A William Fox Production.The Winding Stair.PAUL FIRST MEETS MARGUERITE, DANCER IN THE CAFE IRIS.
A William Fox Production.The Winding Stair.
PAUL FIRST MEETS MARGUERITE, DANCER IN THE CAFE IRIS.
CHAPTER XII
Si El Hadj Arrifasquatted upon his cushions and stared at the flames of the candles in his branched silver candlestick. Captain Paul Ravenel would be half way through the Tala now. It was always in that quarter of the town that turbulence began. He would be half way through the Tala, therefore half way between this house and the Bab Segma too. And as yet there was not a cry. Si El Hadj Arrifa had never known a night so still. But then he had never listened before with such an intensity of fear, fear for himself, fear for that friend of his riding through the silent town, with the lantern swinging close to the ground in front of him. The sky had cleared after the rain and the stars were bright above the open square of the roof. But it was dark and once past the Bab Segma and clear of the town, Paul Ravenel would slip like a swift shadow over the soft ground to Dar-Debibagh. He must be near the gates by now. Si El Hadj Arrifa pictured him now skirting the gardens of Bou Djeloud and very close to the gate; a few yards more, that was all. Si El Hadj Arrifa imagined him knocking upon the gate for the watchman to open it. A sense of relief stole over the Moor. Mohammed would be back very soon now. Upon the relief followed drowsiness. Si El Hadj Arrifa’s head fell forward upon his breast and his body slipped into an easier attitude. . . .
Yes, Paul Ravenel was undoubtedly rapping upon the Segma gate, but rapping rather urgently, rather insistently. How those dogs of watchmen slept, to be sure! And Si El Hadj Arrifa woke with a start and very cold. It was upon his own outer door that some one knocked urgently and insistently.
The Moor rose to his feet and stopped. His eyes had fallen upon his fine silver candlesticks and he stood upright and stiff in a paralysis of terror. The candles had burnt low. He had slept there for a long time. Mohammed should have been back an hour ago. The sound of his knocking, too, urgent, yet with all its urgency, discreet, spoke, like a voice of fear. Something untoward then had happened. Yet the city still slept. Si El Hadj Arrifa was no braver than most of his fellow townsmen. He shivered suddenly and violently and little whimpers of panic broke from his lips. Massacres were not conducted quietly. Uproar and clamour waited upon them; and the strange and eerie silence brooding over the town daunted the soft luxurious Moor till his bones seemed to melt within his body. It was stealthy and sinister like an enemy hidden in the dark. He crept into the passage and listened. There was nothing to hear but the urgent scratching and rapping upon the door.
“Is that you, Mohammed?” he asked.
“Yes, Master.”
Si El Hadj Arrifa unfastened the door and held it ajar, looking out. Mohammed was alone, and there was no longer a lantern in his hand.
“Come in! And make no noise!” said Si El Hadj Arrifa.
Mohammed slipped into the passage, closed the strong door so cautiously that not a hinge whined, then locked and bolted and barred it.
“Now follow me!”
The Moor led the way back to the room with the brass bedstead and sank like a man tired out on to the cushions. His servant stood in front of him with a passive mask-like face and eyes which shone bright with fear in the light of the candles. “Speak low!” said Si El Hadj Arrifa; and this is the story which Mohammed told in a voice hardly above a whisper.
The French officer did not ride to the Segma Gate. He called in a quiet voice to Mohammed and turned off towards the Bab-el-Hadid on the south of the town.
“The Bab-el-Hadid,” Si El Hadj Arrifa repeated in wonderment.
“But his Excellency did not go as far as the gate. He stopped at the hospital and dismounted,” said Mohammed.
Si El Hadj Arrifa’s face lightened. The hospital was the headquarters of the military command. Paul Ravenel had taken his story there.
Paul had remained for a long time in the hospital. Two officers came out with him at length, one of whom was dressed in slippers and pyjamas with a dressing gown thrown on as if he had been wakened from his bed.
“Was his Excellency smiling?” asked Si El Hadj Arrifa.
“No. The other two were smiling. His Excellency shrugged his shoulders and mounted his horse heavily like a man in trouble.”
Si El Hadj Arrifa nodded his head and muttered to himself.
“They will not believe,” he said. “No, they will not believe.” He looked towards Mohammed. “Then he went out by the Bab-el-Hadid?”
But Paul had not. He had turned his back to the Bab-el-Hadid and bade Mohammed lead to the Karouein quarter.
They went for a while through silent empty streets, Mohammed ten paces or so ahead, holding the lantern so that the light shone upon the ground and Paul Ravenel following upon his horse. Mohammed did not turn round at all to see that the Captain was following him, but the shoes of the horse clacked on the cobbles just behind him and echoed from wall to wall. They came to the first gate and it was open. The great doors stood back against the wall and the watchman was not at his post. Mohammed was frightened. An omission to shut off the quarters of the city one from the other at night could not be due to negligence. This was an order given by authority. However, no one stopped them; they saw no one; they heard no one.
They came to a second gate. This too stood wide. Beyond the gate the street was built over for a long way making a black tunnel, and half way down the tunnel it turned sharply at a right angle. When this corner had been turned, a glimmer of twilight far ahead would show where the tunnel ceased.
Mohammed passed in under the roof over the street and after he had walked some twenty paces forward, he judged that Captain Ravenel had fallen a little behind, the shoes of the horse no longer rang so clearly on the stones. He turned then, and saw horse and rider outlined against the dark sky, as they reached the tunnel’s mouth. He noticed Paul Ravenel bent forward over the neck of his horse to prevent his head from knocking against the low roof. Then he entered the tunnel and was at once swallowed up in the blackness of it.
Mohammed walked forward again rather quickly. For he was afraid of this uncanny place, and turned the angle of the street without looking round again. He did not think at all. If he had, he would have understood that once the feeble flicker of his lantern were lost beyond the corner, Paul Ravenel would be left in the darkness of the blind, the mouth of the tunnel behind him, a blank wall before his face. Mohammed was in a fever to reach the open street again and now that he saw it in front of him at the end of the passage opaquely glimmering as an uncurtained window on a dark night will glimmer to one in a room, he pushed eagerly forward. He was close to the outlet when he realised that no horse’s hoofs rang on the cobbles behind him.
