There are two cities of Fez. One is the city of the narrow, crowded streets, where the cry, "Balak! Balak!"[1]resounds all day. Streets, one terms them, since they are the main thoroughfares through which all the merchandise of Morocco passes out to the four quarters of the compass; but they are no wider than the alley-ways of an English village, and in many places a man may stand in the centre and touch the wall on either side. These streets are paved with big cobblestones, but the stones are broken and displaced by the tramp of centuries. If mended at all, they are mended with a millstone or any chance slab of rock; but for the most part they are left unmended altogether. For that is the fashion in Morocco. There they build and make, and they do both things beautifully and well. But they seldom finish; in a house, dainty with fountains and arabesques and coloured tiles, you will still find a corner uncompleted, a pillar which lacks the delicate fluting of the other pillars, an embrasure for a clock half ornamented with gold filagree, and half left plain. And if they seldom finish, they never by any chance repair. The mansion is built and decorated within; artists fit the tiles together in a mosaic of cool colours, and carve, and gild, and paint the little pieces of cedar-wood, and glue them into the light and pointed arches; the rich curtains are hung, and the master enters into his possession. There follows the procession of the generations. The tiles crack, the woodwork of the arches splits and falls, and the walls break and crumble. The householder sits indifferent, and the whole house corrodes. So, in the narrow streets, holes gape, and the water wears a channel where it wills, and the mud lies thick and slippery on the rounded stones; the streets ran steeply up and down the hills, wind abruptly round corners, dive into tunnels. Yet men gallop about them on their sure-footed horses, stumbling, slipping, but seldom falling. "Balak!" they cry. "Balak!" and the man on foot is flung against the wall or jostled out of the way. No one protests or resents.
A file of donkeys, laden with wood or with grain, so fixed upon their backs that the load grazes each street wall, blocks the way. "Balak!" shouts the donkey-driver. And perhaps some nobleman of Fez, soft and fat and indolent, in his blue cloak, who comes pacing on a mule no less fat, preceded by his servants, must turn or huddle himself into an embrasure. There are no social distinctions in the alley-ways of Fez. It may be that one of those donkeys will fall then and there beneath his load, and refuse to rise. His load will be taken from his back, and if he still refuse, he will be left just where he fell, to die. His owner walks on. It is no one's business to remove the animal. There he lies in the middle of the street, and to him "Balak" will be called in vain.
A mounted troop of wild Berbers from the hills, with their long, brass-bound guns slung across their backs, and gaudy handkerchiefs about their heads, will ride through the bazaars, ragged of dress and no less ragged in the harness of their horses. "Balak!" Very swiftly way is made for them. Balak, indeed, is the word most often heard in the streets of Fez.
Those streets wind at times between the walls of gardens, and if the walls are broken, as surely at some point they will be, a plot of grass, a grove of orange trees hung with ruddy fruit, and a clump of asphodel will shine upon the eyes in that brown and windowless city like a rare jewel. At times, too, they pass beneath some spacious arch into a place of width, or cross a bridge where one of the many streams of the river Fez boils for a moment into the open, and then swirls away again beneath the houses. But, chiefly, they run deep beneath the towering walls of houses, and little of the sunlight visits them; so that you may know a man of Fez, even though he be absent from his town, by the pallor of his face. A householder, moreover, may build over the street, if he can come to an agreement with his neighbour on the opposite side, and then the alleys suddenly become tunnels, and turn upon themselves in the dark. Or the walls so lean together at the top that barely a finger's breadth of sky is visible as from the bottom of a well.
Into this city of dark streets Warrisden came upon an evening of gloom. The night before he had camped on the slope of a hill by the village of Segota. Never had he seen a spot more beautiful. He had looked across the deep valley at his feet to the great buttress of Jebel Zarhon, on a dark shoulder of which mountain one small, round, white town was perched. A long, high range of grey hills--the last barrier between him and Fez--cleft at one point by the road, rose on the far side of the valley; and those hills and the fields beneath, and the solitary crumbling castle which stood in the bottom amongst the fields, were all magnified and made beautiful by the mists of evening. The stars had come out overhead, behind him the lights shone in his tent, and a cheerful fire crackled in the open near the door. He had come up quickly from Tangier, and without hindrance, in spite of warnings that the road was not safe. The next morning he would be in Fez. It had seemed to him, then, that fortune was on his side. He drew an augury of success from the clean briskness of the air. And that confidence had remained with him in the morning. He had crossed the valley early, and riding over the long pass on the other side, had seen at last the snow-crowned spur of the Atlas on the further side of the plain of Fez. He had descended into the plain, which perpetually rose and fell like the billows of an ocean; and in the afternoon, from the summit of one of these billows, he had suddenly seen, not an hour's journey off, the great city of Fez, with its crenelated walls and high minarets, a mass of grey and brown, with here and there a splash of white, and here and there a single palm-tree, straggling formlessly across the green plain. The sky had clouded over; the track was now thronged with caravans of camels, and mules, and donkeys, and wayfarers on foot going to and coming from the town; and before the Bab Sagma, the great gate looking towards Mikkes, was reached, the rain was falling.
Warrisden had sent on the soldier who had ridden with him from Tangier, to deliver a note to the Consul, and he waited with his animals and his men for the soldier's return. The man came towards dusk with word that a house had been secured in the town, and Warrisden passed through the gate and down between the high battlements of the Bugilud into the old town. And as he passed through the covered bazaars and the narrow streets, in the gloom of the evening, while the rain fell drearily from a sullen sky, his confidence of the morning departed from him, and a great depression chilled him to the heart. The high, cracked, bulging walls of the houses, towering up without a window, the shrouded figures of the passers-by, the falling light, the neglect as of a city of immemorial age crumbling in decay, made of Fez to him that night a place of gloom and forbidding mystery. He was in a mood to doubt whether ever he would look on Tony Stretton's face again.
