. She says she's his only child."
He paused, ostensibly to blow an elaborate smoke ring, but actually to enjoy McLean's astonishment. As astonishment, it was distinctly vivid. It verged upon a genuine horror as Ryder's meaning sank into his friend's mind.
McLean knew—slightly—Tewfick Pasha. He knew—supremely—the inviolable seclusion of a daughter of such a household. He knew the utter impossibility of any man's speech with her.
Yet here was Ryder telling him—
Ryder's telling him was a sketchy performance. He mentioned the girl's appearance at the masquerade and their acquaintance. He touched lightly upon her attempted flight and his pursuit. Even more lightly he passed over those lingering moments at her garden gate and the exchange of confidences.
"She said that her dead mother had been French. And that her name was her mother's—Aimée. So there is—"
"But the likeness, man—her face? She never unveiled to you?"
"Well, the next night—"
"Thenextnight?"
It was at this point that Ryder began to lose his relish of McLean's astonishment.
"Yes, the next night," he repeated with careful carelessness.... "I told the girl I would come and see if she got in all right—there had been some footsteps the night before—"
"And you went? And she came?"
"Do you suppose she sent her father?"
"You're lucky she didn't send her father's eunuch," McLean retorted grimly. "Well, get on with your damning story. The girl took off her veil—"
"Nothing of the kind," said Jack a trifle testily—so soon does conventional masculinity champion the conservatism of the other sex! "That was just as I was going—gone, in fact. I looked back and she had drawn her veil aside. The moon was bright on her face—I saw her as clear as daylight, and I tell you that this miniature is a picture of her. She is Delcassé's daughter and she doesn't know it. Her mother was stolen by that disgusting old Turk—"
"Hold on a bit. Fifteen years ago Tewfick could hardly have been thirty and he has the rep of a Don Juan. It may have been a love affair or it may have been plunder.... The girl remembers her?"
"Very little. She was so young when her mother died. She said that the father was so in love that he never married again."
"H'm ... It seems to me that I've heard tales of our Tewfick and of pretty ladies in apartments. Cairo is a city of secrets and tattlers. However—as to this Delcassé inheritance, I'll just notify the French legation—"
"We'll have to look sharp," said Ryder quickly. "There's no time to lose. The girl is to be married."
"Married?... But she'll inherit the money just the same."
"But she doesn't want to be married," Ryder insisted anxiously. "Her father—her alleged father—has just sprung this on her. Says there are political or financial reasons. He's been caught in some dirty work by this Hamdi Bey and he's stopping Hamdi's mouth with the girl.... And we've got to stop that."
"I wonder if we can," said McLean thoughtfully.
"If we can? When the girl is French? When she's been lied to and deceived?"
"She seems to have been taken jolly well care of. Brought up as his own and all that. Keep your shirt on, Jack," McLean advised dryly with a shrewd glance from his gray eyes at the other's unguarded heat.
Then his eyes dropped to the miniature again. A lovely face. A lovely unfortunate creature.... And if the daughter looked like that, small wonder that Jack was touched.... Beauty in distress.
Some men had all the luck, McLean reflected. He had never taken Jack for the gallivanting kind, either, yet here he was going to masquerades with one girl and coming home with another....
Jack was too good looking, that was the trouble with the youngster. Good looking and gay humored. The kind that attracted women.... Women and romance were never fluttering about lank, light-eyed, uninteresting old Scotchmen of twenty-nine!
A mild and wistful pang, which McLean refused to name, made itself known.
"I'll see the legation," he began.
"At once. I'll wait," urged Ryder.
And at once McLean went.
The result was what he had foreseen. The legation was appreciative of his interest. That special agent had returned to France but his address was left, and undoubtedly the family of Delcassé would be grateful for any information which Monsieur McLean could send.
"Send!" repudiated Ryder hotly. "Write to France and back—wait for somebody to come over! Can't the legation do something now?"
"The legation has no authority. They can't take the girl away from the man who is, at any rate, her step-father."
"They can put the fear of God into him about this marriage. They can deny his right to hand her over to one of his pals. They can threaten him with an inquiry into the circumstances of her mother's marriage."
"And why should they? They may regard it as a very natural marriage. And remember, my dear Jack, that the legation has no desire to alienate the affections of influential Turks, or criticize fifteen-years-ago romances. You have a totally wrong impression of the responsibilities of foreign representatives."
