There was no measure of time for Ryder in that walled coffin of death. The seconds seemed hours, the minutes ages.
He drew quick, short breaths as if economizing the air that was so soon to fail him; he tugged at his bonds till the veins rose on his forehead, but the silk held and the confines of the prison permitted him no room for struggle; then he leaned forward, to press with all his might upon the bricks before him; he grunted, he sweated with the agony of his exertions, but not a brick was stirred, not a crack was made in the mortar that gripped them tighter every instant.
He died a thousand deaths in the horror that invaded him then. Already he felt strangling, and the painful pumping of his heart seemed the beginning of the end.
Cold sweat stood out all over him; it ran down his face in trickling streams and his body was drenched with that clammy dew of fear.
He tried to count the minutes, the hours, to estimate how long he would hold out....
And then he heard his own voice saying very distinctly and clearly and dispassionately, "This thing is absurd."
It was absurd. It was idiotic. It was utterly irrational. It was an impossible end for an able-bodied young American, an excavator of no mean attainments, a young scholar and explorer of twentieth century science, a sane, modern, harmless young man, to die immured in the ancient walls of a Turkish palace—because he had invaded a marriage reception and intervened between man and wife.
Violent death in any form must always appear absurd to the young and energetic. And the fantastic horror of his death removed it definitely from any realm of possibility. The thing simply could not happen.... He thought of the amazement and the incredulity of his friends....
Dangers in plenty they had warned him against, to his youthful amusement—sand storms and chills and raw fruit and unboiled waters, but they had not warned him against veiled women and the resentments of outraged lords and masters.
He thought of his mother's consternation and dismay. He thought of his father's stern amazement.... What an awful jolt it would give them, he reflected, with an irrational tickling of young humor.
But no, it would not. They would never know. Not a word of this fate would percolate into the world without. Not a comment upon his true end would enliven the daily columns of the East MiddletonMonitor. Never would it regret the tragic and romantic interment of a young native son of talent, buried alive by a revengeful general of the Sultan....
He amused himself by writing the paragraph that would never be written. Then he told himself that he was lightheaded and hysterical and that he had better wonder what would actually be written. What explanation would be found?
A desert storm perhaps, or some accident. McLean would poke about—but for all McLean knew he might be on his way back to camp that very moment. And sometimes he went by sailing canoe, and a rented horse, and sometimes by the accredited steamer and a camel, and sometimes by tram or train to the nearest station. Even McLean's mind and McLean's Copts wouldn't make much of all the alternatives that his unsettled habits had afforded.
Was there any possibility of his being traced, of any rescue reaching him? He thought hard and long upon his last free moments. Jinny Jeffries knew that he was in the palace, and Jinny had been reiteratedly warned about the danger of betraying that knowledge. It would take some little time for alarm before Jinny said anything. And it would take a little time for Jinny to begin to worry.
He had not been so instant in attendance upon Jinny of late, for all their residence in the same hotel, that she would suspect that his absence of twenty-four hours was due to actual incarceration.
His cursed passion for freedom in which to ramble up and down that deserted lane without Tewfick Pasha's garden! His inane love of solitary mooning....
No, Jinny would not soon wonder about him. She had not expected to see him that evening, anyway—he had muttered something to her about a man and an engagement.
Shewouldrather look to see him the next day and talk about their adventure.... But still she would feel no more than pique at his absence; positive worry would not develop until later.
Besides, all the revelations that Jinny could make would do no good. Jinny could only report that he had maintained a disguise at a wedding reception, and talked a few moments, apparently undetected, to a bride. Hamdi Bey, and Hamdi's eunuchs, would be blandly ignorant of such a scandal. What his disappearance would indicate would be some further frolic on his part, some tempting of a later Providence before he had abandoned his disguise.... If he were discovered, for instance, in some of those native quarters, behind a woman's veil....
Decidedly the only effect of Jinny's revelations would be an unsavory cloud upon his character.
There was no hope to be looked for.
And yet he could not believe it. There were moments when the black terror mastered him, but involuntarily his young strength shook it off. He could not believe in its reality. He could not believe that he was actually here, bricked and bound, in this infernal coffin....
But, indisputably, the evidence was in favor of belief.... Only to believe was to feel again that horror....
He tried to tell himself that it didn't matter. One had to die some time. Everybody did. One might as well go out young and strong and still interested in life.
But that was remarkably cold comfort. He didn't want to go out at all. He didn't want to die, not for fifty or sixty years yet, and of all the ways of dying, he wanted least to smother and choke and stifle like a rat walled in its hole in the wall.
He recalled, with peculiar pain, a woodchuck that he had penned up as a boy, and he hoped with extraordinary passion that the poor beast had made another hole. Never again, he resolved, would he pen up a living creature, never again, if only again he could see the light of day and breathe the free air....
He thought of Aimée. And when he thought of her his heart seemed to turn to water. Useless to repeat to himself now those old reminders that he had seen her so little, known her so slightly. Useless to measure that strange feeling that drew him by any artifice of time and acquaintance.
She was Aimée. She was enchantment and delight. She was appeal and tenderness. She was blind longing and mystery. She was beauty and desire....
