"Ah, yes, Sir Hew! ..." Katharine responded. "Naturally as the
builder of Kerr's Arbour, Sir Hew's name is more familiar to us than
that of many a later ancestor. I will except Sir Mark, at whose
portrait you are looking now...."
Her glance followed her visitor's to a noble Vandyke canvas set in
the panelling above the mantelshelf.
"'Sir Mark Forbys,'" John read out from the rusty-gilt lettering
beneath, "'Captain-General In The Royal Forces, 1645. Killed At The
Battle of Naseby.'"
Below the lettering was the coat-of-arms whose faded gilding shone on
the courtyard-gates. The jut of the hooded hearth, below the narrow
mantelshelf, showed the coat again, sculptured in bold relief: and
wrought in enamel on the guard of Sir Mark's sword--embroidered on
the crimson scarf that crossed his breast, and on the corner of the
velvet saddle-cloth of the Arab charger held in the background by a
handsome waiting page; the three silver scallop-shells on a _fesse_
between two chevrons black and gold, were topped by the crest of the
wolf's head, scrolled with its legend, indecipherably minute, or
clear and plain to read:
"FORBYS FOES FA"
John's eyes softened as they rested on the brilliant, clear-cut face,
of which Katharine's was a softer feminine replica. For all the
laces, velvets and silks of his splendid figure in its damascened
steel-plate, with the rich brown curls hanging in heavy masses on the
rose-point of its Stuart collar, Sir Mark bore the cachet of a
dominating race. A proven blade in a velvet sheath, a fighter for
all his frippery....
Bringing his glance back from the portrait to Sir Mark's living
descendant, John Hazel, with a queer thrill of proprietary pride,
promised himself that the foes of this Forbis should not for want of
a champion, remain standing upright!
Had she an enemy? If so, let him look out for himself if ever John
Hazel had the chance to get at him. And then, with a sudden blinding
flare of recollection--as though a searchlight had found at last a
thing that had been hovering in the dark of
semi-forgetfulness--beyond the range of active consciousness--came
the memory of the story heard in the train--the incredible tale of
Katharine's betrayal--the dreadful news that soon would have to be
broken, that might come crashing down upon her any moment now....
Treacherous hound.... Damnable, lying, sneaking--No! The face of
the man seen upon the day before, rose up in Hazel's memory. Not a
face easily forgotten. Thin, brown, handsome, refined,--with
straight, clear-cut features, and-grey, miserable, desperate eyes....
Again Katharine addressed John Hazel, and he started. His heavy Army
boot ground on the kerb of the fireplace as he turned to answer her.
In the same instant, beyond and behind her as she sat before him in
her chair,--framed in the open glass-doors of the more distant of the
terrace-windows,--he saw the tall khaki figure and the haunted face
of Yaill.
Their looks met. Something in the nature of an appeal and a reply
passed between the gaunt black eyes and the miserable grey ones.
Then the tall khaki figure moved on. Not so swiftly but that the
sound of his booted footsteps on the terrace tiles reached the keen
ear of Katharine. Her head turned the fraction of an inch towards
the window ... a wonderful light broke over her, transfiguring,
irradiating.... Marvel of marvels.... John Hazel found himself
looking for the first time in the face of Beautiful Love.
Love.... Not at all the kind of love familiar to John Hazel. Not
the cocktail-kindled emotion of the restaurant or supper-club. Not
the love of a Birdie Bright or any of her venal sisters,--but the
love of a clean-souled, pure-hearted Katharine for her chosen lover,
her one "Man of all men."
Submerged for a moment in a great wave of emotion, John Hazel caught
his breath, reddened and gulped. Such facial characteristics as a
prominent forehead, tanned and tough-skinned as the knee of a
Highlander, and capped with wiry closely-curling hair of inky
blackness,--the heavy smudge of eyebrows thatching those glowing
eye-caverns--the great salient hooked nose, coarse fleshily-lipped
mouth and portentously lengthy chin with a cleft in it--could not be
said to constitute a sympathetic visage. And yet, Katharine found
herself seized with a sudden, irresistible conviction that this
strange young man was sorry for her....
Just as she had caught a passing glimpse of Edward, her man of men,
her precious dear one!--pacing the terrace up and down in the nipping
sunshine, threading the frosty garden-walks with no better companion
than his pipe to cheer him, until his Kathy should bestow her company
on him again....
Sorry. Why should the grandson of Eli Hazaël be so sorry for
Katharine Forbis? For the man had pitied her--it had been written in
his face. Ah, now Katharine understood, and understanding, blushed a
little. Mark had been killed.... Julian was Missing, and--when
to-morrow's solemn rites should be concluded--and that dear sleeper
be carried from the chapel to rest in the Forbis' vault under the
shadow of the Tower--Katharine would be alone....
