CHAPTER XV
Margueritedrove her two trembling negresses out of the corners into which they had flown when the house was invaded, stood over them while they cooked the dinner, and strictly ordered that it should be served with the proper ceremonies. She dressed herself in her European clothes and with even more, to-night, of the scrupulous daintiness which was habitual to her. Paul watched her with a great pride and wonderment.
“How in the world do you know at once what we have to learn?” he asked. “When people are rattled, routine’s the great remedy. Just doing the ordinary things at the ordinary hours lifts you along with a sort of assurance that life is going to be as sane to-morrow as it was yesterday. But we have men to watch, and they teach us these things. Where do you get them from?”
“From myself,” answered Marguerite, with a blush upon her cheeks, which her lover’s praise never failed to provoke. “I had to keep my own little flag of courage flying if I could.”
At half past nine they heard Selim’s three knocks upon the outer door, and Paul let him in and brought him to Marguerite in the room opening on to the patio. He brought with him a budget of black news. A couple of officers had been dragged from their horses and butchered in the streets. An engineer and his wife in Fez Djedid had been shot down as they sat at their luncheon. There had been an attack upon the Hôtel de France, where the managress and a priest had been slain.
“There is a house in the Tala quarter,” said Paul, “where two veterinary surgeons and two other officers lodged. I saw men breaking through the roof to get at them this afternoon.”
“They escaped, Sidi. They let themselves down from a window into an alley. It is believed that they are hiding in a covered drain.”
“And the four French telegraph operators. They, too, occupied a house in the Tala.”
Selim had no good tidings to tell of them. The door of their house had been forced at midday. Throughout the afternoon they had resisted in an upper room, which they had barricaded, firing with what weapons they had until their ammunition was exhausted. At seven in the evening a rescue party had arrived, but only one of them was alive, and he grievously wounded.
“A rescue party!” asked Paul, wondering whence that party had come. There was not enough men at the headquarters in the hospital to do more than protect the quarter of the Consulates, even if they could do that.
“A battalion from Dar-Debibagh forced its way into the city at five o’clock this afternoon,” said Selim.
Paul’s face took life, his eyes kindled. No one knew better than he the difficulties which must have hampered that exploit.
“That was well done,” he cried. “Whose battalion?”
The old Algerian soldier replied:
“The Commandant Philipot’s.”
The gladness died out of Paul Ravenel’s face, and he sat in silence staring at the tiles of the floor. To Marguerite it was as though the light of a lamp waned and flickered out. She laid her hand upon his.
“That’s your battalion, Paul?”
Paul nodded, and whispered “Yes,” not trusting his voice over much.
“You should have been with it, my dear. But for me you would have led your company,” she said, remorsefully; and he cried out aloud suddenly in a voice which she had never heard him use before, a voice rough and violent and full of pain.
“I am on leave.”
Hearing him, she felt the compunction of one who has carelessly knocked against a throbbing wound. Her eyes went swiftly to his face. During these moments Paul Ravenel was off his guard, and she was looking upon a man in torture.
“The little Praslin will be leading my company,” he said, “and leading it just as well as I could have done.” He turned again to Selim. “Did the battalion have trouble to get through?”
“Great trouble, Sidi. The commandant tried to come in by the little gate in the Aguedal wall and the new gardens of the Sultan. But he was attacked by a swarm of men issuing from the Segma Gate on his left flank and by sharp-shooters on the wall itself in front of him.”
“And we taught them to shoot!” cried Paul in exasperation. “The commandant was held up?”
“Yes, Sidi.”
“What then? He was losing men, and quickly. What did he do?” Paul asked impatiently. His own men were under fire. He had got to know, and at once. “Out with it, Selim. What did the Commandant Philipot do?”
“He led his battalion down into the bed of the river Zitoun,” said Selim, and a long “Oh!” of admiration and relief from Paul welcomed the manœuvre. He spread before his eyes, in mind, an imaginary map of the difficult ground at that southwest corner of the city, outside the walls. Pressed hardly upon his left flank, at the mercy of the riflemen on the crest of the high, unscalable wall of the Aguedal, Commandant Philipot, leaving a rear-guard—trust the Commandant Philipot for that!—had disappeared with his battalion into the earth. Paul chuckled as he thought of it—the ingenuity and the audacity, too!
“He made for the Bab-el-Hadid?” he said.
“Yes,” answered Selim.
There had been risk, of course, risk of the gravest kind. Out of shot, the battalion certainly was—out of shot and out of sight. But, on the other hand, in the deep chasm of the Oued Zitoun it could not see any more than could its antagonists. If its rear-guard was overwhelmed by the insurgents from the Segma Gate, if a strong band of tribesmen rode up to the southern lip of the chasm and caught the battalion floundering below amongst the boulders and the swollen river! Why, there was an end of that battalion and, for the moment, of the relief of Fez. But he had got through—there was the fact. And by no other way and with no smaller risk could he have got through. Paul Ravenel, watching that unprinted map upon the floor, over which he bent, had no doubt upon that point. A great risk nobly taken for a great end, and adroitly imagined! And with what speed they must have covered that difficult ground!
“Well, the little Praslin would lead very well,” he said aloud, but with just a hint of effort in his cordiality. “He knows his work.”
“And you are on leave, Paul?”
Marguerite was watching her lover with startled eyes. But Paul noticed neither her look nor the urgent appeal of her voice. He was away with his company in the bed of the Oued Zitoun, now stumbling over the great stones, now flung down headlong by the rush of the rain-swollen torrent and pressing on again in the hurried march. He sat tracing with his finger on the tiles the convolutions of the river, the point where the battalion must leave its shelter and march through the gardens to the gates—lost to all else. And Marguerite, watching him, caught at any reason which could reassure her.
Of course, Paul was unconsciously expressing the regret of a true soldier that his company had gone upon difficult and hazardous service without him, and a soldier’s interest in a brilliant manœuvre successfully accomplished. His absorption meant no more than that. But—but—his cry, “I am on leave,” startled out of him a challenge, an obstinate defiance, harsh with pain, rang in her ears still, argue as she might. In spite of herself, an appalling suspicion flickered like lightning through her mind and went out—and flickered again.
