The Palace of Darkened Windows Part 18

She saw that the young man's face changed. Every clear-cut line of it was sharp with repugnance. "You need not remind me of that," he said with m.u.f.fled fierceness, staring down at his plate.

"The danger line!" she thought while shaking her head at him, with the tense semblance of an amused little smile.... "You aren't the least bit English," she rebuked, "and I thought you were."

"Not in that.... And some day England will see her folly."

"America is seeing her folly now," thought Arlee with secret bitterness. But when she raised her eyes they were gently contemplative. She spoke musingly.

"In things like that you aren't at all what I thought you were--about our social customs, I mean. Yet fundamentally, I think you are."

"That I am what?"

"What I thought you were."

He waited, palpably waited, but Arlee continued to peel a tangerine with absorption, and the question had to come from him. He put it with an air of indolent amus.e.m.e.nt, yet she felt the intent interest in leash.

"And what did you think I was like, _chere pet.i.te mademoiselle_?"

"Very handsome for one thing, Monsieur! You see, I owe you a compliment for calling me such a pretty name as this!" With a mischievous smile she touched the roses nodding in her girdle. "And very autocratic for another, with a very bad temper. If you can't get your way you would be shockingly disagreeable!"

"But I always get my way," he a.s.sured her lazily, his teeth showing under his small, black mustache.

"I believe you do!" Ingenuous admiration, simple and sustained, was in the look she gave him. Her hands were not half so icy now, nor her nerves so tense. She felt strangely surer of herself; the actual presence of the danger calmed her. She must make good with this, she thought simply, in strenuous American.

"And yet," she went on thoughtfully, the pretty picture of fascinated absorption in this most feminine topic--the dissection of a young man--"yet, you are chivalrous. And I think that is the quality we American girls admire most of all."

"The quality--of indulgence?" he questioned, with a half-railing air.

"The quality--of gentleness."

"But is there not another quality which you American girls would admire more than that gentleness--if you ever had the chance in your lives to see it? The quality of dominance? The courage of the man who dares what he desires, and who takes what he wills? Is not that----"

"Ah, yes, we love strong men," Arlee flung into the speech that was bearing him on like a tide, "but we don't think them strong unless they are strong enough to fight themselves. They may take what they will--but they mustn't crush it.... There is a gentleness in great strength--I can't explain what I mean----"

"Ah, I see, I see." He smiled subtly. "I am not to crush you, little Rose of Desire," he said softly.

She met the sly significance of his gaze with a look of frank, unfaltering candor. "Of course not," she said stoutly. "When you--you make me afraid of you, you make me like you less. You seem less like the friend I knew on the boat."

"Ah, that boat!... You were my friend, then!" he added suddenly, with a note of question sounding through the affirmation, and she answered quickly, looking away with an air of petulant reproach.

"Why, you know I was, Captain Kerissen. And here in Cairo----"

"Yes, here in Cairo," he interrupted triumphantly, "in the face of those eyes and tongues--I saw that red-headed dog of an Englishman looking his anger at you! But you smiled on me before them all--those fools, those tyrannic fools----"

"But you mustn't abuse my other friends! They were only--stupid!"

"Stupid as their blood brother, the ox!... But they are not in the picture now--those other friends!" Disagreeably he laughed. "And you do not grieve for them--no? The world has not touched you? There is no one out there,"--he made a gesture over the guarding walls--"no one who holds a fragment of your thought, of your heart in his hands?"

She looked at him as if puzzled, then burst into a bubbling laugh.

"Why, of course not! I've just had a nice time with people. There has never been a bit of sentiment about it!"

"Not on your side," he said meaningly, and because this was. .h.i.tting the truth smartly on the head she looked past him in some confusion.

"Oh--boys!" she said with a deprecating little laugh. "I've never listened to them."

He leaned back in his chair, feeling for his cigarette case, and the contentment of his look deepened. "You have been a child, asleep to life," he murmured complacently. "I told you you were a princess--let us say a sleeping princess waiting for the prince, like that old fairy tale of the English." He was looking at his cigarette as he tapped it on the arm of his chair, and slowly struck a light, then, after the first breath, "But do you not hear his footsteps in your sleep?" he added, and gave her a glance from the corner of his eyes.

She looked up and then down; she stared out into the sun-flooded garden and laughed softly. "Even princesses dream," she demurely acknowledged, and thought the line and her fleet, meaning glance went very well with this mad opera-bouffe which fate was forcing her to play.

