"Then how pleased you must be. Oh, I"m right glad, I tell you; I"m just as pleased as you are. To think that we"ve never met since you left N"York in such a flurry that you hadn"t time even to send me a line--but of course you men are so busy and so smart that girls don"t count, and I knew you were just dying to see me, and I sent the boat off saying it was old Burrow--how you love Burrow!--and here you are, my word!"
She spoke laboring under a heavy excitement, so that her sentences flowed over one another. But he could scarce find a coherent word, and began to tremble as she went on,--
"You"ll stay awhile, of course, and--why, you"re as pale as spectres, I guess. Now if you look like that I shall begin to think that we"re not the old friends we were in N"York a year ago, and walk right upstairs to Arthur. You remember my brother Arthur, of course you do. He was your particular friend, wasn"t he?--but how you boys quarrel. They really told me two months ago in the city that Arthur was going in the shooting business with you. Fancy that now, and at your age."
This sentence revealed what was lacking in the character of the girl; it showed that malicious, if rather low and vulgar, cunning which prompted the whole of this adventure; and it betrayed a revenge which was worthy of a Frenchwoman. Maclaren had but to hear the harsh ring of the voice to know that the girl who had threatened him months ago in New York had met her opportunity, and that she would use it to the last possibility.
Every word that she uttered with such meaning vehemence cut him like a knife; his hair glistened with the drops of perspiration upon it; his right hand was pa.s.sed over his forehead as though some heat was tormenting his brain. And as her voice rose shrilly, only to be modulated to the pretence of suavity again, he blurted out,--
"Evelyn, what are you going to do?"
"I--my dear Lord Maclaren--I am entirely in your hands; you are my guest, I reckon, and even in America we have some idea of what that means. Now, would you like to play cards after dinner, or shall we have a little music?"
The steward entered the cabin at this moment, and the conversation being interrupted, Maclaren chanced to see that the companion was free. A wild idea of appealing to the captain of the yacht came to him, and he made a sudden move to mount the ladder. He had but taken a couple of steps, however, when a l.u.s.ty young fellow, perhaps of twenty-five years of age, barred the pa.s.sage, and pushed him with some roughness into the cabin again. The man closed the long, panelled door behind him; and then addressed the unwilling guest.
"Ah, Maclaren, so that"s you--devilish good of you to come aboard, I must say."
The newcomer was Evelyn Lenox"s brother, the owner of the ketch _Bowery_. He acted his part in the comedy with more skill than his sister, having less personal interest in it; indeed, amus.e.m.e.nt seemed rather to hold him than earnestness. It was perfectly clear to Maclaren, however, that he would stand no nonsense; and seeing that a further exhibition of feeling would not help him one jot, the unhappy prisoner succ.u.mbed. When the dinner was put upon the table, he found himself sitting down to it mechanically, and as one in a dream. It was an excellent meal to come from a galley; and it was made more appetizing by the wit and sparkle of the girl who presided, and who acted her _role_ to such perfection. She seemed to have forgotten her anger, and cloaked her malice with consummate art. She was a well-schooled flirt--and her victim consoled himself with the thought, "They will put me ash.o.r.e in the morning, and I can make a tale." By ten o"clock he found himself laughing over a gla.s.s of whisky and soda. By eleven he was dreaming that he stood at the altar in the church of St. Peter"s and that two brides walked up the aisle together.
The next picture that I have to show you of Maclaren is one which I am able to sketch from a full report of certain events happening on the evening of his wedding day. The yacht lay becalmed some way out in the bay of the Somme; the sea had the l.u.s.ter of a mirror, golden with a flawless sheen of brilliant light which carried the dark shadows of smack-hulls and flapping lug-sails. There was hardly a capful of wind, scarce an intermittent breath of breeze from the land; and the crew of the _Bowery_ lay about the deck smoking with righteous vigor, as they netted or st.i.tched, or indulged in those seemingly useless occupations which are the delight of sailors. Often however, they stayed their work to listen to the rise and fall of sounds in the saloon aft; and once, when Maclaren"s voice was heard almost in a scream, one of them, squirting his tobacco juice over the bulwarks, made the sapient remark, "Well, the old cove"s dander is riz now, anyway."
