*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 60125 ***
[Cover Illustration]
[Illustration: _A William Fox Production._ _The Winding Stair._ “NO
MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, I’LL ALWAYS LOVE YOU.”]
=THE=
=WINDING STAIR=
=BY=
=A. E. W. MASON=
=AUTHOR OF=
=THE FOUR FEATHERS, Etc.=
=“_All rising to great place is by_=
=_a winding stair._”—Bacon.=
=N E W Y O R K=
=G R O S S E T & D U N L A P=
=P U B L I S H E R S=
Made in the United States of America
=COPYRIGHT, 1923,=
=BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY=
=THE WINDING STAIR.=
=———=
=PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA=
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Flags and Pedigree. . . . . 9
II The Man with the Medals. . . 23
III At King’s Corner. . . . . 31
IV Betwixt and Between. . . . 44
V The Villa Iris. . . . . . 49
VI The Order. . . . . . . 62
VII The Pilgrimage. . . . . . 74
VIII Henriette Explains. . . . . 85
IX Marguerite Lambert. . . . . 98
X Colonel Vanderfelt’s Letter. . 114
XI A Dilemma. . . . . . . 119
XII The Little Door in the Angle. . 136
XIII The Companions of the Night. . 143
XIV The Tunic. . . . . . . 160
XV On the Roof Top. . . . . 173
XVI Marguerite’s Way Out. . . . 185
XVII The Outcasts. . . . . . 196
XVIII Captain Laguessière’s Report. . 212
XIX In the Sacred City. . . . . 227
XX The Coup de Grâce. . . . . 239
XXI Two Outcasts. . . . . . 248
XXII The Splendid Throw. . . . . 261
XXIII The Necessary Man. . . . . 272
THE WINDING STAIR
CHAPTER I
Flags and Pedigree
“I have finished work for the week. I’ll see no one else were he as
terse as Tacitus,” cried Mr. Ferguson, the lawyer.
It was six o’clock on a Friday afternoon and a pleasant rustle of the
plane trees in the square came through the open window of the office.
Mr. Ferguson thought of his cool garden at Goring, with the river
running past, and of the fine long day he would have upon the links
to-morrow. Gregory, the head clerk, however, held his ground.
“Perhaps if you would look at this card, Mr. Ferguson.”
Mr. Ferguson looked at the size of it.
“By the Lord, no! It’s a woman. She’ll be as prolix as the devil.”
“It’s not a woman,” the stubborn Gregory insisted.
“Then it’s a foreigner, and that’s worse.”
“It’s not even a real foreigner,” said Gregory. He had been a servant of
the firm for thirty years, and knew the ins and outs of its affairs as
thoroughly as the principals.
“You are very annoying, Gregory,” said Mr. Ferguson, with a sigh. He
took the card regretfully, but when he had read the name printed upon
it, he dropped it upon his table as if it had stung his hand.
“Paul Ravenel!” he said in a low voice, with a glance towards the door.
“The son.”
“Yes.”
“Is he like the father?”
“Not in the least.”
Mr. Ferguson was distressed. It was nine years since he had finished
with that affair, settled it up, locked it away and turned his back on
it for good—as he thought. And here was the son knocking on his door.
“I must see him, I suppose. I can do no less,” he said, but as Gregory
turned towards the door he stopped him. “Why should Paul Ravenel come to
see me?” he asked himself. “And how much does he know? Wait a moment,
Gregory. I have got to go warily here.”
He sat down at his desk. Mr. Ferguson was a man, of middle age, with a
round, genial face and a thick covering of silver-white hair. He looked
like a prosperous country gentleman, which he was, and he had the
reputation of the astutest criminal lawyer of his day. He was that, too.
His kindly manner concealed him, yet he was not false. For he was at
once the best of friends, with his vast experience of the law as a sort
of zareeba for their refuge, and the most patient and relentless of
antagonists; and he had a special kindliness which showed itself
conspicuously in his accounts, for all connected with the arts. It was
an old friendship which was troubling him now as he sat at his desk.
Paul Ravenel, according to his knowledge, would take this or that line
in the interview, Mr. Ferguson must be clear as to how in each case he
should answer. Problems were his daily food—at least until six o’clock
on Friday evening. Yet this problem he met with discomfort.
“You can show him in now,” he said to Gregory, and a few seconds later
the visitor stood within the room, a tall slim youth, brown of face and
with hair so golden that the sun seemed to have taken from it the colour
which it had tanned upon his cheeks.
“You wish to see me, Mr. Ravenel?” he asked, and a smile suddenly broke
upon the boy’s face and made him winning. Mr. Ferguson made a note in
his mind of the smile, for he had not as yet its explanation.
“Yes,” answered Paul. “I should have been more correct in approaching so
prominent a firm, had I written asking for an appointment. But I only
landed in England this morning, and I couldn’t really wait.”
His formal little prepared apology broke down in a laugh and an eager
rush of words.
“That’s all right,” said Mr. Ferguson pleasantly. “Take a chair and tell
me what I can do for you.”
“You knew my father,” said Paul, when he had laid down his hat and stick
and taken his seat. Mr. Ferguson allowed himself a sharp glance at the
lad. For his tone was without any embarrassment at all, any shame or
embarrassment. He was at his ease.
“I knew Mr. Ravenel—yes,” Mr. Ferguson answered cautiously.
“He died a fortnight ago.”
“I was sorry to notice that you were wearing black.”
“He died in a house which he had built upon an island off the coast of
Spain at Aguilas. I lived with him there, during the last eight months,
after I left my school at Tours,” Paul continued.
“Yes?” said Mr. Ferguson.
“My father and I were always—how shall I put it?—in a relationship
which precluded any confidences and even any cordiality. It wasn’t that
we ever quarrelled. We hardly were well enough acquainted for that. But
we were uncomfortable in each other’s company and the end of a meal at
which we had sat together was to both of us an invariable relief. He had
what I think is a special quality of soldiers—he was in the Army, of
course, wasn’t he?”
Paul broke off to ask his question in the most casual manner. But Mr.
Ferguson did not answer it. It was a neat little trap prepared with more
skill than the lawyer had expected. For up till the question was
unconcernedly dropped in, Paul had been framing his sentences with a
sort of pedantry natural to a man who from the nature of his life must
get his English words from books rather than from conversation.
“You say Monsieur Ravenel had some special quality of soldiers,” Mr.
Ferguson observed.
“Yes,” Paul explained. “I approached a subject, or I used a phrase, and
suddenly it seemed as if an iron door was banged in my face, and he was
now behind the door, and not the loudest knocking in the world would
ever get it open. So I have come to you.”
“For information your father did not see fit to give you?” said Mr.
Ferguson.
“Yes.”
“But Monsieur Ravenel had no doubt a lawyer in Paris and an agent in
Casablanca, where he lived for many years, both of whom will be familiar
with his affairs. Why come to me?”
“Because it is not about his affairs that I am seeking information,”
said Paul, and he took a letter from his pocket-case and handed it to
Mr. Ferguson. “This was written by your firm, Mr. Ferguson. It is one of
the two clues to my father’s history which he left behind him. It
slipped out of a book upon his shelf.”
“Certainly the letter was written by our firm to your father, Mr.
Ravenel. But it was the last letter we wrote to him. It closed our
connection with him. We never heard from him again; and the letter is as
you have seen, nine years old.”
“Exactly,” said Paul. “Just about that time my father and I were in
London together for a couple of months, and when I found that letter it
seemed to me to explain why. My father was in London to arrange for the
transfer of his property to France, for the final annihilation of all
his interests and associations with this country.”
It was an assertion rather than a question, but Mr. Ferguson answered
it.
“Yes. I suppose that you may put it that way.”
“Before that time, then, you were his advisers.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why I came to you, Mr. Ferguson,” cried the youth eagerly. “I
want to know what happened to my father in the days when you were his
advisers. I want to know why he renounced his own country, why he buried
himself first in a little distant town on the sea coast of Morocco like
Casablanca, why he took refuge afterwards in a still closer seclusion at
Aguilas in Spain. You know! You must know!”
Mr. Ferguson rose from his desk and walked to the fireplace which was
between his desk and the chair on which Paul was seated. He was puzzled
by the manner of the appeal. There was more eagerness than anxiety in
it. There was certainly no fear. There was even confidence. Mr. Ferguson
wondered whether young Ravenel had some explanation of his own, an
explanation which quite satisfied him and which he only needed to have
confirmed. Paul’s voice broke in upon his wondering.
“Of course I can always find out. It’s only a question of knowing the
ropes. I have no doubt a good enquiry agent could get me the truth in a
very few days if I went to one.”
Mr. Ferguson lifted himself on his toes and looked up to the ceiling.
“I don’t think I should do that,” he answered.
“Whether I do or not depends upon you, Mr. Ferguson,” said Paul, very
quietly. “It’s not curiosity that’s driving me, but I have my life in
front of me, and a plan for it.”
He rose and stood at the open window for a moment or two, and then
turned abruptly back and stood before Mr. Ferguson.
“You see, I was nine years old when I was with my father in London, old
enough to notice, and old enough to remember. And one or two very
curious things happened. We were in lodgings in a little quiet street,
and except on occasions when, I suppose, he had appointments with you,
my father never went out by daylight.”
“Here it comes,” thought Mr. Ferguson, but his face was quite without
expression, and the youth resumed:
“But as soon as darkness fell we took long tramps through the city,
where the streets were empty of everything but the lamp-posts, and the
only sounds were the hollow sounds of our own footsteps upon the
pavement.”
“Yes,” Mr. Ferguson interrupted. “One couldn’t choose a better place for
exercise than the city of London after dark.”
Paul laughed pleasantly and Mr. Ferguson reflected, “I have never been
called a liar in a prettier fashion.”
“On one of these nightly rambles,” Paul resumed, “we turned into a
street closed at one end by a stately building of pinnacles and a
sloping roof, and windows of richly stained glass. This building was a
blaze of light, and in the courtyard in front of it motor-cars and
carriages were taking up ladies in bright evening frocks and coats and
men with orders upon their breasts.”
Mr. Ferguson nodded his head.
“A dinner at the Guildhall, yes.”
“It was curious to come suddenly out of darkness and silence and
emptiness,” Paul Ravenel resumed, “into this gay scene of colour and
enjoyment and light. You can imagine how it impressed a child. This was
what I wanted. I hated long, empty, echoing streets with chains of lamps
stretching ahead. Here I heard to me a sound unknown and divine—I heard
women laughing. ‘Oh, father, do let us stay for a moment and look!’ I
cried, but my father gripped me by the arm, and strode across the road
so swiftly that I had to run to keep up with him. There was the mouth of
another street nearly opposite, and it was that street which my father
wanted to reach.”
“Yes?” said Mr. Ferguson.
“But a man was walking with a limp from the building along the pavement
on the far side of our road. It was a hot night, and he carried his
overcoat upon his arm, and I saw that a conspicuous row of miniature
medals with their coloured ribbons stretched across his left breast. We
reached the kerb when he was only a few yards from us. I felt my
father’s hand tremble suddenly upon my arm. I thought that he was on the
point of turning away in flight. But since that would have been more
noticeable, he just dropped his head so that the brim of his hat
shadowed his face and strode swiftly past the man with the medals. That
man only gave us a careless glance, and I heard my father draw a sigh of
relief. But a few paces on the man with the medals stopped and looked
back. Then he called out: ‘Ned! Ned!’ in a startled voice, and began to
retrace, as fast as his limp would allow him, his steps towards us.
“My father whispered to me: ‘Take no notice, boy! Walk straight on,’ and
in a moment dived into the silence of the street opposite. I turned my
head after we had travelled a few yards in our new direction and I saw
the man with the medals at the angle of the street peering after us as
if he were undecided whether to follow us or not. There the incident
ended, but it was—well—significant, wasn’t it?”
Mr. Ferguson was distinctly uncomfortable. A pair of very steady and
watchful grey eyes were fixed upon his. He was being cross-examined and
not clumsily, and by a boy; and all of this he fretfully resented. To do
the cross-examining was his function in life, not the other fellow’s.
Besides, how was he to answer that word significant? Such a good word!
For it opened no glimpses of the questioner’s point of view and was a
trap for the questioned.
“Was it significant?” he asked.
Paul suddenly smiled, and Mr. Ferguson was more perplexed than ever. The
boy was not obtuse—that was clear. It was no less clear, then, that he
attached some quite special significance of his own invention to the
incident he had related. Monsieur Ravenel was in hiding—that’s what the
incident signified. How had Paul missed it? What strange amulet was he
wearing that saved him from the desolating truth?
“Did you ever read ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’?” Paul inquired, and Mr.
Ferguson jumped.
“I wish you wouldn’t spring from one subject to another like that,” he
answered, testily.
“I am on the same subject,” said Paul.
“Well, then, I did. I used it as a crib for the Alcestis when I was at
school.”
“A pretty good crib, too.”
“Very.”
“But the translation of the Alcestis isn’t the whole of the poem, is it?
The Alcestis makes things pretty black for Admetus, doesn’t it? You’d
call him a bit of a rotter, wouldn’t you? That is, if you take the first
surface meaning of the play. But Balaustion found another meaning
underneath which transfigures Admetus, turns the black to white. Well,
humbly, but just as confidently, I look underneath the first obvious
meaning of what I told you. That’s disgrace, isn’t it? Let’s be frank
about it! A man in disgrace shunning his friends! There’s the surface
reading. And there’s no other—except mine.”
“Let me hear it,” said Mr. Ferguson quickly. He returned to the chair at
his table. Here might be, after all, a pleasant way out of this
disconcerting interview. “Will you smoke?” he asked, and he held out a
tin of cigarettes to his visitor.
“Now fire away!” he said. Mr. Ferguson was in a much more cheerful mood.
Discomfort, however, had not vanished from the room. It had passed from
Mr. Ferguson. But it had entered into Paul. He stammered and was shy.
Finally he blurted out:
“I find the explanation of everything in my father’s passionate love for
my mother.”
Mr. Ferguson’s eyes turned slowly from the plane trees to Paul’s face.
“Will you go on, please?”
“My mother was French.”
“Yes. Virginia Ravenel. She sang for one season at Covent Garden. She
was the most beautiful girl I ever saw in my life.” He laughed, tenderly
caressing his recollections. “There was a time when I fancied myself
your father’s rival. You have a look of her, Mr. Ravenel. She was fair
like you,” and he was still musing with pleasure and just a touch of
regret upon the pangs and ardours of that long-vanished season of summer
and magic, when Paul Ravenel thoroughly startled him.
“I think that my mother died in giving me birth,” he said. “That’s how I
explain to myself my father’s distance and uneasiness with me. I was the
enemy, and worse than that, the enemy who had won. No wonder he couldn’t
endure me, if with her death his whole world went dark. And everything
else follows, doesn’t it? His friends came to mean—not nothing at all,
but an actual annoyance, an encroachment on his grief. He shut himself
up far away in a little town where no one knew him, and brooded over his
loss. And men who do that become extravagant, don’t they, and lose their
perspective, and do far-fetched, unreasonable things. Thus, my mother
was French. So in a sort of distorted tribute to her memory, he changed
his own nationality and took hers, and with it her name, and cut himself
completely off from all his old world—a sort of monk of Love!”
Mr. Ferguson listened to the boy’s speech, which was delivered with a
good deal of hesitation, without changing a muscle of his face. So this
was why Paul could elate with a laugh the flight from the man with the
medals and the lighted courtyard of the Guildhall. This was what he
believed! Well, it was the explanation which a boy ignorant of life,
nursed by dreams and poetry and loneliness and eager to believe the
world a place of sunlight and high thoughts, might easily have
conceived.
“Isn’t that the explanation, Mr. Ferguson?” Paul asked; and Mr. Ferguson
replied without the twitch of a muscle:
“Absolutely! I did not think that you could have understood your
father’s reticence so thoroughly.”
If one must do a thing, to do it with an air is the best way to carry
conviction, thought Mr. Ferguson, and he rose from his chair with a deep
relief. The interview was over, his visitor obviously satisfied, he
could shake him by the hand and after all catch his train to Goring.
Mr. Ferguson’s relief, however, was premature. For the younger man
cried:
“Good! For now the way is clear for me, and I can ask you for your
professional help.”
“Oh!” said the lawyer doubtfully. “I didn’t understand that you came as
a client. I am not very sure that we can undertake much more than we
have upon our hands.”
“It’s not so much more, Mr. Ferguson.”
“I must be the judge of that. Let me hear what it is that you wish.”
“I wish to resume my own real nationality,” said Paul. “I am of my race.
I want the name of it, too.”
Paul was of his race. It was not merely the long-legged build of him,
nor the cut of his clothes, nor the make of his shoes, but a whole
combination of small, indefinable qualities and movements and
repressions which proved it.
“I should never have mistaken him for anything else,” thought Mr.
Ferguson. There was that little speech, for instance, about his father’s
love for his mother, halting, shy, stammered, as if he were more than
half ashamed of admitting the emotions to another man, and tongue-tied
in consequence. The words would have run glibly enough had a French lad
spoken them.
“And with my race, I mean of course also to resume my father’s name,”
Paul continued.
There had suddenly grown up an antagonism between these two people; and
both were aware of it. Paul’s questions became a little implacable; Mr.
Ferguson’s silence a little obstinate. “You know it, of course, Mr.
Ferguson,” Paul insisted.
“Of course,” replied Mr. Ferguson.
“Will you tell it to me, please?”
“I will not.”
“Why not?”
“Your father never told you it. Your father was my client for years, my
friend for many more. I respect his wishes.”
Paul Ravenel bowed and accepted the refusal.
“I have only one more question to ask of you, Mr. Ferguson.”
“I will answer it if I can.”
“Thank you! Who is John Edward Revel?”
“I really don’t know.”
Paul bowed again. He took up his hat and his stick. He was not smiling
any more, and in his eyes there was a look of apprehension. He did not
hold out his hand to Mr. Ferguson.
“It will have to be the enquiry agent after all, then,” he said. “Good
evening.”
The lawyer allowed him to reach the door, and then spoke in an altered
voice. There was a warm kindliness in it now, and to the youth’s anxious
and attentive ears a very audible note of commiseration.
“Mr. Ravenel, I want you to give me four days before you set on foot any
inquiry. There are others concerned in the matter. I assure you that you
will be wise.”
Paul shook his head. “Four days. What shall I do with myself during
those four days?”
“You have been very lonely for years,” said the lawyer gently. “Four
days more, what do they mean?”
“During those years,” answered Paul, “I have had the future for my
companion. Have I got that companion now?” and Mr. Ferguson was silent.
“I came to your office full of expectation. I have not even now revealed
to you the plan I had formed,” Paul resumed. “I leave it a prey to a
very deep anxiety. That name I mentioned to you, I found written on the
flyleaf of an old manual on infantry drill in my father’s bedroom. It
was the only old book on his shelf from which the flyleaf had not been
torn out. I am only now beginning to grasp what that may mean.” But
since Mr. Ferguson had ceased to dispute or pretend, and showed openly a
face where distress was joined with good will, the young man cried:
“Still, I’ll give you the four days, Mr. Ferguson.”
He wrote down the name of his hotel upon a slip of paper and left it on
the desk, and shook the lawyer by the hand.
Left alone, Mr. Ferguson sat for a little while in a muse, living again
the sweet and bitter scenes of vanished years. To what unhappy ends of
death and disgrace had those anxieties and endeavours led? To what
futilities the buoyant aspiration? He rang the bell upon his desk, and
when his head clerk appeared he said:
“I want a message telephoned to Goring that I shall not get home until
eight. Then every one can go. I have a letter to write which will take a
little time.”
“Very well, sir,” said Gregory, and Mr. Ferguson suddenly slapped his
hand down on the table in exasperation.
“Isn’t it a curious thing, Gregory?” he exclaimed. “Here’s a man takes a
world of pains to destroy all traces and records and then keeps by him
one book with a name written upon the flyleaf which brings in a second
all his trouble to nothing! But it’s always the way. Something’s
forgotten which you’d think no man in his senses would overlook! Half
the miseries in the world I do believe come from such omissions.”
“And more than half our business,” Gregory replied drily.
Mr. Ferguson broke into a laugh.
“Why, that’s true, Gregory,” he cried. “And now leave me to my letter!”
He worded his letter with infinite care, for it was as delicate a piece
of work as he had ever been called upon to do, and it took him a full
hour. He posted it himself in a pillar-box on his way to Paddington.
CHAPTER II
The Man with the Medals
Though Paul left Mr. Ferguson’s office with a calm enough face, his mind
was bewildered and fear clutched at his heart. Things were happening to
him which he had never imagined at all. He had been confident with all
the perfect confidence of eighteen years and his confidence in a second
was gone. He was in real distress, which made him ache like some
physical hurt and tortured him at night so that he could not sleep till
long after daybreak. He could not adjust himself to the new conditions
of his life. He looked with surprise upon other people, in the streets
or in the public rooms of his hotel, who were unaware of the troubles
which had hold of him.
He had planned his visit to London full with many a pilgrimage. The
London of Dickens and De Quincey—its inns, its gardens and churches!
That old mansion at the northwest corner of Greek Street, where Mr.
Brunell had given a lodging and a bundle of law papers for a pillow, to
his youthful client—all were to be visited with a thrill of excitement
and a hope that they would not fall short of the images he had made of
them in his thoughts. But the glamour had faded from all these designs.
He paced the streets, and indeed all day, but it was to get through the
long dismal hours and he walked like one in a maze.
He knew no one and throughout the four days no one spoke to him at all.
He moved through the crowded thoroughfares unnoticed as a wraith; he sat
apart in restaurants; and as his father had done, he tramped by night
the hollow-sounding streets of the city where the lamp-posts kept their
sentry guard. On the fifth day, however, the expected letter did come by
the first post from Mr. Ferguson.
“If you will travel to Pulburo’ in Sussex by the 3.55 P. M. train from
Victoria on the day you receive this, Colonel Vanderfelt will send a car
to meet you at the station and will put you up for the night. Will you
please send a telegram to him”; and the Colonel’s address followed.
Paul sent off his telegram at once and followed it in the afternoon.
Outside Pulboro’ station a small grey car was waiting and a girl of his
own age, with brown eyes and a fresh pretty face and a small bright blue
hat sitting tightly on her curls, was at the wheel.
“I am Phyllis Vanderfelt,” she explained. “My father asked me to drive
in and fetch you. He has had to be away to-day and won’t get home much
before dinner time, I’m afraid.”
She turned the car and drove westwards under the railway arch talking
rather quickly as people who are uneasy and dread an awkward silence
will do. They passed through a little town of narrow winding streets and
high walls clustered under a great church with a leaping spire, like a
piece of old France, and swung out onto a high wide road which dipped
and rose, with the great ridge of the South Downs sweeping from
Chanctonbury Ring to Hampshire on their left, forests and bush-strewn
slopes of emerald and cliffs of chalk silver-white in the sun, and from
end to end of the high rolling barrier the swift shadows of the clouds
flitting like great birds.
They had ceased to talk now and there was no awkwardness in the silence.
Paul was leaning forward gazing about him with a queer look of eagerness
upon his face.
“To come home to country like this!” he said in a low voice. “You can’t
think what it means after months of brown earth and hot skies.”
Upon their right a low wall bordered the road, and on the other side of
the wall fallow-deer grazed in a Park. Beyond, a line of tall oaks
freshly green was the home of innumerable rooks who strewed the air
about the topmost branches, wheeling and cawing. The square tower of a
church stood upon a little hill.
“It’s friendly, isn’t it?” he cried, and a look of commiseration made
the eyes of the girl at his side tender. Would he think this countryside
so friendly when the evening was over and he had got to his room?
“Do you know our Downs?”
Phyllis spoke at random and hastily as he turned towards her.
“I wonder,” he answered. “Could I have forgotten them if I had once
known them? I seem to have been within a finger’s breadth of recognising
something.”
“When you have seen my mother we will walk through the village. We shall
have time before dinner,” said Phyllis, and she turned the car into the
carriage-way of a square old house with big windows level with the wall,
which stood close to the road.
Mrs. Vanderfelt, a middle-aged woman with shrewd and kindly eyes
received him with a touch of nervousness in her manner and, as her
daughter had done, talked volubly and a little at random whilst she was
giving him some tea.
“I don’t know what you would like to do until dinner time,” she said,
and Phyllis said:
“I am going to show Mr. Ravenel the village.”
A glance of comprehension was swiftly exchanged between the mother and
the daughter, but not so swiftly but that Paul intercepted it.
“You can get the key at Rapley’s,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt.
The two young people came to four cross-roads, and Paul exclaimed:
“Up the hill to the right, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
They mounted the hill and Paul stopped. He pointed with his stick
towards the signboard of an inn built on the high bank above the road.
“Now I know. I lived here once as a child. I always wondered why the
Horse Guards had an inn here, and what sort of people they were. I used
to imagine that they were half-horse, like the Centaurs, and I always
hoped to see them.”
Phyllis Vanderfelt laughed.
“Isn’t that like a man? I show you a place as beautiful as any in
England and the only thing which you have remembered of it from the time
when you were four is the place where you could get a drink.”
“Yes, the Horseguards’ Inn,” repeated Paul cheerfully. “Let us go on!”
But it was now Phyllis who stopped with a face from which the merriment
had gone.
“I don’t know,” she said indecisively. “It shall be as you wish. But I
wonder. We talked it all over at home. We couldn’t tell whether it would
be helpful to you, whether you would care to remember everything
to-morrow—whether you already remembered. My father was quite clear
that you should see everything. But I am not sure—”
Paul felt the clutch of fear catching his breath once more as he looked
into the girl’s compassionate eyes.
“I am with your father,” he said. “My recollections are too faint. I can
only remember what I see. Let us go on!”
“Very well!”
Phyllis Vanderfelt went into one of the cottages and came out again with
a big key in her hand. Beyond the cottages a thick high hedge led on to
an old rose-red house with an oriel window looking down the road from
beneath a gable and a tiled roof golden with lichen. Wisteria draped the
walls in front with purple.
“It is empty,” said Phyllis, as she put the key into the lock and opened
the door. The rooms were all dismantled, the floors uncarpeted. Paul
Ravenel shook his head.
“I remember nothing here.”
Phyllis led him through a window into a garden. A group of beech trees
sheltered the house from the southwest wind and beyond the beech trees
from a raised lawn their eyes swept over meadows and a low ridge of
black firs and once more commanded the shining Downs. Paul stood for a
little while in silence, whilst Phyllis watched his face. There came
upon it a look of perplexity and doubt. He turned back towards the
house. On its south side, a window had been thrown out; on its tiled
roof a wide band of white clematis streamed down like a great scarf. On
the wall beside the window a great magnolia climbed.
“Wait a moment,” cried Paul; and as he gazed his vision cleared. He saw,
as the gifted see in a crystal, a scene small and distant and very
bright.
There was a table raised up on some sort of stand upon the gravel paths
outside this window. A man was sitting at the table and a small crowd of
people, laughing and jeering a little—an unkindly crowd—was gathered
about him. And furniture and ornaments were brought out. He turned to
Phyllis. “There was a sale here, ever so long ago—and I was present
outside the crowd, looking on. I lived here, then?”
“Yes,” said Phyllis.
“And it was our furniture which was being sold?”
“Yes.”
So far there was no surprise for Paul Ravenel, nothing which conflicted
with his conception and estimate of his father. Monsieur Ravenel had
sold off his furniture, just as he had changed his name and abode. It
was part of the process of destroying all his associations with the
country and people of his birth. Only—his recollections had revealed
something new to him—and disquietingly significant.
“Why were those who came to buy unfriendly and contemptuous?” he asked
slowly.
“Are you sure that they were?” Phyllis returned. But she did not look at
Paul’s face and her voice was a little unsteady.
“I am very sure about that,” said Paul. “A woman was with me, holding my
hand. She led me away—yes—I was frightened by those noisy, jeering
people, and she led me away. It was my nurse, I suppose. For my mother
was dead.”
“Yes,” replied Phyllis, and then, not knowing how hard she struck, she
added, “Your mother had died a couple of months before the sale.”
Paul Ravenel, during the last days, had been schooling himself to a
reserve of manner, but this statement, as of a thing well known which he
too must be supposed to know, loosened all his armour. A startled cry
burst from his lips.
“What’s that?” he exclaimed, and with a frightened glance at his white
face Phyllis repeated her words.
“I thought you knew,” she added.
“No.”
Paul walked a little apart. One of the garden paths was bordered by some
arches of roses. He stood by them, plucking at one or two of the flowers
and seeing none of them at all. The keystone of the explanation which he
had built in order to account for and uphold his father was down now and
with it the whole edifice. It had all depended upon the idea of a
passionate, enduring love in his father’s heart for the wife who had
died in giving birth to her son, the enemy. And in that idea there was
no truth at all!
Paul reflected now in bitterness that there never had been any reason
why he should have held his belief—any wild outburst from Monsieur
Ravenel, any word of tender remembrance. He had got his illusion—yes,
he reached the truth now in this old garden—from an instinct to
preserve himself from hating that stranger with whom he lived and on
whom he depended for his food and the necessities of his life. He turned
suddenly back to Phyllis Vanderfelt.
“What I don’t understand, Miss Phyllis, is how it is that remembering so
much of other things here, I can remember nothing of my mother.”
“She only came home here to die,” Phyllis replied gently.
Paul pressed his hands over his eyes for a moment or two in a gesture of
pain which made the young girl’s heart ache for him. But he looked at
her calmly afterwards and said: “I am afraid that Colonel Vanderfelt has
very bad news to tell me to-night.”
Phyllis Vanderfelt laid her hand gently upon his arm.
“You will remember that you have made very real friends here in a very
short time, won’t you?” she pleaded. “My mother and myself.”
“Thank you,” said Paul.
Yet another shock was waiting for him in Colonel Vanderfelt’s house. For
as he entered the drawing room three-quarters of an hour later, a tall
man lifted himself with an effort from an easy chair and with the help
of a stick limped across the room towards him.
“This is my husband,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt, and before Paul could check
his tongue, the cry had sprung from his lips:
“The man with the medals!”
The older man’s eyes flashed with a sudden anger. Mrs. Vanderfelt gasped
and flushed red. Phyllis took a step forward. All had a look as if they
had suffered some bitter and intolerable insult.
Paul quickly explained. “My father and I crossed you one night a long
time ago when you were coming from a banquet at the Guildhall. You
called to my father. I was a child, and I always remembered you as the
man with the medals. The phrase jumped out when I saw you again.”
The fire died out of Colonel Vanderfelt’s eyes. A look of pity sheathed
them.
“We will talk of all these things after dinner,” he said gently, and his
hand clasped the youth’s arm. “Let us go in now.”
CHAPTER III
At King’s Corner
“Ferguson wrote to me that you mean to return to your own race,” said
Colonel Vanderfelt, when the ladies had withdrawn from the dining room.
He was a small, wiry man, dark of complexion, with a sleek black head of
hair in which there was not one visible thread of grey. His face too was
hardly lined, so that it was not until one looked at his eyes that one
got any impression of age. The eyes, however, betrayed him. Deeply
sunken and with a queer set appearance, they were the eyes of an old,
old man; and they provoked a guess that they had at one time gazed so
desperately upon horrors that they could never again quite get free of
what they had seen.
“Yes,” replied Paul. “Mr. Ferguson was not very sympathetic.”
“Then I think he was wrong,” said Colonel Vanderfelt heartily.
“Philosophers and Labour leaders talk very placidly about throwing down
the walls between nation and nation, as if it was an easy morning’s
work. But the walls aren’t of our building. They are mother earth and
climate and were there from the beginning of time. Some people can pass
over them, of course—American women, especially. But very few men
aren’t weaklings, I believe. To the men worth anything, their soil cries
out louder and louder with each year that passes. A glass of port? Help
yourself! A cigar? No? The cigarettes are in that Battersea box in front
of you. It’s a fiction that tobacco spoils the flavour of port. Claret,
yes! Port, not a bit.”
Colonel Vanderfelt took a cigar from a box upon a side table, lit it and
resumed his seat. Paul brought him back to the subject of their talk.
“I am glad to hear you agree with me, Colonel Vanderfelt. I have been
more and more convinced since I have sat in this room.”
Paul Ravenel looked about the dining room with its fastidious and sober
elegance. Cream walls, upon which a few good prints were hung; a bright
red screen drawn in front of the door; shapely old furniture with red
upholstery, and heavy curtains of red brocaded silk at the one big bow
window; a long, slender Sheraton sideboard against the wall; a fine
Chippendale cabinet in a recess; and this round gleaming table of
mahogany, with its candlesticks and salt-cellars of Battersea enamel,
its silver equipment and its short tubby decanters with the blue tinge
of old Waterford in the glass; in every aspect of the room grace was so
wedded to homeliness, comfort to distinction that Paul could not but
envy its possessors.
“I resume my race and with it of course my name,” he said, keenly
watching Colonel Vanderfelt.
But Colonel Vanderfelt took his cigar from his lips only to ask a
question.
“And then?” he enquired.
“Then I propose to try for a commission in the army,” Paul replied.
“Oh, yes,” said Colonel Vanderfelt, “but the Bar offers more
opportunities to a young fellow nowadays, doesn’t it? Why the Army?
