CHAPTER III
“Fergusonwrote to me that you mean to return to your own race,” said Colonel Vanderfelt, when the ladies had withdrawn from the dining room. He was a small, wiry man, dark of complexion, with a sleek black head of hair in which there was not one visible thread of grey. His face too was hardly lined, so that it was not until one looked at his eyes that one got any impression of age. The eyes, however, betrayed him. Deeply sunken and with a queer set appearance, they were the eyes of an old, old man; and they provoked a guess that they had at one time gazed so desperately upon horrors that they could never again quite get free of what they had seen.
“Yes,” replied Paul. “Mr. Ferguson was not very sympathetic.”
“Then I think he was wrong,” said Colonel Vanderfelt heartily. “Philosophers and Labour leaders talk very placidly about throwing down the walls between nation and nation, as if it was an easy morning’s work. But the walls aren’t of our building. They are mother earth and climate and were there from the beginning of time. Some people can pass over them, of course—American women, especially. But very few men aren’t weaklings, I believe. To the men worth anything, their soil cries out louder and louder with each year that passes. A glass of port? Help yourself! A cigar? No? The cigarettes are in that Battersea box in front of you. It’s a fiction that tobacco spoils the flavour of port. Claret, yes! Port, not a bit.”
Colonel Vanderfelt took a cigar from a box upon a side table, lit it and resumed his seat. Paul brought him back to the subject of their talk.
“I am glad to hear you agree with me, Colonel Vanderfelt. I have been more and more convinced since I have sat in this room.”
Paul Ravenel looked about the dining room with its fastidious and sober elegance. Cream walls, upon which a few good prints were hung; a bright red screen drawn in front of the door; shapely old furniture with red upholstery, and heavy curtains of red brocaded silk at the one big bow window; a long, slender Sheraton sideboard against the wall; a fine Chippendale cabinet in a recess; and this round gleaming table of mahogany, with its candlesticks and salt-cellars of Battersea enamel, its silver equipment and its short tubby decanters with the blue tinge of old Waterford in the glass; in every aspect of the room grace was so wedded to homeliness, comfort to distinction that Paul could not but envy its possessors.
“I resume my race and with it of course my name,” he said, keenly watching Colonel Vanderfelt.
But Colonel Vanderfelt took his cigar from his lips only to ask a question.
“And then?” he enquired.
“Then I propose to try for a commission in the army,” Paul replied.
“Oh, yes,” said Colonel Vanderfelt, “but the Bar offers more opportunities to a young fellow nowadays, doesn’t it? Why the Army? There are other professions.”
“Not for me, sir.”
Colonel Vanderfelt shrugged his shoulders and stared at the shining table in front of him. It was a devil of a world—everything cross-wise and upside down and unaccommodating. Why must this youth with money and the world to choose from, choose just the one bunch of grapes quite out of his reach? And set his very heart on it too. There had been a ring in that “Not for me, sir!” which could not be stilled by argument. It was youth’s challenge to the elders, its “I know better” which there was no use in debating.
“Let me hear,” said Colonel Vanderfelt; and the lad’s ambitions were shyly revealed to him. Histories of campaigns, the lives of great soldiers, books of strategy too technical for him to follow—these had been his favourite reading. It was the actual work of the soldier which had fascinated Paul, not the glitter of the great days of parades and manœuvres, but his daily responsibilities and the command of men and the glory of service. Colonel Vanderfelt listened and nodded and remembered a phrase in Mr. Ferguson’s letter: “The boy’s of the right temper.” Surely he was, and the whole business was perverse and pitiful! He heard Paul closing his little apologia.
“So you see, sir, from the time when I began to think at all of what I should do in the world, this has always been my wish.” The lad was seeking to challenge and defy, but the anxiety which had tortured him during the last four days turned the challenge into a prayer. He searched Colonel Vanderfelt’s face for a sign of agreement. “I know of nothing,” he asserted, “of nothing at all which should hinder me from trying to fulfil my wish.”
“But I do,” replied the other. “I think, Paul, that it would be very difficult for you to take your father’s name and seek a commission in the Army here.”
Paul’s cigarette had gone out whilst he was speaking. He lit it now at one of the candles with trembling fingers. The gentleness of Colonel Vanderfelt’s voice made him think of some compassionate judge passing sentence.
“You will, I trust, make that clear to me,” he said.
“Of course,” returned the Colonel. “I admit to you that up to the last few minutes I had hoped to escape, and leave most of the story untold. And had you chosen another profession, why, very likely I should have spared you and myself, too.”
But though he had promised to be frank, he was reluctant to begin and he had ended on so evident a note of discomfort and pain that Paul Ravenel dared not interpose a word. The windows stood open upon the garden and let into the room the perfume of flowers and the freshness of the dew. Outside was the glamorous twilight of a summer night. It was very still. Occasionally a bird rustled the leaves of a branch; and across a field a cuckoo whose voice was breaking called incessantly. Paul was never to forget that background to these moments of suspense. All the bitterness was not with him on this night. Colonel Vanderfelt was back in the dark places of his life amongst old shames and miseries.
