The Palace of Darkened Windows Part 10

She flung one arm out before her and found it grasped by hands that were hot and burning. The touch shot her with a fierce rage that cleared her brain and unlocked her lips.

"Is that--the conquest of the spirit?" she gasped, and for an instant the white-hot scorn in her eyes, flashing into his, hid any hint of the fear in her.

Involuntarily his grasp relaxed, and violently she wrenched her arm away and stood facing him, a little white-clad image of war, her eyes blazing, her breast heaving, a defiant child in her intrepidity who gave him back look for look.

In his eyes there glowed and battled a conflict of desires. For one moment they seemed flaming at her from the dark, like some wild creature ready to spring; the next moment they were human, recognizable. She read there grudging admiration, arrested ardor, irresolution, dubiety, and secret calculation.

Then he put both hands behind him and bowed with ceremony.

"The spirit," he remarked dryly, "is worth the conquest."

She said proudly, "You would not like your English friends to know how you treat a guest!"

At that she saw his lip curl in irony--at the mention of the English, perhaps, or in disdain at the appearance of fearing a threat, however powerful that threat might be. He answered with calmness, "It is not the English I am considering.... Nor have I treated my guest so ill, _chere pet.i.te mademoiselle_.... If for the moment I mistook my cue--that look within your face--I ask grace for my stupidity."

Suddenly she was frightened. He did not look like a man who wholly surrenders his desires. His eyes seemed to say to her, "Wait--the last word has not been spoken!" She felt her knees trembling.

With an effort she got out, "It is granted--but never again--must you misunderstand. An American girl----"

She stopped. There was a lump in her throat. Across a bright, familiar veranda she could hear a clear, sharp voice answer, "American goose!" She saw a lean tanned face burn red with anger. A wave of loneliness went through her. The irony of it was pitiless.

How right Robert Falconer had been!

He was staring down at the table beside him, frowning, considering.

She saw with peculiar distinctness how the cigarette he had dropped had burned a hole in the fine linen. One of the candles was dripping lopsidedly. She thought some one ought to right it. She wondered if that soft step, hesitating, behind the curtains, was the serving woman's, and she turned toward that doorway.

"I don't think I care for any coffee," she said, with an air of careless finality. "I think I will go back to my room. Good evening."

He followed her to the doorway, drawing aside the curtains as she pa.s.sed into the anteroom, and opening the door at the foot of the steps, with an answering, "Good evening," and an added, "Till to-morrow, Mademoiselle." And then, as the door closed below her, she paused on the dark stairs and huddled against the wall, listening to the faint footfalls from below, crossing and recrossing. Then, when the silence seemed continual, she tiptoed down the stairs again, softly pushed open the unlatched door, stole across the anteroom to the curtained doorway and peered in.

The salon was empty, and in its center the supper table stood stripped of its cloth and candles. Only the pale light from the windows dispelled the growing dark. Like a little white wraith Arlee fled through the room and turned the handle of the door at the head of the _haremlik_ stairs. The door was locked.

She shook the handle, first cautiously, then with increasing violence, then she ran back into the room to the nearest window, staring down through the screen. It would have been a steep jump down into the street, but her tense nerves would have dared it instantly. Her hands tore at the _mashrubiyeh_, but the tiny spindles and delicate curves held sound and firm. She beat against it with fierce little fists; she leaped against it with all her trifling weight. It did not yield an inch. Was there iron in all that delicacy? Or was that old wood impregnable in its grim trust?

Wildly she glanced back into the room. Suppose she took a chair and beat at this carving--could she clear a way before the servants came? Could she take the jump successfully? She gazed down into the street, estimating the fall, trying to calculate the hurt.

As she gazed, her eyes grew fixed and filled with utter amazement.

Down the street, on a black horse that arched his curving neck and danced on light, fleet feet, rode a man in a uniform of green and gold. He sat erect, his clear-cut profile toward her. The next instant his horse, side-stepping at a blowing paper, turned his face into view. It was Captain Kerissen.

Some one was stirring in the anteroom, and Arlee darted to the left of the throne-chair and through the door there which stood ajar.

She was in a dim salon, like the one that she had left, but smaller, and across from her was another door. She flew toward it, wild with the hope of escape, and it opened before her eager hands.

From the shadows of the room it disclosed came a figure with a quick cry. So suddenly it came, so tumultuously it threw itself toward her that Arlee had a startled vision of bare arms, glittering with jeweled bands, arrested outstretched before her as the low gladness of the cry broke in an angry guttural. Slowly the arms dropped in a gesture of despair. She saw a face, distorted, pa.s.sionate, grow haggard beneath its paint in the reversal of hope.

"Madame!" stammered Arlee to that strange figure of her hostess.

"Madame--Oh, pardon me," she cried, s.n.a.t.c.hing at her French, "but tell me how I can go away from here. Tell me----"

"_C'est toi--va-t-en!_" the woman answered in a voice of smothered fury. She made a menacing gesture toward the door. "_Va-t-en_."

