Madeline stood among them, while Dr. Fouad translated their chatter. Her warm laughter rang out when he said they were curious to know whether her man minded that she revealed her throat and arms to the gaze of other men. And why did she not wear henna as they did; had she not made him joyful?
“They’re darlings !” she exclaimed. “And so attractive with their bow lips and long black lashes.”
“They are children!” As Faris Fouad glanced round at the giggling group his handsome face wore a look both indulgent and faintly impatient. Madeline guessed that as an educated man, the Moorish doctor found his primitive countrywomen difficult to converse with. Steeped in the age-old traditions of the East, these women accepted without question the domina-tion of their menfolk and would not have dreamed of raising their voices on any subject that did not relate to the domestic hearth.
Dr. Fouad informed them that the lalla was not married, which calamitous piece of information was received with upraised hands. Ah, but that was sad tragic ! Did she not wish to have sons?
Madeline smiled. “Tell them I have not yet met a man whom I wish to marry.”
And it was as she said these words that a tall, commanding figure came striding into the playground. His hands were plunged into the pockets of a white jacket, and without his Arab headwear he looked startlingly different for a moment
younger, Madeline realized, for now she saw that he had brown hair cropped close to a well-shaped head.
As their eyes clashed in the sunlight, Madeline waited with half-parted lips for him to smile a welcome. But again his steel-hard inflexibility bruised her sensitivity and his, “Bonjour, Miss Page ! ” was crisp and quite impersonal.
CHAPTER III
“HuLLo, Dr. Tourelle!” Madeline could feel her hands clenching on her bag. “I’ve just been taken on a short tour of your children’s wing by Dr. Fouad.”
“Ah, yes, Van Cleef is here to have an X-ray, is he not?”
His cool assumption that her interest in the hospital was no more than a means of passing the time left her feeling snubbed and resentful. She wanted to turn and walk away, then was held immobile as a tiny girl tottered to him and was scooped up in his arms. The child resembled a doll in her tiny tip-toed slippers, silk trousers, and velvet bolero, a little crow of delight escaping her as she buried her face in the doctor’s shoulder.
His glance flickered to Madeline and a faint smile touched his mouth. “I call this one Little Ostrich because she always does this.” Then he held the tiny chin with two big fingers.
“Come, mon petit choux, look at me,” he gently coaxed the child.
Madeline watched his searching appraisal of the little face and the big eyes that were opaque and therefore almost sight-less. An arrow of pain stabbled Madeline. The little thing was blind, yet she had gone to Victor Tourelle like a needle to a magnet and now she lay in his arms like a trusting kitten while he spoke in Arabic to a woman with a tragically lovely face.
The woman, obviously the child’s mother, put a hand to her cheek and rocked her head in the saddest way. At once the French doctor’s voice softened and the chiselled lines of his mouth relaxed into a fleeting gentleness. Madeline wouldn’t have believed that anything like this lay in hiding behind his armoured front, and it touched her sensitive heart, melted away some of her growing resentment that he should treat her with a coolness approaching active dislike.
Dr. Fouad glanced at his wristwatch and remarked that it was time for him to return to his duties. Madeline caught Dr.
Tourelle’s eye and nodded good-bye, then she smiled round at the women to whom she had been chatting and accompanied Dr. Fouad to the entrance through which Brooke had hobbled.
“That little girl,” she said. “Can anything be done for her?”
The Moorish doctor spread his hands in one of his eloquent gestures. “Her parents belong to a nomadic tribe and the child’s eyes should have been treated long before this. She is now three years old and it will take a miracle to save even the fraction of sight which she has left. Victor will do all he can, but miracles are beyond even his skill.”
“What about corneal transplantation?” Madeline asked hopefully.
“In this case we do not think it would work. It is one bless-ing that the child has never grown used to having her full sight. She moves in a world of shadows, and though it sounds a small compensation, the blind have needle-sharp hearing and an inherent cheerfulness that sees them through.”
