The Hawk of Egypt
which, high in the heavens, flung a silver shaft through the open
window straight across the bed. There was absolutely no sound when,
just as, so many miles away, Damaris made her passionate appeal, as she
stood by the window, Hobson, dour, stolid, unimaginative, yet with a
streak of Scotch blood in her veins, sat straight up in bed. Her eyes
were wide open as she stared in front of her, then she passed her
powerful hand over her grim face and flung the bedclothes to one side.
"She's in trouble." She spoke very clearly, sat for a moment thinking,
then reached for a puce dressing-gown trimmed mulberry. "I'll go and
tell her," and the infinite love in the pronoun was good to hear.
"She'll understand."
The duchess 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 godmother'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 passed 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 pass.
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 cushions, 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 hell 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 shimmering 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 scraped a hole in the foetid earth under the straw, with fervent
prayers to whatever he worshipped, 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 passed 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, hellish 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 cushions, 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 superstition 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
Assouan 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.
"Not yet!" she said, loosening with filthy hand the uncombed masses 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 compass anything_."
RABELAIS.
Ben Kelham sat near the balustrade 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 duchess 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