Even to think of her now, in the infernal horror of this cramping grave, was to feel his heart quicken and his blood grow hot in a helpless passion of dread and fear. She was alone, there, helpless, with that madman.
He tried to tell himself that she was not wholly helpless, that she had wit and spirit and courage, and that somehow she would manage to quell the storm; she might persuade Hamdi to their story, make him remember that this was the twentieth century wherein one does not go about immuring inconvenient trespassers as in the earlier years of the Mad Khedive—years which had probably formed the general's impulses—but in telling himself this there was no comfort for the thought of the price that Aimée would have to pay.
It was pleasanter to pretend that Hamdi was really only joking, in a shockingly exaggerated, practical way, and that presently, when the suitable time had elapsed, he would present himself, smiling, to end the ghastly, antiquated jest.
For some time he continued to tell himself that.
And then suddenly he told himself that the time for intervention had surely come. It was very hard to breathe.
The next minute he was assuring himself that this was merely some devil's trick of his apprehensive imagination. There must be a great deal of air left.... But he was distressingly ignorant of the contents of air, and his calculations were lamentably unsupported by any sound basis of fact.
Mistake, not to have gone in for chemistry and physics. A chap who'd done time in those subjects wouldn't now be rocking with suspense; he'd comfortably and satisfactorily know just how many hours, minutes and seconds were allotted before his finish and he could think his thoughts accordingly.
Undoubtedly, so he insisted to himself, there was air enough here to last him till morning. This gasping stuff was all imagination. He wanted to keep cool and quiet. But for all his reassurance therewassomething a little queer with his lungs, and his heart was lurching sickeningly in his side, like a runaway ship's engine.
And then he heard his own voice repeating very tonelessly, "O God, O God," and the horror of it all came blackly over him and a feeling of profound and awful sickness....
Itwasa sound. The faintest scraping and knocking without that wall. It went through him like an electric current.... And then a roar burst from him that fairly split his ears, the reaction of his quivered nerves and racking fears of his uncertainties, his tightening terrors.
But now—nothing. He could not hear a thing. A delusion? A torture of his final hours?... No, it came again. More definitely now, a little grinding and scraping.
Faster and faster, a muffled, driving thud.
A jubilant reassurance sang gayly through him. He had expected this—this was what he had predicted. Hamdi was no foul friend. He was a devilish uncomfortable customer with antiquated notions of revenge, but now he had shot his wad and was going to undo his tricks.
Ryder braced himself to present a carefree jauntiness—an air somewhat difficult to assume when one is trussed like a spitted bird, in a hot coffin space, with hair falling dankly over a steaming brow, with a collar like a string, and an indescribable pallor beneath the bronze of one's face.
Something stirred. One end of a brick was driven in against his chest. Then he felt the blind working of some tool that caught it and worried it free.
It seemed to him that through that dark aperture a current of cold, delicious air came rushing in about him. The blows sounded against the adjoining bricks and he thought of the glorious joy of seeing out again, feeling that he would welcome even the sight of Hamdi's blond mustache and the eunuch's hideous grin.
Now the aperture admitted a pale gleam upon his chest. Staring steadily down he caught a glimpse of the fingers curving about a brick, and his heart that had steadied, began to race again wildly. For they were not the fingers of the black nor yet the wiry joints of the general.
They were soft, white fingers, with a gleam of rings.
Aimée! Somehow, somewhere, she had managed to come to him, to achieve this rescue....
"Aimée!" He breathed the name.
"S-sh!" came a warning little whisper, and impatiently he waited until that opening should be greater and permit of sight and speech.
His helplessness was maddening. If only he could raise his hands, could get those bonds off! He twisted, he writhed, he tried to lift his elbows and get his wrists in reach of the opening, but the coffin was too diabolically cramped for movement until the hole was very much larger. Then with a convulsive pressure he swung his wrists within reach and after a moment's wait he felt a thin blade drawn across the silk.
The relief was glorious. He swung his hands free, rubbing the chafed wrists, then thrust an opened hand out into the opening, and with instant comprehension a short, pointed bit of iron was put within it.
Now he could do something! With furious strength he attacked the bricks edging the hole and as he pried free each brick he could again get a glimpse of those white delicate fingers lifting it carefully away.
And now the hole was large enough. He twisted about and thrust out a leg, and then, with a feeling of ecstasy which made the official literary raptures of saints and conquerors but pale, dim moods, he wormed his way out of that jagged hole and turned, erect and free, to the shrouded figure of his rescuer.
She had drawn back a little against the wall, a gauzy veil across her face. Beside her, upon the stone floor, a solitary candle sent its flickering rays into the shadows, edging with light her slender outlines.
Ryder took one quick step to her, his heart in his throat, and put out eager arms. But in the very moment that he was gathering her to him, even when he felt her pliant body, at first resistant, then softly yielding, swept against his own, he felt, too, a little palm suddenly upon his mouth.
"Hsh!" said the soft, whispering voice, cutting into his low murmur of "Aimée!" and then, in slow emphatic caution, "Be—careful!"
He had need of that caution. For under the saffron veil was not the face of Aimée. He was clasping a young creature that he had never seen before, a girl with flaming henna hair and kohl darkened brows, a vivid blazoning face that smiled enigmatically with a certain mockery of delight at the amazement he reflected so unguardedly.
