AT BAY
Voices sounded below; footsteps hurried; a door slammed. Then feet upon the stairs, and a hand at the door. Arlee struggled to her feet in sudden terror; the candle was out and the room was in darkness. Outside a gale was blowing. The door opened, but the figure which hurried in was not the one her fright anticipated.
It was the old woman again, bustling with haste. She brought more candles for the table, and then a tray with a bottle and glasses and dishes covered with napkins. Then she bestowed her attention to Arlee, bringing her a mirror and a comb from the hamper she had left upon the floor, and a cloth thick with powder. Then Arlee was sure.
She stood rigid a moment, listening to that low buzz of voices from below, then desperately she shook out her tangled hair and combed it back from her hot face. It was still damp from the water that had been dashed upon her, and as she knotted it swiftly, soft strands of it broke away and hung in wet, childish tendrils. She brushed some powder on her face; she bit her bloodless lips, and stared into the glass, to see a wan and big-eyed girl staring back affrighted.
Then the door opened, and desperately calling on her courage, Arlee heard the Captain speaking her name and saw his smiling face advancing through the shadows.
"A thousand greetings, Mademoiselle. Ah, I am glad to see you." A strained emotion quivered through the false assurance of his tone.
She stood very straight and tense before him, a childishly small figure there in the dusk, the blowing candles making strange play of light and shadow over her. Steadily she answered, "And I am very glad to see you, Captain Kerissen."
"And I am glad that you are glad." But his ear had caught the hardness of her voice, for answering irony was in his. Some devil of delay and disappointment seemed to enter into him, for his face, as she saw it now in his advancing, struck fright into her. The four fingers of his right hand were wrapped in a bandage and he extended his left to her, murmuring an apology. "A slight accident, you see."
"There is so much I do not see that I do not feel like shaking hands," gave back Arlee. "Captain Kerissen, this is too strange a situation to be maintained. You must end it."
"It is a very delightful situation," he returned blandly, looking about with dancing eyes. "To be again your host, even in so poor a place as this old house of the Sheik—and the place has its possibilities, Mademoiselle. It is romantic. Your window overlooks that desert you were so anxious to see. The sunsets——"
"Captain Kerissen, I must say that you use a very strange way to keep me your guest!"
"I might respond that any way was justifiable so that it kept you a guest.... But you wrong me. Did I not bring you safely out from that quarantine, as you besought me?" His smile was mockery itself.
"But you did not bring me to my friends. I do not like your sending me here, without explanation," she returned, trying to be very wise and speak quietly and not rouse him to anger. "We passed a city where the American flags were flying over a house, and I could have gone there."
"I am sorry you do not care for my hospitality. I did not know that I was displeasing to you."
"It is those ways that are displeasing to me. I——"
"Then you shall change them," he laughed. "That will give me pleasure.... But I did not come in the dead of this night, half sick and fatigued, to find such welcome. Come, you must smile a little and sit down at the table with me. Here are delicacies I sent from Cairo."
Smilingly he seated himself at the divan by the table and lifted the covers from the plates, nodded satisfaction at the food, and began to help himself, while she stood there, motionless.
Without looking up, "Will you not help me to the Apollinaris, Mademoiselle?" he suggested. "My right hand, you see, is not as it should be. There is a bottle opener on the tray."
Feeling a fool, but unwilling to provoke a crisis, Arlee tugged at the cork and poured him a glass of the sparkling water and then a glass for herself, which she thirstily drank. "How did you hurt your hand?" it occurred to her to say.
"By playing with fire—the single pastime of entertainment!" He spoke gaily, but his lips twitched. "But will you not sit down and join me? This caviar I recommend."
"I do not care to eat."
"No?" He finished his sandwich and drained his glass, talking banteringly the while to her. She did not answer. Something told her that the time of explanation between them was coming fast; he had ceased to play with his good fortune, ceased to feel he could afford to wait and look and fancy. He had come urgent, in the dead of night. His mood was teasing, mocking, but imperative.... Slowly she moved toward the unlatched door.
Alertly he was before her; the bolts shot home. "Ah, pardon, but I was negligent! We might be interrupted—and also," he laughed, as if deprecatingly, "I have foolish fears that you are so dream-like that you will vanish like a dream without those earthly bars. Locks are for treasures.... And now where is that welcome for me? I came in that door on fire to see you, and your eyes froze me. I came to love—you made me mock. Shall we begin again? Will you be nice now, little one, be kind and sweet——"
"Captain Kerissen, you make it impossible for me to like you at all! Why do you treat me like this? You shut me in this house like a prisoner. If you—if you care for me at all," stammered Arlee, "you would not treat me so!"
