Man is a self-deceiver. It must, therefore, ever be a doubtful point
whether Mr. Eustace Greyne, during his residence in Africa, absolutely
lost sight of his sense of duty; whether, beguiled by the lively
attentions of a fiercely foreign town, he deliberately resolved to
take his pleasure regardless of consequences and of the sacred ties of
Belgrave Square. We prefer to think that some vague idea of combining
two duties--that which he owed to himself and that which he owed to Mrs.
Greyne--moved him in all he did, and that the subterfuge into which
he was undoubtedly led was not wholly selfish, not wholly criminal.
Nevertheless, that he had lied to his beloved wife is certain. Even
while she sat over a cutlet and a glass of claret in the white-and-gold
dining-room of the Grand Hotel, preparatory to her departure to the
Kasbah with Abdallah Jack, the dozen of Merrin’s exercise-books lay
upstairs in Mr. Greyne’s apartments filled to the brim with African
frailty. Already there was material enough in their pages to furnish
forth a library of “Catherines.” Yet Mr. Greyne still lingered far from
his home, and wired to that home fabricated accounts of the singular
innocence of Algiers. He even allowed it to be supposed that his
own innocence stood in the way of his fulfilment of Mrs. Greyne’s
behests--he who could now have given points in knowledge of the world to
whole regiments of militiamen!
It was not right, and, doubtless, he must stand condemned by every
moralist. But let it not be forgotten that he had fallen under the
influence of a Levantine.
Mademoiselle Verbena’s mother, hidden in some unnamed hospital of
Algiers, appeared to be one of those ingenious elderly ladies who can
hover indefinitely upon the brink of death without actually dying.
During the whole time that Mr. Greyne had been in Africa her state had
been desperate, yet she still clung to life. As her daughter said, she
possessed extraordinary vitality, and this vitality seemed to have been
inherited by her child. Despite her grave anxieties Mademoiselle Verbena
succeeded in sustaining a remarkable cheeriness, and even a fascinating
vivacity, when in the company of others. As she said to Mr. Greyne,
she did not think it right to lay her burdens upon the shoulders of her
neighbours. She, therefore, forced herself to appear contented, even at
various moments gay, when she and Mr. Greyne were lunching, dining, or
supping together, were driving upon the front, sailing upon the azure
waters of the bay, riding upon the heights beyond El-Biar, or, ensconced
in a sumptuous private box, listening to the latest French farce at one
or another of the theatres. Only one day, when they had driven out to
the monastery at La Trappe de Staouëli, did a momentary cloud descend
upon her piquant features, and she explained this by the frank
confession that she had always wished to become a nun, but had been
hindered from following her vocation by the necessity of earning money
to support her aged parents. Mr. Greyne had never seen the Ouled since
his first evening in Algiers, but he still paid her a weekly salary,
through Abdallah Jack, who explained to him that the interesting lady,
in a discreet retirement, was perpetually occupied in arranging the
exhibitions of African frailty at which he so frequently assisted.
She was, in fact, earning her liberal salary. Mademoiselle Verbena
and Abdallah Jack had met on several occasions, and Mr. Greyne had
introduced the latter to the former as his guide, and had generously
praised his abilities; but in Mademoiselle Verbena took very little
notice of him, and, as time went on, Abdallah Jack seemed to conceive
a most distressing dislike of her. On several occasions he advised Mr.
Greyne not to frequent her company so assiduously, and when Mr. Greyne
asked him to explain the meaning of his monitions he took refuge in
vague generalities and Eastern imagery. He had a profound contempt
for women as companions, which grieved Mr. Greyne’s Western ideas,
and evidently thought that Mademoiselle Verbena ought to be clapped
forthwith into a long veil, and put away in a harem behind an iron
grille. When Mr. Greyne explained the English point of view Abdallah
Jack took refuge in a sulky silence; but during the week immediately
preceding the arrival of Mrs. Greyne his temper had become actively
bad, and Mr. Greyne began seriously to consider whether it would not
be better to pay him a last _douceur_, and tell him to go about his
business.