There are other professions.”
“Not for me, sir.”
Colonel Vanderfelt shrugged his shoulders and stared at the shining
table in front of him. It was a devil of a world—everything cross-wise
and upside down and unaccommodating. Why must this youth with money and
the world to choose from, choose just the one bunch of grapes quite out
of his reach? And set his very heart on it too. There had been a ring in
that “Not for me, sir!” which could not be stilled by argument. It was
youth’s challenge to the elders, its “I know better” which there was no
use in debating.
“Let me hear,” said Colonel Vanderfelt; and the lad’s ambitions were
shyly revealed to him. Histories of campaigns, the lives of great
soldiers, books of strategy too technical for him to follow—these had
been his favourite reading. It was the actual work of the soldier which
had fascinated Paul, not the glitter of the great days of parades and
manœuvres, but his daily responsibilities and the command of men and the
glory of service. Colonel Vanderfelt listened and nodded and remembered
a phrase in Mr. Ferguson’s letter: “The boy’s of the right temper.”
Surely he was, and the whole business was perverse and pitiful! He heard
Paul closing his little apologia.
“So you see, sir, from the time when I began to think at all of what I
should do in the world, this has always been my wish.” The lad was
seeking to challenge and defy, but the anxiety which had tortured him
during the last four days turned the challenge into a prayer. He
searched Colonel Vanderfelt’s face for a sign of agreement. “I know of
nothing,” he asserted, “of nothing at all which should hinder me from
trying to fulfil my wish.”
“But I do,” replied the other. “I think, Paul, that it would be very
difficult for you to take your father’s name and seek a commission in
the Army here.”
Paul’s cigarette had gone out whilst he was speaking. He lit it now at
one of the candles with trembling fingers. The gentleness of Colonel
Vanderfelt’s voice made him think of some compassionate judge passing
sentence.
“You will, I trust, make that clear to me,” he said.
“Of course,” returned the Colonel. “I admit to you that up to the last
few minutes I had hoped to escape, and leave most of the story untold.
And had you chosen another profession, why, very likely I should have
spared you and myself, too.”
But though he had promised to be frank, he was reluctant to begin and he
had ended on so evident a note of discomfort and pain that Paul Ravenel
dared not interpose a word. The windows stood open upon the garden and
let into the room the perfume of flowers and the freshness of the dew.
Outside was the glamorous twilight of a summer night. It was very still.
Occasionally a bird rustled the leaves of a branch; and across a field a
cuckoo whose voice was breaking called incessantly. Paul was never to
forget that background to these moments of suspense. All the bitterness
was not with him on this night. Colonel Vanderfelt was back in the dark
places of his life amongst old shames and miseries.
“Your father’s name was John Edward Revel,” he began, and the boy drew a
long breath. “Yes, the infantry manual was his, some relic of the old
days that he must keep, I suppose—some one small valueless thing—yes,
I think that’s natural. He and I were friends. We passed out of
Sandhurst together and met again in India. Years afterwards—Service
brought us together.”
He named an outlying post in the hills to the northwest of Quetta where
John Edward Revel and he lay beleaguered during one of the frontier
wars. They were ordered to hold on to their position at all costs and
help would come to them.
“We were neither of us youngsters, you must understand, pitchforked into
commands we weren’t fit for. We had seen a lot of service and done
well—both of us. That makes the matter worse perhaps. All the less
excuse! That’s what they did say! We were losing men all the time, and
we hadn’t many to begin with. Ammunition was running low, water still
lower, we were attacked day and night, we two had no sleep, and the
promised relief didn’t come. The Baluchis got into our outer court one
evening and we had the greatest trouble to get them out. The same night
one of our spies came in with the news that a fresh big force was
hurrying to reinforce the Baluchis. We were pretty well at the end of
our tether—Ravel and I—. Something snapped in both of us . . . we
slipped out under cover of darkness, the whole force, and fell back in
spite of our instructions, leaving this key-post unguarded. And the new
enemy we fell back from was our own relief expedition which had marched
night and day and turned the Baluchis’ flank. They found the fort empty,
which we had been ordered at all costs to hold. You can guess what
happened. We were arrested, court-martialled—cashiered! So you can
understand perhaps now our queer reception of you in the drawing room
this evening. When you startled us by calling me, ‘The man with the
medals,’ it sounded like some bitter jibe from those bad days.”
“But I don’t understand,” Paul Ravenel stammered. “You were cashiered
both of you, you and my father?”
“Both of us.”
“Yet I saw you coming from a dinner at the Guildhall, with your medals
upon your breast. You are here in your own home, wearing your rank! How
can that be, sir?”
Colonel Vanderfelt replied with a curious accent of apology to his young
guest.
“I was lucky. I had served in India longer than your father. I had been
more interested; and dialects came to me easily. More than once I had
spent my leave living in the Bazaars, and as far north as Leh. Therefore
it wasn’t so difficult for me. I disappeared. I’m a dark man naturally.
I grew a beard. I joined a battalion of irregular levies. I served for
three years in it on the frontier.”
“Did no one guess who you were?”
“I think one or two suspected and—winked. They were busy years you see.
A good deal was going on all this time and men who knew anything about
soldiering were valuable. Of course they were pretty rough, hard years
for any one with delicate tastes, but there was so much to be perhaps
regained,” and Colonel Vanderfelt pulled himself up quickly. “Well,
after three years I was wounded rather badly. As you see I limp to this
day. It looked then as if the game was up altogether and I was going
out. So I sent a message in my own name to an officer on the border whom
I had known. The Governor of Quetta came up himself to see me in
hospital and the end of it was that my sentence was annulled. There, my
boy, that’s the whole story.”
Colonel Vanderfelt rose from his chair and limping over to the window
looked out upon that quiet garden, which he had lost, and after such
unlovely years won back again. They were years of which he could never
think even now without a shiver of disgust and a cold fear lest by some
impossibility they should come again. None indeed had ever known the
full measure of their abasement and squalor and degradation. Even with
the great prize continually held in view, they had been hardly
endurable. The chance of winning it had been the chance of a raft to a
man drowning in the Pacific. The voice of Paul Ravenel who was still
seated at the table broke in upon him.
“And that’s the whole story, sir?”
“Yes, Paul.”
Paul shook his head.
“The whole story, sir, except that what you did—my father didn’t.
Therefore he lived and died an outcast,” and the young man’s voice died
away in a whisper.
Colonel Vanderfelt turned back to him and laid his hand upon Paul’s
shoulder and shook it in a gentle sympathy.
“There’s another question I would like to have answered,” said Paul. He
was very pale, but his voice was firm again.
“Yes?”
“The disgrace, I suppose, killed my mother?”
“I have no right to say that.”
“The truth, sir, please!” and the appeal came so clearly from a man in
the extremity of torture, that Colonel Vanderfelt could not but answer
it.
“It did. She was in India when this shameful business happened. She came
home and died.”
In a few moments Paul began to laugh. The laughter was pitched in a low
key and horrible to hear; and there was such a flame of agony burning in
the boy’s eyes and so dreadful a grin upon his white face that Colonel
Vanderfelt feared for his reason.
“Steady, Paul, steady!” he said gently.
“I was thinking of the fine myth by which I explained everything to the
honour of the family,” Paul cried in a bitter voice. “Our seclusion, the
antagonism between my father and me, the change of name—it was all due
to a morbid grief at the loss of a wife too deeply loved. That’s what I
believed, sir,” he said wildly, but Colonel Vanderfelt had already
learned of these delusions from Mr. Ferguson. “And shame’s the
explanation. Disgrace is the explanation. He killed my mother with it
and now the son too must hide!”
“No,” said Colonel Vanderfelt with decision. “There’s a good way out of
this tangle for you, a way by which you may still reach all you have set
your heart on—your career, your name and an honoured place amongst your
own people.”
Paul lifted incredulous eyes to the other man’s face.
“Yes,” insisted the older man. “You don’t believe me. You young fellows
see only the worst and the best, and if the best doesn’t tumble into
your hands, you are sure at once that there’s nothing for you but the
worst. Just listen to me!”
Paul took hold upon himself. He was ashamed already of his outburst.
“You are very kind, sir,” he said, and some appreciation of the goodwill
which the older man had shown to him, in baring his own wounds, and
drawing out into the light again old humiliations and guilt long since
atoned, pierced even through the youth’s sharp consciousness of his own
miseries. He rose up from his chair. He was in command of his emotions
now, his voice was steady.
“I have been thinking too much of myself and the distress into which
this revelation has plunged me,” he said, “and too little of your great
consideration and kindness. What you have told me, you cannot have said
without pain and a good deal of reluctance. I am very grateful. Indeed I
wonder why you ever received me here at all.”
“You would have found out the truth without my help.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Paul. “I should have found it out through an
enquiry agent, and the news would have been ten times more hideous
coming in that way rather than broken gently here. Whilst on the other
hand you would have spared yourself.”
“That’s all right,” Colonel Vanderfelt answered uncomfortably, and to
himself he added: “Yes, old Ferguson wrote the truth. That boy’s clean
and a gentleman.” He pressed Paul down into his chair again.
“Come! Take a glass of this old brandy first—it’s not so bad—and then
we’ll talk your prospects over like the men of the world we both
are—eh? Neither making light of serious things nor exaggerating them
until we make endeavour useless.”
He fetched to the table a couple of big goblets mounted on thin stems
within which delicate spirals had been blown, and poured a liqueur of
his best brandy into each.
“I have an idea, Paul. It has been growing all the time we have been
talking together. Let’s see if it means anything to you.”
He held his goblet to his nose and smelt the brandy. “Pretty good, this!
Try it, Paul. There’s not a cough nor a splutter in it. Well, now,” he
went on when Paul had taken his advice, “in the first place, you are
eighteen.”
“Yes,” said Paul.
“And a man of means?”
“Pretty well.”
“You have property in Casablanca, in Morocco?”
“Yes, sir,” said Paul, wondering whither all these questions were to
lead.
“And you lived there for some years?”
“Yes. Before I went to school in France and my father built his house in
Aguilas.”
“You know Arabic, then?”
“The Moorish dialect, yes.”
“And by nationality you are French?”
“Yes,” answered Paul reluctantly.
“Good,” said the Colonel, warming to his theme. “Now listen to me. The
French must move in Morocco, as we moved in India, as we moved in Egypt.
It isn’t a question of policies or persons. It’s the question of the
destiny of a great nation. The instinct of life and self-preservation in
a great nation which sooner or later breaks all policies and persons
that stand in the way. There’ll be the timid ones who’ll say no! And
there’ll be the intriguers who’ll treat the question as a pawn to be
moved in their own interest. But in the end they won’t matter.” Colonel
Vanderfelt had a complete and not very knowledgeable contempt for
politics and politicians like most of his calling until they have joined
the ranks of the politicians themselves.
“Morocco can’t remain as it is—a vast country with a miserable
population, misgoverned if governed at all, with a virgin soil the
richest in the world, and within a few miles of Europe. Somebody’s got
to go in and sort it up. And that some one’s got to be France, for she
can’t afford a possible enemy on her Algerian frontier. Yes, but
there’ll be trouble before she succeeds in her destiny, trouble
and—opportunity.” The Colonel paused to let that word sink into Paul’s
mind. “Why not be one of those who’ll seize it? They are great soldiers,
the French. Join them, since that’s your way of life. Go through the
schools, get your commission in France and then strive heart and soul to
get service in the country whose language you know, the country of
opportunity. Then, in God’s good time, if you still so wish it, come
back here, resume your own name, rejoin your own race!”
Paul Ravenel, from his solitary dreaming life and his age, was inclined
to be impressed by thoughts of sacrifice and expiation and atonement. He
was therefore already half persuaded by Colonel Vanderfelt’s advice. It
would be exile, as he had come to think, but it would also be a
cleansing of his name, an expiation of his father’s crime. And after
all, when he looked at the man who gave him this advice, and remembered
what he had endured with a hope so much more infinitesimal, the course
proposed to him seemed fortunate and light.
“Thank you,” he said. “I should like to think over your idea.”
Colonel Vanderfelt was pleased that there had been no flighty hysterical
acceptance, no assumption that the goal was as good as reached.
“Yes, take your time!”
Colonel Vanderfelt rose and, removing the shades, blew out the candles
upon the dining-table.
“I don’t know what you would like to do?” he said, turning to the lad.
“You will follow your own wish, of course. And if you would rather go
straight now to your room, why, we shall all understand.”
“Thank you, but I should prefer to join the ladies with you.”
Colonel Vanderfelt smiled very pleasantly. The anticipation of Paul’s
visit had caused him a sleepless night or two and not a little pain. How
much should he tell? The question had been troubling him, so that he had
more than once sat down to write to Mr. Ferguson that he would not
receive the boy at all. He was very glad now that he had, and that he
had kept nothing back.
“Come, then,” he said.
In the drawing room Phyllis Vanderfelt sang to that little company some
songs of old Herrick in a small, very sweet, clear voice. Paul sat near
the long, open window. The music, the homely friendliness within the
room, and the quiet garden over which slept so restful a peace were all
new to him and wrought upon him till he felt the tears rising to his
eyes. Phyllis’ hands were taken from the keys and lay idle in her lap.
In the high trees of the Park upon the far side of the road the owls
were calling and the cuckoo still repeated his two notes from the tree
beyond the field. Paul rose suddenly to his feet.
“That throaty old cuckoo means to make a night of it,” he said with a
laugh which was meant to hide the break in his voice and did not
succeed. He stepped over the threshold and was out of sight.
“Let him be!” said Colonel Vanderfelt. And a little later, when Phyllis
had taken herself off to bed: “I liked him very much. The right
temper—that’s the phrase old Ferguson used. He’ll do well,
Milly—you’ll see. We shall see him home here one day carrying his
sheaves,” and as his wife remained silent he looked at her anxiously.
“Don’t you agree with me?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Vanderfelt answered slowly. “I hope so with all my
heart. But—didn’t you notice his looks and a sort of grace he has?”
“Well?” asked the Colonel.
“Well, we have left out one consideration altogether. What part are
women going to play in his life? A large one. Tom, I have been watching
Phyllis to-night. A day or so more, and we should have an aching heart
in this house.”
“Yes, I see,” returned Colonel Vanderfelt. “Women do upset things, don’t
they?”
“Or get upset,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt. “And sometimes both.”
CHAPTER IV
Betwixt and Between
Paul Ravenel left Colonel Vanderfelt’s house of King’s Corner on the
next morning in time to catch an early train to London. His friends
gathered in the drive to wave him a good-bye as he drove away.
“You’ll write to us, won’t you?” said Mrs. Vanderfelt.
“And there’s a room here whenever you have an evening to spare,” added
the Colonel.
Paul had quite captured the hearts of the small household and they were
hardly less concerned for his future and his success than they would
have been had he been their own son.
Paul had given no hint at the breakfast table of his plans, if indeed he
had yet formed any, nor did his friends press him with any question. But
they waited anxiously for letters and in time one came with the postmark
of St. Germain. Paul had passed into St. Cyr. Others followed with
lively enough accounts of his surroundings and companions. Here and
there the name of a friend was mentioned, Gerard de Montignac, Paul’s
senior by a year, for instance, who cropped up more often than any one
else.
They heard later that he had passed out with honours and was now a
sub-lieutenant in the 174th Regiment, stationed at Marseilles; then a
couple of years later, just at the time when Phyllis was married, that
he had been seconded to the 2nd Tirailleurs and was on active service
amongst the Beni-Snassen in Algeria. He escaped from that campaign
without any hurt and wrote a little account of it to his friends at
King’s Corner, with some shrewd pictures of his commanders and brother
officers. But the same reticence overspread the pages. Mrs. Vanderfelt
was at a loss to recapture out of them a picture of the lad who had
stayed one night with them and borne so gallantly the destruction of his
boyish illusions. The letters, to her thinking, might have been written
by an automaton with a brain.
A few months afterwards Colonel Vanderfelt slammed down his newspaper on
the breakfast table.
“That’s where Paul ought to be. I told him! You can’t blame me! I told
him!”
The long-expected trouble in Morocco was coming to a head. The
extravagance and incapacity of the Sultan Abd-el-Aziz; the concession of
the Customs to the French; the jealousies of powerful kaids; and the
queer admixture of contempt and fear with which the tribes watched the
encroachments of Europeans; all these elements were setting the country
on fire. Already there were rumours of disorder in the wealthy coast
town of Casablanca.
“That’s where Paul ought to be,” cried Colonel Vanderfelt angrily. But
his anger was appeased in a couple of days. For he received a letter
from Paul with the postmark of Oran, written on shipboard. He and his
battalion were on their way to Casablanca.
They arrived after the bombardment and massacres, and served under
General D’Amade throughout the campaigns of the Chaiouïa. Paul was
wounded in the thigh during the attack upon Settat but was able to
rejoin his battalion in a month. He was now a senior Lieutenant and his
captain being killed in the fight at McKoun, he commanded his company
until the district was finally pacified by the victory over the great
kaid and Marabout, Bou Nuallah. Paul had done well; he was given the
medaille and at the age of twenty-six was sure that his temporary rank
would be confirmed. He wrote warmly of those days to his friends. There
was a note of confidence and elation which Mrs. Vanderfelt had not
remarked before, and the letter ended with a short but earnest
expression of gratitude to his friends for the help they had given him
eight years before.
For the next two years, then, the household at King’s Corner read only
of the routine of a great camp, described with a lively spirit and an
interest in the little trifles of his profession, which was a clear
proof to them all that Paul had seen straight and clearly when he had
declared: “There’s no other profession for me.” Thereafter came news
which thrilled his audience.
“I am transferred to the General Staff,” Paul wrote, “and am leaving
here on special service. You must not expect to hear from me for a long
while.”
Neither Colonel Vanderfelt nor his wife had quite realised how they had
counted on Paul’s letters, or what a fresh, lively interest they brought
into their quiet lives, until this warning reached them.
“Of course we can’t expect to hear,” said Colonel Vanderfelt irritably,
“Paul’s probably on very important service. Very often a postmark’s
enough to give a clue. But you women don’t understand these things.”
Phyllis, the married daughter, and Mrs. Vanderfelt were the women to
whom this rebuke was addressed, and neither of them had said a word to
provoke it.
“No doubt, dear,” Mrs. Vanderfelt replied meekly, with a private smile
for the daughter. “We shall hear in due time.”
But the weeks ran into months, the months into a year, and still no
letter came. At one moment they wondered whether new associations had
not obliterated from Paul’s mind his former aspirations: at another,
whether he still lived. Colonel Vanderfelt ran across Mr. Ferguson
towards the end of the year outside his club in Piccadilly and made
enquiries.
“Did you ever hear of that boy, Paul Ravenel, again?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, he’s a rich man now and I have acted for him,” returned Mr.
Ferguson. “Since the French occupation, land in and around Casablanca
has gone up to fifty times its former value. Ravenel has realised some
of it. I have bought the freehold of his father’s house close to you and
let it for seven years and invested a comfortable sum for him in British
securities. So I gather that he means to come back in a little while.”
Colonel Vanderfelt was relieved upon one score, but it was only to have
his anxiety increased upon the other.
“When did you hear from Paul last?” he asked, and Mr. Ferguson answered:
“Some while ago. Let me think. Yes, it must be a year at the least.”
Colonel Vanderfelt repeated the conversation to his wife on his return
to King’s Corner, and both of them shirked the question which was heavy
at their hearts.
“It will be pleasant to have him as a neighbour,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt.
“Yes,” replied the Colonel. “And it might be quite soon! Seven years he
has let the house for. And we are getting no younger, are we! The sooner
the better, I say!”
Some look upon his wife’s face, a droop of her shoulders, made him stop;
and it was in a quiet and strangely altered voice that he began again:
“We are both pretending, Milly, and that’s the truth. We are afraid. It
would be hard lines if he died before he did what he aimed to do. Yet we
have got to face that possibility.”
Mrs. Vanderfelt was turning over a plan in her mind.
“I think that it’s time we had news of him,” she said. “There’s a friend
he has mentioned several times in his letters. He was with him at St.
Cyr and met him again at Casablanca—Gerard de Montignac.”
Colonel Vanderfelt went in search of Paul Ravenel’s letters. They were
kept in a drawer of the writing-table in his bedroom and made a big
bundle by now.
“De Montignac. That was the fellow’s name. Let’s look at the last ones
for his rank. He’s a captain of the Chasseurs d’Afrique. I’ll write to
Casablanca to-night, my dear, on the chance of his still being there.”
Colonel Vanderfelt was easier in his mind after he had posted the
letter.
“That was a good idea of mine, Millie,” he said to his wife. “We shall
get some news now.”
Gerard de Montignac was still in Casablanca, but at the time when
Colonel Vanderfelt was writing to him, he was himself just as anxious as
the Colonel about the safety of Paul Ravenel.
CHAPTER V
The Villa Iris
“There’s not the slightest reason for alarm,” Gerard de Montignac
declared testily in much the same tone which Colonel Vanderfelt was
using to his wife nearly two thousand miles away. De Montignac was
dining at the “popote” of his battalion in the permanent camp of
Ain-Bourdja outside the walls of Casablanca, and more than once of late
Ravenel’s long absence had cropped up in the conversation with a good
deal of shaking of heads. “Paul is a serious one,” continued Gerard.
“Too serious. That is his fault. He will not pack up and return until
the last possible observation is taken, the last notes of value written
down in his little book. But then he will. I am not afraid for him, no,
not the least bit in the world. And who should be, I ask you, if I am
not?”
He glanced round the mess but not one of his companions accepted his
challenge. It was not, however, because they shared his confidence.
Indeed every one was well aware that more than half of it was assumed.
They respected a great friendship sealed nearly three years before on
the bloody slopes of R’Fakha. De Montignac, with his squadron of
Chasseurs, had ridden in that desperate charge by means of which alone
the crest of the plateau had been held until the infantry arrived. The
charge had been made down a hillside seamed with tiny gullies invisible
until they gaped beneath the horses’ feet; and the difficulties of the
ground had so split the small force of cavalry that the attack became a
series of scattered tourneys in which each overmatched trooper drove at
a group of Moors armed with rifles and many of them mounted. There had
been but ten minutes of the unequal fight, but those minutes were long
enough for each man who fell wounded to pray with all his soul that the
wound might be swift and mortal and do its work before the mutilating
knife flashed across his face. Gerard de Montignac lay half way down the
slope with a bullet in his shoulder and his thigh pinned to the ground
beneath the weight of his grey charger. The Moors were already
approaching him when Paul’s company of Tirailleurs doubled up to the
crest and Paul recognised the horse. His rescue of his friend was one of
twenty such acts done upon that day, but the memory of them all lived
and stopped many an argument as it did to-night. If Gerard de Montignac
chose to cry obstinately: “Some day Paul Ravenel will walk in upon us.
He is my friend. I know,” it was the part of friendliness to acquiesce.
There were other topics for dispute, enough in all conscience; such as
the new dancing girl who had come that week to Madame Delagrange’s Bar,
the Villa Iris, and about whom young Ollivier Praslin was raving at the
other end of the table.
Paul Ravenel had slipped quietly away now more than a year ago in the
black gabardine and skull cap of a Jew pedlar with a few surveying
instruments packed in cheap, dirty boxes of white wood hidden amongst
his wares on the back of a mule, and a few penny account books in which
to jot his notes. He set out to explore the countries of the Beni-M’Tir
and the Gerouan tribes, to blacken the white spaces of the map by means
of long and perilous journeys. There were no tribes more implacable and
fanatical than these; none whose territories at that time were so little
known; and since they held the mountain passes and the great forests
which border the trade routes from the south and the west to Fez, none
whose strongholds and numbers and resources it was more important that
the Administration should know.
“A Jew travelling alone, carrying on a mule such valuable things as
needles and reels of thread, matches and safety pins, and some bales of
cloth will be able to go where even a Moor of another tribe would lose
his life,” he had declared, and for a long time in vain.
“And what about your notes? How will you make them?” asked the officer
of the Affaires Indigènes, to whom after much persistence he was
referred.
“I have a shorthand. They will take little space. I have a small tent,
too. I shall make them at night.”
“And if you are caught making them at night?”
“I shall be making up my accounts—that is all.”
The Native Department, however, still shook its head. “A Jew will be
robbed, no doubt, and probably kicked and cuffed from tent village to
tent village,” pleaded Ravenel. “But he will not be killed. He carries
useful things.”
In the end his persistence had won the day. He had been given a list of
a few sure friends, a kaid here and there, on whose good will he could
rely; and once or twice some news of him from one or other of these
friends had come in a roundabout fashion to the headquarters of the
Administration at Rabat. But the last of these messages were more than
six months old, and Paul Ravenel himself was two months’ overdue.
Gerard de Montignac was gloomily weighing up his friend’s chances when a
louder burst of laughter came from young Lieutenant Praslin’s corner.
“I tell you she is young and she is pretty, and she can dance,” Praslin
was protesting, quite red in the face with the fervour of his defence.
“And she is at old Delagrange’s Bar in Casablanca!” cried an officer,
laughing.
Here at all events was a statement which could be received with
incredulity.
“But I am not the only one to say so,” exclaimed Praslin.
“Then we must admit that the case is serious,” said Commandant Marnier
very gravely. “Come, let us consider the case of the young lady. Who is
this other who agrees with you, my friend?”
Praslin began to stammer. Commandant Marnier of the Zouaves was the
heavy gun of the mess, a disillusioned man of forty-five with a
satirical and at times a bitter tongue.
“Who is this other?” he asked, leaning forward.
“Little Boutreau of the Legion,” Praslin answered miserably.
“Name of a name, here is an authority!” cried the Commandant. “And how
old is the little Boutreau?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Yes? And where has the little Boutreau been stationed?”
Young Praslin’s voice got smaller and smaller as he replied: “For the
last two years on an advanced post upon the Algerian frontier.”
“Where no doubt he has had full opportunity to compute the beauty of
women,” said the Commandant sagely. “I think we can now construct a
picture of this houri. She will be fifty if she is a day. In the colour
and texture of her skin she will be very like a fig. Not all the kohl in
the East will lend a sparkle to her eyes, nor all the red salve
freshness to her faded lips. She will wear a red dress with a swaying
whale-boned skirt glittering with spangles and she will tell you that
she dined at the Ritz in Paris a fortnight ago.”
The description was not inept, but his voice changed now into a snarl.
Commandant Marnier had the ill humour of men who sit all their lives in
the company of their juniors and see themselves overpassed by each in
turn.
“The ladies of the Villa Iris! Have we not all sought our good fortune
at their hands? The poor pilgrims! Here they have reached the last stage
but one in their doleful Pilgrimage. Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Oran,
Tangiers, Casablanca and then up on the supply wagons to the advanced
Posts of the Legion from which there is no return! Francine, Florette,
Hortense—oh, the pretty names! Yes, that’s about all they have left
when they reach this fine metropolis of Casablanca—their pretty names!”
He rose with a contemptuous movement from his chair, and Gerard de
Montignac asked carelessly, with a mind far away from the subject.
“And what is the name of this girl?”
“Marguerite Lambert, an American,” replied Praslin, and close by Gerard,
a young lieutenant of spahis who had disembarked that morning from Oran
raised himself half out of his chair and sank back again.
“Do you know her, too?” Gerard asked.
“No,” replied the lieutenant. “Yet I have danced with her”; and he sat
wondering not so much that Marguerite Lambert had come to Casablanca as
that he should not have guessed after that short stay of hers at Oran
that it was to Casablanca she must and would come.
Gerard de Montignac moved round the table to Henri Ratenay, an officer
of his own regiment who had made the campaign of Chaiouïa with him and
Ravenel.
“Shall we go to the Villa Iris?” he said.
Ratenay laughed and lifted his cap down from a peg.
“What! Has Praslin fired you? Let us go.”
But outside the long wooden building with its verandah of boards, Gerard
de Montignac stopped. Marguerite Lambert roused no curiosity in him at
this moment.
“A man from the Native Department called Baumann came from Rabat to-day
to see the General. I hear that he has some news of Paul. He returns to
Rabat to-morrow, but I was told that I might find him to-night at the
Villa Iris. Let us go, then! For though I laugh, I am very anxious.”
Gerard de Montignac was an officer of a type not rare in the French
Army. An aristocrat to his finger tips, a youth with one foot in the
drawing rooms of the Faubourg and the other in the cafés of Montmartre,
and contemptuous of politics, he had turned his back on Paris like so
many of his kind and sought a career in the colonial army of France. He
kept up a plentiful correspondence with the beautiful ladies of his
acquaintance, which did him no good with his masters at the War Office.
For the ladies would quote his letters at their dinner parties. “What do
you think? I had a letter from Gerard to-day. He says that such a
mistake was made, etc., etc.” But he was not a gossip. He was a student,
a soldier with a note book and more than one little brochure giving a
limpid account of a campaign, bore witness to his ambition and his zeal.
He was twenty-nine at this date, a year and a half older than Paul; gay
and unexacting in his pleasures. “One soon gets used to the second
best,” was a phrase of his, capable of much endurance and under a gay
demeanour rather hard; a good comrade but a stern enemy; with no liking
for games and not a sportsman at all in the English sense, but a
brilliant horseman, a skilled fencer and hard, throughout his long lean
body, as flesh can be. Women had not touched him deeply but he loved to
be spoken of amongst them; he was flattered that one woman should envy
another because that other received letters from him; if he had a
passion at all it was for this country in which he served and to which
he gave gladly his years of youth and his years of manhood. It was a new
thing to him, half problem, half toy, at once a new rib to the frame of
France and a jewel to be worthily set. On the one hand a country which
wide motor roads and schools of intensive farming and the conversion of
migratory tribes into permanent householders would develop, on the other
a place of beautiful shrines and exquisite archways and grim old kasbahs
with crenelated walls which must be preserved against the encroaching
waves of commerce. In appearance he was thin and long and without
pretension to good looks. His hair was receding a little from his
forehead; and his nose was sharp and gave to his face the suggestion of
a sabre; and he was as careful of his hands and his finger nails as if
he were still living amongst the Duchesses. Moreover, he had a great
love of Paul Ravenel, and as he looked about him on that hot night of
early April, his anxiety increased. For the town was thronged with new
troops, new companies of sappers, new artillery men. The information
from the interior of the country was alarming. The fires of hatred were
blazing up against Mulai Hafid, the new Sultan, as they had three years
before against Abd-el-Aziz. And for the same reason. He had sold himself
and his country to the Christians. Throughout the town there was
excitement and unrest. A movement must be made forward and this time to
Fez. Rumour had it that the Sultan was actually beleaguered there. And
somewhere out in the wild, fierce country Paul Ravenel was wandering.
“Let us hurry!” said Gerard de Montignac.
The Villa Iris stood in one of the meanest of the alleys to the left of
the great landward gate—a dingy, long, green house with all its windows
on the street carefully shuttered and something sinister in its aspect,
as though it was the house of dark stories. When De Montignac and
Ratenay stopped in front of it not a light was showing, but from
somewhere far within there came the tinkle of a piano.
De Montignac pushed open the door and took a step down into a long, dark
passage. They advanced for a few feet and then the door at the other end
was thrown open, letting in a glare of lights and a great noise. Some
one with the light behind him came towards them. Beyond that he was an
officer in uniform they knew nothing of him until they heard his voice.
“So you have come to see for yourself, eh?” he cried gaily. “But you
will do more than see to-night. Such a crowd in there!” and Praslin went
past them.
“What in the world was he talking about?” asked Gerard.
“Marguerite Lambert, I suppose,” replied Ratenay with a laugh. Gerard,
for his part, had forgotten all about her. Nor did she dwell at all in
his thoughts now. He went vaguely forward and found himself in a
grotesque imitation of a Moorish room, cheap tiles of the bathroom kind,
pillars carved and painted to mimic the delicate handicraft of Moorish
workmen, a blaze of light from unshaded globes, and a long, glittering
bar behind which Madame Delagrange presided, a red-faced woman cast in
so opulent a mould that he who looked at her perspired almost as freely
as she did herself. The bar stood against a wall opposite to the door,
and between there were rows of little three-legged iron tables, at which
Levantines, clerks, shopkeepers of every nationality and a few French
officers were seated. In front of the tables a few couples gyrated in a
melancholy fashion to a fox-trot thumped out upon an old and tortured
piano by a complacent Greek. If there could be anything worse on this
hot night than the glare of light and tawdry decorations, it was the
heart-rending racket of the piano. But dancers, decorations, piano and
glare were all lost upon Gerard de Montignac.
At the side of the Bar, wide double doors stood open upon a platform
roofed over with a vine; and in that doorway stood the officer of the
Native Department, of which he was in search.
“Baumann!” he cried, and crossed the room.
Baumann, a middle-aged, stockish Alsatian, long since settled in
Algeria, to whom this Bar seemed the very epitome of devil-may-care
luxury and pleasure, surveyed the Captain of Chasseurs with deference.
“It is gay here,” he said with a smile. “Life, my Captain, the life of
Paris and the Boulevards. You want to speak to me? Yes? We shall be
quieter here.”
He turned back with almost a sigh of regret to the boarded verandah
under the vines. To Gerard the verandah was a relief. Here at all events
it was cool and dark, and the piano did not thump upon the brain with so
exasperating a poignancy. There was a table empty at the end where a
couple of steps led down into a dark garden.