"And how, then, would I treat you?" he inquired slowly.
"You would—you would take me to my own people and give me back my independence, my dignity. Then there would be honor in your—your courtship. I——"
"Would you come back to me?"
"I——"
The lie choked her. And the passion of anger which had flared in her that afternoon sprang up in flame again; the candlelight showed the hot blood in her cheeks. "I shall not come to you if you keep me here!" she gave back fearlessly.
"But here I can come to you. And the preliminaries are always stupid—I have no desire to reënact them. I am well content with where we have arrived. Be content, also."
She stared back at his smiling face. And all she thought was, "Shall I defy him now, or try to hold him off a little longer?" She had ceased to feel afraid; her blood was on fire; it was battle now between them; perhaps a battle of the wits a little longer, then——
"In America men do not make love by force," she flung at him. "You are mad, Captain Kerissen! You will be sorry if you go on like this. If you wish to marry me you must give me the freedom of choice. You must give me time. I must have a minister of my own faith. Do you think I will submit to this? You make me hate you!"
"Hate is often love with a mask," he laughed, his eyes fixed on the spirited, flushed face, the flashing eyes, the defiant mouth. "And do not quote your America to me. You are done with America."
"You say that? You forget who I am! My brother—I tell you my brother will——"
"Do I not know the risks?" His eyes narrowed. "But your brother will ask in vain. He will not see you—until we reappear as husband and wife. I will take you to the Continent, then I will give you everything a woman wants, luxury and jewels—the pearls of my ancestors I will hang on you. These have no woman of mine worn. You shall be my adored, my dearest—— Oh, you must not turn from me," he pleaded, his voice sinking softer and softer as he stole closer to her. "You know that I am mad for you. You have bewitched me, little Rose, you have made me strong and weak in a breath. I am clay in your hands. Be sweet, be kind, be wife to me——" His hot hand gripped her arm. He bent over her, and she sprang back, her hands flung out before her.
"Oh, wait!" she cried beseechingly. "Wait—please wait."
"Wait? I have waited too long!" His voice was a snarl now. The mask of indolent mockery was gone; his face was stamped with cruelty and greed. "Nom d'un nom, I am through with this waiting!"
She sprang back before his approach, then whirled about to face him, trying to beat him back with words, with reason, with appeal. Insanely he laughed and clutched at her as she flew past his outstretched arms; in the corner he pinioned her against the wall and gripped her to him.
Terror gave her the strength of two—and his hand was bandaged. Desperately she attacked it, and as his laughter changed to curses, she wrenched free once more and flew across the room. With both hands she seized the candles and flung them into the pillowed divan; holding the last two to the draperies. Like magic the little flames zigzagged up the cotton hangings.
He threw himself upon the fire, dragging down the hangings, beating on the cushions, but the corner was ablaze. Overhead the flames seized cracklingly on the dry wood and darted little red tongues over the dry surface and a scarlet snake ran out over the carved ceiling.
In utter wildness Arlee had carried the last candle to the open hamper and the garments there caught instant fire. She was oblivious of the sparks falling about her, oblivious of the increasing peril. When Kerissen ran to the door, tearing open the bolts, furiously cursing her, she gave him back the ghost of his earlier mocking laughter and threatened him with a blazing cloth as he turned to drag her from the room.
But the fire reached her fingers and she flung the cloth at him, to have him trample it under foot as he sprang toward her again.
"Would you be burned—be marred?" he shouted at her. "You are mad, you——"
Behind him the door opened. Behind him a tall figure appeared through the thickening smoke. She saw a face she knew; a voice she knew cried out her name:
"Arlee!"
"Oh, here!" she cried and flung herself toward him.
"Not unless you want another?" said Billy B. Hill to the Captain, turning his gun suggestively.
One tense instant the three faced each other in that flaming room, then with a sound of impotent fury, Kerissen turned and darted out the door. But as Billy turned to follow, his hand on Arlee's, there was a sound of sliding bolts.
"Burn, burn, then! Burn together!" called a hoarse voice through the wood.
Hill flung himself against the door; it was unyielding. On the other side the taunts continued. He ran to the window, catching up the little table as he ran, and rained a fury of blows with the table against the close-carved screen. The wood splintered and broke; he wrenched a side away, and dropping his gun in his pocket he crashed through the hole and hung on the outside by his hands.
