"That he forced her to live the life of a Mussulman woman. Why, what else could you expect, when you come to look at it?"
"But an American girl----"
"A woman who marries gives herself to her husband"s nation as well as to her husband, doesn"t she--especially if he"s an Arab? Only, thank G.o.d, it happens to very few European girls, except of the cla.s.s that doesn"t so much matter. Think of it. This Ben Halim, a Spahi officer, falls dead in love with a girl when he"s on leave in Paris. He feels he must have her. He can get her only by marriage. They"re as subtle as the devil, even the best of them, these Arabs. He"d have to promise the girl anything she wanted, or lose her. Naturally he wouldn"t give it away that he meant to veil her and clap her into a harem the minute he got her home. If he"d even hinted anything of that sort she wouldn"t have stirred a step. But for a Mussulman to let his wife walk the streets unveiled, like a Roumia, or some woman of easy virtue, would be a horrible disgrace to them both. His relations and friends would cut him, and hoot her at sight. The more he loved his wife, the less likely he"d be to keep a promise, made in a different world. It wouldn"t be human nature--Arab human nature--to keep it. Besides, they have the jealousy of the tiger, these Eastern fellows. It"s a madness."
"Then perhaps no one ever knew, out here, that the man had brought home a foreign wife?"
"Almost surely not. No European, that is. Arabs might know--through their women. There"s nothing that pa.s.ses which they can"t find out. How they do it, who can tell? Their ways are as mysterious as everything else here, except the lives of us _hiverneurs_, who don"t even try very hard to hide our own scandals when we have any. But no Arab could be persuaded or forced to betray another Arab to a European, unless for motives of revenge. For love or hate, they stand together. In virtues and vices they"re absolutely different from Europeans. And if Ben Halim doesn"t want anybody, not excepting his wife"s sister, to get news of his wife, why, it may be difficult to get it, that"s all I say. Going to Miss Ray"s hotel, you could see something of that Arab street close by, on the fringe of the Kasbah--which is what they call, not the old fort alone, but the whole Arab town."
"Yes. I saw the queer white houses, huddled together, that looked like blank walls only broken by a door, with here and there a barred window."
"Well, what I mean is that it"s almost impossible for any European to learn what goes on behind those blank walls and those little square holes, in respectable houses. But we"ll hope for the best. And here we are at my place. I"m rather proud of it."
They had come to the arched gateway of a white-walled garden. The sun had set fire to the gold of some sunken Arab lettering over the central arch, so that each broken line darted forth its separate flame. "Djenan el Djouad; House of the n.o.bleman," Nevill translated. "It was built for the great confidant of a particularly wicked old Dey of Algiers, in sixteen hundred and something, and the place had been allowed to fall into ruin when my uncle bought it, about twenty or thirty years ago.
There was a romance in his life, I believe. He came to Algiers for his health, as a young man, meaning to stay only a few months, but fell in love with a face which he happened to catch a glimpse of, under a veil that disarranged itself--on purpose or by accident--in a carriage belonging to a rich Arab. Because of that face he remained in Algiers, bought this house, spent years in restoring it, exactly in Arab style, and making a beautiful garden out of his fifteen or sixteen acres.
Whether he ever got to know the owner of the face, history doesn"t state: my uncle was as secretive as he was romantic. But odd things have been said. I expect they"re still said, behind my back. And they"re borne out, I"m bound to confess, by the beauty of the decorations in that part of the house intended for the ladies. Whether it was ever occupied in Uncle James"s day, n.o.body can tell; but Aunt Caroline, his sister, who has the best rooms there now, vows she"s seen the ghost of a lovely being, all spangled gauze and jewels, with silver khal-khal, or anklets, that tinkle as she moves. I a.s.sure my aunt it must be a dream, come to punish her for indulging in two goes of her favourite sweet at dinner; but in my heart I shouldn"t wonder if it"s true. The whole lot of us, in our family, are romantic and superst.i.tious. We can"t help it and don"t want to help it, though we suffer for our foolishness often enough, goodness knows."
The scent of orange blossoms and acacias was poignantly sweet, as the car pa.s.sed an Arab lodge, and wound slowly up an avenue cut through a grove of blossoming trees. The utmost pains had been taken in the laying out of the garden, but an effect of carelessness had been preserved. The place seemed a fairy tangle of white and purple lilacs, gold-dripping laburnums, acacias with festoons of pearl, roses looping from orange tree to mimosa, and a hundred gorgeous tropical flowers like painted birds and b.u.t.terflies. In shadowed nooks under dark cypresses, glimmered arum lilies, sparkling with the diamond dew that sprayed from carved marble fountains, centuries old; and low seats of marble mosaiced with rare tiles stood under magnolia trees or arbours of wistaria. Giant cypresses, tall and dark as a band of Genii, marched in double line on either side the avenue as it straightened and turned towards the house.
