The Hawk of Egypt
to be seen, made a grimace.
"I go out on horseback," she said. "I have not ridden since I left
home."
The man's reply, whatever it might have been, was interrupted by Abdul,
who, all smiles, stood before them, with the white pigeon in the left
hand and the _shahin_ upon his right fist.
The native had no intention of causing the white woman pain; in fact,
wishing to find favour in the eyes of the nobles, he only wanted to
give them a chance of witnessing a little of, to him, the finest sport
in the world.
"Look, lady!" he cried.
He tossed the pigeon high into the air, allowed her a little distance,
then threw the hawk.
"No! Oh, no! don't!" cried Damaris, as the hawk rose, "stooped" and
missed the pigeon by a hair's-breadth as it "put in", which means that
it flew straight into a small niche of a minaret for cover.
"Ah!" cried Damaris, and "_Bi-sma-llah_!" ejaculated Abdul, as he threw
the lure of a dead plover and called his hawk with the luring Eastern
call. "Coo-coo," he called; "coo-coo," to which the hawk responded as
a well-trained _shahin_ should.
Hugh Carden Ali stood with his hand on the stallion's mane, looking up
at the sky, in which shone a great star.
"The hawk of Egypt failed," he said to himself. "Flown at a white
bird, it failed. The House of Allah, who is God, gave sanctuary to the
little white bird. Praise be to Allah who is God."
He looked down at the girl, who was kneeling, consoling the dog, who,
reft 'tween pride and pain, showed a lamentable countenance. Suddenly
she looked up and rose, and stood silently.
"Come," he said simply, while he longed to pick her up and ride with
her to his home in the Oasis. "I will take you to your hotel."
"My car is waiting for me in the Sikket el-Gedideh," she replied.
* * * * *
Later, a vision of loveliness, she walked down the dining-room behind
the Duchess of Longacres, whilst continuous lamentations were wafted
through the spring-doors from the spot where sat a dog with
sticking-plaster across his nose and middle girt with a cummerbund of
pink boracic lint.
Beside the girl's place lay a huge bunch of crimson roses tied with
golden tassels; there was no card, name nor message.
She asked no question, neither did her godmother.
To what purpose should they? The one _knew_; the other firmly believed
in allowing the young to work out the salvation of their own souls;
which did not, however, mean that she would not keep a sharp look-out
in the future over the troubled sea of Life.
"I knew something would happen," thought the wise old lady, as she
passed a biscuit up to the parrot on her shoulder.
"_Kathir Khairak_," it said delightedly.
It merely means "thank you," but had taken weeks of teaching and
repeating to master.
CHAPTER III
"Lor! but women's rum cattle to deal with, the
first man found that to his cost;
And I reckon it's just through a woman, that the
last man on earth'll be lost."
G. R. SIMS.
Damaris was the only daughter of Squire Hethencourt. Her mother was an
Italian from the Udino, where the hair of the women is genuine
Titian-red and the eyes are blue; which perhaps accounted for her
colouring and some part of her temperament.
Her type of beauty was certainly remarkable--given, it must be
confessed, to a certain amount of fluctuation--and she danced divinely,
which gift must not be counted as a parlour-trick; she was slow in her
movements and quiet in her manner until she talked of horses or anybody
she loved; then her great eyes would flash and her laugh ring out, also
she would gesticulate as her mother had been wont to do, until the
climate, maybe, of a northern country had served to repress the
spontaneity of her Latin mannerisms.
She was simple and unsophisticated and would have made a splendid
little chum, if only one out of every three men who met her had not
been consumed with a desire to annex her for life by means of a gold
ring.
"Dads," she exclaimed, two months before the beginning of this story,
having enticed him to her bedroom one night and offered him cream
chocolates as he eat at the foot of her bed, facing her. "Dads, what
am I to do? Guy Danvers says he is coming to see you to-morrow, and
I--I am sure it will only turn out to be--well--you, know."
"But, Golliwog dear, I'm the one to be pitied. This makes the--how
many is it?"
"I don't know, Dads, and it isn't the number; it's the awful _habit_
they've got into--and I don't understand anything and I don't encourage
them, do I? Do lend me a hankie--this chocolate has burst--and what am
I to do?"
"Turn a deaf ear, or a cold shoulder, or put a brave face on,
until------" said Dads, retrieving his handkerchief.
"Until what?"
"Until the right man comes along, darling, as he surely will."
The girl's lids suddenly dropped until the lashes lay like a fringe
upon the white cheek over which very slowly but very surely crept the
faintest of rose-colours.
"Hum!" said Dads to himself, as he made great use of the hankie.
"Do smoke, dearest!"
"No, thank you, pet; I couldn't here."
The man who worshipped his wife and adored his little daughter looked
round the white and somewhat austere room, and ran his eye over the
bookstand at his elbow.
Books on horses, a treatise on bulldogs, the New Testament, essays in
French and in German, the History of Egypt in Arabic, Budge's "Book of
the Dead," and "King Solomon's Mines."
"But what am I do _meanwhile_, Dads?" and the girl threw out her hands
imploringly.
"Be cold, deaf or brave, Golliwog, as I have suggested."
"But I've been all that, and it's quite useless. Do you think it would
help if I let my hair grow and did it up in a tight knob?"
"I think it would help a lot if you shaved your head entirely, kiddie."