Suddenly her voice rose in a pa.s.sion of angry phrases that were indistinguishable to the girl, and then she broke off as suddenly and flung herself down upon a couch. From behind her the old woman came shuffling forth and put a hand on Arlee's arm, and Arlee felt the muscles of that hand as strong and rigid as a man's. Utterly confused and bewildered, the girl suffered herself to be led back through the rooms to the foot of her stairs.

"Mariayah!" screamed the old woman, and after a moment the voice of waiting-maid answered from above, and then as Arlee dumbly ascended the stairs, the voice of the old woman rose with her in shrill admonition.

It was the voice of a jailer, thought the white-lipped girl, and that little, dark-skinned maid who waited upon her so eagerly, with such sidelong glances of strange interest, was the tool of a jailer.

And though the turning of the key in her own hand gave her a momentary sense of refuge from them, it was but a false illusion of the moment. There was neither refuge nor safety here. She was being deceived ...

The quarantine was lifted.

How else could the Captain be cantering down the street? He did not look like a man escaping.... Perhaps he had bribed the doorkeeper--that which he had declared impossible for Arlee....

But certainly he was deceiving her.

Like a swollen river bursting its banks, her racing mind, wild with suspicion, surged out of its simple channels and swirled in every direction.... What did he mean? What was he trying to do? Keep her in ignorance of the outside world, detain her as long as he dared while the Evershams' absence left her friendless, and inflict his dreadful love-making upon her? Perhaps he thought that he could fascinate her!

She laughed aloud, but it was such a ghostly little laugh that it set her nerves jumping. She stopped in her feverish pacing of the floor; she tried to control her racing mind, she tried to be very calm and to plan.

Had he sent all those letters she had written? Steadily she stared at the possibility that he had not. But at least the Evershams knew where she was. Even the meager warmth of their telegram was like an outstretched hand through the dark. She clung tight to it.

It was absurd to be frightened. He would never dare to annoy her--never, in his sober senses. When they were alone together he had lost his head, but that was accident--impulse...

She rolled the divan against the locked door. She piled two chairs upon it.

No, of course, she had nothing really to fear from him. He was too wise not to understand the gulf between them. To-morrow she would confront him flatly with his deceit; she would array the power of the authorities behind her race. She would sweep instantly from that ill-omened palace. There would be no more philandering.

Her lips moved as she silently rehea.r.s.ed the mighty speeches that she would make, and all the while as she leaned there against a window, staring strangely through the candle-light at the barricade before the door, she could think of nothing but how mad and unreal it all seemed--like some bad dream from which she would wake in an instant.

But she did not wake. The dream persisted, and the iron bars across her window were very tangible. Down below her in the garden the old lebbek tree rustled stealthily in the stillness. Gusty clouds hid the stars. In the distance the interminable tom-tom beat.

She cast herself into the bed and cried convulsively, like a desperately frightened child, while the awful sense of terror and utter loneliness seemed to be rolling over and over her, like an unending sea. Her sobbing racked her from head to foot. She cried until she was spent with weakness. Then, her wet face still pressed against the pillow and her tangled hair flung out in disordered curls, she fell at last into the deep sleep of exhausted youth.

She woke with a smothered cry. In the darkness a hand had touched her.

CHAPTER VI

A GIRL IN THE BAZAARS

Billy slapped on his hat with a clap of violence. She might have just _seen_ him! Then he got up and marched down the steps. There was no more use in camping on that veranda. There was no more use in guarding that entrance. When a girl went whirling off in a limousine, "all dolled up" as his academic English put it, that girl wasn't going to be back in five minutes. And anyway he'd be blessed if he lay around in the way any longer like a doormat with "Welcome"

inscribed upon the surface.

So this spurt of masculine shame at his swift surrender to her, and his masculine resentment at being ignored as she went by, sent him hurrying down the street resolved not to return till dinner.

From habit his steps took him to the bazaars. But the zest of that bright pageant was dulled for him. The color was gone even from the red canopies, and the excitement had vanished from the din of noises, the interest fled from the grave figures squatting in their cubby holes of shops draped with silky rags or sewing upon scarlet slippers. He listened apathetically to the warring shouts of the donkey boys and the anathemas of a jostled water carrier stooping under his distended goatskin, then dodged out of the way of a goaded donkey and turned into one of the pa.s.sages where the four-footed could not penetrate.

For a few moments the bargaining over a silver bracelet between two beturbaned and berobed Arabs caught the surface of his attention, and as the wrangling became a bedlam of imprecations, and the explosive gestures made physical violence a development apparently of mere seconds, Billy's eyes brightened and he estimated chances.

But as he picked his favorite there was one final frenzy of fury, and then--peace and joy, utter calm on the wild waters! One Arab counted out the coins from a little leather bag about his neck and the other pa.s.sed over the bracelet, and with mutual salaams and smiling speeches, behold! the affair was accomplished.

Disgustedly Billy turned away. Then on the other side of him he heard a voice, a sweet and rather high voice, with a musical intensity of inflection that was as English as the Union Jack.