“Poor little thing !” Madeline whispered. “It’s terrible that the loss of her sight might have been avoided.”
“Yet who knows, Miss Page?” Dr. Fouad smiled down quietly at Madeline. “Out here we say Inshallah, which means Allah wills. It is often the only consolation a desert dweller ever knows. It softens his hardships, and perhaps it is true.
Inshallah, this happens because it is written Inshallah, I go and I come not at my own willing.”
“You believe then that the hand of fate takes hold of us and leads us?” Madeline murmured.
“I am of the East and therefore touched with its fatalism, Miss Page ah, here comes Mr. Van Cleef ! ”
“Everything all right, Brooke?” Madeline asked.
“Fine, thanks. We have an invitation to tea with the Chief, so come along, honey.”
They said good-bye to Faris, and a few minutes later Madeline was being ushered into the sitting-room of the head of Green Palms. He was a mature, grey-haired Latin whose dark eyes were crinkled by humour, tolerance, and infinite sagacity.
“You bring a refreshing breath of England into my sitting-room,” he gallantly informed Madeline, bowing over her hand and taking in her golden hair with a decided gleam of appreciation in his eyes. “I am sure you will please a crusty bachelor by pouring out his tea for him, eh?”
Madeline slipped into a chair behind the tea-trolley, dismissing with a smile the “crusty bachelor” tag which he gave himself. If Max Berault had not married, it wasn’t because he was unappreciative of women !
Both men took lemon in their tea and relaxed back into roomy chairs. The large, square room was pleasantly cooled by overhead fans, while Oriental rugs and arabesqued footstools added an exotic touch. Cakes, honey-coloured dates, and thin slices of bread and butter made an appetizing picture on thin blue plates.
Then Madeline’s glance settled on a photograph standing on the bureau. It was oval and mounted in a silver frame, showing a very fair-haired woman whose eyes smiled vividly out of a delicately lovely face. Madeline stared over the rim of her teacup, then lowered it to the saucer. Only a short while ago she had looked into a similar pair of eyes in the garden where some of the hospital’s infant patients played with their mothers. Eyes that glinted like golden jasper in the sun, turning cold and hard when they had met Madeline’s.
“That is a photograph of Victor Tourelle’s mother.” Max Berault spoke gently. “She and her husband, an army officer, were victims of enteric fever when Victor was a boy. I was a close friend of both of them, and I reared their son who is devilishly late for tea!”
Max shot a glance at his wristwatch. “I hoped Victor would join us in a cup before he went home. He has few social graces, the barbarian, yet his mother was the most charming and entertaining creature in the world. There is a time to work and a time to play, I tell him, but with the inscrutability of an Oriental he goes his own way.”
“Madeline refuses to believe that Dr. Tourelle is more of an Arab than anything else,” Brooke remarked mischievously.
“She has yet to see him hurling lances with one of the desert patrols, eh?”
Max laughed in a droll way and flicked ash from his thin cigar. “Victor was born under an African moon and he mixed much with the sons of his father’s troops when he was a boy.
Unavoidably some of the Arab temperament has rubbed off on him and he has their fierce independence of spirit. But his affinity with them has its advantages. He is permitted into places where even I, after thirty odd years,
am not allowed.
He takes healing to these people and is utterly without fear of them, and there are still villages in the Atlases that might scare off an armoured patrol.”
Then Max changed the subject and asked Madeline if she could ride.
“I can, as a matter of fact,” she smiled. “I always spent the school holidays with some country cousins of mine and they had a couple of ponies which we used to gallop about on. It’s an exercise I thoroughly enjoy.”
“If you ride out here, Miss Page, always take an escort with you. That foolish niece of Amalia is fond of riding alone, and such capriciousness could land her in trouble.” He shot a frowning glance at Brooke. “Donette is a highly-strung creature and Amalia should keep her in hand more than she does.
She spoils both of you.”
