THE BEY RETURNS
He kissed her hands. She caught the murmur of compliments and the
mingled scent of musk and wine. He had been dining at his reception
for the men, but he called now for a table and more refreshment.
A small table was brought to the end of the room near the marriage
throne where all the day she had paraded; a richly embroidered cloth
of satin was flung over it, and from crowding candelabra fresh
lights shed down a little circle of brilliance.
Faintly Aimée protested that eat she could not, and then she made a
feint of eating, lingering over her sherbets, because eating was,
after all, so safe and uncomplicated a thing.
The black brought champagne in its jacket of ice and filled their
glasses.
The general rose. "_À notre bonheur_--to our happiness," he
declared, holding out his glass, and she clinked her own to it and
brought her lips to touch the brim, but not to that toast could she
swallow a single one of the bubbles that went winking up and down
the hollow stem.
The glass trembled suddenly in her hand as she set it down. An
overpowering sense of fatigue was upon her. With the death of her
poor hope, with the collapse of all those flighty, childish dreams,
the leaden weight of realities seemed to descend crushingly upon
her. She felt stricken, inert, apathetic.
It was all so unreal, so bizarre. This could not possibly be taking
place in her life, this fantastic scene, this table set with lights
and food at the end of a dark, deserted old room opposite this
grimacing, foppish stranger....
She could barely master strength for her replies. How had it all
gone? Excellently? She was satisfied with her new home? With the
service? The appointments?
He plied her with questions and she tried to summon her spirit: she
achieved a few perfunctory phrases, the words of a frightened child
struggling for its manners. She tried to smile, unconscious of the
betrayal of her eyes.
He told her, sketchily, of his day. A bore, those affairs, those
speeches, he told her, gazing at her, his wine glass in his hand, a
flush of wine and excitement in his face. She found it unpleasant to
look at him. Her glance evaded his.
She stammered a word of praise for the palace. It must be very
ancient, she told him. Very--interesting.
He waved a hand on which an enormous ruby glittered. He could tell
her stories of it, he promised. It had been built by one of the
Mamelukes, his ancestor. Its old banqueting hall was still
untouched--the collectors would give much to rifle that, but they
would never get their sharks' noses in. Nothing had been changed,
but something added. Once the Mad Khedive had borrowed it for some
years and begun his eternal additions.
"Forty girls, they say, he kept here," smiled Hamdi Bey. "They
gulped their pleasure, in those days. It is better to sip, is it
not?"
He smiled. "But these are no stories for a bride! I only trust that
you will not find your palace dull. It is very quiet now, very much
of the old school. You may miss your pianos, your electricity, all
your pretty Parisian modernity."
She glanced at the glittering table.
"But I do not find this so--so much of the old school. Here one does
not eat rice with the fingers!"
"And I?" said the bey, leaning suddenly towards her on his outspread
arm. "Do you find me too much of the old school? Eh? eh?"
"But you, monsieur," she stammered, still looking down, "you--I do
not know you--not yet."
"Not--yet. Excellent! There will be time."
"I confess that now I am weary--"
"Ah,--and that diadem is heavy. Your head must ache with it," he
said solicitously.
Perhaps it was the diadem that gave her that leaden, constricted
sense of a band tightening about her forehead. She put up her hands
to it.
"Permit me," he said quickly, springing to his feet. "Permit me to
aid you."
He stepped behind her and bent over her. She held her head very
still, stiff with distaste, and felt the weight lifted. He surveyed
the circlet a moment then placed it upon the marriage throne behind
her. She had an ironic memory of the false omen of her crowning, of
soft, satisfied little Ghul-al-Din's bestowal of her own
happiness.... Happiness, indeed....
"And that veil--surely that is incommoding?" suggested the suave
voice, and she felt the touch of his hands on her hair where the
misty veil was secured.
She stammered that it was quite light--she would not trouble him--
Then she held herself rigid, for suddenly he had swept the veil
aside and bent to press his lips to that most hidden of all veiled
sanctities, for a Moslem, the back of her neck.
