Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  Gerard found this man of smiles and cunning easier to talk with than the aloof masked figure of a minute ago.

  “It was you who constructed those trenches and against us, who were once your comrades,” he said sternly.

  Si Tayeb Reha was once more at a loss.

  “If your Excellency will not speak my tongue, how shall I answer you?” he asked, plaintively, and Gerard did not trouble to answer.

  “I ought to send you down to Meknes, for a court-martial to deal with you,” he said, reflectively. “But all strange crimes have their lures. They breed. God knows what decent-living youngster might get his imagination unwholesomely stirred and do as you have done and bring his name to disgrace! Besides — do you know who guards the gate of Mulai Idris whilst I talk to you? Who but Laguessière? Captain Laguessière.” He searched the still face for a tremor, a twitch of recognition. Si Tayeb Reha had apparently given up the attempt to understand. He stood leaning against the wall at the side of the window and looking out across the ravine to the mountainside.

  “Laguessière, at whose side you charged twisting your staff — do you remember? — back over the bridge by the lime-kilns in Fez two years ago.”

  The light fell full upon the face of the man at the window. It seemed to Gerard de Montignac impossible that any man, even the grand serieux, who had so often carried his life in his hands through the solitary places, could have learnt so to school his features and keep all meaning from his eyes.

  “Yes, that charge counts for you, and something else which shouldn’t count at all. You and I were at St. Cyr together.”

  Indeed, that counted most of all. The sense of an old comradeship broken, the traditions of a great college violated, these had been the true cause of Gerard de Montignac’s discomfort. The years were beginning to build the high barriers about Gerard, shutting off great tracts of which he had once had glimpses to make the heart leap, taking the bright colour from his visions. A treasure-house of good memories was something nowadays to value, and here was one of the good memories, almost the most vivid of them all, destroyed. He rose from his chair, and as he rose, a curtain moved which covered an archway, moved and ever so slightly parted. It was just behind Si Tayeb Reha’s shoulder, and a little to his right at the side of the room; so that he did not notice the movement. Gerard de Montignac could look through the narrow opening. He had a glimpse of a woman with her face veiled, an orange scarf about her head, a broad belt of gold brocade about her white robe. Somehow the sight of her helped him, though he saw her but for a second, before the curtains closed again. It spurred him to that statement which from the outset he had been working to.

  “So that’s it!” he cried. “A woman, eh? Two years since she took your fancy! She must be getting on now, mustn’t she? What’s her age? Seventeen? And for that, honour, career, a decent life, all, into the dustbin!”

  He drew his heavy revolver from the pouch at his belt and laid it on the table.

  “It is loaded,” he said. “You have just the time until my sergeant notices that I have left my revolver behind in this house. If I come back, and — no shot has been fired — then it is Meknes with all its shame and the same end.”

  Nothing surprised Gerard de Montignac more than the coolness with which Si Tayeb Reha, as his old comrade called himself, received his sentence of death. He advanced to the table where the revolver lay and took the weapon up with a smile of curiosity and admiration.

  “We make no such weapons as these,” he said in Arabic, examining the pistol with all a Moor’s fascination for mechanical instruments. “That, your Excellency, is why we are never a match for you and we must open our gates at your summons.”

  He had never said one word except in Arabic during the whole of that interview, just as Gerard had stubbornly refused to speak anything but French. Gerard watched him toying with the weapon for a second and then turned rapidly away. He could not but admire his old friend’s courage; he could not but think: “What a waste of a good man!” He went out of the room without another word or another look. He was sick at heart. He no longer cared whether he had been peevish or argumentative or what kind of figure he had cut. One of the glamorous things in his life, his belief in the grand serieux, had been taken from him.

  He mounted his horse and rode away, wishing for that shot to explode as quickly as possible, so that he might bury the dreadful episode out of sight and forget it altogether.

  But though he listened with both his ears and though he walked his horse as slowly as he could, he heard nothing. He saw his sergeant suddenly look at his belt. It was coming, then, without a doubt. The next moment the sergeant was at his side and looking up into his face.

