“So this is how we repay kindnesses!” Madame Delagrange began, slowly wetting her lips with her tongue. According to Henriette she was exactly like an ogress in a picture book savouring in anticipation the pretty morsel she meant to devour for supper. “We make troubles and inconveniences for the kind old fool of a woman who lets us sing our little songs in her Bar and dance with her clients and who pays us generously into the bargain. We won’t help her at all to keep the roof over her head. We treat her rich clients like mud. Only the beautiful officers are good enough for us! Bah! And we are virtuous too! Oh, he, he, he! Yes, but virtue isn’t bread and butter, my little one. So here’s an address.” She took a slip of paper from the shelf behind her and pushed it towards Marguerite. Marguerite took a step forward to the counter and picked up the paper.
“What am I to do with this, Madame?” she asked in perplexity.
“You are to go to that address, Mademoiselle.”
“To-morrow?”
“Now, little fool!”
“Why?”
“He is waiting for you.”
Marguerite shrank back, her face white as paper, her great eyes wide with horror.
“Who?” she asked in a whisper.
“Petras Tetarnis.”
Madame Delagrange nodded her head at Marguerite with an indignant satisfaction.
“Off you go! We shall be a little more modest, to-morrow evening, eh? We shan’t look at everybody as if they would dirty our little slippers if we stepped on them. Come, take your seven francs and hurry off. Or,” and she thrust out her lips savagely, “never come back to the Villa Iris.”
Marguerite stood and stared at the paper in her hands.
“You can’t mean it, Madame.”
Madame snorted contemptuously.
“Make your choice, little one. I want to go to bed.”
Marguerite folded the paper and with the tears running down her cheeks slowly tore it across and across and let the fragments flutter down to the floor. Madame Delagrange uttered an oath and then let loose upon the girl such a flood of vile abuse, that even those hiding behind the door of the dressing room had never heard the like of it.
“Out with you,” she said, spitting upon the ground and sweeping the seven francs off the counter towards Marguerite, so that they rolled and spun and rattled upon the floor. “Pick up your money and get your rags together and march! Quick now!”
She lolled over the counter screaming with laughter as Marguerite ran hither and thither seeking through her blinding tears for the coins, stooping and picking them up. “There’s another somewhere,” the old harridan cried, holding her fat sides. “Seek! Seek! Good dog! It takes ten years off my life to see the haughty Miss Touch-me-not running about after her pennies.”
Marguerite had got to retrieve them all. In the dreadful penury in which she lived, a single franc had the importance of gold. So she ran about the room, searched under tables and chairs and in the corners. The seven francs were all her capital. They stood between her and death by hunger. She must go on her knees and peer through the veil of her tears for the last of them. Even the women behind the door, hardened though they were, felt the humiliation of that scene in the marrow of their bones, felt it as something horrible and poignant and disturbing. As soon as Marguerite had picked up her money, Madame Delagrange shuffled out from behind her counter.
“Now come along with me. I mean to see that you don’t take away what doesn’t belong to you.”
She took the weeping girl by the elbow and pushed her along in front of her to the dressing room. Then she stood over her whilst she changed into her street dress and put up her dancing kit in a bundle.
“Do you miss anything, girls?” Madame Delagrange asked with her heavy-handed irony and indeed with an evident hope that one of them would miss something and the police could be sent for. But all of them were quick to say no, though not one of them had the courage to take Marguerite by the hand and wish her good luck in the face of the old blowsy termagant.
“Very well then!” and Madame Delagrange took a step towards Marguerite who shrank back as if she expected a blow. Madame Delagrange laughed heartily at the girl’s face, rejoicing to see her so cowed and broken.
“Come here,” she said with a grim sort of pleasantry and she grinned and beckoned with her finger.
Marguerite faltered across the room, and the big woman took her prisoner again and marched her out through the Bar onto the verandah.
“There! You can go out by the garden and a good riddance to you!” Madame Delagrange banged to the big doors behind Marguerite Lambert and bolted them, leaving her with her bundle in her hand standing on the boards beneath the roof of vines.
“That’s the last we saw of her. Poor kid!” said Henriette. “If she hadn’t been such a little fool! Do you know that for a moment or two I hoped that your friend—”
“Paul,” Gerard de Montignac interrupted with a nod of his head. “I also — for a moment or two. But women don’t mean much to Paul.”
Henriette laughed bitterly, wondering to what man women did mean anything at all. In her experience she had never run across them.
“I am afraid for that little one,” she said, her thoughts coming back to Marguerite. “You know what happened? Her little bundle was found on the balcony this morning. The knot had broken, and her dancing dress, her slippers, her silk stockings were lying scattered on the boards. She just left them where they fell. You see, they were her stock-in-trade. She had brought them over with her from France and she has no money to replace them with. I am afraid.”
Gerard de Montignac was conscious of a chill of fear too. He recognised the significance of the abandonment of that bundle. The knot had burst, as Marguerite stood on the verandah, the doors shut behind her, the dark garden in front of her. She had not thought it worth while to gather her poor trifles of finery together again. Their use was over. Whither had she gone? Was she alive now? Had those roaring breakers on the coast drawn her into their embrace and beaten her to death upon the rocks and the sands?