She heard Paul asking questions of Selim and Selim answering. But she was asking of herself a question which made all other questions of little significance. If her suspicion were true, could his love for her remain? Could it live strongly and steadily after so enormous a sacrifice? Wouldn’t it die in contempt of himself and hatred of her? If Paul Ravenel had looked at Marguerite Lambert at this moment he would have seen the haggard dancing girl of the Villa Iris, as he had seen her under the grape-vine of the balcony with her seven francs clenched in her hand.
Paul, however, was giving his attention to Selim. The quarter of the hospitals and the Consulates was now thought to be safe, though the Moors, uplifted by their success, had planned to attack it that night. An attempt had been made by a company of Philipot’s battalion to force the Souk-Ben-Safi and its intricate, narrow streets, but the company had been driven back. A second company had been sent out to capture and hold the Bab-el-Mahroud, but it was now beleaguered and fighting for its life. Another section was at the Bab Fetouh, in the south of the town, under fire from the small mosque of Tamdert. A good many isolated Europeans had been rescued from the houses, and brought into the protected quarter, but Fez, as a whole, was still in the hands of the insurgents.
At this point Paul Ravenel broke in with a sharp question.
“You spoke to no one of this house?”
Selim shook his head.
“To no one, Sidi.”
“To none of the French soldiers? To no friend of the French? You are sure, Selim? You are very sure? There were no Europeans to be rescued from this house? Answer me truthfully!”
Never was question more insistently expressed. Why?—why?—why? . . . Marguerite found herself asking whilst her heart sank. That their secret might still be kept, its sweetness preserved for them? No, that reason was inadequate. Why, then? Because the danger was over? But it was not over. So much Selim had made very clear. The few troops had been withdrawn to the protected quarter of the Consulates. The detachments outside were hard put to it. The city of Fez was still in the hands of the insurgents. Why then? Why the eagerness that the French should know nothing of this secret house? Oh, there was an answer, dared she but listen to it! An answer with consequences as yet only dimly suspected. If it was the true answer!—Marguerite sat stunned. How was she to get away quite by herself that she might think her problem out, without betraying the trouble of her mind to Paul?
It was Paul himself who made escape easy for her. He dismissed Selim and said to Marguerite:
“I’ll go up on the roof, my dear, for a little while. The rain has stopped, but, dressed as you are, it wouldn’t be wise for you to come.”
The excuse was feeble, and he spoke looking away from Marguerite—a rare thing with him. But Marguerite welcomed the excuse and had no eyes for the shifty look of him as he made it.
“Very well,” she said, in a dull voice, and Paul went quickly up the stairs.
Selim’s story had moved him to the depths of his soul. He was conscious of an actual nausea. “I should make the sacrifice again.” He repeated a phrase which had been growing familiar to him during this day, repeated it with a stubborn emphasis. But he was beginning to understand dimly what the sacrifice was to cost him. Soldiering was his business in life. He was sealed to it. He had known it when he stood in his father’s death room on the islet off the coast of Spain; and when he sat over Colonel Vanderfelt’s wine in the dining room looking out upon the moonlit garden; but never so completely as now when his thoughts were with the men of his company stumbling in the river bed, and his feet were dragging up the stairs to the roof.
“I must be alone for a little while, otherwise Marguerite will guess the truth.”
It was an instinct rather than a formulated thought which drove him upwards. He dreaded Marguerite’s swift intuitions, that queer way she had of reaching certainty, cleaving her way to it like a bird through the air. He drew a long breath as he crept out upon the roof. He was alone now, and, sinking down upon the cushions underneath the parapet, he wrestled with his grief, letting it have its way up here in the darkness so that he might confine it the more surely afterwards. For an hour on this first night of the revolt he remained alone upon the roof-top whilst Marguerite, separated from him by the height of the beleaguered house, sat amongst the lighted candles in the room by the court, steeling herself to a sacrifice which should equal his.
When she was sure of herself she wrapped a dark cloak about her shining frock and climbed in her turn to the roof. But she moved very silently, and when she raised her head above the trap she saw her lover stretched upon the terrace, his turban thrown aside, his face buried in his arms, his whole attitude one of almost Oriental grief. He was unaware of her until she crouched by his side and, with something maternal in the loving pity of her hands, gently stroked his head.
“Paul!” she whispered, and he sprang swiftly up. She got a glimpse of a tortured face, and then he dropped by her side and, putting his arms about her, caught her to his heart.
“My dear! My dear!” he said.
“Paul,” she began, in a breaking voice, but Paul would not listen. He pointed his arm westwards over the parapet.
“Look!”
In their neighbourhood all was quiet, though here and there a building was burning near enough to light up from time to time their faces. But away in the southwest a broad red glare canopied the quarter and flames leapt and sank.
“What is that?” asked Marguerite, distracted from her purpose.
“The Mellah,” replied Paul. “They have looted and burnt it. It’s the rule and custom. Whatever the cause of an uprising, the Mellah is the first to suffer.”
Marguerite had never set foot in that quarter. Paul described it to her—its dirty and crowded alleys, its blue-washed houses jammed together and packed with rich treasures and gaudy worthlessness, gramophones blaring out some comic song of London or Paris, slatternly women and men, ten thousand of them, and then the bursting in of the gates.
“And the Jews themselves! What has become of them?” she asked, with a shudder.
“God knows!”
Unarmed, pounded like sheep within their high walls, they were likely to have been butchered like sheep, too.
“There’s a small new gate, however, leading to their cemetery. They may have found that way free,” said Paul, without any confidence. But, as a fact, they had escaped whilst their houses were being plundered. The gardens of the Sultan’s Palace, which adjoined, had been swiftly thrown open to them, and at this very moment they were camping there without food or money or shelter—except the lucky ones who had made little family groups in the empty cages of Mulai Hafid’s menagerie between the lions and the jaguars.
“Paul”—Marguerite began a second time, but now a rattle of firing and a distant clamour of fierce cries broke out upon their left hand. Paul Ravenel turned in the direction of the noise eagerly, and as Marguerite turned with him, once more her attention was arrested. From a semi-circle of streets a blaze of light across which thick volumes of smoke drifted, rose above the house-tops, so that the faces of the two watchers were lit up as by a sunset.
“It is the attack upon the Consulates,” said Paul. “It will fail. There are troops enough now to hold it.”
