The Maids of Paradise Part 45

I had been exercising my lions and putting them through their paces, and had noticed no unusual insubordination among them, when suddenly, Timour Melek, a big Algerian lion, flew at me without the slightest provocation or warning.

Fortunately I had a training-chair in my hand, on which Timour had just been sitting, and I had time to thrust it into his face. Thrice with incredible swiftness he struck the iron-chair, right, left, and right, as a cat strikes, then seized it in his teeth. At the same moment I brought my loaded whip heavily across his nose.

"Down, Timour Melek! Down! down! down!" I said, steadily, accompanying each word with a blow of the whip across the nose.

The brute had only hurt himself when he struck the chair, and now, under the blows raining on his sensitive nose, he doubtless remembered similar episodes in his early training, and shrank back, nearly deafening me with his roars. I followed, punishing him, and he fled towards the low iron grating which separated the training-cage from the night-quarters.

This I am now inclined to believe was a mistake of judgment on my part. I should have driven him into a corner and thoroughly cowed him, using the training-chair if necessary, and trusting to my two a.s.sistants with their irons, who had already closed up on either side of the cage.

I was not in perfect trim that morning. Not that I felt nervous in the least, nor had I any lack of self-confidence, but I was not myself. I had never in my life entered a lion-cage feeling as I did that morning--an indifference which almost amounted to laziness, an apathy which came close to melancholy.

The lions knew I was not myself--they had been aware of it as soon as I set foot in their cage; and I knew it. But my strange apathy only increased as I went about my business, perfectly aware all the time that, with lions born in captivity, the unexpected is always to be expected.

Timour Melek was now close to the low iron door between the part.i.tions; the other lions had become unusually excited, bounding at a heavy gallop around the cage, or clinging to the bars like enormous cats.

Then, as I faced Timour, ready to force him backward through the door into the night-quarters, something in the blank glare of his eyes seemed to fascinate me. I had an absurd sensation that he was slipping away from me--escaping; that I no longer dominated him nor had authority. It was not panic, nor even fear; it was a faint paralysis--temporary, fortunately; for at that instant instinct saved me; I struck the lion a terrific blow across the nose and whirled around, chair uplifted, just in time to receive the charge of Empress Khatoun, consort of Timour.

She struck the iron-bound chair, doubling it up like crumpled paper, hurling me headlong, not to the floor of the cage, but straight through the sliding-bars which Speed had just flung open with a shout.

As for me, I landed violently on my back in the sawdust, the breath knocked clean out of me.

When I could catch my breath again I realized that there was no time to waste. Speed looked at me angrily, but I jerked open the grating, flung another chair into the cage, leaped in, and, singling out Empress Khatoun, I sailed into her with pa.s.sionless thoroughness, punishing her to a stand-still, while the other lions, Aicha, Marghouz, Timour, and Genghis Khan snarled and watched me steadily.

As I emerged from the cage Speed asked me whether I was hurt, and I gasped out that I was not.

"What went wrong?" he persisted.

"Timour and that young lioness--no, _I_ went wrong; the lions knew it at once; something failed me, I don't know what; upon my soul, Speed, I don't know what happened."

"You lost your nerve?"

"No, not that. Timour began looking at me in a peculiar way--he certainly dominated me for an instant--for a tenth of a second; and then Khatoun flew at me before I could control Timour--"

I hesitated.

"Speed, it was one of those seconds that come to us, when the faintest shadow of indecision settles matters. Engineers are subject to it at the throttle, pilots at the helm, captains in battle--"

"Men in love," added Speed.

I looked at him, not comprehending.

"By-the-way," said Speed, "Leo Grammont, the greatest lion-tamer who ever lived, once told me that a man in love with a woman could not control lions; that when a man falls in love he loses that intangible, mysterious quality--call it mesmerism or whatever you like--the occult force that dominates beasts. And he said that the lions knew it, that they perceived it sometimes even before the man himself was aware that he was in love."

I looked him over in astonishment.

"What's the matter with you?" he asked, amused.