“Where does she lodge?” he asked sharply.
“I don’t know,” answered Henriette. “None of us know. She would never tell. I think that she had some poor little room of which she was ashamed. With her seven francs a day, she could have nothing else.”
“I must find out,” cried Gerard, and then he struck his fist upon the table. “But I can’t find out. I march at six o’clock to-morrow morning for Fez.”
“Your friend then,” Henriette suggested eagerly.
“Paul!” replied Gerard. “Yes. He has a few days still in Casablanca. He has compassion, he will help. I know him.”
Henriette’s face lightened a little.
“But he must be quick, very quick,” she urged. “You will see him to-night?”
“I will go to him now,” and Gerard remembered the letter in his pocket from Colonel Vanderfelt. “I was indeed on my way to him when I came here.”
Gerard looked at his watch. It was half past ten. He had stayed longer than he had intended at the Villa Iris.
CHAPTER X
Colonel Vanderfelt’s Letter
GERARD DE MONTIGNAC found Paul still up and putting the last words to the report of long and solitary wanderings amongst the inland tribes. The report was to be despatched the next morning to the Bureau des Affaires Indigènes at Rabat, and Gerard waited in patience until the packet was sealed up. Then he burst out with his story of what had taken place on the night before at the Villa Iris. Paul listened without an interruption, but his face grew white with anger and his eyes burned, as he heard of Madame Delagrange’s coarse abuse and Marguerite’s tears and humiliations.
“So you see, Paul, it was your fault in a way,” Gerard urged. “Of course sooner or later Petras Tetarnis — damn his soul! — would have presented his ultimatum, as he did last night, but you were the occasion of it being done.”
“Yes,” Paul agreed.
“Then you must find her. You
must do what you can, send her home, give her a chance. I’ll start searching myself this very night. But you have more time and better means of discovering her.”
“Yes.”
Paul had knocked about Casablanca as a boy. He had many friends amongst the natives, and was accustomed to sit with them by the hour, drinking mint tea and exchanging jokes. He was a man of property besides in that town and could put out a great many feelers in different quarters.
“I have no doubt that I can discover where she is,” he said, “if she is still in Casablanca.”
“Where else can she be unless it’s in the sea!” cried Gerard. “But remember you have got to be quick. She had only the seven francs. God knows what has become of her!”
He stood gazing at the lamp as if he could read her whereabouts in that white flame as the gifted might do in a crystal; with his cap tilted on the back of his head and a look of grave trouble upon his face.
“I’ll find her, never fear,” said Paul Ravenel, touching his friend upon the arm. “And what I can do to keep her from harm that I will do.”
Gerard responded to the friendliness and the assurance in Paul’s voice. He shook off his dejection.
“Thank you, mon vieux,” he said and held out his hand. “Well, we shall meet in Fez.”
He had reached the door before he remembered the primary reason for his visit.
“By the way, I have a letter about you from some one in England, a Colonel Vanderfelt. Yes, he is anxious for news of you. He wrote to me because in your letters to him you had more than once spoken of me as your friend.”
A shadow darkened Paul’s face as he listened, and a look of pain came into his eyes. He took the letter from Gerard.
“Have you answered it, Gerard?”
“No. It only reached me to-night. I must leave that to you.”
“Right.”
The door-keeper let Gerard out and he tramped through the now silent and empty streets the length of the town to the Market Gate; and so to his quarters in the camp at Ain-Bourdja. Some years were to pass before the two friends met again.
Paul stood for a long time just as Gerard had left him with Colonel Vanderfelt’s letter in his hand. The fragrance of an English garden seemed to him to sweeten this Moorish room. Though the lattices were wide open, he heard no longer the thunder of the great breakers upon the shore. The letter was magical and carried him back on this hot night of May to a country of cool stars. The garden, he remembered, would be white with lilac, the tulips would be in flower, the rhododendrons masses of red and mauve, against the house the wisteria would be hanging in purple clusters. And in the drawing room some very kindly people might at this moment be counting the date on which they could expect an answer to this letter.
Well, the answer would never come.
“All those pleasant dreams are over,” thought Paul. “They have not heard from me for more than a year. Let the break be complete!” and with a rather wistful smile he tore the letter into shreds. Then he went out and turning into a street by the sea-wall came to that house from which Gerard de Montignac had seen him and his agent depart three days before. A lattice was open on the first floor and from a wide window a golden flood of light poured out upon the night. Paul whistled gently and then waited at the door. It was thrown open in a few seconds, just time enough for some one to run down the stairs and open it. Paul stepped into a dark passage and a pair of slender arms closed about his neck and drew his face down.
“Marguerite, why didn’t you tell me how that venomous old harridan treated you?” he whispered.
Marguerite Lambert laughed with a note of utter happiness which no one had heard from her for a long while.
“My dear, what did it matter any longer;” and clinging to him passionately, she pressed her lips to his.
* * * * *
Paul could have added a postscript to Henriette’s story, as Gerard de Montignac had told it to him, if he had so willed. For when Marguerite Lambert stood alone on that verandah, her bundle in her hand, a figure had risen up out of the darkness of the garden and stepped onto the boards. She recoiled at the first moment in terror, and her bundle slipped from her hand and scattered its contents.
