The Hawk of Egypt
her slender jewelled hands, across her bosom, she looked up to the
gilded ceiling, and sighing softly, whispered:
"I love!"
"_Thou_!"
"Yea, lord. I love--and--thou lovest--and--nay, hear me, it is for thy
advancement--and mine--and he, the man for whom my soul has turned to
water, for whom I yearn--yea, if it be but for one single hour of his
love--a memory of rose-time in the ash-pit of my years--he------" She
stopped.
'Tis wise to approach a wounded tiger warily, especially if you are not
certain as to the extent of the hurt or the power of the weapon of
defence in your hand.
"Sit--and speak quickly, for I would have thee gone."
The man spoke curtly as he sank upon a pile of cushions and pointed to
one on the far side of the Persian rug, upon which the most courted
woman in Egypt knelt, with her eyes full of gentleness and her heart
pounding in a torment of rage and fear.
"Yea, I understand."
Hugh Carden Ali spoke wearily, being stricken with love. For ten solid
minutes the woman had talked round her subject. Intuitive, she scented
danger; usually fearless, her whole being was sick with apprehension;
desperate, she dug her nails into her flesh and essayed to reach her
goal by a roundabout way.
Then she stopped, sighed, and cast down her eyes; then raised them
beseechingly when the man spoke.
"Fearing to use force against the--the woman who thou sayest is loved
by the man thou lovest--and may the prophet bear witness that thy tale
is as full of turnings and twistings as the paths in the bazaar in
which thou spinn'st thy web--thou would'st tear her from him by craft.
Explain thy seemingly futile words, and hasten thy lying tongue, for
behold the hour of dawn approacheth."
And the wrath in the voice was such as to hurl the woman pell-mell over
the cliff of discretion down into the depths of her own undoing.
"She, the white woman, walks in the bazaar, yea, even at noon and at
sunset. Perchance one evening, lured by the tale of the riches of the
house of Zulannah, might not her feet stray within the portals at the
setting of the sun. And behold, the key of the great door is within
these hands, and--and------"
The man's hands lay quietly on his knees as he leant forward, and the
shadow thrown by the flowering plants hid the twin pools of murder in
the depths of his eyes.
"And------?" he whispered.
"And------" she whispered back, "would the white man, thinkest thou,
take to wife her who had passed a night in the house of the courtesan?
Would he not, without waiting for explanation, throw her into the filth
of the bazaar, leaving her for the first comer to pick up, and turn
himself to------"
She leapt to her feet, screaming, as his fingers closed round her wrist
in a grip of steel; mad with fury, she tore her raiment and hair,
raving obscenities in the vilest language of the lowest reaches of the
bazaar, oblivious of the dogs which reared and fell and reared
unceasingly behind her.
"The white woman who trapeses the bazaar unveiled," she screamed. "The
white virgin who flung herself into thy arms, in the market-place, thou
trafficker in foreign harlots, the------"
Hugh Carden Ali, the son of his father to the inner-most part of his
being in the horrible scene, had made one little sign, and the dogs
were upon her.
With a sickening scrunch one caught the side of her head in the steel
jaws which stretched from the nape of the neck to the corner of the
mouth; with a sharp snap the other drove its fangs into the muscle
behind the dimpled knee.
They pulled her down and stood stock-still, as these dogs are trained
to do; then with crimson saliva dripping from the jaws, crimson lights
shining in the eyes, let go their hold and stood looking alternately
from master to quarry, with slowly wagging tails.
There was no sign of anger in the man as he sat tranquilly upon the
cushions, the amber mouthpiece of the _nargileh_ between his lips; no
sound of wrath in the gentle voice which bid the Ethiopian eunuch to
remain prostrated upon the floor, until the arrival of the other
slaves, who could be heard pelting through the house from every
direction in answer to the summons of the gong.
"Idrabuh," he said quietly to four of the terror-stricken domestic
staff, pointing to the eunuch. "Upon the soles of the feet so that he
walketh not for many a day--if ever." And as the wretch was dragged
screaming from the room, he beckoned to four others, and pointed to the
body of the woman. "Carry that out and throw it in the street, in such
wise that it is not known from whence it came. Touch not the jewels,
lest thou sharest thy brother's fate."
With falcon upon wrist and blood-stained dogs at his heels, he passed
out of the ill-fated court to his own apartment, and, having bathed and
dressed himself, to his body-servant's grief, in hot, European
riding-kit, with boots from Peter Yapp, tucked the cleansed dogs of
Billi in beside him, and raced his car to the Obelisk which is all that
remains upright of the Biblical City of On.
* * * * * *
The Ethiopian slave Qatim gathered up the broken body of the woman from
the filth of the gutter and carried her to his hovel and flung her upon
the filthy straw under which he hid the jewels he stripped from her.
CHAPTER XIII
"_Best springs from strife and dissonant chords beget
Divinest harmonies_."
SIR LEWIS MORRIS.
As the sky lightened way down in the east and the faithful turned to
prayer, the little old lady sat at her window, taking her hour of
rest--her hour of understanding--with hands clasped peacefully in her
lap, a little smile at the corner of her whimsical mouth and her
snow-white hair fluttered by the breeze of dawn.