On the other side of the city, however, to the north, it was a different matter. By the Bab-el-Mahroud the French outpost was hard-pressed. Paul was listening with all his intentness.
“It sounds as if our ammunition was running short,” he said, in a low, grave voice; and this time Marguerite was not to be denied. Kneeling up, she caught Paul by the arms as he sat, and turned him toward her. The light, strong and bright, was sweeping across his face in waves.
“Paul, is it true?” she asked, searching his eyes.
Paul Ravenel had no need to ask what was true; he had no heart to deny its truth. The thing which most he dreaded had come to pass. Marguerite knew what he had done. He had been certain that she knew from the moment when she had laid her hand upon his head.
“Yes,” he answered, meeting her gaze. “It is true.”
“You are not on leave!”
“No.”
“You have deserted!”
Paul’s face twitched with a spasm of pain, but he did not take his eyes from Marguerite.
“Yes,” he said.
Marguerite shook him gently as one might shake a wayward child.
“But you can’t do that, Paul.”
“I have done it, Marguerite.”
“Oh, Paul—you can’t have understood what you were doing! You can’t have thought!”
“I have thought of everything.”
“You have sacrificed your honour.”
“I have you.”
“Your career.”
“I have you.”
“You have lost every friend.”
“What do I care about friend’s, Marguerite, when I have you?”
She let go of his arms with such an expression of grief and despair upon her face as cut him to the heart to see. She bowed her forehead upon the palms of her hands and burst into tears. Paul drew her close to him, seeking to comfort her.
“We shall be together, Marguerite, always. Yesterday night, when I foretold you of these massacres—you took it lightly because we were together. You seemed to say nothing in the world mattered so long as we were together.”
“But don’t you see, Paul”—she drew herself away and raised her face, down which tears were running—“we have been both of us alone to-night—already. You here on the roof—I in the court below—and we wanted to be alone, yes, my dear—why deny it, since I know? We wanted to be alone, each of us with our miserable thoughts. . . . In a little while you’ll hate me.”
“No,” he said, violently. “That could never be.”
She bent her head over his hands and pressed them to her eyes, wetting them with her tears.
“Paul,” she whispered between her sobs, “I can’t take such a sacrifice. Oh, my dear, you should have left me with my seven francs and my broken bundle on that balcony in Casablanca.”
Paul stooped and kissed her hair.
“Marguerite, I wouldn’t have left you there for anything in the world. From the moment I saw you there was no world for me, except the world in which you and I moved step by step and hand-in-hand.”
CHAPTER XVI
Graduallythe attack upon the Consulates died away. The waving light from the blaze of torches in the ring of streets about that quarter diminished, and darkness came again to the watchers upon the roof top. They sat huddled together in silence. Marguerite’s broken sobbing had ceased. Above them the bright stars wheeled in a sky of velvet. Only away to the north, where the beleaguered post still held out at the Bab-el-Mahroud, was there now any sound of firing, or any faint clamour of voices. The troubled city rested, waiting for daylight.
Paul became conscious that Marguerite was stirring out of the abandonment of grief in which she had lain. He felt her supple body stiffen in his arms. Some idea, some plan perhaps, had occurred to her of which he must beware; all the more because she did not speak of it. He was pondering what that plan might be, when above their heads, in their very ears it seemed, the first mueddin on the balcony of his minaret launched over the city his vibrant call to prayer.
The sound startled them both so that they clung together.
“Don’t move,” whispered Paul.
“The Companions of the Sick!” said Marguerite, in a low voice. “My dear, we shall need them to-night as much as any two in Fez.”
They waited for a few moments. Then they crept swiftly and silently to the hatchway and closed it above their heads. In Marguerite’s room Paul lighted the candles. Marguerite was wearing the little frock of white and silver in which she had dressed the night before, and she let the dark cloak slip from her shoulders and fall about her feet.
“Paul,” she said, joining her hands together upon her breast in appeal. “I want you to do something—for me. You can walk safely through the streets. Dressed as you are, no one will know you. No one will suspect you. If you are spoken to, you can answer. You are Ben Sedira the Meknasi. I want you to go at once to the Protected quarter.”
“Why, Marguerite?”
“You can rejoin your battalion.”
“No.”
“Oh, you can, Paul! You can make yourself known. They will let you through their barricades.”
“It is too late,” said Paul.
Marguerite would not accept the quiet statement.
“No,” she pleaded, her eyes eager, her mouth trembling. “I have been thinking it out, my dear, up there on the roof. You can make an excuse. You were seized yesterday night after you had visited the Headquarters. You were pulled from your horse. You were kept imprisoned and escaped to-night.”
Paul shook his head.
“No one would believe that story, Marguerite. The people of Fez are making no prisoners.”
“Then you took refuge in the house of a friend! You have many friends in Fez, Paul. A word from you and any one of them will back you up and say he gave you shelter. It’ll be so easy, Paul, if you’ll only listen.”
“And meanwhile, Marguerite, what of you?”
She was waiting for that question with her answer ready upon her lips.
“Yes. I have thought of that too, Paul. I shall be quite safe here now by myself. They have searched this house already. They went away satisfied with your story. They will not come here again.”
Paul smiled at her tenderly. She stood before him with so eager a flush upon her face, a light so appealing in her eyes. Only this morning—was it so short a time ago as this morning?—yes, only this morning she had been terrified, even with him at her side, because they were shut in within this house without windows, because they could see nothing, know nothing, and must wait and wait with their hearts fluttering at a cry, at the crack of a rifle, at the sound of a step. Now her one thought was to send him forth, to endure alone the dreadful hours of ignorance and expectation, to meet, if needs must, the loneliest of deaths, so that his honour might be saved and his high career retained.
“You are thinking too much of me, Marguerite,” he said, gently.
Marguerite shook her head.
“I am thinking of myself, my dear, just as much as I am thinking of you. I am thinking of your love for me. What am I without it?”
“Nothing will change that,” protested Paul.
Marguerite smiled wistfully.