He turned and peered back into the tunnel. There was nothing to be seen and there was no sound. Mohammed did not dare to call out. He stood wavering between his duty and his fear; and suddenly a tremendous clatter broke the silence and frightened Mohammed out of his wits. Mohammed had just time to draw back close against the wall when a horse dashed past him at a full gallop. A stirrup iron struck and tore his djellaba and the horse was gone—out of the tunnel up the street. But Mohammed’s eyes were now accustomed to the darkness. He was able to see against the sky that the horse was riderless.
Something had startled the horse and the French Captain was thrown. He was lying on the ground back there, in the darkness. That was all! Thus Mohammed reasoned, listening. Yes, certainly that was all—except that it might well be that the French Captain was hurt.
Mohammed must return and find out. Quaking with alarm he retraced his steps, throwing the light of his lantern on one side of the passage after the other. But so far the passage was empty. No doubt the Captain would be lying on the ground beyond the angle where the tunnel turned. But here too he searched in vain. The Captain had disappeared: somewhere between the two outlets in this black place. He had gone!
Mohammed lifted the lantern above his head, swinging it this way and that so that the light flickered and danced upon the walls. Then his arm grew steady. Opposite it to him in the darkest corner there was a little door studded with great nails—a door you never perceived though you passed through the tunnel ten times a day. Mohammed crossed to it, touched it, shook it. It was locked and bolted. He was debating whether he should knock upon it or no. But he dared not. This was the beginning of that Holy War which was to free El Magreb from the clutch of the Christians,—the stealthy beginning. To-morrow there would not be one of them alive in Fez, and outside Fez the land would be one flame of vengeance. If the French Captain were behind that little door he must be praying for a swift death!
Mohammed drew back and suddenly the mouth of the tunnel was obscured and he saw the figures of two men. Panic had been hovering about Mohammed these many minutes since. It took him by the throat and the heart now. With a cry he dashed his lantern on the ground and fled leaping, past the two men. He was not followed.
This is the story which Mohammed told to Si El Hadj Arrifa in the room with the clocks and the brass bedstead and the silver candelabra.
“That is the gate by Karouein Mosque?” said the master, when his servant had done.
“Yes.”
Si El Hadj Arrifa nodded his head thoughtfully. He did not believe that the Captain had been captured or slain in this noiseless fashion. He himself had been bidden not to open that big envelope locked away upstairs until he was very certain that Paul Ravenel was dead. The Captain had his plans into which it was no business of his friend to pry.
“As to that little door, Mohammed,” he said. “It will be well to forget it.”
“It is forgotten, Master,” answered Mohammed, and far away but very clear and musical in the silence of the night the voice of a mueddin on a lofty minaret called the Faithful to their prayers.
CHAPTER XIII
Si El Hadj Arrifawas right. When Mohammed saw Paul Ravenel ride forward out of the loom of the night into the darkness of the tunnel, bending his head so that it might not strike the roof, he missed a slight action which was much more significant. Paul slipped his right hand into his pocket and took out a heavy key. He had been seeing to it that Mohammed should draw gradually ahead and by the time when he came opposite to the little door in the angle, Mohammed was far beyond the turn and there was not the faintest glimmer of light from the lantern. Paul slipped from his saddle, gave his horse a sharp cut across the buttocks with his riding whip, and as the startled animal galloped off, turned quickly to the little door.
He was in a darkness so complete that he could not see the key in his hand nor the hand that held it. Yet he found the keyhole at once and in another second he was within the house. The passage in which he found himself was as black as the tunnel outside. Yet he locked the door, picked up and fitted the stout transverse bars into their sockets as neatly as though he worked in the broad noon. He had made no sound at all. Yet he had shut a door between the world and himself, and the effort of his life now must be to keep it for ever closed. He had a queer fancy that a door thus momentously closing upon his fortunes ought to clang so loudly that the noise of it would reach across the city.
“There was once a Paul Ravenel,” he said to himself.
The lantern in Mohammed’s hands flickering upon the walls of the tunnel and every second dwindling a little more, receding a little more, danced before his eyes. There went the soul and spirit of that Paul Ravenel.
He was aroused from his misery by the sound of Mohammed’s hands sliding curiously over the panels of the door. The cry of panic followed quickly and the clatter of the lantern upon the cobble stones. Paul waited with his pistol in his hand, wondering what had startled his attendant. But silence only ensued and he turned away from the door into the house. At the end of a short passage he opened a second door and stood on the threshold of a small court brightly lit and beautiful. A round pool from which a jet of water sprang and cooled the sultry air was in the centre of the white-tiled floor. Wooden pillars gaily painted and gilded and ornamented in the Moorish fashion, not by carving but by little squares and cubes and slips of wood delicately glued on in an intricate pattern, supported arches giving entrance to rooms. There was a cool sound of river water running along an open conduit waist-high against a wall; and poised in an archway across the court with her eyes eagerly fixed upon the passage stood Marguerite Lambert, a tender and happy smile upon her lips.
When Paul Ravenel saw her, the remorse which had been stinging him during the ride and had reached a climax of pain as he stood behind the door, was stilled. Marguerite had changed during this year. The hollows of her shoulders and throat had filled. The haggard look of apprehension had vanished from her face. Colour had come into her cheeks and gaiety into her eyes and a bright gloss upon her hair. She wore a fragile little white frock embroidered with silver which a girl might have worn at a dance in a ball room of London or Paris; and in the exotic setting of that court she seemed to him a flame of wonder and beauty. And she was his. He held her in his arms, the softness of her cheek against his.
“Marguerite!” he said. “Each time I see you it is for the first time. How is that?” But Marguerite did not answer to his laugh. She held him off and scanned him with anxious eyes.
“Something has happened, Paul.”
“No.”
“When you came in, you were troubled.”
