It was a radiant night. In the clear sky the stars shone brilliantly, looking down upon the persistent convulsions of the little cha.s.seur, who had not yet recovered from his attack of merriment on learning who Mrs. Greyne was. The sea, quite calm now that the great novelist was no longer upon it, lapped softly along the curving sh.o.r.es of the bay. The palm-trees of the town garden where the band plays on warm evenings waved lazily in the soft and scented breeze. The hooded figures of the Arabs lounged against the stone wall that girdles the sea-front. In the brilliantly-illuminated restaurants the rich French population gathered about the little tables, while the withered beggars stared in upon the oyster sh.e.l.ls, the champagne bottles, and the feathers in the women"s audacious hats.
When Mrs. Greyne emerged upon the pavement before the Grand Hotel, attended by Mrs. Forbes and the guide, she paused for a moment, and cast a searching glance upon the fairy scene. In this voluptuous evening and strange environment life seemed oddly dreamlike. She scarcely felt like Mrs. Greyne. Possibly Mrs. Forbes also felt unlike herself, for she suddenly placed one hand upon her left side, and tottered. Abdallah Jack supported her. She screamed aloud.
"Madam!" she said. "It is the vertigo. I am overtook!"
She was really ill; her face, indeed, became the colour of a plover"s egg.
"Let me go to bed, madam," she implored. "It is the vertigo, madam. I am overtook!"
Under ordinary circ.u.mstances Mrs. Greyne would have prescribed a dose of Kasbah air, but to-night she felt strange, and she wanted strangeness.
Mrs. Forbes with the vertigo, in a small carriage, would be inappropriate. She, therefore, bade her retire, mounted into the vehicle with Abdallah Jack, and was quickly driven away, her bonnet strings floating upon the winsome wind.
"You know my husband?" she asked softly of the guide.
Abdallah Jack replied in French that he rather thought he did.
"How is he looking?" continued Mrs. Greyne in a slightly yearning voice.
"My Eustace!" she added to herself, "my devoted one!"
"Monsieur Greyne is pale as washed linen upon the Kasbah wall," replied Abdallah Jack, lighting a cigarette, and wreathing the great novelist in its grey-blue smoke. "He is thin as the Spahi"s lance, he is nervous as the leaves of the eucalyptus-tree when the winds blow from the north."
Mrs. Greyne was seriously perturbed.
"Would I had come before!" she murmured, with serious self-reproach.
"Monsieur Greyne is worse than all the English," pursued Abdallah Jack in a voice that sounded to Mrs. Greyne decidedly sinister. "He is worse than the tourists of Rook, who laugh in the doorways of the mosques and twine in their hair the dried lizards of the Sahara. Even the guide of Rook rejected him. I only would undertake him because I am full of evil."
Mrs. Greyne began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, and to wish she had not been so ready to pander to Mrs. Forbes" vertigo. She stole a sidelong glance at her strange companion. The carriage was small. The end of his bristling black moustache was very near. What he said of Mr. Greyne did not disturb her, because she knew that her Eustace had sacrificed his reputation to do her service; but what he said about himself was not rea.s.suring.
"I think you must be doing yourself an injustice," she said in a rather agitated voice.
"Madame?"
"I do not believe you are so bad as you imply," she continued.
The carriage turned with a jerk out of the brilliantly-lighted thoroughfare that runs along the sea into a narrow side street, crowded with native Jews, and dark with shadows.
"Madame does not know me."
The exact truth of this observation struck home, like a dagger, to the mind of Mrs. Greyne.
"I am a wicked person," added Abdallah Jack, with a profound conviction.
"That is why Monsieur Greyne chose me as his guide."
The novelist began to quake. Her chocolate brocade fluttered. Was she herself to learn at first hand, and on her first evening in Africa, enough about African frailty to last her for the rest of her life? And how much more of life would remain to her after her stock of knowledge had been thus increased? The carriage turned into a second side street, narrower and darker than the last.
"Are we going right?" she said apprehensively.
"No, madame; we are going wrong--we are going to the wicked part of the city."
"But--but--you are sure Mr. Greyne will be there?"
Abdallah Jack laughed sardonically.
"Monsieur Greyne is never anywhere else. Monsieur Greyne is wicked as is a mad Touareg of the desert."
"I don"t think you quite understand my husband," said Mrs. Greyne, feeling in duty bound to stand up for her poor, maligned Eustace.
"Whatever he may have done he has done at my special request."
"Madame says?"
"I say that in all his proceedings while in Algiers Mr. Greyne has been acting under my directions."
Abdallah Jack fixed his enormous eyes steadily upon her.
"You are his wife, and told him to come here, and to do as he has done?"
"Ye-yes," faltered Mrs. Greyne, for the first time in her life feeling as if she were being escorted towards the criminal dock by a jailer with Puritan tendencies.
"Then it is true what they say on the sh.o.r.es of the great ca.n.a.l," he remarked composedly.
"What do they say?" inquired Mrs. Greyne.
"That England is a land of female devils," returned the guide as the carriage plunged into a filthy alley, between two rows of blind houses, and began to ascend a steep hill.
Mrs. Greyne gasped. She opened her lips to protest vigorously, but her head swam--either from indignation or from fatigue--and she could not utter a word. The horses mounted like cats upward into the dense blackness, from which dropped down the faint sounds of squealing music and of hoa.r.s.e cries and laughter. The wheels bounded over the stones, sank into the deep ruts, sc.r.a.ped against the sides of the unlighted houses. And Abdallah Jack sat staring at Mrs. Greyne as an English clergyman"s wife might stare at the appalling rites of some deadly cannibal encountered in a far-off land, with a stony wonder, a sort of paralysed curiosity.
Suddenly the carriage stopped on a piece of waste land covered with small pebbles. Abdallah Jack sprang out.
"Why do we stop?" said Mrs. Greyne, turning as pale as ashes.
"The carriage can go no farther. Madame must walk."
Mrs. Greyne began to tremble.
"We are to leave the coachman?"
"I shall escort madame, alone."
The great novelist"s tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She felt like a Merrin"s exercise-book, every leaf of which was covered with African frailty. However, there was no help for it. She had to descend, and stand among the pebbles.
"Where are we going?"
Abdallah Jack waved his hand towards a stone rampart dimly seen in the faint light that emanated from the starry sky.
"Down there into the alley of the Dead Dervishes."
Mrs. Greyne could not repress a cry of horror. At that moment she would have given a thousand pounds to have Mrs. Forbes at her side.