“My dear, how many lovers have used and listened to those words? Is there one pair that hasn’t? I am looking forward, Paul, to when this trouble is over—to the best that is possible for us two if we are alive when it is over. Your way! Flight, concealment for the rest of our lives and a bond of disgrace to hold us together instead of a bond of love which has done no harm to any one and has given a world of happiness to both of us. Paul, my way is the better way! Oh, believe it and leave me! Paul, I am pleading for myself—I am!—and”—the light went out of her eyes, her head and her body drooped a little; he had never seen anything so forlorn as Marguerite suddenly looked—“and, oh, ever so much more than you imagine!” she added, wistfully.
Paul took her by the arm which hung listlessly at her side.
“My dear, I can invent no story which would save me. The first shot was fired at noon to-day, not yesterday. Nothing can alter that. And even if it could be altered, I won’t leave you to face these horrors alone. I brought you to Fez—don’t let us forget that! I hid you in this house. My place is here with you.”
But whilst he was speaking Ravenel had a feeling that he had not reached to the heart of the plan which she had formed upon the roof. The sudden change in her aspect, the quick drop from eager pleading to a forlorn hopelessness, the wistful cry, “I am pleading for myself ever so much more than you imagine!”—No, he had not the whole of her intention. There was more in her mind than the effort to persuade him to leave her. There was a provision, a remedy, if persuasion failed.
Paul let her arm go and drew back a step or two until he leaned against a table of walnut wood set against the wall. Marguerite turned to the dressing-table and stood playing absently with her little ornaments, her brushes, and her combs. Then she surprised him by another change of mood. The eager, tender appeal, the sudden hopelessness were followed now by a tripping flippancy.
“Fancy your caring so much for me, Paul!” she cried, and she tittered like a schoolgirl. “A little dancing thing from the Villa Iris! I am not worth it. Am I, Paul?”
She turned to him, soliciting “Yes” for an answer, smiling with her lips though she could not with her eyes, and keeping these latter lowered so that he should not see them. “Well, since your silence tells me so politely that I am, I’ll give up trying to persuade you to leave me.” She yawned. “I am tired to death, Paul. I shall sleep to-night. And you?”
She cocked her head on one side with a coquettish gaiety, false to her at any time, and never so false to her as now. To Paul, whose memory had warned him for the second time that day, it was quite dreadful to see.
“I shall watch in the court below,” he said, and he moved a step or two away from the little table against the wall.
“Then go, or I shall fall asleep where I stand,” said Marguerite, and she led him to the wide doors opening on to the landing. “I shall leave the doors open, so that you will be within call.”
She gave him a little push which was more of a caress than a push, and suddenly caught him back to her. Her eyes were raised now, her arms were about his neck.
“Paul,” she whispered, and both eyes and lips were smiling gravely, “whatever happens to me, my dear, I shall owe you some wonderful months of happiness. Months which I had dreamed of, and which proved more wonderful than any dreams. Thank you, dear one! Thank you a thousand times!”
She kissed him upon the lips and laid her hand upon his cheek and stood apart from him.
“Good-night, Paul.”
Paul Ravenel answered her with a curious smile.
“You might be saying good-bye to me, Marguerite.”
Marguerite shook her head with determination.
“I shall never say good-bye to you, Paul, not even if this very second we were to hear the assassins surging up the stairs,” she said, her eyes glowing softly into his, and a sure faith making her face very beautiful. “We have broken codes and laws, my dear, both of us. But we have both touched, I think, in spite of that, something bigger and finer than we had either of us believed was here to touch. And I don’t believe that—you and I”—she made a little gesture with her hand between herself and him—“the miracle as you called it, of you and me can end just snapped off and incomplete. Why, my dear, even if we go right back to earth, at the very worst, I believe,” she said, with a smile of humour, “some spark of you will kindle some dry tinder of me and make a flame to warm a luckier pair of lovers.”
Paul looked at her in silence.
“You talk to me like that!” he said, at length. “And then you try to persuade me you weren’t worth while.” He turned the moment of emotion with a laugh. “Good-night, Marguerite,” and he went downstairs.
Marguerite waited without moving whilst he descended the stairs and crossed the court. She heard him pass into the room with the archway and the clocks. He was quite invisible to her now. Therefore, so was she to him; and she was standing very close to the doors; just within her bedroom—no more. She stepped back silently. There were rugs upon the floor, and between the rugs she stepped most carefully lest one of the heels of her satin shoes should clack upon the boards. She went straight to the little table of walnut wood set against the wall and laid her hand upon the drawer. The handle was of brass; she lifted it so that it should not rattle, and so stood with an ear towards the stairway, listening. But no sound came from the court, there was not a creak of any tread on the stairs. Reassured, Marguerite pulled open the drawer a little way. The table had been fashioned in a century when tables really were made. The drawer slid out smoothly and noiselessly just far enough for Marguerite’s hand to slip through the opening.
Her fingers, however, touched nothing. She opened the drawer wider. It was empty. Yet it had not been empty that evening when she had changed her clothes.
“Paul was standing here,” she said to herself. “Yes, facing me with his back to the table, whilst I was talking to him.”
She remembered now that when she had thrown her arms about his neck, as he stood in the doorway, he had kept his left hand behind his back. She sat down upon the edge of the bed, and a smile flitted across her face.
“I might have known that he would have understood,” she whispered. He always had understood from the first moment when, without a word, he had called her to him at the Villa Iris. But Marguerite must make sure. She stole out on to the landing. From the point where she stood she could look down and across the court into the room with the clocks. Paul was lying upon the cushions in a muse, looking at something which lay darkly gleaming on the out-stretched palm of his hand—her little automatic pistol. He had cleaned it and reloaded it and replaced it in the drawer that afternoon, after Marguerite had fainted and it had exploded on the floor. He had taken it out of the drawer when Marguerite was bidding him good-bye a few minutes back. For, mingled with her words, another and a coarser voice had been whispering in his ears. “And if it comes—the grand passion! She will blow her brains out—the little fool!”
Not from disillusionment, as Henriette with her bitter experience of life expected, but to save him, Paul Ravenel, to set him free, whilst there was still perhaps a chance that by some deft lie he might hold on to his career and his good name. “That, no!” said Paul, and he pushed the pistol into his waistbelt and composed himself for his long vigil.