“When I saw you the trouble passed. I was afraid that you might be angry. I am very late.”
Marguerite did not believe one word of that explanation, but the way to discover the true one did not lie through argument. She drew Paul across the court, holding him by the hand and saying lightly:
“Foolish one, should I quarrel with you on the evening before you march away? You might never come back to me.”
She led him into a side room and drew him down beside her on the thick, low cushions. Upstairs there were chairs and tables and the paraphernalia of a western home. Here on the level of the patio and the street they had for prudence’ sake kept it all of the country. There was no brass bedstead, it is true, to ornament the room, but there were three tall grandfather clocks, though only one of them was going and that marked the true time. Marguerite laid her head in the hollow of his shoulder and her arm went round his waist.
“Paul, you won’t get killed!” she whispered. “Oh, take care! take care! I am afraid. This year has been so perfect.”
“You must have been lonely many days.”
“And many nights,” whispered Marguerite, with a little grimace. Then she laughed with the trill of a bird. “But you had just gone or you were soon returning and my thoughts were full of you. I am not difficult and thorny, am I, Paul? Say so! Say so at once!”
He laid her down so that her shoulders rested on his knee and her face smiled up at him, and bending he kissed her on the mouth for an answer.
“You are the most golden thing that ever happened in this world,” he said. “I think of all those years that I lived through, before I met you, quite contented with myself and knowing nothing—no, absolutely nothing of the great miracle.”
“What miracle, Paul?”
“The miracle of man and woman,—of you and me—who want to be together—who are hungry when we are not together,—who walk amongst rainbows when we are.”
Paul was the “grand serieux,” as Gerard de Montignac had called him, warning him too of that very fate which had befallen him. Love of this girl had swept him off his feet, calf-love and man’s love had come to him at once. Marguerite was new and entrancingly strange to him as Eve to Adam. He made much of her judgment, as lovers will, marvelling when she swept to some swift, sane decision whilst he was debating the this and the that. She entertained him one moment as though he were an audience and she a company of players; she was the tenderest of companions the next: in her moments of passion she made him equal with the gods; and the pride and glory to both of them was that each had been the first to enter the heart and know the embraces of the other.
“Paul, what are you thinking about?” she asked.
“That’s the prettiest frock I have seen you in,” said he, and with a smile of pleasure she raised herself and sat at his side.
“It’s the prettiest I have got,” she returned.
Paul lifted a strip of the fragile skirt between his fingers.
“It’s a funny thing, Marguerite,” he said. “But until I knew you, I never noticed at all whether a girl was wearing a topping frock or whether she was dowdy. So long as they had something over their shoulders, they were all pretty much the same to me.”
“And now?” asked Marguerite.
“Well, it’s different,” said Paul, disappointing her of her expected flattery. “That’s all.”
Marguerite laughed, as she could afford to. As she knew very well, he loved to see her straight and slim in her fine clothes and it gave him an entrancing little sensuous thrill to feel the delicate fabrics draping exquisitely her firm young body.
Paul, before he had set out with Colonel Gouraud’s supply column on the expedition to Fez, had sent Marguerite across the Straits and up to Madrid, where a credit was opened for her at one of the banks. Paul had been afraid lest she should stint herself, not only of luxuries but of things needed. But she had answered, “Of course I’ll take from you, my dear. I am proud to take from you.”
She looked back upon that journey now and said:
“I had six glorious weeks in Madrid. Fittings and fittings and choosing colours, and buying shoes and stockings and hats and all sorts of things. I began at half past nine every morning and was never finished till the shops closed. I had never had any money to spend before. Oh, it was an orgy!”
“And you regret those weeks?” asked Paul, misled by the enjoyment with which she remembered them.
“Nonsense. I had more fun still when I came back with what I had bought. I was going to make myself beautiful in the eyes of my lord!” and mockingly she pushed her elbow into his side, as she sat beside him.
Marguerite, upon her return, had waited for some weeks in Tangier. Paul had to make sure that he was to be stationed at Fez. Afterwards he had to find and buy this house, furnish it and provide a staff of servants on whose fidelity he could rely. He had secured two negresses and an Algerian, an old soldier who had served with him in the Beni-Snassen campaign before he had ever come on service to Morocco. Even when all was ready at Fez there was a further delay, since the road from Tangier to Fez was for a time unsafe.
“I was tired of waiting, long before Selim and the negress and the little escort you sent for me appeared,” she said. “But the journey up country I adored.”
It was early in the year. The ten villages with their hedges of cactus; the rolling plains of turf over-scattered with clumps of asphodel in flower; the aspect of little white-walled towns tucked away high up in the folds of hills; the bright strong sun by day, the freshness of the nights, and the camp fires in that open and spacious country were a miracle of freedom and delight to this girl who had choked for so long in the hot and tawdry bars of the coast towns. And every step brought her nearer to her lover. It was the season of flowers. Great fields of marigold smiled at her. Yellow-striped purple iris nodded a welcome. Rosy thrift, and pale-blue chicory, and little congregations of crimson poppies, and acres of wild mustard drew her on through a land of colour. And here and there on a small knoll a solitary palm overshadowed a solitary white-domed tomb.
She rode a mule and wore the dress of a Moorish woman. All had been done secretly, even to the purchase of the house in Fez, which was held in the name of a Moorish friend of Paul’s. It was Marguerite’s wish from first to last. Paul would have proclaimed her from the roof tops, had she but lifted an eyebrow. But she knew very well that it would not help Paul in his career were he to bring a pretty mistress up from the coast and parade her openly in Fez. He would get a name for levity and indiscretion. Moreover, the secrecy was for itself delightful to her. It was to her like a new toy to a child.
“I love a secret,” she had said once to Paul, when he urged that her life was dull. “It sets us a little further apart from others and a little nearer together. It will be fun keeping it up, and we shall laugh of an evening, locked safely away in the midst of Fez in our little hidden palace.” It was fun, too, for Marguerite to dress herself in a fine silk caftan of pink or pale blue reaching to her feet, to pass over the mansouriya, to slip her bare feet into little purple embroidered heelless slippers, to wind a bright scarf about her hair, to burden her ankles and arms with heavy clashing rings of silver, to blacken her long eyelashes and veil the lower part of her face and go shopping with one of the negresses in the Souk-Ben-Safi. It was fun also to return home and transform herself into a fashionable girl of the day and wait in this southern patio for the coming of her lover.