And the man leant forward and ran his hand through the red curls.
Once upon a time Damaris had read the advertisement of a certain powder
guaranteed to darken hair of any colour, and life having been one long
torment owing to her violent colouring, she had, greatly daring,
acquired a packet; had followed the directions by mixing the powder
with water and covering her head with the muddy result, and, "to make
assurance doubly sure," had sat with her clay pate for an hour instead
of ten minutes near a fire; had cracked the clay, washed her head, and
found her hair grass-green.
She had chopped the verdant masses off without a thought, and had ever
after refused to allow it to grow to hairpin length, and to her father
only had granted the privilege of calling her by the pet name of
Golliwog.
"Would you like to travel a bit, pet?" And the man smiled, though his
heart was heavy at the thought of the blank which his Golliwog's
departure would leave in the home and the daily round.
"Travel! Travel! Oh! darling--to Egypt?
"Why Egypt? Why not France or--or Italy?"
"Because I've _got_ to go to Egypt sometime or another, Dads. I've got
to see the desert and the mosques and the whites and blues and oranges
and camels. It's _in_ me _here_," and she thumped her nightgown above
her heart. "I shall never be happy until I have seen them all. Oh!
Dads, I wonder if you can understand; it--it sounds so--so silly------"
"Tell me," and the man moved over to the head of the bed and took his
daughter gently in his arms.
"I'm so out of the picture, somehow, here, dearest," said the child,
striving as best she could to describe what was really only the passing
of the border-line between girl and womanhood. "This terrible
colouring of mine, for one thing. Why, amongst other girls, I am like
a Raemaeker stuffed into a Heath Robinson folio, like a palette daubed
with oils hung amongst a lot of water-colours. I want to find my own
nail and hang for one hour by myself, if it's on a barn-door or the
wall of a mosque--as long as I am by myself."
"Good Lord!" said the man inwardly, as he patted his daughter's arm;
then, aloud. "As it happens, Golliwog darling, I had a letter from
_Marraine_ yesterday, asking me to let you go out to her in Cairo for
the winter and see as much as possible of the ordinary sights. We'll
talk it over with Mother to-morrow."
"Oh, Dads--how wonderful! And can't you and Mother come? And oh!
_can_ I take Wellington?"
"I think so, dear, if he hasn't hydrophobia," and the man bent to pat
the head of the great dog which had crept from under the bed at the
sound of his name.
And later Dads stood at his window, smoking two last pipes, whilst a
glimpse into the future was allowed him.
"Can it be--can it possibly be," he said, puffing clouds of smoke into
the creeper, to the annoyance of many insects, "Big Ben Kelham?--and
the estates run alongside. Wonder if Teresa has noticed anything.
And--by Jove!--of course!--he's at Heliopolis, getting over his hunting
accident. I wonder------"
And Damaris sat at her window, with her arms round the dog, who longed
inordinately for his mat.
"The desert," she whispered. "The pyramids--the
bazaar--life--adventure. How _wonderful_!" There came a long, long
pause, and then she added, as she turned towards a coloured picture of
the Sphinx upon the wall, "And who cares if the nail is a tin-tack or a
screw?"
As it happened, it was destined to be the jewel-hilted, double-edged,
unsheathed dagger of love.
And Fate, having mislaid her glasses, worked her shuttle at hazard in
and out of that picture of intricate pattern called Life, and having
tangled and knotted together the crimson thread of passion, the golden
thread of youth and the honest brown of a deep, undemonstrative love,
she left the disentanglement of the muddle in the hands of Olivia,
Duchess of Longacres.
Her Grace was over eighty.
Of a line of yeomen ancestors ranging back down the centuries to the
William Carew who had fought for Harold, she had been, about sixty-five
years ago, the belle of Devon. Against the warnings of her heart and
to the delight of her friends and family, she had married the Duke of
Longacres, whose roving eye had been arrested by her beauty at a meet
of the Devon and Somerset, and his equally roving heart temporarily
captured by the indifference of her demeanour towards his autocratic
self.
She had lost him, to all intents and purposes, two years after the
marriage, but blinding her eyes and stuffing her ears, had held high
her beautiful head and high her honour, filling her empty heart with
the love of her son and the esteem of her legion of real friends;
showing the bravest of beautiful faces to the world, until a happy
widowhood had set her free.
Some years of absolute happiness of the simplest kind had followed; the
marriage of her son and birth of her grandson, who had cost his mother
her life. Then the following year had come the Boer War, and the
heroic tragedy of Spion Kop, which left her childless; after that, many
years of utter devotion, to her grandson, who adored her; then the
Great War and the Battle of the Falkland Islands, which left her
absolutely bereft, with the care of the boy's greatest treasure, even
the grey parrot, Quarter-Deck, Dekko for short.
Methuselah of birds, it was possessed of an uncanny gift of human
speech and understanding, and had been promoted through generation to
generation, from sailing-vessel _via_ Merchant Service to British Navy.
As time and tragedy worked hard together to silver her hair and line
her face, so did a veritable imp of mischief, bred of her desolation,
seem to possess the old darling. She cared not a brass farthing for
the opinion of her neighbours, so that after the death of the great
Queen, who had been her staunchest friend, she had instructed Maria
Hobson, her maid and also staunchest friend, to revive the faded roses