“What have you done with him?” said the Basha. “Speak.”
“I besought a lad who had been my servant to watch the Room Bentham, and his goings and comings. With the dollar which he had given me I bought a little old tent of palmetto and set it up in the corner of the Sôk apart from the tents of the cobblers.”
“Well?” interrupted M. Fournier, “speak quickly.”
“One evening the lad came to me and said the Room had gone up to a house on the hill above the Sôk, where there were many lights and much noise of feasting. So I went down the Sôk to where the Arabs slept by their camels and said to them, ‘It will be to-night.’ And as God willed it the night was dark. The lad led me to the house and I sat outside it till the noise grew less and many went away. At last the Nazarene Bentham came to the door and his mule was brought for him and he mounted. I asked the boy who guided me, ‘Is it he?’ and the boy answered ‘Yes.’ So I dismissed him and followed the mule down the hill to the Sôk, which was very quiet. Then I ran after him and called, and he stopped his mule till I came up with him. ‘What is it?’ he asked, and I threw a cloth over his head and dragged him from the mule. We both fell to the ground, but I had one arm about his neck pressing the cloth to his mouth so that he could not cry out. I pressed him into the mud of the Sôk and put my knee upon his chest and bound his arms together. Then I carried him to my tent and took the cloth from his head, for I wished to hear him speak and be sure that it was Bentham. But he understood my wish and would not speak. So I took his mule-hobbles which I had stolen while he feasted, and made them hot in a fire and tied them about his ankles and in a little while I made him cry out and I was sure. Then I stripped him of his clothes and put upon him my own rags. The Arabs came to the tent an hour later. I gagged Bentham and gave him up to them bound, and in the dark they took him away, with the mule. His clothes I buried in the ground under my tent, and in the morning stamped the ground down and took the tent away.”
“And the chief of these Arabs? Give me his name,” said the Basha.
“Mallam Juzeed,” replied Hassan.
The Basha waved his hand to the soldiers and Hassan was dragged away.
“I will send a soldier with you, give you a letter to the Sheikh of Beni Hassan, and he will discover the Room, if he is to be found in those parts,” said the Basha to M. Fournier.
Charnock spent the greater part of a month in formalities. He took the letter from the Basha and many other letters to Jews of importance in the towns with which M. Fournier was able to provide him; he hired the boy Hamet who had acted as his guide on his first visit, and getting together an equipment as for a long journey in Morocco, rode out over the Hill of the Two Seas into the inlands of that mysterious and enchanted country.
CHAPTER XIX
TELLS OF CHARNOCK’S WANDERINGS IN MOROCCO AND OF A WALNUT-WOOD DOOR
IN THE COURSE of time Charnock came to a village of huts enclosed within an impenetrable rampart of cactus upon the flank of the hills southward of Mequinez and there met the Sheikh. The Sheikh laid his hands upon Mallam Juzeed and bade him speak, which he did with a wise promptitude. It was true; they had taken the Christian from Tangier, but they had sold him on the way. They had chanced to arrive at the great houseless and treeless plain of Seguedla, a day’s march from Alkasar, on a Wednesday; and since every Wednesday an open market is held upon two or three low hills which jut out from the plain, they had sold Ralph Warriner there to a travelling merchant of the Mtoga. Mallam supplied the merchant’s name and the direction of his journey. Charnock packed his tents upon his mules and disappeared into the south.
For two years he disappeared, or almost disappeared; almost, since through the freemasonry of the Jews, that great telephone across Barbary by which the Jew at Tangier shall hear the words which the Jew speaks at Tafilet, M. Fournier was able to obtain now and again rare news of Charnock, and, as it were, a rare glimpse of him at Saforo, at Marakesch, at Tarudant, and to supply him with money. Then came a long interval, until a Jew of the Waddoon stopped Fournier in the Sôk of Tangier, handed him a letter, and told him that many months ago, as he rode at nightfall down a desolate pass of the Upper Atlas mountains, he came to an inhospitable wilderness of stones, where one in Moorish dress and speaking the Moorish tongue was watching the antics of a snake-charmer by the light of a scanty fire of brushwood. The Moor had two servants with him but no escort, and no tent, and for safety’s sake the Jew stayed with him that night. In the morning the Moor had given him the letter to M. Fournier and had bidden him say that he was well.