“I love routine like a dog,” she said on this evening. She was sitting on the low cushion by Paul’s side. Her slim legs showing pink through the fine white silk of her stockings were stretched out in front of her. She contemplated the tips of her small white satin slippers. “I don’t want any more surprises,” and Paul’s face grew for a moment grave and twitched with a stab of pain. “I don’t want any more people. I have had enough of both. I love going up on the roof and watching that great upper city of women, and wondering what’s going on in the narrow streets at the bottom of the deep chasms between the houses. I have books, too, and work when I’m not too lazy to do it, and I am learning the little two-stringed guitar, and I want one person, one foolish dear person, and since I’ve got him, I’m very happy.”
Paul reached forward and, closing a hand round one of her ankles, shook it tenderly.
“Listen to me, Marguerite!” he began, but she was upon her feet in an instant. She snatched up Paul’s kêpi and cocked it jauntily on her curls.
“Canada?” she cried in a sharp, manly voice, and saluted, bringing her high heels together with a click and standing very stiff and upright. She hummed the tune of “The Maple Leaf,” interpolating noises meant to parody the instruments of an orchestra, and she marched in front of Paul and round the patio quickly and briskly like a girl in a pantomime procession, until she came back to her starting point.
“Australia!”
Again she saluted and marched round to the tune of “Australia will be there.”
“The U-nited States of America!” she announced, and this time she skimmed round the patio in a sort of two-step dance, swift as a bird, her white and silver frock glinting and rippling as she moved.
“Yankee Doodle went to townUpon a little pony,”
“Yankee Doodle went to townUpon a little pony,”
“Yankee Doodle went to townUpon a little pony,”
“Yankee Doodle went to town
Upon a little pony,”
she sang, and she returned to her starting point.
“Great Britain!” she cried.
Here she saluted for a long time while marking time and calling out in a gruff voice: “One, two, one, two! Can’t you girls keep time! Miss Montmorenci, you’ve a ladder in your stocking, and if you think any one is going to take the trouble to climb up it, you flatter yourself. Miss de Bourbon, you haven’t marked your face and it can do with a lot!” and off she went to the tune of the “British Grenadiers.” When she came opposite to Paul again she held out her short skirt on each side, dropped a low curtsey and declared:
“And that, ladies and gentlemen, will conclude our entertainment for this evening.”
It was to conclude their entertainment for many and many an evening, for whilst Paul laughed and applauded, from right above their heads, it seemed, a voice vibrant and loud and clear dropped its call to prayer through the open roof of the court.
“Allah Akbar! God is above all. There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet. Rise and pray! Rise and do the thing that is good. There is no God but God!”
It was the same voice to which Si El Hadj Arrifa was listening in another quarter of the city. Paul’s house was built in the very shadow of the Karouein Mosque, and the voice pealing from its high minaret in the silence of the night, familiar though both Marguerite and he were with it, never failed to startle them. It was a voice deep, resonant, a voice of music and majesty.
“The Companions of the Sick!” said Paul, as they listened to it without moving, caught in the spell of its beauty.
“There are ten of them,” said Marguerite. “Like all the rank and fashion of Fez, I set my clocks by their voices.”
“Yes, ten,” Paul explained. “Ben Hayoun, a rich man lay very ill in this city, and night after night he could get no sleep. The silence became terrible to him. He felt an appalling sense of loneliness as the hours dragged by and not a sound varied them. So, when he recovered, he founded this order of ten mueddins, each of whom must chant the summons to prayer for a half of one of the five hours which precede the dawn, so that those in pain shall be no more alone. They call them the companions of the sick.”
Marguerite looked up to the open roof and the stars above it.
“I often wonder what they think when they look down upon this bright square of light beneath them: whether they speculate who live here and why they stay up so late of nights. I fancy sometimes that the mueddin is looking down and watching us as we move about the court.”
She stood for a moment gazing upwards, and then her mood changed.
“One o’clock,” she cried, and running to the clock against the wall, she opened the glass which protected its face and adjusted the hands. “Paul, I’ll give you a whiskey and soda, and you must go.”
She turned to him, trying to laugh gaily, but her voice broke.
“You have to be on parade at six and you have miles to go before you reach your camp.” Her gaiety deserted her altogether. She flung herself into his arms and clung to him, pressing her face against his coat. “Oh, my dear, when shall I see you again? I wish that you weren’t going. Yes, I do! Though I pretend to laugh and to think nothing of it when I am with you, I have been praying for a week with all my heart that something might happen to keep you here.”
“Something has happened,” said Paul.
Marguerite lifted her face.
“You are not going?”
“No.”
“Paul, Paul!” she cried joyfully. But there was a look on his face which dashed her joy. Marguerite was quick in those days to fall from a high buoyancy of spirit to forebodings and alarm. This miracle of her happiness was balanced on so fine a needle point that sometime it must drop and break into a thousand useless shining splinters. “Why aren’t you going?” she asked suspiciously.
“Because of the rain.” Paul Ravenel explained. “The departure of the Mission is postponed for three days.”
“Only for three days?” Marguerite repeated with a wistful droop of the corners of her mouth.
“It won’t leave after three days,” said Paul. “It won’t leave Fez for a long while.”
He spoke very gravely and after a moment of silence Marguerite disengaged herself gently from his embrace. A trace of the haggard look which had once been so familiar upon her face was visible there again: so visible that Paul wondered whether some hint of the threatened massacre had not been given to her by Selim or the negresses.
“Yes, you were in great trouble when you came into the court to-night, and when I asked you why, you put me off with an excuse. The truth now, Paul, please!” she pleaded though she caught her breath at the thought of what the truth might mean to her.
“You have courage, Marguerite.”
The girl’s eyelids closed and fluttered over her eyes.
