A William Fox Production.The Winding Stair.“SO—YOU HAVE BETRAYED EVERY TRUST—WHERE IS YOUR HONOR?”
A William Fox Production.The Winding Stair.
“SO—YOU HAVE BETRAYED EVERY TRUST—WHERE IS YOUR HONOR?”
CHAPTER XX
Thelonger the silence grew, the more difficult Gerard de Montignac felt it was to break. He had entered the room, clothed upon with authority, sensible of it and prepared to demand explanations and exact retribution. But he had now a curious uneasiness. His authority seemed to be slipping from him. Opposite to him without a movement of his body and his face still as a mask, stoodle grand serieux, as half in jest, half in earnest, he used to label Paul Ravenel. He had not a doubt of his identity. Butle grand serieuxwas altogether in earnestle grand serieuxat this moment.
A quiet, tragic figure, drawn to his full height, wearing his dignity with the ease of an accustomed garment, when he should be—what? Crushed under shame, faltering excuses, cringing! Gerard de Montignac said to himself: “Why, I might be the culprit! It might be for me to offer an explanation, or to try to.” He almost wondered if he was the culprit, so complete was his discomfort, and so utterly he felt himself at a disadvantage. He whipped himself to a sneer.
“I am afraid that I am not very welcome, Si Tayeb Reha,” he said, speaking in French.
“Si Tayeb Reha! Yes! That is my name,” returned the Moor, in the Mohgrebbin dialect of Arabic.
“Alias Ben Sedira of Meknes. Alias Paul Ravenel.”
The Moor frowned in perplexity.
“Alias,” he repeated, doubtfully, “and Pôl Rav——” He gave the name up. “What are these words? If your Excellency would speak my language——”
“Your language!” Gerard interrupted, roughly. “Since when have the outcasts a language of their own?”
He flung himself into a chair. He was not going to take a part in any comedy. He continued to speak in French. “You thought you were safe enough here, no doubt. Oh, it was a clever plan, I grant you. Who would look for Paul Ravenel in the sacred city of Mulai Idris? Yet not so safe, after all, if any one knew that you had once travelled through the Zahoun in the train of Si Ahmed Driss of Ouezzan.”
He leaned forward suddenly as some prosecuting counsél in a criminal court might do, seeking to terrify a defendant into an expression or a movement of guilt. But Si Tayeb Reha was simply worried because he could not understand a word of all the scorn which was tumbling from Gerard’s mouth. The officer was angry—that was only too evident—and with him, Si Tayeb Reha! If only he could make it all out! Gerard grew more exasperated than ever.
“No, not safe at all if any one had seen you come out of these gates in the rabble to drive away a visitor to Volubilis. Baumann, eh? Do you remember Baumann of the Affaires Indigènes, Paul Ravenel?”
Si Tayeb Reha raised his hands:
“Your Excellency speaks in a tongue I do not understand.”
“You understand very well. Sanctuary, eh? If one guessed you had run to earth here—sanctuary! No one dare violate the sacred city of Mulai Idris. Once sheltered within its walls, safe to lead the dreadful squalid life you’ve chosen right to its last mean day! Your mistake, Paul Ravenel! The arm of France is stretched over all this country.”
Gerard stopped abruptly and flung himself back in his chair in disgust. He was becoming magniloquent now. In a minute he would be ridiculous, and over against him all the while stood this renegade, dwarfing him by his very silence, and the stillness of his body, putting him in the wrong—for that was it! Putting him in the wrong who was in the right.
Gerard had imagination. He was hampered now by that accursed gift of the artist. Even whilst he spoke he was standing outside himself and watching himself speak, and act, and watching with eyes hostilely critical. Thus were things well interpreted, but not thus were they well done. Thus they were made brilliantly to live again; but not thus were they so contrived as to be worthy to live again. Since by that road come hesitations and phrases that miss their mark.
He tried to sting Si Tayeb Reha into a rejoinder.
“Trenches, too! Fire-trenches on the latest plan—so that if by chance we should come and be fools enough to come without guns”—he broke off and beat upon the table with his closed fist—“you would fight France, would you, to keep your burrow secret! The insolence of it! The Zemmour indeed! Fire-trenches and traverses and the rest of it against the Zemmour.”
Si Tayeb Reha leapt upon a word familiar to his tongue.
“The Zemmour! Yes,” he cried, smiling his relief. Here was something which he could understand. “The Zemmour threatened us two, three, four weeks ago. We made ready to welcome them. But they did not come. They were very wise, the Zemmour!” and he chuckled and nodded.
Gerard found this man of smiles and cunning easier to talk with than the aloof masked figure of a minute ago.
“It was you who constructed those trenches and against us, who were once your comrades,” he said sternly.
Si Tayeb Reha was once more at a loss.
“If your Excellency will not speak my tongue, how shall I answer you?” he asked, plaintively, and Gerard did not trouble to answer.