Before doing this, however, Mr. Greyne desired to have one more
interview with the mysterious Ouled on the heights, to whom he owed the
knowledge which would henceforth enable him to cut out the militia. He
said so to Abdallah Jack. The latter agreed sulkily to arrange it;
and matters so fell out that on the night of Mrs. Greyne’s arrival
her husband was seated in a room in one of the remotest houses of the
Kasbah, watching the Ouled’s mysterious evolutions, while Mademoiselle
Verbena--as she herself had informed Mr.4 Greyne--sat in the hospital by
the bedside of her still dying mother. Abdallah Jack had apparently been
most anxious to assist at Mr. Greyne’s interview with the Ouled, but
Mr. Greyne had declined to allow this. The evil temper of the guide was
beginning to get thoroughly upon his employer’s nerves, and even the
natural desire to have an interpreter at hand was overborne by the
dislike of Abdallah Jack’s morose eyes and sarcastic speeches about
women. Moreover, the Ouled spoke a word or two of uncertain French.
Thus, therefore, things fell out, and such was the precise situation
when Mrs. Greyne flicked a crumb from her chocolate brocade gown, tied
her bonnet strings, and rose from table to set forth to the Kasbah with
Abdallah Jack.
It was a radiant night. In the clear sky the stars shone brilliantly,
looking down upon the persistent convulsions of the little chasseur, who
had not yet recovered from his attack of merriment on learning who
Mrs. Greyne was. The sea, quite calm now that the great novelist was no
longer upon it, lapped softly along the curving shores of the bay. The
palm-trees of the town garden where the band plays on warm evenings
waved lazily in the soft and scented breeze. The hooded figures of the
Arabs lounged against the stone wall that girdles the sea-front. In the
brilliantly-illuminated restaurants the rich French population gathered
about the little tables, while the withered beggars stared in upon the
oyster shells, the champagne bottles, and the feathers in the women’s
audacious hats.
When Mrs. Greyne emerged upon the pavement before the Grand Hotel,
attended by Mrs. Forbes and the guide, she paused for a moment, and cast
a searching glance upon the fairy scene. In this voluptuous evening and
strange environment life seemed oddly dreamlike. She scarcely felt like
Mrs. Greyne. Possibly Mrs. Forbes also felt unlike herself, for she
suddenly placed one hand upon her left side, and tottered. Abdallah Jack
supported her. She screamed aloud.
“Madam!” she said. “It is the vertigo. I am overtook!”
She was really ill; her face, indeed, became the colour of a plover’s
egg.
“Let me go to bed, madam,” she implored. “It is the vertigo, madam. I
am overtook!”
Under ordinary circumstances Mrs. Greyne would have prescribed a dose of
Kasbah air, but to-night she felt strange, and she wanted strangeness.
Mrs. Forbes with the vertigo, in a small carriage, would be
inappropriate. She, therefore, bade her retire, mounted into the vehicle
with Abdallah Jack, and was quickly driven away, her bonnet strings
floating upon the winsome wind.
“You know my husband?” she asked softly of the guide.
Abdallah Jack replied in French that he rather thought he did.
“How is he looking?” continued Mrs. Greyne in a slightly yearning voice.
“My Eustace!” she added to herself, “my devoted one!”
“Monsieur Greyne is pale as washed linen upon the Kasbah wall,” replied
Abdallah Jack, lighting a cigarette, and wreathing the great novelist in
its grey-blue smoke. “He is thin as the Spahi’s lance, he is nervous as
the leaves of the eucalyptus-tree when the winds blow from the north.”
Mrs. Greyne was seriously perturbed.
“Would I had come before!” she murmured, with serious self-reproach.
“Monsieur Greyne is worse than all the English,” pursued Abdallah Jack
in a voice that sounded to Mrs. Greyne decidedly sinister. “He is worse
than the tourists of Rook, who laugh in the doorways of the mosques and
twine in their hair the dried lizards of the Sahara. Even the guide
of Rook rejected him. I only would undertake him because I am full of
evil.”
Mrs. Greyne began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, and to wish she
had not been so ready to pander to Mrs. Forbes’ vertigo. She stole a
sidelong glance at her strange companion. The carriage was small. The
end of his bristling black moustache was very near. What he said of
Mr. Greyne did not disturb her, because she knew that her Eustace had
sacrificed his reputation to do her service; but what he said about
himself was not reassuring.