She did not stir. She sat fixed and tense. Then slowly the blood
came back to her heart, for he was moving away from her again to his
place at the table.
Laughing a little, pulling at his blond mustache in a gesture of
conquest, his kindling eyes glinting down at her, "You must forgive
the precipitateness--of a lover," he murmured. "You do not know your
own beauty. You are like a crystal in which the world has thrown no
reflections. All is pure and transparent--"
If she did not find words to answer him, to divert his admiration,
she felt that she was lost.
"You are not complimentary--a bit of glass, monsieur, instead of a
diamond! But I am too weary to be exacting.... If now, you will
permit me to bid you good evening and withdraw--"
"Little trembler," said the general facetiously, and reached out a
hand to touch her cheek, the light, reassuring caress that one might
give a petted child, but it almost brought a cry of nervous terror
from her lips.
She thought that if he touched her again she would scream. He
inspired her with a horrible fear. There was something so false, so
smiling in him... he was like an ogre sitting down to a delicate
dish of her young innocence, her childish terrors, her frank
fears....
She could not have told why she found him so horrible, but
everything in her shrank convulsively from him.
And the need of courtesy to him, of propititation--!
The cup was bitterer than her darkest dreams.... She wondered how
many other women had drained such deadly brews... had sat in such
ghastly despair, before some other bridegroom, affable, confident,
masterful....
She told herself that she was overwrought, hysterical. The man was
courteous. He was trying to be agreeable, to make a little expected
love. He had drank a little too much--another time she might find
him different. He was probably no worse than any other man of her
world.
It was not in her world, each young Turkish girl said in those days,
that one could find love.
But it was _not_ her world! It was an alien world, enforced,
imprisoning.... That was the bitterest gall of all the deadly cup.
"There is no need for haste," he was assuring her. "In a moment I
will call your woman. Fatima, her name is, an old slave of our
house."
"I could wish," said Aimée, "that I had been permitted to bring my
old nurse, Miriam, without whom I feel strange--"
"No old nurses--I know their wiles," laughed the bey, setting down
his drained cup with a wavering hand. "They are never for the
husbands, those old nurses--we will have no old trot's tricks here!"
He laughed again. "This Fatima is a watch dog, I warn you, my little
one ... but if she does not please you, we can find another. And as
for the rooms--I have assigned this suite to you, the suite of
honor. This is the salon, and there," he pointed to a curtained door
behind them, opening into a small room that Aimée had already seen,
"there is your boudoir and beyond that, your sleeping apartment. I
have had them done over for you, but you shall choose your own
furnishings--everything shall be to your taste, I promise you. You
are too sweet to deny. You have but to ask--"
Certainly, she thought, he was drunk. He moved his head so jerkily
and his whole body swayed so queerly. Desperately she fought against
her horror. Perhaps it was better for him to be drunk.
Drunken men grow sleepy. Perhaps he would fall down and sleep.
Perhaps she ought to urge him to drink. Long ago the black had left
the bottle at his elbow and gone out of his room.
But she did not move. She sat back in her chair, withdrawn and
shrinking, watching him out of those dark, terrified eyes.
"You are beautiful as dreams," he told her, leaning towards her with
such abruptness that his sword struck clankingly against the table.
"Beyond even the words of my babbling cousin--eh, Allah reward
her!--but she did me a good turn with her talk of you!"
Fixedly he stared at her, out of those intent, inflamed eyes.
"I did not know that there was anything like you in the harems of
Cairo. You are like a vision of the old poets--but I suppose that
you do not know the ancient poetry. You little moderns are brought
up upon French and English and music and know little of the Arabic
and the Persian.... I daresay that you have never heard of the poet
Utayyah."
Still leaning towards her he began to intone the stanzas in a very
fair tenor voice, and if his movements were at all unsteady, his
speech was most precise and accurate.
"From her radiance the sun taketh increase when
She unveileth and shameth the moonlight bright."
He chuckled.... "Ah, I shall put the triple veil upon you, my little
moon.... How Is this one?