The candles burned down, and one by one flickered out; mueddin succeeded mueddin in the minaret; but for their voices the town was quiet; Paul Ravenel tired with the anxiety, the sleeplessness, and the inward conflicts which through thirty hours had been his share, nodded, dozed, and in the end slept. He woke to find the grey of the morning thinning the shadows in the house, making it chill and eerie and an abode of ghosts. Surely a ghost was stirring in the house with a little flutter and hiss of unsubstantial raiment, a ripple of silver and fire—there by the balustrade above the patio, now on the stairs. . . . And now Paul Ravenel, though he did not move, was wide awake, watching from his dark corner with startled eyes. Marguerite was on the stairs, now stopping to peer over towards her lover, lest he should have moved, now most stealthily descending.
The last mueddin had ceased his chant, a hum of voices rose through the still air without the house; the city was waking to another day of massacre. And Marguerite was creeping down the stairs. She had not gone to bed that night, after all. She was still wearing her white frock with the embroidery of silver. She had thrown over her shoulders a glistening cloak. She had put on the jewels he had given her. They sparkled in the dim light on her bosom—a square sapphire hung on a chain of platinum and diamonds which went about her neck—on her wrists, on her shoes, at her waist.
“Why? Why?” he asked of himself; and as Marguerite reached the foot of the stairs and stepped into the court, he had the answer to his question. For something gleamed in her hand—the great key of the street door.
Paul Ravenel was just in time. For with the swiftness and the silence of the ghost he had almost taken her to be, Marguerite flashed across the patio, and was gone.
“Marguerite!” he cried aloud, as he sprang to his feet, so that the house rang with his cry. A sob, a wail of despair answered him, a clink as the heavy key dropped from her startled hands. He found her blindly fumbling at the bolts, distraught with her need of haste.
“Paul, let me go! Let me go!” she cried.
He lifted her in his arms as one lifts a child and carried her back into the court.
“Marguerite!” he whispered. “A step outside that tunnel dressed as you are, now that Fez is awake, and—”
“I know, I know,” she interrupted him. “I should be out of your way altogether. Oh, Paul, let me go! I have been thinking of it all night. I can’t take, all the time, and everything you have that’s dear to you! Let me give too—something in return—my life, my dear, that’s worth so little. Oh, Paul, let me give it now, when I am ready to give it—before my courage goes,” and she struggled and beat upon his breast with her small fists in a frenzy.
But he held her close to him. “Poor child, what a night of horror she must have lived through,” he reflected. Lying on her bed in the dark, waiting for the first gleam of dawn, for the first sounds of the city’s awakening, and shutting her eyes and her ears against the terror of these savage and wild-eyed fanatics, forbidding her heart to sink before the ordeal of her great sacrifice. She had decked herself out in her jewels, like that bride of whom she had told him, but for a different reason; that she might the sooner attract notice and invite murder.
“It was mad, Marguerite!” he cried, and then, holding her to his heart. “But it was splendid!”
Already her strength was waning. She no longer struggled. She hung in his arms. Her hands stroked his face.
“Let me go, Paul,” she pleaded, “won’t you? It will be quick. The first of them who sees me! Oh, while I can do it. My dear, my dear, I’ll gladly die for you, I love you so.”
“Quick?” exclaimed Paul Ravenel, savagely. “You don’t know them! I have seen our men on the battlefields. Quick? My dear, they would bind you hand and foot and give you to their women to mutilate alive.”
Marguerite uttered a cry and struggled against him no more. He carried her up the stairs, undressed her, and put her to bed. She laid her hand in his. He would have his way. She gave herself into his keeping and, holding fast on to his hand, she fell asleep.
That morning the roar of the guns was louder, and the shells were flying over the city.
CHAPTER XVII
Thatday, the eighteenth of April, broke in gloom. A heavy canopy of sullen clouds hung over Fez. Nowhere within eye’s reach was there a slant of sunshine. There were no shadows, no flashes of colour. White houses and dark gardens and green-tiled mosques all lay very clear and near and distinct, but without any of the radiance which on a day of sunlight gives to the city so magical a beauty, that a stranger looking down upon it can believe that he has wandered into fairyland.
The shells were screaming over Fez from the south. They dispersed the Moors holding the North Fort outside the walls, and they destroyed the Castle of Sidi Bou Nafa in Fez Djedid, close to the Sultan’s Palace, which was held in force by the insurgents. But there were too many refugees still hiding and too many Fazi secretly friendly to the French to make possible such a bombardment as would reduce the city to terms.
The insurgents were still in possession of every quarter of the town except the Sultan’s Palace and the district of the Embassy and Consulates. The little post at the Bab-el-Mahroud had been exterminated during the night. The company of which that post had been a section, under Captain Henry, subsequently to be famous as a general upon a wider field, was fighting its way desperately back in the Souk Senadjine. Another company sent to join hands with him and occupy the quarter of Tala was held up in the Souk-Ben-Safi; and the post at the southern gate of Bab Fetouh was in desperate straits. The only gleam that morning was the rescue of the guests besieged in the Hôtel de France under the covering fire of a platoon stationed on the roof of the British Consulate. The screams of the women indeed shrilled from the terraces with a fiercer exultation than even on the outbreak of the rising.
Marguerite woke later to the sound of them. She held her hands over her ears and called loudly to Paul:
“I want to look at your arm,” she said, when he ran to her.
“It’s going on finely. It can wait until you are dressed.”
“No.”
She slipped her legs out of bed and sat on the edge of it, thrusting her feet into her slippers. She wanted to do something at once which would take her thoughts from that piercing and inhuman din. Paul brought to her the medicine-chest and she dressed and bandaged the half-healed wound.
“Thank you, Marguerite. I’ll tell them to get your bath ready,” he said, as he turned to go. But the screaming overhead made her blood run cold. She could endure the roar of the seventy-fives, the rattle of musketry, even the wild yelling of the men; but this cruel frenzy of the gaily-dressed women upon the house-tops, never tiring whilst daylight lasted, shocked her as something obscene, the screaming of offal-birds, not women, a thing not so much unnatural as an accusation against nature and the God that made nature. She quickly called her lover back.
“Paul, you took my little pistol from the drawer of my table there last night.”
“Well?” said Paul, looking at her in doubt.
“I want you to give it back to me.”
Paul Ravenel hesitated.
