WITHIN THE WALLS
Ryder sprang forward, trying to reach the bey, but he dodged
skillfully; his holding Aimée blocked Ryder in his attack.
He knew that high, peculiar whistle had been a signal, a call for
aid, and he flung a lightning glance down that long room, tightening
his hold on the revolver--but he did not see the small door that
opened in the shadowy paneling behind him, nor the shadow that grew
into the gorilla-like shape of the black as it launched itself
through the air upon his back.
He only heard Aimée's scream, and then before the crashing weight
upon his shoulders he staggered and went down.
The bey flung Aimée aside and rushed upon the prostrate figure,
kicking the revolver from the outspread hand. The black knelt
swiftly down, unfastening his silken sash.
Giddily the room whirled about Aimée.... In the candle light,
leaping in the rush of conflict, she saw the bey and the black, and
their distorted shadows in a goblin blur.... And beneath them she
saw Ryder, helpless, his hands and feet pinioned.... With the
madness of despair she rushed forward, but the general intercepted
her.
"He is quite helpless.... You need not be alarmed for my safety,
madame!"
The cold, biting fury of his voice steadied her. She saw his face
was distorted, livid with anger. His breathing was stertorous.
She stood helplessly by the table; the general turned and looked
down upon the face of the man who had dared to violate the sanctity
of his harem and attempt to steal his bride; beyond the man's head
Yussuf, the black, was squatting with a grinning, dog-like
watchfulness.
But Ryder did not require watching. That sash had been tied strongly
about his hands and feet. He was as helpless as a baby.
But the peculiar flavor of his helplessness was not so much fear
before the fanatic fury of this man he had outraged, although he had
a clear notion that his position was not enviably secure, but a
bitter, black chagrin.
To have had the game in his hands and have bungled it! To have been
surprised by that simple strategy, taken off his guard by a feigned
collapse! The wily old Turk for all his champagne had the clearer,
quicker brain....
To have let him get to Aimée and call in his black! To have been
thrown, disarmed.... It was crass stupidity. It was outrageous
mismanagement, abominable, maddening....
And Aimée must pay for it. He tried to think very quickly what could
best clear her.
He fixed his eyes on those glittering eyes, staring down upon him.
"I realize I owe you an explanation," he said grimly. "If you will
let me tell you--"
The bey turned to Aimée with a smile that was the lifting of a lip
and the distention of his nostrils.
"This fool thinks he has the time to talk--his English."
Desperately Ryder grasped for his vernacular. "I want to tell
you--why I came. This--this young lady doesn't know me."
Past the general he shot a look of warning at the girl.
"I was trying to get hold of her for her family in France--She is
really a French girl. Tewfick Pasha is not her father but her--"
he could not find the word and dropped into English. "Her
step-father--do you understand? And he had no business to marry her
off, so I tried to steal her for the French family. It was a mad
attempt which has failed--but for which the young lady should not be
blamed. She had never seen me before. She had no idea I was here."
After a pause, "A remarkable story," said the general distinctly. He
turned about to the table and drank off the last of a glass of
champagne, then wiped his mouth with the back of a hand that
trembled.
He turned back to stand over his prostrate invader. "Now, you--you
dog of Satan," he snarled in a sudden snapping of restraint, "how
did you get here? Who admitted you?"
And at that, for all his trussed and helpless plight, Jack Ryder
grinned. He moved his head slightly. "That blackbird of yours here."
"Yussuf--never!"
"The very one. But he didn't know it--I was in that black
mantle--and veil."
"Oh, the mantle, I had forgot. So you stole in, disguised, to
violate my hospitality, to outrage my harem, to gaze upon the
forbidden faces of women and to steal the bride--"
"I tell you I was trying to rescue the girl for her French family.
She _is_ French and Tewfick Pasha is only--"
"And what is that to me? Do I--" the bey broke off and then turned
to the silent girl who stood leaning towards them, a trembling ghost
in white.
"And you, my little one," he murmured sardonically with a savage
irony of restraint, "you, the little dove secluded from the world,
who trembled at a kiss, the crystal vase who had never reflected the
blush of love, whose virginal praises I was chanting when I was so
oddly assaulted, do you support this idiot's story?"
