Miranda of the Balcony Part 31

"Yes," replied Fournier. "I hired that morning a felucca to sail himself across to Tarifa."

"I remember."

"The boat lay at Tarifa. He set sail that night."

"Yes," said Charnock. "I spent the night here. I waited two days for the P. and O. at Gibraltar, we pa.s.sed the _Tarifa_ off Ushant, and three days later I met Warriner in Plymouth. Yes, the times fit."

"It is very likely Ralph who told about Ha.s.san," mused M. Fournier, with a lenient smile. "If he knew, he would have been sure to have told; for there was money in it. To-morrow I will see the Basha."

M. Fournier went down to the Kasbah and found the Basha delivering justice at the gates. The suitors were dismissed, and M. Fournier opened his business.

"We do not wish to trouble the Legation," said he. "The Legation would make much noise, and his Shereefian Majesty, whom G.o.d preserve, would never hear the end of it. Besides, we do not wish it." And upon that money changed hands. "But if the Englishman told your n.o.bility that Ha.s.san Akbar was h.o.a.rding his money in utter selfishness, then your n.o.bility will talk privately with Ha.s.san and find out from him where the Englishman is."

The Basha stroked his white beard.

"The Nazarene speaks wisely. We will not disturb the dignity of his Majesty, whom Allah preserve, for such small things. I will talk to Ha.s.san Akbar and send for you again."

That impenetrable man was fetched from the cemetery gates, and the Basha addressed him.

"Ha.s.san, thou didst hide and conceal thy treasure, and truly the Room told me of it; and since thy treasure was of no profit to thee, I took it."

"When I was blind and helpless," said Ha.s.san.

"So thou wast chastened the more thoroughly for thy profit in the next world, and thy master and my master, the Sultan, was served in this,"

said the Basha, with great dignity, and he reverently bowed his head to the dust. "Now what hast thou done with the Room?"

But Ha.s.san answered never a word.

"Thou stubborn man! May Allah burn thy great-great-grandfather!" said the Basha, and chained his hands and his feet, and had him conveyed to an inner room, where he talked to him with rods of various length and thickness. At the end of the third day the Basha sent a message to M.

Fournier that Ha.s.san's heart was softened by the goodness of G.o.d, and that now he would speak.

The Basha received Charnock and M. Fournier in a great cool domed room of lattice-work and tiles. He sat upon cus.h.i.+ons on a dais at the end of the room; stools were brought forward for his visitors; and M.

Fournier and the Basha exchanged lofty compliments, and drank much weak sweet tea. Then the Basha raised his hand; a door was thrown open; and a blind, wavering, broken man crawled, dragging his fetters, across the floor.

"Good G.o.d!" whispered Charnock; "what have they done to him?"

"They have made him speak, that is all," returned M. Fournier, imperturbably. He kept all his pity for Ralph Warriner.

M. Fournier translated afterwards to Charnock the story which Ha.s.san told as he grovelled on the ground, and it ran as follows:--

"When the son of the English first came into Morocco I showed him great kindness and hospitality, and how he returned it you know. So after I was blind I waited. More than once I heard his voice in the Sok, and in the streets of Tangier, and I knew that he had quarrelled with his own people the Nazarenes, and dared not turn to them for help. I sit by the gate of the cemetery, and many Arabs, and Moors, and Negroes, and Jews come down the road from the country to the market-place, and at last one morning I heard the steps of one whose feet shuffled in his _babouches_; he could not walk in the loose slippers as we who are born to the use of them. And it was not an old man, whose feet are clogged by age, for his stride was long; that my ears told me which are my eyes. It was an infidel in the dress of the faithful. It may be that if I had seen with my eyes, I should never have known; but my ears are sharpened, and I heard. When he pa.s.sed me he gave me greeting, and then I knew it was the Room. He dropped a dollar into my hands and whistled a tune which he had often whistled after he had eaten of my _kouss-kouss_, and so went on his way. I rose up and followed him, thinking that my time had come. Across the Sok I followed him, hearing always the shuffle of the slippers amidst the din of voices and the hurrying of many feet. He did not see me, for he never turned or stopped, but went straight on under the gate of the town, and then turned through the horse-market, and came to a house which he entered. I heard the door barred behind him, and a shutter fixed across the window, and I sat down beneath the shutter and waited. I heard voices talking quickly and earnestly within the room, and then someone rose and came out of the door and walked down the street towards the port. But it was not the man for whom I waited.

