That limousine utterly routed the tiny little qualm which had been furtively worming into Arlee\'s thrill of adventure. Nothing very strange or out-of-the-way, she thought, could be connected with such a modern car; it presented every symptom of effete civilization. Against the upholstery of delicate gray flamed the scarlet poinsettias hanging in wall vases of crystal overlaid with silver tracery; the mirror which confronted her was framed in silver, and beneath it a tiny cabinet revealed a frivolous store of powders and pins and scents. Decidedly the Oriental widow of said sequestration had a car very much up to times. The only difference which it presented from the cars of any modern city or of any modern lady was in the smallness of the window panes, whose contracted size confirmed the stories of the restrictions which Arlee had been told were imposed upon Moslem ladies by even those emancipated masculine relatives who conceded cars.
She peered out of the diminutive windows at the throng of life in the unquiet streets as they halted for the passing of a camel laden with bricks and stones from a demolished building; the poor thing teetered precariously past under such a back-breaking load that the girl felt it would have been a mercy to add the last straw and be done with it. After it bobbed what was apparently an animated load of hay, so completely were this other camel\'s legs hidden by his smothering burden.
Then the car shot impatiently forward, passing a dog cart full of fair-haired English children, the youngest clasped in the arms of a dark-skinned nurse, and behind the cart ran an indefatigable sais, bare-legged and sinewy, his red headdress and gold-embroidered jacket and blue bloomers flashing in the sun. On the sidewalk a party of American tourists were capitulating to a post-card vender, and ahead of them a victoria load of German sightseers careened around the corner in the charge of a determined dragoman.
Arlee smiled in happy superiority over these mere outsiders. She was not going about the beaten track, peeping at mosques and tombs and bazaars and windows; she was penetrating into the real life of this fascinating city, getting behind the grills and veils to glimpse the inner secrets.
She thought, with a deepening of the sparkle in her blue eyes and a defiant lifting of the pointed chin, of a certain sandy-haired young Englishman and how wrong and reasonless and narrow and jealous were his strictures upon her politeness to young Turks, and she thought with a sense of vindicated pride of how thoroughly that nice young man who had managed to introduce himself last night had endorsed her views. Americans understood. And then her thoughts lingered about Billy and she caught herself wondering just how much he did mean about coming up the Nile again. For upon happening to meet Billy that morning—Billy had devoted two hours and a half to the accident of that happening!—he had joyously mentioned that he was trying to buy out another man\'s berth upon that boat. It wasn\'t so much his wanting to come that was droll—teasing sprites of girls with peach-blossom prettiness are not unwonted to the thunder of pursuing feet—but the frank and cheery way he had of announcing it. Not many men had the courage of their desires. Not any men that little Miss Arlee had yet met had the frankness of such courage. And because all women love the adventurous spirit and are woefully disappointed in its masculine manifestations, she felt a gay little eagerness which she would have refused to own. It would be rather fun to see more of him—on the Nile—while Robert Falconer was sulking away in Cairo. And then when she returned she would surprise and confound that misguided young Englishman with her unexpected—to him—presence at the Khedive\'s ball. And after that—but her thoughts were lost in haziness then. Only the ball stood out distinct and glittering and fairylike.
Thinking all these brightly revengeful thoughts she had been oblivious to the many turnings of the motor, though it had occurred to her that they were taking more time than the car had needed to appear, and now she looked out the window and saw that they were in a narrow street lined with narrow houses, whose upper stories, slightly projecting in little bays, all presented the elaborately grilled fa?ades of mashrubiyeh work which announced the barred quarters of the women, the haremlik.
Arlee loved to conjure up a romantic thrill for the mysterious East by reflecting that behind these obscuring screens were women of all ages and conditions, neglected wives and youthful favorites, eager girls and revolting brides, whose myriad eyes, bright or dull or gay or bitter, were peering into the tiny, cleverly arranged mirrors which gave them a tilted view of the streets. It was the sense of these watching eyes, these hidden women, which made those screened windows so stirring to her young imagination.
The motor whirled out of the narrow street and into one that was much wider and lined by houses that were detached and separated, apparently, by gardens, for there was a frequent waving of palms over the high walls which lined the road. The street was empty of all except an old orange vender, shuffling slowly along, with a cartwheel of a tray on her head, piled with yellow fruit shining vividly in the hot sun. The quiet and the solitude gave a sense of distance from the teeming bazaars and tourist-ridden haunts, which breathed of seclusion and aloofness.