“I think you must be doing yourself an injustice,” she said in a rather
agitated voice.
“Madame?”
“I do not believe you are so bad as you imply,” she continued.
The carriage turned with a jerk out of the brilliantly-lighted
thoroughfare that runs along the sea into a narrow side street, crowded
with native Jews, and dark with shadows.
“Madame does not know me.”
The exact truth of this observation struck home, like a dagger, to the
mind of Mrs. Greyne.
“I am a wicked person,” added Abdallah Jack, with a profound conviction.
“That is why Monsieur Greyne chose me as his guide.”
The novelist began to quake. Her chocolate brocade fluttered. Was she
herself to learn at first hand, and on her first evening in Africa,
enough about African frailty to last her for the rest of her life? And
how much more of life would remain to her after her stock of knowledge
had been thus increased? The carriage turned into a second side street,
narrower and darker than the last.
“Are we going right?” she said apprehensively.
“No, madame; we are going wrong--we are going to the wicked part of the
city.”
“But--but--you are sure Mr. Greyne will be there?”
Abdallah Jack laughed sardonically.
“Monsieur Greyne is never anywhere else. Monsieur Greyne is wicked as is
a mad Touareg of the desert.”
“I don’t think you quite understand my husband,” said Mrs. Greyne,
feeling in duty bound to stand up for her poor, maligned Eustace.
“Whatever he may have done he has done at my special request.”
“Madame says?”
“I say that in all his proceedings while in Algiers Mr. Greyne has been
acting under my directions.”
Abdallah Jack fixed his enormous eyes steadily upon her.
“You are his wife, and told him to come here, and to do as he has done?”
“Ye-yes,” faltered Mrs. Greyne, for the first time in her life feeling
as if she were being escorted towards the criminal dock by a jailer with
Puritan tendencies.
“Then it is true what they say on the shores of the great canal,” he
remarked composedly.
“What do they say?” inquired Mrs. Greyne.
“That England is a land of female devils,” returned the guide as the
carriage plunged into a filthy alley, between two rows of blind houses,
and began to ascend a steep hill.
Mrs. Greyne gasped. She opened her lips to protest vigorously, but her
head swam--either from indignation or from fatigue--and she could
not utter a word. The horses mounted like cats upward into the dense
blackness, from which dropped down the faint sounds of squealing music
and of hoarse cries and laughter. The wheels bounded over the stones,
sank into the deep ruts, scraped against the sides of the unlighted
houses. And Abdallah Jack sat staring at Mrs. Greyne as an English
clergyman’s wife might stare at the appalling rites of some deadly
cannibal encountered in a far-off land, with a stony wonder, a sort of
paralysed curiosity.
Suddenly the carriage stopped on a piece of waste land covered with
small pebbles. Abdallah Jack sprang out.
“Why do we stop?” said Mrs. Greyne, turning as pale as ashes.
“The carriage can go no farther. Madame must walk.”
Mrs. Greyne began to tremble.
“We are to leave the coachman?”
“I shall escort madame, alone.”
The great novelist’s tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She felt
like a Merrin’s exercise-book, every leaf of which was covered with
African frailty. However, there was no help for it. She had to descend,
and stand among the pebbles.
“Where are we going?”
Abdallah Jack waved his hand towards a stone rampart dimly seen in the
faint light that emanated from the starry sky.
“Down there into the alley of the Dead Dervishes.”
Mrs. Greyne could not repress a cry of horror. At that moment she would
have given a thousand pounds to have Mrs. Forbes at her side.
Abdallah Jack grasped her by the hand, and led her ruthlessly forward.
Gazing with terror-stricken eyes over the crumbling rampart of the
Kasbah, she saw the city far below her, the lights of the streets, the
lights of the ships in harbour. She heard the music of a bugle, and
wished she were a Zouave safe in barracks. She wished she were a
German-Swiss porter, a merry chasseur--anything but Mrs. Eustace Greyne.