From the slackening grip of his astounded arms she stepped backward, still smiling faintly and holding up in admonishment the palm she had pressed against his mouth.
"But what—what the dev—" muttered Ryder.
She nodded mysteriously, and beckoned.
"Come," she whispered, catching up her candle, and after holding it high for a moment, staring at him, she extinguished it suddenly, and turned to lead the cautious way across the stone spaces while Ryder closely followed.
Not Aimée, then. But some messenger, he could only suppose. Some confidante, at need. A handmaid? The whisper of her silks, the remembered gleam of jewels in the henna hair flouted that thought, and not troubling his ingenuity with alternatives he was content to follow her swift steps.
They were now in those open rubbishy spaces where he remembered the crumbling masonry and broken arches of old, disregarded mosques; now they were again enclosed in narrow stone walls, winding past cellars and store rooms.
The girl's advance grew more cautious. Often she stopped and listened, peering ahead into the darkness, and now, as she took another turning, her care redoubled and Ryder needed no exhortation to imitate it. Obeying a gesture of her arm, he followed at a greater distance, prepared, at the warning of a sound, to flatten himself against the wall or dart into some cranny of retreat.
They were now in the cellars. The corridor was widening out before them with a pallid showing of light, crossed with many bars, at some far end.... They stole towards it. It was a window, or barred gate, he saw, and he heard again that lapping of restless water against stone.
He could see, too, in the dimness the curve of a stair near the gate.
Abruptly his guide checked him. Wary and noiseless he waited while she stole forward to those stairs, peering up into the gloom, attentive for any sound from above.... Apparently satisfied, she went on towards the barred gate, and bent down over a spot of darkness which Ryder had taken for a shadow.
He saw now that it had some semblance to a human outline.
Closely the girl bent and he caught the pallor of her hands, searching swiftly, and then a muffled clink.... Next moment, a wraith with soundless steps, she was back at his side again, urging him on with her. They passed the stairs; he felt the soft yield of carpet beneath his feet; they passed that recumbent figure and now he heard the rhythm of a sleeper's heavy breath, escaping muffledly from the folds of a thick mantle which the sleeper's habits had wrapped about his head. For all the mantle he was aware of the fumes of wine.
"I saw that Ja'afar had his drink," said the girl suddenly in softly whispered Turkish, her head close to his. "He is my friend. I do not neglect him," and under her breath she laughed, as she exhibited the great bunch of keys she had taken from the imbiber.
Stooping now before the gate she fitted the key into the lock. Then over her shoulder she looked up at the young man, and asked him a quick question.
He did not understand. That was the trouble with his vernacular. It would go on very well for a time, when he had a clue to the sense, or when it was a question of every day expression, but a sudden divergence, an unexpected word, was apt to prove a hopeless obstacle.
Now she repeated her question again, more slowly, and again he shook his head.
Now she stood up, frowning a little and began again in English, "You—no, I not know—This way? You do it?" A sudden smile broke over her face as she made a swift pushing gesture with her hands, that, with her pointing to the water outside, sent Ryder a sudden enlightenment.
"Swim? You mean—do I swim?"
She nodded. "Not go—" She made a swift downward movement of her hands and then pointed again to that water just outside the gate.
"Not go down—not sink?" interpreted Ryder. "No, indeed, I can swim," he assured her, and revisited with smiling satisfaction she knelt again before the barred gate.
Open it swung with so sharp a crack that both glanced at the figure behind them, and then at the shadowy gloom of the stairs. But no alarm sounded. Outside the gate Ryder saw the darkness of fairly wide rippling waters, visited with floating stars, and beyond a low-lying, dun bank.
Escape was there. Freedom. Safety. He felt an exultant longing to plunge in and strike out, but he turned, questioningly, to the mysterious rescuer.
"Aimée?" he asked, under his breath. "Where is she?" He repeated it in the vernacular, distrusting her English, and in the vernacular she answered, "You want her? You want to take her away with you?"
She laughed softly at the quick flash in his eyes and hardly waited for his speech.
"Good—what a lover! You are not afraid?"
Mendaciously he assured her that he was not.
"Good!" she said again, with a showing of white teeth between her carmined lips. "You take her—you take her away from him. That is what I want. You understand?"
Very suddenly he understood.
This was no emissary from Aimée. This was no philanthropic bystander. It was some girl of the palace, jealous and daring, conspiring shrewdly for the removal of her rival.
"Take her away," she was saying urgently. "Out of this palace. We want no brides here." Lowering and sullen, she turned bitter on the word.
"To-night, I was watching," she went on swiftly. "I heard—the noise—and then the whispering.... The darkness has ears and eyes—and a tongue. And so I waited out there...."
He could not distinguish all the quick flow of her speech, but he caught enough to understand how she had lurked in the halls, jealously spying, defying the eunuchs' authority, and how she had caught with passionate delight that stifled alarm of scandal. Later, hanging over some banister, she had seen the Ethiopian pass with his burden and had stolen down afterwards, stalking like a cat, and had discovered the lantern gone, the door unlocked.... And then she had watched until the pair emerged without the burden.