“I shall need it?”
“Yes.”
She sank down upon the cushions, for her knees had given under her. Paul did not understand the real cause of her distress until she took his hand between both of hers and spoke.
“You needn’t hesitate, my dear. Of course I have always lived in fear that our life together couldn’t go on. In my happiest moments, deep down, I have felt that dread. Perfection’s not allowed, is it? There’s a jealousy that will shatter it. I was sure of that. But I always hoped—not yet. I always prayed for a little longer time to make up for the wretched years before.”
If trouble was mentioned to Marguerite Lambert in those days she had just the one interpretation of the word. It meant separation from Paul and therefore the ending of all things. Her passion occupied her, heart and brain and blood. She had waited for it, curiously certain that she would not be denied it. Now that the great gift was hers, she was in a desperate alarm lest she should wake one morning to discover that it had been filched from her in the night. Paul dropped down upon the cushions at her side and with a tender laugh drew away her hands from her face.
“Marguerite, you are foolish. It isn’t separation, of course. You haven’t to fear that—no, nor ever will have to. Believe me, Marguerite! Look at me and say you believe me!”
He turned her face towards him and held it between his hands and her eyes lost their trouble and smiled at him.
“That’s right. Now listen, Marguerite!”
He gave her a little shake. For since she knew that the one evil which she dreaded was not to befall her she had ceased to attend.
“I am listening, Paul.”
“I dined with a friend of mine to-night. I went there to leave him a letter of instructions about you if anything happened to me on our march down to the coast.”
“Happened to you?” she exclaimed with a sharp intake of her breath.
“I expected an attack. Si El Hadj Arrifa would have seen that you were sent safely down to the coast. My agents there would have taken care of you. You would of course never want for anything again.”
“I should want for everything,” said Marguerite slowly. “I don’t think, Paul, that I could go on living. . . . I was told of a girl . . . when her husband died, she dressed herself in her wedding gown—I couldn’t do that, my dear,” she interpolated with a little whimsical smile. “Then she lay down on her bed and took poison. . . . I often think of that girl.”
“Marguerite, you shouldn’t. It’s morbid. You are young. Even if I went—” but there came a stubborn look upon Marguerite Lambert’s face against which he was well aware his finest arguments would beat in vain. “I’ll discuss that with you when it’s necessary,” he said. “To-night my friend Si El Hadj Arrifa warned me that not only was the Mission to be attacked on its way to the coast, but that there would also be a rising here.”
He had Marguerite’s attention now. She looked at him with startled eyes.
“In Fez?”
“Yes.”
“That will mean—?”
“Yes, let us face it. A massacre.”
Marguerite shivered and caught Paul’s hand. She looked about the court outside the lighted room in which they sat. There were shadowy corners which daunted her. She looked upwards, straining her ears. But the ceaseless chant of the mueddin on the minaret of the Karouein mosque alone broke the silence of the night.
“When is it to be?” she whispered, as though the fanatics were already gathered about her door.
“To-night, probably. To-morrow, certainly.”
“And you can trust your friend’s word?”
“As I would trust yours,” said Paul.
Marguerite drew closer to her lover and huddled against him. He put his arm about her. She was trembling. The fun of the masquerade was over. She wondered now how without fear she could have wandered with her black servant through the narrow, crowded markets and in those deep, maze-like streets; she pictured to herself the men; furtive, sleek Fasi; wild creatures from the hills with long muskets gleaming with mother-of-pearl; brawny men of the people, and she painted their faces with the colours and the fire of fury and fanaticism. This little house shut in and crowded about with a thousand houses! She had thought of it as a secret palace hidden away in the uncharted centre of a maze. Now it seemed to her a trap set in a jungle of tigers—a trap in which she and Paul were caught. And her thoughts suddenly took a turn. No, only she was in that trap.
She listened, turning her face upwards to the open roof. The city was still quiet.
“Paul, there are other Christians scattered in houses in the town.”
“Yes.”
“Couldn’t you give a warning? So that troops from the camp might be hurried into the town? Leave your uniform here! Dress in your djellaba and your Moorish clothes. You can reach headquarters—”
“I have already been there. They will not believe,” said Paul.
Marguerite thought for a little while, summoning her strength to assist her, and the memory of the great debt she owed her lover.
“Very well,” she said. “You have done all that you can. You must go back to the camp now, Paul, while you still can.”
“No.”
“I shall be all right, Paul. No one suspects this house. You have always been careful when you came here that the tunnel was empty. At the worst I have the little Belgian automatic pistol you gave me.”
“No,” Paul repeated.
“But your place is in the camp with your men.”
“I have leave,” said Paul. “I applied for leave the moment I knew that we had three days more in Fez.”
Marguerite did not for a moment doubt the truth of what he said. He spoke so simply. It was so natural a thing that he should ask for leave. She gave up the little scheme to which she had steeled her heart. Her arms crept about his neck.
“There!” she whispered with a sigh of relief. “I have tried to send you away, haven’t I? I have done my best and you won’t go! I am glad, Paul, I am glad! Alone I should have shivered in terror.”
“We shall be together, Marguerite.”
Her lips trembled to a smile. Danger thus encountered seemed in the anticipation hardly to be considered a danger at all.
“Listen,” she said, lifting her hand.
The voice of another mueddin now rang out across the city. Marguerite rose.
“This lighted square just above our heads, Paul, is just beneath his feet. Let us give him no cause to wonder.”
She put out the candles and returned to Paul Ravenel’s side. They sat together in the darkness, huddled against one another, whilst the companions of the sick followed one another upon the high minaret of the Karouein mosque.
Once, twice when some stray cries broke the silence Paul whispered eagerly.
“It is beginning,” and as silence followed upon the cries. “No! No!” he added in a dull voice, a voice of disappointment.
“Paul, you wish it to begin!” said Marguerite in wonder, and she tried to distinguish the expression of his face, even though the darkness showed her nothing but the silhouette of his head.
“It will be the sooner over,” said Paul quickly. “The revolt can’t last long in any case. There’s a strong column in the field just south of Meknes. A call from the wireless and four days will bring them here.”