Mechanically her head moved in assent, her eyes, dilated with fear,
were like the dark, fascinated eyes of some helpless bird.
"You never saw this young man?" the bey pursued. "And yet you were
ready to run off with him--a pretty character you give yourself, my
snowdrop!--and you liked his eyes and hastened to obey?"
Aimée was silent. From his ignominy upon the floor Ryder hastened to
interpose.
"It is true she had never seen me, but I had already written to her
and acquainted her with the story. I tried to reach her first
through her father but that was useless so I resorted to these
desperate means."
"Oh you wrote! And you told her you would be here, and murder her
husband--"
"I told her nothing of the kind. She didn't know that I was coming
until I spoke to her here, and then she had no idea that I was going
to wait and carry her off--"
"In the name of Allah! Do you take me for a dolt, an ass? You, with
your writing and your masquerade and your secrets! Do any families
try to recover their relatives with such means? Daughter or
step-daughter, it is nothing to me--"
"But it is true," Aimée insisted, in a trembling voice. "My father
was Paul Delcassé--"
"_Yahrak Kiddisak man rabbabk_--curse the man who brought thee up!
Delcassé or devil, it is Tewfick Pasha who is your step-father, your
guardian, who gave you to me for wife--what has your genealogy to
do with this affront upon my honor?"
"But he did not intend to affront your honor--only to aid the family
in France--"
"I ask you again, do I resemble an ass that you should put such a
burden of lies upon me? As if I did not know why young men risked
their lives, in the dead of night, in other men's rooms! If I did
not know what turns their brains to mush and their hearts to leading
strings! And you--you--you little white rose of seclusion--!"
His venom leaped out at her in his voice. It was a terrible voice,
the cold, grating menace of a madman.
"You, who had never seen this man but who fluttered to him like a
white moth to a fire, you who cowered from your husband's hand but
who turned to follow this strange dog into the streets--there will
be care taken of you later. But now--you complained of fatigue.
Surely this scene is overtaxing for your delicacy. If you will come
to your rooms--"
She drew back from the hand he laid upon her. "Do not injure him!
By Allah's truth! He is rash, mad, but a stranger. He did not
know--"
"He needs enlightenment. He needs to learn that a nobleman's harem
is not a café of dancing girls, where all may enter and stare and
fondle. _Bismallah_--he shall learn!... And now come--"
"I shall not go," she said breathlessly.
"What--struggle? But your father has been strangely remiss with his
discipline.... Permit me."
His hand tightened in a grasp of iron.
"My train is caught," she said in a tone of sudden pettishness; she
stooped to lift it with her hand that was free.
"My train--!" he mimicked her in a quivering falsetto. "Have a care
of my frock--do not crush my chiffons.... And these are the women
for whom men break their heads and hearts!"
"I tell you, sir," came urgently from Ryder, "that the girl is
innocent of all--"
"Keep your tongue from her name--and your eyes from her face!...
Come, madame."
With his iron grasp on her elbow he thrust her towards the boudoir
at the end of the drawing-room, behind whose curtains Ryder had so
long been hiding.
The chamber was in darkness, lighted only by a pale gleam from the
other room. Aimée stumbled across the rug and found herself upon a
huge divan against a window screen.
"Fatima is in the next room to come at a call. But perhaps you would
prefer to wait for me alone? I shall not be long."
Desperately she caught at his arm, imploring, "I beg you, monsieur.
He has done no real harm. Let him go. He is a stranger--he
did not know. And he will never trouble you again. I will do
anything--everything you desire--if only you will not injure him--"
"You trouble yourself strangely for a stranger."
"He is a stranger in danger for my sake. For it was in his duty to
my--my family--" her trembling lips stumbled over the ridiculous
lies, "that he has blundered into this. He has no idea how shocking
a thing he has--"
"And you had no idea, either, I suppose. You had never heard of
honor or treachery or--"
"I was wrong, oh, I was wrong! I did want to go to France--I own it.