She had not been able to get hold of the key to the door. But she had resolved to explore and so she had furnished the waterman with his wine, drugged, Ryder gathered, and so stolen past him on the other route to those underground foundations to which her suspicions had been directed by the mortar and dust upon Yussuf.
Evidently she knew the possibilities of the place and the mind of its master. And when she found the old niche freshly bricked and the mortar at hand she had not needed more to assure her that here was the burial place of her rival's lover.
Now, for the boon of his life, he was to relieve her of that rival. Or try to.
"For once—he might not kill her," she whispered, "but if again—" Her eyes glowed like a cat's in the dark. "Take her away. Make her name a spitting and a disgrace.... Her memory a shame and a sting.... Is she beautiful?" she broke off to demand. "They say—but slaves lie—"
"Can you believe a lover?" he said whimsically for all his impatience. "She is a pearl—a rose—a crescent moon—"
"They say she is very pale and thin—"
"She is an Houri from Paradise," he said distinctly. "And now, in the name of Allah, let me get to her. Tell me the way—"
"Will she go gladly with you?" the low, insistent voice went on, and at his quick nod, "Holy Prophet, what a bride!"
She clapped her two ringed hands to smother the impish joy of her laugh. "A warning to those who can be warned—he will not be so eager for another stripe from that same stick!—It was his cousin, Seniha Hanum—Satan devour her!—who made this marriage. Always she hated me.... But now I will tell you how to get to her. Look out, with me."
Kneeling at the gate, over the dark flow of the water, she drew him down beside her, and thrusting out her veiled head, she pointed upward and to the right to a jutting balcony of mashrubiyeh, where a pale light showed through the fretwork.
"There—you see? That is my room. And if you climb up, I can let you in.... There... Up," she repeated in English, resolved to make certain.
"I see. I can get there," he assured her, measuring with his eye the dim distance.
"At once," she said. "I will be there. I cannot take you with me through the upper hall—it is dangerous even for me to be caught. But no eunuch wants my displeasure."
He could believe it, watching the subtle, malicious daring of her face. Even in the gloom he caught the steady-lidded arrogance of her kohl-darkened eyes and the bold insolence of a high cheek bone. She had a hint of gypsy....
"And you can get me in? You're a wonder!" he whispered. "I can't thank you enough—"
"Rid me of her," said the girl swiftly. "But not—not him. You must swear—what is it that Christians swear by?" she broke off to demand. "By the grave of your father? Yes? You will swear not to hurt him, to hurt Hamdi, by the grave of your father? Yes?"
Ryder nodded quickly. His father, to be sure, was in no grave at all. He was, allowing hastily for the difference in time, in his treasurer's cage at the bank in East Middleton, but he did not wait to explain this to the girl.
"I swear it," he repeated. "I won't hurt your Hamdi, since that's your condition. But we're wasting time—"
"Up, then. And if you fall down—do like this."
Smiling mischievously, she made the gesture of swimming. "Allah go with thee—and with me also," he heard her murmur, as he stepped out to the ledge of the entrance, twisted himself agilely about and climbing up the opened gate swung himself up to the stone carving overhead.
Below him, he heard the gate swing shut. He did not hear her lock it. Fervently he hoped she had not, since it was a possible exit for any one in a hurry, but at any rate, he need not worry about a way out of the place until he had got into it again.
And the getting in was not any too simple. It was work for a mountain goat, he reflected, after a short interval devoted to tentative reaches and balancing and digging in of hands and feet. The distances were far greater than the first-glimpsed, foreshortened perspective had allowed him to guess, and there was only the starlight to illumine the gray face of the palace.
He had no idea of the time. Somewhere about the middle of the night or early morning, he judged vaguely by the stars, although it seemed impossible that so few hours had passed.
The river was all silence and darkness. No nuggars with their sleeping crews were moored below. He seemed the only living, breathing thing clambering across the face of time and space.
Gingerly he kicked off the nondescript black shoes he had worn with his disguise that afternoon and essayed a perilous toehold while he reached for the interstices of a mashrubiyeh window just overhead.
Once gripping the rounds he pulled himself up, reflecting that it was well it was night and that no lady was sitting within her shelter to be affrighted at this intrusion of fingers and toes.
From the jutting top of this projection he surveyed his further field of operation. The window with a light was two stories higher yet and to the right. There were two other windows with lights on the second story, very much farther along, and he wondered painfully if these were the rooms of Aimée.
That boudoir in which he had hidden through the end of the long reception had been upon the water. And there had been a door into an adjoining room, for he had seen a sallow-faced attendant passing in and out.
A wild longing seized him to crawl on and over into those windows. But it was a difficult, almost an impossible distance, and even when there he would be like a fly on the outside of a pane with no way of getting in.
The unknown girl had promised him a way through her window and he had confidence in her ingenuity and daring.
So he went on, worming cautiously along old gutters and ledges and jutting balconies until at last he was clasping the lower grill of that mashrubiyeh from which her light gleamed.
Instantly the light went out.
"Wait!" he heard her voice say sharply over his head. She was standing by the window fumbling with the woodwork, and in a moment he heard the click of a knob and then, just opposite his head, the screening grill slipped aside and an aperture appeared.