The car stopped and Arlee stepped out before a great house of ancient stone which rose sharply from the street. A high, pointed doorway, elaborately carved, was before her, arching over a dark wooden door heavily studded with nails. Overhead jutted the little balconies of mashrubiyeh. She had no more than a swift impression of the old fa?ade, for immediately a doorkeeper, very vivid in his Oriental blue robes and his English yellow leather Oxfords, flung open the heavy door.
Stepping across the threshold, with a sudden excited quickening of the senses, in which so many things were mingled that the misgiving there had scarcely time to make itself felt, Arlee found herself in a spacious vestibule, marble floored and inlaid with brilliant tile. She had just a glimpse of an inner court between the high arches opposite, and then her attention was claimed by Captain Kerissen, who sprang forward with a flash of welcome in his eyes that was like a leap of palpable light.
"You are come!" he said, in a voice which was that of a man almost incredulous of his good fortune. Then he bowed very formally in his best military fashion, straight-backed from the waist, heels stiffly together. "I welcome you," he said. "My sister is rejoiced.... This stair—if you please."
He waved to a stairway on the left, a small, steep affair, which Arlee ascended slowly, a sense of strangeness mounting with her, in spite of her confident bearing. She had not realized how odd it would feel to be in this foreign house with the Captain at her heels.
There was a door at the top of the stairs standing open into a long, spacious room which seemed shrouded in twilight after the sunflooded court. One entire side of the room was a brown, lace-like screen of mashrubiyeh windows; wide divans stretched beside them, and at the end of the room, facing Arlee, was a throne-like chair raised on a small dais and canopied with heavy silks.
By one of the windows a woman was squatting, a short, stout, turbaned figure, striking a few notes on a tambourine and crooning softly to herself in a low guttural. She raised her head without rising, to look at the entering couple, and for a startled second Arlee had the half hysterical fear that this squatting soloist was the triste and aristocratic representative of the haut-monde of Moslem which the Captain had brought her to see, but the next instant another figure appeared in a doorway and came slowly toward them.
Flying to the winds went Arlee\'s anticipations of somber elegance. She saw the most amazingly vivid creature that she had ever laid eyes on—a woman, young, though not in her first youth, penciled, powdered, painted, her hair a brilliant red, her gown a brilliant green. After the first shock of scattering amazement, Arlee became intensely aware of a pair of yellow-brown eyes confronting her with a faintly smiling and rather mocking interrogation. The dark of kohl about the eyes emphasized a certain slant diablérie of line and a faint penciling connected with the high and supercilious arch of the brows. Henna flamed on the pointed tips of the fingers blazoned with glittering rings, and Arlee fancied the brilliance of the hair was due to this same generous assistance of nature.
"My soul!" thought the girl swiftly, "they do get themselves up!"
The Captain had stepped forward, speaking quickly in Turkish, with a hard-sounding rattle of words. The sister glanced at him with a deepening of that curious air of mockery and let fall two words in the same tongue. Then she turned to Arlee.
"Je suis enchantée—d\'avoir cet honneur—cet honneur inattendu——"
She did not look remarkably enchanted, however. The eyes that played appraisingly over her pretty caller had a quality of curious hardness, of race hostility, perhaps, the antagonism of the East for the West, the Old for the New. Not all the modernity of clothes, of manners, of language, affected what Arlee felt intensely as the strange, vivid foreignness of her.
"My sister does not speak English—she has not the occasion," the Captain was quickly explaining.
"Gracious" thought Arlee, in dismay. She had no illusions about her French; it did very well in a shop or a restaurant, but it was apt to peeter out feebly in polite conversation. Certainly it was no vessel for voyaging in untried seas. There were simply loads of things, she thought discouragedly, the things she wanted most to ask, that she would not be able to find words for.
Aloud she was saying, "I am so glad to have the honor of being here. I am only sorry that my French is so bad. But perhaps you can understand——"
"I understand," assented the Turkish woman, faintly smiling.
The Captain had brought forward little gilt chairs of a French design which seemed oddly out of place in this room of the East, and the three seated themselves. Out of place, too, seemed the grand piano which Arlee\'s eyes, roving now past her hostess, discovered for the first time.
"It was so kind of you," began Arlee again as the silence seemed to be politely waiting upon her, "to send your automobile for me."
"Ah—my automobile!" echoed the woman on a higher note, and laughed, with a flash of white teeth between carmined lips. "It pleased you?"
"Oh, yes, it is splendid!" the girl declared, in sincere praise. "It is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen."
"I enjoy it very much—that automobile!" said the other, again laughing, with a quick turn of her eyes toward the brother.
Negligently, rather caressingly, the young man murmured a few Turkish words. She shrugged and leaned back in her chair, the flash of animation gone. "And Cairo—that pleases you?" she asked of Arlee.
