Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  Again Paul Ravenel neither denied nor agreed. He left to her the right of way.

  “And in spite of all you still love me!” she cried, in a sudden fervour, clasping her hands together upon her breast. “Me whom you should hate. I clutch the wonder of that to my heart. I must keep your love.”

  Paul Ravenel smiled.

  “There’s no danger of your losing it, Marguerite.”

  Marguerite shook her head.

  “But there is — oh, not at once! But I am warned, Paul. There’s the light showing on the reef. I keep my course at more than my peril.”

  Paul went back upon his words and his looks. What could he have said, he who so watched himself?

  “And this warning?” he asked, with a smile, making light of it.

  “We dare not quarrel,” she answered, slowly. “That human natural thing is barred from us. The sharp words flashing out, the shrug of impatience, the few tears perhaps from me, the silent hour of sulkiness in you, the making-up, the tenderness and remorse — these things are for other lovers, Paul, never, my dear, for you and me. We daren’t quarrel. We must watch ourselves night and day lest we do! For if we did, the unforgivable word might be spoken. I might fling my debt to you in your face. I might be reminded of it, anyway. No, we must live in a constraint. Other lovers can quarrel and love no less. Not you and I — a man who has given his honour and career, and a woman who has taken them!”

  The argument silenced Paul Ravenel, for there was no disputing it. How daintily the pair of them had minced amongst words! With what terror of a catastrophe if the tongue slipped!

  “So . . . ?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Marguerite, with a nod. “So! So, Paul, let us stake all on one splendid throw! Go down if we must, but if we do, in a fine endeavour, and perhaps, after all, win out to the open street!”

  She spoke with a ring in her voice which Paul had not heard for a long while.

  “How?” he asked, and the light leaped in his eyes. So much hung upon the answer.

  “The French are recruiting Moorish soldiers — —” and she got no further, for Paul sprang up from his chair, his face one flame of hope.

  “Marguerite!” he cried, in a thrilling voice, and then sank down again with his face buried in his arms. “Marguerite!” he whispered, and the tenderness and gratitude with which the utterance of her name was winged, she caught into her memories and treasured there against the solitude which was to come.

  She moved round the table and laid her hand upon his bowed head and let it slip and rest upon his heaving shoulder.

  “So the thought has been in your mind too, Paul?” she said, with a smile.

  “Yes.”

  “And for a long time?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you would not speak it. No! I must find that way out for myself,” she said, gently chiding him, “lest you should seem to wish at all costs to be rid of me.” She walked away from his side and drew a chair up to the table opposite to him.

  “Let us be practical,” she said, very wisely, though her eyes danced. “It would be possible for you to enlist without being recognised?”

  Paul lifted his head and nodded:

  “Over in the south by Marrakesch.”

  “And you could continue to escape recognition.”

  “I think so. Even if I were recognised, very likely those who recognised me would say nothing. I remember a case once . . .”

  “Here?” cried Marguerite. “There was a case, then — an example to follow — and even so you would not tell me.”

  “I didn’t mean I know of a case here. I was thinking of another country. India. If that man could, I could, for I am even better equipped than he was.”

  Paul Ravenel could say that with confidence. He knew more of the Moors, had more constantly lived their life and spoken their dialects than Colonel Vanderfelt had known of the Pathans upon the frontier of India. The example of Colonel Vanderfelt had been long in Paul Ravenel’s thoughts. How often had he watched with an envy not to be described, both when he waked and when he slept, that limping figure, with the medals shining upon his breast, walk down the dark city street from the brilliant lights of the Guildhall!

  How often had this room in the remote hill town of Mulai Idris been suddenly filled with the fragrance of a Sussex garden, whilst he himself looked out not upon the hillside of Zahoun but upon a dim and dewy lawn where roses clustered! He had done the bad thing which his father did, and, like his father, lost his place in the world. Could he now win back that place by the expiation of his father’s friend? Was it not of excellent omen that the solution which he had remembered, Marguerite had herself devised? But she must weigh everything.