  “My commandant, you have left your revolver behind in that house.”

  Gerard de Montignac took all the time that he could. He stared at the sergeant and made him repeat his statement as though he had been lost in thought and had never heard it at all. Then he looked down at the holster and fingered it as if he were trying to recollect where in the world he had taken the revolver out.

  “Why, that’s true,” he said, at last. He wheeled his horse around and rode back very dispiritedly with his chin sunk upon his breast. “It is to be Meknes after all, then, and all the public shame,” the sergeant heard him mutter; and then a pistol cracked sharp and clear, and Gerard raised his face. It was lit with a great relief.

  They were only ten paces from the house. Gerard dismounted and gave the reins to the sergeant.

  “Wait for me here! Keep the door clear!” he ordered. He had left the door of the house open when he rode away. It was open still. Gerard ran up the stairs and burst into the room. There was a smell of gunpowder in the air, and the Moorish woman with the orange scarf and the white robe and the deep gold waistband was standing with her hands pressed over her face.

  But there was no sign of Si Tayeb Reha anywhere. They had tried to trick him, then! They imagined that he would accept the evidence of the pistol-shot and continue on his way! They took him for no better than a child, it seemed. No, that would not do!

  “Where is he?” he asked, angrily, of the girl, and now he, too, spoke in Arabic.

  She pointed a trembling hand towards the window; and Gerard saw that the rail of the balustrade of the balcony was broken and that the revolver lay upon the boards. Gerard stepped out from the window and looked down.

  The balcony had been built out from the sheer wall; it was a rough thing of boards, supported upon iron stanchions, and jutting out above the deep chasm at the edge of the town. Gerard could see between the boards deep down a precipice of rocks to a tiny white thread of stream and clumps of bushes. He drew close to the broken rail and leaned cautiously over. Caught upon some outcropping rocks, a little way below the wall, hung the body of Si Tayeb Reha. He was lying face downwards, his arms outspread. The story of what had happened was written there for him to read.

  Paul Ravenel had shot himself on the balcony, the revolver had fallen from his hand, his body had crashed through the flimsy rail and toppled down until it had been caught on the rocks below. Yes, no doubt! The mere fall from that height, even if Ravenel had been unhurt, would have been enough. Yet — yet — there had been a long delay before the shot was fired. Gerard looked keenly and swiftly about the room. No, there was no sign of a rope.

  He looked at the girl. She was now crouched down upon her knees, her face hidden between her hands, her body rocking, whilst a wail like a chant, shrill of key but faint, made a measure for her rocking. She was like an animal in pain — that was all, and for her Paul had thrown a great name to the winds! What a piece of irony that she, with hardly more brain and soul than a favourite dog, should have cost France so much!

  Gerard stooped and picked up his revolver. He broke the breech, ejected the one exploded cartridge, and closed the breech again with a snap. He leaned forward again to take a last look at that poor rag of flesh and bone, hung there for the vultures to feed upon, which once had been his friend — and
he was aware of a subtle change in the woman behind him within the room. Oh, very slight, and for so small a space of time! But just for an imperceptible moment her wail had faltered, the rocking of her body had been stayed. She had been watching him between those fingers with the henna-dyed nails which were so tightly pressed over her face.

  He looked at her closely without moving from his position. It was all going correctly on again — the lament, the swaying, the proper conventional expression of the abandonment of grief. Yet she had been watching him, and for a moment she had been startled and afraid. Of what? And the truth flashed upon him. He had been fingering his revolver. She was afraid of the coup de grâce.

  Then they were tricking him between them — she with her wailing, he spread out on the bulge of rock below. They should see! He stretched out his arm downwards, the revolver pointed in his hand. And out of the tail of his eye he saw the woman cease from her exhibition and rise to her feet. As he took his aim she unwound the veil from before her face. He could not but look at her; and having looked, he could not take his eyes from her face. He stumbled into the room. “Marguerite Lambert!” he said, in a voice of wonder! “Yes, Marguerite Lambert!”