“I ought to send you down to Meknes, for a court-martial to deal with you,” he said, reflectively. “But all strange crimes have their lures. They breed. God knows what decent-living youngster might get his imagination unwholesomely stirred and do as you have done and bring his name to disgrace! Besides—do you know who guards the gate of Mulai Idris whilst I talk to you? Who but Laguessière? Captain Laguessière.” He searched the still face for a tremor, a twitch of recognition. Si Tayeb Reha had apparently given up the attempt to understand. He stood leaning against the wall at the side of the window and looking out across the ravine to the mountainside.
“Laguessière, at whose side you charged twisting your staff—do you remember?—back over the bridge by the lime-kilns in Fez two years ago.”
The light fell full upon the face of the man at the window. It seemed to Gerard de Montignac impossible that any man, even thegrand serieux, who had so often carried his life in his hands through the solitary places, could have learnt so to school his features and keep all meaning from his eyes.
“Yes, that charge counts for you, and something else which shouldn’t count at all. You and I were at St. Cyr together.”
Indeed, that counted most of all. The sense of an old comradeship broken, the traditions of a great college violated, these had been the true cause of Gerard de Montignac’s discomfort. The years were beginning to build the high barriers about Gerard, shutting off great tracts of which he had once had glimpses to make the heart leap, taking the bright colour from his visions. A treasure-house of good memories was something nowadays to value, and here was one of the good memories, almost the most vivid of them all, destroyed. He rose from his chair, and as he rose, a curtain moved which covered an archway, moved and ever so slightly parted. It was just behind Si Tayeb Reha’s shoulder, and a little to his right at the side of the room; so that he did not notice the movement. Gerard de Montignac could look through the narrow opening. He had a glimpse of a woman with her face veiled, an orange scarf about her head, a broad belt of gold brocade about her white robe. Somehow the sight of her helped him, though he saw her but for a second, before the curtains closed again. It spurred him to that statement which from the outset he had been working to.
“So that’s it!” he cried. “A woman, eh? Two years since she took your fancy! She must be getting on now, mustn’t she? What’s her age? Seventeen? And for that, honour, career, a decent life, all, into the dustbin!”
He drew his heavy revolver from the pouch at his belt and laid it on the table.
“It is loaded,” he said. “You have just the time until my sergeant notices that I have left my revolver behind in this house. If I come back, and—no shot has been fired—then it is Meknes with all its shame and the same end.”
Nothing surprised Gerard de Montignac more than the coolness with which Si Tayeb Reha, as his old comrade called himself, received his sentence of death. He advanced to the table where the revolver lay and took the weapon up with a smile of curiosity and admiration.
“We make no such weapons as these,” he said in Arabic, examining the pistol with all a Moor’s fascination for mechanical instruments. “That, your Excellency, is why we are never a match for you and we must open our gates at your summons.”
He had never said one word except in Arabic during the whole of that interview, just as Gerard had stubbornly refused to speak anything but French. Gerard watched him toying with the weapon for a second and then turned rapidly away. He could not but admire his old friend’s courage; he could not but think: “What a waste of a good man!” He went out of the room without another word or another look. He was sick at heart. He no longer cared whether he had been peevish or argumentative or what kind of figure he had cut. One of the glamorous things in his life, his belief in thegrand serieux, had been taken from him.
He mounted his horse and rode away, wishing for that shot to explode as quickly as possible, so that he might bury the dreadful episode out of sight and forget it altogether.
But though he listened with both his ears and though he walked his horse as slowly as he could, he heard nothing. He saw his sergeant suddenly look at his belt. It was coming, then, without a doubt. The next moment the sergeant was at his side and looking up into his face.
“My commandant, you have left your revolver behind in that house.”
Gerard de Montignac took all the time that he could. He stared at the sergeant and made him repeat his statement as though he had been lost in thought and had never heard it at all. Then he looked down at the holster and fingered it as if he were trying to recollect where in the world he had taken the revolver out.
“Why, that’s true,” he said, at last. He wheeled his horse around and rode back very dispiritedly with his chin sunk upon his breast. “It is to be Meknes after all, then, and all the public shame,” the sergeant heard him mutter; and then a pistol cracked sharp and clear, and Gerard raised his face. It was lit with a great relief.
They were only ten paces from the house. Gerard dismounted and gave the reins to the sergeant.
“Wait for me here! Keep the door clear!” he ordered. He had left the door of the house open when he rode away. It was open still. Gerard ran up the stairs and burst into the room. There was a smell of gunpowder in the air, and the Moorish woman with the orange scarf and the white robe and the deep gold waistband was standing with her hands pressed over her face.
But there was no sign of Si Tayeb Reha anywhere. They had tried to trick him, then! They imagined that he would accept the evidence of the pistol-shot and continue on his way! They took him for no better than a child, it seemed. No, that would not do!
“Where is he?” he asked, angrily, of the girl, and now he, too, spoke in Arabic.
She pointed a trembling hand towards the window; and Gerard saw that the rail of the balustrade of the balcony was broken and that the revolver lay upon the boards. Gerard stepped out from the window and looked down.
The balcony had been built out from the sheer wall; it was a rough thing of boards, supported upon iron stanchions, and jutting out above the deep chasm at the edge of the town. Gerard could see between the boards deep down a precipice of rocks to a tiny white thread of stream and clumps of bushes. He drew close to the broken rail and leaned cautiously over. Caught upon some outcropping rocks, a little way below the wall, hung the body of Si Tayeb Reha. He was lying face downwards, his arms outspread. The story of what had happened was written there for him to read.