“Your father’s name was John Edward Revel,” he began, and the boy drew a long breath. “Yes, the infantry manual was his, some relic of the old days that he must keep, I suppose—some one small valueless thing—yes, I think that’s natural. He and I were friends. We passed out of Sandhurst together and met again in India. Years afterwards—Service brought us together.”
He named an outlying post in the hills to the northwest of Quetta where John Edward Revel and he lay beleaguered during one of the frontier wars. They were ordered to hold on to their position at all costs and help would come to them.
“We were neither of us youngsters, you must understand, pitchforked into commands we weren’t fit for. We had seen a lot of service and done well—both of us. That makes the matter worse perhaps. All the less excuse! That’s what they did say! We were losing men all the time, and we hadn’t many to begin with. Ammunition was running low, water still lower, we were attacked day and night, we two had no sleep, and the promised relief didn’t come. The Baluchis got into our outer court one evening and we had the greatest trouble to get them out. The same night one of our spies came in with the news that a fresh big force was hurrying to reinforce the Baluchis. We were pretty well at the end of our tether—Ravel and I—. Something snapped in both of us . . . we slipped out under cover of darkness, the whole force, and fell back in spite of our instructions, leaving this key-post unguarded. And the new enemy we fell back from was our own relief expedition which had marched night and day and turned the Baluchis’ flank. They found the fort empty, which we had been ordered at all costs to hold. You can guess what happened. We were arrested, court-martialled—cashiered! So you can understand perhaps now our queer reception of you in the drawing room this evening. When you startled us by calling me, ‘The man with the medals,’ it sounded like some bitter jibe from those bad days.”
“But I don’t understand,” Paul Ravenel stammered. “You were cashiered both of you, you and my father?”
“Both of us.”
“Yet I saw you coming from a dinner at the Guildhall, with your medals upon your breast. You are here in your own home, wearing your rank! How can that be, sir?”
Colonel Vanderfelt replied with a curious accent of apology to his young guest.
“I was lucky. I had served in India longer than your father. I had been more interested; and dialects came to me easily. More than once I had spent my leave living in the Bazaars, and as far north as Leh. Therefore it wasn’t so difficult for me. I disappeared. I’m a dark man naturally. I grew a beard. I joined a battalion of irregular levies. I served for three years in it on the frontier.”
“Did no one guess who you were?”
“I think one or two suspected and—winked. They were busy years you see. A good deal was going on all this time and men who knew anything about soldiering were valuable. Of course they were pretty rough, hard years for any one with delicate tastes, but there was so much to be perhaps regained,” and Colonel Vanderfelt pulled himself up quickly. “Well, after three years I was wounded rather badly. As you see I limp to this day. It looked then as if the game was up altogether and I was going out. So I sent a message in my own name to an officer on the border whom I had known. The Governor of Quetta came up himself to see me in hospital and the end of it was that my sentence was annulled. There, my boy, that’s the whole story.”
Colonel Vanderfelt rose from his chair and limping over to the window looked out upon that quiet garden, which he had lost, and after such unlovely years won back again. They were years of which he could never think even now without a shiver of disgust and a cold fear lest by some impossibility they should come again. None indeed had ever known the full measure of their abasement and squalor and degradation. Even with the great prize continually held in view, they had been hardly endurable. The chance of winning it had been the chance of a raft to a man drowning in the Pacific. The voice of Paul Ravenel who was still seated at the table broke in upon him.
“And that’s the whole story, sir?”
“Yes, Paul.”
Paul shook his head.
“The whole story, sir, except that what you did—my father didn’t. Therefore he lived and died an outcast,” and the young man’s voice died away in a whisper.
Colonel Vanderfelt turned back to him and laid his hand upon Paul’s shoulder and shook it in a gentle sympathy.
“There’s another question I would like to have answered,” said Paul. He was very pale, but his voice was firm again.
“Yes?”
“The disgrace, I suppose, killed my mother?”
“I have no right to say that.”
“The truth, sir, please!” and the appeal came so clearly from a man in the extremity of torture, that Colonel Vanderfelt could not but answer it.
“It did. She was in India when this shameful business happened. She came home and died.”
In a few moments Paul began to laugh. The laughter was pitched in a low key and horrible to hear; and there was such a flame of agony burning in the boy’s eyes and so dreadful a grin upon his white face that Colonel Vanderfelt feared for his reason.
“Steady, Paul, steady!” he said gently.
“I was thinking of the fine myth by which I explained everything to the honour of the family,” Paul cried in a bitter voice. “Our seclusion, the antagonism between my father and me, the change of name—it was all due to a morbid grief at the loss of a wife too deeply loved. That’s what I believed, sir,” he said wildly, but Colonel Vanderfelt had already learned of these delusions from Mr. Ferguson. “And shame’s the explanation. Disgrace is the explanation. He killed my mother with it and now the son too must hide!”