“Let us sit here!” said Gerard, and when the three were seated and the
drinks ordered from a person of indefinable nationality dressed up as a
Turk, he leaned forward.
“You have news of Paul Ravenel?”
“News? I couldn’t say as much as that,” replied Baumann. “I was at
Meknes when the thing occurred, before Meknes had declared for its new
patent Pretender. It’s five months ago.”
Baumann checked his speech and looked over Gerard’s shoulder intently
into the dark garden. Gerard was sitting by the edge of the verandah,
with his face turned eagerly towards Baumann.
“What’s the matter?” Gerard asked impatiently.
“Nothing, I think. Nothing really.”
But nevertheless Baumann appeared a little uneasy and his eyes still
held their gaze in the same direction. Ratenay turned. At the first he
could see nothing to account for the alertness which had come so swiftly
into Baumann’s face. Then he made out a black figure sitting or
crouching upon the low edge of the verandah some way behind Gerard de
Montignac, just in the edge of the lights, and more in shadow than in
light. Gerard had not moved by so much as the twitch of a limb. He
rapped, however, now upon the iron table with his knuckles.
“Come, Baumann!” he said sharply. “You were at Meknes five months ago.
Well!”
“I had finished my business,” Baumann replied hurriedly, but speaking in
a lower voice than he had used before. “I was on my way back to Rabat by
the plain of the Sebou. You know how the track runs from Meknes, due
north over rolling country, then along the flank of the Zarhoun mountain
to a pass.”
“Yes.”
“Half way to the pass stand the Roman ruins of Volubilis.”
“Yes.”
“But they lie off the track to the right and close under the mountain,
and worse than that, close under the sacred City of Mulai Idris, which
is forbidden ground.”
Both Ratenay and Gerard de Montignac knew well enough the evil
reputation of that inviolate city where the Founder of the Moorish
Empire had his tomb. A hive of bandits and fanatics who lived upon the
fame of the tomb, and when the offerings were insufficient made good the
balance by murder and highway robbery. No European could pass within the
walls of that town, and even to approach them was venturesome.
“I turned off with my small escort,” continued Baumann, “to visit those
ruins, but even before we reached them we heard a clamour from the walls
of the City, far away as it was. And the leader of the escort was very
anxious that I should not delay amongst those tall, broken pillars and
huge, fallen blocks of stone. So I hurried over my visit, but even then,
half way between us and the track a line of men armed and some of them
mounted sprang up from the bushes of asphodel and barred our return.”
“We shall have to unlock and scour that City one of these months,” said
Gerard de Montignac, little thinking that it was he upon whom, in after
years, the duty would fall, or what strange and tragic revelations would
be made to him upon that day.
“When they saw that we were soldiers they let us pass with a few curses,
that is, all of them except one, a young fellow in a ragged djellaba,
armed with a great pole. ‘What are you doing in our country, you dog of
a Christian?’ he screamed at me in a fury, and he twirled his staff
suddenly about his head. He was so near to me that he could have broken
my back with it before I could have raised a hand to defend myself. I
had just time to understand my danger and then he grounded his staff and
laughed at me. His friends grinned, too. I expect that I did look rather
a fool. I was thoroughly frightened, I can tell you. The whole thing had
happened so suddenly. I almost felt my spine snapping,” and Baumann
wiped his face with his handkerchief at the recollection of that great
staff whirling in the air and him helpless upon his horse with his
holsters strapped. “So that until we had passed them and were back upon
the track again, I didn’t understand.”
“Understand what?” asked Gerard de Montignac.
“Understand who had played this joke upon me,” returned Baumann. “It was
Captain Ravenel.”
Gerard de Montignac was startled.
“You are sure?” he cried. “He was there in Mulai Idris, one of them!”
and Baumann suddenly exclaimed:
“Hush! Don’t turn round. There’s a man behind you. He has been creeping
along the edge of the verandah. This town is full of spies.”
Gerard did not turn, but Ratenay, from where he sat, could see. The
black figure crouching well away behind them on the edge of the raised
floor had slipped quietly towards them, whilst Baumann had been telling
his story. He was now close behind Gerard, squatting low upon the plank,
with his feet in the garden, a ragged and dusty Jew with a mass of
greasy ringlets struggling from beneath his skull cap.
Gerard de Montignac turned swiftly round upon him.
“What do you want here?” he cried angrily.
“A whiskey and soda!” replied Paul Ravenel. For that once insular drink
had become lately known with favour to the officers of France.
[Illustration: _A William Fox Production._ _The Winding Stair._ A
CHANCE MEETING IN THE ARABIAN MARKET PLACE.]
CHAPTER VI
The Order
Paul Ravenel reported to the General and then betook himself to the
house by the sea-wall in which he had spent so much of his boyhood. He
had a month’s furlough and an account of his wanderings to write. At the
end of a week he had got the stain from his skin and the dye out of his
hair, but he had not got far with his report, not liking the look of the
words as he wrote them down, and composing the page again to find it no
better done than it had been before. He was sitting despondently at his
writing-table at ten o’clock on one of these evenings, his hair all
rumpled and a chaos of notes spread about him, when Gerard de Montignac
burst into the room.
“Paul, I am worn to a shadow with sheer idleness,” he cried. “Always
something is going to happen, never anything does happen; except ships
and ships and ships and batteries landing and soldiers marching to God
knows where. I can bear no more of it. We will break out to-night, Paul.
We will drink Casablanca in one draught. We will do something wild and
utterly original.”
Paul looked up and laughed.
“For instance?”
“Yes, it is rather difficult. To begin with, we might go to the Villa
Iris.”
“That _bouge_?”
“And we might dance with Marguerite Lambert, the American?”
Paul stared.
“And who the devil is Marguerite Lambert?” he asked. Could any good
thing come out of the Villa Iris?
“It is high time you knew her,” said Gerard de Montignac decidedly.
“What is she like?”
“I haven’t seen her, either. But the little Praslin says she’s a dream,
and the little Boutreau, the little Boutreau of the Legion cannot sleep
at night for thinking of her. It is high time, Paul, that we both made
her acquaintance.”
Paul laughed and shook his head.
“I daren’t risk catching the little Boutreau’s malady until I have
finished this report.”
“You have a month.”
“I know. But I want to go back to my battalion and command my company.
Some day we are going to march to Fez. Don’t forget it!”
Gerard de Montignac sat down, took off his cap, lit a cigarette and drew
up his chair to the table.
“You are a serious one,” he said very sagely, “a fastidious, serious
one. When you look at me I feel that you are very sorry for me—that
poor Gerard—and that you know I can’t help it. And when there are
Generals about, I point to you and say loudly: ‘Ah, there is a serious
one who will go far!’ But here privately I am afraid for you, Paul. I
say to myself, ‘He is not of stone. Some day things will happen with
that serious one, and where we common people scrape our shins, he will
break his neck. When we amuse ourselves for a month, he will marry the
Sergeant-Major’s daughter.’”
Paul had heard this homily a good many times before. He just went on
writing as if his friend were not in the room.
“But I am not sure that something has not already happened to you—oh, a
long time ago.”
Paul’s pen stopped abruptly, but he did not look up from the page.
“Why are you not sure?” he asked.
“Because you have compassions and sympathies and little delicacies of
thought which the rest of us have not. The garrisons of the Colonial
army and the coast towns of North Africa are not the natural soil for
such harvests. Some long time ago, a thing has happened, eh?”
“No,” said Paul. He gathered his papers together and got up. Gerard was
beginning to guess a little too shrewdly. “But I will tell you what is
going to happen. I am going with you to the Villa Iris.”
The nine years which had passed since Paul had listened through an
evening to Colonel Vanderfelt had written less upon his face than on his
character. He hardly looked older, nor had he lost the elusive grace
which made others warm to him from the outset of acquaintanceship. But
he had now the ease, the restful quality of a man who has found himself.
Youth which is solitary is given to luxuriate in woe, but the years of
companionship, of friendly rivalry, of strenuous effort, and a little
trifle of achievement had enabled Paul Ravenel to contemplate the blot
upon his name with a much less tragic eye than when it had first been
revealed to him. He had hurried from Colonel Vanderfelt’s house to
France and for a week had roamed the woods of Fontainebleau sunk in such
an exaggeration of shame that he shunned all speech and company and felt
himself a leper. Paul remembered that week now with amazement and scorn.
He had served throughout the Chaiouïa Campaign, from the capture of
Settat, right on to the wonderful three weeks in March when with the
speed and the mobility of Stonewall Jackson’s “foot-cavalry” they had
marched and fought and straightway marched again until the swift pounce
upon the great camp of Bou Nuallah had put the seal upon their
victories. Settat, M’Kown, Sidi el Mekhi, the R’Fakha, the
M’Karto—those had been royal days of friendship and battle, and
endurance, and the memory of the week at Fontainebleau could only live
in shame beside them.
Gerard de Montignac’s careless words had suddenly set Paul upon this
train of thought, so that he forgot for a moment his friend’s presence
in the room. He had not changed his plans—he found himself putting that
question silently. No, he still meant to go back to his own home and
race and name. He was not of those to whom Eastern lands and Eastern
climes make so searching an appeal that they can never afterwards be
happy anywhere else. He was a true child of the grey skies, and he meant
in due time to live under them. But the actual date for that migration
had been pushed off to a misty day. He put his cap on his head.
“Come, let us sample your Villa Iris,” he said; and the two friends
walked across Casablanca to the green, dark-shuttered house.
The Bar was full and the piano doing its worst. Above the babel of
voices, every harsh note of it hurt like a tap upon a live brain. Paul
and Gerard de Montignac were the only two in uniform there that night. A
few small officials of the French business companies, Greeks, Italians,
nondescripts from the Levant, and Jews, who three years before, paddling
barefoot in the filth of their Mellah, were the only people to shout
“Vive la France,” as the troops marched through Casablanca—these made
up the company of the Villa Iris.
Gerard de Montignac looked about the room. At a big table at the end, a
little crowd of these revellers, dandies in broadcloth and yellow,
buttoned boots, were raising a din as they drank, some standing and
gesticulating, others perched on high stools, and all talking at the top
of their high, shrill voices. Half-a-dozen women in bedraggled costumes
covered with spangles which had once done duty in the outlying Music
Halls of Paris were dancing with their partners in front of the tables.
But Gerard could not believe that any one of them could have cost even
little Boutreau of the Legion five minutes of his ordinary ration of
sleep.
“She may be outside,” said Gerard. “Let us see!”
He made his way between the tables, crossed the open space of floor and
went out through the wide doorway on the big verandah. Paul followed
him. The verandah was almost empty. They sat down at one of the small
iron tables near to the garden, and Gerard de Montignac broke into a
laugh as he noticed his friend’s troubled face.
“You cannot bear it, eh? It is all too vulgar and noisy and crude. You
are sorry for us who are amused by it.”
Paul laughed and his face cleared.
“Don’t be an idiot, Gerard. It isn’t that.”
“What’s the matter, then?”
The look of perplexity returned to Ravenel’s eyes.
“I have seen her,” he said.
“Seen whom?” asked Gerard.
“Your Marguerite Lambert. At least, I think so. It must have been she.”
There was a real note of distress in Paul’s voice which Gerard de
Montignac was quite at a loss to understand. He turned in his chair and
looked into the saloon. Between the doorway and the tables a few couples
were revolving, but the women were of the type native to such places,
their countenances plastered with paint, a fixed smile upon their lips,
and a deliberate archness in their expression, and in their features the
haggard remains of what even at its bloom so many years ago could have
been no more than a vulgar comeliness.
“She is sitting at the big table with those half-drunken Levantines,”
said Paul. “What is she doing amongst them?” He asked the question in a
voice of bewilderment and pity. “Why is she here at all—a child!”
Suddenly the hard uproar of the piano ceased, the dancers stopped their
gyrations, with the abruptness of mechanical figures whose works have
run down, and sauntered to their chairs. Gerard could now see the big
table but there was such a cluster of men about it, gesticulating and
shouting, that Gerard de Montignac was moved to disgust.
“It is for those men we fight and get killed,” he cried, turning towards
Paul. “Look at them! Three years ago they were cringing in their Mellahs
or shivering in their little shops and offices for fear of an attack
upon the city. Now they are the bloods of the town, picking up the money
all day, and living the Life at night. Another three years and half of
them will have their automobiles and take supper at the Café de Paris,
whilst you and I, Paul, if we are lucky, will be shaking with fever in
some garrison in the desert. I should like to bang their noisy heads
together.”
Paul laughed at his friend’s indignation.
“All wars fatten the carrion birds, but it isn’t for the carrion birds
that they are fought,” he said, and in the saloon all the voices ceased.
Gerard de Montignac swung round again in his chair. The men who had been
standing about the big table had taken their seats and on the far side
of it, almost facing the doorway and the two officers beyond in the dark
of the verandah, a girl was standing. Gerard uttered a little cry, so
startled was he by her aspect, by the sharp contrast between her
delicacy and the squalor of her company. He heard Paul Ravenel move
behind him, but he did not turn. His eyes were drawn to that slight
figure and held by it.
“Marguerite Lambert,” he whispered to himself. There she stood, looking
straight out through the doorway towards them. Could she see them, he
wondered. Why was she standing there in view before that crowd, in this
dustbin of Casablanca? It was wrong.
The piano sounded a note and Marguerite Lambert began to sing. But she
could not sing—that was evident from the first bar. A tiny voice, which
even in that silence hardly reached to the two men on the verandah,
clear and gentle but with no range of music in it. It was like a child
singing and an untrained child without any gift for singing. As singing
it was ridiculous. Yet Gerard de Montignac neither laughed, nor could
withdraw his eyes. He even held his breath, and of her singing he was
altogether unaware.
She was pretty—yes, but too thin, and with eyes unnaturally large for
her face. She was fresh: yes, strangely fresh for that place of squalor
and withered flowers. And she was young, so that she stood apart from
the other women like a jewel amongst pebbles. But it was not her beauty
which arrested him, nor some indefinable air of good breeding which she
had, but—and when she was halfway through her little song Gerard
reached the explanation in his analysis—a queer look of fatality. Yes,
a fatal look as though she was predestined to something out of the
common, greater joys perhaps or greater sufferings, a bigger destiny
than falls to the ordinary lot.
Gerard de Montignac had all the Frenchman’s passion for classing people
in their proper categories, and his knack, as soon as that was done, of
losing all interest in them. He was unable to place the girl in hers.
What was she singing about in that absurd little tinkling voice?
Moonlight, and lovers, and lilies on the water? To a lot of degenerate
money-grubbing Levantines? Through Gerard’s memory, to the tune which
she sang was running a chain of names—names of places—names which
Commandant Marnier had savagely strung together one night in the Mess;
the names of the stages in that melancholy pilgrimage from which women
do not return. Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Toulon, Marseilles, Oran,
Tangiers, Casablanca, and the Advanced Posts of the Legion. Yes, but the
pilgrimage occupied a lifetime. What was this girl’s age? Was she
nineteen or twenty? Not more, assuredly! How then had she come to the
penultimate stage so soon? By what desperate circumstance of crime or
ill-fortune? . . .
The song ceased and at once the clatter of voices broke out again.
Madame Delagrange behind her bar poured out the drinks for three or four
dark-skinned waiters dressed like Turks and a painted woman with worn
eyes and wrinkles which no paint could hide minced out in her shabby,
high-heeled dancing slippers to the officers on the verandah.
“Give me something to drink, dearie—I am dying of thirst,” she said,
and she drew a chair to their table. Gerard de Montignac laughed
brutally and would have driven her away, but Paul was quick to
anticipate him. He had seen the woman flush under her paint when Gerard
laughed.
“Of course,” he said at once. “What shall we all drink, Mademoiselle?”
She turned to him gratefully.
“If you will take my advice, the whiskey. The champagne—oh, never.”
“I can imagine it,” said Paul. “Chiefly sugar and sulphuric acid and
mixed in the back yard,” and he laughed pleasantly to put the woman at
her ease.
The one sure gain which had come to Paul from the destruction of his
illusions was a hesitation in passing judgment upon people and
estimating their values and characters. He had been so utterly mistaken
once. He meant to go gently thereafter. And partly for that reason,
partly because of an imagination which made him always want to stand
behind the eyes of others and see what different things they looked out
upon, from the things which he saw himself, there had grown up within
that compassion and sympathy which Gerard de Montignac had noticed as
dangerous qualities.
So although in truth he was more impatient than Gerard that this woman
should be gone, he betrayed no sign of it. She had surely humiliations
enough each day without his adding yet another. Accordingly they sat
about the table, and the woman began with the usual gambit of her class
in the only game which she knew how to play.
“I have not seen you here before. You have just arrived in Casablanca,
too—a few days ago? My name is Henriette. Only to think that a
fortnight ago I was dining in the Café de Paris! But I wanted a
change—so fatiguing, Paris!—and to pay my expenses meanwhile. So I
dance here for a few weeks and return.”
Paul accepted the outrageous lie with a fine courtesy which was lost
upon his friend, who for his part grinned openly, remembering the
Commandant Marnier’s descriptions.
“And what is that little one, Marguerite Lambert, at her age and with
her looks, doing here at the Villa Iris?” he asked bluntly.
Henriette flushed and her eyes grew as hard as buttons. “And why
shouldn’t she be here?” she asked with a resentful challenge. “Just like
the rest of us! Or do you think her so different as those idiots do over
at the table there? But I will tell you one thing,” and she nodded her
head emphatically. “She will not be here long—no, nor anywhere else,
the little fool! But, there!—” Henriette’s anger died away as quickly
as it had flared up. “She is not a bad sort and quite friendly with us
girls.”
“And why will she not stay here long?” asked Gerard.
“Oh, ask her yourself, if you are so curious,” she cried impatiently.
“But you are dull, you two! No, you are not amusing me at all,” and,
emptying her glass, Henriette flung off into the saloon as the
accompanist began once more to belabour the keys of the piano.
Gerard watched her go with a shrug of the shoulders and a laugh. He
turned then towards Paul and Paul’s chair was empty. Paul had risen the
moment Henriette had flung away and was walking at the back of the
tables towards the doorway into the Bar. Gerard watched him curiously
and with a certain malicious amusement. Was he, too—that serious
one—to go at last the way of all flesh? To seek the conventional
compensation for a long period of strenuous service in the facile amours
of the coast towns?
The beginning of the affair, at all events, was not conventional. Gerard
noticed, with a curious envy which he had not thought to feel, that Paul
Ravenel went quietly to the back of that noisy table in the Bar, and
stood just behind Marguerite Lambert. No one at the table noticed him
nor did Marguerite turn. But she rose slowly to her feet, like a person
in a dream. Only then did the men drinking at the table look toward Paul
Ravenel. A strange silence fell upon them, as Marguerite turned about
and went towards Paul. For a moment they stood facing one another. Then
Marguerite fell in at his side, as though an order had been given and
they moved away from the group at the table, slowly, like people alone,
quite alone in an empty world. And no word had been spoken by either of
them to the other, nor did either of them smile; and their hands did not
touch. But as they reached the open floor where a few were dancing,
Marguerite glanced quickly, and to Gerard’s fancy, with fear, at the fat
woman behind the Bar; and then she spoke. There was no doubt what she
was saying.
“We had better dance for a few moments.”
Paul took her in his arms, and they danced. Gerard de Montignac rose and
went out of the Villa Iris. The picture of the meeting between those two
was still vivid before his eyes. It was as though an order had been
given and both without haste or question had perfectly obeyed it.
CHAPTER VII
The Pilgrimage
When they reached the wide doorway they slipped out onto the balcony. It
was cool here and quiet and there was no light except that which came
from the Bar. They sat down at a table apart from the others and close
to the garden. A waiter followed them out quickly and looked at
Marguerite for an order.
“May I have a citronade?” she asked of Paul, and he replied:
“Let me order for you, will you? A little supper and some red wine. You
are hungry.”
Marguerite looked at him swiftly and dropped her eyes.
“Yes, I am hungry,” she said, and a smile slowly trembled about her lips
and then lit up her whole face. “I have never admitted it before.”
The hollows of her shoulders, the unnaturally bright, large eyes burning
in her thin face, and an air of lassitude she had, told a story of
starvation clearly enough. But the visitors at the Villa Iris had not
the compassion nor the interest to read it, and Marguerite, for her own
reasons, had always been at pains that it should not be read at all.
Now, however, she smiled, glad of Paul’s care, glad that he had seen at
once with such keen, sure eyes one of the things which were amiss with
her. Paul ordered some chicken and a salad.
“But the waiter will be quick, won’t he?” she urged. “Madame is not very
content if we are idle.”
Paul laughed.
“I’ll speak to her,” he said lightly. “I’ll tell her that she is not to
worry you to-night.”
He rose half out of his chair, meaning to buy an evening of rest for
Marguerite Lambert from the old harridan behind the Bar. A bottle of
champagne would no doubt be the price and there was no compulsion upon
them to drink it. But he was not yet upon his feet when the girl reached
out her hand and caught his sleeve.
“No! Please!” she cried with a vehemence which quite startled him. “If
she sends for me, I have got to go and you mustn’t say a word! Promise
me!”
She was in terror. Even now her eyes glanced affrightedly towards the
open doorway, already expecting the appearance of her mistress. To the
enigma which the girl’s presence at all in the Villa Iris proposed to
Paul Ravenel, here was another added. Why should she be so terrified of
that red-faced, bustling woman behind the Bar? After all, Marguerite
Lambert—the only delicate and fresh and young girl who had danced there
for a living—must mean custom to Madame Delagrange; must be therefore a
personage to be considered, not a mere slave to be terrified and driven!
Why, then—? How, then—? And his blood was hot at the mere thought of
Marguerite’s terror and subjection.
But he showed nothing of his anger, nothing of his perplexity in his
face. He was at pains to reassure her. Let him not add to her fears and
troubles.
“I promise, Marguerite,” he said. “But let’s hope she doesn’t notice
your absence.”
Once more she smiled, her face a flame of tenderness.
“You called me by my name.”
He repeated it, dwelling upon its syllables.
“It’s a beautiful name,” he said.
“Perhaps, as you speak it,” she answered with a laugh. “But wait till
you hear how harsh a word Madame can make of it.”
The waiter brought the supper and laid it on the table between them.
“Eat and drink first,” said Paul Ravenel, as he poured the red wine into
her glass. “Then we will talk.”
“You shall tell me your name before I begin.”
“Paul—Paul Ravenel,” said he, and she repeated the name once with her
big, serious eyes fixed upon him and a second time with a little grimace
which wrinkled up her nose and gave to her whole face a flash of gaiety.
She drew her chair to the table with an anticipation and relish which
filled Paul with pity and tugged sharply at the strings of his heart.
She ate her supper with enjoyment and daintiness.
“A cigarette?” said Paul, offering her his case as soon as she had
finished.
“Thank you! Oh, but I was hungry!”
She lit it and leaning back in her chair smoked whilst the waiter
cleared the supper away and set the bottle and the glasses between them
on the table. Then Marguerite leaned forward, her face between her
hands, her elbows on the table.
“Paul!” she said with a smile, as if the name was a fruit and delightful
to taste.
“I saw you,” she continued in a low voice, “when you first came into the
room, you and your friend. I thought at once that you would come for me
as you did. I called to you—yes, even then—oh, with all my
strength—quietly—to myself. But I called so earnestly that I was
afraid that I had cried my little prayer out loud. And then when I lost
sight of you out here in the dark I was afraid. I didn’t see you come in
again. I only knew suddenly that you were standing behind me.”
Paul Ravenel watched her as she spoke, her great eyes shining, her face
delicately white in that dim light. He had no doubt that she spoke in
all frankness and simplicity the truth. Were they not once more alone,
shut off by a wall of dreams from all the world? Paul leaned forward and
took her hand.
“I did not need to hear you call, Marguerite. I saw you, too, at once.
My friend had heard of you, was looking for you. I saw you. I told him
where you were”; and for a moment the girl’s face clouded over and the
spell was broken.
So far Paul Ravenel had spoken in French. Now he asked in English:
“Why do they call you the American?”
Marguerite Lambert stared at him with her eyes opened wide.
“You, too?”
“Yes. We are of the same race.”
She looked at his uniform.
“My mother was French, my father English. He took my mother’s
nationality,” he said.
Marguerite suddenly stretched both her hands across the table to him in
a swift abandonment.
“I am glad,” she said. “I come from Devonshire.”
“I from Sussex.”
“I from the county of broad moors and little valleys. You from—”; and
some look upon his face checked her suddenly. “I have said something
that hurts?” she asked remorsefully.
“No,” answered Paul, and for a few moments they were silent. To both of
them this revelation that they were of the same race was no longer so
much of a surprise as a portent. They were like travellers not quite
sure that their feet were on their due appointed road, who come upon a
sign post and know that they have made no mistake. These two had no
doubt that they were upon their road of destiny, that this swift,
unexpected friendship would lead them together into new countries where
their lives would be fulfilled.
“Just to imagine if I had never come to the Villa Iris!” Paul exclaimed
with a gasp of fear; so near he had been to not coming. But Marguerite’s
eyelids drooped over her eyes and a look of doubt and sadness shadowed
her face. Exaltations and hopes—here were bright things she dared
hardly look upon, for if she once looked and took them to her heart, and
found them false, what was merely grievous would no longer be endurable.
“It is a long way from Devonshire to Casablanca,” cried Paul, and
Marguerite smiled.
“There’s a question very prettily put,” said she.
Her story was ordinary enough in its essentials. “Some families go up,”
she said simply. “Others seem doomed to go right down and bring every
member of them down too. Most English villages have an example, I think.
Once and not so long ago they were well off and lived in their farm
house. Now every descendant is a labourer in a cottage, except one or
two perhaps who have emigrated and fared no better abroad. The Lamberts
were like that.”
Marguerite had been born when the family were more than half way down
the hill, although outwardly it still showed prosperous. Her father, a
widower, spent more of his time upon race-courses than upon his farm and
made it a point of pride to educate his children in the fashionable and
expensive schools.
“He was the most happy-go-lucky man that ever lived,” said Marguerite.
“We knew nothing of the debts or the mortgages. He was all for being a
gentleman and to be a gentleman in his definition was to spend money. He
came down to breakfast one morning—there were the four of us at home,
my brother, my two sisters and myself, and said cheerily, ‘Well, girls,
all the money’s gone and the farm, too.’ Then he ate his breakfast
cheerily, went upstairs and blew out his brains with his shot-gun, I
suppose quite cheerily, too.”
The catastrophe had happened a little more than two years before, when
Marguerite was between seventeen and eighteen. Misfortune scatters a
family as a wind autumn leaves. The brother, a small replica of his
father, departed for the Argentine, cheerily confident of rebuilding by
an opportune speculation the Lambert fortune; the eldest of the sisters
married an unsuccessful farmer in the neighbourhood with whom she was in
love; the second became a private secretary, lost her job within the
week, and discovered her proper sphere of work, as a pretty waitress in
a tea-shop. Marguerite herself secured an engagement in the chorus of a
Musical Comedy company which was touring the provinces.
“We were just ordinary girls,” Marguerite continued, “rather fecklessly
brought up, fairly good-looking, decent manners, but nothing
outstanding. There wasn’t any Edna May amongst us. We just did what we
could, not very well.” Marguerite suddenly broke into a delicious laugh.
“You heard me sing, didn’t you? Pathetic, wasn’t it? At least it would
have been if I hadn’t felt the humour of it all the while. Well, we got
stranded in Wigan—I am speaking of my Musical Comedy company. I pawned
a few things and travelled to London. Three of the chorus girls and I
clubbed together and got lodgings in Bloomsbury. But it was October when
the most of the touring companies had already gone out and fresh
engagements were only probable for the Christmas pantomime. One after
another of my companions dropped away. Finally I was offered an opening
in a concert party which was to tour the music halls in France. I was to
dance between the songs.”
“A concert party!” said Paul. “That sounds doubtful.”
Marguerite nodded.
“I was warned against it. The White Slave traffic! But I had to take my
risk. And as it happened there wasn’t any roguery of that kind. Our
concert party was genuine. Only it didn’t attract and at Avignon it came
to an end. There seems to me to be a curse on families going down hill.
Misfortunes centre upon them. It is as though a decent world wanted to
hurry them right down and comfortably out of sight as soon as possible,
so that it might no longer feel the shame of them.” Marguerite laughed,
not so much in bitterness as in submission to a law. “Perhaps it is
simply that we who belong to those families don’t will hard enough that
things should go right.”
Paul Ravenel looked sharply at his companion. He had instances within
his own knowledge to bear out the shrewdness of her remark. His father
and Colonel Vanderfelt! What difference was there between them, except
that one willed hard enough to atone for a crime and the other did not?
“Yes. I expect that’s the truth, if you are started down hill,” he said
slowly. “And then what did you do?”
There was a great fear in his heart as to what her answer might be. He
was already making excuses—already arguing why should there be one law
for the man and another for the woman—and rebelling against the
argument. Marguerite did not resolve his fears in her account of her
miserable little Odyssey; nor, on the other hand, did she increase them.
“I had enough money to take me to Marseilles. . . . I danced at a café
there for a little while. I was told that if I crossed the Mediterranean
to Oran . . . I managed to do that and I danced at Oran for a little
while. Then I came on to Casablanca,” and she caught her breath and
clasped her hands convulsively under the sting of some ever-present
terror. “And I am afraid,” she whispered.
“Of what?” asked Paul.
“That I shall not stay here long, either,” she cried in a dreadful note
of despair, with her great eyes suddenly full of tears. “Then what shall
I do?”
Even as she spoke that question her face changed. Some one was coming
out from the Bar through the doorway. A smile of convention upon her
lips masked her misery.
“I shall have to go now, Paul,” she said in a low voice, caressing his
name. “I am sorry. And you will let me go, as you promised?”
“Yes,” said Paul regretfully.
“And you will come here again, some evening, soon, Paul!” she whispered
with a wistful little smile upon her lips.
“I shall wait now.”
The smile disappeared at once.
“No. I must dance now. I told you Madame did not like to see me idle. I
shall not be able to sit with you again this evening, and we do not
close until two or three in the morning, if there is any one to stay. So
to-morrow, perhaps, Paul?”
“To-morrow, Marguerite.”
She stood up as a man approached the table. He was a thick-set, stoutish
man with a heavy black moustache and a yellowish, shiny face. He was one
of those who had been seated at the table in the saloon with Marguerite
when Ravenel and Gerard de Montignac had entered the room. He came up
with a frown upon his face and spoke surlily in French, with a harsh,
metallic accent.
“We wait a long time for you.”
Marguerite Lambert made no rejoinder. “You wish me to dance with you,”
she said. “I am very happy,” and with a smile of convention upon her
lips she said good-night carelessly to Paul Ravenel. But the appeal and
softness of her eyes took the convention out of her smile and the
carelessness from her farewell.
Paul, left alone at the table, watched her through the doorway as she
danced. Her little plain pink frock was as neat as attention could make
it, her shoes and stockings were spotless, her hair, brown with a
flicker of copper, parted at the side and with a curiously attractive
little peak in the centre of her forehead, was waved smoothly about her
small head. His hands had been tingling to stroke it, to feel its silk
and warmth rippling beneath his fingers, whilst they had been sitting
together on the balcony. There was a slovenliness in the aspect of the
other women. Marguerite was orderly as though even amidst the squalor of
her environment she kept on respecting herself. She wore no ornaments at
all. She was fairly tall, with slim legs and beautiful hands and feet.
As he watched her Paul fell into a cold and bitter rage against the
oily-mustachioed creature with whom she danced.
“Gerard was right,” he said to himself. “We go out and fight, we get
ourselves killed and mutilated, so that such fellows may make money and
keep it up all night in the Bars. The Profiteers! We who are about to
die salute you!”
Thus he apostrophised the man who had taken Marguerite Lambert away from
him, raging furiously. The old prudent Paul Ravenel counting his steps
and avoiding emotions, had for the moment quite disappeared. He was a
boy of nineteen, ardent and unreasonable, and a little ridiculous in the
magniloquence of his thoughts. The only comfort he drew was from an
aloofness in Marguerite of which she had shown nothing whilst she sat
with him, but which was now very evident. She did not speak whilst she
danced, her eyelids were lowered, her face had lost all its expression.
Paul had a fancy that she had just left her body to revolve and glide
delicately in the dance, whilst her spirit had withdrawn itself into
some untarnished home of its own. The piano suddenly was dumb; the
dancers stopped: Marguerite and her partner were standing face to face
in front of the doorway. Paul had promised not to interfere. Very well
then, he would go. He rose abruptly to his feet, his eyes fixed upon the
couple; and at once, though Marguerite never looked his way, she moved
sharply. It was a quick little start, hardly perceptible. Paul felt a
wave of joy sweep over him. She was conscious of him, as he was
conscious of her, so that if he moved abruptly she at a distance was
startled. He turned with a smile upon his lips, but after all he did not
go, as he had intended to do. For Henriette came out of the Bar towards
him.
“Won’t you stay for a minute,” she said, “and give me something to
drink! I am dying of thirst!”