"What's the matter with _you_?" I demanded. "If you mean to intimate that I have fallen in love you are certainly an astonishing a.s.s!"

"Don't talk that way," he said, good-humoredly. "I didn't dream of such a thing, or of offending you, Scarlett."

It struck me at the same moment that my irritable and unwarranted retort was utterly unlike me.

"I beg your pardon," I said. "I don't know exactly what is the matter with me to-day. First I quarrel with poor old Timour Melek, then I insult you. I've discovered that I have nerves; I never before knew it."

"Cold flap-jacks and cider would have destroyed Hercules himself in time," observed Speed, following with his eyes the movements of a lithe young girl, who was busy with the hoisting apparatus of the flying trapeze. The girl was Jacqueline, dressed in a mended gown of Miss Delany's.

"At times," muttered Speed, partly to himself, "that little witch frightens me. There is no risk she dares not take; even Horan gets nervous; and when that bull-necked numbskull is scared there's reason for it."

We walked out into the main tent, where simultaneous rehearsals were everywhere in progress; and I picked up the ring-master's whip and sent it curling after "Briza," a harmless, fat, white mare on which pretty Mrs. Grigg was sitting expectantly. Round and round the ring she cantered, now astride two horses, now guiding a "spike,"

practising a.s.siduously her acrobatics. At intervals, far up in the rigging overhead, I caught glimpses of Miss Crystal swinging on her trapeze, watching the ring below.

Byram came in to rehea.r.s.e the opening processional and to rebuke his dearest foe, the unspeakable "camuel," bestridden by Mrs. Horan as Fatima, Queen of the Desert. Speed followed, squatted on the head of the elephant, ankus on thigh, shouting, "Hout! Mail! Djebe Noain!

Mail the hezar! Mail!" he thundered, triumphantly, saluting Byram with lifted ankus as the elephant ambled past in a cloud of dust.

"Clear the ring!" cried Byram.

Miss Delany, who was outlining Jacqueline with juggler's knives, began to pull her stock of cutlery from the soft pine backing; elephant, camel, horses trampled out; Miss Crystal caught a dangling rope and slid earthward, and I turned and walked towards the outer door with Byram.

As I looked back for an instant I saw Jacqueline, in her glittering diving-skin, calmly step out of her discarded skirt and walk towards the sunken tank in the middle of the ring, which three workmen were uncovering.

She was to rehea.r.s.e her perilous leap for the first time to-day, and I told Speed frankly that I was too nervous to be present, and so left him staring across the dusky tent at the slim child in spangles.

I had an appointment to meet Robert the Lizard at noon, and I was rather curious to find out how much his promises were worth when the novelty of his new gun had grown stale. So I started towards the cliffs, nibbling a crust of bread for luncheon, though the incident of the morning had left me small appet.i.te for food.

The poacher was sunning himself on his doorsill when I came into view over the black basalt rocks. To my surprise, he touched his cap as I approached, and rose civilly, replying to my greeting with a brief, "Salute, m'sieu!"

"You are prompt to the minute," I said, pleasantly.

"You also," he observed. "We are quits, m'sieu--so far."

I told him of the progress that Jacqueline was making; he listened in silence, and whether or not he was interested I could not determine.

There was a pause; I looked out across the sun-lit ocean, taking time to arrange the order of the few questions which I had to ask.

"Come to the point, m'sieu," he said, dryly. "We have struck palms."

Spite of my training, spite of the caution which experience brings to the most unsuspicious of us, I had a curious confidence in this tattered rascal's loyalty to a promise. And apparently without reason, too, for there was something wrong with his eyes--or else with the way he used them. They were wonderful, vivid blue eyes, well set and well shaped, but he never looked at anybody directly except in moments of excitement or fury. At such moments his eyes appeared to be lighted up from behind.

"Lizard," I said, "you are a poacher."

His placid visage turned stormy.

"None of that, m'sieu," he retorted; "remember the bargain! Concern yourself with your own affairs!"

"Wait," I said. "I'm not trying to reform you. For my purposes it is a poacher I want--else I might have gone to another."

"That sounds more reasonable," he admitted, guardedly.