Bodily, mentally, spiritually, she was resting, having filched this
hour in which, before donning the garish trappings of her toilet, to
sit in fine cashmere night attire, covered in camel's-hair wrap as soft
as satin, with her little crimson bed-room slippers peeping from under
the hem and her snow-white hair confined by priceless lace; just as she
had thrown aside the thoughts and worries which are the outcome of the
turmoil and unrest of civilisation, to sit awhile, quietly, with her
eyes upon the dazzling peaks which show so clearly when we push aside
the nightmare fog we have wrapped about ourselves.
Not for her own relief did she sit at rest, for in that way rest does
not come to us; but to the relieving of others by withdrawing from the
lights and noises of this tumultuous planet and so obtaining a better
perspective of things as they stand spiritually, and a clearer insight
into the message of the only book she considered worth studying and
committing to memory.
She was no great thinker, this little old lady, neither did she store
up the printed thoughts of others to repeat them aptly upon fitting
occasions; she invariably mixed up the philosophers and their works;
'osophies simply bewildered her; ritual left her cold, psychology
troubled her but little, save only in its practical application to the
lives of those she loved. But she knew the book of life, with its
tragedies and comedies, humour and crass stupidity, nettles and balm
from the first chapter to the last, and could prescribe you a remedy to
cure your mental hurt just as easily as she could undress your
screaming baby, find the criminal pin and re-dress it for you; and
every member of every Church and every disciple of every creed could
have fought a pitched battle at her feet and left her unmoved, so long
as the sick and sinning crept to her for help and children, rich or
poor, in silks or rags, rushed at her coming to cling about her knees.
She had no fixed time for her hour of understanding. At her window in
moonlight, starlight or the coming of the dawn; in her gilded armchair
in the firelight or the light of the sun; in her rose-garden, in her
parks, anywhere, as long as she was withdrawn from noise and strife.
Not that she did not thoroughly enjoy going out to battle upon the most
mundane of material planes. A born fighter, she would plunge into the
strife for the sheer love of fighting and would take the bull by the
horns or the man by the scruff of his neck and lay about her right
heartily with her stout ebony stick backed by verbal blows from her
vitriolic tongue.
Well, if we all rested for one hour, even for one minute, out of the
twenty-four during the frantic passing of modern days, what a boon we
should grant our neighbours!
And as the duchess sat quietly, with Dekko the parrot fast asleep upon
the back of her chair, as becomes a well-conducted bird, Fate crept up
behind and dropped the black thread of hate and the purple thread of
grief amongst the others she had tossed into the old lady's lap.
She suddenly sat upright with a shiver.
Qatim the Ethiopian lifted the body of a woman from out the gutter, and
the messenger from the Oasis of Khargegh strode through the gateway of
the hotel and kicked the somnolent _ghafir_ or watchman, who coughed
discreetly behind the sleeping night-porter's back.
And when Hobson, some time later, entered the bedroom with her grace's
early cup of tea, which included an egg and fruit, she said nothing of
the terrible story which had run like wildfire through the servants'
quarters and had turned her cold with horror.
Hobson was an autocrat in her own domain and ruled with a cast-iron rod.
"Don't you utter one word of this disgusting tale to her grace," she
had said fiercely as she had sailed through the door of the
ladies-maids' room, held meekly open for her by one of the under-maids,
who had been caught gossiping, "or back you go to England, both of
you." She turned back into the room and rattled the tray to emphasise
her orders. "I won't have my lady troubled with it, d'you hear?
Common circus trash! what has it got to do with you, I should like to
know, if she's been killed or not? That's what they all come to, as
you'll find out, if you don't take care."
She had swept from the room leaving the plump, rosy-cheeked Devonshire
lasses trembling.
Many, many years ago the duchess had taken the bright, intelligent
daughter of a Devonshire farmer on the estate into her service; trained
her and promoted her as her seniors in the lady's service had married
or been pensioned off, until she had finally risen to the post of head
maid and confidential companion.
Love and marriage had passed Maria Hobson by, but she adored her
mistress and constituted herself as dragon, sheep-dog and buffer, so as
to save her from unpleasantness or pain; at the same time issuing
orders as to health and hours which her grace usually meekly
obeyed--though you would not have taken a bet upon it with any feeling
of security.
It is curious, the ascendancy which such a type of maid can obtain over
a strong-willed mistress. Think of Abigail Hill and the influence she
had over Queen Anne, which finally ousted the great Sarah Jennings,
Duchess of Marlborough, brought disturbance into English politics and
ruin to the fortune of the Jacobites.
But at times there was a look in her mistress' eyes and a certain
atmosphere radiating from the frail little person before which Hobson
quailed, so that she said quite gently, "Tea and one letter, your
grace," when she found her sitting at the open window, looking out at
the morning sky.
But although she spoke gently and tucked an extra shawl about the bent
shoulders with a tender hand, she was thinking viciously all the same
over her mistresses leniency towards her god-daughter.
"I wish the young lady could be safely married to that proper English
gentleman. One can see he wants her, but she doesn't seem to know her
own mind. Too pleased by half she is, to my thinking, with this