BELSHAZZAR COMES BACK TO STAY
In her apartments at the Grand Hotel de Esbekie-yeh in Cairo, a
wan-faced girl was looking wearily out over the splendid panorama spread
before her. In the heel of the afternoon the level rays of the sun were
gilding parti-colored minarets of mosque and palaces with barbaric
splendor. In the distance the Shoubrah palaces gleamed even more
fairy-like than usual; the Abbasieyeh camps were astir with multi-hued
life, and on its frowning rock the distant citadel was a gem in red
bronze.
On the bosom of the world's most mysterious river, the brown sails were
gleaming like the wings of great birds, and inshore the graceful lateens
under the dipping shadoofs were closely folded as they lay at rest. Over
beyond Ghizeh loomed the Pyramids which she was to visit on the morrow,
the Sphinx in its majesty between. It was fairyland, in truth, the most
gorgeous riot of color and mystery in the whole world, and yet she saw
it not. The languorous air was heavy almost to oppression with the
blended odor of jasmine, orange, citron, and the thousand and one
flowers of the myriad gardens, mingled with the reek of the bazaars and
the indescribable breath of the Nile. And yet she was all unconscious of
it.
For in the nostrils of her introspection there was only the spicy tang
of lemonias and sagebrush, and the eyes of her soul saw only a little
glade embowered with artemesia and clematis, nestled deep in the
forbidding cleft in the Rocky Mountains, many thousand miles away. A
glade where lay a dead man with the snarl of baffled hatred petrified on
his discolored lips, and another wounded almost to death, his head
clasped close to the bosom of a woman whom she should be logically
hating as woman was never hated before.
And yet in the heart of her there was only pity for the woman, whose
letter lay in her lap. For the hundredth time she read the tear-stained
words, feeling a new accession of tenderness at each transcribed sob:
"Yesterday, at the 'horse-shoe bend' in Lost Canyon, I killed the
man called Jasper Matlock, after he had shot Kenneth Douglass from
ambush. Mr. Douglass was not injured seriously, but at the time I
thought him dead. Somehow I found his revolver in my hands and the
man was making a second attempt.
"Mr. Ballard--ah, the great hearts of these
westerners--magnanimously sought to shield me from the consequences
and publicity. As though all the publicity in the world mattered
now.
"I have wronged you, but in one thing only: the lie about your
engagement to Ellerslie. That was my doing. In everything else I
had the justification of every law of Nature; I loved him far
better than you could ever do, and he was logically mine if I could
but win him. I was ready and eager to sacrifice all, while you in
your pitiful selfishness and egotism turned from the glory laid at
your feet and yielded him nothing. Oh, you fool! You poor, weak
fool! To deny him even the small assurance of your vain little
body, when you should have found, as I did, ecstatic exaltation in
letting him trample on my soul.
"Oh! child, in your wealth of possession be generous and give me a
little of your kindness, a little of your forgiveness. I have so
little, so little of him. I know now that I have never even had
his respect, at times barely his tolerance. And, God help me, I
loved him so. Can you understand when I say that I love him even
the more that he was always greater than the manifold arts I
exercised upon him? That all my sacrifices, my tenderness, my
adoration gave him out apathetic amusement? I was ever but a toy to
divert him from the agony your neglect caused him and any other
woman as fair would have sufficed as well.
"To my shame be it said that I knew it all the time; but I was
hoping against hope. To-day I go away from here, and from him,
forever. He will come to you as certainly as the iron flies to the
magnet, and he will be suffering, penitent and purified. My share
of him has been the coarse dross of passion that must be skimmed
from the crucible of every strong man's hot heart; yours will be
the refined gold of his soul's first and last real love. For God's
sake, child, play with happiness no more, lest you lose it as I
have done.
"In the bitterness of the days to come it would lessen the pain if
I thought you could ever come to forgive me. I can see to write no
more. Mayhap these tears will in time wash out the stain on my
soul. That on my hands I must see forever. It is the visible proof
of my atonement, for by it I gave back his life to you."
The paper was wet with her tears as she thrust it into the bosom of her
dress. Beside the open window she knelt and prayed for the peace of a
troubled soul. But it could never be--this home-coming of her lost love.
Her heart, too, was dead; the feet of her idol had crumbled and the
glorious fabric of her dreams was dust. The yellow drifting sands of the
Libyan desert shimmering before her aching eyes were no more dry and
lifeless than the dead love moldering In her heart. Never again would
her pulses leap at the sound of his voice or her senses reel at his
touch. That was as much a thing of the past as Thebes, Luzor, Karnak and
Athor out yonder, a dead thing buried in the ashes of a murdered hope.