"Quick!" admonished the voice, and quickly indeed he drew himself up and in, reflecting whimsically as he did so that this girl had first helped him out of a hole and then into one.
The next moment she had moved the grill into place and lifted the cover she had placed over her triplet of candles on a stand.
Triumphant, her eyes dancing, her teeth a gleam of light between those scarlet lips of hers, she looked at him for the admiration she saw twinkling back at her in his eyes.
"But not me—no!" she protested, her supple hands gesturing towards the magic casement. "I found it here. It is very old—you understand? Some other, long ago, found time dull and so—"
Delightedly she shared the flavor of that secret of the vagabond lady of long ago who had devised this cunning entrance for her lover.
On some dark night like this, with the gatekeeper drowsy with old wine, some other stripling had climbed that worn façade before him and slipped through the secret space and stood triumphantly before some daring, laughing girl who had cast aside for him her veil and her fear of death.
What ingenuity, Ryder wondered fleetly, had smuggled in the carpenter for the contrivance, what jewels had gone to the bribing, what lies had been told!... And what had been the end of it all?
Evidently not the discovery of the opening....
He hoped, with singular intensity, for the safety of the daring young lovers, that unknown youth whose feet had foreworn the path for his feet and that dead and gone young girl, who had dared anything rather than endure the mortal ennui of those hours behind the veil....
These thoughts all went through him like one thought as he stood there, his eyes roving about the dim, shadowy room of old divans and Eastern hangings, and then turning back to the glimmering figure of its mistress.
She was staring frankly at him, her eyes boldly curious and examining. They were not dark eyes, he saw now; that had been the impression given by the kohl about them and the black line of the brows penciled into one line; they were yellow eyes, golden and glowing, scornful and lazy-lidded.
As she looked at him, these eyes smiled slowly. She was seeing in this lover of her rival a singularly delightful looking young man, for all his dust and disarray, a slender, bronzed, hardy-looking young man, with dark, disordered hair straying across a white brow, and audacious, eager eyes in which the fear of death, so lately glimpsed, had left no daunting reflection.
Slowly she lifted her hand and with deliberate softness put back that straying hair of his.
"Poor boy," she said slowly in English, and then, smiling ruefully, she held out her hands for his inspection. The grime of the bricks had discolored their scented delicacy and he saw bruised finger tips and a torn nail.
"I'm infernally sorry," he said quickly.
Her smile deepened at his look of concern, as he held, a little helplessly, the witnesses of her work of rescue which seemed somehow to stray into his keeping.
"It is nothing—but you—poor boy," she said again, in that English of which she seemed naïvely proud.
"If you could give me some water," he suggested, and drank deep with delight the last drop she brought him from an earthen jar. It seemed to wash from his throat the taste of that dust and fear.
"I can't begin to thank you," he murmured. "I only wish that I could do something for you—"
She looked up at him. They were standing close together, their voices cautiously low.
"Perhaps, yes, you can—"
"It's not doing anything for you to save Aimée," he told her. "That's what you are doing for her and for me.... But if ever you want me for anything after this—my name is Ryder, Jack Ryder, and you can reach me at the Agricultural Bank."
He had a vague vision of some day repaying his enormous debt by assisting this girl, grown tired of her Hamdi, out of this aperture and into a waiting boat. He would do it like a shot, he told himself gladly; he would do anything on God's green earth if only she helped him get Aimée away from that infernal villain.
"Jack," she repeated, under her breath, and then in her slow English, "I like—Jack."
"Don't forget it. I'll always come and do anything for you. And if you'll tell me your name—"
"Aziza."
"Aziza. I'll never forget that. And now, if you'll tell me how I can get to her and then the best way out—"
"Why you so hurry—"
"Why?" he looked a little blank. "I can't lose a minute—he may be with her—"
She came a little nearer to him, her head tilting back with a slow, indolent challenge.
Gone was the silken mantle that had been about her below stairs and he saw now that she was a vivid, exotic shimmer of gauzy green against the saffron veil that fell from her henna hair. There was barbaric beauty in her, in the bold, painted face, the bare, gold-banded arms, the slender, sinuous lines, and there was barbaric splendor in the heavy jewels that winked and flashed....
It struck Ryder that she was gotten up regardless.... In pride, perhaps, on her rival's wedding night?... Or had there been some defiant, desperate design upon Hamdi—?
She did not miss that sudden prolonging of his look upon her.
"You like me—yes?" she murmured, and then slipping back into the vernacular, "I—I am not the stupid veiled girl of the seclusion—not forever. I come from the west, the deserts. I have seen the world: Men—men, I know ... I danced before them, not the dances of the Cairene cafés," she uttered with swift scorn, "but the dance of the two swords, the dance of the serpents.... Men threw the gold from their turbans about my feet when I had danced to them ... And others, English, French—"
She broke off, but her eyes told many things. "Then—Hamdi," she said slowly. "Him I ruled—and his palace.... But I have known other things."
Closer yet she came to him. Her eyes, golden fires of eyes, were smiling up into his, her scarlet lips gathered in soft, sensual curves ... her whole silken scented body seemed to slip into his embrace. A bare arm touched his neck, resting heavily.
"Sweet—heart," she said slowly, in her difficult English.