“No,” said Colonel Vanderfelt with decision. “There’s a good way out of this tangle for you, a way by which you may still reach all you have set your heart on—your career, your name and an honoured place amongst your own people.”
Paul lifted incredulous eyes to the other man’s face.
“Yes,” insisted the older man. “You don’t believe me. You young fellows see only the worst and the best, and if the best doesn’t tumble into your hands, you are sure at once that there’s nothing for you but the worst. Just listen to me!”
Paul took hold upon himself. He was ashamed already of his outburst.
“You are very kind, sir,” he said, and some appreciation of the goodwill which the older man had shown to him, in baring his own wounds, and drawing out into the light again old humiliations and guilt long since atoned, pierced even through the youth’s sharp consciousness of his own miseries. He rose up from his chair. He was in command of his emotions now, his voice was steady.
“I have been thinking too much of myself and the distress into which this revelation has plunged me,” he said, “and too little of your great consideration and kindness. What you have told me, you cannot have said without pain and a good deal of reluctance. I am very grateful. Indeed I wonder why you ever received me here at all.”
“You would have found out the truth without my help.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Paul. “I should have found it out through an enquiry agent, and the news would have been ten times more hideous coming in that way rather than broken gently here. Whilst on the other hand you would have spared yourself.”
“That’s all right,” Colonel Vanderfelt answered uncomfortably, and to himself he added: “Yes, old Ferguson wrote the truth. That boy’s clean and a gentleman.” He pressed Paul down into his chair again.
“Come! Take a glass of this old brandy first—it’s not so bad—and then we’ll talk your prospects over like the men of the world we both are—eh? Neither making light of serious things nor exaggerating them until we make endeavour useless.”
He fetched to the table a couple of big goblets mounted on thin stems within which delicate spirals had been blown, and poured a liqueur of his best brandy into each.
“I have an idea, Paul. It has been growing all the time we have been talking together. Let’s see if it means anything to you.”
He held his goblet to his nose and smelt the brandy. “Pretty good, this! Try it, Paul. There’s not a cough nor a splutter in it. Well, now,” he went on when Paul had taken his advice, “in the first place, you are eighteen.”
“Yes,” said Paul.
“And a man of means?”
“Pretty well.”
“You have property in Casablanca, in Morocco?”
“Yes, sir,” said Paul, wondering whither all these questions were to lead.
“And you lived there for some years?”
“Yes. Before I went to school in France and my father built his house in Aguilas.”
“You know Arabic, then?”
“The Moorish dialect, yes.”
“And by nationality you are French?”
“Yes,” answered Paul reluctantly.
“Good,” said the Colonel, warming to his theme. “Now listen to me. The French must move in Morocco, as we moved in India, as we moved in Egypt. It isn’t a question of policies or persons. It’s the question of the destiny of a great nation. The instinct of life and self-preservation in a great nation which sooner or later breaks all policies and persons that stand in the way. There’ll be the timid ones who’ll say no! And there’ll be the intriguers who’ll treat the question as a pawn to be moved in their own interest. But in the end they won’t matter.” Colonel Vanderfelt had a complete and not very knowledgeable contempt for politics and politicians like most of his calling until they have joined the ranks of the politicians themselves.
“Morocco can’t remain as it is—a vast country with a miserable population, misgoverned if governed at all, with a virgin soil the richest in the world, and within a few miles of Europe. Somebody’s got to go in and sort it up. And that some one’s got to be France, for she can’t afford a possible enemy on her Algerian frontier. Yes, but there’ll be trouble before she succeeds in her destiny, trouble and—opportunity.” The Colonel paused to let that word sink into Paul’s mind. “Why not be one of those who’ll seize it? They are great soldiers, the French. Join them, since that’s your way of life. Go through the schools, get your commission in France and then strive heart and soul to get service in the country whose language you know, the country of opportunity. Then, in God’s good time, if you still so wish it, come back here, resume your own name, rejoin your own race!”
Paul Ravenel, from his solitary dreaming life and his age, was inclined to be impressed by thoughts of sacrifice and expiation and atonement. He was therefore already half persuaded by Colonel Vanderfelt’s advice. It would be exile, as he had come to think, but it would also be a cleansing of his name, an expiation of his father’s crime. And after all, when he looked at the man who gave him this advice, and remembered what he had endured with a hope so much more infinitesimal, the course proposed to him seemed fortunate and light.
“Thank you,” he said. “I should like to think over your idea.”
Colonel Vanderfelt was pleased that there had been no flighty hysterical acceptance, no assumption that the goal was as good as reached.
“Yes, take your time!”
Colonel Vanderfelt rose and, removing the shades, blew out the candles upon the dining-table.
“I don’t know what you would like to do?” he said, turning to the lad. “You will follow your own wish, of course. And if you would rather go straight now to your room, why, we shall all understand.”
“Thank you, but I should prefer to join the ladies with you.”
Colonel Vanderfelt smiled very pleasantly. The anticipation of Paul’s visit had caused him a sleepless night or two and not a little pain. How much should he tell? The question had been troubling him, so that he had more than once sat down to write to Mr. Ferguson that he would not receive the boy at all. He was very glad now that he had, and that he had kept nothing back.