"But to let him dispose of a French girl—"
"He is disposing of her, as his daughter, in honorable marriage to a wealthy and aristocratic general. There can be no question of his motives—"
"Of course, if you think that sort of thing is all right—"
Carefully McLean ignored the other's wrath.
Patiently he explained. "It's not what I think, my dear fellow, it's what the legation thinks. There's not a chance in the world of getting the marriage stopped."
"Then I'll do it myself," declared Ryder. "I'll see this Tewfick Pasha and talk to him. Tell him the money is to come to the girl only when she is single. Tell him the French law gives the father's representatives full charge. Tell him that he kidnapped the mother and the government will prosecute unless the girl is given her liberty. Tell him anything. A man with a guilty conscience can always be bluffed."
In silence McLean gazed upon him, perplexed and clouded, his quizzical twinkle gone. Jack was taking this thing infernally to heart.... And it was a bad business.
"You will let me do the telling," he stated at last, grimly. "What can be said, I'll say. Like a fool, I will meddle."
And so it happened that within another hour two very stiff and constrained young men were ringing the bell at the entrance door of Tewfick Pasha.
A huge Soudanese admitted them. They found themselves in a tiled vestibule, looking through open arches into the green of a garden—that garden, Ryder hardly needed to remind himself, with whose back door he had made such unconventional acquaintance.
Now he had a glimpse of a sunny fountain and fluttering pigeons, and, on either side of the garden, of the two wings of the building, gay white walls with green shutters more suggestive of a French villa than an Egyptian palace, before the Soudanese marshaled them toward the stairs upon the right.
The left, then, was the way to the haremlik. And somewhere in those secluded rooms, to which no man but the owner of the palace ever gained admission, was Aimée.
The Soudanese mounted the stairs before them and held open a door into a long drawing-room from which the pasha's modernity had stripped every charm except the color of some worn old rugs; the windows were draped in European style, the walls exhibited paper instead of paneling; in one corner was a Victrola and in another, beside a lounge chair, stood a table littered with cigarette trays and French novels with explicit titles.
The only Egyptian touch to the place was four enormous oil portraits of pompous turbaned gentlemen, in one of whom Ryder recognized the familiar rotundity of Mahomet Ali in his grand robes.
As a pasha's palace it was a blow, and Ryder's vague, romantic notions of high halls and gilded arches, suffered a collapse.
Tewfick Pasha came in with haste. He had been going out when these callers were announced and he was dressed for parade, in a very light, very tight suit, gardenia in his button-hole, cane in his gloved hands, fez upon his head. For all their smiling welcome, his full, dark eyes were uneasy.
He had grown distrustful of surprises.
It was McLean's affair to reassure him. Far from fulminating any accusations the canny Scot announced himself as the bearer of glad tidings. A fortune, he announced, was coming to the pasha—or to the pasha's family. A very rich old woman in France had decided to change her will.
There he paused and the pasha continued to smile non-committally, but the word fortune was operating. In the back of his mind he was hastily trying to think of rich old women in France who might change their wills.
"I am afraid that it is my stupidity which has kept you from the knowledge of this for some weeks," McLean went on. "I had so many other matters to look up that I did not at once consult my records. And it has been so many years since you married Madame Delcassé that the name had slipped general recollection.... It was twelve years ago, I believe, that she died?"
Casually he waited and Jack Ryder held his breath. He felt the full suspense of a pause long enough for the pasha's thoughts to dart down several avenues and back. If the man should deny it! But why should he? What harm in the admission, after all these years, with Madame Delcassé dead and buried? And with a fortune involved in the admission.
The Turk bowed and Ryder breathed again.
"Ten years," said Tewfick softly.
"Ah—ten. But there has been no communication with France for twelve years or even longer?"
"Possibly not, monsieur."
"This old aunt," pursued McLean, "was a person of prejudice as well as fortune—hence it has taken a little time for her to adjust herself." He paused and looked understandingly at the Turk, who nodded amiably as one whose comprehension met him more than half way.
"My own aunt was of a similar obstinacy," he murmured. He added, "This fortune you speak of—it comes through my wife?"
"For her inheritors. Madame Delcassé—the former Madame Delcassé I should say—left but one daughter?"