“Of course,” he said, and he called to the waiter. He had a great
goodwill towards all women that night, but above all to the women of the
Villa Iris.
CHAPTER VIII
Henriette Explains
Paul was rewarded out of all measure for his courtesy. For as Henriette
sat and drank her whiskey and soda, she talked.
“You were civil to me when your friend would have sent me contemptuously
away,” she said. “And when I told you that I had dined at the Café de
Paris only three weeks ago, and your friend laughed, you did not. You
pretended that you believed it. That was polite of you. For we both knew
that never once in all my life have I dined at the Café de Paris or any
such swell restaurant in Paris. And it was kind of you. It made me ready
to fancy that I had dined there and that does one a little good, eh? One
feels better in one’s self. So I will be kind in my turn. You are
interested in that little one,” and she jerked her head towards the
table in the Bar, where Marguerite had rejoined the noisy group. “Yes,
she has chic, and she is pretty on her feet, and she has a personality,
but—” Paul Ravenel leaned forward, his face hardening.
“Mademoiselle, I do not want to hear.”
“Oh, I am not going to crab her,” replied Henriette, and her petulant
temper flamed up. “You think, I suppose, that women cannot admire a girl
who is younger and prettier than themselves and cannot like her. That is
foolish. I tell you we all like Marguerite Lambert. And I speak to you
for your good and hers. But, of course, if you do not care to hear me—”
“I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle,” said Paul. “I will listen to you very
willingly.”
Henriette’s passions were no more than bubbles upon the surface of her
good-humour. They burst very quickly and left no traces. The flush faded
from her throat and forehead and no doubt from the painted cheeks as
well, though that could not be discovered by mortal eye.
“Listen,” she said. “Your friend asked me what Marguerite Lambert was
doing at the Villa Iris, and I would not answer him. Why should I? It
was clear what he meant, wasn’t it? Why was she, who might really have
dined at the Café de Paris three weeks ago, already here at Casablanca,
so near to the end of things?” Henriette’s face grew for a moment
haggard with terror, as she formulated the problem. The last stage but
one of the dreadful pilgrimage of her class! She herself was making that
journey, and what lay beyond and so hideously close, loomed up when she
thought of it, and appalled her.
Paul interrupted her with a word of solace.
“You are making too much of his question.”
But Henriette would have none of his consolation.
“No, that is what he meant and what you meant, too?”
“I said nothing.”
“But the question was in your face. The question and a great deal of
trouble. Why was Marguerite Lambert already at Casablanca?”
Paul did not contradict her again. She would not believe him if he did
and he might lose the answer to the question.
“You made it still more difficult to understand,” he said frankly. There
was no good to be gained by beating about the bush with this woman who
was disposed to help him. “For though you didn’t answer our question you
added to it another perplexity. You said that she wouldn’t remain here
long.”
Henriette nodded.
“That is right. The answer to both questions is the same. She drifted
here so soon, and she will stay for so short a time, because she waits
for the grand passion. Yes, the little fool!” but it was not in scorn
that she styled Marguerite a little fool, but with a half-contemptuous
tenderness, and perhaps a tiny spite of envy.
“The grand passion!” Paul repeated, wondering what in the world his
companion meant.
“Yes. Oh, she is quite frank with the rest of us. We talk, you know,
when we are dressing, and after the café is closed, when we are changing
back to our street clothes. Until the grand passion comes, nothing,
nothing, nothing to any man. Look, they are dancing again, she and
Petras Tetarnis, the Greek.”
So he was a Greek, the man with the yellow-buttoned boots and the heavy
black moustache! Henriette watched them with the eye of a professional.
“Yes, she dances prettily, that little one. But would you like a girl to
dance with you just in that way—so unconcerned, so half-asleep, so
utterly indifferent to you? And if you wanted her as Petras Tetarnis
does, furiously, wouldn’t you be mad when she swam in your arms so
lightly, with so correct a grace and not one look or smile or thought
for you? So that if you spoke to her, she had to recall her thoughts
from the end of the world before she could answer you? You would be wild
with rage, eh? You would want to take that slim little white throat
between your two big hands and squeeze and squeeze until some attention
was paid to you, if it was only the attention of agony and fear. Am I
not right?”
Paul’s face turned white. He leaned across the table and cried in a low,
fierce voice:
“Was that what you meant, Henriette, when you said that she would not be
here long? That the Greek would murder her?”
Henriette burst into a laugh.
“Oh, no, no, no, my friend. Petras Tetarnis is not the man to run such
perils. He has made much money, since the French have come to
Casablanca. He is a prudent one. It would have to be a very dark night
and a very empty street before Tetarnis risked his beautiful money and
all the enjoyment he gets from it; and even then some one else would
have to do the work. But he will use other ways.”
“What kind of ways?” asked Paul.
Henriette shrugged her shoulders.
“He is always here. He is rich. Madame Delagrange makes much of him.
Very likely he has lent her money, and if so, he will want his
interest.”
“I see.”
Paul leaned back in his chair and Henriette looked at him curiously.
“You were much moved, my friend, when I spoke of the big, coarse hands
gripping that little throat.”
“Well, any man would be, and whoever the woman,” he protested, and
Henriette smiled her disbelief.
“Would you have been so moved if it had been my throat which you thought
to be in danger?” she asked shrewdly. “No! Let us be frank. You would
have said, ‘It is Henriette’s business to look after herself. She is old
enough, anyway’; and you would have forgotten me the next moment.” She
turned her eyes again upon Marguerite Lambert.
“The grand passion. Oh, la, la, la! Until it comes nothing, oh, but
nothing at all for any one—not half a heart beat! But when it does
come, everything, at once, with both hands. The folly!”
“The glorious imprudence!” replied Paul.
Henriette broke into a harsh laugh as she heard the softly spoken words
and saw the light in Paul Ravenel’s eyes. It was the light of a great
relief rather than of hope. The fear which had plagued him all through
this evening had gone now. There was no need for the excuses. He had not
to argue a defence for Marguerite Lambert.
“The glorious imprudence,” Henriette repeated with a sneer. “Yes, so you
say—you, the man who has everything to gain from the glorious
imprudence and when he is tired of it, can drop it in the road behind
him. But I tell you those are not good ideas for a girl who dances for
her living, in the cafés. There is the patron behind the patron like
Petras Tetarnis, who will make trouble if he doesn’t get what he wants,
for there are rich patrons whom the patron does not wish to drive away.
Or there are jealousies which may mean fighting and the police. No, my
fine gentleman! Girls who are difficult, the Villa Irises are no place
for them. That is why Marguerite Lambert at twenty is dancing in
Casablanca and will not dance there long.”
“But if the great passion comes?” cried Paul.
“Then it must come quick! Believe me, very quick. Petras Tetarnis is
growing troublesome. And if it comes! Shall I tell you what will happen?
She will blow her brains out! Oh, you may start in your chair. But look
at her where she sits! There is the mark of fate already upon her face.
It is written, as they say in this country.”
So to Henriette as to Gerard de Montignac and to Paul Ravenel, that
indefinable look of destiny in Marguerite was evident. Paul asked
himself whether it was not simply the outward and visible sign of that
passionate self-respect which had kept her untarnished against the rush
and play of the great passion when it came. Or was the future really
written there—a history of great joys perhaps and great sorrows
certainly to be?
“So Marguerite lives on seven francs a day and—”
She got no further. Paul interrupted her with an exclamation of horror.
“Seven francs!”
“Yes. That is what our generous Madame Delagrange pays us each night and
we provide our own dancing kit out of it. Oh, the little fool starves.
That is certain—all the more certain because she will not let any of
the clients here give her food.”
“But she let me,” cried Paul with a smile of pride.
“Yes, she let you to-night. But the others, never, never, lest—you
understand? Lest they should make a claim.”
“Out of so small a service?” asked Paul incredulously.
Henriette smiled.
“You have been lucky in your world,” she said. “The clients of the Villa
Iris are not so generous. They will make a claim out of anything, as, by
the way, most men will, if the claim may get them what they want. So
that little one, since she will give herself to none of them, is wise to
starve. You are the only one from whom she has taken food. It is
curious, eh? It is because of that and because you treat me like a human
being that I, Henriette, who like the little fool, ramble on so
seriously to you to-night.”
The plastered face softened into tenderness and the bird-like eyes shone
and filled suddenly with tears.
“It is kind of you,” said Paul. If any one had said to him a couple of
hours before that he would have felt himself intensely privileged
because a little dancing girl of the Villa Iris had taken supper from
him and from him alone, he would have laughed his informant to scorn.
But it was so. Paul was radiant with pride. He saw himself as a very
fine fellow, a much finer fellow than he had ever believed himself to
be. The loneliness of his boyhood, a sudden blow crushing his pride and
his dreams in the dust, and years thereafter informed with a strong
purpose to regain his name and his place in his own country, had
combined to defer but had not slain his youth. It was back with him now,
all the more ardent and dangerous from the restraint which had held it
in check. Paul Ravenel was a boy of nineteen on this evening in the fire
of his passion, but with the will and the experience of his own years;
and he was old enough to hide any plans which he might be forming and to
seek all the knowledge he could get from Henriette.
“Why should she blow out her brains, as you say?” he asked, offering to
Henriette a cigarette.
“Because that is what she will do,” replied Henriette as she lighted her
cigarette. “I know my world. Listen! My father kept a little
eating-house at Rouen, where I saw many types of men. He went bankrupt.
I went to dance in Paris. Oh, I was nothing out of the way. I danced in
a quadrille at the Casino de Paris for a little time, then at the Bal
Tabarin. I went to Madrid and Barcelona where I danced at the Lion d’Or,
the restaurant which has no doors, for it is open night and day. And in
the end I came here. Well, I tell you this. Fine dreams are for rich
people. For us, if we are wise, we bury them out of sight the moment
they are born. We will not think of them. We will not allow them. The
rich have much which makes disappointment bearable. For us—we blow our
brains out.”
Whilst she spoke she kept darting little swift glances at her companion,
as though she was practising on him some trivial diplomacy. She
believed, in truth, every word she said. But since her philosophy was
not Marguerite’s, if this man could give the girl a year or two of
happiness, it would be something, at all events. But Paul sat and
listened carelessly and answered not at all.
“See!” she cried. “When you spin the racquet for the choice of courts at
the tennis, it is ‘rough’ or ‘smooth,’ eh? Well, it is always rough with
us and we lose the choice.”
She laughed at her trifle of a joke, and again her eyes glanced at Paul.
But the clearer his purpose became to himself, the more impassive grew
his face. Long ago he had learnt that lesson of defence. Henriette rose.
She, at all events, was openly disappointed.
“So! I have talked to you long enough,” she said. The piano began once
more its dreadful cacophany. “Ah, Marguerite is dancing with another of
that band. He does not matter. You yourself will dance with her again
to-night, isn’t it so?”
Paul shook his head.
“No,” and as he saw Henriette’s face cloud over, he added, “she herself
bade me keep away.”
The cloud passed at once. That was good news. There was an understanding
between them, then, already. Henriette beamed.
“I understand that,” she said in a whisper, “and I hope you understand
it, too. Madame Delagrange is not very content that we dance much with
the officers. She says they have no money.”
Paul laughed. He would have loved to have seen Gerard de Montignac’s
face if that remark had been made before him and to have heard his
reply.
“Not so much, certainly, as those gentlemen over there whom we have made
rich. But enough, Mademoiselle Henriette, to thank a good friend.”
For a moment Henriette was puzzled. Then she looked down. Beside her
empty glass lay a folded slip of paper. The broad band of purple told
her the amount of the bank note. She leaned forward and spoke in a
whisper.
“A thousand francs! It is a fortune to me! You understand that? I will
take it, yes, with a thousand thanks, but it was not to get your money
that I spoke to you.”
“I never thought it. If I had thought it, your surprise would have
proved me wrong.”
Henriette gathered the note in the palm of her hand and making a
movement as if to take her handkerchief, slipped it secretly into her
bosom. Another thought came to her.
“You are really rich then! You could make a little home, a little safe
home, where there would be no clients or patrons or starving. Oh, that
would be different!” she said in a wondering voice. “I take back what I
said about the end her grand passion would lead her to.” Henriette
glanced again towards Marguerite. “She is chic, eh? She has style, the
little one? An air of good breeding. Whence does it come? How is it that
she has kept it?” Paul could have answered that question had he wished
to. She had kept it because of her immense pride and self-respect, she
had probably got it to keep, from the same source. Henriette looked from
the girl dancing to the officer at the table.
“A little home, eh. If it could be!” she pleaded. Paul gazed at her with
a smile upon his lips and in his eyes, but he did not answer her, and
she flung away.
“Oh, you are a box with the lid shut! Good-night, Monsieur!”
“Good-night, Mademoiselle Henriette.”
A few moments later Paul Ravenel followed Henriette into the Bar. He
stopped before the counter where Madame Delagrange was vigorously wiping
the wet rings made by the bottoms of the glasses from the light polished
wood. She had always the duster in her hand, except when she was
measuring out her drinks into the glasses, and very often then, and
generally was at work with it.
“This is quite Maxim’s, Madam,” he said.
The flattery had little effect. Madame barely paused in her polishing
and smiled sourly.
“In that case I must see about raising my prices, Monsieur,” said she.
No, clearly she did not like the officers. Paul went on to the door.
Marguerite, seated with the Levantines, never looked at him, but just as
he was going out she raised her glass to her lips with a little nod of
her head, as though she drank a health to some absent friend, and her
slow smile dawned and trembled on her lips.
But the night was not yet over for Paul Ravenel. As he reached his house
he heard his name called aloud and turning about saw his friend Gerard
de Montignac hurrying towards him.
“There is news at last,” he said.
The town had been full of rumours for many days. Certain things were
known. It was certain, for instance that the tribes of the Beni-M’Tir,
the Ait-Youssi and the Gerouan had actually pitched their tents on the
plain of Fez and in full revolt against Mulai Hafid the Sultan, were
pressing the city close. It was known too that a flying column purposely
small in order to set at rest the distrust of the German Press and the
opposition of politicians in Paris, had been assembled at Kenitra for a
swift march to relieve the capital. This had been delayed by bad weather
which had turned the flat country beyond Kenitra into a marsh.
But there had been for days a continual disembarkation of fresh troops
at Casablanca which pointed to operations on a wider scale. On this
night the truth was out.
“Come into the house and let me hear, Gerard,” said Paul, and opening
his door he switched on the electric lights and led Gerard into a room.
“Meknes has risen too. A new Sultan, Mulai Zine, the brother of Mulai
Hafid has been proclaimed Sultan there. It is no longer to be a flying
column which will camp for a few days under the walls of Fez and return.
It is to be a great expedition. The whole camp at Ain-Bourdja is ringing
with it to-night. I ran down to tell you.”
“That was good of you, Gerard,” said Paul.
There was a great contrast visible now between the two officers, the one
excited and eager, the other playing with the switch of the standard
lamp upon his table, and lost in thought.
“I hear that my squadron is to go up in the first column under Colonel
Brulard. You, of course, with your battalion will be wanted too.”
“I suppose so,” replied Paul slowly. “I should have liked to have
finished this report before I go.”
“The report can wait,” cried Gerard, “France can’t.”
The two friends talked late into the night. Paul gradually threw off the
reticence with which he had at first answered De Montignac. They fell to
debating the strength of the different columns, the line of march,
whether through the forest of Zemmour or over the plain of the Sebou and
by the Col of Segota, and who would command.
“Brulard for the Advance Force,” said Gerard, “the General himself will
follow.”
“And Gouraud?” asked Paul.
“Yes, yes, Gouraud. He couldn’t be left behind. It is said that he will
have the supply column and follow a day or two behind Brulard.”
“We shall know more about it to-morrow,” said Paul, and Gerard looked at
his watch.
“Do you know the time?” he said springing to his feet. “If we were in
France now, we should see daylight.” He was in an emotional mood. He
clapped his friend upon the shoulder. “We shall see one another again,
my old one, before I start, no doubt. But if we don’t, and anything
happens to either of us, well, it is good luck to the survivor.”
He shook hands with Paul and Paul let him out of the house.
Paul went back to the room. The eagerness with which he had discussed
the technical details of the expedition fell from him as soon as he was
alone. He sat down at his table and remained there until dawn at last
did break over the town. But he was not at work upon his report. He had
pushed it from him and sat with his face between the palms of his hands.
CHAPTER IX
Marguerite Lambert
The rumours of the camp were proved true the next morning and the
preparations for provisioning and concentrating so large a force were
swiftly pushed forward. Gerard de Montignac was to march with his
squadron in a week’s time by Rabat and Saller to Kenitra. Paul was to
rejoin his battalion a few days later. Half of that battalion, Paul’s
company included, was to form part of the escort of Colonel Gouraud’s
huge supply column, which with its hundreds of camels was beginning to
assemble at Meheydia at the mouth of the Sebou.
Paul was now a full Captain in command of that company of the
Tirailleurs which he had led during the last engagements of the Chaiouïa
campaign, and marked out by his superiors as an officer likely to reach
the high ranks and responsibilities. He had still a few days of his
leave and he spent the greater part of them in the careful revision of
his report. Gerard de Montignac, on his side was engaged in the
supervision of the equipment of his squadron and was busy from morning
until night. Two or three times during the course of the week, he went
down between nine and ten at night to the Villa Iris, and sat or danced
for half an hour with Marguerite Lambert. But he never saw Paul Ravenel
there and through the week the two friends did not meet except for a
moment or two in the thronged streets.
“Le grand serieux!” said Gerard, speaking of Paul to Marguerite Lambert
with an affectionate mockery. “He will be a General when I am an old
Major dyeing my moustache to make myself look young. But meanwhile,
whilst we are both Captains, I should like to see more of him than I do.
For, after all, we go out with our men—and one never knows who will
come back.”
Marguerite’s face lost its colour at his words and she drew in her
breath sharply. “Oh, it is our business of course,” he continued, taking
her sympathy to himself. “Do you know, Marguerite, that for a second, I
though you had stirred that thick soup in Paul’s veins which he calls
his blood? But no, he never comes here.”
Marguerite laughed hurriedly, and asked at random, “You have seen him
to-day?”
“Yes. He was coming out of a house close to the port with the agent who
looks after his property, a little Italian. Paul was talking very
earnestly and did not notice me. He has a good deal of property in
Casablanca and was making his arrangements no doubt for a long absence.”
Marguerite looked down at the table, tracing a pattern upon its surface
with her finger. When she spoke again her voice broke upon her words and
her lips quivered.
“I shall lose all my friends this week,” she said.
“Only us two,” said Gerard, consoling her.
“That’s what I mean,” she returned with a little smile, and Gerard de
Montignac leaned forward.
“Marguerite, I don’t go for a couple of days,” he said, lowering his
voice to an eager whisper. “Let us make the best of them! Let me have
the memory of two good days and nights to carry away with me, will you?
Why not? My work is done. I could start off with my troops at six
o’clock to-morrow instead of at six o’clock on the third morning. Give
me the next two days.”
Marguerite shook her head.
“No, my friend.”
Gerard de Montignac knew nothing of that conversation which Henriette
had held with Paul Ravenel on this spot a few nights before. He could
but believe that Marguerite Lambert somehow found that dreadful gang of
nondescripts with whom she foregathered more to her taste than he or his
friend. She shone like a flower in this squalid haunt, a tired and
drooping flower. It was extraordinary that she could endure this company
for a moment, to say nothing of their embraces. But women, even the most
delicate amongst them, would blindfold their eyes and stop their ears,
and cease to appreciate both the look of their friends and the esteem in
which they are held, if their interest prompted them. Gerard de
Montignac rose angrily from his chair.
“Of course poor devils of officers like myself can’t hope to compete
with these rich Dagoes,” he said brutally. “We must console ourselves
with reflecting that our efforts and dangers have made them rich.”
Marguerite Lambert flushed scarlet at the insult, and then lowered her
head.
“I do not wish to speak to you again,” she said in a distinct low voice,
and Gerard de Montignac stalked out of the Villa Iris.
He was troubled by his recollection of the little scene during the next
two days; sometimes falling into a remorse, and sometimes repeating his
own words with bravado, and arguing that this was the proper way to
speak; and always ending with a flood of heart-felt curses.
“Damn all Dagoes and Levantines! There ought to be a special code for
them. They ought to be made to take off their shoes when they meet us in
the street. Those old Moors knew something! I’ll never see that girl
again as long as I live. Luckily she’ll be gone by the time I come back
to Casablanca. Henriette said she wouldn’t dance at the Villa Iris for
long. No, I won’t see her again.”
He kept carefully away from the neighbourhood of the Villa for
thirty-six hours. Then a post came in and was delivered throughout the
camp at eight o’clock in the evening. Amongst the letters which Gerard
de Montignac received was one written in English by a Colonel Vanderfelt
in Sussex praying for news of Paul Ravenel. Gerard had enough English to
perceive how much anxiety and affection had gone to the composition of
that letter.
“It ought to be answered at once,” he said. “Paul must answer it.”
Gerard looked at his watch. It was close upon nine now, and he was to
parade at six in the morning. He must hand over that letter to Paul
to-night. He could have sent it by the post very well, or he could have
written an answer to Colonel Vanderfelt himself. But he took up his cap
instead and walked down from Ain-Bourdja towards the town. Very likely
he had some unacknowledged purpose at the back of his mind. For he found
himself presently standing before the Villa Iris, though that house lay
well out of the road between the camp and Paul Ravenel’s house by the
seaward wall.
“Well, since I am here,” he said, as though he had come to this spot
quite by accident, “I may as well go in and make my peace with
Marguerite Lambert. For all I know I may be quitting the world
altogether very shortly, and why should I leave unnecessary enemies to
hate my memory.”
Thus he explained quite satisfactorily to himself his reason for
entering and looking about him for Marguerite. But she was nowhere to be
seen—no, not even amongst the Dagoes and the Levantines. She must be
outside in the cool of the balcony beneath the roof of vines. But a
glance there showed him that he was wrong. There was nothing for it but
to approach the virago behind the Bar, who hotter and redder than ever
on this night in early May, was polishing away at her counter and
serving out the drinks.
Gerard ordered one and taking it from her hand, said carelessly:
“Mademoiselle Marguerite is not here to-night?”
Madame Delagrange made a vicious dab with her duster and cried in an
exasperation:
“Look, Monsieur! When she is here I have nothing but complaints. That
little Marguerite! She holds her nose in the air as if we smelled. She
looks at us as if we were animals at a circus—and she has nothing to be
conceited about with her thin shoulders and tired face. Now she is gone,
it is all the time—‘What have you done with our little Marguerite?’
Well, I have done nothing.” She turned to another customer. “For you,
Monsieur? A bottle of champagne? Abdullah shall bring it to you.”
Abdullah in his Turkish breeches was handed the dreadful decoction and
Gerard de Montignac tried again:
“She has left the Villa Iris altogether?”
“Yes, yes, yes. She has gone, that Miss Ni’Touche!”
“And where has she gone?”
The harridan behind the Bar flung up her hands.
“Saperlipoppette, how should I know, I ask you? I beg you, Monsieur, to
allow me to serve my clients who do not think that because they have
bought a whiskey-soda, they have become proprietors for the night of the
Villa Iris.”
With an indignant nod she turned to some other customers. Gerard
wandered out into the verandah, where he sat down rather heavily. He was
more troubled than he would have thought possible. After all the
disappearance of a little dancing girl from a Bar in a coast town of
Morocco!—what was there to make a fuss about in that? That is the way
of little dancing girls. They dance and they disappear, a question or
two from you and me and the next man are as it were the ripples upon the
pond, and then the surface is still once more.
But Gerard de Montignac could not dismiss Marguerite Lambert with this
easy philosophy. He remembered her too clearly, her slim grace, the
promise of real beauty if only she had food enough, her anger with him
two evenings ago, and above all the queer look of fatality set upon her
like a seal. Marguerite Lambert gone! How and whither? One or two
dreadful sentences spoken a fortnight ago in the mess by the Commandant
Marnier were written in letters of flame upon his memory. Casablanca was
the last halting place but one in the ghastly pilgrimage of these poor
creatures. The last of all—he shuddered to think of it. To picture
Marguerite Lambert amongst its squalors was a sacrilege. Yet she had
gone—she had moved on! There was the appalling fact.
He saw Henriette strolling a little way off between the tables. He
beckoned eagerly to her. She looked at him doubtfully, then with a
mutinous air and a toss of the head she strolled towards him.
“You want to speak to me? You were not very polite the last time.”
“I will atone for my discourtesy to-night, Mademoiselle Henriette.”
Henriette was induced to take a chair and order a drink.
Gerard believed that he must practise some diplomacy with this fiery
creature if he was to get the truth from her, but as a fact he had not
to put one question. For Henriette had hardly begun to sip her whiskey
and soda before she said:
“The little Marguerite! She has been sent away. I am sorry. I told
you—didn’t I?—that she wouldn’t stay here long.”
“Sent away?”
Henriette nodded.
“By Madame?”
“Last night?”
“Yes. After all the guests had gone. But what a scene! Oh, la, la, la! I
was frightened I can tell you. So were we all. We hid in the little room
there off the Bar, where we dress, and listened through the crack of the
door. But a scene! It was terrible.”
“Tell me!” said Gerard.
Henriette twitched her chair into the table with an actual excitement.
She was really and deeply distressed for Marguerite. But for the moment
her distress was forgotten. The joy of the story teller had descended
upon her.
“It was the Greek over there, Petras Tetarnis,” she began. “He was mad
for Marguerite and she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. So he got
her turned away. See how drunk he is to-night. How proud of his fine
revenge on a little girl who asked for nothing more than permission to
earn her seven francs a night in peace.”
“She wouldn’t have anything to say to him!” Gerard protested. “Why, she
was always at that table where he sits.”
“Yes. Because he is the real owner of the Villa Iris. Madame is no more
than his servant. So Marguerite, since she wished to stay here, must be
friendly to him. But Petras was not content with friendliness and last
night when your friend came in—”
“My friend,” interrupted Gerard de Montignac.
“Yes, the one with the yellow hair and the long legs and the face that
tells you nothing at all.”
“Paul! He was here last night!”
“Yes. Oh, he has come here more than once during the last week, but very
late and for a few minutes. He goes straight to that table and takes
Marguerite away, as if he were the master; and somehow they all sit dumb
as if they were the lackeys. Imagine it, Monsieur! All of them very
noisy and boisterous and then—a sudden silence and the yellow-headed
Captain walking away with Marguerite Lambert as if they did not exist.
It used to make the rest of us laugh, but they—they were furious with
humiliation and when, a little time afterwards, the Captain had
gone—oh, how bold they were! They would pull his nose for him the next
time, they would teach him how gentlemen behave—oh, yes, yes! But it
was always the next time that these fine lessons would be given.”
Gerard de Montignac nodded his head.
“I know the breed.”
Henriette described how Paul Ravenel had entered the Bar a little after
midnight. He had taken Marguerite Lambert away, danced a round or two,
and given her some supper; and whilst she ate, Petras Tetarnis
emboldened by drink and the encouragement of his friends had left his
table and begun to prowl backwards and forwards behind Paul Ravenel’s
back, nodding and winking at his associates and muttering to himself.
Paul had taken no notice, but Marguerite had stopped eating and sat in
terror watching him over Paul’s shoulder like a bird fascinated by a
snake. Tetarnis drew nearer and nearer with each turn, Marguerite sat
twisting her hands and imploring Paul to go away and leave her. She was
speaking in English and in a whisper so that Henriette could not repeat
the words. But it was easy enough to translate them. “It is for my
sake,” she was saying. “It is for my sake.”
But Paul would not listen; and with a little helpless flutter of her
frail hands Marguerite sank back in her chair. There would be a
disturbance, very possibly a fight. Once more she was to be the Helen of
a squalid Iliad and the result would be what it always had been. She
would move on—and this time there was no whither she could move. She
had come to the end.
“I could read the despair in her eyes, in the utter abandonment of her
body,” said Henriette, but there had been much at that moment in
Marguerite Lambert’s thoughts which Henriette could not read at all. The
passionate dream of her life was dying, as she sat there. She had come
to the end. It would have no chance of fulfilment now. Where to-morrow,
could she find the great love waiting for her? It had made her life
possible, it had given her strength to endure the squalor of her lodging
and her companions, and the loss of all that daintiness and order which
mean so much to women. It had given her wit to defend herself against
the approaches of her courtiers, and the self-respect which kept her
with the manners of one of gentlest birth. Nearer and nearer drew Petras
Tetarnis until he bumped against Paul’s chair, and then very quickly and
quietly Paul rose to his feet.
A stifled prayer burst from Marguerite’s trembling lips. Then she
covered her face with her hands and closed her ears with her thumbs. But
there was no disturbance at all.
“The Captain Paul took Petras by the elbow and looking down upon him
talked to him as one talks to a child. I could hear what he said. ‘You
are terrifying this lady. You must not behave like this in public
places. You must go back to your place and sit very quietly or you must
go home.’ And Petras went. Yes, without a word, as if he had been
whipped he went back to his chair amongst his friends. But, I tell you,
Monsieur, his eyes had all hell in them! And after a little, very
cautiously, as if he was afraid lest the Captain Paul should notice him
he crept to the counter and talked very earnestly with Madame.”
“What was he saying?” asked Gerard de Montignac.
“I could not hear at all. I dared not even try to listen. I went to the
table where Marguerite and her friend were sitting. Marguerite was
imploring him to go away. I agreed with her. The storm was over. It was
better for Marguerite’s sake that he should go away quietly now without
any fuss.”
“And he went?” asked Gerard.
“Not at first,” returned Henrietta. “No, he was stubborn. He was
thinking of his pride, as men do, not of the poor women who suffer by
it. But at last—it seemed that some idea came into his head, some
thought which made him smile—he consented. He paid his bill and walked,
neither quickly nor slowly through the Bar and out by the passage into
the street. And so the people settled down, and the trouble seemed at an
end.”
And so until the closing of the Bar it was. As a rule the visitors had
all gone by two o’clock in the morning; and this particular night was no
exception. It was the practice as soon as the room was empty for Madame
Delagrange to pay the girls their seven francs apiece at the counter.
Then they crossed into the little dressing room, changed their clothes
and went out into the lane by the street door, which was locked behind
them. On this night, however, Madame Delagrange kept Marguerite Lambert
to the last.
“You others can run away and get off your clothes. I want to have a
little talk by myself with this delicate Miss Touch-me-not,” she said,
lolling over the counter with a wicked leer on her coarse red face and
licking her lips over her victim. The others were very glad to hurry
away and leave the old harridan and Marguerite alone in the gaudily
tiled, brightly lit room. They kept the door of the dressing room ajar,
so that they could both see and hear what took place. But for a minute
or two Madame Delagrange contented herself with chuckling and rubbing
her fat hands together and looking Marguerite up and down from head to
foot and almost frightening the girl out of her wits. Marguerite stood
in front of the counter looking in her short dancing skirt like a
schoolgirl awaiting punishment.
“So this is how we repay kindnesses!” Madame Delagrange began, slowly
wetting her lips with her tongue. According to Henriette she was exactly
like an ogress in a picture book savouring in anticipation the pretty
morsel she meant to devour for supper. “We make troubles and
inconveniences for the kind old fool of a woman who lets us sing our
little songs in her Bar and dance with her clients and who pays us
generously into the bargain. We won’t help her at all to keep the roof
over her head. We treat her rich clients like mud. Only the beautiful
officers are good enough for us! Bah! And we are virtuous too! Oh, he,
he, he! Yes, but virtue isn’t bread and butter, my little one. So here’s
an address.” She took a slip of paper from the shelf behind her and
pushed it towards Marguerite. Marguerite took a step forward to the
counter and picked up the paper.
“What am I to do with this, Madame?” she asked in perplexity.
“You are to go to that address, Mademoiselle.”
“To-morrow?”
“Now, little fool!”
“Why?”
“He is waiting for you.”
Marguerite shrank back, her face white as paper, her great eyes wide
with horror.
“Who?” she asked in a whisper.
“Petras Tetarnis.”
Madame Delagrange nodded her head at Marguerite with an indignant
satisfaction.
“Off you go! We shall be a little more modest, to-morrow evening, eh? We
shan’t look at everybody as if they would dirty our little slippers if
we stepped on them. Come, take your seven francs and hurry off. Or,” and
she thrust out her lips savagely, “never come back to the Villa Iris.”
Marguerite stood and stared at the paper in her hands.
“You can’t mean it, Madame.”
Madame snorted contemptuously.
“Make your choice, little one. I want to go to bed.”
Marguerite folded the paper and with the tears running down her cheeks
slowly tore it across and across and let the fragments flutter down to
the floor. Madame Delagrange uttered an oath and then let loose upon the
girl such a flood of vile abuse, that even those hiding behind the door
of the dressing room had never heard the like of it.
“Out with you,” she said, spitting upon the ground and sweeping the
seven francs off the counter towards Marguerite, so that they rolled and
spun and rattled upon the floor. “Pick up your money and get your rags
together and march! Quick now!”
She lolled over the counter screaming with laughter as Marguerite ran
hither and thither seeking through her blinding tears for the coins,
stooping and picking them up. “There’s another somewhere,” the old
harridan cried, holding her fat sides. “Seek! Seek! Good dog! It takes
ten years off my life to see the haughty Miss Touch-me-not running about
after her pennies.”
