The Winding Stair

by A. E. W. Mason

The light fell full upon the face of the man at the window. It seemed to Gerard de Montignac impossible that any man, even the grand serieux, who had so often carried his life in his hands through the solitary places, could have learnt so to school his features and keep all meaning from his eyes.

“Yes, that charge counts for you, and something else which shouldn’t count at all. You and I were at St. Cyr together.”

Indeed, that counted most of all. The sense of an old comradeship broken, the traditions of a great college violated, these had been the true cause of Gerard de Montignac’s discomfort. The years were beginning to build the high barriers about Gerard, shutting off great tracts of which he had once had glimpses to make the heart leap, taking the bright colour from his visions. A treasure-house of good memories was something nowadays to value, and here was one of the good memories, almost the most vivid of them all, destroyed. He rose from his chair, and as he rose, a curtain moved which covered an archway, moved and ever so slightly parted. It was just behind Si Tayeb Reha’s shoulder, and a little to his right at the side of the room; so that he did not notice the movement. Gerard de Montignac could look through the narrow opening. He had a glimpse of a woman with her face veiled, an orange scarf about her head, a broad belt of gold brocade about her white robe. Somehow the sight of her helped him, though he saw her but for a second, before the curtains closed again. It spurred him to that statement which from the outset he had been working to.

“So that’s it!” he cried. “A woman, eh? Two years since she took your fancy! She must be getting on now, mustn’t she? What’s her age? Seventeen? And for that, honour, career, a decent life, all, into the dustbin!”

He drew his heavy revolver from the pouch at his belt and laid it on the table.

“It is loaded,” he said. “You have just the time until my sergeant notices that I have left my revolver behind in this house. If I come back, and—no shot has been fired—then it is Meknes with all its shame and the same end.”

Nothing surprised Gerard de Montignac more than the coolness with which Si Tayeb Reha, as his old comrade called himself, received his sentence of death. He advanced to the table where the revolver lay and took the weapon up with a smile of curiosity and admiration.

“We make no such weapons as these,” he said in Arabic, examining the pistol with all a Moor’s fascination for mechanical instruments. “That, your Excellency, is why we are never a match for you and we must open our gates at your summons.”

He had never said one word except in Arabic during the whole of that interview, just as Gerard had stubbornly refused to speak anything but French. Gerard watched him toying with the weapon for a second and then turned rapidly away. He could not but admire his old friend’s courage; he could not but think: “What a waste of a good man!” He went out of the room without another word or another look. He was sick at heart. He no longer cared whether he had been peevish or argumentative or what kind of figure he had cut. One of the glamorous things in his life, his belief in the grand serieux, had been taken from him.

He mounted his horse and rode away, wishing for that shot to explode as quickly as possible, so that he might bury the dreadful episode out of sight and forget it altogether.