THE FORTIETH DOOR
by
MARY HASTINGS BRADLEY
AUTHOR OF _The Wine of Astonishment_, etc.
1920
TO
ARTHUR MILLS CORWIN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. A RASH PROMISE
II. MASKS AND MASKERS
III. IN THE PASHA'S PALACE
IV. EXPLANATIONS
V. AT THE GARDEN GATE
VI. A SECRET OF THE SANDS
VII. TO McLEAN'S ASTONISHMENT
VIII. TEWFICK RECEIVES
IX. A WEDDING PRESENT
X. THE RECEPTION
XI. THE FORTY DOORS
XII. THE UNINVITED GUEST
XIII. THE BEY RETURNS
XIV. WITHIN THE WALLS
XV. UNDERGROUND
XVI. OUT OF THE DARKNESS
XVII. AZIZA
XVIII. AZIZA IS OFFENDED
XIX. AN INTERRUPTION
XX. BEYOND THE DOOR
XXI. MISS JEFFRIES MAKES A CALL
XXII. FROM THE BAZAARS
XXIII. IN THE DESERT
XXIV. THE TOMB OF A KING
XXV. IN CAIRO
XXVI. THE PAINTED CASE
CHAPTER I
A RASH PROMISE
He didn't want to go. He loathed the very thought of it. Every
flinching nerve in him protested.
A masked ball--a masked ball at a Cairo hotel! Grimacing through
peep-holes, self-conscious advances, flirtations ending in giggles!
Tourists as nuns, tourists as Turks, tourists as God-knows-what, all
preening and peacocking!
Unhappily he gazed upon the girl who was proposing this horror as a
bright delight. She was a very engaging girl--that was the mischief
of it. She stood smiling there in the bright, Egyptian sunshine, gay
confidence in her gray eyes. He hated to shatter that confidence.
And he had done little enough for her during her stay in Cairo. One
tea at the Gezireh Palace Hotel, one trip to the Sultan al Hassan
Mosque, one excursion through the bazaars--not exactly an orgy of
entertainment for a girl from home!
He had evaded climbing the Pyramids and fled from the ostrich farm.
He had withheld from inviting her to the camp on the edge of the
Libyan desert where he was excavating, although her party had shown
unmistakable signs of a willingness to be diverted from the beaten
path of its travel.
And he was not calling on her now. He had come to Cairo for supplies
and she had encountered him by chance upon a corner of the crowded
Mograby, and there promptly she had invited him to to-night's ball.
"But it's not my line, you know, Jinny," he was protesting. "I'm so
fearfully out of dancing--"
"More reason to come, Jack. You need a change from digging up ruins
all the time--it must be frightfully lonely out there on the desert.
I can't think how you stand it."
Jack Ryder smiled. There was no mortal use in explaining to Jinny
Jeffries that his life on the desert was the only life in the world,
that his ruins held more thrills than all the fevers of her tourist
crowds, and that he would rather gaze upon the mummied effigy of any
lady of the dynasty of Amenhotep than upon the freshest and fairest
of the damsels of the present day.
It would only tax Jinny's credulity and hurt her feelings. And he
liked Jinny--though not as he liked Queen Hatasu or the little
nameless creature he had dug out of a king's ante-room.
Jinny was an interfering modern. She was the incarnation of
impossible demands.
But of course there was no real reason why he should not stop over
and go to the dance.
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, when she had extracted his promise and abandoned
him to the costumers, he was scourging his weakness.
He had known better! Very well, then, let him take his medicine. Let
him go as--here he disgustedly eyed the garment that the Greek was
presenting--as Little Lord Fauntleroy! He deserved it.
Shudderingly he looked away from the pretty velvet suit; he scorned
the monk's robes that were too redolent of former wearers; he
rejected the hot livery of a Russian mujik; he flouted the banality
of the Pierrot pantaloons.
