The Hawk of Egypt Part 28

"Not yet!" she said, loosening with filthy hand the uncombed ma.s.ses of jet-black hair, which still retained something of the perfume of better days. "Not _yet_! Let me think awhile."

And she paid no heed to the man, who sat staring at her, breathing heavily.

The right side of her face, untouched and perfect, showed in all its beauty against the dirty whiteness of the wall; her hair served as a mantle to the perfect figure in the soiled satin wrap; her crippled limbs showed not at all in the foul room lit by a wick floating in a saucer of oil.

The light went out suddenly.

Oh, Zulannah! surely your cap of misery was full to the brim!

CHAPTER XXV

"_He that has patience may compa.s.s anything_."

RABELAIS.

Ben Kelham sat near the bal.u.s.trade on the verandah of Shepheard's Hotel just after breakfast, pretending to read the morning paper, whilst trying to make up his mind.

Sybil Sidmouth and her mother, owing to lack of accommodation, brought about by the crush of visitors in the huge caravanserai, had gone to the Savoy; for which the man was secretly thankful.

He wanted to eat out his heart all by himself in the appalling loneliness which had overwhelmed him when, on ringing up Heliopolis the night before, he had learned that Damaris and the d.u.c.h.ess had transferred themselves to Luxor.

And you simply cannot indulge in your particular brand of _malaise_ or dolour with an extreme optimist sitting opposite you at meals, or adjacent to your elbow at most other times.

He anathematised the postal system of Egypt; his own haste in accepting the girl's refusal; the oriental imagination which magnified cats into lions; but, above all, the wash of that steamer (upon which Damaris had returned from Denderah) which had re-floated his own craft and sent him racing full steam ahead for Cairo.

Another hour of the infernal wait on the sandbank, and he would have transferred himself to one of the scores of small boats and been ferried across to Luxor, where he would have dined at the Winter Palace Hotel, whilst waiting to catch the express to Cairo, and perhaps have seen his beloved in the dining-room, or have heard that she was staying there.

He was thoroughly irritated as he pondered in his deliberate way as to the best thing to do.

Should he take the first train back to Luxor, or, as the d.u.c.h.ess had not seen fit to acquaint him as to her movements, should he stay where he was, write her a letter, or send a telegram and wait for an answer?

Anyway, he was irritated enough to scowl at the commissionaire who was rating a woman whom he had seen hanging about the street, doubtless with intent of soliciting a nickel coin from one of the great white race as he--or she--descended the steps to stroll along the street.

She made a few choice remarks upon the undoubted inclusion of a pig in the commissionaire's parentage, in a curiously sibilant voice, then limped away with a distressing swing of her body from the hips.

"Can't you keep those people quiet?" Kelham demanded angrily, as he moved a chair further back, and lit a cigarette.

An hour had pa.s.sed, in which he had come to no decision, when Fate, in the shape of a page-boy, offered him the just-arrived, local morning paper, which he took and read, with only half a mind upon the gossipy contents.

"By Jove!" he suddenly exclaimed. "If that isn't a bit of luck!

Here's the very excuse for getting down there without kind of thrusting myself upon them." He flattened out the paper and again read through the paragraph which gave a most extraordinarily detailed account of the immensely wealthy Hugh Carden Ali, his career at Harrow; his travels; his stables in the desert; his birds and a hundred and one other details calculated to interest those who like reading about other people's most intimate affairs. It ended: ". . . Being a great sportsman, the strange story of lion which is causing such uneasiness and is likely to do harm to the Luxor season, has taken him to his Tents of Purple and Gold, one of the wonders of modern Egypt and which lie in the desert a little distance from the well-known Colossi."

He did not frown this time as he folded the paper and turned to watch the commissionaire in conclave with a coal-black Ethiopian who, clad in crimson tunic, enormous turban and with scimitar rattling at his side, tendered an envelope.

"Yes, yes," said the hotel servant. "I will see that it is delivered into the gentleman's own hands. And, tell me"--he lowered his voice as he winked his eye--"has she returned from Alexandria?"

Qatim was caught in a quandary, and he cursed the vanity which had urged him to don his most resplendent garments upon his errand to the great hotel, to which he had come after a violent argument with Zulannah.

With a heart full of hatred, and agony in her twisted limbs the woman had hung about the streets in front of the hotel until she had seen the man for whom she had felt such a sudden and fleeting love, and who was the primary cause of her disfigurement.

