Charnock spent the greater part of a month in formalities. He took the letter from the Basha and many other letters to Jews of importance in the towns with which M. Fournier was able to provide him; he hired the boy Hamet who had acted as his guide on his first visit, and getting together an equipment as for a long journey in Morocco, rode out over the Hill of the Two Seas into the inlands of that mysterious and enchanted country.
CHAPTER XIX
[TELLS OF CHARNOCK'S WANDERINGS IN MOROCCO AND OF A WALNUT-WOOD DOOR]
In the course of time Charnock came to a village of huts enclosed within an impenetrable rampart of cactus upon the flank of the hills southward of Mequinez and there met the Sheikh. The Sheikh laid his hands upon Mallam Juzeed and bade him speak, which he did with a wise promptitude. It was true; they had taken the Christian from Tangier, but they had sold him on the way. They had chanced to arrive at the great houseless and treeless plain of Seguedla, a day's march from Alkasar, on a Wednesday; and since every Wednesday an open market is held upon two or three low hills which jut out from the plain, they had sold Ralph Warriner there to a travelling merchant of the Mtoga. Mallam supplied the merchant's name and the direction of his journey. Charnock packed his tents upon his mules and disappeared into the south.
For two years he disappeared, or almost disappeared; almost, since through the freemasonry of the Jews, that great telephone across Barbary by which the Jew at Tangier shall hear the words which the Jew speaks at Tafilet, M. Fournier was able to obtain now and again rare news of Charnock, and, as it were, a rare glimpse of him at Saforo, at Marakesch, at Tarudant, and to supply him with money. Then came a long interval, until a Jew of the Waddoon stopped Fournier in the Sôk of Tangier, handed him a letter, and told him that many months ago, as he rode at nightfall down a desolate pass of the Upper Atlas mountains, he came to an inhospitable wilderness of stones, where one in Moorish dress and speaking the Moorish tongue was watching the antics of a snake-charmer by the light of a scanty fire of brushwood. The Moor had two servants with him but no escort, and no tent, and for safety's sake the Jew stayed with him that night. In the morning the Moor had given him the letter to M. Fournier and had bidden him say that he was well.
In that letter Charnock told in detail the history of his search. How he had held to his clue, how he had missed it and retraced his steps, how he had followed the merchant to Figuig on the borders of Algeria, and back; how he had gone south into the country of Sus and was now returning northwards to Mequinez. He had discarded the escort, because if a protection to himself, it was a warning to the Arabs with whom he fell in. They grew wary and shut their lips, distrusting him, distrusting his business; and since he could speak Arabic before, he had picked up sufficient of the Moghrebbin dialect, what with his dark face and Hamet to come to his aid, to pass muster as a native. M. Fournier sent the letter on to Mrs. Warriner at Ronda, who read it and re-read it and blamed her selfishness in sending any man upon such an errand, and wondered why she of all women in the world should have found a man ready to do her this service. Many a time as she looked from her window over the valley she speculated what his thoughts were as he camped in the night-air on the plains and among the passes. Did his thoughts turn to Ronda? Did he see her there obtruding a figure of a monstrous impertinence and vanity? For she had asked of him what no woman had a right to ask.
His frank confession of how he had defined women came back to her with a pitiless conviction; "A brake on the wheel going up hill, a whip in the driver's hand going down." It was true! It was true! She was the instance which proved it true. There were unhappy months for Miranda of the balcony.
At times Jane Holt would be wakened from her sleep by a great cry, and getting from her bed she would walk round the landing half-way up the patio, to Miranda's bedroom, only to find it empty. She would descend the staircase, and coming into the little parlour, would discover Miranda leaning out of the open window and looking down to a certain angle of the winding road.
She had dreamed, she had seen in her dream Charnock with his two servants encamped upon a hill-side or on a plain, and hooded figures in long robes crawling, creeping, towards them, crouching behind boulders, or writhing their bodies across fields of flowers. She saw him too in the narrow, dim alleys of ruined towns, lured through a doorway behind impenetrable walls, and then robbed for his money and tortured for his creed.
At such times the sight of that road whence he had looked upwards to her window was a consolation, almost a confutation of her dreams. There at that visible corner of the road, underneath these same stars and the same purple sky, Charnock had sat and gazed at this window from which she leaned. He could not be dead! And carried away by a feverish revulsion, she would at times come to fancy that he had returned, that he was even now seated on the bank by the roadside, that but for the gloom she would surely distinguish him, that in spite of the gloom she could faintly distinguish him. And so her cousin would speak to her, and with some commonplace excuse that the night was hot, Miranda would get her back to her room.