Kerissen seemed to think that went very well, too, for his flashing teeth acknowledged his pleasure in her aptness; then his smile faded and she felt him studying her over his cigarette, studying her averted gaze, the bright color in her cheeks, the curves of her lips, and he was puzzled and perturbed by the sweet, baffling beauty of her. A wild elation began to swell his heart. His eyes glowed, his blood burned with the triumph, not so much of his daring capture of her, but of the flattering tribute that her pretty ways were paying toward his personality alone. Wary as he was, cynical of subterfuge, he did not penetrate her guard. His monstrous vanity whispered eager flattery in his ears.

And still he continued to stare at her, finding her unbelievably lovely. "My grandfather would call you an _houri_ from paradise,"

he told her, the warmth of admiration deepening in his eyes.

"And your grandfather's grandson knows that I am only an _houri_ from America!... But that _is_ paradise for _houris_!"

"And not for men, no!... Sometimes I have wished that those English would restore in me that young belief in the heaven of the Prophet,"

he continued, smiling, "and now that wish is granted. It is here, that paradise," and his smile, flashing about the lonely garden, came to dwell again upon the girl before him.

She laughed. "But does one _houri_ make a paradise?" she bantered, while the beating, hurrying heart of her went faster and faster till she thought his ears would hear it. "We have a proverb--one swallow does not make a summer."

"_Cela depend_--that depends upon the _houri_.... When _you_ are that one it is paradise indeed." He leaned toward her, speaking softly, but with a voice that thrilled more and more in its own eloquence.

She was the Rose of Desire, he reminded her, and beside her all other flowers drooped in envy. She was as lovely as young Dawn to the eyes of men. She was the ravishing embodiment of gaiety and youth and delight. He quoted from the poets, not from his own Oriental poets, but s.n.a.t.c.hes from Campion and Wilde, vowing that

"There was a garden in her face, Where roses and white lilies grow,"

and adding, with points of fire dancing in his heavy lidded eyes,

"Her neck is like white melilote, Flushing for pleasure of the sun,"

and went on to add praise to praise and extravagance to extravagance, till a sudden little imp of mirth caught Arlee by the throat, hysterically choking her. "I shall never like praise or poetry or--or men again," she thought, struggling between wild laughter and hot disgust, while aloud she mocked, "Ah, you know too much poetry, Captain Kerissen! I do not recognize myself at all! You are laughing at me!"

"Laughing at you?... I am worshipping you," he said tensely, his eyes on hers, and the fierce words shattered her light defenses to confusion.

Silence gripped her. She tried to meet his look and smile in mock reproof, but her eyes fled away affrighted, so full of desperate, pa.s.sionate things was the dark gaze they touched. She gripped her cold little hands in her lap and looked out beyond the lebbek's shade into the vivid garden. The hot sunshine lay orange on the white-sanded paths; the shadows were purple and indigo. A little lizard had come out from a crack in a stone and was sunning himself, while one bright eye upon them, fixed, motionless, irridescent, warned him of their least stir. She envied him the safety of his crack.... She herself must meet this crisis--must turn this tide....

"It is--so soon," she faltered.

"Soon?" He had risen and was standing over her. "Soon? I was with you on the boat--I walked by your side--I danced with you and held you against my heart. And here in Cairo I walked and talked with you.... And now for three days you have been under my roof, eating at the table with me, alone within these walls, and you call it soon! Truly, you are beyond belief! _Soon!_"

"But soon--for _me_!" she interrupted swiftly, and sprang to her feet to face him with eyes and lips that smiled without a trace of fear. Only her cheeks were no longer crimson but white as chalk.

"Too soon--for me to be sure--how _I_ feel! I hadn't realized--I hadn't known--Oh, you mustn't hurry me! You mustn't hurry me!" She broke off in a confusion he might well misconstrue, and moved nervously away, her back to him.

He stood staring after her, a man not in two minds but in three and four. Her broken words--her smiles--her emotion--these might well arouse the most flattering surmise, and his vanity and his curiosity were stirred to swift delight. He broke into a storm of words, of protestations, of eager persuasion and honied flattery, drawing nearer and nearer to her, while she slipped continually away from him.

"You mustn't hurry me," she echoed defensively. "I am not like you--you Southerners. I----"

"You are asleep--I have told you that you are that sleeping princess," he broke in, and following after as she turned away from him, he put a quick arm about her, and bending over her, tried to turn her about toward him. "Do you know how that little sleeping princess was awakened by her prince?" he murmured fatuously, bending closer.

The hat saved her, that coquettish little hat with its jealously guarding brim which bent obstinately lower and lower between them.