In the narrowest of the alleys, where each of his stirrups touched a wall, his guide stopped. It was almost pitch-dark here. By throwing back his head, Warrisden could just see, far above him, a little slit of light. His guide groped his way down a passage on the right, and at the end opened with a key a ponderous black door. Warrisden stepped over the sill, and found himself in a tiled court of which the roof was open to the sky. On the first floor there was a gallery, and on each of the four sides a long, narrow room, lofty, and closed with great folding doors, opened on to the gallery. In one of these rooms Warrisden had his bed set up. He sat there trying to read by the light of a single candle, and listening to the drip of the rain.
When he left Tangier, he had twenty-one days before he need be at Roquebrune in answer to Pamela's summons. He had looked up the steamers before he started. Four of those days would be needed to carry them from Tangier to Roquebrune. He had reached Fez in five, and he thus had twelve days left. In other words, if Stretton came to Fez within a week, there should still be time, provided, of course, the road to the coast was not for the moment cut by rebellious tribes. That was the danger, as Warrisden's journey had told him. He discounted the timorous statements of his dragoman, Ibrahim, but one who knew had warned him at El Ksar. There was a risk.
The night was cold. Warrisden wrapped himself in a Moorish jellaba of fine, white wool, but he could not put on with it the Moorish patience and indifference. The rain dripped upon the tiles of the court. Where was Stretton, he wondered?
He went to bed, and waked up in the middle of the night. He had left the great doors of his bedroom open; the rain had stopped; and in the stillness of the night he heard one loud voice, of an exquisite beauty, vibrating over the roofs of the sleeping city, as though it spoke from heaven itself. Warrisden lay listening to it, and interpreting the words from the modulation of the voice which uttered them. Now it rang out imperious as a summons, dropping down through the open roofs to wake the sleepers in their beds. Now it rose, lyrical and glorious, in a high chant of praise. Now it became wistful, and trembled away pleading, yet with a passion of longing in the plea. Warrisden could look upwards from his bed through the open roof. The sky was clear again. Overhead were the bright stars, and this solitary voice, most musical and strange, ringing out through the silence.
It was the mueddhin on the tower of the Karueein Mosque. For five hours before the dawn the praises of Allah are sung from the summit of the mosque's minaret. There are ten mueddhins to whom the service is entrusted, and each sends out his chant above the sleeping city for half an hour. But in the voice of this, one of the ten whom Warrisden heard on the first night when he slept in Fez, there was a particular quality. He listened for it during the nights which followed; expected it, and welcomed its first note as one welcomes the coming of a friend. It seemed to him that all the East was in that cry.
It brought back to him sunsets when his camp was pitched by some little village of tents or thatched mud-houses surrounded by hedges of aloes and prickly pears--at Karia Ben Ouder, at Djouma--villages where there was no mosque at all, but whence none the less the voice of a priest dispersed its plaintive cry across the empty country of marigolds and asphodels, startling the white cow-birds and the storks.
Warrisden fell to thinking of Tony Stretton. He struck a match, and looked at his watch. It was close upon the hour of dawn. Perhaps, just at this moment, by some village in that wild, dark, mountain country to the south-east, Stretton stirred in his sleep, and waked to hear some such summons chanted about the village. Perhaps he was even now loading his mule, and setting forth by the glimmer of the starlight upon his dangerous road. Warrisden fell asleep again with that picture in his mind, and woke to find the sunlight pouring through the square opening of the roof. He drank his coffee, and mounting a little winding stairway of broken steps, came out into that other city of Fez, the city of the roof-tops.
Fez is built upon the slope of a hill, and upon some of the flat roofs Warrisden looked down and through the dark square holes of the openings; to the parapets of others he looked up. Upon some there were gardens planted--so, he thought, must have looked the hanging gardens of Babylon; on others, linen was strung out to dry as in some backyard of England; the minarets, here inlaid with white and green tiles, there built simply of bricks and brown plaster, rose high into the limpid air. And on the towers were the great nests of storks.
Warrisden looked abroad, and in the sunlight his hopes revived. It seemed that it must have been into another town that he had entered last night. Nowhere could he see the gash of a street in that plateau of roof-tops--so narrow they were; and no noise rose at all, they were so deep. Here the only sound audible was the chattering of women's voices--for the roofs are the playgrounds of the women, and Warrisden could see them in their coloured handkerchiefs and robes clustered together, climbing from one house to another with the help of ladders, visiting their friends. But of all the clamour which must needs be resounding in those crowded streets, not even one stray cry of "Balak!" reached to this upper air. Lower down the hill to the east, Warrisden could see the city wall and the gate through which Stretton must pass when he came. And he might come to-day!
That was Warrisden's thought. He went down the stairs, had his horse brought into the dark street before the door, and, accompanied by hismehazni, that old soldier who had ridden with him from Tangier, went out of the city over the plain towards Sefru. For through that small town of gardens and fruit at the base of the Atlas spur, Stretton would come. But he did not come on that day, nor on the next. But, on the other hand, Ibrahim, Warrisden's guide, brought bad news.
He mounted to the roof in the morning, while Warrisden sat there after his breakfast, and crouched down behind the parapet so that he might not be seen. For the men leave the roof-tops to their women-folk, and do not trespass there themselves.
"Sir," said he, "the road between Djebel Silfat and Djebel Zarbon is cut. Word has come into Fez this morning. The Z'mur have come down from the hills, and sit across the road, stopping and robbing every one."
