For Fortune and Glory Part 18

"Oh, it is for the hair, then," observed Harry; "and what makes it look all frothy like that?"

"It is prepared by chewing, and women are employed for the purpose; they cheat me sometimes, and swallow a portion. But deign to come up, oh ill.u.s.trious one, and partake of a cup of coffee or a gla.s.s of sherbet and a chibouque, and allow me the unparalleled and ill.u.s.trious honour of showing you my poor goods."

Harry consented, not that he wanted to purchase anything, but because something about the man's face struck him as familiar, and he was anxious to remember where and under what circ.u.mstances he had seen him before.

"I have here a French pistol, a revolver with six chambers, which I can offer your Excellency almost for nothing, with ammunition to match. It is a weapon which will save your life a hundred times by its accuracy and the rapidity of its fire; and what says the wise man? 'Life is sweet, even to the bravest.'" And all the time he was talking, Harry Forsyth kept thinking, "Where have I seen him? What circ.u.mstance does his face recall?"

As he left the shop his eye fell on a bale of goods yet unopened, and on it he read the name *Daireh*!

It acted like a match on a gas-jet. He had come out to seek the will, and Daireh was the man who had abstracted it!

And as he walked home, he remembered everything which had been a puzzle to him. Being still weak, he now grew as much excited as before he had been apathetic, and had his uncle been at home he would have gone to him with the whole story at once. But the sheikh was away, superintending the drill of certain European ruffians in the Mahdi's service who were to man some Krupp guns taken from the Egyptians, and Harry had a forced respite in which to collect his ideas and frame them in the manner best calculated to gain his uncle's attention and a.s.sistance.

And now his anxiety about those at home who had no doubt long mourned him as dead grew more poignant, and remembering his uncle's affection for his sister, he regretted not having confided in him and begged him to get a letter conveyed to some point sufficiently civilised to have a post. He tried to find out from Fatima how long he had been laid up at the fakir's residence, and at first she was puzzled. But at last she gave him a clue.

"The Nile had risen and gone back," she said, "when you were brought to us as dead. It rose again, and fell again, and now it will soon rise once more."

Two years! Was it possible? Nearly two years! And he wondered whether his people had gone into mourning for him, or if they still hoped on.

He next made inquiries about Daireh, setting Fatima to gossip for him and tell him the result. He seemed to bear a shockingly bad character, and to be very unpopular. The fact was that he was a money-lender, and his extortions caused him to be hated.

Harry was glad of this, since it promised to make his task easier.

The Sheikh Burrachee returned, and was rejoiced to find his nephew so much improved in health.

Harry took the first opportunity of opening his budget.

"Do you mind my speaking to you in English?" he said. "I have got to say things which I should find it difficult to explain in a foreign language, which I have very imperfectly picked up, and which may not have idioms answering to the English."

"I do not love the English tongue," said the sheikh, using it, however.

"But what things do you allude to?"

"Family matters, affecting my mother and all of us--you, perhaps."

"When I last went to England," said the sheikh, "I took a final farewell of all relatives, and of everything belonging to the country from which I shook off the dust on my feet, you only excepted, for I saw that you, too, were called out of the seething hotbed of corruption, which is called civilisation, to the natural life of man. Why disturb the ashes of the buried past?"

"I love my mother," replied Harry; "and you, her brother, once loved her too."

His uncle bowed his head. "True," he said; "speak on."

"And besides," added Harry, "justice is justice all the world over, and crime should not prosper. Richard Burke, your brother, died at his home in Ireland. He had made two wills, one leaving the bulk of his fortune to his step-son, Stephen Philipson, and another, and later one, made on the occasion of Philipson turning out badly, leaving him a modest allowance, and bequeathing the bulk of his fortune between his sister and Reginald Kavanagh. This will, which would make my mother and Beatrice comfortable, as they have been brought up to esteem comfort, was not to be found; neither was the other. A dishonest clerk, forced to fly the country because a forgery he had committed must soon be discovered, stole them both out of the lawyer's office where he was employed, for the purpose of levying a sum for giving them to one or the other of the parties interested. But the police were too close on his traces, and he had to fly without a chance of making use of either doc.u.ment. He was an Egyptian, and went home; but not feeling safe at Alexandria or Cairo, and having connections in the Soudan, he came to this country. If both wills are destroyed, part of the property comes to you."

"And the cause has need of funds!" exclaimed the sheikh. "But how shall we find this dog?"

"I saw him the other day in the bazaar; his name is Daireh."