Paul Ravenel had shot himself on the balcony, the revolver had fallen from his hand, his body had crashed through the flimsy rail and toppled down until it had been caught on the rocks below. Yes, no doubt! The mere fall from that height, even if Ravenel had been unhurt, would have been enough. Yet—yet—there had been a long delay before the shot was fired. Gerard looked keenly and swiftly about the room. No, there was no sign of a rope.
He looked at the girl. She was now crouched down upon her knees, her face hidden between her hands, her body rocking, whilst a wail like a chant, shrill of key but faint, made a measure for her rocking. She was like an animal in pain—that was all, and for her Paul had thrown a great name to the winds! What a piece of irony that she, with hardly more brain and soul than a favourite dog, should have cost France so much!
Gerard stooped and picked up his revolver. He broke the breech, ejected the one exploded cartridge, and closed the breech again with a snap. He leaned forward again to take a last look at that poor rag of flesh and bone, hung there for the vultures to feed upon, which once had been his friend—and he was aware of a subtle change in the woman behind him within the room. Oh, very slight, and for so small a space of time! But just for an imperceptible moment her wail had faltered, the rocking of her body had been stayed. She had been watching him between those fingers with the henna-dyed nails which were so tightly pressed over her face.
He looked at her closely without moving from his position. It was all going correctly on again—the lament, the swaying, the proper conventional expression of the abandonment of grief. Yet she had been watching him, and for a moment she had been startled and afraid. Of what? And the truth flashed upon him. He had been fingering his revolver. She was afraid of thecoup de grâce.
Then they were tricking him between them—she with her wailing, he spread out on the bulge of rock below. They should see! He stretched out his arm downwards, the revolver pointed in his hand. And out of the tail of his eye he saw the woman cease from her exhibition and rise to her feet. As he took his aim she unwound the veil from before her face. He could not but look at her; and having looked, he could not take his eyes from her face. He stumbled into the room. “Marguerite Lambert!” he said, in a voice of wonder! “Yes, Marguerite Lambert!”
CHAPTER XXI
Gerardde Montignac had never been so thoroughly startled and surprised in his life. But he was angrily conscious of an emotion far keener than his surprise. He was jealous. Jealousy overmastered the shock of wonder, stabbed him through and left him aching. Marguerite Lambert, the girl of the Villa Iris, so politely difficult! And Paul Ravenel, the man without passion! Why, his brother officers used to laugh at him openly—nay, almost sneered at him and made a butt of him—because of his coldness; and he, indifferent to their laughter, had just laughed back and gone his way. Well, he could afford to, it seemed, since he was here, and for two years had been here, hidden quite away from the world with Marguerite Lambert.
They had stolen a march upon their friends, the pair of them, they had tricked them—yes, that was the exact right word—tricked them, even as they had just tried to trick him, she with her Oriental abandonment to grief—little “animal,” as he had called her in his thoughts—he stretched out on a knob of rock above a precipice in a pose of death! Gerard was in an ugly mood, and he spoke out his thought in a blaze of scorn.
“I asked you the last time I saw you to give me two days of your life, my only two days. I asked no more. Yet you were insulted. You could give two years to another, but two days to me? Oh, dear, no! You wished never to speak to me again.”
“I would give two days to no man,” Marguerite replied, gently, “though I would give my whole life to one man.”
“Even though he deserted?” Gerard asked, with a sneer.
“Paul had not deserted when I gave myself to him,” she answered, quietly. “When he did, it was to save me!”
Gerard did not want to hear anything about that. Some conjecture that the truth of this catastrophe was to be discovered there, had been at the back of his mind ever since he had recognised Marguerite. But he intended not to listen to it, not to let it speak at all. Somehow, her use of Paul’s name angered him extremely. It dropped from her lips with so usual and homely a sound.
“No doubt it was to save you. It would be!” he said, sardonically. “Some decent excuse would be needed even between you two when you sat together alone through the long dark evenings.”
Gerard meant to hurt, but Marguerite wore an armour against him and his arrows were much too blunt to pierce it. She had a purpose of her own to serve, of which Gerard de Montignac knew nothing; she was clutching at a desperate chance—if, indeed, so frail a thing could be called a chance—not of merely saving her lover’s life, but of so much more that she hardly dared to think upon it. Her only weapon now and for a long heart-breaking time to come, was patience.
“You are unjust,” she said, without any anger, and without any appeal that he should reconsider his words. Gerard suddenly remembered the last words that the black-bearded Basha had spoken as he climbed onto his mule.
“We are all in God’s hand.”
Marguerite had spoken just in his tone. Argument and prayer were of no value now. It was all written, all fated. What would be, would be. Either Gerard de Montignac would drop that revolver from his hand and her desperate chance become a little less frail than before, or he would not.
“What was it that woman in the spangled skirt used to say of you?” Gerard asked, with a seeming irrelevance.
“Henriette?”