Warrisden sat up.
"Are you sure?" he asked. He was, as he knew, in a country of liars. Ibrahim, in addition, was a coward in the country districts, though the best of braggarts at Tangier. He had ridden on his mule slung about with weapons--a Spanish rifle on his back, a revolver in his belt, and a Winchester in his hands; while between the fingers of his left hand he carried ready four cartridges--but he was none the less afraid. However, Warrisden remembered that mountain pass which led from the plain of the Sebou up to Segota. It was very lonely, it was narrow, the road looped perpetually round the bases of the round buttresses of Djebel Silfat. It would certainly be an awkward place wherein to be entrapped.
"Yes, yes, I am sure," replied Ibrahim, "the Z'mur are bad men. They might capture you and hold you to ransom."
Warrisden was inclined to discount Ibrahim's terror of the Z'mur. The lawless deeds of that wild and fanatical tribe had been dinned into his ears ever since he had crossed the Sebou; until he had come to make light of them. But there was no doubt they terrorised the people; in the villages where Warrisden had camped, they were spoken of with a dread hardly less than that which Ibrahim betrayed. It would certainly never do to be taken by the Z'mur. They would be released, no doubt; but time would be wasted. They might be kept for weeks in the forest of Marmura. They would reach Roquebrune too late.
Warrisden had brought with him, as a servant, one of the men who had been with him to Ain-Sefra, and descending the stairs he called him, and spoke, bidding Ibrahim interpret.
"Do you remember the mule which I gave away at Ain-Sefra?" he asked. And the man answered, "Yes!"
"You would know it again?"
The man was sure upon that point. He described the marks by which he would recognise the beast.
"Very well," said Warrisden. "Go out to the west of Fez, and watch the road to Sefru. If you see a Jew come towards Fez driving the mule, lead him at once to this house. Watch all day until the gate is closed."
The man went off upon his errand, and Warrisden betook himself to the vice-consulate. On his return he summoned Ibrahim, and said--
We must travel by Mequinez and Mediyah. A letter will be given to us, passing us on from governor to governor. We can reach Larache, travelling hard, in five days. We may find a steamer there for Gibraltar. If not, we must go on, in one more day, to Tangier.
Ibrahim bowed his head and made no further protest. In the evening Warrisden's servant came back from the gate; his watch had been fruitless. Thus three days had passed. Warrisden became anxious again, and restless. The seven days which Tony Stretton could take, and still reach Roquebrune by the date on which Pamela insisted, were now curtailed. Six days formed the limit, and even that limit implied that the journey should be of the swiftest. Of those six days, three had gone.
The fourth came, and passed. Warrisden rode out upon the track to Sefru in vain. Even the promised letter did not come. Warrisden made inquiries. It would come, he was told. There was no doubt upon that score. But a Government letter takes a long time in the writing in Morocco. It was not until the fifth evening that a messenger from the Palace knocked upon the door. These were the days when Mulai-el-Hassan ruled in Morocco, and was on the march against his rebellious tribes for nine months out of the twelve. Mulai-el-Hassan, at this particular time, was far away to the south in the Sus country, and therefore the mountain pass to the north was dangerous.
Warrisden had his letter, however, sealed with the Viceroy's seal. But he gazed out over the city as it lay, warm and ruddy in the sunset, and wondered whether it would avail at all. His servant had come back from the gate with his familiar answer. No Jew had driven the mule down the road into Fez that day. And there was only one more day.
Warrisden descended the stairs to the gallery on the first floor, and as he came out upon it, he heard voices in the courtyard below. He looked over the balustrade and saw a man standing amongst his muleteers and servants. Warrisden could not see his face. He was dressed in rags, but the rags were the remnants of a black gabardine, and he wore a black skull-cap upon his head.
It is likely that Warrisden would have taken no further notice of the man, but that he cringed a little in his manner as though he was afraid. Then he spoke in Arabic, and the voice was timorous and apologetic. Warrisden, however, knew it none the less. He leaned over the balustrade--
"Stretton!" he cried out in a burst of joy.
The man in the courtyard looked up. Warrisden would never have known him but for his voice. A ragged beard stubbled his cheeks and chin; he was disfigured with dirt and bruises; he was lean with hunger; his face was drawn and hollow from lack of sleep. But there was something more, a wider difference between this ragged Stretton in the courtyard and the Stretton Warrisden had known than mere looks explained. The man who had looked up when he heard his voice loudly and suddenly pronounced had been startled--nay, more than startled. He had raised an arm as though to ward off a blow. He had shrunk back. He had been afraid. Even now, when he looked at Warrisden, and knew that he was here in a house of safety, he stood drawing deep breaths, and trembling like one who has received a shock. His appearance told Warrisden much of the dangers of the journey from Ain-Sefra through the hills to Fez.
"Yes," said Tony, "I am here. Am I in time?"
"Just in time," cried Warrisden. "Oh, but I thought you never would come!"
He ran down the steps into the courtyard.
"Balak!" cried Stretton, with a laugh. "Wait till I have had a bath, and got these clothes burnt."
In such guise, Tony Stretton came to Fez. He had gone straight to the vice-consulate, and thence had been directed to Warrisden's house. When, an hour later, he came up on to the gallery and sat down to dinner, he was wearing the clothes of a European, and the look of fear had gone from his face, the servility from his manner. But Warrisden could not forget either the one or the other. Tony Stretton had come through the mountains--yes. But the way had not been smooth.
The two men smoked together upon the roof-top afterwards.
"I left a man at the gate all day," said Warrisden, "to watch the track from Sefru. I had brought him from Algiers. I do not know how he came to miss you."