The scene below was played vigorously. Evelyn Lenox sat upon the sofa, her arms resting upon the cabin table, her bright face positively alight with triumph. Maclaren stood before her with clenched hands and gnashing teeth. Arthur, the brother, was smoking a pipe and pretending to read a newspaper, leaving the conversation to his guest, who had no lack of words.
"Good G.o.d, Evelyn," he said, "you cannot mean to keep me here any longer--to-morrow"s my wedding day!"
She answered him very slowly.
"How interesting! I remember the time, not so long ago, when my wedding day was fixed--and postponed."
He did not heed the rebuke, but continued cravenly,--
"You do not seem to understand that your brother and yourself have perpetrated upon me an outrage which will make you detested in every country in Europe. Great Heaven! the whole town will laugh at me. I shan"t have a friend in the place; I shall be cut at every club, as I"m a living man."
The girl listened to him, her eyes sparkling with the excitement of it.
"Did you never stop to think," said she, "when you left America, like the coward you were, that people would laugh at me, too, and I should never be able to look my friends in the face again? Why, even in the newspapers they held me up to ridicule when my heart was breaking. You speak of suffering; well, I have suffered."
Her mood changed, as the mood of women does--suddenly. The feminine instinct warred against the actress, and prevailed. She began to weep hysterically, burying her head in her arms; and a painful silence fell on the man. He seemed to wait for her to speak; but when she did so, anger had succeeded, and she rose from her place and stamped her foot, while rage seemed to vibrate in her nerves.
"Why do I waste my time on you?" she cried; "you who are not worth an honest thought. Pshaw! "Lord Maclaren, ill.u.s.trious n.o.bleman and great sportsman""--she was quoting from an American paper--"go and tell them that for ten days you have humbled yourself to me, and have begged my pity on your knees. Go and tell them that my crew have held their sides when the parts have been changed, and you have been the woman. Oh, they shall know, don"t mistake that; your wife shall read it on her wedding tour. I will send it to her myself, I, who have brought the laugh to my side now, scion of a n.o.ble house. Go, and take the recollection of your picnic here as the best present I can give to you."
I was told that Maclaren looked at her for some moments in profound astonishment when she pointed to the cabin door. Then, without a word, he went on deck, to find the yacht"s boat manned and waiting for him. He said himself that many emotions filled him as he stepped off the yacht--anger at the outrage, desire for revenge, but chiefly the emotions of the thought, was there time to reach St. Peter"s for the wedding ceremony? He did not doubt that lies would save him from the American woman, if things so happened that he could reach England by the morning of the next day. But could he? Where was he? Where was he to be put ash.o.r.e? He asked the men at the oars these questions in a breath, standing up for one moment as the boat pushed off to shake his fist at the yacht, and cry, "D--n you all!" But the answer that he got did not rea.s.sure him. He was to be put ash.o.r.e, the seaman said, at Crotoy, the little town on a tongue of land in the bay of the Somme. There was a steamer thence once a day to Saint Valery, from which point he could reach Boulogne by rail. He realized in a moment that all his hope depended on catching the steamer. If she had not sailed, he would arrive at Boulogne before sunset, and, if need were, could get across by the night mail and a special train from Folkestone. But if she had sailed!
This possibility he dared not contemplate.
The men were now rowing rapidly towards the sh.o.r.e, whose sandy dunes and flat outlines were becoming marked above the sea-line. The yacht lay far out, drifting on a gla.s.sy mirror of water; the sun was sinking with great play of yellow and red fire in the arc of the west. Maclaren had then, however, no thought for Nature"s pictures, or for seascapes. One burning anxiety alone troubled him--had the steamer sailed? He offered the men ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred pounds if they would catch her.
The remark of one of them that she left on the top of the tide begot in him a mad eagerness to learn the hour of high-water; but none of those with him could remember it. He found himself swaying his body in rhythm with the oars as c.o.xswains do; or standing up to look at the white houses sh.o.r.ewards. Another half-hour"s rowing brought him a sight of the pier; he shouted out with a laugh that might have come from a jackal when he saw that the steamer was moored against it, and that smoke was pouring heavily from her funnels.