Marguerite had got to retrieve them all. In the dreadful penury in which
she lived, a single franc had the importance of gold. So she ran about
the room, searched under tables and chairs and in the corners. The seven
francs were all her capital. They stood between her and death by hunger.
She must go on her knees and peer through the veil of her tears for the
last of them. Even the women behind the door, hardened though they were,
felt the humiliation of that scene in the marrow of their bones, felt it
as something horrible and poignant and disturbing. As soon as Marguerite
had picked up her money, Madame Delagrange shuffled out from behind her
counter.
“Now come along with me. I mean to see that you don’t take away what
doesn’t belong to you.”
She took the weeping girl by the elbow and pushed her along in front of
her to the dressing room. Then she stood over her whilst she changed
into her street dress and put up her dancing kit in a bundle.
“Do you miss anything, girls?” Madame Delagrange asked with her
heavy-handed irony and indeed with an evident hope that one of them
would miss something and the police could be sent for. But all of them
were quick to say no, though not one of them had the courage to take
Marguerite by the hand and wish her good luck in the face of the old
blowsy termagant.
“Very well then!” and Madame Delagrange took a step towards Marguerite
who shrank back as if she expected a blow. Madame Delagrange laughed
heartily at the girl’s face, rejoicing to see her so cowed and broken.
“Come here,” she said with a grim sort of pleasantry and she grinned and
beckoned with her finger.
Marguerite faltered across the room, and the big woman took her prisoner
again and marched her out through the Bar onto the verandah.
“There! You can go out by the garden and a good riddance to you!” Madame
Delagrange banged to the big doors behind Marguerite Lambert and bolted
them, leaving her with her bundle in her hand standing on the boards
beneath the roof of vines.
“That’s the last we saw of her. Poor kid!” said Henriette. “If she
hadn’t been such a little fool! Do you know that for a moment or two I
hoped that your friend—”
“Paul,” Gerard de Montignac interrupted with a nod of his head. “I
also—for a moment or two. But women don’t mean much to Paul.”
Henriette laughed bitterly, wondering to what man women did mean
anything at all. In her experience she had never run across them.
“I am afraid for that little one,” she said, her thoughts coming back to
Marguerite. “You know what happened? Her little bundle was found on the
balcony this morning. The knot had broken, and her dancing dress, her
slippers, her silk stockings were lying scattered on the boards. She
just left them where they fell. You see, they were her stock-in-trade.
She had brought them over with her from France and she has no money to
replace them with. I am afraid.”
Gerard de Montignac was conscious of a chill of fear too. He recognised
the significance of the abandonment of that bundle. The knot had burst,
as Marguerite stood on the verandah, the doors shut behind her, the dark
garden in front of her. She had not thought it worth while to gather her
poor trifles of finery together again. Their use was over. Whither had
she gone? Was she alive now? Had those roaring breakers on the coast
drawn her into their embrace and beaten her to death upon the rocks and
the sands?
“Where does she lodge?” he asked sharply.
“I don’t know,” answered Henriette. “None of us know. She would never
tell. I think that she had some poor little room of which she was
ashamed. With her seven francs a day, she could have nothing else.”
“I must find out,” cried Gerard, and then he struck his fist upon the
table. “But I can’t find out. I march at six o’clock to-morrow morning
for Fez.”
“Your friend then,” Henriette suggested eagerly.
“Paul!” replied Gerard. “Yes. He has a few days still in Casablanca. He
has compassion, he will help. I know him.”
Henriette’s face lightened a little.
“But he must be quick, very quick,” she urged. “You will see him
to-night?”
“I will go to him now,” and Gerard remembered the letter in his pocket
from Colonel Vanderfelt. “I was indeed on my way to him when I came
here.”
Gerard looked at his watch. It was half past ten. He had stayed longer
than he had intended at the Villa Iris.
CHAPTER X
Colonel Vanderfelt’s Letter
Gerard de Montignac found Paul still up and putting the last words to
the report of long and solitary wanderings amongst the inland tribes.
The report was to be despatched the next morning to the Bureau des
Affaires Indigènes at Rabat, and Gerard waited in patience until the
packet was sealed up. Then he burst out with his story of what had taken
place on the night before at the Villa Iris. Paul listened without an
interruption, but his face grew white with anger and his eyes burned, as
he heard of Madame Delagrange’s coarse abuse and Marguerite’s tears and
humiliations.
“So you see, Paul, it was your fault in a way,” Gerard urged. “Of course
sooner or later Petras Tetarnis—damn his soul!—would have presented
his ultimatum, as he did last night, but you were the occasion of it
being done.”
“Yes,” Paul agreed.
“Then you must find her. You must do what you can, send her home, give
her a chance. I’ll start searching myself this very night. But you have
more time and better means of discovering her.”
“Yes.”
Paul had knocked about Casablanca as a boy. He had many friends amongst
the natives, and was accustomed to sit with them by the hour, drinking
mint tea and exchanging jokes. He was a man of property besides in that
town and could put out a great many feelers in different quarters.
“I have no doubt that I can discover where she is,” he said, “if she is
still in Casablanca.”
“Where else can she be unless it’s in the sea!” cried Gerard. “But
remember you have got to be quick. She had only the seven francs. God
knows what has become of her!”
He stood gazing at the lamp as if he could read her whereabouts in that
white flame as the gifted might do in a crystal; with his cap tilted on
the back of his head and a look of grave trouble upon his face.
“I’ll find her, never fear,” said Paul Ravenel, touching his friend upon
the arm. “And what I can do to keep her from harm that I will do.”
Gerard responded to the friendliness and the assurance in Paul’s voice.
He shook off his dejection.
“Thank you, mon vieux,” he said and held out his hand. “Well, we shall
meet in Fez.”
He had reached the door before he remembered the primary reason for his
visit.
“By the way, I have a letter about you from some one in England, a
Colonel Vanderfelt. Yes, he is anxious for news of you. He wrote to me
because in your letters to him you had more than once spoken of me as
your friend.”
A shadow darkened Paul’s face as he listened, and a look of pain came
into his eyes. He took the letter from Gerard.
“Have you answered it, Gerard?”
“No. It only reached me to-night. I must leave that to you.”
“Right.”
The door-keeper let Gerard out and he tramped through the now silent and
empty streets the length of the town to the Market Gate; and so to his
quarters in the camp at Ain-Bourdja. Some years were to pass before the
two friends met again.
Paul stood for a long time just as Gerard had left him with Colonel
Vanderfelt’s letter in his hand. The fragrance of an English garden
seemed to him to sweeten this Moorish room. Though the lattices were
wide open, he heard no longer the thunder of the great breakers upon the
shore. The letter was magical and carried him back on this hot night of
May to a country of cool stars. The garden, he remembered, would be
white with lilac, the tulips would be in flower, the rhododendrons
masses of red and mauve, against the house the wisteria would be hanging
in purple clusters. And in the drawing room some very kindly people
might at this moment be counting the date on which they could expect an
answer to this letter.
Well, the answer would never come.
“All those pleasant dreams are over,” thought Paul. “They have not heard
from me for more than a year. Let the break be complete!” and with a
rather wistful smile he tore the letter into shreds. Then he went out
and turning into a street by the sea-wall came to that house from which
Gerard de Montignac had seen him and his agent depart three days before.
A lattice was open on the first floor and from a wide window a golden
flood of light poured out upon the night. Paul whistled gently and then
waited at the door. It was thrown open in a few seconds, just time
enough for some one to run down the stairs and open it. Paul stepped
into a dark passage and a pair of slender arms closed about his neck and
drew his face down.
“Marguerite, why didn’t you tell me how that venomous old harridan
treated you?” he whispered.
Marguerite Lambert laughed with a note of utter happiness which no one
had heard from her for a long while.
“My dear, what did it matter any longer;” and clinging to him
passionately, she pressed her lips to his.
* * * * *
Paul could have added a postscript to Henriette’s story, as Gerard de
Montignac had told it to him, if he had so willed. For when Marguerite
Lambert stood alone on that verandah, her bundle in her hand, a figure
had risen up out of the darkness of the garden and stepped onto the
boards. She recoiled at the first moment in terror, and her bundle
slipped from her hand and scattered its contents.
“Marguerite,” the man whispered, and with a wild throb of her heart she
knew it was Paul Ravenel who was speaking to her.
“You! You!” she said in so low a voice that, though he stood at her
side, the words only reached his ears like a sigh. “Oh!” and her arms
were about his shoulders, her hands tightly clasped behind his head, and
her tear-stained cheeks pressed close against the breast of his tunic.
He tried to lift her face, but she would not let him.
“No! No!” she whispered. He could feel her bosom rising and falling, and
hear the sobs bursting from her throat. Then she flung up her face.
“My dear! My dear! I was hoping that some sudden thing would kill me,
because I couldn’t do it myself. And then—you are here!”
She drew herself from his arms, and not knowing what she did she kneeled
and began to gather together her scattered belongings. Paul Ravenel
laughed and stooping, lifted her up.
“You won’t want those things any more, my dear,” and with his arm about
her he led her from the garden through the quiet streets to this house
by the sea-wall which had been got ready against her coming.
CHAPTER XI
A Dilemma
It was the sixteenth day of April in the following year. The dawn broke
over Fez sullen and unfriendly as the mood of the city. And all through
the morning the clouds grew heavier. Many watched them with anxiety
through that forenoon: the French Mission which was to set out on the
morrow, on its return to Rabat with the treaty of the Protectorate of
Morocco signed and sealed in its pocket; Mulai Hafid himself, now for
these many months Sultan, who was to travel with the Mission, on his way
to Paris; various high dignitaries of state, who though outwardly
wreathed in smiles and goodwill had prepared a little surprise for the
Mission in one of the passes on its line of march to the coast; and
various young officers of the escort who after ten months of garrison
duty outside Fez welcomed a chance of kicking up their heels for a week
or two in the cafés of the coast towns. Like conversation before dinner,
all these arrangements depended on the weather.
At twelve o’clock Mulai Hafid gave a farewell luncheon to the Mission in
his great Palace in Fez Djedid; and after luncheon he conducted his
guests to a Pavilion looking upon a wide open space called Mechouar.
They had hardly reached the Pavilion before a storm burst with all the
violence of the tropics. The Pavilion was like everything else in
Morocco. It had never been finished when it was new, and never repaired
when it was old; and very soon, the rain breaking through the flimsy
roof had driven the guests from the first floor to the chamber of
audience below, and was splashing down the stairs in a cascade. A
general discomfort prevailed. Mulai Hafid himself was in a difficult
mood. To one French Commissioner of importance who apologized to him
because a certain General, lately promoted from Colonel, had not yet had
time to procure the insignia of his new rank, Mulai Hafid replied dryly:
“The sooner he gets them the better. He’ll want them all to protect him
before he has done.”
And a little later when the Head of the Mission, with whom he was
playing chess, indiscreetly objected to the Sultan moving
surreptitiously one of his knights with a latitude not authorised by the
rules, he turned in vexation to a Kaid of his friends and said: “See
what I have come to! I can no longer even move my own cavalry as I
please, without the consent of his Excellency and the French.”
Altogether it was an uneasy luncheon party. Alone Paul Ravenel was
content. He was on duty with the Mission and all the morning his face
had been as cloudy as the sky because the storm did not break. Now he
stood at a window of the upper room, sheltering himself as best he might
from the leaks of the roof and smiled contentedly. Lieutenant Praslin,
who a year before had trumpeted the praises of Marguerite Lambert in the
mess at Ain-Bourdja, stood at his elbow. Praslin commanded now a platoon
in Paul’s company and held his chief in awe. But annoyance spurred him
to familiarity.
“You are amused, my old one, are you?” he enquired. “We are of the
escort to-morrow. We shall swim through mud. The banks of the rivers
will be as slippery as a skating rink. We shall have horses and camels
tumbling about and breaking our necks. We shall have ladies in the party
too. And you are amused! Name of a name, you have a sense of humour, my
Captain.”
“I laugh,” replied Paul, “because if the rain continues, we shan’t go at
all.”
“And you don’t want to go! To arrive safely at Rabat with the Mission,
it might easily mean your step.”
That Paul should despise the indifferent gaieties of Rabat and
Casablanca—that was understood. He was the serious one, destined for
the high commands. But here was opportunity and Paul Ravenel had been
quick to seize upon opportunity. There had been a pretty little fight
between Kenitra and Segota when Paul was in command of the Advance Guard
of Colonel Gouraud’s convoy; and Paul had fought his little battle with
a resourceful skill which had brought his name into the orders of the
day. He had been for ten months now in command of his Company at the
great camp of Dar-Debibagh, four kilometres out of Fez. These were days
of rapid promotion in an army where as a rule promotion was slow. A
successful march to Rabat might well make him Commandant and give him
his battalion. Yet the look upon his face, as he watched the sheets of
rain turning the plain of the Mechouar into a marsh, was the look of a
man—no, not relieved, but reprieved—yes, actually reprieved, thought
the Lieutenant Praslin.
Below them in the chamber of audience the Chiefs of the Mission were at
this moment debating the postponement of the journey and they came
quickly to the only possible decision. The departure was put off for
three days.
“We shall go then, however,” said Praslin, when this decision was
announced. “The escort is made up. There will be no change.”
“I wonder,” Paul Ravenel replied. “In three days a man may learn wisdom.
The Mission may after all wait until a sufficient force is assembled to
protect it properly and then the whole personnel of the escort may be
changed.”
“Oh, those stories!” cried Praslin contemptuously. He had the official
mind which looks upon distrust of official utterances as something next
to sacrilege. And official utterances had been busy of late. There was
no truth, they declared stoutly, in those stories that the Maghzen, the
Government itself, was stirring up disaffection and revolt behind the
back of the Mission. Very likely the people of Fez were saying that the
Sultan was the prisoner of the French, that he was being taken to Rabat
and Paris to be exhibited triumphantly as a captive; but the people of
Fez were born gossips and there was no danger in their talk. Had not the
Grand Vizier himself pledged his word that the country was quiet? Thus
the official mind. Thus too, consequently, Lieutenant Praslin, who was
very anxious to see life as it is lived in the coast towns. And if the
Intelligence Division and some soldiers who had spent years in the
country took a different view, why, soldiers were always alarmists and
foolish people and it was waste of time to listen to them.
Paul rode back through the rain with Lieutenant Praslin to the camp at
Dar-Debibagh when the reception was over. They went by the Bab Segma and
the bridge over the Fez River. The track was already a batter of mud
above the fetlocks of their horses. At seven o’clock, however, the rain
ceased and Paul, changing into a dry uniform, went into Praslin’s tent.
“I am dining with a friend of mine in Fez,” he said, “and I shall not be
back until late.”
“The battalion parade’s at six in the morning,” Praslin reminded him.
“The order has not been countermanded.”
“I know,” answered Paul. “I shall be on duty of course”; and mounting
his horse he rode again into the city.
He rode back by the way he had come and just within the Bab Segma he met
four Moors mounted upon mules richly caparisoned, and themselves wearing
robes of a spotless white. They were clearly men of high rank and one
rode a little in advance of the others. As Paul drew closer to them he
recognised this man as the Minister of War and one of the most important
dignitaries of the Maghzen. Paul saluted him and to his amazement the
Minister did not return the salute but turned to one of his companions
with a dishonouring word.
“Djiffa!” he said contemptuously, and spat on the ground. Paul took no
notice of the insult. But if he had needed proof of the stories which
the official mind refused to entertain, here it was openly avowed. Very
likely the postponement of the Mission’s departure had upset the
precious plans of the Maghzen and the Minister of War was showing his
displeasure. The point of importance to Paul was that he should dare to
show it so openly. That could but imply very complete plans for an
ambuscade in force on the road of the Mission to the coast, and a very
complete confidence as to the outcome.
Paul began to think of his own affairs.
“Suppose that the Mission and its escort is destroyed,” he reflected. “I
have left nothing to chance. No! The blow must fall as lightly as I can
make possible.”
He enumerated one by one the arrangements which he had made and recalled
the wording of his instructions to his solicitors and agents.
“No, I can think of nothing else,” he concluded. He had this final
request for help to make to-night, and he was very sure that he would
not make it in vain. “No,—whatever money can do to lighten the
blow—that has been done. And money can do much assuredly.
Only—only”—and he admitted to himself at last with a little shiver, a
dark thought which he had hitherto driven off—“she is just the kind of
girl who might commit suttee.”
He rode along the main street into the quarter of Tala. It was a street
always narrow, but sometimes so narrow that if two mules met they could
hardly pass. High walls of houses without any windows made it a chasm
rather than a street. At rare intervals it widened into a “place” or
square, where a drinking fountain stood or a bridge crossed a stream. It
was paved with broken cobble stones with a great rut in the middle where
the feet of the mules and horses had broken down to the brown earth
beneath; and here and there a slippery mill-stone on which the horse
skidded, had been let in to the cobbles by way of repair. It climbed
steeply and steeply fell, and in places the line of houses was broken by
a high garden wall above which showed orange trees laden with their
fruit and bougainvillæa climbing.
At times he passed under an archway where the street was built over
above his head and huge solid doors stood back against the walls on
either hand, that one quarter might be shut off from another during the
night, or in times of trouble. On his right hand a number of alleys led
into the Souk-ben-Safi and the maze of Fez-el-Bali. Into one of these
alleys Paul turned and stopped in front of a big house with an imposing
door studded with nails, and a stone by which to mount a horse.
He dismounted and knocked upon the door. To his surprise, it was not at
once thrown open. He looked about him. There was no servant waiting to
take his horse in charge. If there had been a mistake! Paul’s heart sank
at the thought. Suppose that his friend Si El Hadj Arrifa, on whom so
much now might depend, had been called away from his home? But that
couldn’t be—surely! However peremptory the summons had been, so
punctilious a personage as Si El Hadj Arrifa would have found a moment
wherein to put off his expected guest. Yet if nevertheless it were so
. . . !
Paul Ravenel felt the weighty letter under his tunic and gazed at the
blank wall of the great house with troubled eyes. Oh, he must talk with
his friend to-night! In three days the Mission and its escort were to
start. He might not get another chance. He redoubled his blows upon the
door and at last he heard a key turn in the lock and a clatter as the
wooden cross-bars were removed.
That sound completed his uneasiness. He had ridden through the city
thinking of his own affairs, his eyes in blinkers. Now tracing his steps
in memory, he recalled that the streets had been strangely quiet,
strangely empty. And here at the end of his journey was this hospitable
house barricaded against an invited guest.
“Oh, no,” he said, seeking to reassure himself, “the danger’s out there
in the ‘bled,’ on the way to the coast, not here in the town.”
But a picture rose before his mind of four notable Moors in milk-white
robes mounted on mules with trappings of scarlet and silver who sneered
openly at the uniform and spat. Paul Ravenel was frightened now. If it
was not only in the “bled” that danger threatened, then all his careful
letters and arrangements were worth just as much as the cobble stones
underneath his feet.
The door was open at last and as a servant took Paul’s horse by the
bridle and led it away to a stable, Paul hurried impatiently into the
house. But he was no more impatient than the servant who closed and
bolted the door behind him; and in the passage he saw a small troop of
attendants, every one of them armed and at the entrance from the passage
into the central court Si El Hadj Arrifa himself with a face of fear and
in the attitude of a man poised for flight.
But when he caught sight of the gold lace upon Paul’s uniform, the
Moor’s expression changed to surprise and surprise in its turn to a
smile of welcome. Si El Hadj Arrifa was a stout man, fair like so many
of the Fasi, with a fringe of beard round his fat face. He was dressed
in a silken shirt with an overgarment of pink tissue under his white
djellaba and his hands were as well-kept as a woman’s. He wore a fine
white haik over his turban and fez.
“I am afraid that you didn’t expect me,” said Paul.
“Your Excellency is always welcome,” replied Si El Hadj Arrifa. “Our
poor little meal is ready.”
But it was not ready and Paul’s uneasiness increased. He knew, however,
that he would hear nothing until hospitality was satisfied of its
ceremonies and then only by a roundabout road. He was led into a room
opening by means of a wide archway onto the court. In one corner of the
room stood a big modern brass bedstead. It was an ornament and a
decoration, nothing more. For sleep, cushions upon the tiled floor were
used. Round the wall there were a great number of clocks, Grandfather
clocks, heavy Victorian clocks of ormolu, clocks of marble, most of them
ticking away but registering quite different hours, and on the tiled
floor stood two branched candlesticks of shining silver with the candles
burning. Thick cushions were stretched upon the tiles about the candles
and upon them Paul and his host took their seats.
Si El Hadj Arrifa was a personage in Fez, a man of influence in politics
and of great wealth. He had visited Manchester more than once, to buy
cotton goods and he talked of that town whilst they waited for dinner.
“They have good dentists,” he said.
Paul looked at this soigné and dainty gentleman in the fine setting of
his beautiful house, and smiled to think of the figure he must cut in
Manchester. He probably wore a black gown like a gabardine and elastic
sided boots over white woollen socks and lived in a small room in a
dingy street. But Si El Hadj Arrifa fell soon into an uneasy silence and
sat listening with his head cocked as if he expected some sound from the
city without to ring out over the open square in the roof above the
court. A fountain was playing in the centre of the court in honour of
the visitor, but the Moor called to a servant to turn it off, since the
splash and tingle of the water so filled the ears that they could
apprehend nothing else.
Dinner was brought in at last by a couple of negresses and Paul must eat
of each course beginning with sweetmeats, and ranging through a
couscouss, a roasted leg of mutton and a stuffed chicken. Paul put his
right hand into the dish and tore at the meat in the due fashion and
accepted tit-bits from the fingers of his host. Some orange water was
brought for him to drink, and when the long meal was over one of the
negresses brought them a ewer and soap and poured water over their hands
whilst they washed them.
“Yes, they have good dentists in Manchester,” said Si El Hadj Arrifa
and, taking a complete set of shining teeth from his mouth, he washed
them and polished them and replaced them.
“They seem to have very good dentists there,” said Paul with befitting
gravity.
A silver tea kettle was brought and a silver spirit lamp, and Si El Hadj
Arrifa brewed two little cups of heavily sweetened green tea and
flavoured it with mint. But even while engaged upon this important work,
he still kept his head cocked a little on one side, as though he still
listened for some dreaded yet expected sound. And when he handed the cup
to Paul, it rattled in the saucer.
Nothing on this evening had so startled Paul Ravenel. His heart jumped
within his breast. Si El Hadj Arrifa was not merely disturbed. His hand
was shaking. He was desperately afraid. He drew a breath and leaned
forward to speak and Ravenel said to himself with relief. “At last! It
is coming.”
But he was wrong. His host only enquired whether Paul had ever visited
America.
“No,” he answered.
“A man in Manchester told me that they had a way there of stuffing
turkeys which was very good. But they used oysters for it and of course
so far from the sea we can get none at Fez.”
“Some day there will be a railway,” said Paul consolingly. Si El Hadj
Arrifa made another brew of tea, this time suspending in the brew a
little lump of ambergris to flavour it.
“I must begin,” thought Paul, as he took his cup. He felt for the big
letter in his tunic but before he could take it from his breast his host
spoke in a low, quiet tone, words which at first seemed of little more
importance than any which had been spoken before, and afterwards were
able to set Paul’s heart fluttering.
“I sent a messenger this evening to you at the camp at Dar-Debibagh.
“He missed me,” replied Paul.
“It is a pity.”
“Why?”
“I sent him to warn you not to come into Fez to-night.”
“Why?”
“You are my friend. There is danger.”
“But outside the city,” cried Paul, “from the tribes—after we have
marched.”
“Here in Fez too,” Si El Hadj Arrifa insisted in a voice which now
frankly shook with terror. “For you and all of your creed that dwell in
this city.”
Paul was already on his feet, his face and his eyes set in a stare of
horror. Si El Hadj Arrifa quite misunderstood the French officer’s
manner. He said soothingly:
“You shall stay in my house till it is all over.”
“All over?” Paul repeated. He took his hand from the bulky letter in his
tunic. If the dreadful news were true, his plans must change. His heart
sank as he caught a glimpse of how they must change.
“I must know more, my friend,” he said, and he sat quietly down again
upon the cushions.
“There are the Askris,” said the man of Fez, “the tribesmen. You have
taken them too quickly into your armies. You have armed them too
quickly. You have placed them with their instructors in the Kashab des
Cherarda by the Segma gate as a garrison for this town. Oh, madness!”
“Yes,” Paul agreed. “We should have waited a year—two years.”
“They are told that they must carry knapsacks,” continued Si El Hadj
Arrifa. “With us that is work for women, an insult to men.”
“But it isn’t true,” said Paul Ravenel.
“What does that matter if it is believed? The knapsacks were carried on
mules publicly through the city, so that all men might see them. Six
thousand of them.”
“Not by our orders,” said Paul, and the swift look and the shrug of the
shoulders with which the protest was received told him much. It was by
the order of the Maghzen that those knapsacks had been paraded. The
Government itself was behind this movement in the city as it was behind
the insurrection on the plains. Once more he saw very clearly the four
contemptuous notables upon their mules.
“Of course we have known of this trouble,” said Paul slowly. “But we
thought that each instructor could make it clear to his men that the
story was a lie.”
Si El Hadj Arrifa flung up his hands.
“Oh, the great lessons and nothing is learnt! Was there not trouble once
for the English in India? Was there not talk of cartridges greased with
the fat of pigs? It was not true. No! But it served. As the knapsacks
will serve in Fez.”
“A little time,” cried Paul Ravenel, clutching at the straw of that
faint hope.
“There is no time,” answered Si El Hadj Arrifa. “Listen!” He looked
swiftly behind him into the shadows of the court to make sure that there
were none to overhear. “The revolt in Fez was planned for to-morrow,
after the Mission had departed. There was to be a scouring.”
“Yes.”
“The Askris are ready: more than ready. It was difficult to hold them
in, even with the promise of to-morrow. Now that the departure is
postponed, they will not wait. It needs a word perhaps, but the speaking
of that word cannot be delayed.”
Paul nodded gloomily.
“And they won’t believe it,” he said in a dull quiet voice, as he stared
upon the ground. Believe it? Paul Ravenel knew very well that were he to
batter down the door of the Embassy, they would not even allow him to
blurt his story out. Why should he come prattling his soldier’s
silliness at that unearthly hour? Let him go back to his camp and await
his well-deserved reprimand in the morning! There are proper channels by
which presumptuous young officers must address their importunities. It
is the history of many disasters. Politics and ambition and the play of
parties must decide what is going to happen, not prescience or
knowledge. Is a country notoriously _studiis asperrima belli_? Let us
never admit it, lest we range against us this or that faction which is
strong enough to bring us down. It’s all a gamble. So let us plank our
money and everybody else’s and their lives into the bargain on to our
colour and chance it turning up. “All rising to Great Place is by a
winding stair.” So we must twist and turn and see nothing beyond the
next step by which we mount. Authority in Fez had just been given the
cravat of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, because the
negotiations for the Protectorate had been conducted so smoothly and had
ended in so resounding a success. It would never do for authority to
listen to any intrusive soldier who insisted that murder and torture
were knocking on the door. Had not the Maghzen declared that the
tribesmen in the “bled” were only thinking of their husbandry? Did not
the Grand Vizier himself guarantee the goodwill and peacefulness of Fez?
“They have stopped their ears and bandaged their eyes,” said Paul.
“But you will stay here to-night,” his friend urged. “No one, I think,
saw you come into my house, and my servants are faithful. Yes, you will
stay here and be safe until this danger is overpast!”
Paul shook his head.
“That I cannot do,” he said, and Si El Hadj Arrifa hearing the tone he
used, knew that there would be no persuading him.
“Then go while you can, and ride quickly with your pistol loose in its
holster.”
But even so Paul did not move.
“Wait,” he said.
He raised his head to listen. The night was still as a tomb. A cry even
from the most distant corner of the city, it seemed to him, must carry
to this open square of darkness above them. He had time. “Yes, wait,” he
repeated, and he went apart into the shadowy patio. Never had he been
set to face so tragic a dilemma. He knew Si El Hadj Arrifa too well to
doubt him. Nor indeed had he any real doubt as to the choice which he
himself would make. The choice was in truth made, had been made from the
moment he was sure that torture and massacre threatened those who
remained in Fez as much as those who marched to Rabat. But he stood in
that shadowy court of marble and tiles, gazing with a great sorrow upon
many lovely cherished things which he was now forever to forego, his own
hopes and ambitions, a little circle of good friends, honour and good
report, a career of active service and study well-applied, and at the
end of it all a name cleansed of its stain, and—even now the picture
rose before his mind—a dreamlike high garden fragrant with roses, from
which one looked out over moonlit country to the misty barrier of the
Downs. It was such a farewell as he had never thought to make and when
he turned back into the room his face was twisted as with a physical
pain and anguish lay deep in his brooding eyes.
He took the envelope from his breast.
“I shall trust you with more than my life,” he said.
“Your Excellency has honoured me with his friendship. I am his servant
in all things.”
“I have been for three nights writing this letter. I had it in my mind
to open it here and read it to you. But the bad news you have given me
points to another way. It may be that there will be no need to use it. I
give it into your hands and I beg you to keep it sealed as it is, until
you are certain of my death. If I am alive I shall find a means to let
you know. If I am dead, I pray you to do all that I have written here.”
Si El Hadj Arrifa took the letter and bowed his forehead upon it, as
though it carried the very Sultan’s seal.
“With God’s will, I will do as you direct.”
Paul took his friend by the hand, and looked him in the eyes.
“I could not rest quiet in my grave if my wishes written there were not
fulfilled—if misfortune struck where there is no need that it should
strike. A voice would call to me, in sorrow and distress, and I should
hear it and stir in my grave though I was buried metres deep in clay. It
is a promise?”
“Yes.”
Si El Hadj Arrifa struck a bell and a man came out to him from the
servants’ quarters.
“All is quiet, Mohammed?”
“Up till this hour.”
“His Excellency’s horse then! You will go in front of him with a lantern
as far as the Bab Segma. His Excellency returns to the camp at
Dar-Debibagh.”
The servant’s eyes opened wide in fear. He looked from his master to his
master’s guest, as though both of them had been smitten with madness.
Then he went out upon his business, and the two men in the court heard
the fall of the bars and the grinding of the lock of the door.
“I will put this away,” said Si El Hadj Arrifa, balancing the letter in
his hands; and he went upstairs to his own room. When he came down Paul
was standing in the patio, with his cap upon his head.
“I will bid you good-bye here my friend,” said Paul, but his host,
terrified though he was, would not so far fall short of his duties. He
went out with Paul Ravenel to the street. The city all about them was
very quiet. There was no light anywhere but the light in the big lantern
which Mohammed was carrying in one hand whilst he held the bridle of
Paul’s horse with the other. Paul mounted quickly and without a word. Si
El Hadj Arrifa stood in the doorway of his house. He watched the lantern
dwindle to a spark, he heard the sharp loud crack of the horse’s shoes
upon the cobbles soften and grow dull. He waited until the spark had
vanished, and, a little time afterwards, the beat of the hoofs had
ceased. And still there was no sign of any trouble, no distant clamour
as of men gathering, no shrill cries from the women on the roofs. He
went back into his house.
[Illustration: _A William Fox Production._ _The Winding Stair._ PAUL
FIRST MEETS MARGUERITE, DANCER IN THE CAFE IRIS.]
CHAPTER XII
The Little Door in the Angle
Si El Hadj Arrifa squatted upon his cushions and stared at the flames of
the candles in his branched silver candlestick. Captain Paul Ravenel
would be half way through the Tala now. It was always in that quarter of
the town that turbulence began. He would be half way through the Tala,
therefore half way between this house and the Bab Segma too. And as yet
there was not a cry. Si El Hadj Arrifa had never known a night so still.
But then he had never listened before with such an intensity of fear,
fear for himself, fear for that friend of his riding through the silent
town, with the lantern swinging close to the ground in front of him. The
sky had cleared after the rain and the stars were bright above the open
square of the roof. But it was dark and once past the Bab Segma and
clear of the town, Paul Ravenel would slip like a swift shadow over the
soft ground to Dar-Debibagh. He must be near the gates by now. Si El
Hadj Arrifa pictured him now skirting the gardens of Bou Djeloud and
very close to the gate; a few yards more, that was all. Si El Hadj
Arrifa imagined him knocking upon the gate for the watchman to open it.
A sense of relief stole over the Moor. Mohammed would be back very soon
now. Upon the relief followed drowsiness. Si El Hadj Arrifa’s head fell
forward upon his breast and his body slipped into an easier
attitude. . . .
Yes, Paul Ravenel was undoubtedly rapping upon the Segma gate, but
rapping rather urgently, rather insistently. How those dogs of watchmen
slept, to be sure! And Si El Hadj Arrifa woke with a start and very
cold. It was upon his own outer door that some one knocked urgently and
insistently.
The Moor rose to his feet and stopped. His eyes had fallen upon his fine
silver candlesticks and he stood upright and stiff in a paralysis of
terror. The candles had burnt low. He had slept there for a long time.
