AN INTERRUPTION
When Hamdi Bey had taken Aimée back to her apartments he pulled
sharply upon a bellcord. In a few moments the slave woman, Fatima,
made her appearance, no kindly-eyed old crone like Miriam, but a
sallow, furtive-faced creature, with an old disfiguring scar across
a cheek.
The general pointed to the wet and fainting girl huddling weakly
upon the divan.
"Your new mistress has met with an accident, out boating--a curse
upon me for gratifying forbidden caprice!" he said crisply. "Be
silent of this and array her quickly in garments of rest. I will
return."
Very hurriedly he took himself and his own wet condition away. He
was furious, through and through. What a night--what a wedding
night! Scandal and frustration... a bride with a desperate lover...
a bride who, herself, drew revolvers and threatened.
It was beyond any old tale of the palace. For less, girls had had
his father's dagger driven through their hearts--his grandfather, at
a mere whisper from a eunuch, had given his favorite to the lion.
The whisper was found incorrect at a later--too late--date, and the
eunuch had furnished the lion another meal.
His modern leniency in this case would have outraged his ancestors.
But it was not in the bey's nature to deal the finishing stroke to
anything so soft and lovely as Aimée. He had no intention of
depriving himself of her. If she were red with guilt he would feign
belief in her, to save his face until his infatuation was gratified.
But actually he did not believe in any great guilt of hers. Tewfick
Pasha, for all his indulgent modernity, would keep too strict a
harem for that. What he rather believed had happened was that the
young American--now so happily immured in his masonry--had become
aware of the girl through the story of her French father, and in
that connection had struck up the clandestine and romantic
correspondence which had led to their mutual infatuation and his
desperate venture there that afternoon.
The young man had been dealt with--and the thought of the very
summary and competent way he had been dealt with drew the fangs from
the bite of that night's invasion.
His fury felt soothingly glutted.
He had been a match for them both. He recalled his own subtlety and
agility with a genuine smile as he exchanged his dripping uniform
for more informal trousers and a house coat. He had taught that
young man a lesson--a final and ultimate lesson. And he was
beginning to teach one to that girl. Before he was done with
her ...
He felt for her a mingled passion for her beauty and a lust for
conquest of her resistant spirit that fed every base and cruel
instinct of his nature.
A find--a rare find--even with her circumvented lover! He would have
his sport with her.... But though he promised this to himself with
feline relish, apprehension and chagrin were still working.
The fond fatuity with which he had welcomed that starry-eyed little
creature had been rudely overthrown. And his pride smarted at the
idea of the whispers that might echo and re-echo through his palace.
He was too wise an old hand to flatter himself that it would
preserve its bland and silent unawareness of this night.
So far, he believed, he had been unobserved. In Yussuf's silence he
had absolute confidence.... But of course there were a hundred other
chances--some spying, back-stairs eye, some curious, straining
ear....
And for this matter of the boating mishap--he cursed himself now, as
he combed up his fair mustaches and settled a scarlet fez upon his
thinned thatch of graying hair, cursed himself roundly for his
malicious resort to that old oubliette. Anything else would have
done to frighten and overwhelm her and yet he had gratified his
dramatic itch--and now had paid for it with that idiotic story of
the boating expedition.
He had reason to trust Fatima--there was history behind the old
sword scar upon her cheek, and he had a hold over her through her
ambition for a son. But Fatima was a woman. And she--or some other
who would see that drenched satin would be curious of that boating
story....
And of course they could find out from the boatman.
It occurred to him to go and see the boatman and order him away so
that afterward the man could say he had been sent off duty, and the
story of a nocturnal river trip would not appear too incredible. It
was a small concession to stop gossip's mouth.
So drawing on a swinging military cloak, the general stole down
through the stair of the water entrance into the lower hall, where
the pale light gleamed through the cross-barred iron of the gate and
the gatekeeper slept like a log in his muffling cloak.
The soundness of that slumber--loudly attested by the fumes of
wine--afforded the general a profound pleasure. He took the man's
keys softly, and went to the gate; it afforded him less pleasure to
observe that the gate was unlocked, but he put this down to the
keeper's muddleheadedness.
Carefully he turned the lock and pocketed the keys--for a lesson to
the man's overdeep sleep in the morning and to attest his own
presence there that night; then he went back and brought out an oar,
which he placed conspicuously beside the smallest boat, drawn up
just within the gates.
He was afraid to alter the boat's position lest the noise should
prove too wakening, but he considered he had laid an artistic
foundation for his story and with a gratifying sense of triumph he
mounted the stairs.
He was not conscious of fatigue. He had always been a wiry,
indefatigable person, and the alarms and emotions of this night had
cleared his head of its wines and drowsiness. He felt the sense of
tense, highstrung power which came to him in war, in fighting, in
any element of danger.
Youth! He snapped his fingers at it. Youth was buried in
his masonry--and helpless in its shuttered room. Power was
master--power, craft, subtlety.
But his elation ebbed as he crossed again that long drawing room
with its faded flowers about the marriage throne, and its abandoned
table with its cloth askew, its crystal disarrayed, its candles
gutted and spent.
The memory of that insolent moment when a man's hand had gripped
him, had whirled him from Aimée--when a man's voice and gun had
threatened him--that memory was too overpowering for even his
triumph over the invader to lay wholly its smart of outrage.
He felt again the tightening of his nerves, like quivering wires, as
he crossed the violated reception room and entered the boudoir. It
was empty, but on the divan the flickering candle light revealed the
damp, spreading stain where Aimée's drenched satins had been.
