The Pursuit Part 5

He was smiling with tranquil amus.e.m.e.nt, a smile which seemed to rouse her to anger.

"Let us go now, at once!" she said, and wheeled her horse.

Despard nodded, but did not dismiss the smile.

"Might I inform you that Aylmer has been my friend since our Sandhurst days, and that I have shared his intimacy with Commandant Rattier for the last five years? I can vouch for them; I really can."

She reined in her horse again and sat looking at all three with doubt still lurking in her eyes. Aylmer met her expression with unrestrained amazement. He found her mistrust of him a conundrum to which there was no answer. The Frenchman's shoulders rose and fell almost imperceptibly.

His head was slanted with deferential acquiescence. He laid his hand upon Aylmer's arm.

"Your horse?" he interposed.

He pointed to it and to Absalaam, who had now arrived and was touching the wounds in its flank with delicate, probing fingers. The commandant's gesture seemed to imply that the situation in which they found themselves demanded a tactful retreat, and that here he indicated a dignified one.

Aylmer still hesitated. He saw no reason why he should concur in his own dismissal; the idea grated on him. What had he done?

It was Despard who took the edge of restraint off the situation. He swung himself back into the saddle, and pointed up the hill.

"After all, the thing was a squeak," he allowed. "You are shaken." He turned and nodded slightly to the other two. "I will return and help with the horses; we shall have no other beat to-day."

They smiled, bowed to his companion, and gave him answering nod. They understood. He was going to use the opportunity to sponsor them. Then he would return, and they would have their explanation. They watched him bend towards his companion as they rode away.

"It is almost as if we diffused a contagion, you and I," speculated Rattier as they turned to Absalaam and the horses, but Aylmer made no effort to elaborate the issue. An inexplicable instinct to make the incident a personal rather than a general one had overtaken him. As he watched Despard ride away with his companion, he felt almost as if he were being defrauded. The relations between his cousin and her sister made a tie between Miss Van Arlen and himself; surely, in spite of everything, they were sufficient foundation upon which to found something more than a mere acquaintanceship. In the name of all the other decent-minded, clean-living Aylmers, he might have been allowed to make his and their protest against being held responsible for the knaveries of the head of their house.

So it was with something of dissatisfaction in his aspect that he turned to Absalaam and the wounded horse. The Moor saw it but misunderstood its purport.

"Merely a flesh wound, Sidi," he hastened to a.s.sure Aylmer. "A week, perhaps ten days, of rest and he is himself again. A small price to pay for so precious a thing as that child's life."

Aylmer looked at him with tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt. Absalaam ibn Said had neither harem nor wife; his career had been notoriously one of unrest and adventure. These pious opinions issued oddly from his bachelor lips.

"A small price indeed," he agreed pleasantly, "but a hundred youngsters run risks little less in the Sok of Tangier every day."

The Moor made a sweeping motion of the hand, as if he suddenly dropped the subject of conversation from a higher plane to a lower.

"The children of the Sok!" he cried contemptuously.

"Khabyles--Arabs--Susi--Riffs! What are they? Little more than vermin; their ranks are replenished all too quickly as it is! But this one! Here we tell a different story, do we not?"

Aylmer halted in his examination of the wounded pastern and looked up.

There was something arresting in the Moor's vehemence.

Absalaam caught the look and shrugged his shoulders.

"The Sidi has not visited Tangier for five or six weeks?" he said.

Aylmer nodded. And waited. He had had a good deal of experience of the Moor and his conversational methods. He was aware that the deferring of a climax till it could be launched on a tide of tantalization was the chiefest of them.

"Therefore, Sid' Aylmer," continued the Moor, "you have not heard all the tales which center round this small one's fortunes?"

Aylmer smiled and prepared to give his attention again to his horse. It was left to Rattier to ruin the pyramid of stimulation.

"What tales?" he demanded laconically.

Absalaam's brown eyes met both question and questioner with melancholy--almost, indeed, with scorn. How could one t.i.tillate, how could one embroider, how could one work up to a brave display of interest, if bald facts were to be wrung from one at this stage of a tale? He sighed.

"Tales of his wealth and importance, Sidi," he answered, in accents of subjection.

Rattier drew up the monocle which swung from a ribbon at his b.u.t.tonhole and concentrated his stare upon the Moor.

"Wealth?" he repeated tersely.

Absalaam opened his arms to their widest and held his palms emptily outflung.

"Wealth sufficient to buy all Tangier, all Fez, the whole of Mogrheb al Acksa, if a tenth of the reports be true. His life, therefore? How can one value it!"

He beamed upon them. He had been robbed of his slowly forged culmination, but he had, at least, been able to offer them a surprise.

Aylmer replaced upon the ground the hoof which he had been holding. He looked at the Moor good-humoredly.

"So the gossip mongers of the Sok credit this infant with riches?" he said. "On what evidence, if any?"

Absalaam made a motion towards the sea.

"In the harbor, when you landed, did you observe a yacht, Sidi--a white boat, with lines of gold at her cut.w.a.ter and figurehead?"

"Yes."

"That boat lies there at the service of that child. They have taken for him the Villa Eulalia; they have surrounded it with tents of men who are there to do no more than guard his safety; there are servants, horses, donkeys. The Gibraltar steamer brings packets of provisions or what not several times a week. In the town their money flows."

Rattier dropped his eyegla.s.s.

"I think, _mon ami_," he said slowly, "that gold must be freer with them than grat.i.tude. Were you thanked for what you did? I don't seem to remember it."

Aylmer shook his head.

"That is the mystery," he agreed. "I did little enough, but I was going to be thanked--till I disclosed my name. Then," he shrugged his shoulders, "you saw."

He meditated a minute. Then he burst out laughing.

"I was not allowed even to hold him, and I am not at all sure that I am not his guardian!" he said suddenly.

Rattier's surprise was evident, but he managed to concentrate it in a monosyllable.

"Eh?" he demurred wonderingly.

Aylmer gave an emphatic nod of the head.

"I was coming home from China at the time of the marriage of my cousin Landon with this child's mother. I broke my journey in New York specially to attend it. And Landon, merely as a form, asked me as his kinsman to be a party to his settlement. In certain circ.u.mstances, including his death, I was to be one of the trustees for his children."