Utterly alone, had it not been for Edward. Oh, thanks to God! for
that gift of his faithful love. And what was the deep bass voice of
this extraordinary John Hazel saying? She roused herself to
attention with a little, secret sigh:
Edward was waiting for her in the garden after long years of
separation, but Father would have wished her to be particularly
gracious to this queer young man from Cornhill. Father had looked
forward to his coming with extraordinary interest.... He would have
towed him off to his den; and they would have been boxed up hours
together, questioning and answering.... And you would have heard the
Jew's big voice booming down the gallery in spite of the thickness of
the old oak door....
She broke a silence that grew awkward, saying in her mellow tones:
"About the borrowing of the money for the building of the Tower, here
on our Scottish Border, there must be some story.... He--my
dearest--" her thought went tenderly to the sleeper lying not far off
in the sacred silence of the chapel--"he always said there must be
one, and that we should light on it some day. We have our legend
about the Roman tribune Marcus Fabius (who must have been a son of
Philoremus Florens Fabius). He was bred by a community of Coptic
monks in Egypt, and came over to Britain in the service of the
Emperor Constantine. But beyond his signature appended to a queer
lead-sealed parchment covered with crabbed brown Gothic
handwriting--a kind of Twelfth century builder's estimate--kept with
other family papers in our strong-room--where the wonderful crumbly
Title Deed of Kir Saba and all the rest shall join it presently!--of
Sir Hew, hardly anything is known."
"I'll tell you what I've crammed of Hew." The speaker went on,
feeling for his sentences, sometimes using the excellent if archaic
English of the translated letter, other times reverting to modern
slang: "He was a Crusader who had served Baldwin I, King of
Jerusalem"--(the thick mouth under the cropped black moustache
sneered a little)--"first as page and cupbearer, afterwards as
body-squire, and later on as a Knight, in Baldwin's last campaign of
1118. He got what one might call a Blighty wound--an arrow through
the fleshy part of the thigh--in 1145--driving the Egyptians under
Nureddin, their Sultan, out of the castles and coast-towns of
Palestine; and the fever of the country--malaria, we'd call
it!--seems to have given him beans. But being recovered of his wound
under the care of Issachar Ben Hazaël, who tended him as his own son
in his house near Joppa, he rebuilt and adorned the Tower of Kir
Saba, which had been held as a fortress by the invading Paynims--that
means the Egyptians under the Abbasside--and then 'wearying of
Palestine'--this was in 1146--'bethought him of quitting the Holy
Land and returning to Britain straightway.' ..."
Katharine was listening, fair cheek on white hand, as some
twelfth-century lady of the Forbis race might have listened to the
tale of Hew....
"But want of boodle intervened, according to Hew's chronicler.
Restoring castles even in those days, sometimes spelt bankruptcy, and
'_being impoverished_'--I'm quoting from a contemporaneous
document--'_firstly by the great cost of hewn stone and timber; and
secondly by his excessive love of good wine, feasting and
prodigality; the shows of jugglers, the songs of minstrels--and the
company of the daughters of Delilah, this Knight cast about to raise
money upon loan._'"
The narrator broke off to comment:
"A sporty boy, Hew, evidently,--and not the first Brass Hat who's
enlivened his H.Q. on a War Front--with imported talent and
beauty--of the Musical Comedy kind. So being short of cash to settle
his accounts, and charter ships to carry him home, and incidentally
rebuild the Tower of Kir Saba in North Britain 'so as to make the
dwelling seemly for a lord of his estate,' Sir Hew engineered a loan
from the Jew, Issachar Ben Hazaël of Joppa--the Joppa of those days
is Jaffa to-day,--and the facts I'm giving are taken from a letter,
written in the Twelfth Century _lingua Franca_, and the usual Gothic
hand. I've a translation as well as the original, which of course is
our property.... Means nothing to me but brown scratches on mouldy
sheepskin, though to my pal Harding, ex-Curator of the Mediæval
Manuscript Dep. at the British Museum--it would have been toffee and
peppermint-rock. First-class man, my pal Harding--killed last March
at Richebourg St. V." He answered Katharine's look of interrogation.
"A German prisoner shot him from the rear, in our trenches.... And I
went balmy and laid out the Hun! ..."
"You mean that you--killed the prisoner who did it?" Miss Forbis'
cairngorm eyes were cold and judicial in their regard.
"Exactly." John nodded, and Katharine told herself that the man was
a brute as well as a bounder. "But I seem to have been getting away
from Sir Hew...."