Again the pasha bowed and again Ryder felt the throb of triumph. He looked upon his friend with admiration. How marvelously McLean had worked the miracle. No accusations, no threats, no obstacles, no blank walls of denial! Not a ruffle of discord in the establishment of these salient facts—the marriage of Madame Delcassé to the pasha and the existence of the daughter.
Wonderful man—McLean. He had never half appreciated him.
But the pasha was not wholly the simple assenter.
"Do I understand," he inquired, "that there is a fortune coming from France for my daughter?" And at McLean's confirmation, "And when you say fortune," he continued, "you intend to say—?" and his glance now took in the silent American, considering that some cue must be his.
But McLean responded. "The figures are not to be divulged—not until the aunt is in communication with her niece. But they will be large, monsieur, for this aunt is a person of great wealth."
"And yet alive to enjoy it," said Tewfick with smiling eyes.
"An aged and dying woman," thrust in Ryder in haste. "Her only care now is to see her niece before she dies."
"Ah!... But that could be arranged," said Tewfick amiably.
"We have at once communicated with France," McLean told him, "but we came instantly to you, to, inform you—"
"A thousand thanks and a thousand! The bearers of good tidings," smiled their host.
"Because we understand that there is a question of the young lady's marriage," pursued McLean, "and you would, of course, wish to defer this until these new circumstances are complied with."
The pasha stared. "Not at all. A fortune is as pleasant to a wife as to a maid."
"There are so many questions of law," offered McLean with purposeful vagueness. "French wardship and trusteeship and all that. It would be advisable, I think, to wait."
"Absurd," said the pasha easily.
"You would want no doubts cast upon the legality of the marriage," McLean persisted thoughtfully, "and since mademoiselle is under age and the French law has certain restrictions—"
"Pff! We are not under the French law—at least I have not heard that England has relinquished her power," retorted Tewfick not without malice.
"But Mademoiselle Delcassé is French," thrust in Ryder. He knew that McLean had ventured as far as he, an official and responsible person, could go, and that the burden of intimation must rest upon himself. "And under her father's will his family there is considered in trusteeship. So there would be certain technicalities that must be considered before any marriage can be arranged, the signature of the French guardian, the settlement of the dot—this inheritance, for instance—all mere formalities but involving a little delay."
Tewfick Pasha turned in his chair and cocked his eyes at this strange young man who had dropped from the blue with this extensive advice. He looked puzzled. This American fitted into no type of his acquaintance. He was so very young and slim and boyish ... with not at all the air of a legal representative.... But McLean's position vouched for him.
"You speak for the French family, monsieur?"
Unhesitatingly Ryder declared that he did.
"Then you may inform the family," announced Tewfick, bristling, "that my daughter has been very well cared for all these years without advice from France."
"I haven't a doubt of it," said Ryder quickly, "but the French law might begin to entertain doubts of it, if mademoiselle were married off now without consultation with the authorities.... Already," he added a little meaningly, as the other shrugged the suggestion away, "there have been questions raised concerning the mother's marriage and the separation of the little Mademoiselle Delcassé from her relatives in France, and now if she were to be married without any legal settlement of her estate—"
Steadily he sustained the other's gaze, while his unfinished thought seemed to float significantly in the air about them.
"Have a cigarette," said the pasha hospitably, extending a gold case monogrammed with diamonds and emeralds. "Ah, coffee!" he announced, welcomingly, as a little black boy entered with a brass tray of steaming cups.
"I hope, gentlemen, that you like my coffee. It is not the usual Turkish brew. No, this comes from Aden, the finest coffee in the world. A ship captain brings it to me, especially."
Beamingly he sipped the scalding stuff, then darted back to that suspended sentence. "But you were saying—something of a trusteeship?... Do I understand that it is an aunt of Madame Delcassé—the former Madame Delcassé—who is leaving this money?"
"Not of Madame but of Monsieur Delcassé," McLean informed him.
"Ah!... That accounts ... But in that case, then, there need be no concern in France over my daughter's marriage...." He turned his round eyes from one to the other a moment.
"There is no Mademoiselle Delcassé."
"Sir?" said Ryder sharply.
"There is no Mademoiselle Delcassé," repeated the pasha, his eyes frankly enlivened.