“Yes, Henriette. You had a look of fate. Yes! She was right, too. It was that look which set you apart, more than your beauty. Indeed, you weren’t beautiful then, Marguerite.”
He was gazing at her moodily. The sharp anger had become a sullenness. Marguerite had grown into beauty since those days, but it was not the roseleaf beauty born of days without anxiety and nights without unrest. It was the beauty of one who is haunted by the ghosts of dead dreams and who wakes in the dark hours to weep very silently lest some one overhear. Destined for greater sorrows or perhaps greater joys than fall to the common lot! That was what Henriette had meant! And looking at Marguerite, Gerard, with a little ungenerous throb of pleasure, perceived that at all events the greater joys, if ever they had fallen to her, had faded away long since.
“These have been unhappy years for you, Marguerite,” he said.
“For both of us,” she answered. “How could they have been anything else? Paul had lost everything for which he had striven, whilst I knew that it was I who had caused his loss.”
“But he didn’t lose you.”
“He didn’t have to strive for me,” Marguerite returned, with just the hint of a smile and more than a hint of pride. “I was his from his first call—no, even before he called.”
Gerard could not but remember the first meeting of this tragic couple in the Villa Iris. Paul Ravenel had stood behind Marguerite’s chair, and without a word, without even turning her head to see who it was that stood behind her, she had risen from the midst of the Dagoes and Levantines, as at an order given. She had fallen into step at his side, and no word had as yet passed between them. Gerard de Montignac recollected that, even then, a little pang of jealousy had stabbed him and sharply enough to send him straight out of the cabaret.
“Yes . . . yes,” he said, slowly. “I had never spoken to you then, had I? It wasn’t until afterwards . . .” He was thinking and drawing some queer sort of balm from the thought, that Marguerite had not so much flatly refused him his two days as set her heart on Paul Ravenel before she had met him. If it had been he, for instance, who had stood behind Marguerite’s chair and silently called her! But, then, he hadn’t. He had gone away and left the field clear for Paul Ravenel. Other memories came back to him to assuage his wrath.
“After all, it was I who brought you and Ravenel together,” he said. “For it was I who persuaded him to come with me on that first night to the Villa Iris.”
“Yes!” Marguerite drew in her breath sharply. “He told me that he almost didn’t come.”
It would have been better if he had not come, if he had stayed quietly in his house and gone on with his report. So her judgment told her. But she could never imagine those moments during which Paul had stood in doubt, without picturing them so vividly that she had a quiver of fear lest he should decide not to come.
“It was I, too, who sent Paul Ravenel to you at the end,” Gerard de Montignac continued; and as Marguerite drew her brows together in a wrinkle of perplexity, “Yes,” he assured her. “The night after you didn’t want to speak to me any more, I went back to the Villa Iris to find you. Did you know that? Yes, I was leaving the next morning with the advance guard for Fez. I didn’t know what might happen on the march. I wanted to make friends with you again, so that if anything did happen to me, you wouldn’t have any bitter memories of me.”
“That was a kind thought,” said Marguerite.
“Kind to myself,” returned Gerard, with, for the first time in this interview, the ghost of a smile. Yet to Marguerite it was as the glimmer of dawn upon a black night of sickness and pain. There was a hope, then, that the revolver would be returned to its holster with its remaining five cartridges still undischarged. Gerard’s own memories were at work with him, memories of a kindlier self, with enthusiasms and generous thoughts; and they must be left to do their work. There was little that she could say or do—and that little not until his mood had changed.
“I didn’t find you,” Gerard resumed. “You had gone. Henriette told me how you had gone and why. Yes, the whole horrible story of that old harridan and the Greek! And you had dropped your bundle and disappeared. And Henriette feared for you. I was leaving at six in the morning; I was helpless. I went on to Paul Ravenel and told him that he must find you before any harm came to you. And he did, of course. That’s clear. So I had my share in all this dreadful business. Yes . . . yes, I hadn’t realised it.”
He sat down on a chair by the table and stared at its surface with his forehead puckered. But he still held the butt of his revolver in his hand. If only he would lay it down just for a moment! Marguerite had a queer conviction that he would never take it up again to use outside the window, once he let go of it. But he did not let go. His fingers, indeed, tightened upon the handle, and he cried: “I don’t know what to do.” Neither did Marguerite. She could let Gerard de Montignac remain in his error, or she could dispel it. She was greatly tempted not to interfere. It was a small matter, anyway. Only, small matters count so much in great issues. Let the scales tremble, the merest splinter will make one of them touch ground. Marguerite trusted to some instinct which she could not afterwards explain.
“Perhaps I am unwise,” she said. The note of hesitation, for the first time audible, drew Gerard’s eyes to her troubled face. “But I don’t know . . . The truth is you had no real share in our”—she paused for a word which would neither blame nor excuse—“in our disaster. The night I was turned out, Paul was waiting for me in the garden. I didn’t expect him. I was in despair. I dropped my bundle; and he rose up out of the darkness in front of me. I loved him. It was the wonderful thing come true. He took me away to a house which he had got ready——”
“A house near to his on the sea-wall?” suddenly exclaimed Gerard.
“Yes.”