"He could not know me," said Tony, "and I spoke to no one."
"But he knew the mule!"
Tony was silent for a little while. Then he said, in a low, grave voice, like a man speaking upon matters which he has no liking to remember--
"The mule was taken from me some days ago in the Ait Yussi country." And Warrisden upon that said--
"You had trouble, then, upon the way--great trouble."
Again Tony was slow in the reply. He looked out across the city. It was a night of moonlight, so bright that the stars were pale and small, as though they were withdrawn; there was no cloud anywhere about the sky; and on such a night, in that clear, translucent air, the city, with its upstanding minarets, had a grace and beauty denied to it by day. There was something of enchantment in its aspect, Tony smoked his pipe in silence for a little while. Then he said--
"Let us not talk about it! I never thought that I would be sitting here in Fez to-night. Tell me rather when we start!"
"Early to-morrow," replied Warrisden. "We must reach Roquebrune in the South of France by the thirty-first."
Stretton suddenly sat back in his chair.
"Roquebrune! France!" he exclaimed. "We must go there? Why?"
"I do not know," Warrisden answered. "A telegram reached me at Tangier. I kept it."
He took the telegram from his pocket and handed it to Stretton, who read it and sat thinking.
"We have time," said Warrisden, "just time enough, I think, if we travel fast."
"Good," said Stretton, as he returned the telegram. "But I was not thinking of the time."
He did not explain what had caused him to start at the mention of Roquebrune; but after sitting for a little while longer in silence, he betook himself to bed.
Early the next morning they rode out of the Bab Sagma upon the thronged highway over the plain to Mequinez.
The caravans diminished, striking off into this or that track. Very soon there remained with them only one party of five Jews mounted on small donkeys. They began to ride through high shrubs and bushes of fennel over rolling ground. Stretton talked very little, and as the track twisted and circled across the plain he was constantly standing up in his stirrups and searching the horizon.
"There does not seem to be one straight path in Morocco," he exclaimed impatiently. "Look at this one. There's no reason why it should not run straight. Yet it never does."
Indeed, the track lay across that open plain like some brown, monstrous serpent of a legend.
"I do not believe," replied Warrisden, "that there is a straight path anywhere in the world, unless it is one which has been surveyed and made, or else it runs from gate to gate, and both gates are visible. One might think the animals made this track, turning and twisting to avoid the bushes. Only the tracks are no straighter in the desert, where there are no bushes at all."
They halted for half an hour at eleven, beside a bridge which crossed a stream, broken and ruinous, but still serviceable. And while they sat on the ground under the shadow they suddenly heard a great clatter of hoofs upon the broken cobbles; and looking up saw a body of men ride across the bridge. There were about forty of them, young and old; all were mounted, and in appearance as wild and ragged a set of bandits as could be imagined. As they rode over the bridge they saw Warrisden and Stretton seated on the ground beneath them; and without a word or a shout they halted as one man. Their very silence was an intimidating thing.
"Z'mur," whispered Ibrahim. He was shaking with fear. Warrisden noticed that the two soldiers who accompanied them on this journey to Mequinez quietly mounted their horses. Stretton and Warrisden rose to do likewise. And as they rose a dozen of the mounted Z'mur quietly rode round from the end of the bridge and stood between them and the stream. Then the leader, a big man with a black beard turning grey, began to talk in a quiet and pleasant voice to the soldiers.
"You are bringing Europeans into our country. Now, why are you doing that? We do not like Europeans."
The soldiers no less pleasantly replied--
"Your country? The Europeans are travelling with a letter from your master and mine, my Lord the Sultan, to the Governor of Mequinez."
"You will show us then the letter?"
"I will do nothing of the kind," the soldier replied, with a smile. The Z'mur did not move; the two soldiers sat upon their horses smiling--it seemed that matters had come to a deadlock. Meanwhile Warrisden and Stretton got into their saddles. Then the leader of the Z'mur spoke again--
"We passed five Jews riding on donkeys a little while ago. They were kind enough when we stopped them to give us a peseta apiece. We are going to Fez to offer our help to the Sultan, if only he will give us rifles and ammunition. But we shall go home again when we have got them. Perhaps the Europeans would like to give us a peseta apiece as well."
"I do not think they would like it at all," said the soldier. "Peace go with you!" and he turned his horse and, followed, by Warrisden and Stretton, the terrified Ibrahim and the train of mules, he rode right through the forty Z'mur and over the bridge.
It was an awkward moment, but the men of Warrisden's party assumed, with what skill they could, an air of unconcern. Trouble was very near to them. It needed only that one of those wild tribesmen should reach out his hand and seize the bridle of a horse. But no hand was reached out. The Z'mur were caught in a moment of indecision. They sat upon their horses motionless. They let the Europeans pass.
Ibrahim, however, drew no comfort from their attitude.
"It is because they wish rifles and ammunition from the Government," he said. "Therefore they will avoid trouble until they have got them. But with the next party it will not be so."
There are three waterfalls in Morocco, and of those three one falls in a great cascade between red cliffs into a dark pool thirty feet below, close by the village of Medhuma. By this waterfall they lunched, the while Ibrahim bared his right arm to the shoulder, stretched himself full length upon the ground, and, to the infinite danger of the bystanders, practised shooting with his revolver. They lunched quickly and rode on. Towards evening, above a group of trees on a hill, they saw here and there a minaret.
"Mequinez," exclaimed Ibrahim. "Schoof! Mequinez!"