"But—we have just been speaking—you cannot mean to say—"
"We have been speaking of my daughter—the daughter of the former Madame Delcassé."
Smilingly he looked upon them. "A pity that we did not understand each other. But you appear to know so much—and I supposed that you knew that, too, that the daughter of Monsieur Delcassé was dead."
Neither of the young men spoke. McLean looked politely attentive; Ryder's face maintained that look of concentration which guarded the fluctuations of his feelings.
"It was many years ago," the pasha murmured, putting down his coffee cup and selecting another cigarette. "Not long after her mother's marriage to me.... A very charming little girl—I was positively attached to her," Tewfick added reminiscently.
"Well, well, well, what a pity now," said McLean very slowly. "This will be a great disappointment.... And so the present mademoiselle—"
"Is my daughter."
McLean was silent. Ryder could hardly trust himself to speak.
"What did she die of?" he asked at last, in a voice whose edged quality brought the pasha's glance to him with a flash of hostility behind its veil.
But he answered calmly enough. "Of the fever, monsieur.... She was never strong."
"And her grave... I should like to make a report."
"It was in the south ... desert burial, I am afraid. You must know that the little one was hardly a true believer for our cemetery."
"And you would say that she was only five or six years old?" Ryder persisted.
The pasha nodded.
"I should like to get as near as possible to the date if it is not too much trouble.... The father died about fifteen years ago and the mother was married to you soon after?"
"Really, monsieur, you—"
Tewfick was frankly restive.
"I know nothing of the father," he said sullenly. "And as to the child's death—how can one recall after these years? In one, two years after she came to me—one does not grave these things upon the eyeballs."
"But you do remember that it was long ago—when your own daughter was very little?"
"Exactly. That is my recollection, monsieur.... And I recall," said the pasha, suddenly obliging and sentimental, "that even my little one cried for the child. It was afflicting.... Assure the family in France of my sympathy in their disappointment."
"I am sorry that my news is after all of no interest to you," observed McLean, setting the example for rising. "You will pardon my error of information—and accept my appreciation of your courtesy."
"It is I who am indebted for your trouble," their host assured them, all smiles again.
But Ryder was not to be led away without a parting shot.
"The name of the Delcassé child—was Aimée?"
Imperceptibly Tewfick hesitated. Then bowed in assent.
"Odd," said young Ryder thoughtfully. "And your own daughter's name, also, is Aimée.... Two little ones with the same name."
With a slight, vexed laugh, as one despairing of understanding, the pasha turned to McLean. "Your young friend, monsieur, is uninformed that Turkish children have many names.... After the loss of the elder we called the little one by the same name.... I trust I have made everything perfectly clear to you?"
"As crystal," said McLean politely.
"As lightning," said Jack Ryder hotly, striding down the street. "It was a flash of invention, that yarn. When I spoke about the questions raised by his marriage the old fox sniffed the wind and was afraid of trouble—he decided on the instant that no future fortune was worth interference with his plans, and he cut the ground from under our feet.... Lord, what a lie!"
"Masterly, you must admit."
"Oh, I admired the beggar, even while I choked on it. But fever—desert burial—two Aimées! And the sentimental face he pulled—he ought to have had a spot-light and wailing woodwinds."
McLean chuckled.
"I'll believe anything of him now," Ryder rushed on. "I'll bet he murdered Delcassé and kidnapped the mother—and now he is selling their daughter—"
"I fancy murder's a bit beyond our Tewfick. That's too thick. He's probably telling the truth there—he may never have known Delcassé. And as for the widow—she must have been in no end of trouble with a dead man and a wrecked expedition and a baby on her hands, and Tewfick may have offered himself as a grateful solution to her. You'd be surprised at the things I've heard. And if she looked like her picture Tewfick probably laid himself out to be lovely to her.... I rather like the chap, myself."
"I love him," Ryder snorted. "The infernal liar—"
"Steady now—suppose it's all the truth? Nothing impossible to it. Fact is, I rather believe it," said McLean imperturbably. "It hangs together. If this girl you met thinks she's his daughter, that's conclusive. She'd have some idea—servants' gossip or family whisperings.... And why should he have brought her up as his own?"
"No other children. And he'd grown fond of her, of course. If you could see her!" retorted Ryder.
"Just as well, I can't.... And I think he could hardly have kept her in the dark.... We'd better call it a wild goose chase and say the man's telling the truth."