“Come, then,” he said.
In the drawing room Phyllis Vanderfelt sang to that little company some songs of old Herrick in a small, very sweet, clear voice. Paul sat near the long, open window. The music, the homely friendliness within the room, and the quiet garden over which slept so restful a peace were all new to him and wrought upon him till he felt the tears rising to his eyes. Phyllis’ hands were taken from the keys and lay idle in her lap. In the high trees of the Park upon the far side of the road the owls were calling and the cuckoo still repeated his two notes from the tree beyond the field. Paul rose suddenly to his feet.
“That throaty old cuckoo means to make a night of it,” he said with a laugh which was meant to hide the break in his voice and did not succeed. He stepped over the threshold and was out of sight.
“Let him be!” said Colonel Vanderfelt. And a little later, when Phyllis had taken herself off to bed: “I liked him very much. The right temper—that’s the phrase old Ferguson used. He’ll do well, Milly—you’ll see. We shall see him home here one day carrying his sheaves,” and as his wife remained silent he looked at her anxiously. “Don’t you agree with me?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Vanderfelt answered slowly. “I hope so with all my heart. But—didn’t you notice his looks and a sort of grace he has?”
“Well?” asked the Colonel.
“Well, we have left out one consideration altogether. What part are women going to play in his life? A large one. Tom, I have been watching Phyllis to-night. A day or so more, and we should have an aching heart in this house.”
“Yes, I see,” returned Colonel Vanderfelt. “Women do upset things, don’t they?”
“Or get upset,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt. “And sometimes both.”
CHAPTER IV
Paul Ravenelleft Colonel Vanderfelt’s house of King’s Corner on the next morning in time to catch an early train to London. His friends gathered in the drive to wave him a good-bye as he drove away.
“You’ll write to us, won’t you?” said Mrs. Vanderfelt.
“And there’s a room here whenever you have an evening to spare,” added the Colonel.
Paul had quite captured the hearts of the small household and they were hardly less concerned for his future and his success than they would have been had he been their own son.
Paul had given no hint at the breakfast table of his plans, if indeed he had yet formed any, nor did his friends press him with any question. But they waited anxiously for letters and in time one came with the postmark of St. Germain. Paul had passed into St. Cyr. Others followed with lively enough accounts of his surroundings and companions. Here and there the name of a friend was mentioned, Gerard de Montignac, Paul’s senior by a year, for instance, who cropped up more often than any one else.
They heard later that he had passed out with honours and was now a sub-lieutenant in the 174th Regiment, stationed at Marseilles; then a couple of years later, just at the time when Phyllis was married, that he had been seconded to the 2nd Tirailleurs and was on active service amongst the Beni-Snassen in Algeria. He escaped from that campaign without any hurt and wrote a little account of it to his friends at King’s Corner, with some shrewd pictures of his commanders and brother officers. But the same reticence overspread the pages. Mrs. Vanderfelt was at a loss to recapture out of them a picture of the lad who had stayed one night with them and borne so gallantly the destruction of his boyish illusions. The letters, to her thinking, might have been written by an automaton with a brain.
A few months afterwards Colonel Vanderfelt slammed down his newspaper on the breakfast table.
“That’s where Paul ought to be. I told him! You can’t blame me! I told him!”
The long-expected trouble in Morocco was coming to a head. The extravagance and incapacity of the Sultan Abd-el-Aziz; the concession of the Customs to the French; the jealousies of powerful kaids; and the queer admixture of contempt and fear with which the tribes watched the encroachments of Europeans; all these elements were setting the country on fire. Already there were rumours of disorder in the wealthy coast town of Casablanca.
“That’s where Paul ought to be,” cried Colonel Vanderfelt angrily. But his anger was appeased in a couple of days. For he received a letter from Paul with the postmark of Oran, written on shipboard. He and his battalion were on their way to Casablanca.
They arrived after the bombardment and massacres, and served under General D’Amade throughout the campaigns of the Chaiouïa. Paul was wounded in the thigh during the attack upon Settat but was able to rejoin his battalion in a month. He was now a senior Lieutenant and his captain being killed in the fight at McKoun, he commanded his company until the district was finally pacified by the victory over the great kaid and Marabout, Bou Nuallah. Paul had done well; he was given the medaille and at the age of twenty-six was sure that his temporary rank would be confirmed. He wrote warmly of those days to his friends. There was a note of confidence and elation which Mrs. Vanderfelt had not remarked before, and the letter ended with a short but earnest expression of gratitude to his friends for the help they had given him eight years before.
For the next two years, then, the household at King’s Corner read only of the routine of a great camp, described with a lively spirit and an interest in the little trifles of his profession, which was a clear proof to them all that Paul had seen straight and clearly when he had declared: “There’s no other profession for me.” Thereafter came news which thrilled his audience.
“I am transferred to the General Staff,” Paul wrote, “and am leaving here on special service. You must not expect to hear from me for a long while.”