And I was not ready for marriage. And I had heard that you--I was
afraid. But now--if you will let him go for my sake, if you will not
visit my sins upon him, oh, I should be so grateful--so grateful
that anything I can ever do--"
"But you will be grateful, anyway, my little blossom. I promise you
that you will learn to be very grateful--"
"It is easier to die than to learn to love a hated one," she
reminded him softly, leaning towards him. "I can die very willingly,
monsieur.... And you would not want a wife before whom there was
always an object of terror--"
Through the dusk her great eyes sought his.
"Be generous--and harm him not," she breathed. "I beg of you, I
implore--"
"And if I am--lenient--you will always be grateful?"
Mutely she nodded, her eyes trying pitifully to read that shadowy
mask of mockery he turned towards her.
"And how grateful could you be, little dove?"
Pitifully she smiled.
"Could you," he murmured, "could you learn to kiss?"
He leaned nearer and involuntarily she shrank back. Faintly, "At
this moment--I beg of you, monsieur--"
"Oh, if it is to be an affair of moments! We shall never find the
right one. But you were so full of promises--"
"I will do anything," said Aimée, convulsively, "if you will promise
me--"
"Come, then a kiss. A peck from my little dove."
She looked at him out of wretched eyes.
"And you promise to free him, not to hurt him--"
"I promise not to hurt a hair of his head. Come, that is generous,
isn't it? As to freeing him--h'm--that is for later. Perhaps, if you
are very good. A kiss then... and later...."
He bent over her. She shut her eyes and heard the taunt of his
laugh. She kissed him, and he laughed again.
"What is it the Afghan poets say? 'Kissed lips lose no sweetness,
but renew their freshness with the moon.' Certainly if you have ever
been kissed, little bud, you have lost no dew.... Delicious.... I
shall hurry back."
He cast a hard look down at her as she sat there, her arms drooping
at her sides. He looked about the room as if consideringly, then
nodded at an unseen door at the right.
"Fatima is there if you want lights or assistance.... And Alsamit,
Yussuf's brother, is at the other door beyond. Do not stir, little
bird. I shall be back very soon."
"And he--you promised--"
"I shall not hurt a hair of his head."
But he was smiling evilly in the darkness as he drew shut the door
and returned to the bound figure by the guarding black.
For a moment he stood silent, considering, while Yussuf looked up
with glistening-eyed intentness like an eager dog ready for the word
of attack.
Then in hasty Turkish the general gave his directions and the black
nodded and strode to a portière, jerking it down, which he wrapped
about Ryder's helpless form.
Then he hoisted his burden over his huge shoulder and bore it on
after the general.
Across the great room they went and down the long stairs up which
that day a most complacent Hamdi Bey had escorted his just-glimpsed
bride.
Now at the bottom of the stairs a shadowy figure of a sleeping
eunuch was stretched.
Hamdi Bey spoke sharply, giving a quick order. The black scrambled
to his feet, yawned, nodded, and strode away into the main vestibule
and out into the garden to investigate a shadow which the general
had just reported, and when he was out of sight the general and
Yussuf, with his unwieldy burden, came quietly down the stairs and
turned back into a long, dark hall.
For a moment they paused outside a wide, many-columned banqueting
room, and there Hamdi Bey stood listening, straining attentive ears
for the faint sounds from the service quarters on the other side of
the room. He caught the guttural of a half inaudible voice, and the
wash of water and clink of a dish, showing that the belated work of
the reception was going draggingly on, but it was all far away and
invisible.
Satisfied he went on a few steps to a pointed door set in the heavy
stone. From a nail he took down a lantern of heavy, fretted brass
and lighted it, not without some difficulty, for his hands were
still trembling. Then he took from the black a cumbersome key which
he fitted into the lock and turned heavily.
Drawing back the door he motioned Yussuf ahead, and followed,
drawing the door shut. Down a steep, stone spiral stair they went,
and at the bottom, at the general's order, the black set Ryder down
from his shoulder and flung aside the portière.