“That’s true, then. I saw his agent and him coming out of it. I think that I told Henriette, never dreaming that the house was meant for you, that you were already in it when I told Henriette.” He looked at Marguerite suddenly with eyes of pity. “You two poor children!” he exclaimed, softly, and after a few moments he added with a whimsical smile, “I told Paul that he would break his leg when we, the less serious ones, only barked our shins. It is a bad thing not to walk in the crowd, Marguerite.”
He watched her for a little while like a man in doubt. Then he reached his arm out and tapped with the muzzle of his revolver—for he still held it in his hand—on the part of the table opposite to him.
“You must sit down and tell me exactly what happened.”
Marguerite obeyed. She told Gerard of her journey up from the coast to Fez when Paul was sure that the road was safe, and how she came to the little palace with the door upon the roofed alley which Paul had got ready for her. Gerard, who had thought to listen to her story without question or comment, could not restrain an exclamation.
“You were in Fez, then, all that year!” he said, wondering. “In the house of Si Ahmed Driss! I never dreamt of it. Even when I discovered it and searched it, that never occurred to me. When I saw you both here, I imagined that Paul had slipped away at a bad moment for France, without a thought of his duty, to join you at Mulai Idris in accordance with a plan.”
Marguerite shook her head.
“No. I was in the house at Fez. Later, on that night of the sixteenth, he knew that the massacres were certain. He went to headquarters with the information. If they had listened to him then, he would never have deserted at all. But they wouldn’t listen, and he had to choose.”
She described how on the next day the fanatics had rushed in searching for a French officer who had been seen once or twice to visit there.
“It was not before that night, then, the night he came to the headquarters, that he was sure?” Gerard interrupted, quickly.
“No.”
“They would have come to seek him in the house, even if he had ridden straight back from the Hospital Auvert to Dar-Debibagh.”
“Yes.”
“Then he did save your life by deserting,” said Gerard. And, on the other hand, he asked himself was there any duty not discharged because Paul did desert? Was there any mistake made because the little Praslin led Paul Ravenel’s company along the river bed instead of Paul himself?
“My God, but it’s difficult!” cried Gerard. “Complexities upon complexities! How shall one judge—unless”—and he caught with relief at his good rules and standards—“yes, unless one walks in the crowd. It’s the only way to walk. Thou shalt do this! Thou shalt not do that! All clear and ordered and written in the book.”
Gerard had gibed enough in his day at those innumerable soldiers who answered every problem of regulations and manœuvres immediately with a complacent “It’s so laid down,” or “It’s not so laid down in the book.” He was glad to get back in the windings of this case to the broad highway of “the book.” The book told him how to deal with Paul Ravenel. Well, then!— Yet—yet——!
Marguerite watched his face cloud over, and hurriedly continued her story, or rather began to continue it. For at her first words as to how Paul had out-witted the invaders of the house in Fez Gerard interrupted her with a cry.
“The uniform tunic, eh, Marguerite? The tunic all hacked and battered with blood?” He uttered a little wholesome laugh of appreciation. “And all prepared in readiness the night before. Yes, I recognise Paul there.”
This was the third time that Gerard de Montignac had spoken of “Paul” without any “Ravenel” added to it to show that he and Paul were strangers. Marguerite, you may be sure, had counted each one of them with a little leap of the heart. “And the blood!” he went on. “I think I know whence that came. His arm, eh? Wasn’t it so?”
Marguerite had determined to use no tricks with him, but she could not resist one now, the oldest and simplest and the never-failing. She looked at Gerard with awe and admiration—so sharp he was and penetrating.
“Yes. Oh, but how did you know? It’s rather wonderful.”
“When he was standing against the window there, the sleeve of his djellaba fell back. There was a scar like a white seam on his forearm.”
“Yes.”
Marguerite breathed her wonder at this prodigy of insight, and, like a good artist, having made her point, she did not labour it. She related with what reluctance Paul had afterwards told her the thing which he had done.
“I knew nothing of it before. I thought that he was on leave. I should have killed myself whilst there was yet time for him to return to the camp if I had known. Even when I did know, I hoped that he could make some excuse, and I tried to kill myself. But he had, of course, foreseen that, and prepared against it.”
Gerard nodded.
“How?”
“He had taken my little pistol secretly from the drawer where I kept it. He did not give it me back again until I promised that I would not use it unless the Moors were on the stair.”
Gerard de Montignac started suddenly and pushed his chair sharply back. Some quite new consideration had flashed into his mind. He looked at Marguerite with a sentence upon his lips. But he did not speak it. He turned away and took a turn across the room towards the window and back again, whilst Marguerite waited with her heart in her mouth.
“What am I to do?” he asked; and to Marguerite the fact of his actually addressing the question to her made the interview more of a nightmare than ever. He was standing close to her (breaking the breech of his revolver and snapping it to again, and almost unaware of who she was, and quite unaware that with each click and snap of the mechanism she could have screamed aloud). “What am I to do, Marguerite?”
Marguerite mastered her failing nerves.
“Those trenches outside Mulai Idris,” she said. “They were dug to resist the Zemmour. The people here might have used them against you but for Paul. He warned the Basha that he couldn’t win, that he would find you just and fair and careful of all his rights. Do you believe that?”