In a little while fragments of thick wall began to show, scattered here and there about the plain. Brown walls, high and crumbling to rain, walls that never had been walls of houses, but which began and ended for no reason. They were all that was left of the work of Mulai Ismail, who, in the seventeenth century, had built and planned buildings about this town until death put an end to all his architecture. There was to be a wall across the country, from Fez to Morocco city far away in the south, so that the blind, of which this kingdom still has many, and then was full, might pass from one town to another without a guide. Part of that wall was built, and fragments of it rise amongst the oleanders and the bushes to this day.
The travellers entered now upon a park. A green mossy turf spread out soft beneath the feet of their horses, dwarf oaks made everywhere a pleasant shade; Stretton had lost sight now of the minarets, and no sign of Mequinez was visible at all. The ground sloped downwards, the track curved round a hill, and suddenly, on the opposite side of a valley, they saw the royal city, with its high walls and gates, its white houses, and its green-tiled mosques, and its old grey massive palaces stretch along the hillside before their eyes.
One of the soldiers rode forward into the town to find the Basha and present his letters. A troop of men came out in a little time and led the travellers up the cobbled stones through a gateway into the wide space before the Renegade's Gate, that wonderful monument of Moorish art which neither the wear of the centuries nor the neglect of its possessors has availed to destroy. Its tiles are broken. The rains have discoloured it, stones have fallen from their places. Yet the gate rises, majestic yet most delicate, beautiful in colour, exquisite in shape, flanked with massive pillars, and surmounted by its soaring arch, a piece of embroidery in stone, fine as though the stone were lace. By the side of this arch the camp was pitched just about the time when the horses and mules are brought down to roll in the dust of the square and to drink at the two great fountains beyond the gate.
Later in that evening there came a messenger from the Basha with servants bearing bowls of kouss-kouss.
"Fourteen soldiers will ride with you to-morrow," he said, "for the country is not safe. It will be well if you start early, for you have a long way to go."
"The earlier the better," said Stretton.
"It will do if you breakfast at five--half-past five," said Ibrahim, to whom punctuality was a thing unknown. "And start at six--half-past six."
"No," said Warrisden. "We will start at five--half-past five."
That night a company of soldiers kept guard about the tents, and passed the hours of darkness in calling to one another and chanting one endless plaintive melody. Little sleep was possible to the two Englishmen, and to one of them sleep did not come at all. Now and then Warrisden dropped off and waked again; and once or twice he struck a match and lit his candle. Each time that he did this he saw Stretton lying quite motionless in his bed on the other side of the tent. Tony lay with the bed-clothes up to his chin, and his arms straight down at his sides, in some uncanny resemblance to a dead man. But Warrisden saw that all the while his eyes were open. Tony was awake with his troubles and perplexities, keeping them to himself as was his wont, and slowly searching for an issue. That he would hit upon the issue he did not doubt. He had these few days for thought, and it was not the first time that he had had to map out a line of conduct. His course might be revealed to him at the very last moment, as it had been on the trawler in the North Sea. Or it might flash upon him in a second, as the necessity to desert had flashed upon him amidst the aloes of Ain-Sefra. Meanwhile he lay awake and thought.
They started early that morning, and crossing a valley, mounted on to that high, wide plain Djebel Zarhon and Djebel Gerowaun. They left the town of Mequinez behind them; its minarets dropped out of sight. They had come into a most empty world. Not a tent-village stood anywhere beside the track. Far away to the right, in a deep recess, the white sacred town of Mulai Idris fell down the dark side of Zarhon like a cascade. A little further an arch of stone and a few pillars rising from the plain showed where once the Romans had built their town of Volubilis. But when that was passed there was no sign of life anywhere at all. For hours they rode in a desolate, beautiful world. Bushes of asphodel, white with their starry flowers, brushed against them; plants of iris, purple and yellow, stood stirrup-high upon their path; and at times the bushes would cease, and they would ride over a red carpet of marigolds, which would pale away into the gold of the mustard flower. Flowers were about them all that day, the red anemone, the blue lupin, periwinkles, the yellow flower of the cytisus, but no living things. Even the air above their heads was still. The country seemed too empty even for the birds.
At eleven o'clock they stopped beside a stream which ran prettily between trees across their path.
"We shall find no more water until evening," said Ibrahim. "We will stop here."
Stretton dismounted, and said--
"We can send the mules on and catch them up. It will save time."
The soldiers shook their heads.
"We are in the Berber country," they said. "We must not separate."
Stretton looked around impatiently.
"But there is no one within miles," he exclaimed; and, as if to contradict him, a man walked out from the bushes by the stream and came towards them. He had been robbed on this very track not two hours before by eleven mounted Berbers. He had been driving three mules laden with eggs and food to Mulai Idris, and his mules and their loads had been taken from him. He was walking home, absolutely penniless, His whole fortune had been lost that day; and when once again the travellers started upon their journey he ran at a trot beside their horses for safety's sake.
The road mounted now on to stony and mountainous country. It wound continually, ascending in and out amongst low, round peaks towards the summit of a great line of hills which ran from east to west opposite to them against the sky.
"Beyond the hills," cried Ibrahim, "is the plain of the Sebou."
A big village crowned the hill just where the track ascended. It had been placed there to protect the road. In a little while they came to the brow of the hill, and suddenly they saw, far below them, the great plain of the Sebou, green and level, dotted with villages and the white tombs of saints and clumps of trees, stretching away as far as the eye could reach. It was afternoon, not a cloud was in the sky, and the sun shone through the clear, golden air beneficently bright. The hillside fell away to the plain with a descent so sheer, the plain broke so abruptly upon the eyes, that the very beauty of the scene caught the breath away. Both Warrisden and Stretton reined in their horses, and sat looking across the plain as a man might who suddenly from the crest of some white cliff sees for the first time the sea. And then Warrisden heard his companion begin to hum a song. He caught some of the words, but not many.