“You need not fear,” she continued. “Yesterday I meant to use it—for your dear sake as I thought—or rather for both our sakes. But since you will keep me with you—why, all that’s over and I shall not use it unless there is real need. Listen!”
She lifted her hand and, as she listened, shuddered. “You spoke of those women this morning. What they would do to me. I should feel—safe if you would give my pistol back to me.”
Paul took it from his belt and laid it on the flat of her hand.
“Thank you,” she said, with a sigh of relief. She sat on the edge of the bed, her hair tumbled about her shoulders, smiling at this little weapon which could make death swift and easy, like a child delighted with a new toy.
Things which make the flesh crawl and the spirit shudder have sometimes a curious and dreadful fascination. All through their luncheon these strident cries called to Marguerite, drew her like some morbid vice. She wanted to creep up on to the roof, to crouch behind the parapet, though she knew that her heart would miss its beats and her senses reel on the edge of terror. And when Paul Ravenel said:
“Marguerite, I shall lie down on my bed and sleep when we have finished,” she realized that it was her own wish which he was uttering. She was almost disappointed when he lit a cigar. A cigarette, yes; but a cigar! That needs a deal of smoking. “You’ll wake me if there’s need,” said Paul. “I think that I shall sleep soundly.”
Marguerite noticed the heaviness of his eyelids, and was filled with compunction.
“If I must,” she answered, determining that whatever happened he who had hardly slept at all for fifty hours should sleep his sleep out now.
Yet within an hour she had waked him.
Hardly, indeed, had Paul’s eyes closed before she climbed to the roof. The terraces of the houses were a very kaleidoscope of shifting colours. Orange, scarlet, deep waistbelts of cloth of gold over dresses of purple and blue and pink were grouped in clusters here like flower beds. There the women moved in and out with frantic gestures like revellers in Bedlam. And over all the shrill vibrant pæan like a canopy!
Marguerite watched and listened, shivering—until one house caught and riveted her eyes. Beneath her flowed the Karouein river. The farther bank was lined with the walls of houses, and about one, a little to Marguerite’s right, there was suddenly a great commotion. Marguerite lifted her head cautiously above the parapet and looked down. A narrow path ran between the houses and the stream, and this path was suddenly crowded with men as though they had sprung from the earth. They beat upon the door, they fired senselessly at the blind mud walls with rifles, they shouted for admittance. And the roof of that one house was empty. Marguerite was suddenly aware of it. It was the only empty roof in all that row of houses.
The shouts from the path were redoubled. Orders to open became screams of exultation, threats of vengeance. Marguerite, looking down from her high vantage point, saw the men upon the pathway busy like ants. A group of them clustered suddenly. They seemed to stoop, to lengthen themselves into line—and now she saw what they were lifting. A huge square long beam of wood—a battering ram? Yes, a battering ram. Three times the beam was swung against the door to the tune of some monotonous rhythm of the East, which breathed of deserts and strange temples and abiding wistfulness, curiously out of keeping with the grim violence which was used. At the fourth blow the door burst and broke. It was as though a river dam had broken and a river torrent leapt in a solid shaft through the breach.
For a few moments thereafter nothing was seen by Marguerite. The walls of the house were a curtain between her and the tragic stage. She could only imagine the overturning of furniture, the pillage of rooms a moment since clean and orderly, now a dirty wreckage, a pandemonium of a search—and then the empty roof was no longer empty. A man sprang out upon it, a man wearing the uniform of a French officer. He had been bolted like a rat by dogs.
Clearly his enemies were upon his heels. Marguerite saw him spring over the parapet on to the adjoining roof and a cloud of women assail him. Somehow he threw them off, somehow he dived and dodged between them, somehow he reached the further parapet, found a ladder propped against the outside wall, and slid down it on to a third housetop. And as he reached the flat terrace, yet another swarm of screaming termagants enveloped him. He was borne down to the floor of the room.
For a little while there was a wild tossing of arms, a confusion of bodies. It seemed to Marguerite as though all these women had suddenly melted into one fabulous monster. Then, with shrieks of joy and flutterings of scarves and handkerchiefs, they stood apart, dancing flatly on their feet. The officer for his part lay inert and for the best of reasons; he was bound hand and foot. . . . And shortly afterwards the women lighted a fire. . . .
“A fire?” said Marguerite, in a perplexity. “Why a fire?”
She watched—and then she heard the dreadful loud moan of a man in the extremity of pain. In a moment she was shaking Paul Ravenel by the shoulder, her face white and quivering, her eyes still looking out in horror upon a world incredible.
“Paul! Paul! Wake up!”
Ravenel came slowly out of a deep sleep, with a thought that once more the insurgents were about his door. But a few stammering words from Marguerite brought him quickly to his feet. He unlocked a cupboard and took from it a carbine in a canvas case. He slipped off the case and fitted a charged magazine beneath the breech.
“You will wait here, Marguerite.”
Whilst he was speaking he was already on the stair. Marguerite could not wait below as he had bidden her. This horror must end. She must know, of her own knowledge, that it had ended. She followed Paul as far as the mouth of the trap, and came to a stop there, her feet upon the stairs, her head just above the level of the roof. The groans of the tortured man floated across the open space mingled with the triumphant screams of the women.
“Oh, hurry, Paul, hurry,” she cried, and she heard him swear horribly.
The oath meant less than nothing to her. Would he never fire? He was kneeling behind the parapet, crouching a little so that not a flutter of his haik should be visible, with the barrel of his carbine resting upon the bricks. Why didn’t he fire? She stamped upon the stairs in a frenzy of impatience. She could not see that the women were perpetually shifting and crossing about their victim and obscuring him from Paul Ravenel.
At last a moment came when the line of sight was clear; and immediately the carbine spoke—once and no more; and all about her in this upper city of the air all noises ceased, groans, exultations, everything. It was to Marguerite as though the crack of that carbine had suspended all creation. In a few seconds the shrill screams broke out again, but there could be no doubt about their character. They were screams of terror. These, in their turn, dwindled and ceased. Had Marguerite raised her head above the parapet now she would have seen that those terraces so lately thronged were empty except one on which a fire was burning, and where one man in a uniform lay quite still and at peace with a bullet through his heart.