  “It may be long before opportunity comes,” he warned her. “Such opportunity as will restore to me my name. It may never come at all. Or death may come with it.”

  Marguerite looked round the room and out of the window to the barren hill.

  “Is not this death, Paul?” she answered, simply, and he was answered.

  “You must make me a promise, too, before I go, Marguerite,” he continued. “More than once you’ve said you couldn’t go on living if . . .”

  Marguerite interrupted him.

  “I promise.”

  “Then I’ll go.”

  A great load was lifted from both of them. They set straightway about their preparations. Marguerite was to set out first with Selim and her women. The road over the Red Hill to Tangier was no longer safe at all, since it passed through a portion of the Spanish zone. But five days of easy travel would take her to Casablanca, through a country now peaceful as a road in France. She would go to Marseilles, she said, and wait there for news of Paul. They passed that evening with a lightness of spirit which neither of them had known since they had laughed and loved in the house of Si Ahmed Driss before the massacres of Fez.

  “There is one thing which troubles me,” said Paul, catching her in his arms and speaking with a great tenderness. “Long ago in Fez you once told me of a girl who, when her husband died, dressed herself in her wedding gown — —”

  “Hush!” said Marguerite, and laid her hand upon his lips.

  “You remember, then?” said Paul. He took her hand gently away, and Marguerite bent her head down and nodded. “ ’I couldn’t do that, my dear,’ you said. I have never forgotten it, Marguerite. I should have dearly loved, if before we parted — that had been possible.”

  Marguerite raised her face. There were tears in her eyes, but her lips were smiling, and there was a smile, too, in her eyes behind the tears.

  “I know! the World proscribes not love;

    Allows my finger to caress

  Your lips’ contour and downiness

    Provided I supply a glove.

  “The World’s good word! — the Institute!

    Guizot receives Montalembert!

  Eh? Down the court three lampions flare;

    Put forward your best foot!”

  She quoted with a laugh from the poet whose brown books had been the backbone of their library, and then drew his head down to hers and whispered:

  “Thank you, Paul. The world shall supply its glove — afterwards, when you come back to me.”

  “But if I don’t come back . . . ?”

  “Well, then, my dear, since you have been the only man for me, and I have been the only woman for you, we must hope that the good God will make the best of it.” She laughed again and her arms tightened about his neck. “But come back to me, my dear!” she whispered. “I am young, you know, Paul — twenty-three. I shall have such a long time to wait if you don’t, now that I have promised.”

  They were ready within the twenty-four hours. The tail of Gerard de Montignac’s column had hardly disappeared before Marguerite, with her little escort, her tents and camp outfit, rode out of the gate of Mulai Idris and turned northwards past the columns of Volubilis. Paul rode with her to the top of the breach in the hills, whence the track zigza
gged down to the plain of the Sebou. There they took their leave of one another. At each turn of the road Marguerite looked upwards and saw her lover upon his horse, his blue cape and white robes fluttering about him, outlined against the sky. The tears were raining down her face now which she had withheld so long as they were together, and in her heart was one deep call to him: “Oh, come back to me!” She looked up again and the breach in the hills was empty. Her lover had gone.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  The Necessary Man

  IN THE SUMMER of that same year, the thundercloud burst over Europe, and France, at her moment of need, reaped the fine harvest of her colonial policy. Black men and brown mustered to the call of her bugle as men having their share of France. Gerard de Montignac scrambled like his brother officers to get to the zone of battles. He was seconded in the autumn, was promoted colonel a year later, and was then summoned to Paris.

  In a little room upon the first floor in a building adjacent to the War Office Gerard discovered Baumann, of the Affaires Indigènes, but an uplifted Baumann, a Baumann who had grown a little supercilious towards colonels.

  “Ah, De Montignac!” he said, with a wave of the hand. “I have been expecting you. Yes. Will you sit down for a moment?”