Neither Colonel Vanderfelt nor his wife had quite realised how they had counted on Paul’s letters, or what a fresh, lively interest they brought into their quiet lives, until this warning reached them.
“Of course we can’t expect to hear,” said Colonel Vanderfelt irritably, “Paul’s probably on very important service. Very often a postmark’s enough to give a clue. But you women don’t understand these things.”
Phyllis, the married daughter, and Mrs. Vanderfelt were the women to whom this rebuke was addressed, and neither of them had said a word to provoke it.
“No doubt, dear,” Mrs. Vanderfelt replied meekly, with a private smile for the daughter. “We shall hear in due time.”
But the weeks ran into months, the months into a year, and still no letter came. At one moment they wondered whether new associations had not obliterated from Paul’s mind his former aspirations: at another, whether he still lived. Colonel Vanderfelt ran across Mr. Ferguson towards the end of the year outside his club in Piccadilly and made enquiries.
“Did you ever hear of that boy, Paul Ravenel, again?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, he’s a rich man now and I have acted for him,” returned Mr. Ferguson. “Since the French occupation, land in and around Casablanca has gone up to fifty times its former value. Ravenel has realised some of it. I have bought the freehold of his father’s house close to you and let it for seven years and invested a comfortable sum for him in British securities. So I gather that he means to come back in a little while.”
Colonel Vanderfelt was relieved upon one score, but it was only to have his anxiety increased upon the other.
“When did you hear from Paul last?” he asked, and Mr. Ferguson answered:
“Some while ago. Let me think. Yes, it must be a year at the least.”
Colonel Vanderfelt repeated the conversation to his wife on his return to King’s Corner, and both of them shirked the question which was heavy at their hearts.
“It will be pleasant to have him as a neighbour,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt.
“Yes,” replied the Colonel. “And it might be quite soon! Seven years he has let the house for. And we are getting no younger, are we! The sooner the better, I say!”
Some look upon his wife’s face, a droop of her shoulders, made him stop; and it was in a quiet and strangely altered voice that he began again:
“We are both pretending, Milly, and that’s the truth. We are afraid. It would be hard lines if he died before he did what he aimed to do. Yet we have got to face that possibility.”
Mrs. Vanderfelt was turning over a plan in her mind.
“I think that it’s time we had news of him,” she said. “There’s a friend he has mentioned several times in his letters. He was with him at St. Cyr and met him again at Casablanca—Gerard de Montignac.”
Colonel Vanderfelt went in search of Paul Ravenel’s letters. They were kept in a drawer of the writing-table in his bedroom and made a big bundle by now.
“De Montignac. That was the fellow’s name. Let’s look at the last ones for his rank. He’s a captain of the Chasseurs d’Afrique. I’ll write to Casablanca to-night, my dear, on the chance of his still being there.”
Colonel Vanderfelt was easier in his mind after he had posted the letter.
“That was a good idea of mine, Millie,” he said to his wife. “We shall get some news now.”
Gerard de Montignac was still in Casablanca, but at the time when Colonel Vanderfelt was writing to him, he was himself just as anxious as the Colonel about the safety of Paul Ravenel.
CHAPTER V
“There’snot the slightest reason for alarm,” Gerard de Montignac declared testily in much the same tone which Colonel Vanderfelt was using to his wife nearly two thousand miles away. De Montignac was dining at the “popote” of his battalion in the permanent camp of Ain-Bourdja outside the walls of Casablanca, and more than once of late Ravenel’s long absence had cropped up in the conversation with a good deal of shaking of heads. “Paul is a serious one,” continued Gerard. “Too serious. That is his fault. He will not pack up and return until the last possible observation is taken, the last notes of value written down in his little book. But then he will. I am not afraid for him, no, not the least bit in the world. And who should be, I ask you, if I am not?”
He glanced round the mess but not one of his companions accepted his challenge. It was not, however, because they shared his confidence. Indeed every one was well aware that more than half of it was assumed. They respected a great friendship sealed nearly three years before on the bloody slopes of R’Fakha. De Montignac, with his squadron of Chasseurs, had ridden in that desperate charge by means of which alone the crest of the plateau had been held until the infantry arrived. The charge had been made down a hillside seamed with tiny gullies invisible until they gaped beneath the horses’ feet; and the difficulties of the ground had so split the small force of cavalry that the attack became a series of scattered tourneys in which each overmatched trooper drove at a group of Moors armed with rifles and many of them mounted. There had been but ten minutes of the unequal fight, but those minutes were long enough for each man who fell wounded to pray with all his soul that the wound might be swift and mortal and do its work before the mutilating knife flashed across his face. Gerard de Montignac lay half way down the slope with a bullet in his shoulder and his thigh pinned to the ground beneath the weight of his grey charger. The Moors were already approaching him when Paul’s company of Tirailleurs doubled up to the crest and Paul recognised the horse. His rescue of his friend was one of twenty such acts done upon that day, but the memory of them all lived and stopped many an argument as it did to-night. If Gerard de Montignac chose to cry obstinately: “Some day Paul Ravenel will walk in upon us. He is my friend. I know,” it was the part of friendliness to acquiesce. There were other topics for dispute, enough in all conscience; such as the new dancing girl who had come that week to Madame Delagrange’s Bar, the Villa Iris, and about whom young Ollivier Praslin was raving at the other end of the table.