"'On Sun and Moon of Palace cast thy sight,
Enjoy her flower-like face, her fragrant light,
Thine eyes shall never see in hair so black
Beauty encase a brow so purely white.'"
He got up and drew his chair closer to her. "That is the song for
you, little white rose of beauty."
Back went her own chair, and she rose to her feet.
"I thank you for the compliment, monsieur. But now have I your
permission to retire? For it has been a long day and I am indeed
fatigued--"
To her vexation her voice was trembling, but she steadied it
proudly.
"I bid you good evening."
"Nonsense, my little white rose. This is not so fatiguing--a few
words more. But you are like the flower that flies before the
wind.... But your room, yes, to be sure. Shall I show you the way?"
"I can discover it, monsieur."
"Monsieur--fie on you, my little dove.... Hamdi, I tell you, your
lover Hamdi."
He laughed unsteadily, and put a hand on her arm. "You are running
away, I know that. And I have so much to tell you ... Oh, it was
tedious in that villa of your father's! 'Yes,' I thought to myself,
'that is a fine story, a funny story, but I have heard them all
before. And you are in no haste, you revelers--you have no little
bride waiting for you at home.'... That one glance at you--I tell you
it was the glance of which the poet sings--the glance that cost him
a thousand sighs. I was on fire with impatience.... For I am
beauty's slave, little dove.... You may have heard--but no matter. A
wife must be a pearl unspotted.... I am not as the English who take
their wives from the highways, where all men's glances have rested
upon them. Have I not been at their balls? Their women dance in
other men's arms. They marry wives whose hands other men have
pressed. Sometimes--who knows?--their lips have been kissed.... And
then a husband takes her.... Oh, many thanks!"
He laughed sardonically and waved his hands a little wildly. "Oh, I
know English--all the Europeans. I have seen their women. I have
seen them selling their wares--stripping themselves half bare in the
evenings, the shameless--For me, never! My wife is a hidden
treasure. You know what the poet says:
"'An' there be one who shares with me her love
I'd strangle Love tho' Life by Love were slain,
Saying, O Soul, Death were the nobler choice,
For ill is Love when shared twixt partners twain.'"
"You are fond of your poets," said Aimée with stiff lips.
"You--you kindle poetic fires, my little one. You--I--" He stammered
a moment, then forgot his fierce speech against foreign ways. "You
have the raven hair--"
His hand went out to it. He smoothed it back out of her eyes, then
tried to draw her to him.
Desperately she resisted. "Monsieur, one does not expect a
gentleman--"
"Expect! Ho--what should one expect when a man has such a little
sweetmeat, such a little syrup drop, such a rose petal--Come, come,
you would not struggle--"
But it was not the struggling hand of the frightened girl that sent
the general back.
It was a brown, sinewy hand on his shoulder, a hand protruding from
a well tailored gray sleeve and lilac striped cuff, that caught
Hamdi Bey by the epauleted shoulder and sent him spinning about.
Another hand was holding a revolver very directly at him.
"Silence!" said Jack Ryder in his best Turkish and repeated it, with
amplification, in English. "Not a sound--or I'll blow your head
off."
Aimée gave a strangled gasp.
He had not gone, then! He had hidden there, in some nook of that
boudoir behind those shadowy curtains, waiting to protect her, to
rescue....
Over one arm he had the black mantle and veil, "Better put these
on," he suggested, without taking his eyes from the rigid bey, "and
then run for it."
"But you--you--?"
"I'll take care of myself. After you are out of the way. Dare you
try that? Or what do you suggest?"
"Oh, not alone. Together--"
"So--so--" said Hamdi Bey inarticulately, his head nodded, he
staggered, his knees gave way and he crumpled very completely upon
the floor, and lay like a felled log.
After a quick look down at him Ryder turned to Aimée. "Quick, then.
We'll make a run for it--"
He did not finish. Hamdi Bey, upon the floor, fallen half under the
folds of the white cloth, made a swift and very expert roll and
darted to his feet beside Aimée, whirling her about, with pinioned
elbows, for his shield.
And so screened, he gave a shrill whistle.