  Gerard smiled and obeyed contentedly. There were so many Baumanns about nowadays, and he never tired of them. Baumann frowned portentously over some papers on his desk for a few moments, and then, pushing them aside, smoothed out his forehead with the palm of his hand.

  “Yours is a simpler affair, De Montignac. I am happy to say,” he said, with a happy air of relief. “The Governor-General is in Paris. You will see him after this interview. He wants you again in Morocco.”

  “It is necessary?” Gerard asked, unwillingly.

  “Not a doubt of it, my dear fellow. You can take that from me. The Governor-General is holding the country with the merest handful of soldiers, and there are — annoyances.”

  “Serious ones?”

  “Very. Bartels, for instance.”

  “Bartels?” Gerard repeated. “I never heard of him.”

  Far away from the main shock of the battles, many curious and romantic episodes were occurring, many strange epics of prowess and adventure which will never find a historian. Bartels was the hero of one, and here in Baumann’s clipped phrases are the bare bones of his exploit.

  “He was a non-commissioned officer in the German army . . . enlisted on his discharge in our Foreign Legion — was interned in August, 1914, and got away to Melilla.”

  “In the Spanish zone, on the coast. Yes,” said Gerard.

  “He was safe there and on the edge of the Riff country. He got into touch with a more than usually turbulent chieftain of those parts, Abd-el-Malek, and also with a German official in Spain. From the German officials Bartels received by obscure routes fifteen thousand pounds a month in solid cash, minus, of course, a certain attrition which the sum suffers on the way.”

  “Of course,” said Gerard.

  “With the fifteen thousand — call it twelve — with the twelve thousand pounds a month actually received, and Abd-el-Malek’s help, Bartels has built himself a walled camp up in the hills close to the edge of the French zone, where he maintains two thousand riflemen well paid and well armed.”

  Gerard leaned forward quickly.

  “But surely a protest has been made to Spain?”

  Baumann smiled indulgently.

  “How you rush at things, my dear De Montignac!”

  “It will be ‘Gerard’ in a moment,” De Montignac thought.

  “Of course a protest has been lodged. But Spain renounces responsibility. The camp is in a part of the country which she has officially declared to be not yet subdued. On the other hand, it is in the Spanish zone — and we have enough troubles upon our hands as it is, eh?”

  Gerard leaned back in his chair.

  “That has always been our trouble, hasn’t it? The unsubdued Spanish zone,” he said, moodily. “What does Bartels do with his two thousand riflemen?”

  “He wages war. He comes across into French Morocco, and raids and loots and burns and generally plays the devil. And, mark you, he gets information; he chooses his time cleverly. When we are just about to embark fresh troops to France, that’s his favourite moment. The troops have to be retained, rushed quickly up country — and he, Bartels, is snugly back on the Spanish side of the line and we can’t touch him. Bartels, my dear De Montignac” — and here Baumann, of the Affaires Indigènes, tapped the table impressively with the butt of his pencil— “Bartels has got to be dealt with.”

  “Yes,” Gerard replied. “But how, doesn’t seem quite so obvious, does it?”

  Baumann gently flourished his hand.

  “We leave that with every confidence to you, my dear Colonel.”

  Gerard pushed his chair back.

  “Oh, you do, do you! I don’t know that I’ve the type of brain for that job,” he said, and thought disconsolately how often he had jeered at the officers who simply passed everything that wasn’t in “the book.” He would very much have liked to take the same line now. “How does this fellow Bartels get his twelve thousand pounds?”

  “Through Tetuan probably. We don’t quite know,” said Baumann.

  “And where exactly is his camp on the map?” Gerard asked next.

  “We are not sure. We can give you, of course, a general idea.”

  “We have nobody amongst his two thousand men, then?”

  “Not a soul. So, you see, you have a clear field.”

  “Yes, I see that, and I need hardly say that I am very grateful,” said De Montignac.