From its muffling folds Ryder looked out bewilderedly into the
darkness about him, illumined only by the yellow flare of the
ancient lantern. The general cautioned him to silence while Yussuf
knelt and untied the strip that bound his feet, then, his arms still
bound, he was ordered to march on before them.
This, he said to himself, as he silently obeyed that order, this
really was the time to pinch himself and wake up! Of all the dark,
eerie nightmares! This slow procession through these underground
halls, the giant black on his heels, the general's lantern throwing
its flickering rays over the huge, seamed blocks of granite
foundations.
It made him think of the Catacombs. It made him think of the
Serapeum. It made him think of those damp, tortuous underground ways
of the Villa Bordoni....
They seemed to be in the wine cellars. He saw bins and barrels and
barred vaults that would have done credit to an English squire, and
he reflected fleetly that wine bibbing was forbidden to Mohammedans
and that Hamdi Bey was a fanatic Moslem.... Then he saw open spaces
of ancient stuffs, broken tables and dismantled caiques and a broken
oar. His earlier observation of the palace had told him that it had
a water gate and he thought now that they might be near some
opening.
He wondered if they were going to throw him, pinioned, into the
river. He wouldn't put it past this livid, silent, shaking man--and
yet the thing appeared so impossible, so theatric, so utterly
unrelated to any of the ways that he, Jack Ryder, might be expected
to end his days, that it couldn't possibly send more than a shiver
of speculation down his spine.
And yet men _had_ been thrown into rivers--this very river. And men
had disappeared from just such palaces as this. There was the story
about young Monkton. He knew it perfectly; he had reminded himself
of it the last evening while he reflected upon this escapade, but he
had never actually appreciated the peculiar poignancy of the thing
until now.
Monkton had met--so rumor reported--a Turkish lady of position,
flirted with her, it was said, while on horseback outside her motor
when caught in the crush at Kasr-el-Nil bridge. There had been a
meeting or two in the back of shops, and then he had boasted,
lightheartedly, of a design to take tea in her harem.
He had never boasted about the tea. No one had ever seen Monkton
again and he was generally reported, after a stifled inquiry, to
have been thrown from his horse in the desert, or spilled out of his
sailing canoe.
The government, English or Egyptian, assumed no interest in the
matter of gentlemen found in other gentlemen's harems.
There were other stories, too. There was one of a little Viennese
actress who after a dramatic escape reported a whole winter of
captivity in one of these old palaces, and there was a vaguer rumor
of a rash young American girl, detained for days....
Ryder had always known these stories. They were part of the gossip
and thrill of Cairo. But he had never till now realized how
exquisitely possible was their occurrence.
Anything, everything might happen in these hidden, secret chambers.
These Turks were as much masters here as their old predecessors who
had reared these stones. This black upon his heels might have been
the grinning, faithful executioner of some Khedive or Caliph--he
might have been the very Masrur, the Sworder of Vengeance of Al
Raschid.
He told himself that it was no time to think of the past. His
business--acutely--was the present. If only he could get his hands
untied! If only he could get those untied hands upon that demoniac
Turk!
But, strain as he could upon the knots, they held.
It seemed to him that they had been walking for an interminable
distance, in odd, roundabout ways. Once they had stopped and he had
involuntarily glanced back over his shoulder, but at a word from the
general he had kept his head forward again, while he heard the black
behind him gathering something that clinked. Later, a stolen glance
had revealed the eunuch with some tools in one hand and bag slung
over his shoulder.
The bag disquieted him. Bags filled a foreboding place in the
Eastern literature of vengeance. He wondered if he were to go into
the river in that bag, with the tools for weight.
He decided, feeling now a very odd and definite disturbance in the
region of his stomach, that he would tell that general that he was a
cousin of the late Lord Cromer and a nephew of Lord Kitchener.
Something insistent would have to be done about this.
They were passing now through a strange, open space, between old
arches that for an instant arrested his excavator's interest. He saw
in the shadows about them, a crumpled, crumbling dome and broken
shafts, with half a wall of masonry pierced with Arabesques. Traces
of old ruins, fragments of some old, forgotten mosque over which the
palace had spread its foundations in bygone days.... Buried
treasure, looted, some of it, for the palace overhead, but still
rare and lovely.... That was a gleam of lapis lazuli that winked at
him from the crumbling mortar under his feet.