But there was another reason why with all his soul he prayed to hear the still night break up in a clatter of firing and fierce cries. If the revolt began to-night, why then he himself had been caught in it, had been forced to seek a refuge, had been unable to regain his post. Who could gainsay him? All was saved—Marguerite and honour too. Whereas if the morning came and Fez was still at peace and his appointed place empty—then some other man must fill it. But the voices on the minaret rang out in music above their heads, until Marguerite said: “This is the last. It is he who raises the flag over the mosque. In half an hour we shall have the dawn.”
CHAPTER XIV
“Marguerite,you must go to bed,” said Paul. “I’ll rouse you if there’s any danger.”
It was very near to the dawn now. There was a freshness and an expectation in the air; a faint colourless light was invading the darkness; in the patch of sky above their heads the bright stars were swooning. For most of this last half hour Marguerite’s head had lain heavy upon his shoulder, and if she opened her eyes it was only to close them again with a sigh of content. Paul lifted her on to her feet and led her up the stairs.
“And you, Paul?” she asked, drowsily.
“I shall be within call. I shall sleep for a little on the cushions below. Good-night.”
Marguerite noticed that the voice of the last mueddin ceased whilst she was still preparing herself for her bed; and after she had got into it, she heard a kettle singing cheerfully in the court below as if Paul were brewing for himself some tea. Then, with the doors of her bedroom open upon the little gallery above the court she went fast asleep.
Hours afterwards a shattering noise awakened her. She lay for a few moments deliciously poised between sleep and consciousness, and vaguely thinking her long and troubled vigil to have been a nightmare which the light of day had happily dispelled. The sunlight was falling in a sheet of gold through the open roof. “It must be very late,” she reflected, lazily, and thereupon sharply and crisply two shots from a rifle split the air. Marguerite sprang up in her bed with a hand to her heart, as though one of those shots had wounded her. It was just the same noise which had broken through her slumbers. The nightmare was true, then! She listened, resting upon one arm, with her face turned towards the open doors. A clamour of voices was borne from a distance to her ears. The new Terror had begun.
“Paul!” she cried loudly. “Paul”; and a tall man dressed in the robes of a Moor stood beside her bed. She shrank away with a little scream. It was not until he smiled that she recognized her lover.
“You had better get up, Marguerite,” he said, and bending down he kissed her. “You have slept well, thank the Lord.”
One of the negresses brought her a cup of tea and Marguerite, slipping on her dressing gown, sat upon the edge of the bed and thrust her feet into her slippers.
“What is the time, Paul?”
“A little past one.”
“So late?”
“I let you sleep. There was no disturbance. The first shot waked you.”
“I will be quick,” she said, or rather began to say. For the words, half-uttered, were frozen upon her lips. Such a din, so shrill, so menacing and strange, burst out above their heads that Marguerite cowered down under it as under the threat of a blow. She had never heard the like of it, she hoped never to hear the like of it again; yet she was to hear it now for days—the swift repetition of one strident note, swelling and falling in a pæan of wild inhuman triumph. Marguerite imagined all the birds of prey in the world wheeling and screaming above the city; or a thousand thin voices shrieking in a madhouse; you—you—you—you—you—the piercing clamour ran swift as the clacking of a mitrailleuse, and with a horrid ferocity which made the girl’s blood run cold.
“Paul,” she said, “what is it?”
“The women on the roofs.”
“Oh!”
Marguerite shuddered as she listened, clutching tight her lover’s arm. Such a promise of cruelty was in those shrill cries as made Marguerite think of the little automatic pistol in the drawer of her table as a talisman which she must henceforth carry close to her hand. She felt that even if she escaped from the peril of these days, she could never walk again in the narrow streets between the blind houses without the chill of a great fear. Her clasp tightened upon her lover’s arm and he winced sharply. Marguerite looked up into his face, and saw that his lips were pressed close together to prevent a cry of pain.
“Paul!” she said wonderingly. She loosened her clasp and turned back the sleeve of his djellaba. Beneath it, his forearm was roughly but tightly bandaged. “Oh, my dear,” she cried, in a voice of compunction, “what happened to you whilst I slept? You are wounded—and for me! Must I always do you harm?” and she beat her hands together in her distress.
“It was an accident,” said Paul.
“An accident?”
She ran to her medicine-chest, and making him sit beside her, unfastened the bandage. “An accident?” she repeated. It looked to her as if he had been stabbed. A knife had been driven right through the flesh of his forearm. Paul did not reply to her exclamations and she did not press her questions. She washed and dressed the wound and bound it up again.
“It must hurt terribly,” she said, her forehead knitted in distress.
“It is easier now,” he answered. “The knife was clean.”
“You are sure of that, Paul?”
“Quite.”
She made a sling of his arm and sent him away. She dressed quickly, wondering how that wound had been inflicted and why he wished not to explain it. Surely he had not gone out whilst she slept? Surely there had been no attack upon the house? No! But she was plunged now into a world of mystery and fear, and she wrung her hands in an impotent despair.
They took their breakfast in a room upon the first floor, Paul asking questions as to how far the house was provisioned, and Marguerite answering almost at random, whilst the cries of the women rang shrill overhead.
“Oh, yes, there is food,” she answered.
“We can always send Selim out,” he added.
Marguerite’s eyes lightened.
“We will send him out, Paul,” she exclaimed. “Do you know what has been troubling me? We haven’t a window upon any street. We are here at the bottom of a well with nothing but our ears to warn us of danger. We can see nothing.”
Paul looked at her anxiously. She was nervous, the flutter of her hands feverish, and her voice running up and down the scale as though she had no control over it. Paul reached across the table and laid his hand upon her arm.
“You poor little girl!” he said gently. “These are trying days. But there won’t be many. The wireless here will have got into touch already with Moinier’s column near Meknes. The troops, too, at Dar-Debibagh may do something,” and ever so slightly his voice faltered when he spoke of the troops, yet not so slightly but that Marguerite noticed it. “They have some guns,” he went on hurriedly, and again Marguerite noticed the hurry, the desire to cover up and hide that little spasm of pain which had stabbed him when he thought of his men. “Yes, the guns!” he said. “There will be an end to that infernal twittering on the roof tops when the guns begin to talk.”