Paul Ravenel had slipped quietly away now more than a year ago in the black gabardine and skull cap of a Jew pedlar with a few surveying instruments packed in cheap, dirty boxes of white wood hidden amongst his wares on the back of a mule, and a few penny account books in which to jot his notes. He set out to explore the countries of the Beni-M’Tir and the Gerouan tribes, to blacken the white spaces of the map by means of long and perilous journeys. There were no tribes more implacable and fanatical than these; none whose territories at that time were so little known; and since they held the mountain passes and the great forests which border the trade routes from the south and the west to Fez, none whose strongholds and numbers and resources it was more important that the Administration should know.
“A Jew travelling alone, carrying on a mule such valuable things as needles and reels of thread, matches and safety pins, and some bales of cloth will be able to go where even a Moor of another tribe would lose his life,” he had declared, and for a long time in vain.
“And what about your notes? How will you make them?” asked the officer of the Affaires Indigènes, to whom after much persistence he was referred.
“I have a shorthand. They will take little space. I have a small tent, too. I shall make them at night.”
“And if you are caught making them at night?”
“I shall be making up my accounts—that is all.”
The Native Department, however, still shook its head. “A Jew will be robbed, no doubt, and probably kicked and cuffed from tent village to tent village,” pleaded Ravenel. “But he will not be killed. He carries useful things.”
In the end his persistence had won the day. He had been given a list of a few sure friends, a kaid here and there, on whose good will he could rely; and once or twice some news of him from one or other of these friends had come in a roundabout fashion to the headquarters of the Administration at Rabat. But the last of these messages were more than six months old, and Paul Ravenel himself was two months’ overdue.
Gerard de Montignac was gloomily weighing up his friend’s chances when a louder burst of laughter came from young Lieutenant Praslin’s corner.
“I tell you she is young and she is pretty, and she can dance,” Praslin was protesting, quite red in the face with the fervour of his defence.
“And she is at old Delagrange’s Bar in Casablanca!” cried an officer, laughing.
Here at all events was a statement which could be received with incredulity.
“But I am not the only one to say so,” exclaimed Praslin.
“Then we must admit that the case is serious,” said Commandant Marnier very gravely. “Come, let us consider the case of the young lady. Who is this other who agrees with you, my friend?”
Praslin began to stammer. Commandant Marnier of the Zouaves was the heavy gun of the mess, a disillusioned man of forty-five with a satirical and at times a bitter tongue.
“Who is this other?” he asked, leaning forward.
“Little Boutreau of the Legion,” Praslin answered miserably.
“Name of a name, here is an authority!” cried the Commandant. “And how old is the little Boutreau?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Yes? And where has the little Boutreau been stationed?”
Young Praslin’s voice got smaller and smaller as he replied: “For the last two years on an advanced post upon the Algerian frontier.”
“Where no doubt he has had full opportunity to compute the beauty of women,” said the Commandant sagely. “I think we can now construct a picture of this houri. She will be fifty if she is a day. In the colour and texture of her skin she will be very like a fig. Not all the kohl in the East will lend a sparkle to her eyes, nor all the red salve freshness to her faded lips. She will wear a red dress with a swaying whale-boned skirt glittering with spangles and she will tell you that she dined at the Ritz in Paris a fortnight ago.”
The description was not inept, but his voice changed now into a snarl. Commandant Marnier had the ill humour of men who sit all their lives in the company of their juniors and see themselves overpassed by each in turn.
“The ladies of the Villa Iris! Have we not all sought our good fortune at their hands? The poor pilgrims! Here they have reached the last stage but one in their doleful Pilgrimage. Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Oran, Tangiers, Casablanca and then up on the supply wagons to the advanced Posts of the Legion from which there is no return! Francine, Florette, Hortense—oh, the pretty names! Yes, that’s about all they have left when they reach this fine metropolis of Casablanca—their pretty names!”
He rose with a contemptuous movement from his chair, and Gerard de Montignac asked carelessly, with a mind far away from the subject.
“And what is the name of this girl?”
“Marguerite Lambert, an American,” replied Praslin, and close by Gerard, a young lieutenant of spahis who had disembarked that morning from Oran raised himself half out of his chair and sank back again.
“Do you know her, too?” Gerard asked.
“No,” replied the lieutenant. “Yet I have danced with her”; and he sat wondering not so much that Marguerite Lambert had come to Casablanca as that he should not have guessed after that short stay of hers at Oran that it was to Casablanca she must and would come.
Gerard de Montignac moved round the table to Henri Ratenay, an officer of his own regiment who had made the campaign of Chaiouïa with him and Ravenel.