Then they were between other walls, not crumbling ones, but the
solid, pillared blocks of the palace masonry with here and there
broad arches of old brick.
They stopped. Between two arches the general held his lantern high,
flashing it over the surface while Yussuf swung down his sack and
knocked with the handle of his tool.
Suddenly he stopped and looked at his master, nodding cheerfully.
The general lowered his light and stepped back and Yussuf reared the
pickaxe in his powerful arms and sent it dexterously at the wall,
between two broken bits of brick.
It caught, and sent the mortar spraying; another blow and another
loosened a hole in which the black inserted a short iron and began
nervously grinding and prying.
Ryder, watching with oppressed and helpless fury, saw the bricks at
last break and tumble faster and faster in a cloud of dust, and saw
a pocket in the wall become revealed, a long, upright niche, the
size, perhaps, of a man's coffin, on end.
He tried, very suddenly, to talk. His tongue felt thick and swollen
and there seemed no words in all the world to fit his need of
overcoming this fanatic madman,--and after all, he had no chance for
them, for Yussuf, with a huge palm upon his mouth, urged him
suddenly backwards towards that horrible niche.
"Gently, Yussuf, gently," said the general, suavely and with a slow
distinctness that was for Ryder's ears. "I gave my word that I would
not hurt a hair of his head--"
Grinning, the black lifted him over the remaining wall, and set him
down into the niche, leaving him standing in there like a helpless
statue, tasting to the full fury of his heart the bitterness of his
helplessness and the ludicrous impotence of all struggle.
"Good God, sir, you must be mad," he said in a strained sharp
voice that his ears would not have known as his own. "Do you
realize--there will be an inquiry--there is such a thing as law--"
It seemed to him that he talked, in English and stammering Arabic,
for a long time. The black was kneeling, out of sight, stooping over
a basin of water and his abominable sack, and Ryder was facing that
silent, sardonic face, with its fantastic mustache, its evil,
gloating eyes....
He stopped for very shame. The man was mad. Mad and drunk--and there
was no appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober.... Mad or drunk, he
had devised his vengeance shrewdly.
Upon Ryder's helpless body a cold sweat of incredulous horror broke
softly out.
At his feet he heard the black beginning to fit his bricks and
smooth his mortar.
"You do well to save your breath," said Hamdi Bey at last, as Ryder
still stood silent. "You will need it in this chamber I am
providing.... But it may be," he said thoughtfully, "that your
breath will last your need. Thirst may be the more impatient for her
victim; they tell me thirst is an obtrusive visitor. As you were,
this evening.... Still, why do you not cry out a little? It will
amuse my black."
Yes, this was real, Ryder reminded himself. And these things could
happen--had happened. He remembered suddenly the hideous scene,
outside the dungeons, in "Francesca da Rimini," when that bestial
brother goes in to the helpless prisoners. He remembered the sick
horror of those groans....
He remembered also various excursions of his in the Tower of London
and the Seigniory of Florence, and the sight of old rings and stakes
and racks and the feeling of their total unrelatedness to every
actuality.
And yet they had happened. And this thing, for all its fantastic
medieval horror, was happening. Brick by brick the imprisoning wall
was rising. Brick by brick it intervened between him and sane,
sensible, happy, normal life.
Eye for eye he gave the general back his look. He had always
wondered about the poor devils in underground torture chambers. Had
wondered how they had the stuff to hold out, against such odds, for
some belief, some information.... Now he knew the stiffening stuff
of a personal hate, upholding to the very grave....
That sardonic, devil's face.... That face which was going back
upstairs to Aimée.... But he must not think of that or he should
give way and begin to babble, to plead.... He must simply stand and
meet that glance....
And there came the incredible, insane moment when Ryder looked out
on that face through one last breathing space, and then saw the
fitted brick, settled into place, blot the world to darkness before
his eyes.