"If this girl were his daughter she couldn't be more than fourteen years old. And I've seen the girl and she's eighteen if she's a day—you might take her for twenty.Fourteen!" said Ryder in repudiating scorn.
Hesitating McLean murmured something about the early maturity of the natives.
"Natives?" Ryder flung angrily back. "This girl's French!"
"As far as we are concerned, Jack, this girl is Turkish—and fourteen.... We can't get around that, and you had better not forget it," his friend quietly advised. "We've done everything that we can and there is no use working yourself up.... If anybody's to blame in this business, I don't think it's Tewfick—he's done the handsome thing by her—but the fool Frenchman who took his baby and his wife into the desert, and it's too late to rag him. Cheer up, old top, and forget it. There's nothing more to be done."
It was sound advice, Jack Ryder knew it. They had done all that they could. McLean had been a brick. There remained nothing now but to notify the Delcassé aunt that Tewfick Pasha claimed the child.
"And I've a notion, Jack," said McLean thoughtfully, "that he might not have done that if you hadn't rushed him so, trying to break off the marriage. That was what frightened him."
"I thought you said she was his own daughter," Ryder responded indignantly, and to that McLean merely murmured, "She will be now, to all time."
It was a haunting thought. It left Ryder with the bitter taste of blame in his mouth, the gall and wormwood of blame and a baffled defeat.
But for that sense of blame he might have taken McLean's advice. He might—but for that—have gone the way of wisdom, and accepted the inevitable.
As it was, he did none of these things.
He said to himself that all that he could do now—and the least that he could do—was to let the girl know as much of the story as he knew and draw her own conclusions. Then, if she wanted to go on and sacrifice herself for Tewfick, very well. That was none of his affair.
But she had a right to the truth and to the chance of choice.
He did not know what he could do, but secretly and defiantly he promised himself that he would do something, and in the back of his mind an idea was already taking shape. It was manifest in the tenacity with which he refused to send the locket to the Delcassés. He had the case and the miniature photographed very carefully by the man who did the reproductions for museum illustrations, and he sent that, conscious of McLean's silent thought that he was cherishing the portrait for a sentimental memory.
But he had other plans for it.
He did not return to his diggings. He sent a message to the deserted Thatcher, faking errands in Cairo, and he took a room at the hotel where Jinny Jeffries—now up the Nile—had stayed. He spent a great deal of time evenings in the hotel garden, staring over the brick walls to the tops of distant palms beyond, and not infrequently he slipped out the garden's back door and wandered up and down the dark canyon of a lane.
He might as well have walked up and down the veranda of Shepheard's Hotel.
And yet the girl had her key. She could get away if she wanted to and she might want to if she knew the truth.
But how to get that truth to her? That was his problem. A dozen plans he considered and rejected. There were the mails—simple and obvious channel—but he had a strong idea that maidens in Mohammedan seclusion do not receive their letters directly. And now, especially, Tewfick would be on his guard.
Then there was the chance of a message through some native's hands. The house servants—? There were hours, one day, when Ryder sauntered about the streets, covertly eyeing the baggy-trouseredsaiswho stood holding a horse in the sun or the tattered baker's boy, approaching the entrance with his long loaves upon his head, but Ryder's Arabic was not of a power or subtlety to corrupt any creature, and he stayed his tongue.
Bitterly he regretted his wasted years. If he had not misspent them in godly living he would now be upon such terms of intimacy with some official's pretty wife who had the entrée to a pasha's daughter that she could be induced to make use of it for him.
Desperately he thought of remedying this defect. There were several charming young matrons not averse to devoted young men, but the time was short for establishing those confidential relations which were what he required now.
Jinny Jeffries would do it for him if she could, but Jinny would not return for another week. And if she changed her mind and took the boat back—as he, alack! had advised—instead of the express, then she would be longer.
And meanwhile the days were passing, four of them now since he and McLean had heard the Soudanese locking the door behind them.
There seemed nothing for it but to trust to that idea which had been slowly shaping in his mind.
In a room high in the palace a young girl was trying on a frock. Before a tall pier glass she stood indifferently, one hip sagging to the despair of the kneeling seamstress, her face turned listlessly from the image in the glass.
