It Happened in Egypt Part 7

"Which was it?" I inquired.

"Mixed. The girl riled me, rather, so much so that I definitely decided it would be fair play to make use of her as a cat's-paw. But it depends on you, whether she's to lose or win her bet."

"If she loses, I get her hat. If she wins, I've engaged myself to procure for her--your green turban."

"Did you think you could, without my consent?"

"No. I distinctly thought I couldn't. But I would have been willing to bet the head in the turban, served up on a charger, so sure I was that you'd refuse to come near her. I thought I knew you _au fond_, you see."

"You do. I haven't changed. But--circ.u.mstances have changed. And that brings me near to the stage of this business which concerns you and me.

First, before I go further though, I'll tell you a part of the reason why I'm sporting the green turban. There's been the d.i.c.kens to pay here, about a new street that had to be made; an immensely important and necessary street. Well, they couldn't make it, because the tomb of a popular saint or sheikh was in the way. To move the body or even disturb a saint's tomb would mean no end of a row. You remember or have read enough about Mohammedans to know that. What to do, was the question. n.o.body'd been able to answer it till yesterday, when the sight of me reminded them of a trick or two I'd brought off some time ago, by disguising myself and hanging about the cafes. They wanted me to try it again. Consequently Captain A. Fenton received a telegram and had to leave Cairo at once on business. He gave up his room at Shepheard's, and the only regrettable thing to the official mind is, that the fellow'd been seen about town even for an hour. However, it couldn't be helped. Luckily Ahmed Antoun is not unknown in Cairo cafes.

He's made quite an impression upon the public on several occasions since his pilgrimage to Mecca, two years ago. And since yesterday afternoon, he's been drinking enough coffee to give him jaundice, while casually spreading the story of a dream he had. Our friend the Hadji related how he had slept in the mosque of Ibn Tulun after the noon hour, and dreamed of the sheikh whose tomb is so inconveniently placed.

In the dream, the saint clamoured to have his tomb moved on account of a bad smell of drainage which he considers an insult to his own memory.

Also dogs have taken to howling round his resting-place at night, and you know that to the true believer a dog is an unclean animal. Except for hunting purposes, or watch-d.o.g.g.i.ng in various branches, good Mohammedans cla.s.s dogs and Christians together in their mind. Well, already the Hadji's dream is working like yeast. The news of it is being carried from one cafe to another; and I hope that a few more nights' work will do the trick. The votaries of the saint will get up a pet.i.tion to have his body moved. When it has found another abode, the making of the new thoroughfare will be suggested."

"Very neat! I see it all, except the connection with Miss Gilder. What has your saint got to do with her?"

"Very little, I should say, by the look in her eyes. But though a green turban's as good as an heirloom, and extorts respect wherever it goes, even a Hadji may have jealous detractors. I have mine. Another green turban in this town, whose genuineness is doubted for some obscure reason or other, has sneered at my dream."

"I say! That sounds as if you might be in danger. If one man suspects you to-day, to-morrow------"

"Oh, it's only the dream he suspects--at present. I know all the little prayer tricks so well, and I've invented my own history so ingeniously, with a _patois_ to match my province, that I shall get through this incident as I have through others of the sort. There's only one hole in my jebbah. Last night, when my rival sprang a sudden question as to what I was doing in Cairo (I'm supposed to be a Luxor man), on the spur of the moment I replied that I was acting as dragoman to a rich family of tourists. On that, the brute inquired with honeyed accents where they were staying. I said Shepheard's, because I expected you to be there, and thought if I were followed, you might be useful as a dummy."

"Ah, that's where Miss Gilder comes in? A gilded gingerbread lamb, ready for the sacrifice. Why didn't you accept her offer at once, as she seemed so providential?" "I'm coming to that. It sounds complicated, but it isn't. For one thing, though, it may be well to wait and find out a little more about that goat-eyed Armenian of yours."

"He isn't mine. He's--".

"I want to know for certain whose he is. If he has anything to do with my rival Hadji, there's more venom and wit inside that green turban than I've given it credit for. Is there a reason, by the way, except their riches, why one should want to 'get at' a member of the American party?"