Stumbling a little in her French, but resolutely rushing over the difficulties, Arlee launched into the expression of how very much it pleased her. Everything was beautiful to her. The color, the sky, the mosques, the minarets, the Nile, the pyramids—they were all wonderful. And the view from the Great Pyramid—and then she stopped, wondering if that were not beyond her hostess\'s experience.
In confirmation of the thought the Turkish lady smiled, with an effect of disdain. "Ascend the pyramids—that is indeed too much for us," she said. "But nothing is too much for you Americans—no?"
Her curious glance traveled slowly from Arlee\'s flushed and lovely face, under the rose-crowned hat, down over the filmy white gown and white-gloved hands clasping an ivory card case, to the small, white-shod feet and silken ankles. Arlee did not resent the deliberate scrutiny; in coming to gaze she had been offering herself to be gazed upon, and she was conscious that the three of them presented a most piquant group in this dim and spacious old room of the East—the modern American girl, the cosmopolitan young officer in his vivid uniform, and this sequestered woman, of a period of transition where the kohl and henna of the odalisque contrasted with a coiffure and gown from Paris.
Slowly and disconnectedly the uninspiring conversation progressed. Once, when it appeared halted forever, Arlee cast a helpless look at the Captain and intercepted a sharp glance at his sister. Indeed, Arlee thought, that sister was not distinguishing herself by her grateful courtesy to this guest who was brightening the tristesse of her secluded day, but perhaps this was due to her Oriental languor or the limitations of their medium of speech.
It was a relief to have the Captain suggest music. At their polite insistence Arlee went to the piano and did her best with a piece of MacDowell. Then the sister took her turn, and to her surprise Arlee found herself listening to an exquisite interpretation of some of the most difficult of Brahms. The beringed and tinted fingers touched the notes with rare delicacy, and brought from the piano a quality so vivid and poignant in appeal that Arlee could dream that here the player\'s very life and heart were finding their real expression.
The last note fell softly into silence, and with her hands still on the keys the woman looked up over her shoulder at her brother, looked with an intentness oddly provocative and prolonged. And for the first time Arlee caught the quality of sudden and unforeseen attraction in her, and realized that this insolence of color, this flaunting hair and painted mouth might have their place in some scheme of allurement outside her own standards.... And then suddenly she felt queerly sorry for her, touched by the quick jarring bitterness of a chord the woman suddenly struck, drowning the laughing words the Captain had murmured to her.... Arlee felt vaguely indignant at him. No one wanted to have jokes tossed at her when she had just poured her heart out in music.
The Captain was on his feet, making his adieux. Now that the ladies were acquainted, he would leave them to discuss the modes and other feminine interests. He wished Miss Beecher a delightful trip upon the Nile and hoped to see her upon her return, and she could be sure that everything would be arranged for her. When she had had her tea and wished to leave, the motor would return her to the hotel. He made a rapid speech in Turkish to his sister, bowed formally to Arlee over a last au revoir and was gone.
Immediately the old woman entered with a tray of tea things, the same old woman who had been squatting by the window, but who had noiselessly left the room during the music. She was followed by a bewitching little girl of about ten with another tray, who remained to serve while the old woman shuffled slowly away. Arlee was struck by the informality of the service; the servants appeared to be underfoot like rugs; they came and went at will, unregarded.
The tea was most disappointingly ordinary, for the pat of butter bore the rose stamp of the English dairy and the bread was English bake, but the sweetmeats were deliciously novel, resembling nothing Arlee had seen in the shops, and new, too, was the sip of syrup which completed the refreshment.
Her hostess had said but little during the repast, remaining silent, with an air of polite attention, her eyes fixed upon her caller with a gaze the girl found bafflingly inscrutable. Now as the girl rose to go, the Turkish woman suddenly revived her manners of hostess and suggested a glimpse of some of the other rooms of the palace. "Our seclusion interests you—yes?" she said, with a half-sad, half-bitter smile on her scarlet lips, and Arlee was conscious of a sense of apologetic intrusion battling with her lively curiosity as she followed her down the long chamber and through a curtained doorway to the right of the throne-like chair, into a large and empty anteroom, where the sunlight streaming through the lightly screened window on the wall at the right reminded Arlee that it was yet glowing afternoon.
She lingered by the window an instant, looking down into the court which she had glimpsed from the vestibule. Across the court she saw a row of windows which, being unbarred, she guessed to be on the men\'s side of the house, and to the left the court was ended by a sort of roofed colonnade.