"Daireh, the money-lender, against whom I have had so many complaints, but who always manages to have the law on his side?"

"The very same."

The Sheikh Burrachee clapped his hands; an attendant came. "Bring hither Daireh, the Egyptian usurer," said the sheikh; "and keep him guarded in the outer court."

The Arab inclined his head and departed without a word.

It may seem to you that Harry Forsyth had recovered his wits very rapidly, and this, indeed, was the case. Up to a certain point his progress had been very slow, but that once pa.s.sed he had come to himself almost at a bound. But as for his clear statement to his uncle, that he had prepared beforehand with great care, writing it out and learning it by heart, feeling that it was necessary to be as concise as possible.

A thoughtful expression came over the Sheikh Burrachee's face, quite different from the wild faraway look which now ordinarily characterised it.

"And so Richard is dead," he murmured to himself; "and Mary has known poverty in a land where there is no kindness for the poor; where all is hard and cold, and people can no longer love or even hate. And this fellow has robbed her. By my beard he shall smart for it!"

When the sheikh swore by his beard the matter was serious, and if Daireh had heard him he would not have walked along between the guards who arrested him with so impudent an air. He had so often been had up, and had got the best of his accusers, that he felt quite safe. For he knew well the customs which had the force of laws in the country, and took care not to violate them, though straining every point to his advantage.

And the Sheikh Burrachee was just, and however much he might sympathise with the complainant, would not allow his judgment to be affected by his feelings.

It was indeed a rough-and-ready justice, not always consistent, and such as would not meet entire approval from any civilised persons; he went on the principle that when he could not do what he would, he did what he could, to set things straight according to his judgment and the evidence before him, adopting the habits of the people with whom he had identified himself, who had not the horror of physical pain--for others--or the employment of it to elicit truth, which we have.

He rose from the divan by the garden where he had been sitting with Harry, and, beckoning to the latter to follow him, proceeded to the outer and larger hall, where he took his seat, with his nephew at his side. And hardly had he done so when Daireh was brought in. He salaamed with a confident air, which expressed, "Who will find me tripping? It would take a clever fellow to do that. They are willing enough to agree to my terms when they want to borrow, but when I claim my own, there is all this bother and outcry, and I am dragged before the sheikh forsooth!"

But he looked more serious when the Sheikh Burrachee said to him--

"Daireh, where are the two wills you stole from Burrows and f.a.gan, the Dublin lawyers, when you ran away from their employ?"

Surely such an incongruous question was never put in an Arab town in the heart of Africa by a sheikh dressed in bernouse and turban, with a jewel-hilted yataghan at his side, sitting cross-legged on a cushion.

No wonder Daireh was flabbergasted; such a thunderbolt out of a clear sky has seldom fallen upon any man.

"Your Mightiness is mistaken," he stammered. "I have lived, earning an honest livelihood as a poor merchant, at Khartoum and Berber, Alexandria and Cairo. But what is Dublin? I know it not."

"Is that your photograph?" asked Harry Forsyth, suddenly, in English.

"No!" replied Daireh, startled into answering in the same language; and the moment he did so he could have bitten his tongue out for vexation.

The sheikh took the likeness in his hand; it was unmistakable.

"Here is your portrait, and it was taken in Dublin, for it bears that name upon it. Also you know English," he said.

"I learned that language at Alexandria," replied Daireh, more firmly now he had collected his wits; "and I had a brother very like me who went beyond the seas, and may have lived in the place you speak of, for I never heard of him again."

"You speak the words of Sheytan, the father of lies," said the sheikh sternly; "where are the stolen doc.u.ments?"

"I never heard of them, your Justice; and I know not what you mean,"

replied Daireh, striving, but with indifferent success, not to tremble.

"Ha.s.san!" called the sheikh, and a tall, stalwart black stepped forward, with a courbash in his hand. "Twenty lashes to refresh his memory."

"Mercy, great sheikh; oh, favourite of Allah, have mercy, and listen to me!" cried the wretch; but without heeding his cries four men seized him and flung him on the ground face downwards. Two held his legs, one his arms, and a third put a knee on his back between the shoulder-blades to keep him in position. It was all done in a twinkling.

Then Ha.s.san stepped up, courbash in hand, and measured his distance.

The courbash is a fearful whip made of hippopotamus' hide, a stroke from which is felt by a bullock as painfully as a cut from an ordinary whip is by a horse.

It whistled through the air, and came down upon the naked flesh of the victim, who screamed with the pain as if he would break a blood-vessel.