"By Jove!" said I, as if I had been pinched--for there was a sharp nip in the thought Anthony's question jabbed into my mind. I had disliked and distrusted Bedr el Gemaly, but I had a.s.sociated my distaste for him with Fenton's affairs. It had not occurred to me that Biddy's fears meant more than a nervous woman's vague forebodings. During the few hideous years of hide-and-seek she had pa.s.sed in trying to protect the traitor, Richard O'Brien, she had no doubt had real enough reason to dread a spy in every stranger; but I had cheerfully advised her "not to be morbid" when she spoke of herself as a dangerous companion, or stopped me with a gasp in the midst of what seemed an innocent question about her stepdaughter. Could it be possible that her alarms might after all be justified, and that the powerful a.s.sociation betrayed by O'Brien would visit his sins on his widow and daughter? That American accent of Gemaly's! He admitted having been in New York. Of course, he had made acquaintances there. My thoughts flashed back to the meeting at the railway train. Could the fellow have found out in advance that I was with Mrs. O'Brien, [alias Jones] and her friends? It seemed as if such knowledge could have reached land ahead of us only by miracle. But there was always Marconi. Perhaps news of Miss Gilder had been sent by wireless to Alexandria, with our humbler names starred as satellites of that bright planet. If this were so, Bedr, instructed from afar to watch Richard O'Brien's widow, might easily have been clever enough to suborn a messenger waiting for one Ernest Borrow.

"What are you mumbling about?" Anthony wanted to know, when I forgot to answer. "Have I put some idea that you don't like into your head?"

"I was turning your question over in it," I explained, "and wondering what to answer. Of course, Miss Gilder's rather important, and I believe her father's obsession used to be when she was a child, that she'd be kidnapped for ransom. The 'little sprite of a woman' you admire so much, knew the Gilders in those days. She says that the unfortunate baby used to be dragged about in a kind of caged perambulator, and that some of her nurses were female detectives in disguise, with revolvers under their white ap.r.o.ns. No wonder the girl revels in emanc.i.p.ation and travel! I should think, now she's grown up to twenty-one years and five foot eight or nine of height, without being kidnapped, there's not much danger so long as she keeps in the boundaries of civilization. Still, one never knows, in such a queer world as ours, where newspapers live on happenings we'd laugh to scorn if they came out of novel writers' brains."

"That's the only incentive you can suggest for spying, unconnected with my affairs?"

I hesitated, for Biddy's secret was not my secret, and it seemed that I had no right to pa.s.s it on, even to my best friend. I must ask Biddy's permission before telling Fenton that Mrs. Jones was the widow of the informer Richard O'Brien; that she feared over-subtlety on the part of the enemy might confuse her girl travelling companion with Esme O'Brien, hidden in a convent school near Monaco. "It's just credible that there may be other incentives," I said. "But I must confess, I'd rather believe that Armenian spies were on the track of Ahmed Antoun, who can take care of himself, than after poor Miss Gilder or--any of her party."

"What's the name of the laughing sprite?" suddenly asked Fenton.

"Mrs.--er--Jones. Brigit Jones."

"Where's her husband?"

"In his grave."

"Oh! Well, his widow looks ready to bubble over with the joy of life, so I suppose we can't a.s.sociate spies or anything shady with her?

That's too much to hope for?"

"Why to 'hope' for?"

"It would make her too interesting."

"Look here, my dear fellow, you can't have them both!"

The dark eyes of Antoun lit with a spark of surprise and laughter. "I don't want either, thanks. I admire flowers, but I never gather them. I leave them growing. However, you might tell me which one you want for your own b.u.t.tonhole?" "Really, I don't know," I mumbled, taken aback.

"All I do know is, it's not likely I can get either."

Anthony stared at me with a curious expression, then abruptly changed the subject. "You've heard of Sir Marcus Lark?" he asked.

"Of course," said I, surprised at this question sandwiched into our affairs. Sir Marcus Lark is a man who has had his finger in many pies, but I didn't see how he could poke one into ours. Everybody knows Sir M. A. Lark, given a baronetcy by the Radicals some years ago in return for services to the party--starting and running a newspaper which must have cost him fifty thousand pounds before it began to pay. He has financed theatres, and vegetarian restaurants; he owns cocoa plantations and factories, and a garden city; he has a racing yacht which once beat the German Emperor's; he owns two hotels; he has written a book of travel; his name as a director is sought by financial companies; he has lent money to a distressed South American government in the making; and though the success of his enterprises has sometimes hung in the balance for months or years, his wonderful luck seems invariably to triumph in the end; so much so, that "Lark's Luck" has become a well-known heading for newspaper columns, in the middle of which his photograph is inset. At the mention of his name, the oft-seen picture rose before my eyes--a big man, anywhere between thirty-six and fifty--good head, large forehead, curly hair, kind eyes, pugnacious nose, conceited smile under waxed moustache, heavy jaw, unconquerable chin, and prize-fighter's neck and shoulders. "What has Sir Marcus Lark to do with us?" "He's in Egypt--in Cairo just now; and--he's got our mountain."