Gerard reflected.
“Yes, I do,” he said, slowly. “After all, he charged with Laguessière when Laguessière was put to it.”
“Charged with Laguessière?” repeated Marguerite.
“Yes—in Fez—one afternoon during the revolt. He had a great staff and used it—used it well. So much of the old creed remained with him, at all events.”
Yes, thought Marguerite, there had been an afternoon when Paul had been on edge and she had sent him out. He had come back, appeased, and a new man. The riddle of that change was now explained to her. But she had no leisure to dwell upon the explanation. Gerard had swung away again from her, and was now standing close to the window looking out across the chasm to the dark blue of the hill in the shadow opposite. One little step would carry him on to the balcony, and the butt of his revolver was still in his hand.
“Listen to me, Marguerite,” he said, in a low voice; and suddenly he became, to her thought, more dangerous in his calm than he had been in his anger. “Here’s a law broken by you and Paul, and see what misery has come of it! What loss! Shall I repair that law by breaking another? Hardly! Look at me, Marguerite!”
But he did not look at her. He even advanced a foot beyond the window-ledge so that the boards of the balcony creaked and groaned beneath its pressure.
“I could have lived in Paris with Deauville for the summer and Monte Carlo for the winter, and my own lands for the autumn—a pleasant, good life. I could have lived with women about me—the fine flower of them, the women who are exquisite and delicate. But I didn’t. I left the enjoyments to the others. I came out into these hot countries, the countries of squalor, to serve France. And I have served; yes, by God, I have served! That has been my creed. Shall I let another spit on it, even though he was my greatest friend? Not I!”
Marguerite gave all up for lost. The one chance at the eleventh hour was not to be tried out by Paul and her. Well—she was very tired. She closed her eyes that she might not see anything of what happened at the window—anything more in the world. If ever she had worn the look of one set apart by fate, as so many had declared, she wore it now, stamped upon the submission of her face. Her hands went to her girdle and felt within its folds; and that action saved her lover and herself. For Gerard de Montignac saw it as he was stepping out onto the boards of the balcony.
“Wait!” he cried, in a sharp, loud voice; and in a moment he was standing in front of her with a look of horror in his eyes. “The little pistol, which Paul took away from you and gave you back only on your promise—where is it?”
Marguerite neither moved nor answered him.
“It is there,” he cried, pointing to where her hand rested within her belt. It was that bedrabbled woman in the spangled skirt who had prophesied it. Henriette, yes, Henriette! It was strange over how many years that poor waif’s words had reached and with what effect. “No!” he cried. “You must go your ways. I’ll not have that upon my soul the day I die,” and he turned from her and rushed from the room, and in a few moments Marguerite heard the sound of a horse galloping away down the cobbled street as though its rider had no thought for his neck.
Gerard de Montignac talked for many hours the next day with the Basha in the house at the city’s top. But neither he nor the Basha spoke once of Si Tayeb Reha. They came to a good understanding, and Gerard rode back to his camp, his work in Mulai Idris done. He sat in his camp chair outside his tent that night watching the few lights upon the hillside go out one after the other and Mulai Idris glimmer, unsubstantial, as the silver city of a dream.
Gerard had carried off a small sort of triumph which would mean many good marks in the books of his great commander. But he was only thinking to-night of the two outcasts in the house on the city wall. Whither would they seek a refuge now that the gates of Mulai Idris were to stand open to the world? And was it worth their while? Marguerite’s haunted face and Paul Ravenel burrowing deeper and deeper into obscurity! Gerard turned to Laguessière, who was smoking at his side.
“Walk in the crowd, my friend! It is always less dangerous to walk in the crowd. Well, let us turn in, for we start early to-morrow.”
In the morning the tents were gone and Gerard’s column was continuing its march through the Zarhoun.
CHAPTER XXII
Whathad happened between the moment when Gerard de Montignac rode away from the door of Si Tayeb Reha’s house the first time and the moment when the pistol-shot rang out? It had all been Marguerite Lambert’s idea—a despairing clutch at some faint and far-off possibility, hardly a hope, yet worth putting to the proof. She had heard every word which Gerard had spoken. She had seen the revolver laid upon the table. She had seen even more than that. For when Gerard had gone from the room, Paul had taken the revolver at once in his hands. It would be a very little while before the sergeant noticed that Gerard’s revolver was missing from its pouch. He had not even time to write more than one “good-bye” to Marguerite. There were good friends who would look after her—the Basha himself, Selim his own servant.
The road to the coast passed across the plain below the city, and there was a letter for her long since written with his instructions, on the top of his desk. He paused after he had written his one word to make sure that he had forgotten nothing. The addresses of his agents and his lawyers were written in the letter and all that he had, his property in the English funds, his houses in Fez and Casablanca, was bequeathed to her in a will of which Mr. Ferguson had charge. No, nothing had been forgotten—except that Marguerite herself was watching him from behind the curtains. She came into the room.
Paul handed to her the paper with the one word “good-bye” written upon it.
“Marguerite, Gerard de Montignac has been here.”
“I know. I heard.”