"Perhaps you have!" Sarcasm was lost upon this pachydermatous
person, who murdered prisoners in calm defiance of the Geneva
Convention. "Why did he want to build another Kir Saba here on the
Border?"
"Because--though he'd got a Tower here already, he didn't consider it
seemly for a lord of his swagger, being only 'of great stones
unmortared and unbevelled, standing inside a paled enclosure of
wattle and posts and earth.'"
"Then that is why the old chronicles call it a pale-tower?"
Katharine's interest was eager and vivid now....
"A pale-tower. I expect so. And the bags of French gold were wanted
to pay the architect's fee and the wages of the stone-quarriers; and
'the lime and sand wherewith to mortar the stone, and the cost of the
clippings of a troop of the Scots King's horse, the better to bind
the same.' So the mortgage of Kir Saba was drawn up, signed and
sealed--you've got it there with the rest--and you ought to have a
duplicate somewhere! And the bags of French gold were packed in
boxes and sent down to Sir Hew's ship. He had three of 'em,
high-sterned three-banked galleys with scarlet-lug-sails, to take him
and his servants, and his Arab horses, and the rest of his baggage
home to Britain--and the one he chose for his own use was called _The
Scottish Crown_...."
"Oh--do go on!" Katharine began to see Sir Hew, healed of his
arrow-wound by the Jew's skill, with the brown of Syrian suns on his
fair skin, and their bleach on his yellow hair--going home to rebuild
his Tower and rear his long-legged, broad-shouldered race of Forbis.
"This part of the story is wonderfully interesting. If only Father
had been alive to hear it to-day!"
"There's not so much to tell. Hew got ready to sail. Old Issachar
Ben Hazaël loaded him with gifts; myrrh and spices, incense and dried
raisins,--Egyptian hangings and silk embroideries, mother-of-pearl
and turquoises; ivory and rare woods--fresh fruit for the voyage and
so on.... And Hew took all that he could get--not that I'm inclined
to blame him! But at the last minute he wanted a thing with which my
ancestor wasn't inclined to part.... Issachar Hazaël had a
daughter.... It seems--" The tone changed.... The sentences came
dropping from the heavy mouth like strings of cold, weighty,
slippery, polished beads of jade--or so it seemed to Katharine: "It
seems that my ancestress and Sir Hew had met at our house--it is our
house still!--if the Turks have left it standing amongst the orange
and olive-groves to the nor'east of Jaffa. And--the girl was
beautiful, and Hew--was a Crusader...."
"He--wished to marry her?" The tone was enigmatical.
"He broached the subject of marrying her--an hour before he sailed."
"With what success?"
"With the--result that might have been expected."
Their looks crossed like swords. And resentment burned in Katharine.
She stiffened and drew more upright in her chair.
"The Jew--refused to entertain my ancestor's proposal?"
"Just that. He said to him"--the voice of the speaker changed and
deepened:
"'_Thou hast the gold and the goods. Depart with that which is thine
to the country of thine adoption. When the money is recovered in the
fulness of time, the title-deeds concerning Kir Saba will be given
back again.... For_'"--
The big voice echoed among the rafters of the heavily-beamed room,
making a brass Chinese gong hung upon a stand at the further end,
vibrate with a faint tenor humming....
"'_For by a great oath sworn by a forefather of our race in ancient
times, we of the Hazaël are bound to succour the children of thy
House unto the final generation. That oath we have kept, and will
keep, Sir Knight. But we do not defile the pure stream of Jewish
lineage with the blood of Gentile veins. I have spoken!_' ..."
Fierce scarlet leaped to the roots of Katharine's hair. As though
the speaker had struck or insulted her, she rose from her seat with
one swift supple movement,--and so stood facing him, quivering with
wrath. He too had risen--and thus the woman and the man opposed each
other in a silence that both knew hostile; pregnant with hatred,
racial, religious--sprung green and poisonous from the dust of nearly
two thousand years....
"He dared to speak so to a Scottish gentleman! A Jew!" ...
The great black eyes beneath Hazel's heavy eyebrows burned like live
coals. His deep voice echoed:
"A Jew, Miss Forbis. A representative of the People who received the
Law from Sinai. Who possessed, besides the Torah, Literature,
Poetry, Arts and Sciences--even when a rabble of Aryan nations, swept
North by the besom of some Assyrian conqueror--rolled into the
Caucasus through the Pass of Dariel. Verily, verily!--and peopled
Russia and Germany,--crossing lakes and seas and rivers on log-rafts
and in boats of osiers and skins. And paddling across the North
Sea--and building forts of tree-trunks at the mouth of an
estuary--laid the foundations of the British Nation of which you
boast to-day!"