Thankfully he remembered McLean. Kilts, that was the thing. Tartans,
the real Scotch plaids. Some use, now, McLean's precious
sporrans.... He'd look him up at once.
Out of the crowded Mograby he made his way on foot to the Esbekeyih
quarters where the streets were wider and emptier of Cairene
traffickers and shrill itinerates and laden camels and jostling
donkeys.
It was a glorious day, a day of Egypt's blue and gold. The sky was a
wash of water color; the streets a flood of molten amber. A little
wind from the north rustled the acacias and blew in his bronzed face
cool reminders of the widening Nile and dancing waves.
He remembered a chap he knew, who had a sailing canoe--but no, he
was going to get a costume for a fool ball!
Disgustedly he turned into the very modern and official-looking
residence that was the home of his friend, Andrew McLean, and the
offices of that far-reaching institution, the Agricultural Bank.
A white-robed, red-sashed and red-fezed houseboy led him across the
tiled entrance into the long room where McLean was concluding a
conference with two men.
"Not the least trace," McLean was saying. "We've questioned all our
native agents--"
Afterwards Ryder remembered that indefinite little pause. If the two
men had not lingered--if McLean had not remembered that he was an
excavator--if chance had not brushed the scales with lightning
wings--!
"Ever hear of a chap called Delcassé, Paul Delcassé, a French
excavator?" McLean suddenly asked of him. "Disappeared in the desert
about fifteen years ago."
"He was reported, monsieur, to have died of the fever," one of the
men explained.
McLean introduced him as a special agent from France. His companion
was one of the secretaries of the French legation. They were trying
every quarter for traces of this Delcassé.
Ryder's memory darted back to old library shelves. He saw a thin,
brown volume, almost uncut....
"He wrote a book on the Tomb of Thi," he said suddenly. "Paul
Delcassé--I remember it very well."
Now that he thought of it, the memory was clear. It was one of those
books that had whetted his passion for the past, when his student
mind was first kindling to buried cities and forgotten tombs and all
the strange store and loot of time.
Paul Delcassé. He didn't remember a word of the book, but he
remembered that he had read it with absorption. And now the special
agent, delighted at the recognition, was talking eagerly of the
writer.
"He was a brilliant young man, monsieur, but he was of no importance
to his generation--and he becomes so now through the whim of a
capricious woman to disinherit her other heirs. After all this time
she has decided to make active inquiries."
"But you said that Delcassé had died--"
"He left a wife and child. Her letters of her husband's death
reached his relatives in France, then nothing more. They feared that
the same fever--but nothing, positively, was known.... A sad story,
monsieur.... This Delcassé was young and adventurous and an ardent
explorer. An ardent lover, too, for he brought a beautiful French
wife to share the hazards of his expedition--"
"An ardent idiot," thrust in McLean unfeelingly. "Knocking a woman
about the desert.... Not much chance of a clue after all these
years," he concluded with a very British air of dismissal.
But the French agent was not to be sundered from the American who
remembered the book of Delcassé.
From his pocket he brought a leather case and from the case a large
and ornate gold locket.
"His picture, monsieur." He pressed the spring and offered Ryder the
miniature. "It was done in France before he returned on that last
trip, and was left with the aunt. It is said to be a good likeness."
Ryder looked down upon the young face presented to his gaze with a
feeling of sympathy for this unlucky searcher of the past who had
left his own secret in the sands he had come to conquer--sympathy
mingled with blank wonder at the insanity which had brought a woman
with it....
McLean couldn't understand a man's doing it.
Jack Ryder couldn't understand a man's _wanting_ to do it. Love to
Ryder was incomprehensible idiocy. Woman, as far as he was
concerned, had never been created. She was still a spectacle, an
historical record, an uncomprehended motive.
"Nice looking chap," he commented briefly, fingering the curious old
case as he handed it back.