Brooke carelessly lifted his shoulders and chewed a date, his plastered foot stretched out in front of him, his tropical suit throwing into relief his chestnut hair. “Donette can take care of herself,” he drawled, “but I agree there’s something a bit wild about her. I swear she spooked the horse I was riding when I hurt my ankle.”
Madeline shot a questioning look at him. His smile had faded and he was looking quite serious.
“We were out together,” he went on, “and Hassan kept jibbing and pulling at the bit. He’s a good creature as a rule, but Donette was laughing in that wound-up way of hers, and all at once he reared and tossed me out of the saddle.”
A stream of cigar smoke eddied to Madeline’s nostrils and she saw Max Berault compress his lips in a thoughtful way. “I would say of that one,” he murmured, “that she needs the guilding of a firm husband.”
As he spoke a firm hand rapped his door and swung it open.
Victor Tourelle had arrived for his cup of tea, accompanied by a vivid, laughing girl in a cream silk suit and ruby-red sandals that matched her lip colouring.
Madeline could feel her backbone stiffening. So Donette had come to the hospital this afternoon, just in time to drive home with the inscrutable but undeniably attractive desert doctor.
“We have been saving you some tea,” Max said to him.
“You will both stay for a cup, no?”
“Shall we, Victor ?” Donette half turned her glossy dark head and slanted a provocative look up into his bronzed face.
It seemed to Madeline that her mind photographed that scene in such vivid detail that she would always be able to recall it
Donette, a cream and jet etching against that powerful frame in crisp khaki drill, his tawny eyes resting on her ruby pout of a mouth.
“I do not see how we can refuse,” he replied half mockingly, handing Donette into a chair. She settled herself, crossing her slender legs and giving. Madeline one of her heavy-lidded smiles tinged with that faint insolence that was a provocation to men, but something else to women.
“You are playing hostess for Max, eh?” she drawled. She fluttered a smile in his direction. “How does it feel, mon ami, to have your tea poured by female hands for a change?”
“My tea has never tasted sweeter,” Max retorted gallantly.
“I hope Miss Page will often honour me with a visit. She finds my hospital a place of great charm, and has made friends, Victor, with one of your small patients the Raschid child, upon whom you operated for that retina detachment.”
“I thought him a delightful little boy,” Madeline murmured, her fair head bent as she poured tea into a pair of blue cups. “Do you take sugar, Doctor ?”
“Victor likes his tea black as a curse, with two lumps of sugar,” Donette informed her.
Madeline handed him his cup and saucer. As he stirred the dark liquid, he said to her : “No doubt you were able to converse a little with Tahar, Miss Page. He has some French and is quite unafflicted with shyness.”
“What of his sight, Dr. Tourelle ?” Her eyes, wide and deeply blue, begged a reassurance of him. “Will his eye be all right?”
“I am certainly hopeful.” He lounged on the padded arm of Donette’s chair. “Luckily for Tahar his parents lost very little time getting him here to the hospital. He was injured in a ball game Dr. Fouad has told you of this, no ?”
Madeline nodded. “He was also telling me of the suspicious attitude of his people regarding French medical aid.”
“Ah, yes. But this is a barrier we are now breaking down.
The educated Moor is an impatient fellow and he expects this miracle to happen overnight. He can barely wait for the day when he will rip the veils from women’s faces, raise the trees that will hold back the encroaching sands, and see the children of his land with the rounded limbs of correct nourishment.”
Victor shot a quizzical smile at Max Berault. “Your fight was a much harder one than mine, is this not so, mon gardien?
Your atelier was not Green Palms, but a few ancient houses held together on a shoestring.”
Max lifted his shoulders and bit on his cigar, but for a brief moment Madeline glimpsed in his dark eyes that same smile of affection she had seen when he had talked of Victor’s mother. Had Max loved her, that lovely fair creature with the topaz eyes? Was that why he had remained unmarried?
“A little more tea, if you please?” Donette pushed her cup towards Madeline, her gem-bright nails flashing against the lace cloth on the trolley.
“Your ankle is mending correctly, mon anti?” Victor enquired of Brooke.
