Si El Hadj Arrifa was right. When Mohammed saw Paul Ravenel ride forward out of the loom of the night into the darkness of the tunnel, bending his head so that it might not strike the roof, he missed a slight action which was much more significant. Paul slipped his right hand into his pocket and took out a heavy key. He had been seeing to it that Mohammed should draw gradually ahead and by the time when he came opposite to the little door in the angle, Mohammed was far beyond the turn and there was not the faintest glimmer of light from the lantern. Paul slipped from his saddle, gave his horse a sharp cut across the buttocks with his riding whip, and as the startled animal galloped off, turned quickly to the little door. He was in a darkness so complete that he could not see the key in his hand nor the hand that held it. Yet he found the keyhole at once and in another second he was within the house. The passage in which he found himself was as black as the tunnel outside. Yet he locked the door, picked up and fitted the stout transverse bars into their sockets as neatly as though he worked in the broad noon. He had made no sound at all. Yet he had shut a door between the world and himself, and the effort of his life now must be to keep it for ever closed. He had a queer fancy that a door thus momentously closing upon his fortunes ought to clang so loudly that the noise of it would reach across the city.
“There was once a Paul Ravenel,” he said to himself.
The lantern in Mohammed’s hands flickering upon the walls of the tunnel and every second dwindling a little more, receding a little more, danced before his eyes. There went the soul and spirit of that Paul Ravenel.
He was aroused from his misery by the sound of Mohammed’s hands sliding curiously over the panels of the door. The cry of panic followed quickly and the clatter of the lantern upon the cobble stones. Paul waited with his pistol in his hand, wondering what had startled his attendant. But silence only ensued and he turned away from the door into the house. At the end of a short passage he opened a second door and stood on the threshold of a small court brightly lit and beautiful. A round pool from which a jet of water sprang and cooled the sultry air was in the centre of the white-tiled floor. Wooden pillars gaily painted and gilded and ornamented in the Moorish fashion, not by carving but by little squares and cubes and slips of wood delicately glued on in an intricate pattern, supported arches giving entrance to rooms. There was a cool sound of river water running along an open conduit waist-high against a wall; and poised in an archway across the court with her eyes eagerly fixed upon the passage stood Marguerite Lambert, a tender and happy smile upon her lips.
When Paul Ravenel saw her, the remorse which had been stinging him during the ride and had reached a climax of pain as he stood behind the door, was stilled. Marguerite had changed during this year. The hollows of her shoulders and throat had filled. The haggard look of apprehension had vanished from her face. Colour had come into her cheeks and gaiety into her eyes and a bright gloss upon her hair. She wore a fragile little white frock embroidered with silver which a girl might have worn at a dance in a ball room of London or Paris; and in the exotic setting of that court she seemed to him a flame of wonder and beauty. And she was his. He held her in his arms, the softness of her cheek against his.
“Marguerite!” he said. “Each time I see you it is for the first time. How is that?” But Marguerite did not answer to his laugh. She held him off and scanned him with anxious eyes.
“Something has happened, Paul.”
“No.”
“When you came in, you were troubled.”
“When I saw you the trouble passed. I was afraid that you might be angry. I am very late.”
Marguerite did not believe one word of that explanation, but the way to discover the true one did not lie through argument. She drew Paul across the court, holding him by the hand and saying lightly:
“Foolish one, should I quarrel with you on the evening before you march away? You might never come back to me.”
She led him into a side room and drew him down beside her on the thick, low cushions. Upstairs there were chairs and tables and the paraphernalia of a western home. Here on the level of the patio and the street they had for prudence’ sake kept it all of the country. There was no brass bedstead, it is true, to ornament the room, but there were three tall grandfather clocks, though only one of them was going and that marked the true time. Marguerite laid her head in the hollow of his shoulder and her arm went round his waist.
“Paul, you won’t get killed!” she whispered. “Oh, take care! take care! I am afraid. This year has been so perfect.”
“You must have been lonely many days.”
“And many nights,” whispered Marguerite, with a little grimace. Then she laughed with the trill of a bird. “But you had just gone or you were soon returning and my thoughts were full of you. I am not difficult and thorny, am I, Paul? Say so! Say so at once!”
He laid her down so that her shoulders rested on his knee and her face smiled up at him, and bending he kissed her on the mouth for an answer.
“You are the most golden thing that ever happened in this world,” he said. “I think of all those years that I lived through, before I met you, quite contented with myself and knowing nothing—no, absolutely nothing of the great miracle.”
“What miracle, Paul?”
“The miracle of man and woman,—of you and me—who want to be together—who are hungry when we are not together,—who walk amongst rainbows when we are.”
Paul was the “grand serieux,” as Gerard de Montignac had called him, warning him too of that very fate which had befallen him. Love of this girl had swept him off his feet, calf-love and man’s love had come to him at once. Marguerite was new and entrancingly strange to him as Eve to Adam. He made much of her judgment, as lovers will, marvelling when she swept to some swift, sane decision whilst he was debating the this and the that. She entertained him one moment as though he were an audience and she a company of players; she was the tenderest of companions the next: in her moments of passion she made him equal with the gods; and the pride and glory to both of them was that each had been the first to enter the heart and know the embraces of the other.
“Paul, what are you thinking about?” she asked.
“That’s the prettiest frock I have seen you in,” said he, and with a smile of pleasure she raised herself and sat at his side.
“It’s the prettiest I have got,” she returned.
Paul lifted a strip of the fragile skirt between his fingers.