"Climb out on my shoulders," he commanded, and Arlee climbed—how, she never knew. For one instant she had an impression of hanging out over an abyss with fire crackling in her face; the next instant the soles of her feet were smarting and her eyes still seemed to see stars.
There was a run, stumbling, with Billy's hand sustaining her, and then she was on a camel, clutching the saddle as the beast rose swiftly in response to urgent whacks, and beside her Billy was on another. Some one on foot goaded the beasts into a startled run, and behind them yells and screeches were growing louder and louder.
Over her lurching shoulder she had one last glimpse of a burning building and saw flames pouring from the roof, and the room where she had been an open furnace, and then she turned her face toward the dark ahead.
"Hang tight," Billy was calling to her, and she saw him lean over and lash both camels into furious speed. "Some one is riding after," and then he turned and shot his gun warningly into the air.
The yells behind them stopped. But after some moments they heard a camel snarl, and knew that some one was still back there in the darkness, hanging on their trail. So they rode hard ahead, into the enveloping night, over the rolling dunes, with the wind leaping and tearing and hurling the sand in their faces, as if the very elements were fighting against them.
It was a strange chase and a hot one, pounding on and on, racked with the wild, lurching flight, deeper and deeper into the yellow-gray night that welcomed them with more strident blasts and more stinging particles of sand.
"It's a storm," Billy shouted at her, raising his voice above the wind. "It's been blowing up this way for an hour now—they won't follow long in the face of it. Can you hang on a little longer?"
"Forever," she cried back, gripping the pommel tight and bending her head before the whirling particles. There was sand in her hair, sand on her lashes and in her eyes, sand on her face and down her neck, and sand in her mouth when she wet her lips, but she heard herself laughing in the night.
"By and by we'll get off," he called back, and by and by when the hot, stifling, stinging, choking, whirling gale was too blinding to be borne, he checked the camels in one of the hollows of the desert dunes from which the wind was skimming ammunition for its peppery assaults, and the beasts knelt with a haste that spoke of gladness.
"It's the backbone of it now; cover your head and lie down," Billy commanded, and Arlee covered it with what he thrust into her hands—his overcoat, she found—and tucked herself down against him as he crouched beside the camels.
"I should think—it was—the backbone," she gasped, unheard, into her muffling coat. For the wind howled now like a rampaging demon; it tore at them in hot anger; it dragged at the coat about her head, and when her clutch resisted, it flung the sand over and over her till she lay half buried and choking. And then, very slowly and sulkily, it retreated, blowing fainter and fainter, but slipping back for a last spiteful gust whenever she thought it finally gone, but at last her head came out from its burrow, and she began cautiously to wipe the sand crust off her face and lashes.
"In your eyes?" said a sympathetic voice.
In the darkness beside her Billy Hill was sitting up, digging at his countenance.
"Not now—I've cried—that all gone," she panted back.
He chuckled. "I'll try it—swearing's no use."
She sat up suddenly. "Are they coming?"
"Not a bit. No use, if they did. You're safe now."
"Oh, my soul!" She drew a long, long breath. "I can't believe it." Then she whirled about on him. "How—why—why is it you?"
He looked suddenly embarrassed, but the darkness hid it from her. He became oddly intent on brushing his clothes. "Oh, I guessed," he said in a casual tone.
"You guessed? Don't they know? What did they think? Oh, where did everyone think I was?"
He told her, dwelling upon the misleading details; the hasty message of farewell from the station, the directions about luggage, the money to pay the hotel bill. "You see, his wits and luck were just playing together," he said.
"Then the Evershams are up the Nile?"
"Of course. They never dreamed——"
"They wouldn't." Arlee was silent. She wondered confusedly—she wanted to ask a question—she wanted to ask two questions.
"But—but—no one else——?" she stammered.
There was a particularly large lump of sand in Billy B. Hill's throat just then; he cleared it heavily. "Oh, yes, some one else guessed, too," he said then. "That English friend of yours, Robert Falconer, he and I had a regular old shooting party in the palace last Sunday evening. If you'd been there then he would certainly have had you out."
"So he knows." She said it a little faintly, Billy thought, as if she was disappointed and troubled. She would know, of course, by intuition, how the Englishman would think about a scrape of that sort.
"But he doesn't know now," he said eagerly. "He is sure you are all right in Alexandria, because the Evershams received another fake telegram from you from Alexandria. The Captain was stalling them along, apparently, keeping everything under cover as long as possible. And when Falconer heard about that, his suspicions were over. He thought we'd made fools of ourselves in going to the palace."