In that letter Charnock told in detail the history of his search. How he had held to his clue, how he had missed it and retraced his steps, how he had followed the merchant to Figuig on the borders of Algeria, and back; how he had gone south into the country of Sus and was now returning northwards to Mequinez. He had discarded the escort, because if a protection to himself, it was a warning to the Arabs with whom he fell in. They grew wary and shut their lips, distrusting him, distrusting his business; and since he could speak Arabic before, he had picked up sufficient of the Moghrebbin dialect, what with his dark face and Hamet to come to his aid, to pass muster as a native. M. Fournier sent the letter on to Mrs. Warriner at Ronda, who read it and re-read it and blamed her selfishness in sending any man upon such an errand, and wondered why she of all women in the world should have found a man ready to do her this service. Many a time as she looked from her window over the valley she speculated what his thoughts were as he camped in the night-air on the plains and among the passes. Did his thoughts turn to Ronda? Did he see her there obtruding a figure of a monstrous impertinence and vanity? For she had asked of him what no woman had a right to ask.
His frank confession of how he had defined women came back to her with a pitiless conviction; “A brake on the wheel going up hill, a whip in the driver’s hand going down.” It was true! It was true! She was the instance which proved it true. There were unhappy months for Miranda of the balcony.
At times Jane Holt would be wakened from her sleep by a great cry, and getting from her bed she would walk round the landing half-way up the patio, to Miranda’s bedroom, only to find it empty. She would descend the staircase, and coming into the little parlour, would discover Miranda leaning out of the open window and looking down to a certain angle of the winding road.
She had dreamed, she had seen in her dream Charnock with his two servants encamped upon a hill-side or on a plain, and hooded figures in long robes crawling, creeping, towards them, crouching behind boulders, or writhing their bodies across fields of flowers. She saw him too in the narrow, dim alleys of ruined towns, lured through a doorway behind impenetrable walls, and then robbed for his money and tortured for his creed.
At such times the sight of that road whence he had looked upwards to her window was a consolation, almost a confutation of her dreams. There at that visible corner of the road, underneath these same stars and the same purple sky, Charnock had sat and gazed at this window from which she leaned. He could not be dead! And carried away by a feverish revulsion, she would at times come to fancy that he had returned, that he was even now seated on the bank by the roadside, that but for the gloom she would surely distinguish him, that in spite of the gloom she could faintly distinguish him. And so her cousin would speak to her, and with some commonplace excuse that the night was hot, Miranda would get her back to her room.
These were terrible months for Miranda of the balcony. And the months lengthened, and again no news came. Miranda began to wonder whether she had only sent Charnock out to meet Ralph’s disaster, to become a slave beaten and whipped and shackled, and driven this way and that through the barbarous inlands.
The months were piled one upon the other. The weight of their burden could be measured by the changes in Miranda’s bearing. Her cheeks grew thin, her manner feverish. The mere slamming of a door would fling the blood into her face like scarlet; an unexpected entrance set her heart racing till it stifled her.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Charnock had long ceased to be troubled by the interruption of his career. He moved now across wide prairies of iris and asphodel under a blazing African sun, with perhaps a single palm tree standing naked somewhere within view, or a cluster of dwarf olives; he halted now for the night under a sinister sky on a dark plain, which stretched to the horizon level as the sea; he would skirt a hill and come unawares upon some white town of vast, gaunt, crumbling walls, that ran out for no reason into the surrounding country, and for no reason stopped. He passed beneath their ruined crenellations, under the great gateways into the tortuous and dark streets where men noiseless and sombre went their shrouded way. There were nights too when he sat with a Mouser pistol in his hand, searching the darkness until the dawn.