Hurt him she must, if only as a balm to her own physical and mental agony; and in what better way than by destroying his faith in the white girl he loved?

Hence the letter, written hastily in the hovel and consigned to the care of the Ethiopian, who, in return for his a.s.sistance, had demanded backs.h.i.+sch in the shape of a pink leaf covered with strange black marks.

The woman's presence in the great city in her deplorable state was the last thing he wanted to be known; so he lied--clumsily.

"Nay; she is in Alexandria," he blurted out.

The commissionaire slowly winked an eye.

"Perhaps," he said; "perhaps not," and chuckled as the negro turned hastily and strode away in the direction of the bank.

And thus came it to be known in the bazaar that Zulannah the courtesan had returned to the great city.

And a little later, Ben Kelham felt no tweak at the string with which Fate had hobbled him to his destiny, when, on hearing his number called, he took the letter from the page-boy, turned it over, and looked at it on each side, as we do when curious, but not over-interested; then he opened it idly, read it and crushed it in both hands.

It was written in the execrable English Zulannah had picked up in her few years of cosmopolitan intercourse with different nationalities; it was in vile hand-writing and was as despicable a method of revenge as an anonymous letter usually is.

It ran after this fas.h.i.+on:

"If you want to find your white woman go and look for her in the ruins of Karnak, at night, in the arms of her half-caste lover, Hugh Carden Ali."

And the woman who had limped back to the street, sn.i.g.g.e.red behind her veil as she watched the man tear the letter into shreds, while he sat and thought out an answer to this second problem.

"It's a d.a.m.nable lie. My Damaris and good old Carden! I expect they've met, but who------" He sniffed at his hands suddenly. "Pah!

Now, where have I smelt that scent before?--filth!" He sat with his hands to his nose, then frowned as, under the suggestion of the perfume, the picture of a lovely woman clad in silks and satins and wearing rich jewels rose before him.

"My G.o.d!" he said slowly, as the full significance of it all dawned slowly upon him. "Of course! She--she invited me to--to visit her--and I refused. By all that's clean and decent, if I don't make her pay for this! And it's Carden, too, who can tell me the best way to set about it. The harlot! I wonder if I shall have to wait until evening for a train." He clenched his hands until the knuckles showed white, as he unseeingly watched a woman limp down the street. "I'll make her sorry she was ever born."

He need not have worried on that point. Fate was d.o.g.g.i.ng those unsteady feet back to the hovel.

The spreading of a prairie fire is slow compared to the speed with which news runs through the bazaar. The servants in the big house in the big garden went sullenly about their various tasks of tidying and clearing up the courtesan's home, whilst little knots of people, composed princ.i.p.ally of women, stood about in the vicinity of the gate.

It was the first time the tyrannical woman had been absent upon a long journey, and the relatives and friends even unto a most distant generation of her servants had taken advantage of it to visit the house and examine its, to them, surpa.s.sing luxury.

The Ethiopian, with his mind fixed only upon the bank, had taken but little interest in the house itself, and had visited it but rarely, and then only for the sake of appearances; so that the visitors had become more and more brazen, as the days pa.s.sed, fingering the satins, sitting upon the cus.h.i.+ons, feasting on the floor.

Bes, the monstrous keeper of the lions, had become prime favourite with the men, and the neighbourhood had resounded with the roars of the brutes at night as they fought for their food.

Also was there something savage in the way the women visitors had fingered and touched everything, and had visited every corner of the building. They were fat or thin, plain or pa.s.sably good-looking; they were all hideously poor, and in their heads they had the echo of the gibes their menfolk had cast at them, when, returning with empty pockets, they had boasted of great conquests.

Which boasting the sillies had believed, thinking, as all women think, that their own particular male has been specially favoured of the G.o.ds and is therefore an Adonis in the eyes of every other woman.

There was an indefinite air of trouble in that quarter of the bazaar which increased with the heat of the day. Household matters were neglected, whilst the women foregathered to talk; words were few, but gestures were quick and expressive; the servants, wondering at the absence of the Ethiopian, grumbled as they worked; they had been paid no wages in their mistress's absence, and were on the verge of mutiny.

Brave words! When they knew that they would fall flat upon their faces at the first swish of her satin robes.