It was the deuce of a position.
No man can rudely snatch from his neck the arm of the lady who has just saved him from a harrowing death. And a lady who was risking more than her life in sheltering him—decidedly the situation was delicate.
It was not the lady's fault that her impetuosity, the impetuosity which had been his salvation, now plunged her into amorous caprice. There were obvious handicaps, moral, social and ethical, in her upbringing. She was a child of nature, a nature undisciplined, unruly, tempestuous.
And even queening over Hamdi and his palace must have offered little diversion to a wild dancing girl familiar with the excitement of more varied conquest.
Ryder was horribly embarrassed. He was visited with a fearful constraint, a chivalrous wish not to hurt her feelings, and a sharp prevision of the danger of offending her.
He took the first turn of least resistance.
He did not need to bend his head; their eyes were on a level. He simply kissed her. And she kissed him back.
He hated himself for the leap of his blood... and for the Puritanical discomfort of his nature....
Her arm about his neck was pressing closer. It was the moment for action and Ryder acted. Very firmly he put his hand upon her hand, withdrew it from its clasp about him, and raised it to his lips.
His kiss was respectful gratitude and an abdication of the delights of dalliance.
"Good-bye, my dear," he murmured. "Now, if you will show me the way out—"
Her eyes agleam between half-closed lids, she studied him. It occurred to Ryder that probably never before had her hands been detached—and kissed—and put away. He must be a phenomenon, an enigma.
Then her lips parted in a faintly scornful smile.
"You afraid—you? You want—run?"
"I'm horribly afraid," he said earnestly. "I want to get out of here as quick as I can."
That was putting, he considered, the very wisest construction upon it.
Negligently her gesture reminded him of the opening in the window. "Here you are safe." she murmured in the vernacular. "And the doors are locked—"
"Yes, but—but Aimée isn't safe, you know—and I must get her out of here."
"Aimée?" In those yellow eyes he caught the flash of capricious resentment at the reminder. Then, indifferently, she brushed the distraction away.
"There is time enough for Aimée. She is not lonely now."
"Not lonely?" he shivered at the cold carelessness of her tone. "I must get to her quickly then."
"But that is not safe.... A little—later."
Uncomfortably he tried to infuse his glance with innate innocence and utter lack of understanding.
"I shan't hurt him—if I have the chance," he told her. "I've given you my word—"
"And I trust you—much." Her gaze sought his in a trifle of impatience at such simplicity. "But it is not safe for you now.... Later ... By and by."
"You don't want him to have a chance to make love to her, do you?" said Ryder sharply. "I thought that was the very thing youdidn't—"
Her smile was a subtle, confessing caress. "I shall have my revenge," she murmured, and pressed closer to him again, every sensuous, sumptuous line of her a challenge and an enticement.
"I give you life," she whispered, very low in her throat. "You give me, perhaps, an hour—?"
"Ihaven'tan hour," said Ryder very desperately and unhappily. "Not when Aimée is with that devil—"
It took every thought of Aimée to get the words out.
He felt a brute about it, a low, ungrateful dog. Shehadgiven him life and every fiber in him clamored to save her pride and champion her caprice.
It seemed so dastardly to wrench away from her now, like some self-centered Joseph, leaving that beastly stab in her vanity.... And she was a stunning creature, lawless, elemental, hot and cold like the seventh wind of the inferno....
But it was Aimée who was in his blood like a fever.... Aimée, that frail white rose of a girl, in her bonds of terror....
He saw the flame in Aziza's eyes. He saw the stiffening of her defiance, of half-incredulous affront. Then, her form drawn up, her bared arms outflung, her vivid, painted, furious face challenging him. "I am not beautiful—like Aimée?" she said in a voice of venom, and in the English, for double measure, "You not like me—no?"
"Youarebeautiful and Idolike you," Ryder combated, feeling a bungling fool. And then went on to thrust into that half-second of suspended fury, a faint breath of appeasing. "But—don't you see—it's my duty—"
"You go—?" she said clearly.
Even in that moment he had a sharp prescience of the unwisdom of his rejection. A cold calculator of chance and probabilities would have reckoned that a half hour of assuagement here would have been a wiser investment of his mortal moments than any virtuous plunge into single-hearted duty.
But Ryder did not calculate. He could not, with Aimée under that beast's hand. His heart and soul were possessed with her danger and his heart and soul carried his body instinctively back from the dancing girl's advance, and he whispered, "I must go. There is no time—"
She flung back her fiery-hued head with a gesture of intolerable rage. Her eyes were lightnings.
"Dog of a Christian!" she said chokingly and flew to the doors.
Back she thrust the heavy hangings, turning a quick key in the lock and wrenching the door wide. And before Ryder could understand, before he could bring himself to realize that she was not simply violently expelling him from her room, she gave a shriek that rang wildly down the long-unseen corridors.
At the top of her lungs, with one hand out to thrust him back or cling to him if he attempted to pass, she shrieked again and again.
Instantly there came a running of feet.
When Hamdi Bey had taken Aimée back to her apartments he pulled sharply upon a bellcord. In a few moments the slave woman, Fatima, made her appearance, no kindly-eyed old crone like Miriam, but a sallow, furtive-faced creature, with an old disfiguring scar across a cheek.