Mohammed should have been back an hour ago. The sound of his knocking,
too, urgent, yet with all its urgency, discreet, spoke, like a voice of
fear. Something untoward then had happened. Yet the city still slept. Si
El Hadj Arrifa was no braver than most of his fellow townsmen. He
shivered suddenly and violently and little whimpers of panic broke from
his lips. Massacres were not conducted quietly. Uproar and clamour
waited upon them; and the strange and eerie silence brooding over the
town daunted the soft luxurious Moor till his bones seemed to melt
within his body. It was stealthy and sinister like an enemy hidden in
the dark. He crept into the passage and listened. There was nothing to
hear but the urgent scratching and rapping upon the door.
“Is that you, Mohammed?” he asked.
“Yes, Master.”
Si El Hadj Arrifa unfastened the door and held it ajar, looking out.
Mohammed was alone, and there was no longer a lantern in his hand.
“Come in! And make no noise!” said Si El Hadj Arrifa.
Mohammed slipped into the passage, closed the strong door so cautiously
that not a hinge whined, then locked and bolted and barred it.
“Now follow me!”
The Moor led the way back to the room with the brass bedstead and sank
like a man tired out on to the cushions. His servant stood in front of
him with a passive mask-like face and eyes which shone bright with fear
in the light of the candles. “Speak low!” said Si El Hadj Arrifa; and
this is the story which Mohammed told in a voice hardly above a whisper.
The French officer did not ride to the Segma Gate. He called in a quiet
voice to Mohammed and turned off towards the Bab-el-Hadid on the south
of the town.
“The Bab-el-Hadid,” Si El Hadj Arrifa repeated in wonderment.
“But his Excellency did not go as far as the gate. He stopped at the
hospital and dismounted,” said Mohammed.
Si El Hadj Arrifa’s face lightened. The hospital was the headquarters of
the military command. Paul Ravenel had taken his story there.
Paul had remained for a long time in the hospital. Two officers came out
with him at length, one of whom was dressed in slippers and pyjamas with
a dressing gown thrown on as if he had been wakened from his bed.
“Was his Excellency smiling?” asked Si El Hadj Arrifa.
“No. The other two were smiling. His Excellency shrugged his shoulders
and mounted his horse heavily like a man in trouble.”
Si El Hadj Arrifa nodded his head and muttered to himself.
“They will not believe,” he said. “No, they will not believe.” He looked
towards Mohammed. “Then he went out by the Bab-el-Hadid?”
But Paul had not. He had turned his back to the Bab-el-Hadid and bade
Mohammed lead to the Karouein quarter.
They went for a while through silent empty streets, Mohammed ten paces
or so ahead, holding the lantern so that the light shone upon the ground
and Paul Ravenel following upon his horse. Mohammed did not turn round
at all to see that the Captain was following him, but the shoes of the
horse clacked on the cobbles just behind him and echoed from wall to
wall. They came to the first gate and it was open. The great doors stood
back against the wall and the watchman was not at his post. Mohammed was
frightened. An omission to shut off the quarters of the city one from
the other at night could not be due to negligence. This was an order
given by authority. However, no one stopped them; they saw no one; they
heard no one.
They came to a second gate. This too stood wide. Beyond the gate the
street was built over for a long way making a black tunnel, and half way
down the tunnel it turned sharply at a right angle. When this corner had
been turned, a glimmer of twilight far ahead would show where the tunnel
ceased.
Mohammed passed in under the roof over the street and after he had
walked some twenty paces forward, he judged that Captain Ravenel had
fallen a little behind, the shoes of the horse no longer rang so clearly
on the stones. He turned then, and saw horse and rider outlined against
the dark sky, as they reached the tunnel’s mouth. He noticed Paul
Ravenel bent forward over the neck of his horse to prevent his head from
knocking against the low roof. Then he entered the tunnel and was at
once swallowed up in the blackness of it.
Mohammed walked forward again rather quickly. For he was afraid of this
uncanny place, and turned the angle of the street without looking round
again. He did not think at all. If he had, he would have understood that
once the feeble flicker of his lantern were lost beyond the corner, Paul
Ravenel would be left in the darkness of the blind, the mouth of the
tunnel behind him, a blank wall before his face. Mohammed was in a fever
to reach the open street again and now that he saw it in front of him at
the end of the passage opaquely glimmering as an uncurtained window on a
dark night will glimmer to one in a room, he pushed eagerly forward. He
was close to the outlet when he realised that no horse’s hoofs rang on
the cobbles behind him.
He turned and peered back into the tunnel. There was nothing to be seen
and there was no sound. Mohammed did not dare to call out. He stood
wavering between his duty and his fear; and suddenly a tremendous
clatter broke the silence and frightened Mohammed out of his wits.
Mohammed had just time to draw back close against the wall when a horse
dashed past him at a full gallop. A stirrup iron struck and tore his
djellaba and the horse was gone—out of the tunnel up the street. But
Mohammed’s eyes were now accustomed to the darkness. He was able to see
against the sky that the horse was riderless.
Something had startled the horse and the French Captain was thrown. He
was lying on the ground back there, in the darkness. That was all! Thus
Mohammed reasoned, listening. Yes, certainly that was all—except that
it might well be that the French Captain was hurt.
Mohammed must return and find out. Quaking with alarm he retraced his
steps, throwing the light of his lantern on one side of the passage
after the other. But so far the passage was empty. No doubt the Captain
would be lying on the ground beyond the angle where the tunnel turned.
But here too he searched in vain. The Captain had disappeared: somewhere
between the two outlets in this black place. He had gone!
Mohammed lifted the lantern above his head, swinging it this way and
that so that the light flickered and danced upon the walls. Then his arm
grew steady. Opposite it to him in the darkest corner there was a little
door studded with great nails—a door you never perceived though you
passed through the tunnel ten times a day. Mohammed crossed to it,
touched it, shook it. It was locked and bolted. He was debating whether
he should knock upon it or no. But he dared not. This was the beginning
of that Holy War which was to free El Magreb from the clutch of the
Christians,—the stealthy beginning. To-morrow there would not be one of
them alive in Fez, and outside Fez the land would be one flame of
vengeance. If the French Captain were behind that little door he must be
praying for a swift death!
Mohammed drew back and suddenly the mouth of the tunnel was obscured and
he saw the figures of two men. Panic had been hovering about Mohammed
these many minutes since. It took him by the throat and the heart now.
With a cry he dashed his lantern on the ground and fled leaping, past
the two men. He was not followed.
This is the story which Mohammed told to Si El Hadj Arrifa in the room
with the clocks and the brass bedstead and the silver candelabra.
“That is the gate by Karouein Mosque?” said the master, when his servant
had done.
“Yes.”
Si El Hadj Arrifa nodded his head thoughtfully. He did not believe that
the Captain had been captured or slain in this noiseless fashion. He
himself had been bidden not to open that big envelope locked away
upstairs until he was very certain that Paul Ravenel was dead. The
Captain had his plans into which it was no business of his friend to
pry.
“As to that little door, Mohammed,” he said. “It will be well to forget
it.”
“It is forgotten, Master,” answered Mohammed, and far away but very
clear and musical in the silence of the night the voice of a mueddin on
a lofty minaret called the Faithful to their prayers.
CHAPTER XIII
The Companions of the Night
Si El Hadj Arrifa was right. When Mohammed saw Paul Ravenel ride forward
out of the loom of the night into the darkness of the tunnel, bending
his head so that it might not strike the roof, he missed a slight action
which was much more significant. Paul slipped his right hand into his
pocket and took out a heavy key. He had been seeing to it that Mohammed
should draw gradually ahead and by the time when he came opposite to the
little door in the angle, Mohammed was far beyond the turn and there was
not the faintest glimmer of light from the lantern. Paul slipped from
his saddle, gave his horse a sharp cut across the buttocks with his
riding whip, and as the startled animal galloped off, turned quickly to
the little door.
He was in a darkness so complete that he could not see the key in his
hand nor the hand that held it. Yet he found the keyhole at once and in
another second he was within the house. The passage in which he found
himself was as black as the tunnel outside. Yet he locked the door,
picked up and fitted the stout transverse bars into their sockets as
neatly as though he worked in the broad noon. He had made no sound at
all. Yet he had shut a door between the world and himself, and the
effort of his life now must be to keep it for ever closed. He had a
queer fancy that a door thus momentously closing upon his fortunes ought
to clang so loudly that the noise of it would reach across the city.
“There was once a Paul Ravenel,” he said to himself.
The lantern in Mohammed’s hands flickering upon the walls of the tunnel
and every second dwindling a little more, receding a little more, danced
before his eyes. There went the soul and spirit of that Paul Ravenel.
He was aroused from his misery by the sound of Mohammed’s hands sliding
curiously over the panels of the door. The cry of panic followed quickly
and the clatter of the lantern upon the cobble stones. Paul waited with
his pistol in his hand, wondering what had startled his attendant. But
silence only ensued and he turned away from the door into the house. At
the end of a short passage he opened a second door and stood on the
threshold of a small court brightly lit and beautiful. A round pool from
which a jet of water sprang and cooled the sultry air was in the centre
of the white-tiled floor. Wooden pillars gaily painted and gilded and
ornamented in the Moorish fashion, not by carving but by little squares
and cubes and slips of wood delicately glued on in an intricate pattern,
supported arches giving entrance to rooms. There was a cool sound of
river water running along an open conduit waist-high against a wall; and
poised in an archway across the court with her eyes eagerly fixed upon
the passage stood Marguerite Lambert, a tender and happy smile upon her
lips.
When Paul Ravenel saw her, the remorse which had been stinging him
during the ride and had reached a climax of pain as he stood behind the
door, was stilled. Marguerite had changed during this year. The hollows
of her shoulders and throat had filled. The haggard look of apprehension
had vanished from her face. Colour had come into her cheeks and gaiety
into her eyes and a bright gloss upon her hair. She wore a fragile
little white frock embroidered with silver which a girl might have worn
at a dance in a ball room of London or Paris; and in the exotic setting
of that court she seemed to him a flame of wonder and beauty. And she
was his. He held her in his arms, the softness of her cheek against his.
“Marguerite!” he said. “Each time I see you it is for the first time.
How is that?” But Marguerite did not answer to his laugh. She held him
off and scanned him with anxious eyes.
“Something has happened, Paul.”
“No.”
“When you came in, you were troubled.”
“When I saw you the trouble passed. I was afraid that you might be
angry. I am very late.”
Marguerite did not believe one word of that explanation, but the way to
discover the true one did not lie through argument. She drew Paul across
the court, holding him by the hand and saying lightly:
“Foolish one, should I quarrel with you on the evening before you march
away? You might never come back to me.”
She led him into a side room and drew him down beside her on the thick,
low cushions. Upstairs there were chairs and tables and the
paraphernalia of a western home. Here on the level of the patio and the
street they had for prudence’ sake kept it all of the country. There was
no brass bedstead, it is true, to ornament the room, but there were
three tall grandfather clocks, though only one of them was going and
that marked the true time. Marguerite laid her head in the hollow of his
shoulder and her arm went round his waist.
“Paul, you won’t get killed!” she whispered. “Oh, take care! take care!
I am afraid. This year has been so perfect.”
“You must have been lonely many days.”
“And many nights,” whispered Marguerite, with a little grimace. Then she
laughed with the trill of a bird. “But you had just gone or you were
soon returning and my thoughts were full of you. I am not difficult and
thorny, am I, Paul? Say so! Say so at once!”
He laid her down so that her shoulders rested on his knee and her face
smiled up at him, and bending he kissed her on the mouth for an answer.
“You are the most golden thing that ever happened in this world,” he
said. “I think of all those years that I lived through, before I met
you, quite contented with myself and knowing nothing—no, absolutely
nothing of the great miracle.”
“What miracle, Paul?”
“The miracle of man and woman,—of you and me—who want to be
together—who are hungry when we are not together,—who walk amongst
rainbows when we are.”
Paul was the “grand serieux,” as Gerard de Montignac had called him,
warning him too of that very fate which had befallen him. Love of this
girl had swept him off his feet, calf-love and man’s love had come to
him at once. Marguerite was new and entrancingly strange to him as Eve
to Adam. He made much of her judgment, as lovers will, marvelling when
she swept to some swift, sane decision whilst he was debating the this
and the that. She entertained him one moment as though he were an
audience and she a company of players; she was the tenderest of
companions the next: in her moments of passion she made him equal with
the gods; and the pride and glory to both of them was that each had been
the first to enter the heart and know the embraces of the other.
“Paul, what are you thinking about?” she asked.
“That’s the prettiest frock I have seen you in,” said he, and with a
smile of pleasure she raised herself and sat at his side.
“It’s the prettiest I have got,” she returned.
Paul lifted a strip of the fragile skirt between his fingers.
“It’s a funny thing, Marguerite,” he said. “But until I knew you, I
never noticed at all whether a girl was wearing a topping frock or
whether she was dowdy. So long as they had something over their
shoulders, they were all pretty much the same to me.”
“And now?” asked Marguerite.
“Well, it’s different,” said Paul, disappointing her of her expected
flattery. “That’s all.”
Marguerite laughed, as she could afford to. As she knew very well, he
loved to see her straight and slim in her fine clothes and it gave him
an entrancing little sensuous thrill to feel the delicate fabrics
draping exquisitely her firm young body.
Paul, before he had set out with Colonel Gouraud’s supply column on the
expedition to Fez, had sent Marguerite across the Straits and up to
Madrid, where a credit was opened for her at one of the banks. Paul had
been afraid lest she should stint herself, not only of luxuries but of
things needed. But she had answered, “Of course I’ll take from you, my
dear. I am proud to take from you.”
She looked back upon that journey now and said:
“I had six glorious weeks in Madrid. Fittings and fittings and choosing
colours, and buying shoes and stockings and hats and all sorts of
things. I began at half past nine every morning and was never finished
till the shops closed. I had never had any money to spend before. Oh, it
was an orgy!”
“And you regret those weeks?” asked Paul, misled by the enjoyment with
which she remembered them.
“Nonsense. I had more fun still when I came back with what I had bought.
I was going to make myself beautiful in the eyes of my lord!” and
mockingly she pushed her elbow into his side, as she sat beside him.
Marguerite, upon her return, had waited for some weeks in Tangier. Paul
had to make sure that he was to be stationed at Fez. Afterwards he had
to find and buy this house, furnish it and provide a staff of servants
on whose fidelity he could rely. He had secured two negresses and an
Algerian, an old soldier who had served with him in the Beni-Snassen
campaign before he had ever come on service to Morocco. Even when all
was ready at Fez there was a further delay, since the road from Tangier
to Fez was for a time unsafe.
“I was tired of waiting, long before Selim and the negress and the
little escort you sent for me appeared,” she said. “But the journey up
country I adored.”
It was early in the year. The ten villages with their hedges of cactus;
the rolling plains of turf over-scattered with clumps of asphodel in
flower; the aspect of little white-walled towns tucked away high up in
the folds of hills; the bright strong sun by day, the freshness of the
nights, and the camp fires in that open and spacious country were a
miracle of freedom and delight to this girl who had choked for so long
in the hot and tawdry bars of the coast towns. And every step brought
her nearer to her lover. It was the season of flowers. Great fields of
marigold smiled at her. Yellow-striped purple iris nodded a welcome.
Rosy thrift, and pale-blue chicory, and little congregations of crimson
poppies, and acres of wild mustard drew her on through a land of colour.
And here and there on a small knoll a solitary palm overshadowed a
solitary white-domed tomb.
She rode a mule and wore the dress of a Moorish woman. All had been done
secretly, even to the purchase of the house in Fez, which was held in
the name of a Moorish friend of Paul’s. It was Marguerite’s wish from
first to last. Paul would have proclaimed her from the roof tops, had
she but lifted an eyebrow. But she knew very well that it would not help
Paul in his career were he to bring a pretty mistress up from the coast
and parade her openly in Fez. He would get a name for levity and
indiscretion. Moreover, the secrecy was for itself delightful to her. It
was to her like a new toy to a child.
“I love a secret,” she had said once to Paul, when he urged that her
life was dull. “It sets us a little further apart from others and a
little nearer together. It will be fun keeping it up, and we shall laugh
of an evening, locked safely away in the midst of Fez in our little
hidden palace.” It was fun, too, for Marguerite to dress herself in a
fine silk caftan of pink or pale blue reaching to her feet, to pass over
the mansouriya, to slip her bare feet into little purple embroidered
heelless slippers, to wind a bright scarf about her hair, to burden her
ankles and arms with heavy clashing rings of silver, to blacken her long
eyelashes and veil the lower part of her face and go shopping with one
of the negresses in the Souk-Ben-Safi. It was fun also to return home
and transform herself into a fashionable girl of the day and wait in
this southern patio for the coming of her lover.
“I love routine like a dog,” she said on this evening. She was sitting
on the low cushion by Paul’s side. Her slim legs showing pink through
the fine white silk of her stockings were stretched out in front of her.
She contemplated the tips of her small white satin slippers. “I don’t
want any more surprises,” and Paul’s face grew for a moment grave and
twitched with a stab of pain. “I don’t want any more people. I have had
enough of both. I love going up on the roof and watching that great
upper city of women, and wondering what’s going on in the narrow streets
at the bottom of the deep chasms between the houses. I have books, too,
and work when I’m not too lazy to do it, and I am learning the little
two-stringed guitar, and I want one person, one foolish dear person, and
since I’ve got him, I’m very happy.”
Paul reached forward and, closing a hand round one of her ankles, shook
it tenderly.
“Listen to me, Marguerite!” he began, but she was upon her feet in an
instant. She snatched up Paul’s kêpi and cocked it jauntily on her
curls.
“Canada?” she cried in a sharp, manly voice, and saluted, bringing her
high heels together with a click and standing very stiff and upright.
She hummed the tune of “The Maple Leaf,” interpolating noises meant to
parody the instruments of an orchestra, and she marched in front of Paul
and round the patio quickly and briskly like a girl in a pantomime
procession, until she came back to her starting point.
“Australia!”
Again she saluted and marched round to the tune of “Australia will be
there.”
“The U-nited States of America!” she announced, and this time she
skimmed round the patio in a sort of two-step dance, swift as a bird,
her white and silver frock glinting and rippling as she moved.
“Yankee Doodle went to town
Upon a little pony,”
she sang, and she returned to her starting point.
“Great Britain!” she cried.
Here she saluted for a long time while marking time and calling out in a
gruff voice: “One, two, one, two! Can’t you girls keep time! Miss
Montmorenci, you’ve a ladder in your stocking, and if you think any one
is going to take the trouble to climb up it, you flatter yourself. Miss
de Bourbon, you haven’t marked your face and it can do with a lot!” and
off she went to the tune of the “British Grenadiers.” When she came
opposite to Paul again she held out her short skirt on each side,
dropped a low curtsey and declared:
“And that, ladies and gentlemen, will conclude our entertainment for
this evening.”
It was to conclude their entertainment for many and many an evening, for
whilst Paul laughed and applauded, from right above their heads, it
seemed, a voice vibrant and loud and clear dropped its call to prayer
through the open roof of the court.
“Allah Akbar! God is above all. There is no God but God and Mohammed is
his prophet. Rise and pray! Rise and do the thing that is good. There is
no God but God!”
It was the same voice to which Si El Hadj Arrifa was listening in
another quarter of the city. Paul’s house was built in the very shadow
of the Karouein Mosque, and the voice pealing from its high minaret in
the silence of the night, familiar though both Marguerite and he were
with it, never failed to startle them. It was a voice deep, resonant, a
voice of music and majesty.
“The Companions of the Sick!” said Paul, as they listened to it without
moving, caught in the spell of its beauty.
“There are ten of them,” said Marguerite. “Like all the rank and fashion
of Fez, I set my clocks by their voices.”
“Yes, ten,” Paul explained. “Ben Hayoun, a rich man lay very ill in this
city, and night after night he could get no sleep. The silence became
terrible to him. He felt an appalling sense of loneliness as the hours
dragged by and not a sound varied them. So, when he recovered, he
founded this order of ten mueddins, each of whom must chant the summons
to prayer for a half of one of the five hours which precede the dawn, so
that those in pain shall be no more alone. They call them the companions
of the sick.”
Marguerite looked up to the open roof and the stars above it.
“I often wonder what they think when they look down upon this bright
square of light beneath them: whether they speculate who live here and
why they stay up so late of nights. I fancy sometimes that the mueddin
is looking down and watching us as we move about the court.”
She stood for a moment gazing upwards, and then her mood changed.
“One o’clock,” she cried, and running to the clock against the wall, she
opened the glass which protected its face and adjusted the hands. “Paul,
I’ll give you a whiskey and soda, and you must go.”
She turned to him, trying to laugh gaily, but her voice broke.
“You have to be on parade at six and you have miles to go before you
reach your camp.” Her gaiety deserted her altogether. She flung herself
into his arms and clung to him, pressing her face against his coat. “Oh,
my dear, when shall I see you again? I wish that you weren’t going. Yes,
I do! Though I pretend to laugh and to think nothing of it when I am
with you, I have been praying for a week with all my heart that
something might happen to keep you here.”
“Something has happened,” said Paul.
Marguerite lifted her face.
“You are not going?”
“No.”
“Paul, Paul!” she cried joyfully. But there was a look on his face which
dashed her joy. Marguerite was quick in those days to fall from a high
buoyancy of spirit to forebodings and alarm. This miracle of her
happiness was balanced on so fine a needle point that sometime it must
drop and break into a thousand useless shining splinters. “Why aren’t
you going?” she asked suspiciously.
“Because of the rain.” Paul Ravenel explained. “The departure of the
Mission is postponed for three days.”
“Only for three days?” Marguerite repeated with a wistful droop of the
corners of her mouth.
“It won’t leave after three days,” said Paul. “It won’t leave Fez for a
long while.”
He spoke very gravely and after a moment of silence Marguerite
disengaged herself gently from his embrace. A trace of the haggard look
which had once been so familiar upon her face was visible there again:
so visible that Paul wondered whether some hint of the threatened
massacre had not been given to her by Selim or the negresses.
“Yes, you were in great trouble when you came into the court to-night,
and when I asked you why, you put me off with an excuse. The truth now,
Paul, please!” she pleaded though she caught her breath at the thought
of what the truth might mean to her.
“You have courage, Marguerite.”
The girl’s eyelids closed and fluttered over her eyes.
“I shall need it?”
“Yes.”
She sank down upon the cushions, for her knees had given under her. Paul
did not understand the real cause of her distress until she took his
hand between both of hers and spoke.
“You needn’t hesitate, my dear. Of course I have always lived in fear
that our life together couldn’t go on. In my happiest moments, deep
down, I have felt that dread. Perfection’s not allowed, is it? There’s a
jealousy that will shatter it. I was sure of that. But I always
hoped—not yet. I always prayed for a little longer time to make up for
the wretched years before.”
If trouble was mentioned to Marguerite Lambert in those days she had
just the one interpretation of the word. It meant separation from Paul
and therefore the ending of all things. Her passion occupied her, heart
and brain and blood. She had waited for it, curiously certain that she
would not be denied it. Now that the great gift was hers, she was in a
desperate alarm lest she should wake one morning to discover that it had
been filched from her in the night. Paul dropped down upon the cushions
at her side and with a tender laugh drew away her hands from her face.
“Marguerite, you are foolish. It isn’t separation, of course. You
haven’t to fear that—no, nor ever will have to. Believe me, Marguerite!
Look at me and say you believe me!”
He turned her face towards him and held it between his hands and her
eyes lost their trouble and smiled at him.
“That’s right. Now listen, Marguerite!”
He gave her a little shake. For since she knew that the one evil which
she dreaded was not to befall her she had ceased to attend.
“I am listening, Paul.”
“I dined with a friend of mine to-night. I went there to leave him a
letter of instructions about you if anything happened to me on our march
down to the coast.”
“Happened to you?” she exclaimed with a sharp intake of her breath.
“I expected an attack. Si El Hadj Arrifa would have seen that you were
sent safely down to the coast. My agents there would have taken care of
you. You would of course never want for anything again.”
“I should want for everything,” said Marguerite slowly. “I don’t think,
Paul, that I could go on living. . . . I was told of a girl . . . when
her husband died, she dressed herself in her wedding gown—I couldn’t do
that, my dear,” she interpolated with a little whimsical smile. “Then
she lay down on her bed and took poison. . . . I often think of that
girl.”
“Marguerite, you shouldn’t. It’s morbid. You are young. Even if I
went—” but there came a stubborn look upon Marguerite Lambert’s face
against which he was well aware his finest arguments would beat in vain.
“I’ll discuss that with you when it’s necessary,” he said. “To-night my
friend Si El Hadj Arrifa warned me that not only was the Mission to be
attacked on its way to the coast, but that there would also be a rising
here.”
He had Marguerite’s attention now. She looked at him with startled eyes.
“In Fez?”
“Yes.”
“That will mean—?”
“Yes, let us face it. A massacre.”
Marguerite shivered and caught Paul’s hand. She looked about the court
outside the lighted room in which they sat. There were shadowy corners
which daunted her. She looked upwards, straining her ears. But the
ceaseless chant of the mueddin on the minaret of the Karouein mosque
alone broke the silence of the night.
“When is it to be?” she whispered, as though the fanatics were already
gathered about her door.
“To-night, probably. To-morrow, certainly.”
“And you can trust your friend’s word?”
“As I would trust yours,” said Paul.
Marguerite drew closer to her lover and huddled against him. He put his
arm about her. She was trembling. The fun of the masquerade was over.
She wondered now how without fear she could have wandered with her black
servant through the narrow, crowded markets and in those deep, maze-like
streets; she pictured to herself the men; furtive, sleek Fasi; wild
creatures from the hills with long muskets gleaming with
mother-of-pearl; brawny men of the people, and she painted their faces
with the colours and the fire of fury and fanaticism. This little house
shut in and crowded about with a thousand houses! She had thought of it
as a secret palace hidden away in the uncharted centre of a maze. Now it
seemed to her a trap set in a jungle of tigers—a trap in which she and
Paul were caught. And her thoughts suddenly took a turn. No, only she
was in that trap.
She listened, turning her face upwards to the open roof. The city was
still quiet.
“Paul, there are other Christians scattered in houses in the town.”
“Yes.”
“Couldn’t you give a warning? So that troops from the camp might be
hurried into the town? Leave your uniform here! Dress in your djellaba
and your Moorish clothes. You can reach headquarters—”
“I have already been there. They will not believe,” said Paul.
Marguerite thought for a little while, summoning her strength to assist
her, and the memory of the great debt she owed her lover.
“Very well,” she said. “You have done all that you can. You must go back
to the camp now, Paul, while you still can.”
“No.”
“I shall be all right, Paul. No one suspects this house. You have always
been careful when you came here that the tunnel was empty. At the worst
I have the little Belgian automatic pistol you gave me.”
“No,” Paul repeated.
“But your place is in the camp with your men.”
“I have leave,” said Paul. “I applied for leave the moment I knew that
we had three days more in Fez.”
Marguerite did not for a moment doubt the truth of what he said. He
spoke so simply. It was so natural a thing that he should ask for leave.
She gave up the little scheme to which she had steeled her heart. Her
arms crept about his neck.
“There!” she whispered with a sigh of relief. “I have tried to send you
away, haven’t I? I have done my best and you won’t go! I am glad, Paul,
I am glad! Alone I should have shivered in terror.”
“We shall be together, Marguerite.”
Her lips trembled to a smile. Danger thus encountered seemed in the
anticipation hardly to be considered a danger at all.
“Listen,” she said, lifting her hand.
The voice of another mueddin now rang out across the city. Marguerite
rose.
“This lighted square just above our heads, Paul, is just beneath his
feet. Let us give him no cause to wonder.”
She put out the candles and returned to Paul Ravenel’s side. They sat
together in the darkness, huddled against one another, whilst the
companions of the sick followed one another upon the high minaret of the
Karouein mosque.
Once, twice when some stray cries broke the silence Paul whispered
eagerly.
“It is beginning,” and as silence followed upon the cries. “No! No!” he
added in a dull voice, a voice of disappointment.
“Paul, you wish it to begin!” said Marguerite in wonder, and she tried
to distinguish the expression of his face, even though the darkness
showed her nothing but the silhouette of his head.
“It will be the sooner over,” said Paul quickly. “The revolt can’t last
long in any case. There’s a strong column in the field just south of
Meknes. A call from the wireless and four days will bring them here.”
But there was another reason why with all his soul he prayed to hear the
still night break up in a clatter of firing and fierce cries. If the
revolt began to-night, why then he himself had been caught in it, had
been forced to seek a refuge, had been unable to regain his post. Who
could gainsay him? All was saved—Marguerite and honour too. Whereas if
the morning came and Fez was still at peace and his appointed place
empty—then some other man must fill it. But the voices on the minaret
rang out in music above their heads, until Marguerite said: “This is the
last. It is he who raises the flag over the mosque. In half an hour we
shall have the dawn.”
CHAPTER XIV
The Tunic
“Marguerite, you must go to bed,” said Paul. “I’ll rouse you if there’s
any danger.”
It was very near to the dawn now. There was a freshness and an
expectation in the air; a faint colourless light was invading the
darkness; in the patch of sky above their heads the bright stars were
swooning. For most of this last half hour Marguerite’s head had lain
heavy upon his shoulder, and if she opened her eyes it was only to close
them again with a sigh of content. Paul lifted her on to her feet and
led her up the stairs.
“And you, Paul?” she asked, drowsily.
“I shall be within call. I shall sleep for a little on the cushions
below. Good-night.”
Marguerite noticed that the voice of the last mueddin ceased whilst she
was still preparing herself for her bed; and after she had got into it,
she heard a kettle singing cheerfully in the court below as if Paul were
brewing for himself some tea. Then, with the doors of her bedroom open
upon the little gallery above the court she went fast asleep.
Hours afterwards a shattering noise awakened her. She lay for a few
moments deliciously poised between sleep and consciousness, and vaguely
thinking her long and troubled vigil to have been a nightmare which the
light of day had happily dispelled. The sunlight was falling in a sheet
of gold through the open roof. “It must be very late,” she reflected,
lazily, and thereupon sharply and crisply two shots from a rifle split
the air. Marguerite sprang up in her bed with a hand to her heart, as
though one of those shots had wounded her. It was just the same noise
which had broken through her slumbers. The nightmare was true, then! She
listened, resting upon one arm, with her face turned towards the open
doors. A clamour of voices was borne from a distance to her ears. The
new Terror had begun.
“Paul!” she cried loudly. “Paul”; and a tall man dressed in the robes of
a Moor stood beside her bed. She shrank away with a little scream. It
was not until he smiled that she recognized her lover.
“You had better get up, Marguerite,” he said, and bending down he kissed
her. “You have slept well, thank the Lord.”
One of the negresses brought her a cup of tea and Marguerite, slipping
on her dressing gown, sat upon the edge of the bed and thrust her feet
into her slippers.
“What is the time, Paul?”
“A little past one.”
“So late?”
“I let you sleep. There was no disturbance. The first shot waked you.”
“I will be quick,” she said, or rather began to say. For the words,
half-uttered, were frozen upon her lips. Such a din, so shrill, so
menacing and strange, burst out above their heads that Marguerite
cowered down under it as under the threat of a blow. She had never heard
the like of it, she hoped never to hear the like of it again; yet she
was to hear it now for days—the swift repetition of one strident note,
swelling and falling in a pæan of wild inhuman triumph. Marguerite
imagined all the birds of prey in the world wheeling and screaming above
the city; or a thousand thin voices shrieking in a madhouse;
you—you—you—you—you—the piercing clamour ran swift as the clacking
of a mitrailleuse, and with a horrid ferocity which made the girl’s
blood run cold.
“Paul,” she said, “what is it?”
“The women on the roofs.”
“Oh!”
Marguerite shuddered as she listened, clutching tight her lover’s arm.
Such a promise of cruelty was in those shrill cries as made Marguerite
think of the little automatic pistol in the drawer of her table as a
talisman which she must henceforth carry close to her hand. She felt
that even if she escaped from the peril of these days, she could never
walk again in the narrow streets between the blind houses without the
chill of a great fear. Her clasp tightened upon her lover’s arm and he
winced sharply. Marguerite looked up into his face, and saw that his
lips were pressed close together to prevent a cry of pain.
“Paul!” she said wonderingly. She loosened her clasp and turned back the
sleeve of his djellaba. Beneath it, his forearm was roughly but tightly
bandaged. “Oh, my dear,” she cried, in a voice of compunction, “what
happened to you whilst I slept? You are wounded—and for me! Must I
always do you harm?” and she beat her hands together in her distress.
“It was an accident,” said Paul.
“An accident?”
She ran to her medicine-chest, and making him sit beside her, unfastened
the bandage. “An accident?” she repeated. It looked to her as if he had
been stabbed. A knife had been driven right through the flesh of his
forearm. Paul did not reply to her exclamations and she did not press
her questions. She washed and dressed the wound and bound it up again.
“It must hurt terribly,” she said, her forehead knitted in distress.
“It is easier now,” he answered. “The knife was clean.”
“You are sure of that, Paul?”
“Quite.”