Her hostess passed under an elaborate archway, and Arlee followed slowly, passing through one stately, high-ceiled, dusty room into another, plunged again into the twilight of densely screening mashrubiyeh. There were views of fine carving, painted ceilings, inlaid door paneling, and rich and rusty embroideries where the name of Allah could frequently be traced, but Arlee was ignorant of the rare worth of all she saw; she stared about with no more than a girl\'s romantic sense of the old-time grandeur and the Oriental strangeness, mingled with a disappointment that it was all so empty and devoid of life.
This part of the palace was very old, her hostess said uninterestedly; these were the rooms of the dead and gone ladies of the dead and gone years. One of the Mamelukes had first built this wing for his favorite wife—she had been poisoned by her rival and died, here, on that divan, the narrator indicated, with a negligent gesture.
Wide-eyed, Arlee stared about the empty, darkened rooms and felt dimly oppressed by them. They were so old, so melancholy, these rooms of dead and gone ladies. How much of life had been lived here, how much of hope had been smothered with these walls! What aching love and fiery hate had vibrated here, only to smolder into helpless ennui under the endless weight of tedious days.... She shivered slightly, oppressed by the dreams of these ancient rooms, dreams that were heavy with realities.
Slowly she moved back after her hostess, who had pushed back a panel in one wall, and Arlee stepped beside her within the tiny, balcony-like enclosure the panel had revealed, one side of which was a wooden lace-work of fine screening, permitting one to see but not be seen. Pressing her face against the grill, Arlee found she was looking down into a long and spacious hall, lined with delicate columns bearing beautiful, pointed arches, and brilliant with old gilding and inlay.
This was the colonnade which she had seen forming one side of the court; it was the hall of banquets, she was told, and connected this wing of the palace, the haremlik, with the selamlik, the men\'s wing, across the way. Here in old times the lord of the palace gave his feasts, and this nook had been built for some favorite to view the revels.
Arlee stared down into the great empty hall with an involuntary quickening of the breath. How desolate it was, but how beautiful in its desolation! What strange revels had taken place there to the notes of wild music, what girls had danced, what voices had shouted, what moods had been indulged! She thought of the men who had made merry there ... and then she thought of the women, generations of women, who had stood where she was standing, pressing their young faces against the grill, their bright eyes peering, peering down. She felt their soft little silken ghosts all about her, their bangles clinking, their perfumes enveloping her sense—lovely little painted dolls, their mimic passions helpless in their hearts....
Dreaming, she turned and in silence retraced her way after her hostess, loitering by the window in the anteroom to watch a veiled girl drawing water at the old well in the center, an old well rich in arabesques.
How much happier, thought Arlee, were these serving maids in the freedom of their poverty than the cloistered aristocrats behind their darkened windows. She wondered if that strange figure beside her, half Moslem, half modern, envied the little maid the saucy jest which she flung at a bare-footed boy idling beside a dozing white donkey. As she watched the old-world quiet of the picture was broken. Some one, the doorkeeper, she thought, from his vivid robes and yellow shoes, came running across the court, shouting something at the girl which sent her flying to the house, her jar forgotten, and another man, an enormous Nubian with blue Turkish bloomers, short red jacket and a red fez, hurried across the court toward the haremlik.
The lady stepped toward the screening and called down; the man stopped, raised his head, and shouted back a jargon of excited gutturals, waving his arms in vehement gesturing. His mistress interrupted with a brief question, then with another, then nodding her head indifferently to herself, she called down an order, apparently, and turned away.
"One of our servants is dead," she murmured to Arlee in explanation. "They say now it is the plague."
"The plague?" repeated the girl absently. She was thinking what a hideous creature that great Nubian was. Then, more vividly, "The plague?"
"You have fear?" said the negligent voice.
Arlee nodded frankly. "Oh, yes, I should be terribly afraid of it," she averred. "Aren\'t you?" And then she reflected, as she saw the inscrutable smile playing about the older woman\'s lips, that she must be witnessing that fatalistic apathy of the East that she had read about.
But there was nothing apathetic about the Captain. He followed on the very heels of the announcement, his sword clanking, his spurs jingling, as he bounded up the stairs and hurried through the long, dim drawing-room toward them.
"You have heard?" he cried in English as they came to meet him. "You have heard?"
"Of the plague!" Arlee answered, wondering at his agitation. "Yes, your sister just told me. Is it really the plague?"
"So say those damned doctors—pardon, but they are such imbeciles!" He made an angry gesture with his clenched hand. His face was tense and excited. "They say so. And there is another sick ... Dieu, what a misfortune! Truly, there was illness about us, a little, but who thought——"
"I shall run back to my hotel," said Arlee lightly, "before I catch one of your germs."
"To the hotel—a thousand pardons, but that is the thing forbidden." The young man made a gesture, with empty palms outspread, eloquent of rebellion and despair. "Those doctors—those pig English—they have set a quarantine upon us!"