But Marguerite was watching Paul, who had sunk down below the edge of the parapet and was gazing upwards with startled eyes. Marguerite crept to his side.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Paul pointed. Just above their heads a tiny wisp of smoke coiled and writhed in the air like an adder.
“If that were seen—” said Paul, in a low voice.
“Yes.”
If that tiny wisp from the smokeless powder of his cartridge were seen floating in the air, there would be no doubt from what roof the shot had been fired. Paul drew Marguerite down beside him; together they watched. There was no wind at all; the air was sluggish and heavy; it seemed to them that the smoke was going slowly to curl and weave above their heads for ever. It grew diaphanous, parted into fine shreds, tumbled, and at last was gone.
The two lovers looked at one another with a faint smile upon their lips. But they did not move; they crouched down, seeing nothing but the empty sky above their heads.
The danger was not past. At any moment the sound of blows upon their door might resound again through the house. Or they might hear a ladder grate softly on the outside of this parapet, as it was raised from one of the roofs below. They waited there for half an hour. Then a shell screamed above their heads and exploded. It was followed by another and another.
“They are shelling the Souk-Ben-Safi,” said Paul. “Look! You can see the twinkle of the guns.” He pointed out to her the flashes on the hills to the east of the town. “That’s the way! Let the guns talk to these torturers!” He shook his fist over the town, standing upright now upon the roof, his face aflame with anger.
“Paul! Paul!” Marguerite cried in warning.
“There’s no one to see,” he returned, with a savage laugh. “One shell in the Souk-Ben-Safi and they’re shivering in their cellars. Come, let us go down!”
For an hour the shells screeched above the roof, and Paul, as he cleaned his carbine, whistled joyously. He raised his head from his task to see Marguerite, very white in the face, clinging to her chair with clenched hands, and trying in vain to whistle too.
“I am a brute,” he cried, in compunction. “They won’t touch this house, Marguerite! It’s too near the Karouein Mosque. The French are going to stay in Morocco. They’ll not touch the Karouein Mosque. There’s no spot in Fez safer from our guns.”
Marguerite professed herself reassured, but it did occur to her that gunners and even guns might make occasionally a mistake, and she drew a very long breath of relief when the bombardment ceased.
Paul Ravenel, however, fell into a restless mood, pacing the court, and now and again coming to a stop in front of Marguerite with some word upon his lips, which, after all, he did not speak. Marguerite guessed it, and after a little struggle made herself his interpreter.
“The bombardment’s over. It will keep Fez quiet for awhile. Even if that wisp of smoke was seen, no crowd will come here for an explanation—yet, at all events. Why don’t you go outside into the town and get the news?”
The eager light in his eyes told her clearly that she had interpreted him aright. But Paul, not knowing the reason which had prompted her, sought for another. He looked at Marguerite warily.
“I gave you back your pistol,” he said.
“And I promised not to use it,” she replied.
Paul shifted from one foot to the other, anxious for news, eager, after his two days’ confinement in this shell, for action, yet remorseful for his eagerness.
“It wouldn’t be fair,” he said, half-heartedly.
“But I want you to go,” she answered, with a glimmer of a smile at this man turned shamefaced school-boy who stood in front of her. “You’re wild to go really, Paul, and I am in no danger.” She drew a swift breath as she said that and hoped that he would not notice it.
Paul Ravenel did not.
“Yes, I am restless, Marguerite,” he said in a burst. “I’ll tell you why? Do you know what I did on the roof? What I had to do?”
“You frightened the women away—shot one of them—put an end to their fiendishness.”
Paul shook his head.
“That would have been no use, my dear. The man, a brother-officer of mine, would still have lain upon that roof in torture and helpless. They would have left him there till dark and finished their work then, if he were still alive. Can you guess what they were doing? They were burning his head slowly.”
“Oh!”
Marguerite had a vision of herself rushing out into the street as only that morning she had proposed to do, and meeting the same fate. She covered her eyes with her hands.
“I am sorry, dear. I had to tell you, because I have to tell you this too. I killed him.”
Marguerite took her hands from her face and stared at her lover.
“I had to,” said Paul, in a dull voice. “There was no other way to save him. But, of course, it”—and he sat down suddenly with his hands clenched together and his head bowed—“it troubles me dreadfully. Who he was I don’t know; his face was blackened with the fire. But he may have served with me in the Chaiouïa—he may have marched up with me to Fez—we may have sat together on many nights over a camp fire, telling each other how clever we were—and I had to kill him, just as one puts a horse out of its misery.”
“Oh, my dear,” said Marguerite. She was at his side with her arm about his shoulders—comforting him. “I didn’t understand. You could do nothing else. And you were quick. He would be the first to thank you.”
Paul took the hand that was laid upon his shoulders gratefully. “No, I could do nothing else,” he said. “But I want to move, so that I mayn’t think of it.”
“I know,” she said.
She made light of her own isolation in that house. Paul, it was plain to her, was in a dangerous mood. Horror at the thing which he had been forced to do, anger at the stroke of fate which had set him to the tragic choice between his passion and his duty, bitterness against the men in power who had refused to listen, were seething within him. He was in a mood to run riot in a berserk rage at a chance word, a chance touch, to kill and kill and kill, until he in turn was borne down and stamped to death. But Marguerite stood aside. One appeal—it would be enough if only her eyes looked it—and without a doubt he would stay. Yes, stay and remember that he had been stayed! She did not even bid him take care or hurry back to her. She called Selim and bade him stand by the outer door.
Paul took a great staff in his hand and came back to Marguerite, and kissed her on the lips.
“Thank you,” he said. “How you know!”
“I pay my little price, Paul, for a very big love,” and as was her way, she turned off the moment of emotion with a light word and a laugh. “There! Run along, and mind you don’t get your feet wet!”
For three hours thereafter she sat alone in the court, with her pistol in her hand, paying her little price; outside the noise of a town in tumult, inside the ticking of a clock. And darkness came.
* * * * *
Marguerite had her reward. Paul Ravenel returned at eight o’clock, his robes covered with dust and mud, his body tired, but his black mood gone. He dressed himself after his bath in the grey suit of a European, and as they sat at dinner he gave Marguerite his good news. The back of the rebellion was broken. The tribes which were gathering in the South and East of the town had been dispersed by the artillery.