One thing alone supported her in this hour of trial, the thought of her
husband’s ecstasy when she appeared upon the dread scene of his awful
labours, to tell him that he was released, that he need visit them no
more.
The alley of the Dead Dervishes is long and winding. To Mrs. Greyne it
seemed endless. As she threaded it with faltering step, gripped by the
feverish hand of Abdallah Jack, who now began to display a strange and
terrible excitement, she became a centre of curiosity. Unwashed Arabs,
rakish Zouaves in blue and red, wandering Jews of various nationalities,
unveiled dancing-girls covered with jewels, stared in wonder upon the
chocolate brocade and the floating bonnet strings, followed upon her
footsteps, pointing with painted fingers, and making remarks of a
personal nature in French, Arabic, and other unknown tongues. She moved
in the midst of a crowd, on and on before lighted interiors from which
wild music flowed.
“Shall we never be there?” she panted to Abdallah Jack. “My limbs refuse
their office.” She jogged against a Tunisian Jewess in a pointed hat,
and rebounded upon an enormous Riff in a tattered sheep-skin. “I can go
no farther.”
“We are there! Behold the house of the Ouled!”
As he uttered the last word he burst into a bitter laugh, and drew Mrs.
Greyne, now gasping for breath, through an open doorway into a little
hall of imitation marble, with fluted pillars adorned with oilcloth, and
walls hung with imported oleographs. From a chamber on the right, near
a winding staircase covered with blue-and-white tiles, came the sound of
laughter, of song, and of a hideous music conveyed to the astonied ear
by pipes and drums.
“They are in there!” exclaimed Abdallah Jack, folding his arms, and
looking at Mrs. Greyne. “Go to your husband!”
Mrs. Greyne put her hands to her magnificent forehead, and tottered
forward. She reached the door, she pushed it, she entered. There upon a
wooden dais, surrounded by gilt mirrors and artificial roses, she beheld
her husband, in a check suit and a white Homburg hat, performing the
wildest evolutions, while opposite him a lady, smothered in coloured
silks and coins, tattooed and painted, dyed and scented, covered with
kohl and crowned with ostrich feathers, screamed a nasal chant of the
East, and bounded like an electrified monkey.
“Eustace!” cried Mrs. Greyne, leaning for support against an oleograph.
Her husband turned.
“Eustace!” she cried again. “It is I!”
He stood as if turned to stone. Mrs. Greyne hesitated, started, moved
forward to the dais, and stared upon the Ouled, who had also ceased from
dancing, and looked strangely surprised, even confused, by the great
novelist’s intrusion.
“Miss Verbena!” she exclaimed. “Miss Verbena in Algiers!”
“Eugenia!” said Mr. Greyne in a husky voice, “what is this you say?
This lady is the Ouled.”
A sardonic laugh came from the doorway. They turned. There stood
Abdallah Jack. He advanced roughly to the Ouled.
“Come,” he said angrily. “Have we not earned the money of the stranger?
Have we not earned enough? To-morrow you shall marry me as you have
promised, and we will return to our own land, to the canal where you and
I were born. And nevermore shall the Levantine instruct the babes of
the English devils, but dwell veiled and guarded in the harem of her
master.”
“Mademoiselle Verbena!” said Mr. Greyne in a more husky voice.
“But--but--your dying mother?”
“She sleeps, monsieur, in the white sands of Ismailia, beside the
bitter lake. I trust that madame can now go on with the respectable
‘Catherine.’”
And with an ironic reverence to Mrs. Eustace Greyne she placed her hand
in Abdallah Jack’s and vanished from the room.
“Catherine’s Repentance,” published in a gigantic volume not many weeks
ago, was preceded by Mr. Eustace Greyne’s. When last heard of he was
seated in the magnificent library of the corner house in Park Lane next
to the Duke of Ebury’s, busily engaged in pasting the newspaper notices
of Mrs. Greyne’s greatest work into a superb new album.
The Abdallah Jacks have returned to the Suez Canal, bearing with them
a snug little fortune to be invested in the purchase of a coal wharf
at Port Said, and a remarkably handsome crocodile dressing-case, fitted
with gold, and monogrammed with the initials “E. G.”