The continent he had left behind seemed very far away; the echo of its clamours diminished; the hurry of its conflicts became unreasonable and strange. He was in a country where the moss upon the palace roofs was itself of an immemorial antiquity; where neither the face of the country nor the ways of those who lived on it had changed. He had waited as he turned his back upon a town in the violet sunset, to see the white flags break out upon the tops of the minarets, and the Mueddins appear. He had waited for their cry, “Allah Akbar!” and for the great plaintive moan of prayer which rose to answer it from the terraces, the bazaars, from every corner of the town, and which trembled away with infinite melancholy over infinite plains, “Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!”
From those very minarets, during long successive centuries, a Mueddin at just that hour had uttered just that cry; so that the Mueddin became nothing, but the cry echoed down the years. And just that same answer had risen and trembled out in just the same plaintive mournfulness, so that those who prayed became of no account, and the prayer repeated by the generations, the one thing which lived.
Charnock used to halt upon his road, turn his face backwards to the town, and picture to himself that from East to West the whole continent of Africa was murmurous with that one prayer, that the Atlantic carried away the sound of it upon its receding waves, and that the Nile floated it down from village to village through the Soudan. He ceased to wonder at the indifference, the passivity, the fatalism, of these mysterious men amongst whom he lived; for he felt something of that fatalism invading himself.
He continued his search, northwards from the Atlas, escaping here a band of robbers, there struggling in the whirl of a swollen stream, listening at night to the cries of the jackals, and yielding to the witchery of a monotonous Arab flute into which one servant blew a few yards away, while Hamet, in a high strident voice, chanted a no less monotonous song. He continued his search almost because “it was written.”
Until on a dull afternoon he came to Mequinez, with its palaces of dead kings, which rise up one behind the other, draped in golden lichens, vast roofs stretching away into the distance, green and grey with the whipping of rains, tower overtopping tower, crumbling crenellations of wall, silent, oppressive. Each palace shut and barred after its master was dead, and left so, to frown into decay and make a habitation for the storks.
To this city Charnock tracked the merchant, and taking up his abode in the Mellah with a Jew to whom M. Fournier had recommended him, he walked out through the streets beneath the walls of the palaces, neither inquiring for the merchant nor scanning the faces of the passers-by, but wrapped in his burnous, careless of any cry, impenetrable, unobservant, until he came out of the darkness of a bazaar, and saw, right before his eyes, a door.
The door was set in a wall perhaps sixty feet high. Charnock could not see the top for the narrowness of the street. Blank, and menacing in the sinister light, the wall towered up before his eyes, and reached out to the right and to the left. And at the foot of the wall was the door — a door of walnut wood, studded with copper nails, and the nails were intricately ordered in a geometrical figure, impossible for the eye to unravel.
That Charnock already knew; he had made trial before now to unravel those geometrical figures, once, very long ago, and very far away in the white sunlit street of a Spanish town. Charnock stood and stared at the door, and the Spanish town loomed larger before his vision, drew nearer, moved towards him, first slowly, then quickly, then in a rush. Ronda! Ronda! The town, as it were, swept over him. He seemed to wake; he seemed to stand again in the street. To his right was the chasm of the Tajo, and the bridge, and the boiling torrent; behind that door lived — and these two years slipped from him like a cloak. With an unconscious movement of his hands he pushed the hood back from his forehead, and stood bare-headed and alert. He was again one of the hurrying, strenuous, curious folk who live beyond the Straits.
He gazed at the door. Behind that door’s fellow Miranda lived and waited. Even as the thought burned through his mind, the door opened. For a moment Charnock imagined that Miranda herself would step out; but only a Moor came forth from an interview with the Basha, and a ragged, decrepit greybeard of a servant attended on the Moor and made his path. Charnock was in an instant aware of a grey light filtering between the squalid roof-tops, of the filth of the streets, of the tottering walls of Mulai Ismail. He was in Mequinez.