“Moinier and his column will be here before they can gather again. They were the great danger, Marguerite. For if they had once got into Fez they would have looted it from end to end. Friend’s house or enemy’s house, Fasi or Christian, would have been all the same to those gentlemen.”
The rising was premature. That had been the cause of its failure. The quarter of the Consulates and the Embassy had not been carried by storm on the first day. A number of the Askris who had joined the insurgents under fear, were now returning to their duties. The great dignitaries of the Maghzen were in a hurry to protest their loyalty by returning the few wounded prisoners and such dead bodies of the French soldiers as they could collect, to the headquarters at the Hospital.
“There’s still a post very hard-pressed at the Bab Fetouh. An effort was made to relieve it this afternoon—” Paul Ravenel broke off abruptly with a sudden smile upon his face and a light of enjoyment in his eyes. “I expect that they will try now from Dar-Debibagh outside the walls. It should be easier that way,” he said hurriedly.
Something had happened that afternoon of which he had not told Marguerite, and to which he owed his high spirits. Marguerite was well aware of it. She had not a doubt that he was hiding from her some rash act of which he was at once rather ashamed and very glad; and it amused her to note how clever he thought himself in concealing it from her. What had happened in that attempt to relieve the post at the Bab Fetouh? Marguerite did not ask, having a fine gift of silence. She had Paul back safe and sound, and the worst of their dangers was over. They were gay once more that night, looking upon it as a sort of sanctuary between the dangers of the past two days and the troubles which awaited them in the future.
“Shall we go up on the roof?” Marguerite asked, looking at the clock.
“We will go halfway up to the roof,” replied Paul, and Marguerite laughed as he put out the candles.
The next day the rebellion was over. A battalion from Meknes with a section of mitrailleuses marched in at three o’clock in the afternoon, having covered the sixty-five kilometres in a single stage. An order was given that every house which wished to avoid bombardment must fly the tricolour flag on the following morning, and Fez was garnished as for a festival. Never was there so swift a change. On every housetop daybreak saw the flag of France, and though the women thronged the terraces as yesterday, they were as silent as the bricks of their parapets. By a curious chance the pall of sullen rain-charged clouds, which for four days had hung low, was on this morning rolled away, and the city shimmered to the sun.
Paul and Marguerite watched the strange spectacle, hidden behind their roof wall; and their thoughts were busy with the same question:
“What of us now—the outcasts?”
Paul looked across the city to Fez Djedid and the East. From that quarter General Moinier’s column was advancing. One day—two days perhaps—three days at the most, and it would be here at the Bab Segma. There was little time!
He turned to find Marguerite’s eyes swimming in tears.
“Paul, can nothing be done to give you back your own place?”
“Nothing, Marguerite. Let us face it frankly! I went to Headquarters and warned them. Therefore I knew the danger. All the more, therefore, my place that night was with my company. Nothing can get over that.”
Marguerite with a sob buried her face in her hands.
“What I have cost you, Paul!”
“What you have given me, Marguerite!” he replied, and fell into a silence. When he spoke to her again he spoke with his eyes averted from her face, lest she should read more than he meant her to in his.
“Of course, Marguerite, you have done no wrong. . . . We have got to consider that, my dear. There isn’t really any reason why you should pay too. You wanted to take the risk. . . .”
“The certainty, Paul, as it turned out. I should not be in the sunshine on this roof now if you had listened to me,” she interrupted; but Paul was not to be led aside.
“What I mean is that you are not responsible. I am, I alone. Therefore, there’s no reason why you should cut yourself off from all the things which make life lovely,” he continued. “For it means that, my dear. All the things which make life lovely will go.”
“Except one,” said Marguerite, quietly, “and that one outweighs all the rest.”
Still Paul would not turn to her.
“Think well, Marguerite!” and he spoke without stirring, in a level, toneless voice, so that no spark of his desire might kindle her to a sacrifice which, after days, monotonous and lonely, would lead her bitterly to regret. “Think carefully! You can travel in a little while to the coast. You can go home. No one can gainsay you. You will not be poor any more. In a few years you will be able to look back upon all this as a dream. . . .”
“Don’t, Paul!” she said, in a low voice. “You hurt me. You make me ashamed. How could I go home and live, leaving you here?”
But what hurt and shamed her most, she could not tell him. It was the knowledge that this hero of hers, this—her man who could do no wrong, had done such wrong for her that he was now an outcast who must dodge and duck his head, and slink unrecognized in the shadows. Her pain, however, was evident enough in the quiver of her voice and the tight clasp of her hand upon his arm.
“Look at me, Paul!”
She waited until he had turned, and her great eyes, dewy and tender, rested upon his.
“Where you go, I go. That was settled for us at the Villa Iris on the night we met, perhaps even before that.”
Paul argued no more. He was kneeling in front of her upon a cushion. He took her two hands, and, lifting them, he bowed his head and pressed the palms against his face.
“Then let us go down and make our plans,” he said. “For what we do, we must do very quickly.”
His urgency startled her.
“But this house is not known. We are safe here!”
Paul glanced again towards the east. He had the look of the hunted.
“There’s a man drawing nearer to us every minute who will rake through Fez with a fine-tooth comb to find out what has become of me,” he said.
“An enemy?” Marguerite asked, in dismay.
“No; my friend, Gerard de Montignac. He is on Moinier’s staff.”
“But he will remain your friend,” cried Marguerite, “even if he—”
Paul Ravenel completed the sentence for her.
“Discovers that I deserted. Not he! Perhaps, just because he was my friend, he would be harder than any other.”
Underneath the good-fellowship, the fun, the delight in the gaieties and ornaments of life, Gerard de Montignac had all the hard practical logic of the French character. Certain things are not permissible. For those who do them there is a law, and that is the end of the matter. And at the very head of the things that are not permissible is the tampering with the military oath.
“Friendship will lead Gerard to search for me in every corner,” said Paul. That was the danger. For if Gerard stumbled upon the truth in his search, the friend would turn straightway into the hunter.
Paul followed Marguerite down the stairs, and they talked earnestly for a long while. Then Paul arranged his haik about his turban, slipped his djellaba of wool over his linen caftan, and, going out, was very busy in Fez all that day.