She made a sling of his arm and sent him away. She dressed quickly,
wondering how that wound had been inflicted and why he wished not to
explain it. Surely he had not gone out whilst she slept? Surely there
had been no attack upon the house? No! But she was plunged now into a
world of mystery and fear, and she wrung her hands in an impotent
despair.
They took their breakfast in a room upon the first floor, Paul asking
questions as to how far the house was provisioned, and Marguerite
answering almost at random, whilst the cries of the women rang shrill
overhead.
“Oh, yes, there is food,” she answered.
“We can always send Selim out,” he added.
Marguerite’s eyes lightened.
“We will send him out, Paul,” she exclaimed. “Do you know what has been
troubling me? We haven’t a window upon any street. We are here at the
bottom of a well with nothing but our ears to warn us of danger. We can
see nothing.”
Paul looked at her anxiously. She was nervous, the flutter of her hands
feverish, and her voice running up and down the scale as though she had
no control over it. Paul reached across the table and laid his hand upon
her arm.
“You poor little girl!” he said gently. “These are trying days. But
there won’t be many. The wireless here will have got into touch already
with Moinier’s column near Meknes. The troops, too, at Dar-Debibagh may
do something,” and ever so slightly his voice faltered when he spoke of
the troops, yet not so slightly but that Marguerite noticed it. “They
have some guns,” he went on hurriedly, and again Marguerite noticed the
hurry, the desire to cover up and hide that little spasm of pain which
had stabbed him when he thought of his men. “Yes, the guns!” he said.
“There will be an end to that infernal twittering on the roof tops when
the guns begin to talk.”
“Paul, you should have been with your men,” said Marguerite, and he
answered her with a kind of violent obstinacy which drew her eyes in one
swift glance to his face. “I am on leave.”
He changed his tone, however, immediately.
“We will send Selim into the town for news,” he said cheerfully, “and we
will go up on to the roof.”
Selim was bidden to knock twice, and, after a tiny interval, once more
upon his return. Paul stood behind the door listening to make sure that
the tunnel was empty before he opened it. Then he let him go, and locked
and barred the door again.
“Come,” he said to Marguerite and, picking up some cushions, they went
upstairs to the roof. Marguerite had followed Paul’s example, and was
dressed in Moorish clothes; the house was higher by a storey than any
which adjoined it, and the roof itself was enclosed in a parapet
waist-high. They crouched upon the cushions behind the wall and
cautiously looked over it.
A pack of clouds was threatening in the west, but just now the city
glittered in the sunlight like a jewel, with its hanging gardens and
high terraces, its white houses huddling down the hillside like a flock
of sheep, and the bright green tiles of its mosques. Paul and Marguerite
never tired of this aspect of the lovely city, shut within its old
crumbling walls and musical with the rushing noise of its many rivers.
But to-day they saw it as they had never seen it before. For the roofs
were crowded with women in their coloured robes of gauze and bright
scarves, who danced and screamed, and climbed from one house to another
on little ladders in such a frenzy of excitement that the eyes were
dazzled and the ears deafened. Paul turned towards the north. Upon the
roof of one house men were breaking through with axes and picks, whilst
others flung down rags and sticks which had been soaked in paraffin and
lighted, through the holes into the rooms below.
“I think that’s the house of the French veterinary surgeon,” said Paul;
and from all about that house rose a continuous rattle of firing.
“Look!” said Paul, and he nodded to the south. Here there was a gap
between the houses, and Marguerite could see far below a tumble-down
stone bridge built in a steep arch across a stream. As she looked, a
wild horde of men swarmed upon the bridge, capering and yelling.
“There are soldiers amongst them,” said Marguerite. “I can see their
rifles and their bandoliers.”
“Yes, the Askris who have revolted,” answered Paul, and suddenly he
covered Marguerite’s eyes with the palm of his hand. “Don’t look!” But
Marguerite had already seen, and she sank down behind the parapet with a
moan. In the midst of that wild procession some rifles with bayonets
fixed were held aloft, and on one of the bayonets the trunk and the
limbs of a man were impaled. The head was carried last of all, and upon
a pole taller than the bayonets, a head black with blood, like a
negro’s, on which a gold-laced kêpi was derisively cocked.
Paul swore underneath his breath.
“One of my brothers,” he whispered. “Oh, my God,” and dropping his head
into his hands, he rocked his body to and fro in an agony of remorse.
Marguerite touched him on the shoulder.
“Paul, there’s a carbine in your room.”
“It would be fatal to use it.”
“I don’t care,” Marguerite cried fiercely. Her face was alive with
passion. “Use it, Paul. I don’t care!” and from far below there rose the
sound of a loud knocking upon a door.
Marguerite’s heart fluttered up into her throat. She stared at Paul with
her eyes opened wide in horror. The same thought was in both their
minds. Both listened, holding their breath that they might hear the
better.
“It was upon our door they knocked,” Marguerite whispered, and she crept
a little closer to her lover.
“Listen!” replied Paul, and as the knocking began again, but this time
louder, he added with a grim look upon his face, “Yes.”
“And it was not Selim who knocked,” said Marguerite.
They could hear cries now, angry orders to open, followed by a muffled
clamour and such a clatter of heavy blows as shook the very house.
“I must go down,” said Paul, in a low voice. “Otherwise they’ll break in
the door.”
Marguerite nodded. Her face was white to the lips, but she was quite
still now and her eyes steady. They crept down to the uppermost floor of
the house. The noise was louder.
“You will stay here, Marguerite?”
“Yes.”
“You have your pistol?”
Marguerite drew it from her broad waistbelt of gold brocade, snapped
back the barrel, and set the safety catch. Her hand never shook. Now
that the peril was at her elbow she could even smile. Paul took her
passionately in his arms.
“You are gold all through, Marguerite,” he cried. “If this is the end, I
thank you a thousand times. I would hate to have died without knowing
the wonder of such rare love as yours.”
“‘We two embracing under death’s spread hand.’” She quoted from a book
upon her shelf in which she was pleased to find a whole library of
wisdom and inspiration.
“You will wait until the last moment?” said Paul, touching the little
automatic in her hand.
“Until they are on this last flight of stairs,” she replied, in an even
voice. “Paul!” She clung to him for a second, not in terror, but as to
some inestimable treasure which she could hardly let go. Then she stood
away, her eyes shining like the dew, her face hallowed with tenderness.
“Now, my dear, go!”
Paul Ravenel ran down the stairs. The clamour echoing from the tunnel
had taken on a fiercer note; the door, stout as it was, bent inwards
under the blows. Marguerite, standing upon the landing, heard him unbolt
the door. She drew back out of sight as a crowd of men, some in
djellabas spotted with blood, some in ragged caftans, some armed with
rifles, others with curved knives, others, again, with sharpened poles,
swept screaming like madmen over the court.
“The Frenchman,” cried a great fellow, brandishing a butcher’s cleaver.
“Give him to us! God has willed that they shall all die this day.”
What had become of Paul? she wondered. Had he been swept off his feet
and trampled down in the rush? She heard his voice above the clamour.
She imagined him standing with uplifted hand claiming silence. At all
events, silence followed, and then his voice rang out.
“God willed that he should die yesterday,” said Paul.
Marguerite peered out between the curtains which overhung the entrance
to the room. She saw him move, calm and smiling, across the court to an
alcove and point to a corner.
“The Frenchman came to my house once too often. Look! He sought refuge
here last night. He was not wise to seek refuge in the house of Ben
Sedira the Meknasi. For to-day his body rolls in the river—” Paul threw
open a small door in the back wall and showed them the Karouein River
tumbling, swollen with the rain, past the walls of his house. Then he
pointed to the alcove: “And his livery lies there.”
There was a rush into the alcove, and the shouts of exultation broke out
again. A blue tunic, on the breast of which medals glinted and rattled,
was tossed out high amidst the throng. The tunic was gashed and all
cluttered and stained with blood which had dried. Paul’s gold-lace cap
spun through the air, was caught, and clapped upon the head of a boy,
his breeches and boots and accoutrements were flung from hand to hand
and shared out amidst laughter and cheering. And once more there was a
surge of men, and the court was empty and silent. No, not quite empty.
Paul was talking in a gentle voice to one wild man who was now wearing
over a ragged caftan Paul’s uniform tunic. Paul held him firmly by the
elbow, and was speaking in a curiously soft, smooth voice, than which
Marguerite had never heard anything more menacing.
“You will leave that tunic, good friend. You will take it off at once
and leave it here. It is my trophy. Have I not earned it?”
The man protested, and sought to disengage himself, but Paul still held
him firmly.
“It shall hang in my house,” he continued, “that my children may
remember how once there were Frenchmen befouling the holy ground of
Morocco.”
Once more Marguerite heard the rattle of the medals as the coat was
restored, and the Moor cried out: “There will be none alive in Fez this
night. Salam aleikum, O man of Meknes!” And a little afterwards the door
was slammed and barred.
Paul returned to the court, holding the tunic in his hands. The peril of
the last few moments was swept altogether out of his mind. For a moment
Marguerite herself was forgotten. He was holding the badge of many years
of honourable service, and the shining medals which proved that the
service had been of real value to the country he served. All was now
wasted and foregone.
“I should make the sacrifice again,” he said obstinately to himself, “if
it were to make again. I should! I should!”
But he had not borne to see the tunic and its medals paraded in triumph
on the back of one of these assassins through the streets of Fez. When
he stopped the Moor and held him back from his companions, his hand had
gripped close the revolver hidden in his waistband. Had the man clung to
the tunic, Paul would have killed, whatever the risk. The traditions and
the whole training of his life had forced his hand. He knew that, as he
stood in the silent sunlit patio fondling the stuff of the coat between
his fingers, and his heart aching as though some little snake had
slipped into his bosom and was feeding there.
“I have done what my father did,” he thought. “I, who set out to atone
for him.” And he laughed aloud with so much mockery at his own
pretensions that the laughter startled him. “I can plead a different
reason. But what of that? I have done what my father did!”
He folded the tunic reverently, and laid it down again in the alcove. As
he stood up he was startled by the clatter of something falling overhead
and the sharp explosion of a pistol. He looked upwards. The sound had
come from behind those curtains where Marguerite was hidden. Had she
been watching? Had she seen him fondling the tunic? Had she heard his
bitter laughter? Perhaps he had spoken aloud. For a moment his heart
stood still. Some words that Henriette had said to him—oh, ever so long
ago, in the Villa Iris, flashed back into his mind. “Even if the grand
passion comes—oh la, la la!—she will blow her brains out, the little
fool!”
He sprang up the stairs, crying “Marguerite! Marguerite!” and stumbling
in his haste. No answer was returned to him. He tore the curtains aside,
and saw her lying on the floor by the side of a divan. The pistol had
slipped from her hand and fallen a little way from her. Paul flung
himself upon his knees beside her, lifted her, and pressed her close to
his heart. “Marguerite! Marguerite!” he whispered. There was no wound,
and she was breathing, and in a moment or two her eyes opened. Paul
understood in that supreme moment of relief how greatly his love of
Marguerite overpowered his grief at honour lost.
“Oh, my dear, you frightened me!” he said.
She smiled as he lifted her onto the divan.
“I was foolish,” she answered.
She had waited upon the outcome of that wild scene in the court below,
her nerves steady, her mind unconscious of any effort to steel herself
against catastrophe. She could catch but a glimpse of what was going
forward; she did not understand the trick by which Paul Ravenel had
appeased the invaders; she heard the wild babble of their frenzied
voices and Paul’s voice over-topping them. She had waited serenely with
her little pistol in her hand, safety to be reached so easily by the
mere pressure of a finger. Then suddenly all was over; the court was
empty, the house which had rung with fury a moment since was silent; and
as she heard the bolts of the door shot once more into their sockets her
strength had melted away. She had stood for a little while in a daze
and, catching at the divan as she fell, had slipped in a swoon to the
floor. The pistol fell from her hand and exploded as it fell.
“I was foolish,” she repeated; “I didn’t understand what had happened. I
don’t even now.”
“I was afraid that some time or another some one had seen me enter this
house and remembered it,” Paul Ravenel explained. “Last night something
happened outside the door—what, I don’t know, but enough to trouble me
a little. So after you had gone to bed I boiled a kettle—”
“Yes, I heard it.”
“And sterilized my big knife. I drove the knife through my arm and let
the blood soak through my tunic, and then I stabbed the tunic again in
the back. It was lucky that I did.”
“What should I have done without you?” she said, as she rested upon the
cushions of the divan. She laid a hand gently in his.
“Does the wound hurt, Paul?”
“It throbs a little if I move it. That’s all. It’s nothing.”
“I’ll dress it again to-night,” she said, sleepily, and almost
immediately she fell asleep. She slept so deeply, that a muffled roar,
which shook the house, did not even trouble her dreams. Paul smiled as
he heard that sound. “That’s one of the seventy-five,” he reflected. The
guns from the camp at Dar-Debibagh were coming into action.
He left Marguerite sleeping, and climbed again to the roof. The guns
were firing to the south of the town, and were still far away. But no
man who had fought through the Chaiouïa Campaign could ever forget the
tribesmen’s terror of the guns.
“Another day or two!”
Paul counted up the stages of the march of Moinier’s column from Meknes.
If only he was quick, so that the tribesmen could not mass between him
and Fez! There were houses alight now in Fez-el-Bali. The work of
massacre was going on. But let General Moinier hurry, and the guns over
there at Dar-Debibagh talk insistently to Fez! Moreover, at five o’clock
the rain began again. It fell like javelins, with the thunder of surf
upon a beach.
CHAPTER XV
On the Roof Top
Marguerite drove 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
Marguerite’s Way Out
Gradually the 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
The Outcasts
That day, 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.
CHAPTER XVIII
Captain Laguessière’s Report
On the twenty-first of April, three days later, Gerard de Montignac rode
into Fez at ten o’clock of the morning behind General Moinier. He was
lodged at the Auvert Hospital and as he came out of his room he passed
in the corridor a face which he remembered. He turned on the instant.
“Baumann!”
Baumann was that short stockish Alsatian belonging to the Department of
Native Affairs, whom Gerard many months before had sought at the Villa
Iris. He shook Gerard’s hand with deferential warmth.
“Captain de Montignac! How can I serve you?”
The sight of Gerard always made Baumann think of the Bois de Bologne and
brought to his nostrils a smell of Paris. “Stylish” was Baumann’s
epithet for this slim razor-like being.
“You can tell me for a second time how it goes with my _grand serieux_,
and where he is to be found.”
Baumann was enchanted by the familiar allusion. It made him out as an
intimate of Captain de Montignac. But he was baffled too.
“The name would help,” he said, hesitating.
“Oh, Paul Ravenel, of course,” replied Gerard impatiently, and Baumann’s
face lengthened. He fidgeted uncomfortably on his feet. Yes, Paul
Ravenel, to be sure! Captain de Montignac had been uneasy about Paul
Ravenel in Casablanca, when there was really no occasion for uneasiness.
This time, however, the case was very different.
“Alas, my Captain, I can give you no news of your friend at all. Many
officers were caught at a disadvantage. We are afraid—yes, we are all
very much afraid.”
Gerard, with his legs apart and his hands thrust into the pockets of his
riding-breeches, looked at his twittering companion for a moment. Then
he said abruptly:
“Let me hear!”
Baumann had an uncomfortable little story to tell. Late on the night of
the sixteenth, the night before the massacres openly began, Captain
Ravenel had ridden up to the door of the hospital with a native servant
carrying a lantern in front of him. He was labouring under a great
anxiety and distress. Baumann himself received Captain Ravenel and heard
his story. Captain Ravenel had assured him that the Askris would revolt
immediately, and that there would be a massacre of the white people
throughout the city.
“And you didn’t believe Paul Ravenel?” thundered Gerard de Montignac.
Baumann was in a haste to exculpate himself.
“I waked up the two Intelligence Officers, Colonel Renaud and Captain
Brouarre,” he said. “They came down in their pyjamas. We went into the
room on the right of the entrance here, and the Captain told us all
again many bad things which have since been fulfilled.”
“And you wouldn’t believe Paul Ravenel!” Gerard looked at Baumann with a
bitter amazement. “He gave you the warning, he, the wise one, and you
thought he was exaggerating like some panic-stricken rich Fasi.”
“We hoped he was exaggerating,” said the unhappy Baumann. “You see, our
hands were tied. Reports that disturbances were likely had gone to the
Embassy before and had been not very civilly received. It was an order
that no similar reports should be presented. It was late at night. We
could do nothing.”
Gerard could read into the halting sentences all that Baumann was not
the man to say.
“Well?” he asked, curtly. “What of Paul?”
Paul, very disappointed, had mounted his horse again and ridden off to
the Bab Segma on his way to the camp at Dar-Debibagh.
“But he never reached the camp. He has not been seen since. We are all
very much afraid.”
It was quite clear that Baumann had no hope at all that Paul Ravenel
would ever be seen again.
“Most of our people scattered through Fez have been accounted for,” he
added. “Many were rescued and brought here to safety. The bodies of
others, too, but not of all. There has been no means of making
enquiries.”
“That of course I understand,” said Gerard de Montignac, as he turned
sorrowfully away.
Gerard was a monarchist. Some day the French would have a king again,
when there was a claimant worth his salt. Meanwhile he was heart and
soul for France, whatever its régime. So his first grief now was for the
loss to France of the great soldier that was surely to be—nay, that was
already beginning to be. He had lost a good comrade and friend too.
These losses must be paid for—as soon as there was leisure to exact
payment—and paid for in full.
Meanwhile he went about his work. On the twenty-second the troops
occupied the city. The two following days were taken up in the
disarmament of the population. Yet other two days were given to
pleadings and arguments and exhortations to Paris and the Civil
Authorities for permission to declare a state of siege. Only when this
permission was reluctantly granted and the order made, could any of the
General’s staff unbutton their tunics and give a little time to their
own affairs.
Gerard’s first move was to ride out to the camp at Dar-Debibagh, whither
Paul’s battalion of tirailleurs had now returned. There he found the
little Praslin now in command of Paul’s company, and the little Praslin
had information of importance to give to him.
“Captain Ravenel rode back with me to the camp from the Sultan’s Palace
on the evening of the sixteenth, after the great storm,” said Praslin.
“He was very glad that the storm had delayed for three days the
departure of the Mission.”
“He knew already, then, that afternoon, that the massacres were coming!”
said Gerard.
“No! I should say not. He was quite frank about the whole position of
affairs here, as he saw it. If he had imagined that Fez itself was going
to rise he would have said so, I am sure. What he did believe was that a
serious attack would be made upon the Mission out in the bled, on its
way to the coast.”
“He was afraid that the escort was not strong enough?”
“He certainly thought that,” replied Praslin, slowly, and in a voice
which suggested that he did not consider this explanation at all
adequate to explain Paul’s satisfaction at the postponement of the
march. “But fear doesn’t enter into the matter at all. There was
something more. I got the impression that he just hated the idea of
going down to the coast if only for a few weeks. He wanted to stay on
here in Fez. An attack on the line of march! That he would have
considered as in the day’s work. No. He didn’t want to leave Fez.
Curious! Wasn’t it?”
Gerard glanced sharply at Lieutenant Praslin.
“Oho!” he exclaimed, softly. “Curious? Yes! But then Paul Ravenel was
never like the rest of us.”
He remained silent for a little while, turning some quite new thought
over and over uneasily in his mind.
“Well?” he said, waking up again.
“After we had returned here, he changed into a dry uniform, for we were
both wet through, and told me that he was going to dine with a friend in
Fez,” Praslin resumed. “I reminded him that there was a battalion parade
at six the next morning.”
“Yes?”
“He answered that he had not forgotten and rode off.”
“And that was the last you heard of him?” asked Gerard de Montignac.
“No!”
“Oh?”
“It was the last I saw of him,” Praslin corrected.
“What do you mean?” asked Gerard de Montignac.
“Five minutes after Captain Ravenel had gone, a native came to the camp
and asked for him. He carried a letter.”
Gerard’s face lit up.
“A letter? What became of it?”
“It was taken by Captain Ravenel’s orderly and placed on the table in
his tent.”
“Yes?”
“The next morning I saw it there and took charge of it. It was addressed
in Arabic.”
“You have got it still?”
“Yes!”
“Let me see it!”
Gerard reminded the little Praslin of some lean sharp-nosed pointer
which somewhere in the stubble has picked up a scent. Praslin led him to
his tent, unlocked a leather satchel and tipped out a number of letters
on to his bed.
“Here it is!”
He handed a paper, not an envelope, folded and sealed and superscribed
in Arabic characters, to Gerard. Gerard almost snatched at it. But once
he had it in his hands, he was no longer so sure. He twiddled it between
his fingers and gingerly. He sat down in Praslin’s camp chair and looked
at Praslin and looked at the letter. He seemed to be afraid of what he
might read in it. Finally, in a burst, he cried:
“I shall open it.”
“But of course,” said the little Praslin.
Gerard broke the seal and read. Praslin wondered what he had dreaded to
find written upon that paper, so evident was his relief now. It was the
letter from Si El Hadj Arrifa which had just missed Paul Ravenel on the
night of the sixteenth. It began with the usual flowery protestations
and ended with an apologetic request that Paul should not come into Fez
that night.
“This makes everything easier,” said Gerard, springing up from his
chair. “I shall keep this letter, Praslin.”
He returned with it in his pocket and at once made inquiries as to what
was known of Si El Hadj Arrifa. The warning on the face of it was a sign
of goodwill to France. Yes, but some of these Fasi were very foxy
people. This letter arriving at the camp just too late to save Paul
Ravenel’s life, but in heaps of time to establish Si El Hadj Arrifa’s
good name for loyalty, might easily have been despatched with those two
objects. It was all quite in keeping with the sly furtive character of
the men of Fez. However, Gerard was soon satisfied on that point. Si El
Hadj Arrifa was of the real friends. Gerard accordingly knocked upon his
door that very night.
He was received with much ceremony and a great warmth of welcome; not to
be wondered at, since the Moor had been sitting cowering behind his
stoutly-barred door ever since the night of the sixteenth. Gerard made
haste to put the timid man at his ease.
“All the weapons have been collected. All the gates are held by armed
posts. A state of siege is proclaimed so that violence can be dealt with
sternly and at once,” he said. But even then he must not put the
questions burning on his tongue. France was to remain in Morocco. Very
well! Then even in small things must the ways of the country be
respected. Gerard had the patience which is the kernel and centre of
good manners. He sat through the five brewings of green tea,
ceremoniously conversing. Only then did he come to the reason of his
visit.
“It has been my good fortune, O, Si El Hadj Arrifa, to bring you
excellent news to-night. Would that I could hear news as excellent from
you! My friend and your friend, Captain Ravenel, dined with you one
night and rode away from your door, and that night he disappeared.”
Si El Hadj Arrifa struck a bell which stood by his side and spoke a word
to the negress who answered it. He turned again to Gerard.
“I have sent for my servant Mohammed, who carried the lantern in front
of His Excellency’s horse. He shall tell you the story with his own
lips.”
Mohammed duly appeared and told the truth—with omissions; how the
Captain had fallen behind in the tunnel, how the startled horse had
dashed past him, how he had returned and found no sign of the Captain at
all, how two men had appeared and he had fled in a panic. But there was
no mention of any small door in the angle of the wall.
“We will look at that tunnel by daylight,” said Gerard, when the man had
finished, “if, O, Si El Hadj Arrifa, you will lend me your servant.”
He spoke dispiritedly. There seemed very little chance that he would
find any trace of his _grand serieux_. He had been and he was not. No
doubt these two men at the mouth of the tunnel had seen their
opportunity and seized it. Paul Ravenel had been the first victim of the
massacre, no doubt. Yet Paul—to be taken unawares—with Si El Hadj
Arrifa’s earnest invitation to remain sheltered in his house only within
this hour uttered—Paul, in a word, warned! That was not like the Paul
Ravenel he knew, at all! And on the next morning, following Paul’s route
with Mohammed for a guide, and a patrol of soldiers, he discovered the
little door.
With a thrill of excitement he ran his hands over the heavy nails.
“Open! Open!” he cried, beating upon the panel with his fists; and
pressing his ear against it afterwards, he heard the racket echo emptily
through the house.
“Open! Open!” he cried again, and, turning to the sergeant of the
patrol, bade him find a heavy beam. Even with that used as a battering
ram it took the patrol a good half hour to smash in the little door, so
stout it was, so strong the bolts and bars. But the work was done at
last. Gerard darted in and found himself in a house, small but exquisite
in its decorations, its thick cushions of linen worked with the old silk
embroideries of Fez, its white-tiled floors spread with carpets of the
old Rabat patterns. But from roof to court the house was empty.
Gerard went through every room with the keen eye of a possible tenant
with an order to view; and found precisely nothing. Had he come a week
ago, he would have discovered on the upper floors furniture of a
completely European make. All that, however, was safely lodged now in a
storehouse belonging to Si El Hadj Arrifa, and the upper floors were
almost bare. Gerard had left the patio to the last, and whilst he
stepped here and there he heard a tinkling sound very familiar to his
ears.
“What’s that?” he cried, swinging round.
In a corner of an alcove the sergeant was bending down.
“What’s that, Beauprè?” Gerard cried again, and the sergeant stood up
and faced him. He was holding in his hands the blue tunic of an officer;
and on the breast of it a row of the big French medals tinkled and
glinted.
Gerard took the tunic reverently from the sergeant’s hands. It was all
cluttered with blood, and stabbed through and through. It had the badges
of Paul’s rank, and still discernible on a linen label inside the collar
was Paul’s name. It was here, then, in this house, that Paul Ravenel had
been done to death. The tunic which Gerard held in his hand was the
conclusive proof. He stood in the centre of the patio, so pleasant, so
quiet now, with the shafts of bright sunlight breaking upon the tiles.
Who had lived here? What dreadful scene had been staged in this empty
house? Gerard shivered a little as he thought upon it. The knives at
their slow work—the man, his friend, slowly losing, whilst the heart
still beat and the nerves stabbed, all the semblance of a man!
“But they shall pay,” he said aloud, in a bellowing voice; and while he
shouted, a perplexity began to trouble him. He opened the door leading
from the court into the outer passage. This passage was cumbered with
the splintered panels, the bolts, the heavy transverse bars which the
patrol’s battering ram had demolished. How was it that in this empty
house the door was still barricaded from within? He returned into the
court and saw that the sergeant had pushed aside a screen at the back,
and in a recess had discovered a second door. This door was merely
locked, and there was no key in the lock. It was quickly opened. The
Karouein river raced and foamed amidst its boulders, and between the
river and the house wall there ran a tiny path.
Gerard crossed to the door.
“Yes, that way they went. When, I wonder? Perhaps when we were actually
beating on the door.”
He unpinned the medals from his friend’s blood-stained tunic and wrapped
them up in a handkerchief. There might be somewhere a woman who would
love to keep them bright. Paul Ravenel talked little about his own
affairs. Who could tell? If there were no one, he could treasure them
himself in memory of a good comrade.
Meanwhile there was an immediate step to take. A crowd had gathered in
the gateway and about the door in the dark tunnel.
“Whose is this house?” Gerard asked, and there were many voices raised
at once with the answer:
“Si Ahmed Driss of Ouezzan.”
Gerard de Montignac was taken aback by the answer. Si Ahmed Driss was
one of the great Shereefian family of Ouezzan, which exercised an
authority and a power quite independent of the Sultan. From the first,
moreover, it had been unswervingly loyal to the French. Si Ahmed Driss
himself during the days of massacre had given shelter in the sanctuary
of his own residence to all the Europeans whom he could reach. Gerard de
Montignac went straight now to where he lived in the Tala and begged an
audience.
“I have broken into a house which I now learn belongs to you, Si Ahmed
Driss, whom may God preserve,” he said.
Si Ahmed Driss was a tall, dignified old gentleman with a white beard
flowing over his chest.
“It is forgiven,” he said, gently. “In these days many strange things
are done.”
“Yet this was not done without reason,” Gerard protested, and he told Si
Ahmed Driss of the finding of the tunic and the story of Mohammed the
servant.
Si Ahmed Driss bowed his head.
“That this should have happened in my house puts me to shame,” he said.
“I let it many months ago to Ben Sedira—a man of Meknes whom . . .” and
a flow of wondrous curses was invoked upon Ben Sedira himself and his
ancestors and descendants to the remotest degrees of consanguinity, by
the patriarch. A bargee, could he but have understood, would have
listened to them in awe and withdrawn from competition. The old
gentleman, however, in uttering them lost none of his dignity.
“Ben Sedira of Meknes,” Gerard repeated. “We will see if we can find
that man.”
But he had very little hope of succeeding. There had been two clear days
between the end of the revolt and the arrival of Moinier’s column,
during which surveillance could not be exercised. There were not
sufficient French soldiers to hold the town gates and question all who
went in and out. The moment the French tricolours floated so gaily upon
all the house-tops of Fez, Ben Sedira would have known the game was up.
He would have gone and gone quickly; nor would Meknes in the future
house any one of his name.
Thus, Gerard de Montignac reasoned, the affair would remain a mystery.
Official enquiries would be made. But the great wheels of Administration
could not halt for ever at the little door in the roofed alley. Paul
Ravenel would become a case, one of the infinite enigmas of Mohammedan
Africa. So he thought during the next fortnight.
But Gerard was on General Moinier’s staff, and many reports came under
his eyes. Amongst them, one written by a Captain Laguessière, giving an
account of an unsuccessful attempt to relieve a little post at the Bab
Fetouh on the afternoon of the seventeenth, the second day of the
revolt. Gerard was reading the report in his office not overcarefully
when a passage leaped out on the written page and startled him. He sat
for a moment very still. Then he shook or tried to shake some
troublesome thought from his shoulders.
“It couldn’t be, of course!” he said, but he read the passage again.
And here is what he read:
“I met with no trouble until I had passed the lime-kilns and crossed a
bridge over the Oued el Kebir. Here further progress was stopped by
three strong groups of Moors armed with rifles. It was clear to me that
I could not force a way through with my twenty men and retain any hope
of relieving the post. I determined, therefore, to make a detour and try
to advance by way of the Bab Jedid. As I recrossed the bridge I was
violently attacked from the rear, from in front of me and from a street
upon my left; whilst from a house upon my right I saw a number of the
Askris pour out. I ordered a charge, and, leading ‘_au pas
gymnastique_,’ I brought my men into a narrow turning, whence we were
able to clear the street by repeated volleys. I had two men killed and
six wounded. I received great assistance from a tall Moor who, jumping
from the crowd, charged with my men. He was armed only with a big heavy
pole, but he swung it about him with so much vigour and skill that he
cleared a space for us. I tried to find this Moor when I had re-formed
my men, but he had disappeared as suddenly as he had come.”
Gerard de Montignac sat back in his chair and ran his fingers through
his sleek hair.
“Of course, it’s quite out of the question,” he assured himself. But
none the less he rose abruptly and, leaving the report on his desk, went
into another office inconveniently crowded. At the far end of the room
was seated at a desk the man for whom he was looking.
“Baumann!” he called. “Can you spare me a minute?”
Baumann rose and followed Gerard back to his room.
“Take a chair there.” He pointed to one at the side of his desk.
“Do you remember telling me some time ago at Casablanca that you once
met Captain Ravenel close to Volubilis?”
“Yes,” said Baumann. “I didn’t recognise him. He twirled a great staff
round his head and frightened me out of my life.”
“Yes, that’s it,” said Gerard. “A little thing in one of these reports
reminded me of your story. I wanted to be sure of it. Thank you.”
Baumann rose to go and stopped with his hand upon the door-knob.
“A great loss, Captain Ravenel. There is no news of him, I suppose?”
Gerard shook his head.
“None.”
“Is it known whom he dined with that last night he was seen?”
“Yes. Si El Hadj Arrifa.”
Baumann nodded.
“Si El Hadj Arrifa was one of Captain Ravenel’s closest friends in Fez.
But there’s another closer still of whom you might enquire.”
“I will. Give me his name,” said Gerard eagerly, and he drew a slip of
paper towards him.
But he did not write upon it. For Baumann answered: “Si Ahmed Driss.”
Gerard dropped his pencil and looked swiftly up.
“Of the Sheereefs of Ouezzan?”
“Yes.”
“You are sure?”
“Quite.”
Gerard set his elbows on the arms of his chair and joined his hands
under his chin.
“So Paul was a great friend of Si Ahmed Driss, was he?” he said ever so
softly.
“Yes. It was as a servant in the train of Si Ahmed Driss of Ouezzan that
Captain Ravenel travelled through the Zarhoun country, and visited the
Holy Cities.”
“I see. Thank you, Baumann.”
Gerard de Montignac was swimming in deep waters. He was not imaginative
but he had imagination. He comprehended, though he did not feel, the
call and glamour of the East; and nowhere in the world is there a land
more vividly Eastern in its spirit, its walled cities, its nomad tribes,
and its wide spaces, than this northwestern corner of Africa. Gerard had
lived long enough in it to see men yield to it, as to a drug, forsake
for it all that is lovely and of good repute. Was this what had happened
to his friend? He wondered sorrowfully. Paul was friendly, cheerful,
gay, but none the less really and truly a man of terrific loneliness.
Walled about always. Gerard tried to think of an intimate confidence
which Paul had ever made him. He could not remember one. He was the very
man to whom the strange roads might call with the voices of the Sirens.