The general pointed to the wet and fainting girl huddling weakly upon the divan.
"Your new mistress has met with an accident, out boating—a curse upon me for gratifying forbidden caprice!" he said crisply. "Be silent of this and array her quickly in garments of rest. I will return."
Very hurriedly he took himself and his own wet condition away. He was furious, through and through. What a night—what a wedding night! Scandal and frustration... a bride with a desperate lover... a bride who, herself, drew revolvers and threatened.
It was beyond any old tale of the palace. For less, girls had had his father's dagger driven through their hearts—his grandfather, at a mere whisper from a eunuch, had given his favorite to the lion. The whisper was found incorrect at a later—too late—date, and the eunuch had furnished the lion another meal.
His modern leniency in this case would have outraged his ancestors.
But it was not in the bey's nature to deal the finishing stroke to anything so soft and lovely as Aimée. He had no intention of depriving himself of her. If she were red with guilt he would feign belief in her, to save his face until his infatuation was gratified.
But actually he did not believe in any great guilt of hers. Tewfick Pasha, for all his indulgent modernity, would keep too strict a harem for that. What he rather believed had happened was that the young American—now so happily immured in his masonry—had become aware of the girl through the story of her French father, and in that connection had struck up the clandestine and romantic correspondence which had led to their mutual infatuation and his desperate venture there that afternoon.
The young man had been dealt with—and the thought of the very summary and competent way he had been dealt with drew the fangs from the bite of that night's invasion.
His fury felt soothingly glutted.
He had been a match for them both. He recalled his own subtlety and agility with a genuine smile as he exchanged his dripping uniform for more informal trousers and a house coat. He had taught that young man a lesson—a final and ultimate lesson. And he was beginning to teach one to that girl. Before he was done with her ...
He felt for her a mingled passion for her beauty and a lust for conquest of her resistant spirit that fed every base and cruel instinct of his nature.
A find—a rare find—even with her circumvented lover! He would have his sport with her.... But though he promised this to himself with feline relish, apprehension and chagrin were still working.
The fond fatuity with which he had welcomed that starry-eyed little creature had been rudely overthrown. And his pride smarted at the idea of the whispers that might echo and re-echo through his palace. He was too wise an old hand to flatter himself that it would preserve its bland and silent unawareness of this night.
So far, he believed, he had been unobserved. In Yussuf's silence he had absolute confidence.... But of course there were a hundred other chances—some spying, back-stairs eye, some curious, straining ear....
And for this matter of the boating mishap—he cursed himself now, as he combed up his fair mustaches and settled a scarlet fez upon his thinned thatch of graying hair, cursed himself roundly for his malicious resort to that old oubliette. Anything else would have done to frighten and overwhelm her and yet he had gratified his dramatic itch—and now had paid for it with that idiotic story of the boating expedition.
He had reason to trust Fatima—there was history behind the old sword scar upon her cheek, and he had a hold over her through her ambition for a son. But Fatima was a woman. And she—or some other who would see that drenched satin would be curious of that boating story....
And of course they could find out from the boatman.
It occurred to him to go and see the boatman and order him away so that afterward the man could say he had been sent off duty, and the story of a nocturnal river trip would not appear too incredible. It was a small concession to stop gossip's mouth.
So drawing on a swinging military cloak, the general stole down through the stair of the water entrance into the lower hall, where the pale light gleamed through the cross-barred iron of the gate and the gatekeeper slept like a log in his muffling cloak.
The soundness of that slumber—loudly attested by the fumes of wine—afforded the general a profound pleasure. He took the man's keys softly, and went to the gate; it afforded him less pleasure to observe that the gate was unlocked, but he put this down to the keeper's muddleheadedness.
Carefully he turned the lock and pocketed the keys—for a lesson to the man's overdeep sleep in the morning and to attest his own presence there that night; then he went back and brought out an oar, which he placed conspicuously beside the smallest boat, drawn up just within the gates.
He was afraid to alter the boat's position lest the noise should prove too wakening, but he considered he had laid an artistic foundation for his story and with a gratifying sense of triumph he mounted the stairs.
He was not conscious of fatigue. He had always been a wiry, indefatigable person, and the alarms and emotions of this night had cleared his head of its wines and drowsiness. He felt the sense of tense, highstrung power which came to him in war, in fighting, in any element of danger.
Youth! He snapped his fingers at it. Youth was buried in his masonry—and helpless in its shuttered room. Power was master—power, craft, subtlety.
But his elation ebbed as he crossed again that long drawing room with its faded flowers about the marriage throne, and its abandoned table with its cloth askew, its crystal disarrayed, its candles gutted and spent.
The memory of that insolent moment when a man's hand had gripped him, had whirled him from Aimée—when a man's voice and gun had threatened him—that memory was too overpowering for even his triumph over the invader to lay wholly its smart of outrage.
He felt again the tightening of his nerves, like quivering wires, as he crossed the violated reception room and entered the boudoir. It was empty, but on the divan the flickering candle light revealed the damp, spreading stain where Aimée's drenched satins had been.
He thrust aside a hanging and pushed open the door into the room beyond.