  Baumann was not quick to appreciate irony even in its crudest form. He smiled as one accepting compliments.

  “We do our best, my dear Gerard,” and Gerard beamed with satisfaction. He had heard what he had wanted to hear, and he would not spoil its flavour. He rose at once and took up his cap.

  “I will go and see the Governor-General.”

  “You will find him next door,” said Baumann. “We keep him next door to us whilst he is in Paris, so far as we can.”

  “You are very wise,” said Gerard, gravely, and he went next door, which was the War Office. There he met his chief, who said:

  “You have seen Baumann? Good! Take a little leave, but go as soon as you can. Ten days, eh? I will see you in a fortnight at Rabat,” and the Governor-General passed on to the Elysée.

  Gerard de Montignac did not, however, take his ten days. He knew his chief, a tall, preëminent man, both in war and administration, who, with the utmost good-fellowship, expected much of his officers. Gerard spent one day in Paris and then travelled to Marseilles. At Marseilles he had to wait two days, and visited in consequence a hospital where a number of Moorish soldiers lay wounded, men of all shades from the fair Fasi to the coal-black negro from the south. Their faces broke into smiles as Gerard exchanged a word or a joke with them in their own dialects.

  He stopped a little abruptly at the foot of one bed in which the occupant lay asleep with — a not uncommon sight in the ward — a brand-new medaille militaire pinned upon the pillow.

  “He is badly hurt?” Gerard asked.

  “He is recovering very well,” said the nurse who accompanied him. “We expect to have him out of the hospital in a fortnight.”

  Gerard remained for a moment or two looking at the sleeper, and the nurse watched him curiously.

  “It will do him no harm if I wake him up,” she suggested.

  Gerard roused himself from an abstraction into which he had fallen.

  “No,” he answered, with a laugh. “If I was a general, I would say, yes. But sleep is a better medicine than a crack with a mere colonel. What is his name?”

  “Ahmed Ben Larti,” said the nurse, and with a careless “So?” Gerard de Montignac moved along to the next bed. But before he passed out of the ward he jerked his head towards the sleeper and asked:

  “Will he be fit for service again?”

&n
bsp; “Certainly,” she answered. “In a month, I should think.”

  Gerard left the hospital, and the next morning was back in Baumann’s office in Paris.

  “I have found the man I want,” he said.

  “Who is he?”

  “Ahmed Ben Larti. He is in hospital at Marseilles. He has the medaille militaire.”

  Baumann shrugged his shoulders. “Who has it not?” he seemed to say.

  “I had better see the Governor-General,” said Gerard.

  Baumann became mysterious, as befitted a high officer of Intelligence.

  “Difficult, my young friend,” he began.

  “Excellent, Baumann, excellent,” interrupted Gerard, with a chuckle.

  Baumann pouted.

  “I don’t quite understand,” he said.

  “And there’s no reason that you should,” Gerard answered, politely.

  Baumann was not very pleased. It was his business to do the mystifying.

  “It’s practically impossible that you should see the Governor-General again. He is so occupied,” he said, firmly.

  Gerard got up from his chair.

  “Where is he?”

  “Ah!” said Baumann, wisely. “That is another matter.”

  “Then you don’t know,” exclaimed Gerard, standing over him.

  “No,” answered Baumann, and it took Gerard the rest of that day before he ran his chief to earth. Like other busy men, the Governor-General had the necessary time to give to necessary things, and in a spare corner of the Colonial Office, he listened with some astonishment, asked a few questions, and wrote a note to the War Office.

  “This will get you what you want, De Montignac. For the rest, I agree.”

  Forty-eight hours later Gerard had a long interview with Ahmed Ben Larti in a private ward to which the Moor had been removed: and towards the end of the interview, Ahmed Ben Larti made a suggestion.

  “That’s it!” said Gerard enthusiastically. Then his spirits dropped. “But we haven’t got any. No, we haven’t got one.”

  “The Governor-General,” the Moor suggested.