“Shall we go to the Villa Iris?” he said.
Ratenay laughed and lifted his cap down from a peg.
“What! Has Praslin fired you? Let us go.”
But outside the long wooden building with its verandah of boards, Gerard de Montignac stopped. Marguerite Lambert roused no curiosity in him at this moment.
“A man from the Native Department called Baumann came from Rabat to-day to see the General. I hear that he has some news of Paul. He returns to Rabat to-morrow, but I was told that I might find him to-night at the Villa Iris. Let us go, then! For though I laugh, I am very anxious.”
Gerard de Montignac was an officer of a type not rare in the French Army. An aristocrat to his finger tips, a youth with one foot in the drawing rooms of the Faubourg and the other in the cafés of Montmartre, and contemptuous of politics, he had turned his back on Paris like so many of his kind and sought a career in the colonial army of France. He kept up a plentiful correspondence with the beautiful ladies of his acquaintance, which did him no good with his masters at the War Office. For the ladies would quote his letters at their dinner parties. “What do you think? I had a letter from Gerard to-day. He says that such a mistake was made, etc., etc.” But he was not a gossip. He was a student, a soldier with a note book and more than one little brochure giving a limpid account of a campaign, bore witness to his ambition and his zeal. He was twenty-nine at this date, a year and a half older than Paul; gay and unexacting in his pleasures. “One soon gets used to the second best,” was a phrase of his, capable of much endurance and under a gay demeanour rather hard; a good comrade but a stern enemy; with no liking for games and not a sportsman at all in the English sense, but a brilliant horseman, a skilled fencer and hard, throughout his long lean body, as flesh can be. Women had not touched him deeply but he loved to be spoken of amongst them; he was flattered that one woman should envy another because that other received letters from him; if he had a passion at all it was for this country in which he served and to which he gave gladly his years of youth and his years of manhood. It was a new thing to him, half problem, half toy, at once a new rib to the frame of France and a jewel to be worthily set. On the one hand a country which wide motor roads and schools of intensive farming and the conversion of migratory tribes into permanent householders would develop, on the other a place of beautiful shrines and exquisite archways and grim old kasbahs with crenelated walls which must be preserved against the encroaching waves of commerce. In appearance he was thin and long and without pretension to good looks. His hair was receding a little from his forehead; and his nose was sharp and gave to his face the suggestion of a sabre; and he was as careful of his hands and his finger nails as if he were still living amongst the Duchesses. Moreover, he had a great love of Paul Ravenel, and as he looked about him on that hot night of early April, his anxiety increased. For the town was thronged with new troops, new companies of sappers, new artillery men. The information from the interior of the country was alarming. The fires of hatred were blazing up against Mulai Hafid, the new Sultan, as they had three years before against Abd-el-Aziz. And for the same reason. He had sold himself and his country to the Christians. Throughout the town there was excitement and unrest. A movement must be made forward and this time to Fez. Rumour had it that the Sultan was actually beleaguered there. And somewhere out in the wild, fierce country Paul Ravenel was wandering.
“Let us hurry!” said Gerard de Montignac.
The Villa Iris stood in one of the meanest of the alleys to the left of the great landward gate—a dingy, long, green house with all its windows on the street carefully shuttered and something sinister in its aspect, as though it was the house of dark stories. When De Montignac and Ratenay stopped in front of it not a light was showing, but from somewhere far within there came the tinkle of a piano.
De Montignac pushed open the door and took a step down into a long, dark passage. They advanced for a few feet and then the door at the other end was thrown open, letting in a glare of lights and a great noise. Some one with the light behind him came towards them. Beyond that he was an officer in uniform they knew nothing of him until they heard his voice.
“So you have come to see for yourself, eh?” he cried gaily. “But you will do more than see to-night. Such a crowd in there!” and Praslin went past them.
“What in the world was he talking about?” asked Gerard.
“Marguerite Lambert, I suppose,” replied Ratenay with a laugh. Gerard, for his part, had forgotten all about her. Nor did she dwell at all in his thoughts now. He went vaguely forward and found himself in a grotesque imitation of a Moorish room, cheap tiles of the bathroom kind, pillars carved and painted to mimic the delicate handicraft of Moorish workmen, a blaze of light from unshaded globes, and a long, glittering bar behind which Madame Delagrange presided, a red-faced woman cast in so opulent a mould that he who looked at her perspired almost as freely as she did herself. The bar stood against a wall opposite to the door, and between there were rows of little three-legged iron tables, at which Levantines, clerks, shopkeepers of every nationality and a few French officers were seated. In front of the tables a few couples gyrated in a melancholy fashion to a fox-trot thumped out upon an old and tortured piano by a complacent Greek. If there could be anything worse on this hot night than the glare of light and tawdry decorations, it was the heart-rending racket of the piano. But dancers, decorations, piano and glare were all lost upon Gerard de Montignac.
At the side of the Bar, wide double doors stood open upon a platform roofed over with a vine; and in that doorway stood the officer of the Native Department, of which he was in search.