  CHAPTER XXI

  Two Outcasts

  GERARD DE MONTIGNAC had never been so thoroughly startled and surprised in his life. But he was angrily conscious of an emotion far keener than his surprise. He was jealous. Jealousy overmastered the shock of wonder, stabbed him through and left him aching. Marguerite Lambert, the girl of the Villa Iris, so politely difficult! And Paul Ravenel, the man without passion! Why, his brother officers used to laugh at him openly — nay, almost sneered at him and made a butt of him — because of his coldness; and he, indifferent to their laughter, had just laughed back and gone his way. Well, he could afford to, it seemed, since he was here, and for two years had been here, hidden quite away from the world with Marguerite Lambert.

  They had stolen a march upon their friends, the pair of them, they had tricked them — yes, that was the exact right word — tricked them, even as they had just tried to trick him, she with her Oriental abandonment to grief — little “animal,” as he had called her in his thoughts — he stretched out on a knob of rock above a precipice in a pose of death! Gerard was in an ugly mood, and he spoke out his thought in a blaze of scorn.

  “I asked you the last time I saw you to give me two days of your life, my only two days. I asked no more. Yet you were insulted. You could give two years to another, but two days to me? Oh, dear, no! You wished never to speak to me again.”

  “I would give two days to no man,” Marguerite replied, gently, “though I would give my whole life to one man.”

  “Even though he deserted?” Gerard asked, with a sneer.

  “Paul had not deserted when I gave myself to him,” she answered, quietly. “When he did, it was to save me!”

  Gerard did not want to hear anything about that. Some conjecture that the truth of this catastrophe was to be discovered there, had been at the back of his mind ever since he had recognised Marguerite. But he intended not to listen to it, not to let it speak at all. Somehow, her use of Paul’s name angered him extremely. It dropped from her lips with so usual and homely a sound.

  “No doubt it was to save you. It would be!” he said, sardonically. “Some decent excuse would be needed even between you two when you sat together alone through the long dark evenings.”

  Gerard meant to hurt, but Marguerite wore an armour against him and his arrows were much too blunt to pierce it. She had a purpose of her own to serve, of which Gerard de Montignac knew nothing; she was clutching at a desperate chance — if, indeed, so frail a thing could be called a chance — not of merely saving her lover’s life, but of so much more that she hardly dared to think upon it. Her only weapon now and for a long heart-breaking time to come, was patience.

  “You are unjust,” she said, without any anger, and without any appeal that he should reconsider his words. Gerard suddenly remembered the last words that the black-bearded Basha had spoken as he climbed onto his mule.

  “We are all in God’s hand.”

  Marguerite had spoken just in his tone. Argument and prayer were of no value now. It was all written, all fated. What would be, would be. Either Gerard de Montignac would drop that revolver from his hand and her desperate chance become a little less frail than before, or he would not.

  “What was it that woman in the spangled skirt used to say of you?” Gerard asked, with a seeming irrelevance.

  “Henriette?”

  “Yes, Henriette. You had a look of fate. Yes! She was right, too. It was that look which set you apart, more than your beauty. Indeed, you weren’t beautiful then, Marguerite.”

  He was gazing at her moodily. The sharp anger had become a sullenness. Marguerite had grown into beauty since those days, but it was not the roseleaf beauty born of days without anxiety and nights without unrest. It was the beauty of one who is haunted by the ghosts of dead dreams and who wakes in the dark hours to weep very silently lest some one overhear. Destined for greater sorrows or perhaps greater joys than fall to the common lot! That was what Henriette had meant! And looking at Marguerite, Gerard, with a little ungenerous throb of pleasure, perceived that at all events the greater joys, if ever they had fallen to her, had faded away long since.

  “These have been unhappy years for you, Marguerite,” he said.

  “For both of us,” she answered. “How could they have been anything else? Paul had lost everything for which he had striven, whilst I knew that it was I who had caused his loss.”

  “But he didn’t lose you.”

  “He didn’t have to strive for me,” Marguerite returned, with just the hint of a smile and more than a hint of pride. “I was his from his first call — no, even before he called.”