“Then you understand, my dear. This is the end for me.”
“For both of us, then, Paul.”
He began to argue and stopped. The futility of his words was too evident. She would follow him, whatever he might say. He began to thank her for the great love she had lavished on him and he stopped again. “I could never tell you what you have meant to me,” he said, helplessly. “But if it was all to do again, I should do as I did. For nothing in the world would I have left you alone through those days in the house of Si Ahmed Driss. Only, it is a pity that it must all end like this.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her and put her from him. “Will you leave me now, my dear? At any moment the knock may come upon the door.”
It was then that Marguerite’s inspiration came to her. She besought him to hold his hand. She fetched a rope and an axe. Often she had noticed from the window that ledge of rock breaking the precipice below. Paul was inclined to revolt against the trick which she was asking him to play. It was not likely to succeed with Gerard de Montignac. It would only add one more touch of indignity to their deaths. But Marguerite was urgent.
“I’m not thinking of just saving our lives, Paul, so that we may fly and hide ourselves again in some still darker corner for a little while,” she said, eagerly. “I’ll tell you of my hope, my plan, afterwards. Now we must hurry.”
Paul doubled the rope over one of the iron stanchions of the balcony close to the wall, whilst Marguerite locked the door. He climbed over the rail, and, taking a turn of the doubled rope round the upper part of his right arm and another turn round his right thigh, he let himself down until he hung below the balcony. He kept his arms squared and his hands below the level of his chin, and placing the flat of his feet against the wall of the house, he was able, by slackening the coils round arm and thigh, to descend without effort to the ledge of rock, where he lay huddled in a counterfeit of death.
“Don’t move until you hear my voice calling to you,” she whispered. Then she drew up the rope and broke down the rail of the balcony with some blows of the axe, and, unlocking the door, hid away both axe and rope in another room. She came back swiftly, and then, taking up the heavy revolver, fired it out of the window and let it fall upon the boards of the balcony. She dropped to her knees, and thus Gerard de Montignac found her.
All through that scene, whilst life and death were in the balance for these two, Paul Ravenel lay motionless upon the ledge of rock below the city wall. He dared not look up; he heard Gerard’s voice raised in anger and scorn; he expected the shock of the bullet tearing through his heart. But the voice diminished to a murmur. Gerard had gone back into the room. Some debate was in progress, and while it was in progress, from this and that far quarter of the sky the vultures gathered and wheeled above the precipice. . . .
After a while he heard Marguerite’s voice, and, looking up, saw that she was letting down the rope to him. She had tied knots in it at intervals to help him in his ascent, and he clambered up to her side.
“Gerard has gone?” he asked.
“Yes. He will not come here again.”
“Then he believed you?”
“No. He left us in pity to live our lives out as best we could,” said Marguerite.
Paul nodded his head.
“Others will be coming and going now,” he said. “This city will become a show-place, very likely. We can’t remain in Mulai Idris because of those others.”
“And we can’t remain anywhere else because of ourselves,” said Marguerite, quietly.
Paul was not startled by the words. They were no more than the echo of words which he had been trying during this last half hour not to speak to himself. They had built up with elaborate care a great pretence of contentment, watching themselves so that there might be no betrayal of the truth, watching each other so that if the truth did at some unendurable moment flash out, no heed should be taken of it; and hoping even without any conviction that one day the contentment would grow real. But all that patient edifice of pretence was a crumble of dust now. The outer world in the person of Gerard de Montignac in his uniform had rushed in, with his hard logic, its scorn for duty abandoned, its emblems of duty fulfilled; and there was no more any peace for Paul Ravenel and Marguerite Lambert. To live for thirty or forty years more as they had been living! It was in both their thoughts that it would have been better for Gerard de Montignac to have done straightway what he threatened, and for Marguerite to have followed her lover as she had determined.
Paul sat down at the table with his eyes upon Marguerite. She had some hope, some plan. So much she had said. Was it, he wondered, the plan of which he from time to time had dreamed, but for her sake had never dared to speak? He waited.
“You are a man, Paul,” she began, “oh, generous as men should not be, but a man. And you sit here idle. A great personage in Mulai Idris, no doubt. The power behind the throne—the Basha’s throne!” The hard words were spoken with a loving gentleness which drew their sting. “A man must have endeavour—I don’t say success—but endeavour of a kind, if only in games. Otherwise what? He becomes a thing in carpet slippers, old before his youth is spent, and this you would dwindle, too, for me! No, my dear!”
Paul made no gesture and uttered no word. She was to speak her thought out.
“You laugh and joke with these people here. For five minutes at a time no doubt you can forget,” she continued. “But you can never exchange thoughts with your equals, you can never talk over old dreams you have had in common, old, hard, and tough experiences which you have shared. And these things, Paul, are all necessary for a man.”
Again Paul Ravenel neither denied nor agreed. He left to her the right of way.
“And in spite of all you still love me!” she cried, in a sudden fervour, clasping her hands together upon her breast. “Me whom you should hate. I clutch the wonder of that to my heart. I must keep your love.”
Paul Ravenel smiled.
“There’s no danger of your losing it, Marguerite.”
Marguerite shook her head.
