The Hawk of Egypt Part 27

The d.u.c.h.ess turned: her head as the door opened slowly, but made no movement, although her heart suddenly quickened its beat.

"Yes?" she said quietly.

Hobson walked up to the bed and took one of the little old hands between her own powerful ones.

"Miss Damaris wants you, ma'am." She spoke with certain conviction; then added, "I've had a dream, ma'am. I saw nothing, but I heard Miss Damaris calling you. It woke me up. '_Marraine_,' she said, 'I want you.' That was all. And she does, ma'am."

She stood patting the hand of her mistress, who lay for a moment quite still; then the faithful creature put a Shetland shawl round the bent shoulders as the old lady sat straight up in bed.

"Would you please find Miss Jill's maid," (she used the term of the past, when Jill Carden had stayed at the Castle and had teased Hobson to death) "and ask her to tell her mistress that I should be pleased if she could find it convenient to come to my room for a moment."

Hobson found the aged body-servant lying asleep outside her mistress's door.

Ameena had learned a few words of the English language in the last twenty years, but not enough to allow her to understand the terrifying person who stood over her; so that she shook her head whilst Hobson repeated her request over and over again, and ever more distinctly, until it ended at last in a veritable shout which brought Jill, who had not slept for the ache in her mother-heart, to the door.

For a moment she stood, a beautiful picture, with big questioning eyes and two great plaits of auburn hair hanging down over her satin wrap; then she ran down the corridor and into her G.o.dmother's bedroom.

In an hour those two forceful women had made their plans, acting without hesitation upon what might so easily have been the outcome of digestive trouble on Maria Hobson's part.

Fully clothed, the two maids entered her grace's bedroom, the one carrying the tea-tray and the other a plate of biscuits.

"Ameena," said Jill, who was sitting on the end of the bed, "please go and find Mustapha. Tell him to go to the station, find the station-master and give him this letter. We want a special train as soon as possible. Mustapha is to bring me a written reply from the station-master."

She spoke with the authority of the Eastern potentate and took no notice of the maid when she knelt and kissed the hem of her satin wrap.

"Give me a cigarette, Hobson," said her grace, in the depths of whose eyes twinkled the star of humour. "We shall be starting as soon as possible, maybe directly after breakfast, for Luxor."

"Yes, your grace. I will begin the packing," said the imperturbable Hobson, placing the tray on the table beside the bed. "And when you have had your tea, ma'am, will you try and get a little sleep? You can leave everything safely to me."

But special trains do not grow like blackberries upon a side line in the East, so that many weary hours pa.s.sed before they set out upon the return journey, which was rendered infinitely tedious by the never-ending mistakes which got them shunted into sidings to allow the ordinary trains to pa.s.s.

CHAPTER XXIV

"_The watchmen that went about the city found me; they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the wall took away my veil from me_."

SONG OF SOLOMON.

The night before Ben Kelham's return to Cairo, Zulannah sat on a pile of cus.h.i.+ons, with her back to the crumbling plaster wall, in the filthy, smoke-filled hovel.

She had completely recovered, and save for the excruciating pain caused by the shrunken muscles when she moved, was as sound as a bell, and likely to live to a ripe old age, slave to her whilom servant, who sat on his heels, inhaling the fumes of the jewel-encrusted _nargileh_ which his heart had always coveted.

It is useless writing about the h.e.l.l through which the woman had lived from the moment she had returned to consciousness. Besides, there are some things which words cannot describe, and which in any case are best left alone, not even to the imagination.

She was absolutely in the power of the negroid brute. With the destruction of her beauty she had lost everything save what she had in the bank, and from the ever-growing heaps of little canvas bags in a corner and little piles of banknotes under the straw, she knew that some day that, too, must come to an end.

She had loved her jewels, loved the s.h.i.+mmering pearls and sparkling diamonds, and had found her greatest joy in dipping her hand into a leather bag filled with unset stones. How often had she sat in the luxury of her bedroom, revelling in the trickle of the rubies, sapphires and emeralds from between her fingers into her lap.

Even those she had lost.

The Milner safe stood open, showing empty shelves, and she shuddered yet at the memory of the frightful scene which had followed her refusal to open it.

She loved jewels; wanted them for their beauty; had fought the negro for them; but there was one thing she clung to even more, and that was life, so that when the huge hands had slowly, so very slowly pressed upon her neck, she had given in and setting the combination, had swung the door slowly back.

And Qatim, grey-green with fright, thinking that it had been worked by the power of a _djinn_ or devil, had flung her out into the night, and having sc.r.a.ped a hole in the foetid earth under the straw, with fervent prayers to whatever he wors.h.i.+pped, had withdrawn the jewels, hidden them, and called the woman back.

Yes! she clung to life. Strange is it how we do, even when youth and beauty and health have pa.s.sed from us. How, crippled and unlovely, twisted of temper or limb, with failing senses, in bath-chair, or propped on sticks, we hang on to the last thread, when surely we ought to be so thankful to snap it and be away to whatever our lives here have prepared for us over the border.

"Were't not a shame, were't not a loss for him In this clay carcase, crippled, to abide?"

Well might old Omar ponder upon this.

But Zulannah had a good reason for clinging to life, in spite of the greatness of her debacle.

The metal of which had been wrought the one love that had come to her in her short life had not been able to withstand the crucible of physical pain. For hours and days she had writhed in the agony of her physical injury, with no one to care if she suffered or starved, except the Ethiopian, who, when her senses had come back to her, had twitted her upon her failure in her love-affairs; had tormented and mocked and laughed, until a great wish for revenge had taken the place of her former love for the Englishman. Revenge, above all things, on the girl who had been capable of inspiring love in two such men; revenge on the white man who had really been the primary cause of her downfall, but a lingering, h.e.l.lish revenge, if she could only think of one, for the man who had given the order to the dogs just because she had reviled the white girl, Damaris.

So she sat on the pile of cus.h.i.+ons, smoking the cheapest cigarette of the bazaar, whilst her cunning brain wove plots around the astounding news Qatim had just imparted.

They were perfectly free from interruption. The door was barred and the small aperture which served as window was too highly placed in the wall to allow of eyes to peep; but it was superst.i.tion that really kept them safe and proved far more potent as a barrier against their neighbours' curiosity than any spike-crowned wall.

Qatim had given out that the woman was bewitched, and that death, instantaneous and horrible, would be the fate awaiting anyone but himself who should speak to her or look upon her unveiled face before the setting of the sun--some of us Christians refuse to walk under ladders--and, although it entailed much fetching and carrying and marketing on his part, still, it ensured them solitude.

"And you saw him?"

She spoke with a sibilant intaking of breath, caused by the twist to her mouth.

"Yes; with a beautiful white woman--another. They have come from a.s.souan by the boat."

"Not the girl who rode in the desert with------"

She touched the purple angry marks on her cheek.

"Nay, woman; I have told thee, _she_ walks in the blackness of the ruins, with the man who caused thee thy hurt. She drives with him," he spat, "she should take thy place in the bazaar, O Zulannah of the thousand lovers."

The woman paid no heed to the jibe.

"Who told thee?"

"Behold, the night-watchman of the big hotel upon the edge of the water sent me word."

"Why?"

"That is no business of thine. Tell me what scheme thou hast in thy head. Dost desire the death of the three?"

Zulannah shook her head and turning it so that the wounds and distortion were hidden, leant against the wall.