  Gerard could not but remember the first meeting of this tragic couple in the Villa Iris. Paul Ravenel had stood behind Marguerite’s chair, and without a word, without even turning her head to see who it was that stood behind her, she had risen from the midst of the Dagoes and Levantines, as at an order given. She had fallen into step at his side, and no word had as yet passed between them. Gerard de Montignac recollected that, even then, a little pang of jealousy had stabbed him and sharply enough to send him straight out of the cabaret.

  “Yes . . . yes,” he said, slowly. “I had never spoken to you then, had I? It wasn’t until afterwards . . .” He was thinking and drawing some queer sort of balm from the thought, that Marguerite had not so much flatly refused him his two days as set her heart on Paul Ravenel before she had met him. If it had been he, for instance, who had stood behind Marguerite’s chair and silently called her! But, then, he hadn’t. He had gone away and left the field clear for Paul Ravenel. Other memories came back to him to assuage his wrath.

  “After all, it was I who brought you and Ravenel together,” he said. “For it was I who persuaded him to come with me on that first night to the Villa Iris.”

  “Yes!” Marguerite drew in her breath sharply. “He told me that he almost didn’t come.”

  It would have been better if he had not come, if he had stayed quietly in his house and gone on with his report. So her judgment told her. But she could never imagine those moments during which Paul had stood in doubt, without picturing them so vividly that she had a quiver of fear lest he should decide not to come.

  “It was I, too, who sent Paul Ravenel to you at the end,” Gerard de Montignac continued; and as Marguerite drew her brows together in a wrinkle of perplexity, “Yes,” he assured her. “The night after you didn’t want to speak to me any more, I went back to the Villa Iris to find you. Did you know that? Yes, I was leaving the next morning with the advance guard for Fez. I didn’t know what might happen on the march. I wanted to make friends with you again, so that if anything did happen to me, you wouldn’t have any bitter memories of me.”

  “That was a kind thought,” said Marguerite.

  “Kind to myself,” returned Gerard,
with, for the first time in this interview, the ghost of a smile. Yet to Marguerite it was as the glimmer of dawn upon a black night of sickness and pain. There was a hope, then, that the revolver would be returned to its holster with its remaining five cartridges still undischarged. Gerard’s own memories were at work with him, memories of a kindlier self, with enthusiasms and generous thoughts; and they must be left to do their work. There was little that she could say or do — and that little not until his mood had changed.

  “I didn’t find you,” Gerard resumed. “You had gone. Henriette told me how you had gone and why. Yes, the whole horrible story of that old harridan and the Greek! And you had dropped your bundle and disappeared. And Henriette feared for you. I was leaving at six in the morning; I was helpless. I went on to Paul Ravenel and told him that he must find you before any harm came to you. And he did, of course. That’s clear. So I had my share in all this dreadful business. Yes . . . yes, I hadn’t realised it.”

  He sat down on a chair by the table and stared at its surface with his forehead puckered. But he still held the butt of his revolver in his hand. If only he would lay it down just for a moment! Marguerite had a queer conviction that he would never take it up again to use outside the window, once he let go of it. But he did not let go. His fingers, indeed, tightened upon the handle, and he cried: “I don’t know what to do.” Neither did Marguerite. She could let Gerard de Montignac remain in his error, or she could dispel it. She was greatly tempted not to interfere. It was a small matter, anyway. Only, small matters count so much in great issues. Let the scales tremble, the merest splinter will make one of them touch ground. Marguerite trusted to some instinct which she could not afterwards explain.

  “Perhaps I am unwise,” she said. The note of hesitation, for the first time audible, drew Gerard’s eyes to her troubled face. “But I don’t know . . . The truth is you had no real share in our” — she paused for a word which would neither blame nor excuse— “in our disaster. The night I was turned out, Paul was waiting for me in the garden. I didn’t expect him. I was in despair. I dropped my bundle; and he rose up out of the darkness in front of me. I loved him. It was the wonderful thing come true. He took me away to a house which he had got ready — —”