“Baumann!” he cried, and crossed the room.
Baumann, a middle-aged, stockish Alsatian, long since settled in Algeria, to whom this Bar seemed the very epitome of devil-may-care luxury and pleasure, surveyed the Captain of Chasseurs with deference.
“It is gay here,” he said with a smile. “Life, my Captain, the life of Paris and the Boulevards. You want to speak to me? Yes? We shall be quieter here.”
He turned back with almost a sigh of regret to the boarded verandah under the vines. To Gerard the verandah was a relief. Here at all events it was cool and dark, and the piano did not thump upon the brain with so exasperating a poignancy. There was a table empty at the end where a couple of steps led down into a dark garden.
“Let us sit here!” said Gerard, and when the three were seated and the drinks ordered from a person of indefinable nationality dressed up as a Turk, he leaned forward.
“You have news of Paul Ravenel?”
“News? I couldn’t say as much as that,” replied Baumann. “I was at Meknes when the thing occurred, before Meknes had declared for its new patent Pretender. It’s five months ago.”
Baumann checked his speech and looked over Gerard’s shoulder intently into the dark garden. Gerard was sitting by the edge of the verandah, with his face turned eagerly towards Baumann.
“What’s the matter?” Gerard asked impatiently.
“Nothing, I think. Nothing really.”
But nevertheless Baumann appeared a little uneasy and his eyes still held their gaze in the same direction. Ratenay turned. At the first he could see nothing to account for the alertness which had come so swiftly into Baumann’s face. Then he made out a black figure sitting or crouching upon the low edge of the verandah some way behind Gerard de Montignac, just in the edge of the lights, and more in shadow than in light. Gerard had not moved by so much as the twitch of a limb. He rapped, however, now upon the iron table with his knuckles.
“Come, Baumann!” he said sharply. “You were at Meknes five months ago. Well!”
“I had finished my business,” Baumann replied hurriedly, but speaking in a lower voice than he had used before. “I was on my way back to Rabat by the plain of the Sebou. You know how the track runs from Meknes, due north over rolling country, then along the flank of the Zarhoun mountain to a pass.”
“Yes.”
“Half way to the pass stand the Roman ruins of Volubilis.”
“Yes.”
“But they lie off the track to the right and close under the mountain, and worse than that, close under the sacred City of Mulai Idris, which is forbidden ground.”
Both Ratenay and Gerard de Montignac knew well enough the evil reputation of that inviolate city where the Founder of the Moorish Empire had his tomb. A hive of bandits and fanatics who lived upon the fame of the tomb, and when the offerings were insufficient made good the balance by murder and highway robbery. No European could pass within the walls of that town, and even to approach them was venturesome.
“I turned off with my small escort,” continued Baumann, “to visit those ruins, but even before we reached them we heard a clamour from the walls of the City, far away as it was. And the leader of the escort was very anxious that I should not delay amongst those tall, broken pillars and huge, fallen blocks of stone. So I hurried over my visit, but even then, half way between us and the track a line of men armed and some of them mounted sprang up from the bushes of asphodel and barred our return.”
“We shall have to unlock and scour that City one of these months,” said Gerard de Montignac, little thinking that it was he upon whom, in after years, the duty would fall, or what strange and tragic revelations would be made to him upon that day.
“When they saw that we were soldiers they let us pass with a few curses, that is, all of them except one, a young fellow in a ragged djellaba, armed with a great pole. ‘What are you doing in our country, you dog of a Christian?’ he screamed at me in a fury, and he twirled his staff suddenly about his head. He was so near to me that he could have broken my back with it before I could have raised a hand to defend myself. I had just time to understand my danger and then he grounded his staff and laughed at me. His friends grinned, too. I expect that I did look rather a fool. I was thoroughly frightened, I can tell you. The whole thing had happened so suddenly. I almost felt my spine snapping,” and Baumann wiped his face with his handkerchief at the recollection of that great staff whirling in the air and him helpless upon his horse with his holsters strapped. “So that until we had passed them and were back upon the track again, I didn’t understand.”
“Understand what?” asked Gerard de Montignac.
“Understand who had played this joke upon me,” returned Baumann. “It was Captain Ravenel.”
Gerard de Montignac was startled.
“You are sure?” he cried. “He was there in Mulai Idris, one of them!” and Baumann suddenly exclaimed:
“Hush! Don’t turn round. There’s a man behind you. He has been creeping along the edge of the verandah. This town is full of spies.”
Gerard did not turn, but Ratenay, from where he sat, could see. The black figure crouching well away behind them on the edge of the raised floor had slipped quietly towards them, whilst Baumann had been telling his story. He was now close behind Gerard, squatting low upon the plank, with his feet in the garden, a ragged and dusty Jew with a mass of greasy ringlets struggling from beneath his skull cap.
Gerard de Montignac turned swiftly round upon him.
“What do you want here?” he cried angrily.
“A whiskey and soda!” replied Paul Ravenel. For that once insular drink had become lately known with favour to the officers of France.