Through the open window, banded with three bars, she looked into the rustling tops of palms, from which the yellow date fruit hung, and beyond the palms the hot, bright, blue sky and the far towers of a minaret.
"A bit more to the left, h'if you please, miss," the woman entreated through a mouthful of pins, and apathetically the young figure moved.
"A bit of h'all right, now, that drape," the woman chirped, sitting back on her heels to survey her work.
She was an odd gnome-like figure, with a sharp nose on one side of her head and an outstanding knob of hair on the other. Into that knob the thin locks were so tightly strained that her pointed features had an effect of popping out of bondage.
She was London born, brought out by an English official's wife as dressmaker to the children, remaining in Cairo as wife of a British corporal. Since no children had resulted to require her care and the corporal maintained his distaste for thrift, Mrs. Hendricks had resumed her old trade, and had become a familiar figure to many fashionable Turkish harems, slipping in and out morning and evening, sewing busily away behind the bars upon frocks that would have graced a court ball, and lunching in familiar sociability with the family, sometimes having a bey or a captain or a pasha for a vis-à-vis when the men in the family dropped in for luncheon.
As the girl did not turn her head she looked for approbation to the third person in the room, a tall, severely handsome Frenchwoman in black, whose face had the beauty of chiseled marble and the same quality of cold perfection. This was Madame de Coulevain, teacher of French and literature to thejeunes fillesof Cairo, former governess of Aimée, returned now to her old room in the palace for the wedding preparations.
There was history behind madame's sculptured face. In an incredibly impulsive youth she had fled from France with a handsome captain of Algerian dragoons; after a certain matter at cards he had ceased to be a captain and became petty official in a Cairo importing house; later yet, he became an invalid.
Life, for the Frenchwoman, was a matter of paying for her husband's illness, then for his funeral expenses, and then of continuing to pay for the little one which the climate had required them to send to a convent in France.
There was, at first, the hope of reunion, extinguished by each added year. What could madame, unknown, unfriended, unaccredited, accomplish in France? The mere getting there was impossible—the little one required so much. Her daughter was no dependent upon charity. And in Cairo madame had a clientèle, she commanded a price. And so for the child's sake she taught and saved, concentrating now upon a dot, and feeding her heart with the dutifully phrased letters arriving each week of the years, and the occasional photographs of an ever-growing, unknown young creature.
It was to madame's care that Aimée had been given when the motherless girl had grown beyond old Miriam's ministrations, and for nearly nine years in the palace madame had maintained her courteous and tactful supervision. Indeed, it was only this last year that madame had undertaken new relations with the world outside, perceiving that Aimée would not longer require her.
"Excellent," she said now in her careful, unfamiliar English to Mrs. Hendricks, and in French to Aimée she added, with a hint of asperity, "Do give her a word. She is trying to please you."
"It is very nice, Mrs. Hendricks," said the girl dutifully, bringing her glance back from that far sky.
The little seamstress was instantly all vivacity. "H'and now for the sash—shall we 'ave it so—or so?" she demanded, attaching the wisp of tulle experimentally.
"As you wish it.... It is very nice," Aimée repeated vaguely. She picked up a bit of the shimmering stuff and spread it curiously across her fingers. A dinner gown.... When she wore this she would be a wife.... The wife of Hamdi Bey.... A shiver went through her and she dropped the tulle swiftly.
In ten days more....
Gone was her first rush of sustaining compassion. Gone was her fear for her father and her tenderness to him. Only this numb coldness, this dumb, helpless certainty of a destiny about to be accomplished.... Only this hopeless, useless brooding upon that strange brief past.
There was a stir at the door and on her shuffling, slippered feet old Miriam entered, handing some packages to Madame de Coulevain. Then she turned to revolve about the bright figure of her young mistress, her eyes glistening fondly, her dark fingers touching a soft fold of silver ribbon, while under her breath she chanted in a croon like a lullaby, "Beautiful as the dawn ... she will walk upon the heart of her husband with foot of rose petals ... she will dazzle him with the beams of her eyes and with the locks of her hair, she will bind him to her ... beautiful as the dawn...."
It was the marriage chant of Miriam's native village, an old love song that had come down the wind of centuries.
Mrs. Hendricks, thrusting in the final pins, paid not the slightest attention and Madame de Coulevain displayed interest only in the packages. If she saw the stiffening of the girl's face and the rigid aversion of her eyes from the old nurse's adulation she gave no sign.