“Paul, you should have been with your men,” said Marguerite, and he answered her with a kind of violent obstinacy which drew her eyes in one swift glance to his face. “I am on leave.”
He changed his tone, however, immediately.
“We will send Selim into the town for news,” he said cheerfully, “and we will go up on to the roof.”
Selim was bidden to knock twice, and, after a tiny interval, once more upon his return. Paul stood behind the door listening to make sure that the tunnel was empty before he opened it. Then he let him go, and locked and barred the door again.
“Come,” he said to Marguerite and, picking up some cushions, they went upstairs to the roof. Marguerite had followed Paul’s example, and was dressed in Moorish clothes; the house was higher by a storey than any which adjoined it, and the roof itself was enclosed in a parapet waist-high. They crouched upon the cushions behind the wall and cautiously looked over it.
A pack of clouds was threatening in the west, but just now the city glittered in the sunlight like a jewel, with its hanging gardens and high terraces, its white houses huddling down the hillside like a flock of sheep, and the bright green tiles of its mosques. Paul and Marguerite never tired of this aspect of the lovely city, shut within its old crumbling walls and musical with the rushing noise of its many rivers. But to-day they saw it as they had never seen it before. For the roofs were crowded with women in their coloured robes of gauze and bright scarves, who danced and screamed, and climbed from one house to another on little ladders in such a frenzy of excitement that the eyes were dazzled and the ears deafened. Paul turned towards the north. Upon the roof of one house men were breaking through with axes and picks, whilst others flung down rags and sticks which had been soaked in paraffin and lighted, through the holes into the rooms below.
“I think that’s the house of the French veterinary surgeon,” said Paul; and from all about that house rose a continuous rattle of firing.
“Look!” said Paul, and he nodded to the south. Here there was a gap between the houses, and Marguerite could see far below a tumble-down stone bridge built in a steep arch across a stream. As she looked, a wild horde of men swarmed upon the bridge, capering and yelling.
“There are soldiers amongst them,” said Marguerite. “I can see their rifles and their bandoliers.”
“Yes, the Askris who have revolted,” answered Paul, and suddenly he covered Marguerite’s eyes with the palm of his hand. “Don’t look!” But Marguerite had already seen, and she sank down behind the parapet with a moan. In the midst of that wild procession some rifles with bayonets fixed were held aloft, and on one of the bayonets the trunk and the limbs of a man were impaled. The head was carried last of all, and upon a pole taller than the bayonets, a head black with blood, like a negro’s, on which a gold-laced kêpi was derisively cocked.
Paul swore underneath his breath.
“One of my brothers,” he whispered. “Oh, my God,” and dropping his head into his hands, he rocked his body to and fro in an agony of remorse.
Marguerite touched him on the shoulder.
“Paul, there’s a carbine in your room.”
“It would be fatal to use it.”
“I don’t care,” Marguerite cried fiercely. Her face was alive with passion. “Use it, Paul. I don’t care!” and from far below there rose the sound of a loud knocking upon a door.
Marguerite’s heart fluttered up into her throat. She stared at Paul with her eyes opened wide in horror. The same thought was in both their minds. Both listened, holding their breath that they might hear the better.
“It was upon our door they knocked,” Marguerite whispered, and she crept a little closer to her lover.
“Listen!” replied Paul, and as the knocking began again, but this time louder, he added with a grim look upon his face, “Yes.”
“And it was not Selim who knocked,” said Marguerite.
They could hear cries now, angry orders to open, followed by a muffled clamour and such a clatter of heavy blows as shook the very house.
“I must go down,” said Paul, in a low voice. “Otherwise they’ll break in the door.”
Marguerite nodded. Her face was white to the lips, but she was quite still now and her eyes steady. They crept down to the uppermost floor of the house. The noise was louder.
“You will stay here, Marguerite?”
“Yes.”
“You have your pistol?”
Marguerite drew it from her broad waistbelt of gold brocade, snapped back the barrel, and set the safety catch. Her hand never shook. Now that the peril was at her elbow she could even smile. Paul took her passionately in his arms.
“You are gold all through, Marguerite,” he cried. “If this is the end, I thank you a thousand times. I would hate to have died without knowing the wonder of such rare love as yours.”
“ ‘We two embracing under death’s spread hand.’ ” She quoted from a book upon her shelf in which she was pleased to find a whole library of wisdom and inspiration.
“You will wait until the last moment?” said Paul, touching the little automatic in her hand.
“Until they are on this last flight of stairs,” she replied, in an even voice. “Paul!” She clung to him for a second, not in terror, but as to some inestimable treasure which she could hardly let go. Then she stood away, her eyes shining like the dew, her face hallowed with tenderness. “Now, my dear, go!”
Paul Ravenel ran down the stairs. The clamour echoing from the tunnel had taken on a fiercer note; the door, stout as it was, bent inwards under the blows. Marguerite, standing upon the landing, heard him unbolt the door. She drew back out of sight as a crowd of men, some in djellabas spotted with blood, some in ragged caftans, some armed with rifles, others with curved knives, others, again, with sharpened poles, swept screaming like madmen over the court.
“The Frenchman,” cried a great fellow, brandishing a butcher’s cleaver. “Give him to us! God has willed that they shall all die this day.”
What had become of Paul? she wondered. Had he been swept off his feet and trampled down in the rush? She heard his voice above the clamour. She imagined him standing with uplifted hand claiming silence. At all events, silence followed, and then his voice rang out.
“God willed that he should die yesterday,” said Paul.
Marguerite peered out between the curtains which overhung the entrance to the room. She saw him move, calm and smiling, across the court to an alcove and point to a corner.