White in the distance where that black procession halted, glittered the old Arab palace, built in one long facade, and other facades smaller, less regular, looking like so many huge blocks of marble grouped together. Over one of these blocks fell a crimson torrent of bougainvillaea; another was veiled with white roses and purple clematis; a third was showered with the gold of some strange tropical creeper that Stephen did not know.
On the roof of brown and dark-green tiles, the sunlight poured, making each tile l.u.s.trous as the scale of a serpent, and all along the edge grew tiny flowers and gra.s.ses, springing out of interstices to wave filmy threads of pink and gold.
The princ.i.p.al facade was blank as a wall, save for a few small, mysterious windows, barred with _grilles_ of iron, green with age; but on the other facades were quaint recessed balconies, under projecting roofs supported with beams of cedar; and the door, presently opened by an Arab servant, was very old too, made of oak covered with an armour of greenish copper.
Even when it had closed behind Stephen and Nevill, they were not yet in the house, but in a large court with a ceiling of carved and painted cedar-wood supported by marble pillars of extreme lightness and grace.
In front, this court was open, looking on to an inner garden with a fountain more delicate of design than those Stephen had seen outside.
The three walls of the court were patterned all over with ancient tiles rare as some faded Spanish brocade in a cathedral, and along their length ran low seats where in old days sat slaves awaiting orders from their master.
Out from this court they walked through a kind of pillared cloister, and the facades of the house as they pa.s.sed on, were beautiful in pure simplicity of line; so white, they seemed to turn the sun on them to moonlight; so jewelled with bands and plaques of lovely tiles, that they were like snowy shoulders of a woman hung with necklaces of precious stones.
By the time they had left this cloistered garden and threaded their way indoors, Stephen had lost his bearings completely. He was convinced that, once in, he should never find the clue which would guide him out again as he had come. There was another garden court, much larger than the first, and this, Nevill said, had been the garden of the palace-women in days of old. It had a fountain whose black marble basin was fringed with papyrus, and filled with pink, blue, and white water lilies, from under whose flat dark pads glimmered the backs of darting goldfish. Three walls of this garden had low doorways with cunningly carved doors of cedar-wood, and small, iron-barred windows festooned with the biggest roses Stephen had ever seen; but the fourth side was formed by an immense loggia with a dais at the back, and an open-fronted room at either end. Walls and floor of this loggia were tiled, and barred windows on either side the dais looked far down over a world which seemed all sky, sea, and garden. One of the little open rooms was hung with Persian prayer-rugs which Stephen thought were like fading rainbows seen through a mist; and there were queer old tinselled pictures such as good Moslems love: Borak, the steed of the prophet, half winged woman, half horse; the Prophet"s uncle engaged in mighty battle; the Prophet"s favourite daughter, Fatma-Zora, daintily eating her sacred breakfast. The other room at the opposite end of the tiled loggia was fitted up, Moorish fashion, for the making of coffee; walls and ceiling carved, gilded, and painted in brilliant colours; the floor tiled with the charming "windmill" pattern; many shelves adorned with countless little coffee cups in silver standards; with copper and bra.s.s utensils of all imaginable kinds; and in a gilded recess was a curious apparatus for boiling water.
Nevill Caird displayed his treasures and the beauties of his domain with an ingenuous pride, delighted at every word of appreciation, stopping Stephen here and there to point out something of which he was fond, explaining the value of certain old tiles from the point of view of an expert, and gladly lingering to answer every question. Some day, he said, he was going to write a book about tiles, a book which should have wonderful ill.u.s.trations.
"Do you really like it all?" he asked, as Stephen looked out from a barred window of the loggia, over the wide view.
"I never even imagined anything so fantastically beautiful," Stephen returned warmly. "You ought to be happy, even if you could never go outside your own house and gardens. There"s nothing to touch this on the Riviera. It"s a palace of the "Arabian Nights.""
"There was a palace in the "Arabian Nights," if you remember," said Nevill, "where everything was perfect except one thing. Its master was miserable because he couldn"t get that thing."
"The Roc"s egg, of Aladdin"s palace," Stephen recalled. "Do you lack a Roc"s egg for yours?"
"The equivalent," said Nevill. "The one thing which I want, and don"t seem likely to get, though I haven"t quite given up hope. It"s a woman.