It was a small bedroom evidently very recently furnished in new and white shining lacquer of French design, elaborately inlaid with painted porcelains and draped with a profusion of rosy taffeta. Among this elegance, surprisingly unrelated to the ancient paneled walls, stood the hastily opened trunk and bags of the bride, their raised lids and disarranged trays heaped with the confusion of unaccustomed, swiftly searching hands.
Aimée herself, in a gay little French boudoir robe of jade and citron, sat huddled in a chair, like a mute, terrified child, in the hand of her dresser, who was shaking out the long, damp hair and fanning it with a peacock fan.
At the bey's entrance Fatima suspended the fanning, but with easy familiarity exhibited the long ringlets.
Curtly the bey nodded, and gestured in dismissal; the woman laid down her fan, and with a last slant-eyed look at that strangely still new mistress she went noiselessly out a small service door.
With an air of negligent assurance Hamdi Bey gazed about the room and yawned. "Truly a fatiguing evening," he remarked in his dry, sardonic voice. "But you look so untouched! What a thing is radiant youth."
He sauntered over to her, who drew a little closer together at his approach, and lifted one of the long dark curls that the serving woman had exhibited.
"The ringlets of loveliness," he murmured. "You know the old saying of the Sadi? 'The ringlets of the lovely are a chain on the feet of reason and a snare for the bird of wisdom.'... How long ago he said it—and how true to-day ... Yet such a charming chain! Suppose, then, I forgive you, little one, since sages have forgiven beauty before?"
She was silent, her eyes fixed on him with the silent terror with which a trapped bird sees its captor, in their bright darkness the same mute apprehension, the same filming of helpless despair.
Ryder was dead, she thought. This cruel, incensed old madman had killed him, for all his oaths. Somewhere beneath those ancient stones he was lying drowned and dead, a strange, pitiable addition to the dark secrets of those grim walls.
He had died for her sake, and all that she asked now of life, she thought in the utter agony of her youth, was death. And very quickly.
"I am so soft hearted," he sighed, still with that ringlet in his lifted hand, his hand which wanted palpably to settle upon her and yet was withheld by some strange inhibition of those fixed, helpless eyes. "Who knows—perhaps I may forgive you yet? You might persuade me—"
"He is dead," she said shiveringly.
"Dead? He?... Ah, the invader, the intruder, the young man who wanted you for a family in France!" The bey laughed gratingly. "No, I assure you he is not dead—I have not harmed a hair of his head. He is alive—only not with quite the widest range of liberty—"
He broke off to laugh again. "Ah, you disbelieve?" he said politely. "Shall I send, then, for some proof—an ear, perhaps, or a little finger, still very warm and bleeding, to convince you?... In five minutes it will be here."
Then terror stirred again in her frozen heart. If Ryder were alive and still in this man's power—
"You are horrible," she said to him in a voice that was suddenly clear and unshaken. "What is it you want of me—fear and hate—and utter loathing?"
Her unexpected spirit was briefly disconcerting. The Turk looked down upon her in arrested irony and then he smiled beneath his mustaches and bent nearer with kindling gaze.
"Not at all—nothing at all like that, little dove with talons. I want sweetness and repentance—and submission. And—"
"You have a strange way to win them," she said desperately.
"You have taken a strange way with me, my love! Little did I foresee, when I escorted you up the stairs this morning—" He broke off. "There are men," he reminded her, "who would not consider a cold bath as a complete recompense for your bridal plans."
She was silent.
"But I," he murmured, "I am soft hearted." He dropped on one knee before her and tried to smile into her averted face. "I can never resist a charming penitent.... I assure you I am pliability itself in delicate fingers—although iron and steel to a threatening hand.... If you should woo me very sweetly, little one—"
She could not overcome and she could not hide from his mocking eyes the sick shrinking that drew her back from his least touch. But she did fight down the wild hysteria of her repugnance so that her voice was not the trembling gasp it wanted to be.
"How can I know what you are?" she told him. "You mock me—you threaten to torture that man—it would be folly not to think that you are deceiving me. If you would only prove to me so that I could believe—"
"If you would but prove tomeso thatIcould believe—! Prove that you are mine—and not that infidel's. Prove that you bring me a wife's devotion—not a wanton's indifference." He caught her cold hands, trying to draw her forward to him. "Prove that you only pity him," he whispered, "but that your love will be mine—"
She felt as if a serpent clasped her. And yet, if that were the only way to win Ryder's safety—if it were possible for her sickened senses to allay this madman's suspicions and undermine his revenge—
Quiveringly she thought that to save Ryder she would go through fire.
But the hideous, mocking uncertainties! Her utter helplessness—her lost deference....
It was not a sudden sound that broke in upon them but rather the perception of many sounds, muffled, half heard, but gaining upon their consciousness. Running feet—a stifled voice—something faint and shrill—
Aimée sprang to her feet; the general rose with her and turned his head inquiringly in the direction. Then he jerked open the door through which Fatima had disappeared; it led to a dark service corridor and small anteroom, from whose bed the attendant was absent. An outer door was ajar.
No need to question the sounds now. Faint, but piercingly shrill shrieks were sounding from above, while the footsteps were racing, some down, some up—
The bey flung shut the door behind him and hurried towards the confusion.