This one walked with little jaunty, tripping steps, and I was glad that he went away; for the bolt of the door was not shut behind him, and the dog of a Nazarene was alone. I rose and walked to the door. A son of the English stood in the way: I asked him for alms with the one hand and felt for the latch with the other; but the son of the English saw what I was doing and shouted through the door."

"It was I," said Charnock.

Ha.s.san turned his sightless face towards Charnock and reflected. Then he answered: "It was indeed you. And after you had spoken the bolt was shot. Thereupon I went back to the Sok, and asking here and there at last fell in with some Arabs from Beni Ha.s.san with whom in other days I had traded. And for a long while I talked to them, showing that there was no danger, for the Room was without friends amongst his own people, and moreover that he would fetch a price, every okesa of which was theirs. And at the last they agreed with me that I should deliver him to them at night outside the walls of Tangier and they would take him away and treat him ill, and sell him for a slave in their own country. But the Room had gone from Tangier and the Arabs moved to Tetuan and Omara and Sok-et-Trun, but after a while they returned to Tangier and the Room also returned; and the time I had waited for had come."

"What have you done with him?" said the Basha. "Speak."

"I besought a lad who had been my servant to watch the Room Bentham, and his goings and comings. With the dollar which he had given me I bought a little old tent of palmetto and set it up in the corner of the Sok apart from the tents of the cobblers."

"Well?" interrupted M. Fournier, "speak quickly."

"One evening the lad came to me and said the Room had gone up to a house on the hill above the Sok, where there were many lights and much noise of feasting. So I went down the Sok to where the Arabs slept by their camels and said to them, 'It will be to-night.' And as G.o.d willed it the night was dark. The lad led me to the house and I sat outside it till the noise grew less and many went away. At last the Nazarene Bentham came to the door and his mule was brought for him and he mounted. I asked the boy who guided me, 'Is it he?' and the boy answered 'Yes.' So I dismissed him and followed the mule down the hill to the Sok, which was very quiet. Then I ran after him and called, and he stopped his mule till I came up with him. 'What is it?' he asked, and I threw a cloth over his head and dragged him from the mule. We both fell to the ground, but I had one arm about his neck pressing the cloth to his mouth so that he could not cry out. I pressed him into the mud of the Sok and put my knee upon his chest and bound his arms together. Then I carried him to my tent and took the cloth from his head, for I wished to hear him speak and be sure that it was Bentham.

But he understood my wish and would not speak. So I took his mule-hobbles which I had stolen while he feasted, and made them hot in a fire and tied them about his ankles and in a little while I made him cry out and I was sure. Then I stripped him of his clothes and put upon him my own rags. The Arabs came to the tent an hour later. I gagged Bentham and gave him up to them bound, and in the dark they took him away, with the mule. His clothes I buried in the ground under my tent, and in the morning stamped the ground down and took the tent away."

"And the chief of these Arabs? Give me his name," said the Basha.

"Mallam Juzeed," replied Ha.s.san.

The Basha waved his hand to the soldiers and Ha.s.san was dragged away.

"I will send a soldier with you, give you a letter to the Sheikh of Beni Ha.s.san, and he will discover the Room, if he is to be found in those parts," said the Basha to M. Fournier.

Charnock spent the greater part of a month in formalities. He took the letter from the Basha and many other letters to Jews of importance in the towns with which M. Fournier was able to provide him; he hired the boy Hamet who had acted as his guide on his first visit, and getting together an equipment as for a long journey in Morocco, rode out over the Hill of the Two Seas into the inlands of that mysterious and enchanted country.

CHAPTER XIX

TELLS OF CHARNOCK'S WANDERINGS IN MOROCCO AND OF A WALNUT-WOOD DOOR

In the course of time Charnock came to a village of huts enclosed within an impenetrable rampart of cactus upon the flank of the hills southward of Mequinez and there met the Sheikh. The Sheikh laid his hands upon Mallam Juzeed and bade him speak, which he did with a wise prompt.i.tude. It was true; they had taken the Christian from Tangier, but they had sold him on the way. They had chanced to arrive at the great houseless and treeless plain of Seguedla, a day's march from Alkasar, on a Wednesday; and since every Wednesday an open market is held upon two or three low hills which jut out from the plain, they had sold Ralph Warriner there to a travelling merchant of the Mtoga.