Towards Aimée's moods madame preserved a calm and sensible detachment. Never had she invited confidence, and for all the young girl's charm she had never taken her to her heart in the place of that absent daughter. As if jealously she had held herself aloof from such devotion.
Perhaps in Aimée's indulged and petted childhood, with a fond pasha extolling her small triumphs, her dances, her score at tennis at the legation, madame found a bitter contrast to the lot of that lonely child in France. Certainly there was nothing in Aimée's life then to invite compassion, and later, during those hard, mutinous months of the girl's first veiling and seclusion, she had not tried to soften the inevitable for her with a useless compassion.
So now, perceiving this marriage as one more step in the irresistible march of destiny for her charge, she overlooked the youthful fretting and offered the example of her own unmoved acceptance.
"What diamonds!" she said now admiringly, holding up a pin, and, examining the card. "From Seniha Hanum—the cousin of Hamdi Bey."
A moment more she held up the pin but the girl would not give it a look.
"And this, from the same jeweler's," continued madame, while the dressmaker was unfastening the frock, aided by Miriam, anxious that no scratch should mar that milk-white skin.
"How droll—the box is wrapped in cloth, a cloth of plaid."
Aimée spun about. The dress fell, a glistening circle at her feet, and with regardless haste she tripped over it to madame.
"How—strange!" she said breathlessly.
A plaid ... A Scotch plaid. Memories of an erect, tartan-draped young figure, of a thin, bronzed face and dark hair where a tilted cap sat rakishly ... memories of smiling, boyish eyes, darkening with sudden emotion ... memories of eager lips....
She took the box from madame. Within the cloth lay a jeweler's case and within the case a locket of heavily ornamented gold.
Her heart beating, she opened it. For a moment she did not understand. Her own face—her own face smiling back. Yet unfamiliar, that oddly piled hair, that black velvet ribbon about the throat....
Murmuring, madame shared her wonder.
It was Miriam's cry of recognition that told them.
"Thy mother—the grace of Allah upon her!—It is thy mother! Eh, those bright eyes, that long, dark hair that I brushed the many hot nights upon the roof!"
"But you are her image, Aimée," murmured the Frenchwoman, but half understanding the nurse's rapid gutturals, and then, "Your father's gift?"
With the box in her hands the girl turned from them, fearful of the tell-tale color in her cheeks. "But whose else—his thought, of course," she stammered.
That plaid was warning her of mystery.
The dressmaker was creating a diversion. Leaving, she wished to consult about the purchases for to-morrow's work, and madame moved towards the hall with her, talking in her careful English, while Miriam bent towards the dropped finery.
Aimée slipped through another door, into the twilight of her bedroom, whose windows upon the street were darkened by those fine-wrought screens of wood. Swiftly she thrust the box from sight, into the hollow in the mashrubiyeh made in old days to hold a water bottle where it could be cooled by breezes from the street.
Leaning against the woodwork, her fingers curving through the tiny openings, she stared toward the west. The sky was flushing. Broken by the circles, the squares, the minute interstices of the mashrubiyeh, she saw the city taking on the hues of sunset.
Suddenly the cry of a muezzin from a nearby minaret came rising and falling through the streets.
"La illahé illallah Mohammedun Ressoulallah—"
The call swelled and died away and rose again ... There is no God buttheGod and Mahomet is the Prophet of God ... From farther towers it sounded, echoing and re-echoing, vibrant, insistent, falling upon crowded streets, penetrating muffling walls.
"La illahé illallah—"
In the avenue beneath her two Arabs, leading their camels to market, were removing their shoes and going through the gestures of ceremonial washing with the dust of the street.
"La illahé—"
The city was ringing with it.
The seamstress and the Frenchwoman, still talking, had passed down the hall. In the next room Miriam's lips were moving in pious testimony.
"Ech hedu en la illahé—! I testify that there is no God buttheGod."
In the street the Arabs were bowing towards the east, their heads touching the earth.
And in the window above them a girl was reading a note.
The last call of the muezzin, falling from the tardy towers of Kait Bey drifted faintly through the colored air. With resounding whacks the Arabs were urging on their beast; Miriam, her prayers concluded, was shaking out silks and tulle with a sidelong glance for that still figure in the next room, pressing so close against the guarding screens.