"Men," he said, "if you catch that boat, I"ll give you two hundred and fifty pounds!" and later on their lethargy moved him to such disjointed exclamations as "For the love of heaven, get on to it!" "Now, then, a little stronger--fine fellows, all of you--a marriage depends upon this." "I"ll give you a gold watch apiece, as I"m alive." "By----, she"s moving--no, she isn"t, there"s time yet, if you"ll put your backs on to it--time, time--oh, Lord, what a crawl, what a cursed crawl!"
If one had peered into the faces of the yachtsmen critically, one might have detected the ripples of smirks about their lips; but Maclaren could not take his eyes away from the steamer, and the import of the suppressed amus.e.m.e.nt was lost upon him. The little town of Crotoy, with the garish _etabliss.e.m.e.nt des bains_, the picturesque church, and the time-wrecked ramparts escarped by the ceaseless play of currents, was then not half a mile away; but a bell was ringing on the pier, and there was all the hurry and the press known in "one packet" or "one train"
towns. Those who had much to do did it slowly, that they might enjoy leisure to blow whistles or to shout; those who had little atoned by great displays of ineffective activity. Some ran wildly to and fro near the steamer; others bawled incomprehensible e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, and incited, both those who were to leave by the ship, and those who were not, to hurry, or they would be late. Presently the little pa.s.senger steamer whistled with a hoa.r.s.e and lowing shriek, and cast foam behind her wheels. Maclaren observed the motion, and cried out as a man in pain, waving his arms wildly. Those on sh.o.r.e mistook as much as they could see of his surprising signals for a parting salute to the vessel; and she left ten minutes after her time--without him.
He was hot from the battle of excitement, rivulets of perspiration trickling upon his face; but he had breath to curse the crew of the yacht"s boat for five minutes when he stepped ash.o.r.e; and the request of the c.o.xswain to drink his health stirred up uncounted gifts for oath-making within him. In a quarter of an hour he was raving about the town of Crotoy, threatening to do himself injury if a boat were not forthcoming to carry him to St. Valery, whence he could get train to Boulogne. But the day was nigh gone, and the local seamen were at their homes. Few cared for his commission, and the man who took it ultimately set him down just twenty minutes after the last train had left.
The accounts given in the society papers for the abandonment of the wedding between Lord Maclaren and the Hon. Christine King were many. The true one is found in the simple statement that his lordship did not reach England until the evening of the day which had been fixed for the ceremony. So the presents were returned--and I kept the pearls which were to have made the famous anchor bracelet. And when I think the matter over, I cannot wonder at Maclaren"s hatred of them, or of his wish that I should burn them.
"Sutton," he said, "I was more than a fool. I ought to have remembered that Evelyn Lenox was with me when I saw the piece of stuff similar to that I wanted you to make. Why, I got the very notion of it from her, and it was only when one of your idiots let a society journalist know what you were doing for me that she heard of the marriage, and of my being at Ramsgate."
But the rest of his remarks were purely personal.
THE WATCH AND THE SCIMITAR.
THE WATCH AND THE SCIMITAR.
The city of Algiers, the beautiful El Djzar, as the guide-book maker calls it, has long ceased to charm the true son of the East, _blase_ with the nomadic fulness of the ultimate Levant, or charged with those imaginary Oriental splendors which are nowhere writ so large as in the catalogues and advertis.e.m.e.nts of the later day upholsterer. This is not the fault of the new Icosium, as any student of the Moorish town knows well; nor is it to be laid to the account of the French usurpation, and that strange juncture of Frank and Fatma, which has brought the boulevard to the city of the Corsairs and banished Mohammed to the shadow of the Kasbah. Rather, it is the outcome of coupons and of co-operative enthusiasm, which sends the roamer to many lands, of which he learns the names, and amongst many people with whose customs he claims familiarity.