Mallam supplied the merchant's name and the direction of his journey.

Charnock packed his tents upon his mules and disappeared into the south.

For two years he disappeared, or almost disappeared; almost, since through the freemasonry of the Jews, that great telephone across Barbary by which the Jew at Tangier shall hear the words which the Jew speaks at Tafilet, M. Fournier was able to obtain now and again rare news of Charnock, and, as it were, a rare glimpse of him at Saforo, at Marakesch, at Tarudant, and to supply him with money. Then came a long interval, until a Jew of the Waddoon stopped Fournier in the Sok of Tangier, handed him a letter, and told him that many months ago, as he rode at nightfall down a desolate pa.s.s of the Upper Atlas mountains, he came to an inhospitable wilderness of stones, where one in Moorish dress and speaking the Moorish tongue was watching the antics of a snake-charmer by the light of a scanty fire of brushwood. The Moor had two servants with him but no escort, and no tent, and for safety's sake the Jew stayed with him that night. In the morning the Moor had given him the letter to M. Fournier and had bidden him say that he was well.

In that letter Charnock told in detail the history of his search. How he had held to his clue, how he had missed it and retraced his steps, how he had followed the merchant to Figuig on the borders of Algeria, and back; how he had gone south into the country of Sus and was now returning northwards to Mequinez. He had discarded the escort, because if a protection to himself, it was a warning to the Arabs with whom he fell in. They grew wary and shut their lips, distrusting him, distrusting his business; and since he could speak Arabic before, he had picked up sufficient of the Moghrebbin dialect, what with his dark face and Hamet to come to his aid, to pa.s.s muster as a native. M.

Fournier sent the letter on to Mrs. Warriner at Ronda, who read it and re-read it and blamed her selfishness in sending any man upon such an errand, and wondered why she of all women in the world should have found a man ready to do her this service. Many a time as she looked from her window over the valley she speculated what his thoughts were as he camped in the night-air on the plains and among the pa.s.ses. Did his thoughts turn to Ronda? Did he see her there obtruding a figure of a monstrous impertinence and vanity? For she had asked of him what no woman had a right to ask.

His frank confession of how he had defined women came back to her with a pitiless conviction; "A brake on the wheel going up hill, a whip in the driver's hand going down." It was true! It was true! She was the instance which proved it true. There were unhappy months for Miranda of the balcony.

At times Jane Holt would be wakened from her sleep by a great cry, and getting from her bed she would walk round the landing half-way up the patio, to Miranda's bedroom, only to find it empty. She would descend the staircase, and coming into the little parlour, would discover Miranda leaning out of the open window and looking down to a certain angle of the winding road.

She had dreamed, she had seen in her dream Charnock with his two servants encamped upon a hill-side or on a plain, and hooded figures in long robes crawling, creeping, towards them, crouching behind boulders, or writhing their bodies across fields of flowers. She saw him too in the narrow, dim alleys of ruined towns, lured through a doorway behind impenetrable walls, and then robbed for his money and tortured for his creed.

At such times the sight of that road whence he had looked upwards to her window was a consolation, almost a confutation of her dreams.

There at that visible corner of the road, underneath these same stars and the same purple sky, Charnock had sat and gazed at this window from which she leaned. He could not be dead! And carried away by a feverish revulsion, she would at times come to fancy that he had returned, that he was even now seated on the bank by the roadside, that but for the gloom she would surely distinguish him, that in spite of the gloom she could faintly distinguish him. And so her cousin would speak to her, and with some commonplace excuse that the night was hot, Miranda would get her back to her room.

These were terrible months for Miranda of the balcony. And the months lengthened, and again no news came. Miranda began to wonder whether she had only sent Charnock out to meet Ralph's disaster, to become a slave beaten and whipped and shackled, and driven this way and that through the barbarous inlands.

The months were piled one upon the other. The weight of their burden could be measured by the changes in Miranda's bearing. Her cheeks grew thin, her manner feverish. The mere slamming of a door would fling the blood into her face like scarlet; an unexpected entrance set her heart racing till it stifled her.