She was silent. Looking at her, after a while, Billy saw her staring out obliviously into the darkness; her hair was hanging all about her.
His glance seemed to recall her thoughts. She started and then brushed back her hair; the sand fell from it and she took hold of one soft strand. "Look out, I'm going to shake this!" she warned, and he half shut his eyes and underneath the lids he saw her shaking her head as vigorously as a little terrier after a bath.
"Isn't it awful?" she appealed.
"I could scratch a match on my face," he confirmed.
"But tell me," she began again, "how did you know I was in that palace? And I must tell you how I happened to go and how I was kept there."
"You were told there was a quarantine, weren't you?" Billy supplied, as she hesitated.
Her astonishment found quick speech. "Why, how did you know that?"
"The Baroff told me—that Viennese girl who came into your room."
"Why, you know everything! How did you?"
"Oh, I carried her over a wall, thinking it was you."
"But how could you think it was I? And what were you doing at the wall? I don't see how——"
"Oh, one of the palace maids gave me a message in Arabic and I thought it was from you. You see, I suspected—I had seen you drive off in that motor——"
"But how could the maid bring you a message? Where were you? Where did she see you?"
"I was painting out in front of the palace." Billy sounded more and more casual.
"You said you were an engineer," said Arlee. His heart jumped. At least she had remembered that!
"So I am—the painting was just a joke."
"And you happened there," she began, wondering, and after he had opened his mouth to correct her, he closed it silently again. Gratitude was an unwieldy bond. He did not want to burden her with obligation. And he suspected, with a rankling sort of pang, that he was not the rescuer she had expected. So he made as light as possible of his entrance into the affair, telling her nothing at all of his first uneasiness and his interview with the one-eyed man which had confirmed his suspicions against the Captain's character, and the masquerade he had adopted so he could hang about the palace. Instead he let her think him there by chance; he ascribed the delivery of Fritzi's message to sheer miracle, and his presence under the walls that night to wanton adventure, with only a half-thought that she was involved.
Stoutly he dwelt upon Falconer's part in the attack the next night, and upon the entire reasonableness of his abandonment of the trail. He put it down to his own mulishness that he had hung on and had learned through the little boy of her removal from the palace.
He interrupted himself then with questions, and she told him of her strange trip down the Nile in the dahabiyeh, under guard of the old woman and the Nubian. "But how did you come?" she demanded.
"Well, I just swung on to the same train he was in," said Billy. "And I got out at Assiout because he'd bought a ticket there, but I couldn't see a thing of him in the darkness and confusion of the station, and I had a horrid feeling that he'd gone somewhere else, the Lord knew where, to you. But the Imp—that's the little Arab boy who adopted me and my cause—went racing up and down, and he got a glimpse of the Captain tearing off on a horse and behind him a man loping along with a bundle on a donkey, and the Imp raced behind him and yelled he'd dropped something. The man went back to look, and the Imp ran alongside him, asking him for work as a donkey boy. The fellow shook him off, but that had delayed him, and though we lost the horseman we kept the donkey-man in sight and followed him on to the village. I reconnoitered while the Imp stole these two camels—jolly good ones they are—and while I was trying to make out where you were, for there were lights in several windows, I suddenly heard your voice and then I saw a glare of fire. Well, my revolver was a passport.... Now, how about that fire? What started it?"
"I did; he—he was trying to make love to me," she answered breathlessly, "and I just got to the candles."
"Are you burned at all? Truthfully now? I never stopped to ask."
"If I am, I don't know it," she laughed tremulously. Then, "Isn't this crazy!" she burst forth with.
"It's—it's off the beaten track," Billy B. Hill admitted. "It's a jump back into the Middle Ages." His note of laughter joined hers as they sat staring owlishly at each other through the dark of the after-storm.
A little longer they talked, their questions and answers flitting back and forth over those six strange days; then, as the excitement waned, Billy heard a sleepy little sigh and saw a small hand covering a yawn. The girl's slender shoulders were wilting with incalculable fatigue.
Instantly he commanded sleep, and obediently she curled down into the little nest he prepared, pillowing her head upon his coat, and almost instantly he heard her rhythmic breathing, slow and unhurried as a little child. His heart swelled with a feeling for which he had no name, as he sat there, his back against a camel, staring out into the night, an unknown feeling in which joy was very deep and triumph was merged into a holy thankfulness.