Over in the aridity of the eternal desert, where for ages she had
watched in contemptuous silence the petty tragedies enacted on the worn
old stage of Life by the gibbering puppets who call themselves Man, the
woman-breasted Sphinx, touched by the shadow of a passing cloud, smiled
cynically into the vacancy of the everlasting East.
Two hours after her carriage had entered the airline avenue from Ghizeh
to the Pyramids, the incoming train from Alexandria bore into the
composite Bedlam called "Masr el Kahira" a bronzed young American at
sight of whom more than one _yashmak_ fluttered eagerly as its dark-eyed
owner beamed approval of this handsome _giaour_. Even the lounging
pith-hatted Englishmen nodded their appreciation of this lithe Yankee
who so hurriedly bounded up the steps of Shepheard's Hotel and spoke
imperiously to the Maitre d' Hotel of that famous hostelry.
Money is everything in Cairo, and Lord Frederick Chillingham of H. R. M.
Hussars was open in his admiration of the horsemanship of the newcomer
as, a short half-hour afterward, Douglass, mounted on a superb barb,
swept out into the square. How he obtained accouterments and that
magnificent mount in so short a time is a mystery only known to the
smiling factotums who bowed and scraped their enjoyment of one of the
most princely _douceurs_ that had ever been lavished upon them.
"Cowboy, b'gad!" drawled the honorable Freddie knowingly to a fair-faced
young English girl who was watching the rider with a degree of interest
rather distasteful to the stalwart guardsman. "I wonder now where the
beggar got that horse. Best looker I've seen in Egypt."
"Best lookers, you mean, Freddie," corrected the girl mischievously;
"but how do you know he is a cowboy?"
"By the seat of him," tersely explained the blond giant. "Rides straight
up, grips with his thighs, don't know he's got stirrups; and don't need
them, either. Those Yankees can ride no end!" he concluded grudgingly.
"This one seems to be in a rush!"
But once out on the tawny stretch that lay between him and his heart's
desire, Douglass checked the swallow-like flight of that wonderful
blue-blood and paced more leisurely along in profound meditation. He was
not at all sure of his reception. What was he going to say in pleading
to his outraged queen? What God-given words would be vouchsafed him to
offer in palliation? He groaned at thought of the hopelessness of it.
What had he deserved but her contemptuous scorn!
He licked his lips nervously and a cold sweat broke on his brow despite
the stifling heat that beat up in shimmering waves against his face. He
fumbled a moment in the bosom of his shirt, and prayed for the second
time in many years:
"Oh! Mother, help me!"
Suddenly, to the trained far-seeing eyes sweeping that cheerless waste
hungrily, appeared a faint speck of color on one of the sand dunes at
the base of the Sphinx. With eyes fixed unwaveringly upon it he put the
barb at full speed. What he would do, what he would say--all hesitation
dropped away in his fierce desire to look into her eyes once more, to
hear that sweet voice again, though it were only to send him hurtling
down into the hell of his deserts.
Grace Carter, sitting alone in the carriage, watched listlessly the rest
of her party kodaking at a distance the immobile face of the Great
Mystery. But she saw them as in a dream and ere long she was looking,
with a heart as old and cold and dead as that of the grim Mistress of
the Nile, as far and unseeingly into the west as the Sphinx stared into
the east.
Before her fast-misting eyes blazed one line in Constance's letter:
"For God's sake, play with happiness no more!"
It would be easy to obey that prayer, she thought bitterly, for never
more would happiness come anigh her. Afar in the desert a sand spout
flared up, whirled along feverishly for a few minutes, and was gone. She
watched it with a strange fascination and muttered brokenly:
"Just like his love, fierce, threatening, grand and evanescent. And yet
I was to blame! Oh, why did I ever let him go?"
The twanging of some stringed instrument in one of the Bedouin black
tents clustered about the base of the Sphinx woke a long-forgotten chord
and she mechanically crooned the words of a song that once wailed a
heart misery as great as hers:
"'Could you come back to me, Douglass, Douglass,
Back with the old-time smile that I knew?
I'd be so faithful and loving, Douglass!
Douglass, Douglass, tender and true!
"Could you come back with--'"
Her voice broke and she buried her face in her hands, her form convulsed
by a paroxysm of tears. Then to her numbed senses came vaguely another
remembrance of the buried past, frantic hoof-beats. For a second she
cowered as she had done on that awful day, then she turned with a sigh
of relief to welcome, this time, the end of all things. Through her
tear-blinded eyes she saw the blue stallion sweeping down upon her but
she never flinched. God was going to be kind after all.