He thrust aside a hanging and pushed open the door into the room
beyond.
It was a small bedroom evidently very recently furnished in new and
white shining lacquer of French design, elaborately inlaid with
painted porcelains and draped with a profusion of rosy taffeta.
Among this elegance, surprisingly unrelated to the ancient paneled
walls, stood the hastily opened trunk and bags of the bride, their
raised lids and disarranged trays heaped with the confusion of
unaccustomed, swiftly searching hands.
Aimée herself, in a gay little French boudoir robe of jade and
citron, sat huddled in a chair, like a mute, terrified child, in the
hand of her dresser, who was shaking out the long, damp hair and
fanning it with a peacock fan.
At the bey's entrance Fatima suspended the fanning, but with easy
familiarity exhibited the long ringlets.
Curtly the bey nodded, and gestured in dismissal; the woman laid
down her fan, and with a last slant-eyed look at that strangely
still new mistress she went noiselessly out a small service door.
With an air of negligent assurance Hamdi Bey gazed about the room
and yawned. "Truly a fatiguing evening," he remarked in his dry,
sardonic voice. "But you look so untouched! What a thing is radiant
youth."
He sauntered over to her, who drew a little closer together at his
approach, and lifted one of the long dark curls that the serving
woman had exhibited.
"The ringlets of loveliness," he murmured. "You know the old saying
of the Sadi? 'The ringlets of the lovely are a chain on the feet of
reason and a snare for the bird of wisdom.'... How long ago he said
it--and how true to-day ... Yet such a charming chain! Suppose,
then, I forgive you, little one, since sages have forgiven beauty
before?"
She was silent, her eyes fixed on him with the silent terror with
which a trapped bird sees its captor, in their bright darkness the
same mute apprehension, the same filming of helpless despair.
Ryder was dead, she thought. This cruel, incensed old madman had
killed him, for all his oaths. Somewhere beneath those ancient
stones he was lying drowned and dead, a strange, pitiable addition
to the dark secrets of those grim walls.
He had died for her sake, and all that she asked now of life, she
thought in the utter agony of her youth, was death. And very
quickly.
"I am so soft hearted," he sighed, still with that ringlet in his
lifted hand, his hand which wanted palpably to settle upon her and
yet was withheld by some strange inhibition of those fixed, helpless
eyes. "Who knows--perhaps I may forgive you yet? You might persuade
me--"
"He is dead," she said shiveringly.
"Dead? He?... Ah, the invader, the intruder, the young man who
wanted you for a family in France!" The bey laughed gratingly. "No,
I assure you he is not dead--I have not harmed a hair of his head.
He is alive--only not with quite the widest range of liberty--"
He broke off to laugh again. "Ah, you disbelieve?" he said politely.
"Shall I send, then, for some proof--an ear, perhaps, or a little
finger, still very warm and bleeding, to convince you?... In five
minutes it will be here."
Then terror stirred again in her frozen heart. If Ryder were alive
and still in this man's power--
"You are horrible," she said to him in a voice that was suddenly
clear and unshaken. "What is it you want of me--fear and hate--and
utter loathing?"
Her unexpected spirit was briefly disconcerting. The Turk looked
down upon her in arrested irony and then he smiled beneath his
mustaches and bent nearer with kindling gaze.
"Not at all--nothing at all like that, little dove with talons. I
want sweetness and repentance--and submission. And--"
"You have a strange way to win them," she said desperately.
"You have taken a strange way with me, my love! Little did I
foresee, when I escorted you up the stairs this morning--" He broke
off. "There are men," he reminded her, "who would not consider a
cold bath as a complete recompense for your bridal plans."
She was silent.
"But I," he murmured, "I am soft hearted." He dropped on one knee
before her and tried to smile into her averted face. "I can never
resist a charming penitent.... I assure you I am pliability itself
in delicate fingers--although iron and steel to a threatening
hand.... If you should woo me very sweetly, little one--"
She could not overcome and she could not hide from his mocking eyes
the sick shrinking that drew her back from his least touch. But she
did fight down the wild hysteria of her repugnance so that her voice
was not the trembling gasp it wanted to be.
"How can I know what you are?" she told him. "You mock me--you
threaten to torture that man--it would be folly not to think that
you are deceiving me. If you would only prove to me so that I could
believe--"
"If you would but prove to _me_ so that _I_ could believe--! Prove
that you are mine--and not that infidel's. Prove that you bring me a
wife's devotion--not a wanton's indifference." He caught her cold
hands, trying to draw her forward to him. "Prove that you only pity
him," he whispered, "but that your love will be mine--"
She felt as if a serpent clasped her. And yet, if that were the only
way to win Ryder's safety--if it were possible for her sickened
senses to allay this madman's suspicions and undermine his revenge--
Quiveringly she thought that to save Ryder she would go through
fire.
But the hideous, mocking uncertainties! Her utter helplessness--her
lost deference....
It was not a sudden sound that broke in upon them but rather the
perception of many sounds, muffled, half heard, but gaining upon
their consciousness. Running feet--a stifled voice--something faint
and shrill--
Aimée sprang to her feet; the general rose with her and turned his
head inquiringly in the direction. Then he jerked open the door
through which Fatima had disappeared; it led to a dark service
corridor and small anteroom, from whose bed the attendant was
absent. An outer door was ajar.
No need to question the sounds now. Faint, but piercingly shrill
shrieks were sounding from above, while the footsteps were racing,
some down, some up--
The bey flung shut the door behind him and hurried towards the
confusion.