“Yes. But it’s a darn nuisance. I can’t play tennis with Madeline or take her dancing and riding.”
“Brooke, I’m not out here on a vacation,” she protested.
“Once your aunt gets really going on her book I shall be up to my ears in work.”
“Is the dusty past of genuine interest to you, Miss Page?”
Victor Tourelle took a cake and neatly halved it with his white teeth. As he chewed cake he regarded her with those worldly eyes she remembered from their first meeting. A tremor took possession of her wrist as she poured tea for Donette, and she resented anew his implication that she was little more than an adolescent. Three apples high, wasn’t that how he had put it?
Yet she was only a year younger than Donette, whose shoulder his arm was brushing… .
Then she gave a small pained gasp, for as she held out Donette’s cup and saucer a pointed fingernail jabbed her hand, and the next moment the cup had tilted and a tawny cascade of tea was pouring over the white cloth of the trolley and spattering the other girl’s cream silk suit.
“Ma F oi!” Donette’s eyes flashed with temper as she jumped to her feet. “Look, my suit, it is marked ! How clumsy of you, Madeline ! Why could you not be more careful?”
Madeline was also standing up, bewildered by the scratch Donette had deliberately inflicted. “I didn’t upset the cup on purpose,” she gasped. “You know I didn’t ! ”
Donette had snatched up a napkin and she was dabbing at her skirt in an injured way that made Madeline feel terrible.
The silk suit was obviously expensive, and she was wildly wondering if tea stains were removable from such light material.
“Come, I will drive you quickly home.” Victor took hold of Donette and propelled her to the door.
“Ugh, I feel such a mess ! ” she cried. “This was a model from the house of Dior ! ”
Madeline bit her lip, certain Donette had engineered that mishap with the tea in order to make her look clumsy and gauche in front of the three men. Max was imperturbably mop-ping up with a sheet of blotting paper, while Brooke sat lazily grinning. He would be amused by the incident, Madeline thought, half inclined to give him a shake.
“We will be off,” Victor said from the doorway. His tawny glance flickered over Madeline’s distressed face, then he had whisked Donette out of the room. “Assez de tout fa!” he crisped. “She is but a jeune fille, so let us not cry over spilled tea.
Their voices died away down the corridor, and Brooke put back his chestnut head and gave a laugh. “Tourelle certainly knows how to handle that tigress,” he chuckl
ed. “But it’s my guess, Madeline mia, that you won’t be one of my cousin’s favourite people from now on.”
Madeline was in full agreement with this sentiment. She had sensed animosity in Donette from the moment she had arrived at the villa, and this afternoon the other girl had revealed her claws … and used them.
“Is the carpet all right, Dr. Berault?” she asked, standing aside as a servant whisked the messy trolley out of the room, Max having rung the service bell while Madeline’s attention had been concentrated upon Donette’s dramatics.
“As good as new, petite,” Max assured her. “Now please sit down again that’s right. I think we were talking about Amalia’s book, were we not?”
Conversation was resumed, but Madeline felt rather frighteningly far from home in this moment. She was among strangers on the fringe of the desert, which created tensions she had not been fully aware of until today.
The fortnight that followed was a busy one for Madeline. She and Amalia had started the first chapter of the book, and spent from eight in the morning to noon shut away study, absorbed in their work.
They got along splendidly together, and because Madeline found it possible to tolerate Donette. She was inclined to throw out catty remarks now and again, hoping to get a rise out of Madeline, but when this didn’t happen she seemed to lose interest in the game.
Then one evening, probably at Max Berault’s insistence, Amalia tackled her niece about the early morning rides she took alone.
“I have no one to go with.” Donette lolled on a divan in silk trousers, a backless top and slippers with tilted toes. In one hand she held a cocktail glass. “Brooke cannot ride while his ankle is in plaster, and I will not be attended by one of the servants like like a child who cannot be allowed out alone.”
“It would be for your own good, honey,” Amalia coaxed.
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