But even as the lean head ranged beside her, the foam splattering on her
bosom as she involuntarily covered her eyes with her hands, from out of
Chaos came a cry:
"Gracie, forgive--!"
Slowly she dropped her hands and stared incredulously. What was this
wonder that had come to her in the moment of death? She tottered
unsteadily, swaying to and fro like a wind-tossed leaf. As in a fog she
saw him there with arms extended, waiting to carry her across the dark
ford.
Then, by God's mercy, her brain cleared and she knew.
* * * * *
At the Court of Europe's greatest prince men strive with each other
doing honor to the beautiful wife of the new American Ambassador, Anselm
Brevoort.
"As good as she is beautiful, God bless her!" was Frederick, Lord
Chillingham's enthusiastic eulogy one night when her name was mentioned
at the United, and his comrades silently drank her health standing.
"As pure and as cold as the stars above, God bless her!" sighs the
silver-haired Ambassador, looking wistfully at her where she sits with
her protege, little Eulalie Blount, in her lap, patiently explaining
that the tail makes all the difference between O and Q.
"I love oo, Tonnie!" lisps the little tot kneeling by her little white
bed. And the woman, clasping in her bosom a tiny satin bag containing a
common yellow telegraph blank on which are written a few now
undecipherable words, looks dry-eyed into the night and wonders.
* * * * *
In the marshal's office at Gunnison, over their cigars and a big-bellied
bottle, Red McVey and Ballard are looking reminiscently at a Mauser
hanging on the wall.
"I reckon that were thu best jawb yuh evah done, Lew," says the cowboy
with much conviction.
Ballard, dropping his eyes unaccountably, hesitates long over his
selection of a fresh weed.
"What the hell else was there to do?" he says gruffly. But the recording
angel, looking kindly and indulgently at the honest face, smiles softly
and forgets the pen in his hand.
For a long time the men smoke in a silence more eloquent than words.
Then Ballard shifts the threads in the loom.
"That's a great kid that Ken's got, I hear. Think I'll take a pasear
over there with you when you go back and look at his points."
"That kid!" says Red enthusiastically. "Say, Lew, hush! He's thu biggest
thing on thu range. Why, thu damn leetle cuss actooly kin make fists
already, an' he jes' nacherally pre-empts my ole hawg laig every time I
goes there. Thu han'le is good to cut his teeths on, Ken says, an' he
kin eat it cleah off if he wants. I m thinkin' o leavin my spah gun foh
him to nibble on at odd times."
"An' Ken?"
There is a certain diffidence in the sturdy fellow's voice. Red looking
at him with a world of reassurance in his laughing blue eyes, grins
broadly.
"Hell!" he says succinctly. "Yuh go oveh theah and watch hes eyes
follerin' of her. When a man gits through playin' thu goat he gin'rally
feels some obligated to act sheep foh a spell, so's to even up thu
deal."
* * * * *
Over at the Circle D ranch a broad-shouldered man in flannel shirt and
"fair leather" _chaparejos_ lies sprawled on the veranda beside a
low-hung hammock in which is lying a brown-haired woman. Pressed to her
lips is a spray of mountain heart's-ease, and In her heart is the
sweeter ease of mountains removed. The man is dusty and saddle-worn,
but in his heart is a great Peace.
Tenderly he lays his lips on the hand shyly touching his bronzed cheek
and the woman crimsons with pleasure. For a long time they lie in
understanding silence, then the grave rich voice of the man says:
"Tell me, sweetheart, do you never long for the pleasant gayety, the
diversions, the distractions of your old social world? Are you really
happy and content here in this circumscribed little sphere?"
She slips quickly from the hammock to the floor beside him and draws his
head up to her bosom.
"Do I ever long? Yes, sweetheart, I have wept with longing--for the hour
of your daily return. I have sighed--for the coming of the dusk that
would bring you home to baby and me! I have pined--for the music of the
hoof-beats that would thrill me if they passed over my grave."
From the little nursery comes the lusty insistence of a child clamoring
for his desires. Very gently she releases herself from his embrace. Then
this Madonna of the Range goes proudly to the mothering of her
first-born.
Old Abigail, hastening likewise to obey that imperious summons, smiles
approvingly as the man, catching at the garment trailing above his face,
lays his lips to its hem.
"I kinda reckon," she says softly to herself, "that Belshazzar has come
back to stay!"