"Oh, come out, mah love, I'm awaitin' foh you heah!" Tony began, and suddenly checked himself with an expression of anger, as though the words had associations which it hurt him to recall.
"Let us ride on," he said, and led the way down the steep, winding track towards the plain.
They pressed on that evening, and camped late in the Beni Hassan country. Stretton slept that night, but he slept fitfully. He had not yet come to the end of his perplexities, and as he rode away from their camping-ground in the morning he said, impulsively--
"It is quite true. I have thought of it. I am to blame. I should have gone into the house that night."
He was endeavouring to be just, and to this criticism of himself he continually recurred. He should have entered his house in Berkeley Square on the night when he contented himself with looking up to the lighted windows. He should have gone in and declared what was in his mind to do. Very likely he would only have made matters worse. Contempt for a visionary would very likely have been added to the contempt for a ne'er-do-weel. Certainly no faith would have been felt by Millie in the success of his plan. He would have been asked, in a lukewarm way, to abandon it and stay at home. Still, he ought to have gone in. He had made a mistake that night.
All that day they rode through the Beni Hassan country westwards. The plain was level and monotonous; they passed village after village, each one built in a circle round a great space of open turf, into which the cattle were driven at night. For upon the hills, and in the forest of Mamura to the south, close by, the Z'mur lived, and between the Beni Hassan and the Z'mur there is always war. In the afternoon they came to the borders of that forest, and skirting its edge, towards evening reached the caravanserai of El Kantra.
The travellers saw it some while before they came to it--four high, smooth, castellated walls crowning a low hill. It stands upon the road from Fez to Rabat, and close to the road from Rabat to Larache, and a garrison guards it. For you could almost throw a stone from its walls into the trees of Mamura. Stretton and Warrisden rode round the walls to the gate, and as they passed beneath the arch both halted and looked back.
Outside was a quiet country of grey colours; the sun was near to its setting; far away the broken walls of the old Portuguese town of Mediyah stood upon a point of vantage on a hillside, like some ruined castle of the Tyrol. Inside the caravanserai all was noise and shouting and confusion. In the thickness of the walls there were little rooms or cells, and in these the merchants were making their homes for the night, while about them their servants and muleteers buzzed like a hive of bees. And the whole great square within the walls was one lake of filthy mud, wherein camels, and mules, and donkeys, and horses rolled and stamped and fought. A deafening clamour rose to the skies. Every discordant sound that the created world could produce seemed to be brayed from that jostling throng of animals as from some infernal orchestra. And the smell of the place was fetid.
"Let us pitch our camp outside!" said Warrisden. But the captain of the garrison came hurrying up.
"No," he cried excitedly. "The Z'mur! The Z'mur!"
Stretton shrugged his shoulders.
"I am getting a little bored with the Z'mur," said he.
"They have sent in word to us," the captain continued, "that they mean to attack us to-night."
Stretton looked perplexed.
"But why send in word?" he asked.
The captain of the garrison looked astonished at the question.
"So that we may be ready for them, of course," he replied, quite seriously; for life in Morocco has some of the qualities ofopera-bouffe. "So you must come inside. You have a letter from my lord the Basha of Fez, it is true. If the letter said you were to sleep outside the walls of El Kantra, then I would kiss the seal and place it against my forehead, and bring out my five hundred men to guard you, and we should all get killed. But it does not say so."
His five hundred men were really short of fifty. Stretton and Warrisden laughed; but they had to go inside the caravanserai. This was the last day on which they ran any risk. To-morrow they would cross the Sebou at Mediyah, and beyond the Sebou the road was safe.
They rode inside the caravanserai, and were allotted a cell which obtained some privacy from a hurdle fixed in the ground in front of it. The gates of the caravanserai were closed, the sunset flushed the blue sky with a hue of rose; the mueddhin came out upon the minaret which rose from the southern wall, and chanted in a monotone his call to prayer; and then a drummer and a bugler advanced into the crowded square. Suddenly there fell upon Stretton's ears, competing with the mueddhin and the uproar of the animals, the "Last Post."
Stretton started up, amazed, and most deeply moved. An English officer instructed the Moorish troops. What more natural than that he should introduce the English calls and signals? But to Stretton it seemed most wonderful that here, in this Eastern country, while the Mohammedan priest was chanting from his minaret, he should hear again, after so many years, that familiar tattoo sounded by an Eastern bugle and an Eastern drum. In how many barracks of England, he wondered, would that same "Last Post" ring out to-night? And at once the years slipped away, the hard years of the North Sea and the Sahara. He was carried back among the days when he served in the Coldstream. Then arose in his heart a great longing that something of the happiness of those days might be recaptured still.
Warrisden and Stretton crossed the Sebou the next morning, and rode with the boom of the Atlantic in their ears. Hills upon their left hand hid the sea from their eyes, and it was not until the next day, when they mounted on to a high tableland four hours from Larache, that they saw it rolling lazily towards the shore. They caught a steamer at Larache that night.