And at Mequinez the long two years should end, and in ending bear their fruit. That door, on which his eyes were set, augured as much, nay promised it. “Not a sparrow shall fall....” Just for this reason, centuries ago, a Moorish conqueror had taken these slabs of walnut wood in Spain, and brought them back upon the shoulders of his slaves and made his door from them and set it in his wall at Mequinez; just that Charnock coming to this spot centuries afterwards might be quickened in his service towards a woman, and gird himself about with the memory of things which were growing dim, and be assured the service should not fail! Charnock was uplifted to believe it.
He drew the hood again about his head, and the voice of the Mueddin called the world to prayer. Through the open doors of the mosques, from the white walls glimmering in the dimness within those doors, from the streets, from the houses, the high-pitched tremulous prayer rose and declined in an arc of sound.
Charnock felt his whole being throb exultantly. At Mequinez, yes, and to-night, his search would end. Surely to-night! For the hour after the evening prayer was the hour for the selling of slaves.
Charnock walked to the market and sat himself down in the first dim corner. He did not choose a place prominent and visible, inviting whosoever had wares to sell; he took the first seat which offered — certain that wherever he sat Ralph Warriner would be brought to him. He sat down and looked about him.
Some half a dozen men were grouped about the market talking; a young negress from the Soudan, a white Moorish girl, a young negro from Timbuctoo, were brought to them in turn. They examined their teeth, their arms, their feet. The Moorish girl was bought; the others passed on, each with the owner. They were followed by the Moor whom Charnock had seen step from the Basha’s door. He wished to sell his decrepit greybeard, and was met with laughter wheresoever he turned. These were all the slaves in the market.
Charnock did not lose heart. At any moment within the next few minutes the narrow entrance to the market might darken, and Ralph Warriner’s owner thrust Ralph Warriner in — at some moment that would happen.
Did Warriner still shuffle in the Moorish slippers as he walked? Charnock found himself asking the question with a curious light-heartedness. The negress was offered to him, and then the negro; he refused them with a gesture. He lent an ear to the rustling whispering traffic of the streets outside. He listened patiently, confidently, for the sound of a shuffling footstep to emerge, and grow distinct and more distinct. The Moor brought his greybeard to Charnock’s corner. Charnock held his head aside and listened for the loose slap-slap of the slipper upon the mud. The Moor spoke, was importunate; Charnock waved him aside impatiently.
But as he waved his arm he turned his head; and then he suddenly reached out a hand, while his heart leaped in his throat. “Ten dollars,” he said. The Moor began to expatiate on th
e merits of his slave; he was still strong; he could carry heavy loads, and for far distances. Charnock was impatient to interrupt, to pay the price. When he had turned his head, suddenly, for an instant, he had looked straight into the greybeard’s eyes — and they were the blue eyes which had stared into his — once, how many centuries ago? — through the window of a hansom cab in a noisy street of Plymouth. Charnock had no doubt. Other Moors had blue eyes, and in no other feature of this wizened, haggard creature but his eyes could he trace a resemblance to Ralph Warriner; but he had no doubt. All the intuitions of the last half-hour came to his aid. He remembered the door, the call to prayer. This was Ralph Warriner, and he had almost let him pass! Had he not turned by mere accident just at the one moment when the greybeard’s eyes were raised, he would have lost his chance now and forever. Warriner would have perished in his servitude, would have dropped somewhere on the plain under a load too heavy, and lain there until nightfall brought the jackals.
The thought took Charnock at the throat, left him struggling for his breath. So near had he been to failing when he must not fail! He began to fear at once that another purchaser might step in, while the Moor was still exaggerating his goods. Yet he must not interrupt; he must give no sign of anxiety lest he should awaken suspicion; he must bargain with extreme indifference while a fever burnt in all his blood.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 313