"Good heavens!" I stared blankly at Anthony, seeing not his dark face under the green turban, but that everlasting, ever-smiling newspaper block portrait. Down toppled our castle in the air, Anthony's and mine--the s.h.i.+ning castle which had been the lodestone of my journey to Egypt, the secret hope and romance of our two lives, for all those months since Anthony first read the Ferlini papers and began negotiations with the Egyptian Government.

"It's all up then," I said, when I felt that I could speak without betraying palsy of the jaw. "We're done!"

"I'm not sure of that," Fenton answered. "If I had been, I shouldn't have broken the news so brutally. It's on the cards that we may be able to bring the thing off yet."

"But how, if that bounder has got the place for himself? He must have found out the truth about it somehow, or he wouldn't have bothered. And if he knows what we know--or think we know--he certainly won't give up to us what he's grabbed for himself. A beastly shame we should have been let in like this, after being given to understand that it would be all right."

"Lark must have had a pull of some sort, I haven't learned what; but I will. The one hope is, that he hasn't stumbled onto the secret."

"What! You think he hit on our pitch by a mere coincidence--an accident?"

"No. There's not a shadow of doubt that he had a special motive for wanting _our_ mountain and no other." "Have you formed an idea what the motive is, if not the same as ours?"

"I've heard his version from his own lips. It's rather astounding. And I want you to hear it from him, too."

"You've met him!"

"Yesterday at Shepheard's, before I went in for this dressing-up business. Lark heard I had wired for a room at the hotel, and was lying in wait for me on the terrace when I got back from the Agency. We had a talk. I'd heard just before, the news about the mountain. But he explained. Now he wants to see you. He's got something special to say, and I've made an appointment for you with him at two o'clock."

CHAPTER VI

THE GREAT SIR MARCUS

The appointment was at the Semiramis Hotel, where Sir Marcus Lark was staying. I went with my mind an aching void, and my heart a cold boiled potato. I can think of nothing more disagreeable! For not a word more would Fenton let drop as to the great man's business with us or the Mountain of the Golden Pyramid.

I sent up my card, and a few minutes later was shown into a private salon more appropriate to a beautiful young d.u.c.h.ess than to a middle-aged, b.u.mptious financier. It was pale green and white, full of lilies and fragrance, and an immense French window opened out upon a roofed loggia overlooking the Nile. This would have been the ideal environment for our Gilded Rose; and I felt more venomous than before, if possible, toward the rich bounder who posed against such an unsuitable background. I thought, as the door of the salon was opened for me by the smart Arab servant, that the room was untenanted, and that Sir Marcus Lark meant to keep me waiting; but there he was, on the balcony, gazing in rapture at the s.h.i.+ning river. As if he were capable of raptures, he, an earth-bound worm! But there was no mistaking that back, those shoulders, or the face, as the big body turned. He advanced through the open window, holding out a hand as big as a steak. He was exactly like his photograph, except that there was even more of him than I had been led to expect. The pretty room was net small, but entering, he seemed to turn it into a doll's house parlour. "Six foot two, if he's an inch!" I said to myself, longing to play David to his Goliath. "Big, rich, common brute!" I thought. "You s.n.a.t.c.h our mountain out of our mouths, and then you send for us as if we were servants--men whose boots you ought to be blacking!" I was vindictive. I stared him straight between the eyes--where a stone from David's sling would have fitted in neatly.

The eyes were wide apart, and kinder than in the photographs. They were even curiously innocent, and boyish. His grin of greeting made the large, waxed black moustache point joyously up. He showed teeth white as a child's, and had dimples--actually dimples--in his big cheeks, to say nothing of the one in his chin, with which snapshots had familiarized me. He looked like a huge, overgrown schoolboy with a corked moustache. My glare faded in the light of his smile. No man with a gleam of humour could have kept a mask of grimness. I found my hand enveloped in the pound of steak, and warmly shaken up and down inside it.

"Lord Ernest Borrow, I'm delighted to see you. Very good of you to come, I'm sure!" to David quoth Goliath, in a big voice, mellow despite a slight c.o.c.kney accent. "Nice view I've treated myself to here, what?

I'm in Egypt on business, but I like to have pretty things around me --pleasant colours and flowers and a view. That's a specialty of mine.