“Marguerite,” the man whispered, and with a wild throb of her heart she knew it was Paul Ravenel who was speaking to her.
“You! You!” she said in so low a voice that, though he stood at her side, the words only reached his ears like a sigh. “Oh!” and her arms were about his shoulders, her hands tightly clasped behind his head, and her tear-stained cheeks pressed close against the breast of his tunic. He tried to lift her face, but she would not let him.
“No! No!” she whispered. He could feel her bosom rising and falling, and hear the sobs bursting from her throat. Then she flung up her face.
“My dear! My dear! I was hoping that some sudden thing would kill me, because I couldn’t do it myself. And then — you are here!”
She drew herself from his arms, and not knowing what she did she kneeled and began to gather together her scattered belongings. Paul Ravenel laughed and stooping, lifted her up.
“You won’t want those things any more, my dear,” and with his arm about her he led her from the garden through the quiet streets to this house by the sea-wall which had been got ready against her coming.
CHAPTER XI
A Dilemma
IT WAS THE sixteenth day of April in the following year. The dawn broke over Fez sullen and unfriendly as the mood of the city. And all through the morning the clouds grew heavier. Many watched them with anxiety through that forenoon: the French Mission which was to set out on the morrow, on its return to Rabat with the treaty of the Protectorate of Morocco signed and sealed in its pocket; Mulai Hafid himself, now for these many months Sultan, who was to travel with the Mission, on his way to Paris; various high dignitaries of state, who though outwardly wreathed in smiles and goodwill had prepared a little surprise for the Mission in one of the passes on its line of march to the coast; and various young officers of the escort who after ten months of garrison duty outside Fez welcomed a chance of kicking up their heels for a week or two in the cafés of the coast towns. Like conversation before dinner, all these arrangements depended on the weather.
At twelve o’clock Mulai Hafid gave a farewell luncheon to the Mission in his great Palace in Fez Djedid; and after luncheon he conducted his guests to a Pavilion looking upon a wide open space called Mechouar. They had hardly reached the Pavilion before a storm burst with all the violence of the tropics. The Pavilion was like everything else in Morocco. It had never been finished when it was new, and never repaired when it was old; and very soon, the rain breaking through the flimsy roof had driven the guests from the first floor to the chamber of audience below, and was splashing down the stairs in a cascade. A general discomfort prevailed. Mulai Hafid himself was in a difficult mood. To one French Commissioner of importance who apologized to him because a certain General, lately promoted from Colonel, had not yet had time to procure the insignia of his new rank, Mulai Hafid replied dryly:
“The sooner he gets them the better. He’ll want them all to protect him before he has done.”
And a little later when the Head of the Mission, with whom he was playing chess, indiscreetly objected to the Sultan moving surreptitiously one of his knights with a latitude not authorised by the rules, he turned in vexation to a Kaid of his friends and said: “See what I have come to! I can no longer even move my own cavalry as I please, without the consent of his Excellency and the French.”
Altogether it was an uneasy luncheon party. Alone Paul Ravenel was content. He was on duty with the Mission and all the morning his face had been as cloudy as the sky because the storm did not break. Now he stood at a window of the upper room, sheltering himself as best he might from the leaks of the roof and smiled contentedly. Lieutenant Praslin, who a year before had trumpeted the praises of Marguerite Lambert in the mess at Ain-Bourdja, stood at his elbow. Praslin commanded now a platoo
n in Paul’s company and held his chief in awe. But annoyance spurred him to familiarity.
“You are amused, my old one, are you?” he enquired. “We are of the escort to-morrow. We shall swim through mud. The banks of the rivers will be as slippery as a skating rink. We shall have horses and camels tumbling about and breaking our necks. We shall have ladies in the party too. And you are amused! Name of a name, you have a sense of humour, my Captain.”
“I laugh,” replied Paul, “because if the rain continues, we shan’t go at all.”
“And you don’t want to go! To arrive safely at Rabat with the Mission, it might easily mean your step.”
That Paul should despise the indifferent gaieties of Rabat and Casablanca — that was understood. He was the serious one, destined for the high commands. But here was opportunity and Paul Ravenel had been quick to seize upon opportunity. There had been a pretty little fight between Kenitra and Segota when Paul was in command of the Advance Guard of Colonel Gouraud’s convoy; and Paul had fought his little battle with a resourceful skill which had brought his name into the orders of the day. He had been for ten months now in command of his Company at the great camp of Dar-Debibagh, four kilometres out of Fez. These were days of rapid promotion in an army where as a rule promotion was slow. A successful march to Rabat might well make him Commandant and give him his battalion. Yet the look upon his face, as he watched the sheets of rain turning the plain of the Mechouar into a marsh, was the look of a man — no, not relieved, but reprieved — yes, actually reprieved, thought the Lieutenant Praslin.
Below them in the chamber of audience the Chiefs of the Mission were at this moment debating the postponement of the journey and they came quickly to the only possible decision. The departure was put off for three days.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 572