Meanwhile Pamela waited at the Villa Pontignard, swinging from hope to fear, and from fear again to hope. The days chased one another. She watched the arrival of each train from Marseilles at the little station below, with an expectant heart; and long after it had departed towards Italy, she kept within her vision the pathway up the hillside to the villa. But the travellers did not return. Expectation and disappointment walked alternately at her elbow all the day, and each day seemed endless. Yet, when the next day came, it had come all too quickly. Every morning it seemed to her, as she turned her calendar, that the days chased one another, racing to the month's end; every evening, tired out with her vigil, she wondered how they could pass so slowly. The thirty-first of the month dawned at last. At some time on this day Millie Stretton would arrive at Eze. She thought of it, as she rose, with a sinking heart; and then thrust thought aside. She dared not confront the possibility that the trains might stop at Roquebrune, and move on to Italy and discharge no passengers upon the platform. She dared not recognise her dread that this day might close and the darkness come as fruitlessly as all the rest. It was her last day of hope. Lionel Callon was waiting. Millie Stretton was arriving. To-morrow, Tony might come, but he would come too late. Pamela lived in suspense. Somehow the morning passed. The afternoonRapideswept through towards Mentone. Pamela saw the smoke of the engine from her terrace, and knew that upon that train had come the passenger from England. Half an hour ago Millie had most likely stepped from her carriage on to the platform at Eze. And still Tony Stretton and Warrisden lingered.
Towards dusk she began to despair. In a little while another train was due. She heard its whistle, saw it stop at the station, and waited with her eyes fixed upon the hillside path. No one appeared upon it. She turned and went into the house. She thought for a moment of going herself to Eze, thrusting herself upon Millie at the cost of any snub; and while she debated whether the plan could at all avail, the door was opened, a servant spoke some words about a visitor, and a man entered the room. Pamela started to her feet. The man stood in the twilight of the room: his back was against the light of the window. Pamela could not see his face. But it was not Warrisden, so much she knew at once. It could only be Tony Stretton.
"So you have come," she cried. "At last! I had given up hope."
She advanced and held out her hand. And some reserve in Tony's attitude, something of coldness in the manner with which he took her hand, checked and chilled her.
"It is you?" she asked. "I watched the path. The train has gone some while."
"Yes, it is I," he replied. "I had to inquire my way at the village. This is the first time I ever came to Roquebrune."
Still more than the touch of his hand and the reserve of his manner, the cold reticence of his voice chilled her. She turned to the servant abruptly--
"Bring lamps," she said. She felt the need to see Tony Stretton's face. She had looked forward so eagerly to his coming; she had hoped for it, and despaired of it with so full a heart; and now he had come, and with him there had come, most unexpectedly, disappointment. She had expected ardour, and there was only, as it seemed, indifference and stolidity. She was prepared for a host of questions to be tumbled out upon her in so swift a succession that no time was given to her for an answer to any one of them; and he stood before her, seemingly cold as stone. Had he ceased to care for Millie, she wondered?
"You have come as quickly as you could?" she asked, trying to read his features in the obscurity.
"I have not lost a moment since I received your letter," he answered.
She caught at the words, "your letter." Perhaps there lay the reason for his reserve. She had written frankly, perhaps too frankly she feared at this moment. Had the letter suddenly killed his love for Millie? Such things, no doubt, could happen--had happened. Disillusion might have withered it like a swift shaft of lightning.
"My letter," she said. "You must not exaggerate its meaning. You read it carefully?"
"Very carefully."
"And I wrote it carefully," she went on, pleading with his indifference; "very carefully."
"It contains the truth," said Tony; "I did not doubt that."
"Yes; but it contains all the truth," she urged. "You must not doubt that either. Remember, you yourself are to blame. I wrote that, didn't I? I meant it."
"Yes, you wrote that," answered Tony. "I am not denying that you are right. It may well be that I am to blame. It may well be that you, too, are not quite free from blame. Had you told me that morning, when we rode together in the Row, what you had really meant when you said that I ought never to leave my wife----" And at that Pamela interrupted him--
"Would you have stayed if I had explained?" she cried. And Tony for a moment was silent. Then he answered slowly--
"No; for I should not have believed you." And then he moved for the first time since he had entered the room. "However, it can do neither of us any good to discuss what we might have done had we known then what we know now."
He stopped as the door opened. The lamps were brought in and set upon the tables. Tony waited until the servant had gone out, and the door was closed again; then he said--
"You sent a telegram. I am here in answer to it. I was to be at Roquebrune on the thirty-first. This is the thirty-first. Am I in time?"
"Yes," said Pamela.
She could now see Tony clearly; and of one thing she at once was sure. She had been misled by the twilight of the room. Tony, at all events, was not indifferent. He stood before her travel-stained and worn. His face was haggard and thin; his eyes very tired, like the eyes of an old man; there were flecks of grey in his hair, and lines about his eyes. These changes she noticed, and took them at their true value. They were signs of the hard life he had lived during these years, and of the quick, arduous journey which he had made. But there was more. If Tony had spoken with a measured voice, it was in order that he might control himself the better. If he had stood without gesture or motion, it was because he felt the need to keep himself in hand. So much Pamela clearly saw. Tony was labouring under a strong emotion.
"Yes you are in time," she cried; and now her heart was glad. "I was so set on saving both your lives, in keeping you and Millie for each other. Of late, since you did not come, my faith faltered a little. But it should not have faltered. You are here! You are here!"
"My wife is here, too?" asked Tony, coldly; and Pamela's enthusiasm again was checked. "Where is she?"
"She arrives in the south of France to-day. She stops at Eze. She should be there now."
She had hoped to see the blood pulse into his face, and some look of gladness dawn suddenly in his eyes, some smile of forgiveness alter the stern set of his lips. But again she was disappointed.
Tony seemed to put his wife out of his thoughts.
"And since your message was so urgent," he continued deliberately, "it follows that Callon comes to-day as well," and he repeated the name in a singularly soft, slow, and almost caressing voice. "Lionel Callon," he said.