“It’s a funny thing, Marguerite,” he said. “But until I knew you, I never noticed at all whether a girl was wearing a topping frock or whether she was dowdy. So long as they had something over their shoulders, they were all pretty much the same to me.”
“And now?” asked Marguerite.
“Well, it’s different,” said Paul, disappointing her of her expected flattery. “That’s all.”
Marguerite laughed, as she could afford to. As she knew very well, he loved to see her straight and slim in her fine clothes and it gave him an entrancing little sensuous thrill to feel the delicate fabrics draping exquisitely her firm young body.
Paul, before he had set out with Colonel Gouraud’s supply column on the expedition to Fez, had sent Marguerite across the Straits and up to Madrid, where a credit was opened for her at one of the banks. Paul had been afraid lest she should stint herself, not only of luxuries but of things needed. But she had answered, “Of course I’ll take from you, my dear. I am proud to take from you.”
She looked back upon that journey now and said:
“I had six glorious weeks in Madrid. Fittings and fittings and choosing colours, and buying shoes and stockings and hats and all sorts of things. I began at half past nine every morning and was never finished till the shops closed. I had never had any money to spend before. Oh, it was an orgy!”
“And you regret those weeks?” asked Paul, misled by the enjoyment with which she remembered them.
“Nonsense. I had more fun still when I came back with what I had bought. I was going to make myself beautiful in the eyes of my lord!” and mockingly she pushed her elbow into his side, as she sat beside him.
Marguerite, upon her return, had waited for some weeks in Tangier. Paul had to make sure that he was to be stationed at Fez. Afterwards he had to find and buy this house, furnish it and provide a staff of servants on whose fidelity he could rely. He had secured two negresses and an Algerian, an old soldier who had served with him in the Beni-Snassen campaign before he had ever come on service to Morocco. Even when all was ready at Fez there was a further delay, since the road from Tangier to Fez was for a time unsafe.
“I was tired of waiting, long before Selim and the negress and the little escort you sent for me appeared,” she said. “But the journey up country I adored.”
It was early in the year. The ten villages with their hedges of cactus; the rolling plains of turf over-scattered with clumps of asphodel in flower; the aspect of little white-walled towns tucked away high up in the folds of hills; the bright strong sun by day, the freshness of the nights, and the camp fires in that open and spacious country were a miracle of freedom and delight to this girl who had choked for so long in the hot and tawdry bars of the coast towns. And every step brought her nearer to her lover. It was the season of flowers. Great fields of marigold smiled at her. Yellow-striped purple iris nodded a welcome. Rosy thrift, and pale-blue chicory, and little congregations of crimson poppies, and acres of wild mustard drew her on through a land of colour. And here and there on a small knoll a solitary palm overshadowed a solitary white-domed tomb.
She rode a mule and wore the dress of a Moorish woman. All had been done secretly, even to the purchase of the house in Fez, which was held in the name of a Moorish friend of Paul’s. It was Marguerite’s wish from first to last. Paul would have proclaimed her from the roof tops, had she but lifted an eyebrow. But she knew very well that it would not help Paul in his career were he to bring a pretty mistress up from the coast and parade her openly in Fez. He would get a name for levity and indiscretion. Moreover, the secrecy was for itself delightful to her. It was to her like a new toy to a child.
“I love a secret,” she had said once to Paul, when he urged that her life was dull. “It sets us a little further apart from others and a little nearer together. It will be fun keeping it up, and we shall laugh of an evening, locked safely away in the midst of Fez in our little hidden palace.” It was fun, too, for Marguerite to dress herself in a fine silk caftan of pink or pale blue reaching to her feet, to pass over the mansouriya, to slip her bare feet into little purple embroidered heelless slippers, to wind a bright scarf about her hair, to burden her ankles and arms with heavy clashing rings of silver, to blacken her long eyelashes and veil the lower part of her face and go shopping with one of the negresses in the Souk-Ben-Safi. It was fun also to return home and transform herself into a fashionable girl of the day and wait in this southern patio for the coming of her lover.
“I love routine like a dog,” she said on this evening. She was sitting on the low cushion by Paul’s side. Her slim legs showing pink through the fine white silk of her stockings were stretched out in front of her. She contemplated the tips of her small white satin slippers. “I don’t want any more surprises,” and Paul’s face grew for a moment grave and twitched with a stab of pain. “I don’t want any more people. I have had enough of both. I love going up on the roof and watching that great upper city of women, and wondering what’s going on in the narrow streets at the bottom of the deep chasms between the houses. I have books, too, and work when I’m not too lazy to do it, and I am learning the little two-stringed guitar, and I want one person, one foolish dear person, and since I’ve got him, I’m very happy.”
Paul reached forward and, closing a hand round one of her ankles, shook it tenderly.
“Listen to me, Marguerite!” he began, but she was upon her feet in an instant. She snatched up Paul’s kêpi and cocked it jauntily on her curls.
“Canada?” she cried in a sharp, manly voice, and saluted, bringing her high heels together with a click and standing very stiff and upright. She hummed the tune of “The Maple Leaf,” interpolating noises meant to parody the instruments of an orchestra, and she marched in front of Paul and round the patio quickly and briskly like a girl in a pantomime procession, until she came back to her starting point.
“Australia!”
Again she saluted and marched round to the tune of “Australia will be there.”
“The U-nited States of America!” she announced, and this time she skimmed round the patio in a sort of two-step dance, swift as a bird, her white and silver frock glinting and rippling as she moved.
“Yankee Doodle w............