"I'll keep up the inquiries," McLean assured them, "but, as I said,
nothing will come of it.... It's been fifteen years. One more grain
lost in the desert of sand.... By luck, you know, you might just
stumble on something, some native who knew the story, but if fever
carried them off and the Arabs rifled their camp, as I fancy,
they'll jolly well keep their mouths shut. No white man will
know.... I don't advise your people to spend much money on the
search."
"Odd, the inquiries we get," he commented to Ryder when the
Frenchmen had completed their courteous farewells. "You'd think the
Bank was a Bureau of Information! Yesterday there was a stir about
two crazy lads who are supposed to have joined the Mecca pilgrims in
disguise.... Of course our clerks are Copts and _do_ pick up a bit
and the Copts will talk.... I say, Jack, what are you doing?" he
broke off to demand in astonishment, for Jack Ryder had seated
himself upon a divan and was absorbedly rolling up his trouser leg.
"The dear Egyptian flea?" he added.
"Not at all. I am looking at my knees," said Ryder glumly. "I just
remembered that I have to show them to-night.... A ball--in
masquerade. At a hotel. Tourist crowd.... How do you think they'll
look with one of your Scotch plaidies atop?" he inquired feelingly.
"Fascinating, Jack, fascinating," said the promptly sardonic McLean.
"You--at a masquerade!... So that's what brought you to town."
He cocked a taunting eye at him. "Well, well, she must be a most
engaging young person--you'll be taking her out on the desert with
you now, like our friend Delcassé--a pleasant, retired spot for a
body to have his honeymoon ... no distractions of society ...
undiluted companionship, you might say.... Now what made you think
she'd like your knees?" he murmured contemplatively. "Aren't you
just a bit--previous? Apt to startle and frighten the lady?"
"Oh, go on, go on," Ryder exhorted bitterly. "I like it. It's better
than I can do myself. Go on.... But while you are talking trot out
your tartans. Something clannish now--one of those ancestral rigs
that you are always cherishing ... Rich and red, to set off my dark,
handsome type."
"Set off you'll be, Jack dear," promised McLean, dragging out a huge
chest. "Set off you'll be."
* * * * *
Set off he was.
And a fool he felt himself that night, as he confronted his
brilliant image in the glass. A Scot of the Scots, kilted in vivid
plaid, a rakish cap on his black hair, a tartan draped across his
shoulder, short, heavy stockings clasping his legs and low shoes gay
with big buckles.
"Oh, young Lochinvar has come out of the west," warbled McLean
merrily, as he straightened the shoulder pin of silver and Scotch
topaz.
"Out of Hades," said Ryder, rather pointlessly, for he felt it was
Hades he was going into.
Chiefly he was concerned with his knees and the striking contrast
between their sheltered whiteness and the desert brown of his
face.... Milky pale they gleamed at him from the glass.... Bony
hard, they flaunted their angles at every move.... He was grateful
that he was not a centipede.
"Oh, 'twas all for my rightful king,
That I gaed o'er the border;
Twas all for--
"You didn't tell me her name, now, Jack."
"Where's my mask?" Ryder was muttering. "I say, aren't there any
pockets in these confounded petticoats?"
"In the sporran, man.... There!" McLean at last withheld his hand
from its handiwork. "Jock, you're a grand sight," he pronounced with
a special Scottish burr. "If ye dinna win her now--'Bonny Charley's
now awa,'" he sung as Ryder, with a last darkling look at his vivid
image, strode towards the door.
"He's awa' all right--and he'll be back again as soon as he can make
it."
With this cheerless anticipation of the evening's promise, the
departing one stalked, like an exiled Stuart, to his waiting
carriage.
For a moment more McLean kept the ironic smile alive upon his lips,
as he listened to the rattle of the wheels and the harsh gutturals
of the driver, then the smile died as he turned back into the room.
"Eh, but wouldn't you like it, though, Andy," he said to himself,
"if some girl now liked you enough to get you to go to one of those
damned things.... The lucky dog!"