It might be . . . it might be. Gerard de Montignac never sought again
for traces of his lost friend. He left the search to the Administration
and the Administration had other work to do.
CHAPTER XIX
In the Sacred City
The sharp lesson, then the goodwill; and always even during the
infliction of the lesson, fair dealing between man and man, and nothing
taken without payment on the spot. This, the traditional policy of the
great French Governors, was carried out in Fez. Only the lesson was not
so sharp as many thought it should have been. But the policy achieved
its end, and it was not long before many a Fasi, like his kinsmen of the
Chaiouïa, would proudly assure you that he was a Frenchman. The work of
settlement and order could be transferred to other regions, and Gerard
de Montignac went with it. He served in the mountains about Taza during
the autumn of that year, and then went upon long leave. He was in Paris
for Christmas, and there, amidst its almost forgotten lights and
brilliancies, took his pleasures like a boy. He hunted in the Landes,
returned to Morocco, and a year later, after a campaign in the country
south of Marrakesch, got his step and the command of his battalion.
For three months afterwards he was stationed at Meknes and drew his
breath. He had the routine of his work to occupy his mornings, and in
this city of wide spaces and orchards to engross his afternoons. Meknes
with the ruined magnificence of its palaces of dead kings, its huge
crumbling stables, the great gate of mosaic built through so many years
by so many captives of the Sallee pirates, and so many English prisoners
from Tangier; that other gate hardly less beautiful to the north of the
town; its groves of olives; its long crumbling crenellated walls
reaching out for miles into the country with no reason, and with no
reason abruptly ending—Meknes satisfied the æsthetic side of him as no
other city in that enchanted country. He delighted in it as a woman in
her jewels.
But in the autumn the Zarhoun threatened trouble for the hundredth
time—the Zarhoun, that savage mountain mass with its sacred cities
which frowns above the track from Meknes to Rabat and through which the
narrow path from Tangier to Fez is cleft. It was decided that the sacred
cities must at last throw open their gates and the Zarhoun be brought
into line. The work was entrusted to Gerard de Montignac.
“You will have a mixed battalion of infantry, a squadron of Chasseurs, a
section of mitrailleuses, and a couple of mountain guns,” said the
Commander-in-Chief. “But I think you will not need to use them. It will
be a demonstration, a reconnaissance in force, rather than an attack.”
Thus one morning of June, Gerard led his force northwards over the
rolling plain, onto the higher ground, and marching along the flank of
Djebel Zarhoun, camped that night close to the tall columns and broken
arches of Volubilis. In front of the camp, a mile away, dark woods of
olive trees mounted the lower slopes, and above them the sacred city of
Mulai Idris clung to the mountain sides, dazzlingly white against the
sombre hill and narrowing as it rose to an apex of one solitary house.
In the failing light it had the appearance of a gigantic torrent, which,
forcing itself through a tiny cleft, spread fanwise as it fell, in a
cascade of foam.
There was no fighting, as the Commander-in-Chief had predicted. At nine
o’clock the next morning the Basha, followed by three of his notable
men, rode down on their mules through the olive groves, and, being led
to the little tent over which floated the little red flag of the
commander, made his obeisance.
“I will go back with your Excellency into the city,” said Gerard, and he
gave orders that a company of tirailleurs should escort him.
Thus, then, an hour later they set out: Gerard riding ahead with the
Basha upon his right, the notables behind, and behind them again the
company of tirailleurs advancing in column of platoons with one Captain
Laguessière at their head. When they reached the first of the rising
ground, Gerard reined in his horse and stared about him.
The Basha, a portly man with a black beard, smiled with a flash of white
teeth and the air of one expecting compliments. He did not get them,
however. Gerard’s face wore, indeed, a quite unfriendly look. He turned
round in his saddle.
“Captain Laguessière.”
Laguessière, who had halted his company, rode up to Gerard’s side.
“Do you see?”
“Yes, my Commandant. I have been wondering for the last few minutes
whether it was possible. If these fellows had put up a fight we might
have lost a lot of men.”
“Yes,” said Gerard, shortly.
To the right and left of the track which led up to the gate of the town,
very well placed, just on the first rise of the ground, were fire
trenches. Not roughly scooped shallow depressions, but real trenches
scientifically constructed. Deep and recessed and with traverses at
short intervals. The inside walls were revetted; arm rests had been cut
for the riflemen, the earth dug from the trenches had been used for
parapets and these had been turfed over for concealment; there were
loopholes, artfully hidden by bunches of grass or little bundles of
branches and leaves. Communication trenches ran back and—nothing so
struck Gerard de Montignac with surprise as this—the extra earth had
been built into parapets for dummy trenches, so that the fire of the
attacking force might be diverted from those which were manned.
The surprise of the two officers caused the Moors the greatest
satisfaction. The three notables were wreathed in smiles. The Basha
laughed outright.
“They are good,” he said, nodding his head.
“Too good,” replied Gerard, gravely. “But it is as well that you did not
use them against us.”
To the Moors this rejoinder seemed the very cream of wit. The Basha
rocked in his saddle at the mere idea that his trenches could have been
designed against the French.
“No, indeed! We are true friends of your Excellency and your people. We
know that you are just and very powerful too. These trenches were
intended to defend our sacred city from the Zemmour.”
“Oh, the Zemmour! Of course,” exclaimed Gerard, openly scoffing.
The Zemmour were turbulent and aggressive and marauders to a man. They
lived in the Forest of Mamora and sallied out of it far afield. But they
were also the bogey men of the countryside. You threatened your
squalling baby with the Zemmour, and whatever bad thing you had done,
you had done it in terror of the Zemmour.
The Basha was undisturbed by Gerard de Montignac’s incredulity.
“Yes, the Zemmour are very wicked people,” he said, smiling virtuously
and apparently quite unconscious that he himself presided over a city of
malefactors and cutthroats. “But now that you have taken us poor people
under your protection we feel safe.”
Gerard smiled grimly and Captain Laguessière stroked his fair moustache
and remarked: “He has a fine nerve, this old bandit.”
“And when did you expect the Zemmour?” asked Gerard.
“Two weeks, three weeks ago. They sent word that they would attack us on
a certain night, so that we might be ready.”
“And then they didn’t come?” said Gerard.
“No.”
Captain Laguessière laughed, incredulous of the whole story. But Gerard
recognised a simple form of humour thoroughly Moroccan. To warn your
enemy that you meant to attack him, to keep him on the watch and
thoroughly alarmed all night and then never to attack him at all—that
might well seem to the Zemmour a most diverting stroke of wit. The
Zemmour, after all, were not so very far from Zarhoun.
“I wonder,” said Gerard.
“I don’t, my Commandant,” replied Captain Laguessière. “I think that if
they hadn’t seen our mountain guns passing up the track below, we should
have found these trenches manned this morning.”
Gerard turned about on his horse and looked down onto the plain.
“Yes. They could see very clearly. That’s the explanation—so far.”
He gave his attention once more to the construction of the trenches.
“And who taught you to make those trenches, my friend?” Gerard asked,
looking keenly at the Basha. The Basha answered composedly:
“It was Allah who put it into our heads. Allah protecting the holy city
where Mulai Idris lies buried.”
“That’s all very fine,” Captain Laguessière observed. “But then who lent
Allah his copy of the Manual of Field Engineering?”
“Exactly,” Gerard agreed with a laugh. “I think we had better find that
out. No Moor that ever I met with would take the time and trouble, even
if he had the skill, to work out——” and the laugh died off his lips.
He turned suddenly startled eyes upon his companion. “Laguessière!” he
exclaimed, and again, in a lower key, “Yes, Laguessière! I was sure that
I had never met you before.”
“Not until this expedition, my Commandant.”
“Yet your name was familiar to me. I did not think why. I was too busy
to think why. But I remember now. You were in Fez two years ago. Yes, I
remember now.”
His face darkened and hardened and grew very menacing as he sat with
moody eyes fixed upon the ground and seeing visions of old and pleasant
days leap into life and fade. “Volubilis, too!” he said in a low voice.
“Yes, just below those olives.”
Strange that he should have seen the columns and broken arches yesterday
and again this morning, and only thought of them with wonder as the
far-flung monuments of the old untiring Rome! And never until this
moment as things of great and immediate concern to him—signs perhaps
for him to read and not neglect. For of all the pictures which he saw
changing and flickering upon the ground, two came again and again. He
saw Baumann and his friends riding in the springtime between clumps of
asphodel towards those high pillars, and a horde of wild ragged men
pouring out of the gates of this white-walled city, and Baumann
shrinking back as a tall youth whirled with a grin a great staff about
his head. Then he saw the same man, whirling the same staff, charge with
Laguessière’s section in a street of Fez. A grim and sinister fancy
flashed into his mind. He wondered whether he had been appointed by
destiny to demand here and to-day an account for the betrayal of a great
and sacred trust. He looked up the hill to where the big wooden gates
stood open.
“Is that the only entrance into Mulai Idris?” he asked of the Basha.
“The only one.”
Gerard de Montignac turned to his subordinate.
“You will set a guard upon that gate, Captain Laguessière. No one is to
go out until I give a further order.”
“Very well, my Commandant.”
“You will have the town patrolled and the walls watched. I will bring up
another company to act with you.”
He wrote an order with a pencil in his note book, detached the leaf, and
sent it back by an orderly to the camp. “Now we will move on,” he said.
All his good humour had vanished. He had no longer any jests to exchange
with the Basha as the little cavalcade rode upwards among the olive
trees and through the steep, narrow streets of the town.
In an open space just below that last big house which made the apex of
the triangle, a seat was placed, and to this Gerard de Montignac was
conducted. The little city lay spread out in a fan beneath him. The
great Mosque in which the tomb of the Founder of the Moorish Empire was
sheltered stood at the southern angle. Gerard looked down into a corner
of its open precincts and saw men walking to and fro. He called the
Basha to his side, and pointed down to it.
“Yes, that is the great Mosque, your Excellency.”
“No one will violate it. For us it is sacred as for you,” said Gerard.
“But no food must go into it. That is a strict order.”
“It shall be obeyed.”
“I shall place men of my own in the streets about the entrances. They
will molest no one, but they will see to it that the order is obeyed.”
The Mosque was sanctuary, of course. Any man who took refuge there was
safe. Neither the law nor any vengeance could touch him. But no man must
die in it, for that would be a defilement. A little time, therefore, and
any refugee would be thrust out by the guardians of the sanctuary, lest
his death should taint the holy place.
Gerard sent a messenger down with a new order to Laguessière at the gate
and waited on the seat until it had been carried out, and Laguessière
had ridden to his side. The two officers lunched with the Basha and his
notables in the big house and drank the five cups of tea with them
afterwards.
“I will now ride with you through the town,” said Gerard to the Basha.
“You shall tell me of the houses and of those who live in them. And you
shall take me into those I wish, so that I may speak to them and assure
them of our friendship.”
“That will be an excellent thing,” replied the Basha.
Gerard kept a sergeant and a small guard of soldiers with him, and with
the Basha on his mule beside him he rode down on the left side of the
town. For on this side only, he had seen, were there any houses of
importance. The rest of the town was made up of hovels and little
cottages. The three chief men who rode with the Basha pointed out their
own residences with pride; the owners of others were described, and at
each of them Gerard smiled and said he was content. They made thus a
complete circuit of the city.
“Your Excellency has not thought fit to enter any one of the houses,”
said the Basha with a smile of reproach. Gerard led him a little apart.
“I will make good that omission now,” he replied. “There was one which
we passed. You did not speak of it at all. Yet it was a good house, a
fine house, finer almost than any except your Excellency’s own.”
The Basha was apparently mystified. He could not remember.
“I think that I can find the house again,” said Gerard. “I hope that I
shall be able to. For it attracted me.” He looked the Basha in the eyes.
“That is the house which I wish to enter and whose owner I wish to see.”
Finality was in Gerard’s voice as clearly as in his words. The Basha
bowed to it.
“It is for your Excellency to give orders here. We are in God’s hands,”
he said, and he drew a step nearer to Gerard de Montignac. “It is
permitted to dismiss my friends now to their homes? Si Tayeb Reha, whom
we shall visit, will not be prepared for so many.”
“Si Tayeb Reha?” Gerard repeated. “That is his name? I had a thought it
might be Ben Sedira.”
The Basha shook his head.
“That is not a name known in Mulai Idris.”
He turned to his notables and took leave of them with ceremonious
speeches. Then he mounted his mule again and rode down the hill beside
Gerard with the sergeant and the escort at their heels. Gerard said not
a word now. He was thinking of those carefully constructed trenches
outside the city, and his face grew hard as granite. They came to a
house of two storeys with one latticed window in the uppermost floor,
and for the rest a blank wall upon the street. It was for Fez a small
house, for Mulai Idris one of importance. The door opened upon a side
street, and the sergeant knocked upon it whilst Gerard and the Basha
dismounted. There followed a long silence whilst a little crowd gathered
about the soldiers. Gerard wondered what message that sharp loud
knocking brought to the inmate. Had he seen the cavalcade ride past from
a corner of that latticed window and with a smile upon his lips believed
himself to be safe? What a shattering blow, then, must have been this
sudden knocking upon his door? Or was he himself altogether in error?
Gerard drew a breath of relief at the mere hope that it might be so.
Well, he would know now, for the door was opened. And in a moment all
Gerard’s hopes fell. For the native who opened it was surprised into a
swift movement as his eyes fell upon Gerard in his uniform. It was a
movement which he checked before he had completed it, but he was too
late. He had betrayed himself. It was the involuntary movement of an old
soldier standing to attention at the sudden appearance of an officer.
The Basha spoke a few words to the servant who stood inside. There was
no court in this house. A staircase faced them steeply, and on the right
hand of it was the kitchen. Gerard turned to the servant as he passed
in.
“And what is your name?”
“Selim,” answered the servant. He led the way up the dark staircase.
There was no window upon the staircase; the only light came from the
doorway upon the street. At the top there was a landing furnished with
comfort, and in the middle of the landing was a fine door. Selim knocked
upon it, and would have opened it. But Gerard laid his hand upon his arm
and with a gesture in place of words bade him stand aside. He opened the
door himself and entered. He was standing in a room of low roof but
wide. It was furnished altogether in the Moorish style, and with a
certain elegance. But the elegance was rather in the disposition of the
room than in the quality of its equipment. One great window, with a
balcony protected by a rail, gave light to the room; and it looked not
upon the street but across a great chasm to the mountain, for the house
was built upon the town wall. The light thus flooded the room. Close to
the window a tall Moor was standing. He bowed and took a step forward.
“Had I hoped that your Excellency would do me the honour to visit my
poor house,” he said with a smile, “I should have made a better
preparation.”
He had a small beard trimmed neatly to a point and a thin line of
moustache. Gerard did not answer him for a little while. He took out his
note book and wrote in it and detached the leaf. Then he sent Selim down
the stairs to fetch up the sergeant of his escort; and it was noticeable
that, scrupulous as he usually was in this land of observances, he made
use of the servant as his messenger without troubling himself to ask the
master’s permission.
When the sergeant came up into the room, Gerard handed him the sheet of
paper.
“You will send this by one of your men immediately to Captain
Laguessière at the gate.”
“Very well, my Commandant,” and the sergeant went out of the room.
Gerard turned to the Basha.
“I have sent an order to remove the posts from the neighbourhood of the
Mosque, and to throw open the gates so that men may go out and in as
they will.”
The Basha expressed his thanks. There would be no trouble. The people of
Mulai Idris were very good people, not like those scoundrels from the
Forest of Mamora, and quite devoted to the French.
“Since this morning,” Gerard answered with a smile. “We shall have much
to say to one another to-morrow morning, in a spirit of help and
goodwill. But I beg you to leave me now, so that I may talk for a little
while privately with Si Tayeb Reha. For I have come now to the end of
this day’s work.”
Si Tayeb Reha bowed gravely. It was the only movement he had made since
he had spoken his words of welcome upon Gerard’s first entrance into the
room.
The Basha took his leave, went downstairs and mounted his mule.
“We are all in God’s hands,” he said, and he rode slowly away towards
his house. Within the room the two men stood looking at each other in
silence.
[Illustration: _A William Fox Production._ _The Winding Stair._
“SO—YOU HAVE BETRAYED EVERY TRUST—WHERE IS YOUR HONOR?”]
CHAPTER XX
The Coup de Grâce
The longer 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, stood _le grand serieux_, as half in jest,
half in earnest, he used to label Paul Ravenel. He had not a doubt of
his identity. But _le grand serieux_ was altogether in earnest _le grand
serieux_ at 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 the _grand 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 the _grand 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 the _coup 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
Two Outcasts
Gerard de 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
The Splendid Throw
What had 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.
“_I know! the World proscribes not love;_
_Allows my finger to caress_
_Your lips’ contour and downiness_
_Provided I supply a glove._
“_The World’s good word!—the Institute!_
_Guizot receives Montalembert!_
_Eh? Down the court three lampions flare;_
_Put forward your best foot!_”
She quoted with a laugh from the poet whose brown books had been the
backbone of their library, and then drew his head down to hers and
whispered:
“Thank you, Paul. The world shall supply its glove—afterwards, when you
come back to me.”
“But if I don’t come back . . . ?”
“Well, then, my dear, since you have been the only man for me, and I
have been the only woman for you, we must hope that the good God will
make the best of it.” She laughed again and her arms tightened about his
neck. “But come back to me, my dear!” she whispered. “I am young, you
know, Paul—twenty-three. I shall have such a long time to wait if you
don’t, now that I have promised.”
They were ready within the twenty-four hours. The tail of Gerard de
Montignac’s column had hardly disappeared before Marguerite, with her
little escort, her tents and camp outfit, rode out of the gate of Mulai
Idris and turned northwards past the columns of Volubilis. Paul rode
with her to the top of the breach in the hills, whence the track
zigzagged down to the plain of the Sebou. There they took their leave of
one another. At each turn of the road Marguerite looked upwards and saw
her lover upon his horse, his blue cape and white robes fluttering about
him, outlined against the sky. The tears were raining down her face now
which she had withheld so long as they were together, and in her heart
was one deep call to him: “Oh, come back to me!” She looked up again and
the breach in the hills was empty. Her lover had gone.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Necessary Man
In the summer of that same year, the thundercloud burst over Europe, and
France, at her moment of need, reaped the fine harvest of her colonial
policy. Black men and brown mustered to the call of her bugle as men
having their share of France. Gerard de Montignac scrambled like his
brother officers to get to the zone of battles. He was seconded in the
autumn, was promoted colonel a year later, and was then summoned to
Paris.
In a little room upon the first floor in a building adjacent to the War
Office Gerard discovered Baumann, of the Affaires Indigènes, but an
uplifted Baumann, a Baumann who had grown a little supercilious towards
colonels.
“Ah, De Montignac!” he said, with a wave of the hand. “I have been
expecting you. Yes. Will you sit down for a moment?”
Gerard smiled and obeyed contentedly. There were so many Baumanns about
nowadays, and he never tired of them. Baumann frowned portentously over
some papers on his desk for a few moments, and then, pushing them aside,
smoothed out his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“Yours is a simpler affair, De Montignac. I am happy to say,” he said,
with a happy air of relief. “The Governor-General is in Paris. You will
see him after this interview. He wants you again in Morocco.”
“It is necessary?” Gerard asked, unwillingly.
“Not a doubt of it, my dear fellow. You can take that from me. The
Governor-General is holding the country with the merest handful of
soldiers, and there are—annoyances.”
“Serious ones?”
“Very. Bartels, for instance.”
“Bartels?” Gerard repeated. “I never heard of him.”
Far away from the main shock of the battles, many curious and romantic
episodes were occurring, many strange epics of prowess and adventure
which will never find a historian. Bartels was the hero of one, and here
in Baumann’s clipped phrases are the bare bones of his exploit.
“He was a non-commissioned officer in the German army . . . enlisted on
his discharge in our Foreign Legion—was interned in August, 1914, and
got away to Melilla.”
“In the Spanish zone, on the coast. Yes,” said Gerard.
“He was safe there and on the edge of the Riff country. He got into
touch with a more than usually turbulent chieftain of those parts,
Abd-el-Malek, and also with a German official in Spain. From the German
officials Bartels received by obscure routes fifteen thousand pounds a
month in solid cash, minus, of course, a certain attrition which the sum
suffers on the way.”
“Of course,” said Gerard.
“With the fifteen thousand—call it twelve—with the twelve thousand
pounds a month actually received, and Abd-el-Malek’s help, Bartels has
built himself a walled camp up in the hills close to the edge of the
French zone, where he maintains two thousand riflemen well paid and well
armed.”
Gerard leaned forward quickly.
“But surely a protest has been made to Spain?”
Baumann smiled indulgently.
“How you rush at things, my dear De Montignac!”
“It will be ‘Gerard’ in a moment,” De Montignac thought.
“Of course a protest has been lodged. But Spain renounces
responsibility. The camp is in a part of the country which she has
officially declared to be not yet subdued. On the other hand, it is in
the Spanish zone—and we have enough troubles upon our hands as it is,
eh?”
Gerard leaned back in his chair.
“That has always been our trouble, hasn’t it? The unsubdued Spanish
zone,” he said, moodily. “What does Bartels do with his two thousand
riflemen?”
“He wages war. He comes across into French Morocco, and raids and loots
and burns and generally plays the devil. And, mark you, he gets
information; he chooses his time cleverly. When we are just about to
embark fresh troops to France, that’s his favourite moment. The troops
have to be retained, rushed quickly up country—and he, Bartels, is
snugly back on the Spanish side of the line and we can’t touch him.
Bartels, my dear De Montignac”—and here Baumann, of the Affaires
Indigènes, tapped the table impressively with the butt of his
pencil—“Bartels has got to be dealt with.”
“Yes,” Gerard replied. “But how, doesn’t seem quite so obvious, does
it?”
Baumann gently flourished his hand.
“We leave that with every confidence to you, my dear Colonel.”
Gerard pushed his chair back.
“Oh, you do, do you! I don’t know that I’ve the type of brain for that
job,” he said, and thought disconsolately how often he had jeered at the
officers who simply passed everything that wasn’t in “the book.” He
would very much have liked to take the same line now. “How does this
fellow Bartels get his twelve thousand pounds?”
“Through Tetuan probably. We don’t quite know,” said Baumann.
“And where exactly is his camp on the map?” Gerard asked next.
“We are not sure. We can give you, of course, a general idea.”
“We have nobody amongst his two thousand men, then?”
“Not a soul. So, you see, you have a clear field.”
“Yes, I see that, and I need hardly say that I am very grateful,” said
De Montignac.
Baumann was not quick to appreciate irony even in its crudest form. He
smiled as one accepting compliments.
“We do our best, my dear Gerard,” and Gerard beamed with satisfaction.
He had heard what he had wanted to hear, and he would not spoil its
flavour. He rose at once and took up his cap.
“I will go and see the Governor-General.”
“You will find him next door,” said Baumann. “We keep him next door to
us whilst he is in Paris, so far as we can.”
“You are very wise,” said Gerard, gravely, and he went next door, which
was the War Office. There he met his chief, who said:
“You have seen Baumann? Good! Take a little leave, but go as soon as you
can. Ten days, eh? I will see you in a fortnight at Rabat,” and the
Governor-General passed on to the Elysée.
Gerard de Montignac did not, however, take his ten days. He knew his
chief, a tall, preëminent man, both in war and administration, who, with
the utmost good-fellowship, expected much of his officers. Gerard spent
one day in Paris and then travelled to Marseilles. At Marseilles he had
to wait two days, and visited in consequence a hospital where a number
of Moorish soldiers lay wounded, men of all shades from the fair Fasi to
the coal-black negro from the south. Their faces broke into smiles as
Gerard exchanged a word or a joke with them in their own dialects.
He stopped a little abruptly at the foot of one bed in which the
occupant lay asleep with—a not uncommon sight in the ward—a brand-new
_medaille militaire_ pinned upon the pillow.
“He is badly hurt?” Gerard asked.
“He is recovering very well,” said the nurse who accompanied him. “We
expect to have him out of the hospital in a fortnight.”
Gerard remained for a moment or two looking at the sleeper, and the
nurse watched him curiously.
“It will do him no harm if I wake him up,” she suggested.
Gerard roused himself from an abstraction into which he had fallen.
“No,” he answered, with a laugh. “If I was a general, I would say, yes.
But sleep is a better medicine than a crack with a mere colonel. What is
his name?”
“Ahmed Ben Larti,” said the nurse, and with a careless “So?” Gerard de
Montignac moved along to the next bed. But before he passed out of the
ward he jerked his head towards the sleeper and asked:
“Will he be fit for service again?”
“Certainly,” she answered. “In a month, I should think.”
Gerard left the hospital, and the next morning was back in Baumann’s
office in Paris.
“I have found the man I want,” he said.
“Who is he?”
“Ahmed Ben Larti. He is in hospital at Marseilles. He has the _medaille
militaire_.”
Baumann shrugged his shoulders. “Who has it not?” he seemed to say.
“I had better see the Governor-General,” said Gerard.
Baumann became mysterious, as befitted a high officer of Intelligence.
“Difficult, my young friend,” he began.
“Excellent, Baumann, excellent,” interrupted Gerard, with a chuckle.
Baumann pouted.
“I don’t quite understand,” he said.
“And there’s no reason that you should,” Gerard answered, politely.
Baumann was not very pleased. It was his business to do the mystifying.
“It’s practically impossible that you should see the Governor-General
again. He is so occupied,” he said, firmly.
Gerard got up from his chair.
“Where is he?”
“Ah!” said Baumann, wisely. “That is another matter.”
“Then you don’t know,” exclaimed Gerard, standing over him.
“No,” answered Baumann, and it took Gerard the rest of that day before
he ran his chief to earth. Like other busy men, the Governor-General had
the necessary time to give to necessary things, and in a spare corner of
the Colonial Office, he listened with some astonishment, asked a few
questions, and wrote a note to the War Office.
“This will get you what you want, De Montignac. For the rest, I agree.”
Forty-eight hours later Gerard had a long interview with Ahmed Ben Larti
in a private ward to which the Moor had been removed: and towards the
end of the interview, Ahmed Ben Larti made a suggestion.
“That’s it!” said Gerard enthusiastically. Then his spirits dropped.
“But we haven’t got any. No, we haven’t got one.”
“The Governor-General,” the Moor suggested.
“I’ll send him a telegram,” said Gerard de Montignac.
Now this was in the spring of autumn, 1916, when Bartels was in the full
bloom of power. His camp was full, for the danger was small, the pay
high, and the discipline easy. The Moor brought his horse and his rifle,
was paid so many dollars a day, and could go home if the pay failed or
his harvest called him. But in the autumn Bartels in his turn began to
suffer annoyance. Thus, on one occasion a strange humming filled the
air, and a most alarming thing swooped out of the sky with a roar and
dropped a bomb in the middle of the camp.
Bartels ran out of his hut with an oath. “They’ve located us at last,”
he growled. Not one of his soldiers had ever seen an aeroplane before,
except perhaps the man who was cowering down on the ground close to him
with every expression of terror. Bartels jerked him up to his feet.
“What’s your name?”
“Ahmed Ben Larti.”
“They make a great noise, but they hurt no one,” Bartels declared. “Tell
the others!”
The others were running for their lives to any sort of shelter. For,
indeed, this sort of thing was worse than cannon. And unfortunately for
Bartel’s encouragements, the aeroplane was coming back. It dropped its
whole load of bombs in and around that camp, breaching the walls and
destroying the huts and causing not a few casualties into the bargain.
There was an exodus of some size from that camp under cover of the
night, and Bartels the next morning thought it prudent to move.
He moved westwards into the country of the Braue’s, and there his second
misfortune befell him. His month’s instalment of money did not come to
hand. It should have travelled upon mules from Tetuan, and a rumour
spread that the English had got hold of it. Nothing, of course, could be
said; Bartels had just to put up with the loss and see a still further
diminution of his army. Within a month the new camp was raided by
aeroplanes, and Bartels had to move again. From a harrier of others he
had sadly fallen to being harried himself.
“There is a traitor in the camp,” he said, and he consulted Abd-el-Malek
and stray German visitors from Tetuan and Melilla. They suspected
everybody who went away before the raids and came back afterwards. They
never suspected men like Ahmed Ben Larti, who was always present in the
camp on these occasions of danger, not overconspicuously present, but
just noticeably present, running for shelter, for instance, or
discharging his rifle at the aeroplane in a panic of terror. Bartels,
however, carried on with constantly diminishing forces until the crops
were ripening in the following year. Then the aeroplanes dealt with him
finally.
Wherever he pitched his camp, there very quickly they found him out and
burnt the crops for a mile around. The villages would no longer supply
him with food; his army melted to a useless handful of men; he became
negligible, a bandit on the move. Ahmed Ben Larti called off the little
train of runners which had passed in his messages to French agents in
Tetuan, and one dark evening slipped away himself. His work was done,
and almost immediately his luck gave out.
A telegram reached Gerard de Montignac at Rabat a week later from the
French consul in Tetuan, which, being decoded, read: “Larti brought in
here this morning. He was attacked two miles from here and left for
dead. Recovery doubtful.”
The last of Ahmed’s messengers had been lured into a house in Tetuan,
and upon him Larti’s final message announcing the date of his own
arrival had been discovered. Further telegrams came to Rabat from
Tetuan. Larti had lost his left arm just below the shoulder, and his
condition was precarious. He began to mend, however, in a week, but
three months passed before a French steamer brought to Casablanca a
haggard thin man in mufti with a sleeve pinned to his breast, who had
once been Captain Paul Ravenel of the Tirailleurs.
Gerard de Montignac met him on the quay and walked up with him to the
cantonment at Ain-Bourdja.
“We have got quarters for you here,” said Gerard. “There’s nobody you
know any longer here.”
“Yes!” said Paul.
“We can rig you out with a uniform. The General will want to see you.”
“Yes?” said Paul.
“You know that you have been on secret service the whole time. The
troubles at Fez were the opportunity needed to make your disappearance
natural.”
Paul sat down on the camp bed.
“That was arranged in Paris before you went to Bartels,” said Gerard.
“Oh, by the way, I have something of yours.”
He opened a drawer of the one table in the tiny matchboard room and,
unfolding a cloth, handed to Paul the row of medals which he had taken
from Paul’s tunic when he had searched the house of Si Ahmed Driss in
Fez.
Paul sat gazing at the medals for a long while with his head bowed.
“I have got another to add to these, you know—the _medaille
militaire_,” he said, with a laugh, and his voice broke. “I shall turn
woman if I hold them any longer,” he cried, and, rising, he put them
back in the drawer. Gerard de Montignac turned to a window which looked
out across the plain of the Chaiouïa. He pointed towards the northwest
and said:
“Years ago, Paul, you saved me from mutilation and death over there. I
forgot that in Mulai Idris, and you didn’t remind me.”
“I, too, had forgotten it,” said Paul. He looked about the cabin, he
drew a long breath as though he could hardly believe the fact that he
was there. Then he said abruptly:
“I must send a telegram to Marseilles!”
Gerard de Montignac stared at him.
“Marseilles?”
“Yes, Marguerite has been living there all this time.”
“But you were in hospital there, and no one visited you, I know. The
nurse told me.”
Paul Ravenel smiled.
“Marguerite never knew I was there. I was always afraid that she would
come there by chance. Fortunately, she was driving a car. I was just
Ahmed Ben Larti. The time had not come.” He looked at Gerard and nodded
his head. “But I can tell you it was difficult not to send for her.
There she was, just a few streets and just a few house-walls between us.
There were sleepless nights, with the light shining down on all those
beds of wounded men when I could have screamed for Marguerite aloud.”
He sent off his telegram from the Cantonment Post Office and then
strolled into the town with Gerard de Montignac. The Villa Iris was
closed; Madame Delagrange had vanished. Petras Tetarnis was no doubt
driving his Delaunay-Belleville through the streets of Paris. Paul
looked at his watch and put it back into his pocket with impatience. It
was out in the palm of his hand again. He was counting the minutes until
a telegram could be delivered in Marseilles. He was wondering whether
she was already aware—as she had been aware when he had stood behind
her on the first night that they met.
* * * * *
A fortnight later Mr. Ferguson, the lawyer, received a telegram which
put him into a fluster. He was an old gentleman nowadays and liable to
excitement. He sent for his head clerk, not that pertinacious servant,
Mr. Gregory—he had long since gone into retirement—but another, from
whom Mr. Ferguson was not inclined to stand any nonsense.
“I shall want to-morrow all the necessary forms for securing English
nationality,” he said, “and please get me Colonel Vanderfelt on the
trunk line.”
The clerk went out of the office. The old man sat in a muse, looking out
of the window upon the plane trees in the Square. So here was Virginia
Ravenel’s son coming home, invalided, with a wife. How the years did
fly, to be sure! Yet though the plane trees were a little dim to his
eyes, he heard a voice, fresh as the morning, through that dusty room,
and saw the Opera House at Covent Garden with people wearing the strange
dress of thirty years ago.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.
Some illustrations were moved to facilitate page layout.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Winding Stair, by A. E. W. Mason
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 60125 ***