“But there is—oh, not at once! But I am warned, Paul. There’s the light showing on the reef. I keep my course at more than my peril.”
Paul went back upon his words and his looks. What could he have said, he who so watched himself?
“And this warning?” he asked, with a smile, making light of it.
“We dare not quarrel,” she answered, slowly. “That human natural thing is barred from us. The sharp words flashing out, the shrug of impatience, the few tears perhaps from me, the silent hour of sulkiness in you, the making-up, the tenderness and remorse—these things are for other lovers, Paul, never, my dear, for you and me. We daren’t quarrel. We must watch ourselves night and day lest we do! For if we did, the unforgivable word might be spoken. I might fling my debt to you in your face. I might be reminded of it, anyway. No, we must live in a constraint. Other lovers can quarrel and love no less. Not you and I—a man who has given his honour and career, and a woman who has taken them!”
The argument silenced Paul Ravenel, for there was no disputing it. How daintily the pair of them had minced amongst words! With what terror of a catastrophe if the tongue slipped!
“So . . . ?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Marguerite, with a nod. “So! So, Paul, let us stake all on one splendid throw! Go down if we must, but if we do, in a fine endeavour, and perhaps, after all, win out to the open street!”
She spoke with a ring in her voice which Paul had not heard for a long while.
“How?” he asked, and the light leaped in his eyes. So much hung upon the answer.
“The French are recruiting Moorish soldiers——” and she got no further, for Paul sprang up from his chair, his face one flame of hope.
“Marguerite!” he cried, in a thrilling voice, and then sank down again with his face buried in his arms. “Marguerite!” he whispered, and the tenderness and gratitude with which the utterance of her name was winged, she caught into her memories and treasured there against the solitude which was to come.
She moved round the table and laid her hand upon his bowed head and let it slip and rest upon his heaving shoulder.
“So the thought has been in your mind too, Paul?” she said, with a smile.
“Yes.”
“And for a long time?”
“Yes.”
“And you would not speak it. No! I must find that way out for myself,” she said, gently chiding him, “lest you should seem to wish at all costs to be rid of me.” She walked away from his side and drew a chair up to the table opposite to him.
“Let us be practical,” she said, very wisely, though her eyes danced. “It would be possible for you to enlist without being recognised?”
Paul lifted his head and nodded:
“Over in the south by Marrakesch.”
“And you could continue to escape recognition.”
“I think so. Even if I were recognised, very likely those who recognised me would say nothing. I remember a case once . . .”
“Here?” cried Marguerite. “There was a case, then—an example to follow—and even so you would not tell me.”
“I didn’t mean I know of a case here. I was thinking of another country. India. If that man could, I could, for I am even better equipped than he was.”
Paul Ravenel could say that with confidence. He knew more of the Moors, had more constantly lived their life and spoken their dialects than Colonel Vanderfelt had known of the Pathans upon the frontier of India. The example of Colonel Vanderfelt had been long in Paul Ravenel’s thoughts. How often had he watched with an envy not to be described, both when he waked and when he slept, that limping figure, with the medals shining upon his breast, walk down the dark city street from the brilliant lights of the Guildhall!
How often had this room in the remote hill town of Mulai Idris been suddenly filled with the fragrance of a Sussex garden, whilst he himself looked out not upon the hillside of Zahoun but upon a dim and dewy lawn where roses clustered! He had done the bad thing which his father did, and, like his father, lost his place in the world. Could he now win back that place by the expiation of his father’s friend? Was it not of excellent omen that the solution which he had remembered, Marguerite had herself devised? But she must weigh everything.
“It may be long before opportunity comes,” he warned her. “Such opportunity as will restore to me my name. It may never come at all. Or death may come with it.”
Marguerite looked round the room and out of the window to the barren hill.
“Is not this death, Paul?” she answered, simply, and he was answered.
“You must make me a promise, too, before I go, Marguerite,” he continued. “More than once you’ve said you couldn’t go on living if . . .”
Marguerite interrupted him.
“I promise.”
“Then I’ll go.”
A great load was lifted from both of them. They set straightway about their preparations. Marguerite was to set out first with Selim and her women. The road over the Red Hill to Tangier was no longer safe at all, since it passed through a portion of the Spanish zone. But five days of easy travel would take her to Casablanca, through a country now peaceful as a road in France. She would go to Marseilles, she said, and wait there for news of Paul. They passed that evening with a lightness of spirit which neither of them had known since they had laughed and loved in the house of Si Ahmed Driss before the massacres of Fez.
“There is one thing which troubles me,” said Paul, catching her in his arms and speaking with a great tenderness. “Long ago in Fez you once told me of a girl who, when her husband died, dressed herself in her wedding gown——”
“Hush!” said Marguerite, and laid her hand upon his lips.
“You remember, then?” said Paul. He took her hand gently away, and Marguerite bent her head down and nodded. “ ‘I couldn’t do that, my dear,’ you said. I have never forgotten it, Marguerite. I should have dearly loved, if before we parted—that had been possible.”
Marguerite raised her face. There were tears in her eyes, but her lips were smiling, and there was a smile, too, in her eyes behind the tears.