And at once Pamela was desperately afraid. It needed just that name uttered in just that way to explain to her completely the emotion which Tony so resolutely controlled. She looked at him aghast. She had planned to bring back Tony to Millie and his home. The Tony Stretton whom she had known of old, the good-natured, kindly man who loved his wife, whom all men liked and none feared. And lo! she had brought back a stranger. And the stranger was dangerous. He was thrilling with anger, he was anticipating his meeting with Lionel Callon with a relish which, to Pamela, was dreadful.
"No," she exclaimed eagerly. "Mr. Callon has been here all this while, and Millie only comes to-day."
"Callon has been waiting for her, then?" he asked implacably.
"Oh, I don't know," Pamela exclaimed in despair. "I have not spoken to him. How should I know?"
"Yet you have no doubts."
"Well, then, no," she said, "I have no doubt that he is waiting here for Millie. But she only arrives to-day. They have not met until to-day. That is why I sent the telegram."
Tony nodded his head.
"So that I might be present at the meeting?"
And Pamela could have cried out aloud. She had not thought, she had not foreseen. She had fixed all her hopes on saving Millie. Set upon that, she had not understood that other and dreadful consequences might ensue. These consequences were vivid enough before her eyes now. All three would meet--Tony, Millie, and Lionel Callon. What would follow? What might not follow? Pamela closed her eyes. Her heart sank; she felt faint at the thought of what she had so blindly brought about.
"Tony!" she exclaimed. She wrung her hands together, pleading with him in short and broken sentences. "Don't think of him!... Think of Millie. You can gain her back!... I am very sure.... I wrote that to you, didn't I?... Mr. Callon.... It is not worth while.... He is of no account.... Millie was lonely, that was all.... There would be a scandal, at the best...." And Tony laughed harshly.
"Oh, it is not worth while," she cried again piteously, and yet again, "it is not worth while."
"Yet I am anxious to meet him," said Tony.
Suddenly Pamela looked over his shoulder to the door, and, for a moment, hope brightened on her face. But Stretton understood the look, and replied to it.
"No, Warrisden is not here. I left him behind with our luggage at Monte Carlo."
"Why did he stay?" cried Pamela, as again her hopes fell.
"He could hardly refuse. This is my affair, not his. I claimed to-night. He will come to you, no doubt, tomorrow."
"You meant him to stay behind, then?"
"I meant to see you alone," said Tony; and Pamela dared question him no more, though the questions thronged in her mind and tortured her. Was it only because he wished to see her alone that he left Warrisden behind? Was it not also so that he might not be hampered afterwards? Was it only so that another might not know of the trouble between himself and Millie? Or was it not so that another might not be on hand to hinder him from exacting retribution? Pamela was appalled. Tony was angry--yes, that was natural enough. She would not have felt half her present distress if he had shown his passion in tempestuous words, if he had threatened, if he had raved. But there was so much deliberation in his anger, he had it so completely in control; it was an instrument which he meant to use, not a fever which might master him for a moment and let him go.
"You are so changed," she cried. "I did not think of that when I wrote to you. But, of course, these years and the Foreign Legion could not but change you."
She moved away, and sat down holding her head between her hands. Stretton did not answer her words in any way. He moved towards her, and asked--
"Is Callon, too, at Eze?"
"No, no," she cried, raising her head, thankful, at last, that here was some small point on which she could attenuate his suspicions. "You are making too much of the trouble."
"Yet you wrote the letter to me. You also sent the telegram. You sent me neither the one nor the other without good reason." And Pamela dropped her eyes again from his face.
"If Callon is not at Eze," he insisted, "he is close by!"
Pamela did not answer. She sat trying to compose her thoughts. Suppose that she refused to answer, Tony would go to Eze. He might find Millie and Callon there. On the other hand, it was unlikely that he would. Pamela had seen that quiet, solitary restaurant by the sea where Callon lodged. It was there that they would be, she had no doubt.
"Where is Callon?" asked Tony. "Where does he stay?"
Pamela closed her ears to the question, working still at the stern problem of her answer. If she refused to tell him what he asked, Millie and Callon might escape for to-night. That was possible. But, then, to-morrow would come. Tony must meet them to-morrow in any case, and to-morrow might be too late.
"I will tell you," she answered, and she described the place. And in another minute she was alone. She heard the front door close, she heard Tony's step upon the gravel of the garden path, and then all was silent. She sat holding her throbbing temples in her hands. Visions rose before her eyes, and her fear made them extraordinarily luminous and vivid. She saw that broad, quiet terrace over the sea where she had lunched, the lonely restaurant, the windows of that suite of rooms open on to the terrace. A broad column of light streamed out from the window in her vision. She could almost hear voices and the sound of laughter, she imagined the laughter all struck dumb, and thereafter a cry of horror stabbing the night. The very silence of the villa became a torture to her. She rose and walked restlessly about the room. If she could only have reached Warrisden! But she did not even know to which hotel in all the hotels of Monte Carlo he had gone. Tony might have told her that, had she kept her wits about her and put the question with discretion. But she had not. She had no doubt that Stretton had purposely left him behind. Tony wished for no restraining hand, when at last he came face to face with Lionel Callon. She sat down, and tried to reason out what would happen. Tony would go first to Eze. Would he find Millie there? Perhaps. Most likely he would not. He would go on then to the restaurant on the Corniche road. But he would have wasted some time. It might be only a little time, still, however short it was, what was waste of time to Tony might be gain of time to her--if only she could find a messenger.
Suddenly she stood up. There was a messenger, under her very hand. She scribbled a note to Lionel Callon, hardly knowing what she wrote. She bade him go the instant when he received it, go at all costs without a moment's delay. Then, taking the note in her hand, she ran from the villa down the road to Roquebrune.