And she doesn"t want me--or my palace. I"ll tell you about her some day--soon, perhaps. And maybe you"ll see her. But never mind my troubles for the moment. I can put them out of my mind with comparative ease, in the pleasure of welcoming you. Now we"ll go indoors. You haven"t an idea what the house is like yet. By the way, I nearly forgot this chap."
He put his hand into the pocket of his grey flannel coat, and pulled out a green frog, wrapped in a lettuce leaf which was inadequate as a garment, but a perfect match as to colour.
"I bought him on the way down to meet you," Nevill explained. "Saw an Arab kid trying to sell him in the street, poor little beast. Thought it would be a friendly act to bring him here to join my happy family, which is large and varied. I don"t remember anybody living in this fountain who"s likely to eat him, or be eaten by him."
Down went the frog on the wide rim of the marble fountain, and sat there, meditatively, with a dawning expression of contentment, so Stephen fancied, on his green face. He looked, Stephen thought, as if he were trying to forget a troubled past, and as if his new home with all its unexplored mysteries of reeds and lily pads were wondrously to his liking.
"I wish you"d name that person after me," said Stephen. "You"re being very good to both of us,--taking us out of Hades into Paradise."
"Come along in," was Nevill Caird"s only answer. But he walked into the house with his hand on Stephen"s shoulder.
IX
Djenan El Djouad was a labyrinth. Stephen Knight abandoned all attempt at keeping a mental clue before he had reached the drawing-room. Nevill led him there by way of many tile-paved corridors, lit by hanging Arab lamps suspended from roofs of arabesqued cedar-wood. They went up or down marble steps, into quaint little alcoved rooms furnished with nothing but divans and low tables or dower chests crusted with Syrian mother-o"-pearl, on into rooms where brocade-hung walls were covered with Arab musical instruments of all kinds, or long-necked Moorish guns patterned with silver, ivory and coral. Here and there as they pa.s.sed, were garden glimpses, between embroidered curtains, looking through windows always barred with greenish wrought iron, so old as to be rarely beautiful; and some small windows had no curtains, but were thickly frilled outside with the violent crimson of bougainvillaea, or fringed with ta.s.sels of wistaria, loop on loop of amethysts. High above these windows, which framed flowery pictures, were other windows, little and jewelled, mere plaques of filigree workmanship, fine as carved ivory or silver lace, and lined with coloured gla.s.s of delicate tints--gold, lilac, and pale rose.
"Here"s the drawing-room at last," said Nevill, "and here"s my aunt."
"If you can call it a drawing-room," objected a gently complaining voice. "A filled-in court, where ghosts of murdered slaves come and moan, while you have your tea. How do you do, Mr. Knight? I"m delighted you"ve taken pity on Nevill. He"s never so happy as when he"s showing a new friend the house--except when he"s obtained an old tile, or a new monster of some sort, for his collection."
"In me, he kills two birds with one stone," said Stephen, smiling, as he shook the hand of a tiny lady who looked rather like an elderly fairy disguised in a cap, that could have been born nowhere except north of the Tweed.
She had delicate little features which had been made to fit a pretty child, and had never grown up. Her hair, of a reddish yellow, had faded to a yellowish white, which by a faint fillip of the imagination could be made to seem golden in some lights. Her eyes were large and round, and of a china-blue colour; her eyebrows so arched as to give her an expression of perpetual surprise, her forehead full, her cheekbones high and pink, her small, pursed mouth of the kind which prefers to hide a sense of humour, and then astonish people with it when they have ceased to believe in its existence. If her complexion had not been netted all over with a lacework of infinitesimal wrinkles, she would have looked like a little girl dressed up for an old lady. She had a ribbon of the MacGregor tartan on her cap, and an uncompromising cairngorm fastened her fichu of valuable point lace. A figure more out of place than hers in an ancient Arab palace of Algiers it would be impossible to conceive; yet it was a pleasant figure to see there, and Stephen knew that he was going to like Nevill"s Aunt Caroline, Lady MacGregor.
"I wish you looked more of a monster than you do," said she, "because you might frighten the ghosts. We"re eaten up with them, the way some folk in old houses are with rats. Nearly all of them slaves, too, so there"s no variety, except that some are female. I"ve given you the room with the prettiest ghosts, but if you"re not the seventh son of a seventh son, you may not see or even hear them."
"Does Nevill see or hear?" asked Stephen.
"As much as Aunt Caroline does, if the truth were known," answered her nephew. "Only she couldn"t be happy unless she had a grievance. Here she wanted to choose an original and suitable one, so she hit upon ghosts--the ghosts of slaves murdered by a cruel master."