To know Algiers, something more than a three days" _pension_ in the Hotel de la Regence is necessary; though that is the temporal limit for many who return to Kensington or Mayfair to protest that "it is so French, you know." I can recollect well the monitions and advice which I received two years gone when I ventured a voyage to Burmah--in the matter of the ruby interest--and determined to see Cairo, Tunis, and the City of Mosques on my return westward. Many told me that I would do better to reach Jaffa and Jerusalem, others advised the seven churches of Asia; many spoke well of Rhodes; all agreed, whether they had been there or whether they had not, that Algiers was eaten up with Chauvinism, and scarce worthy a pa.s.sing call. Barisbroke at the club, who is always vigorous in persuading other people not to do things, summed it up in one of his characteristically inane jokes. "It"s had its Dey," said he, and buried himself in his paper as though the project ended then and there upon his own _ipse dixit_. This marked and decided consensus of opinion could have had but one result--it sent me to the town of Hercules at the first opportunity.
If the truth is to be told, the visit was in some part one of pleasure, but in the more part a question of sequins. I had done well in the remoter East, and had sent some fine parcels of rubies, sapphires, and pearls to Bond Street; but a side-wind of curiosity casting me up upon the sh.o.r.es of Tunis, I had bought there, in the house of a very remarkable Jew, a bauble whose rival in strange workmanship and splendor of effect I have not yet met with. It was, to describe it simply, the model of a Moorish scimitar perhaps four inches long, the sheath exquisitely formed of superb brilliants, the blade itself of platinum, and in the haft not only a strange medley of stones, but a little watch with a thin sheet of very fine pearl for a face, and a superb diamond as the cup of the hands. Although the jewels in this were worth perhaps five hundred pounds, the workmanship was so fine, and the whole bauble had such an original look, that I paid eight hundred pounds for it cheerfully, and thought myself lucky to get it at that. What is more to the point, however, is the fact that the hazard which gave me the possession of the scimitar sent me also to Algiers to hunt there for like curiosities--and in the end brought me a large knowledge of the Moorish town, and nearly cost me my life.
I had intended to stay in the town for three days, but on the very evening of my coming to the Hotel d"Orleans in the Boulevard de la Republique, I met a French lieutenant of artillery, a man by name Eugene Cha.s.saigne; an exceedingly pleasant fellow, and one who had some Arabic, but small appreciation of anything beyond the "to-day" of life. He laughed at my notion of buying anything in the upper city, and urged me not to waste time plodding in dirty bazaars and amongst still dirtier dealers. For himself his one idea was to be _dans le mouvement_; but he brought me to know, on the second day of my visit, a singularly docile Moor, Sidi ben Ahmed by name; and told me that if I still persisted in my intention, the fellow would serve well for courier, valet, or in any office I chose to place him. And in this he spoke no more than the truth, as I was very soon to prove.
I have always thought when recalling this sheep-like Moor to my recollection, that the Prophet had done him a very poor turn in locating him so far away from the blessings of company-promotion and rickety building societies. His face would have been his fortune at any public meeting; and as for thoroughness, his love of detail was amazing. Before I had been in his hands for twenty-four hours he knew me; being able to tell you precisely how much linen I carried, the number of gold pieces in my purse, my taste in fish and fruits, my object in coming to his country. And this was vexatious; for all the vendors of Benares ware fashioned in Birmingham, all the sellers of gaudy burnouses, the hucksters of the tawdriest carpets and the most flimsy scimitars, held concert on the steps of the hotel every time I showed my face within twenty paces of the door. Sidi alone was immobile, stolid "_Nom d"un chien_--they are _blagueurs_ all," said he; and I agreed with him.
If these things troubled my man, the jewel I had purchased in Tunis troubled him still more. How he learned that I had it heaven alone could tell; but he did not fail to come to me at _dejeuner_ each morning and to repeat with unfailing regularity the monition, "If Allah wills, the jewel is stolen." I used to tolerate this at first; but in the end he exasperated me; and upon the seventh morning I showed him the model and said emphatically, "Sidi, you will please to observe that Allah does not will the loss of the jewel--let us change the subject." He gave me no answer, but on the next morning I had from him the customary greeting--and the laugh was all upon his side, for the scimitar was gone.