“The Frenchman came to my house once too often. Look! He sought refuge here last night. He was not wise to seek refuge in the house of Ben Sedira the Meknasi. For to-day his body rolls in the river—” Paul threw open a small door in the back wall and showed them the Karouein River tumbling, swollen with the rain, past the walls of his house. Then he pointed to the alcove: “And his livery lies there.”
There was a rush into the alcove, and the shouts of exultation broke out again. A blue tunic, on the breast of which medals glinted and rattled, was tossed out high amidst the throng. The tunic was gashed and all cluttered and stained with blood which had dried. Paul’s gold-lace cap spun through the air, was caught, and clapped upon the head of a boy, his breeches and boots and accoutrements were flung from hand to hand and shared out amidst laughter and cheering. And once more there was a surge of men, and the court was empty and silent. No, not quite empty. Paul was talking in a gentle voice to one wild man who was now wearing over a ragged caftan Paul’s uniform tunic. Paul held him firmly by the elbow, and was speaking in a curiously soft, smooth voice, than which Marguerite had never heard anything more menacing.
“You will leave that tunic, good friend. You will take it off at once and leave it here. It is my trophy. Have I not earned it?”
The man protested, and sought to disengage himself, but Paul still held him firmly.
“It shall hang in my house,” he continued, “that my children may remember how once there were Frenchmen befouling the holy ground of Morocco.”
Once more Marguerite heard the rattle of the medals as the coat was restored, and the Moor cried out: “There will be none alive in Fez this night. Salam aleikum, O man of Meknes!” And a little afterwards the door was slammed and barred.
Paul returned to the court, holding the tunic in his hands. The peril of the last few moments was swept altogether out of his mind. For a moment Marguerite herself was forgotten. He was holding the badge of many years of honourable service, and the shining medals which proved that the service had been of real value to the country he served. All was now wasted and foregone.
“I should make the sacrifice again,” he said obstinately to himself, “if it were to make again. I should! I should!”
But he had not borne to see the tunic and its medals paraded in triumph on the back of one of these assassins through the streets of Fez. When he stopped the Moor and held him back from his companions, his hand had gripped close the revolver hidden in his waistband. Had the man clung to the tunic, Paul would have killed, whatever the risk. The traditions and the whole training of his life had forced his hand. He knew that, as he stood in the silent sunlit patio fondling the stuff of the coat between his fingers, and his heart aching as though some little snake had slipped into his bosom and was feeding there.
“I have done what my father did,” he thought. “I, who set out to atone for him.” And he laughed aloud with so much mockery at his own pretensions that the laughter startled him. “I can plead a different reason. But what of that? I have done what my father did!”
He folded the tunic reverently, and laid it down again in the alcove. As he stood up he was startled by the clatter of something falling overhead and the sharp explosion of a pistol. He looked upwards. The sound had come from behind those curtains where Marguerite was hidden. Had she been watching? Had she seen him fondling the tunic? Had she heard his bitter laughter? Perhaps he had spoken aloud. For a moment his heart stood still. Some words that Henriette had said to him—oh, ever so long ago, in the Villa Iris, flashed back into his mind. “Even if the grand passion comes—oh la, la la!—she will blow her brains out, the little fool!”
He sprang up the stairs, crying “Marguerite! Marguerite!” and stumbling in his haste. No answer was returned to him. He tore the curtains aside, and saw her lying on the floor by the side of a divan. The pistol had slipped from her hand and fallen a little way from her. Paul flung himself upon his knees beside her, lifted her, and pressed her close to his heart. “Marguerite! Marguerite!” he whispered. There was no wound, and she was breathing, and in a moment or two her eyes opened. Paul understood in that supreme moment of relief how greatly his love of Marguerite overpowered his grief at honour lost.
“Oh, my dear, you frightened me!” he said.
She smiled as he lifted her onto the divan.
“I was foolish,” she answered.
She had waited upon the outcome of that wild scene in the court below, her nerves steady, her mind unconscious of any effort to steel herself against catastrophe. She could catch but a glimpse of what was going forward; she did not understand the trick by which Paul Ravenel had appeased the invaders; she heard the wild babble of their frenzied voices and Paul’s voice over-topping them. She had waited serenely with her little pistol in her hand, safety to be reached so easily by the mere pressure of a finger. Then suddenly all was over; the court was empty, the house which had rung with fury a moment since was silent; and as she heard the bolts of the door shot once more into their sockets her strength had melted away. She had stood for a little while in a daze and, catching at the divan as she fell, had slipped in a swoon to the floor. The pistol fell from her hand and exploded as it fell.
“I was foolish,” she repeated; “I didn’t understand what had happened. I don’t even now.”
“I was afraid that some time or another some one had seen me enter this house and remembered it,” Paul Ravenel explained. “Last night something happened outside the door—what, I don’t know, but enough to trouble me a little. So after you had gone to bed I boiled a kettle—”
“Yes, I heard it.”
“And sterilized my big knife. I drove the knife through my arm and let the blood soak through my tunic, and then I stabbed the tunic again in the back. It was lucky that I did.”
“What should I have done without you?” she said, as she rested upon the cushions of the divan. She laid a hand gently in his.
“Does the wound hurt, Paul?”
“It throbs a little if I move it. That’s all. It’s nothing.”
“I’ll dress it again to-night,” she said, sleepily, and almost immediately she fell asleep. She slept so deeply, that a muffled roar, which shook the house, did not even trouble her dreams. Paul smiled as he heard that sound. “That’s one of the seventy-five,” he reflected. The guns from the camp at Dar-Debibagh were coming into action.
He left Marguerite sleeping, and climbed again to the roof. The guns were firing to the south of the town, and were still far away. But no man who had fought through the Chaiouïa Campaign could ever forget the tribesmen’s terror of the guns.
“Another day or two!”
Paul counted up the stages of the march of Moinier’s column from Meknes. If only he was quick, so that the tribesmen could not mass between him and Fez! There were houses alight now in Fez-el-Bali. The work of massacre was going on. But let General Moinier hurry, and the guns over there at Dar-Debibagh talk insistently to Fez! Moreover, at five o’clock the rain began again. It fell like javelins, with the thunder of surf upon a beach.