"Hit upon them, indeed!" she echoed indignantly, making her knitting needles click, a movement which displayed her pretty, miniature hands, half hidden in lace ruffles. "As if they hadn"t gone through enough, in flesh and blood, poor creatures! Some of them may have been my countrymen, captured on the seas by those horrid pirates."
"Who was the cruel master?" Stephen wanted to know, still smiling, because it was almost impossible not to smile at Lady MacGregor.
"Not my brother James, I"m glad to say," she quickly replied. "It was about three hundred years before his time. And though he had some quite irritating tricks as a young man, murdering slaves wasn"t one of them.
To be sure, they tell strange tales of him here, as I make no doubt Nevill has already mentioned, because he"s immoral enough to be proud of what he calls the romance. I mean the story of the beautiful Arab lady, whom James is supposed to have stolen from her rightful husband--that is, if an Arab can be rightful--and hidden in this house far many a year, till at last she died, after the search for her had long, long gone by."
"You"re as proud of the romance as I am, or you wouldn"t be at such pains to repeat it to everybody, pretending to think I"ve already told it," said Nevill. "But I"m going to show Knight his quarters. Pretty or plain, there are no ghosts here that will hurt him. And then we"ll have lunch, for which he"s starving."
Stephen"s quarters consisted of a bedroom (furnished in Tunisian style, with an imposing four-poster of green and gold ornamented with a gilded, sacred cow under a crown) and a sitting room gay with colourful decorations imported from Morocco. These rooms opened upon a wide covered balcony screened by a carved wooden lattice and from the balcony Stephen could look over hills, near and far, dotted with white villas that lay like resting gulls on the green wave of verdure which cascaded down to join the blue waves of the sea. Up from that far blueness drifted on the wind a murmurous sound like aeolian harps, mingled with the tinkle of fairy mandolins in the fountain of the court below.
At luncheon, in a dining-room that opened on to a white-walled garden where only lilies of all kinds grew, to Stephen"s amazement two Highlanders in kilts stood behind his hostess"s chair. They were young, exactly alike, and of precisely the same height, six foot two at least.
"No, you are not dreaming them, Mr. Knight," announced Lady MacGregor, evidently delighted with the admiring surprise in the look he bestowed upon these images. "And you"re quite right. They _are_ twins. I may as well break it to you now, as I had to do to Nevill when he invited me to come to Algiers and straighten out his housekeeping accounts: they play Ruth to my Naomi. Whither I go, they go also, even to the door of the bathroom, where they carry my towels, for I have no other maid than they."
Stephen could not help glancing at the two giants, expecting to see some involuntary quiver of eye or nostril answer electrically to this frank revelation of their office; but their countenances (impossible to think of as mere faces) remained expressionless as if carved in stone. Lady MacGregor took nothing from Mohammed and the other Kabyle servant who waited on Nevill and Stephen. Everything for her was handed to one of the Highlanders, who gravely pa.s.sed on the dish to their mistress. If she refused a _plat_ favoured by them, instead of carrying it away, the giants in kilts silently but firmly pressed it upon her acceptance, until in self-defence she seized some of the undesired food, and ate it under their watchful eyes.
During the meal a sudden thunderstorm boiled up out of the sea: the sky became a vast brazen bowl, and a strange, coppery twilight bleached the lilies in the white garden to a supernatural pallor. The room, with its embroidered Moorish hangings, darkened to a rich gloom; but Mohammed touched a b.u.t.ton on the wall, and all the quaint old Arab lamps that stood in corners, or hung suspended from the cedar roof, flashed out cunningly concealed electric lights. At the same moment, there began a great howling outside the door. Mohammed sprang to open it, and in poured a wave of animals. Stephen hastily counted five dogs; a collie, a white deerhound, a Dandy Dinmont, and a mother and child of unknown race, which he afterwards learned was Kabyle, a breed beloved of mountain men and desert tent-dwellers. In front of the dogs bounded a small African monkey, who leaped to the back of Nevill"s chair, and behind them toddled with awkward grace a baby panther, a mere ball of yellow silk.
"They don"t like the thunder, poor dears," Nevill apologised. "That"s why they howled, for they"re wonderfully polite people really. They always come at the end of lunch. Aunt Caroline won"t invite them to dinner, because then she sometimes wears fluffy things about which she has a foolish vanity. The collie is Angus"s. The deerhound is Hamish"s.
The dandy is hers. The two Kabyles are Mohammed"s, and the flotsam and jetsam is mine. There"s a great deal more of it out of doors, but this is all that gets into the dining-room except by accident. And I expect you think we are a very queer family."