I say that the laugh was with Sidi, but in very truth I do not believe that this worthy fellow ever laughed in his life. He possessed a stolid immobility of countenance that would have remained in repose even at the sound of the last trumpet. The intelligence which I conveyed to him, I doubt not with pathetic anger, and much bad language, moved him no more than the soft south wind moved the statue of the first Governor-General out by the mosque there. He examined my ravished bag with a provoking silence; muttered a few pessimistic sentences in Arabic; and then fell back upon the Koran and the plat.i.tudes of his prophet. If he had been an Englishman, I should have suspected him without hesitation; but he bore such a character, he had been so long a servant of the hotel, he was by his very stolidity so much above doubt, that this course was impossible; and being unable to accuse him, I bade him take me to the nearest bureau of police, that I might satisfy my conscience with the necessary farce.
This he did without a protest, but I saw that he looked upon me with a pitying gaze, as one looks upon a child that is talking nonsense.
Although I flatter myself that I concealed my annoyance under a placid exterior, this loss affected me more than I cared to tell. For one thing, the jewel was very valuable (I was certain that I could have obtained a thousand pounds for it in Bond Street); I was convinced, moreover, that I should hardly discover its fellow if I searched Europe through. During my stay at the Hotel d"Orleans I had kept it locked in a well-contrived leather pouch in my traveling trunk; and as this pouch had been opened with my own keys it was evident that the thief had access to my bedroom during the night--a conclusion which led me to think again of this stolid Moor, and to declare that the case against him was singularly convincing. So strong, in fact, were my suspicions that I made it my first care to go to the _maitre_ of the hotel and to demand satisfaction from him with all the justifiable indignation which fitted the case. When he heard my tale, his face would have given Rembrandt a study.
"How?" said he. "Monsieur is robbed, and _chez-moi_?"
I repeated that I was, and told him that if he did not recover the bauble in twenty-four hours, consequences would follow which would be disastrous to his establishment. Then I asked him frankly about the Moor Sidi; but he protested with tears in his eyes that he would as soon accuse his own mother. He did not deny that some one in his house might know something about it; and presently he had marshaled the whole of his servants in the central court, addressing them with the fierce accusation of a _juge d"instruction_. It is superfluous to add that we made no headway, and that all his "desolation" left me as far from the jewels I had lost as I was at the beginning of it.
From the hotel to the bureau of the police was an easy transition, but a very hopeless one. A number of extremely polite, and elaborately braided, officials heard me with interest and pity; and having covered some folios of paper with notes declared that nothing could be done. For themselves, their theory was that the Moor Sidi had been talking about my treasure, and that some other domestic in the Hotel de la Regence had opened my door while I slept and got possession of the ornament with little risk. But that any one should recover the property was in their idea a preposterous a.s.sumption.
"It is on its way to Paris," said one of them as he closed his note-book with a snap, "and there"s an end of it. We shall, without doubt, watch the servants of the hotel closely for some time, but that should not encourage you. It is possible that the man Mohammed, the porter of the place, may know something of the affair. We shall have his house searched to-day, but, my friend, _ne vous montez pas la tete_, we are not in Paris, and the upper town is worse than a beehive. I am afraid that your hope of seeing the thing again is small."
I was afraid so, too; but being accustomed to strange losses and to strange recoveries, I determined to venture something in the hazard, and to remain in Algiers for a few weeks, at any rate. The most difficult part of my work lay in my ignorance of the city, and in that matter Sidi alone could help me. Every day we went with measured and expectant tread through that labyrinth of fantastic and half-dark streets, where repulsive hags grin at the wickets below, and dark eyes coquette at the gratings above; every day we delved in booths and bazaars, we haggled with the jewel sellers, we bartered with the gold workers, but to no purpose. I had come to think at last that the loss was not worth further trouble; and had made up my mind to return to London, when I recollected with some self-reproach that I had as yet neglected one of the very simplest means to grapple with the occasion--that I had, in fact, offered no reward for the recovery of the jeweled scimitar, and to this omission owed, I did not doubt, the utter absence of clue or conviction.