She could not see the pallor in the young face. She could not see the tumult in the dark eyes. She could not see the note, crushed convulsively against the beating breast, in the fingers which so few moments ago had drawn it from the hiding place in the box.
Ryder had not dared a personal letter. But clearly, and distinctly, he stated the story of the Delcassés. He gave the facts which the pasha admitted and the ingenious explanation of the two Aimées. And for reference he gave the address of the Delcassé aunt and agent in France and of Ryder and McLean at the Agricultural Bank.
The pasha did not dine with his daughter that night. He had been avoiding her of late, a natural reaction from the strain of too-excessive gratitude. A man cannot be continually humble before the young! And it was no pleasure to be reminded by her candid eyes of his late misfortunes and of her absurd reluctance towards matrimony.
As if this marriage were not the best thing for her! As if it were a hardship! To make sad eyes and draw a mouth because one is to be the wife of a rich general.... Irrational ... The little sweetmeat was irritating.
To this point Tewfick's buoyancy had brought him, and all the more hastily because of his eagerness to escape the pangs of that uncomfortable self-reproach. To Aimée, in her new clear-sightedness of misery, it was bitterly apparent that he was reconciled with her lot and careless of it.
So blinded had been her young affection that it was a hard awakening, and she was too young, too cruelly involved, to feel for his easy humors that amused tolerance of larger acquaintance with human nature. She had grown swiftly bitter and resentful, and deeply cold.
And now this letter. It dazed her, like a flame of lightning before her eyes, and then, like lightning, it lit up the world with terrifying luridity. Fiery colored, unfamiliar, her life trembled about her.
Truth or lies? Custom and habit stirred incredulously to reject the supposition. The romance, the adventure of youth, dared its swift acceptance. How could she know? Intuitively she shrank from any question to the pasha, realizing the folly and futility of exposing her suspicion. If he needed to lie, lie he would—and in her understanding of that, she read her own acceptance of the possibility of his needing to lie.
Madame de Coulevain? Madame had never known her mother. Only old Miriam had known her mother and Miriam was the pasha's slave. But the old woman was unsuspecting now, and full of disarming comfort in this marriage of her wild darling.
Through dinner she planned the careless-seeming questions. And then in her negligée, as the old nurse brushed out her hair for the night, "Dadi," said the girl, in a faint voice, "am I truly like my mother?" and when Miriam had finished her fond protestation that they were as like as two roses, as two white roses, bloom and bud, she launched that little cunning phrase on which she had spent such eager hoping.
"And was I like her when I was little—when first she came to my father?"
"Eh—yes. Always thou wast the tiny image which Allah—Glory to his Name!—had made of her," came the nurse's assurance.
"I am glad," said Aimée, in a trembling voice.
She dared not press that more. Confronted with her unconscious admission the old woman would destroy it, feigning some evasion. But there it was, for as much as it was worth....
Presently then, she found another question to slip into the old woman's narrative of the pasha's grief.
"Eh, to hear a man weep," Miriam was murmuring. "Her beauty had set its spell upon him, and—"
"And he lost her so soon. Three or four years only, was it not," ventured Aimée, "that they had of life together?"
It seemed that Miriam's brush missed a stroke.
"Years I forget," the nurse muttered, "but tears I remember," and she began to talk of other things.
But it seemed to Aimée that she had answered. As for that other matter, of the dead Delcassé child, she dared not refer to it, lest Miriam tell the pasha. But how many times, she remembered, had she been told that she was her mother's only one!
Yet, oh, to know, to hear all the story, to learn Ryder's discovery of it! It was all as strange and startling as a tale of Djinns. And the life that it held out to her, the enchanted hope of freedom, of aid—Oh, not again would she refuse his aid!
She had no plans, no purposes. But that night over her hastily-donned frock she slipped the black street mantle and when at last, after endless waiting, the murmuring old palace was safely still and dark, she stole down the spiral stair and gained the garden. And then, a phantom among its shadows, she fled to the rose bushes by the gate.
Breathlessly she knelt and dug into the hiding place of that gate's key. To the furthest corner her fingers explored the hole, pushing furiously against the earth. And then she drew back her hand and crushed it against her face to check the nervous sobs.
The hole was empty. The key was gone.