The Winding Stair

by A. E. W. Mason

“Shall we go to the Villa Iris?” he said.

Ratenay laughed and lifted his cap down from a peg.

“What! Has Praslin fired you? Let us go.”

But outside the long wooden building with its verandah of boards, Gerard de Montignac stopped. Marguerite Lambert roused no curiosity in him at this moment.

“A man from the Native Department called Baumann came from Rabat to-day to see the General. I hear that he has some news of Paul. He returns to Rabat to-morrow, but I was told that I might find him to-night at the Villa Iris. Let us go, then! For though I laugh, I am very anxious.”

Gerard de Montignac was an officer of a type not rare in the French Army. An aristocrat to his finger tips, a youth with one foot in the drawing rooms of the Faubourg and the other in the cafés of Montmartre, and contemptuous of politics, he had turned his back on Paris like so many of his kind and sought a career in the colonial army of France. He kept up a plentiful correspondence with the beautiful ladies of his acquaintance, which did him no good with his masters at the War Office. For the ladies would quote his letters at their dinner parties. “What do you think? I had a letter from Gerard to-day. He says that such a mistake was made, etc., etc.” But he was not a gossip. He was a student, a soldier with a note book and more than one little brochure giving a limpid account of a campaign, bore witness to his ambition and his zeal. He was twenty-nine at this date, a year and a half older than Paul; gay and unexacting in his pleasures. “One soon gets used to the second best,” was a phrase of his, capable of much endurance and under a gay demeanour rather hard; a good comrade but a stern enemy; with no liking for games and not a sportsman at all in the English sense, but a brilliant horseman, a skilled fencer and hard, throughout his long lean body, as flesh can be. Women had not touched him deeply but he loved to be spoken of amongst them; he was flattered that one woman should envy another because that other received letters from him; if he had a passion at all it was for this country in which he served and to which he gave gladly his years of youth and his years of manhood. It was a new thing to him, half problem, half toy, at once a new rib to the frame of France and a jewel to be worthily set. On the one hand a country which wide motor roads and schools of intensive farming and the conversion of migratory tribes into permanent householders would develop, on the other a place of beautiful shrines and exquisite archways and grim old kasbahs with crenelated walls which must be preserved against the encroaching waves of commerce. In appearance he was thin and long and without pretension to good looks. His hair was receding a little from his forehead; and his nose was sharp and gave to his face the suggestion of a sabre; and he was as careful of his hands and his finger nails as if he were still living amongst the Duchesses. Moreover, he had a great love of Paul Ravenel, and as he looked about him on that hot night of early April, his anxiety increased. For the town was thronged with new troops, new companies of sappers, new artillery men. The information from the interior of the country was alarming. The fires of hatred were blazing up against Mulai Hafid, the new Sultan, as they had three years before against Abd-el-Aziz. And for the same reason. He had sold himself and his country to the Christians. Throughout the town there was excitement and unrest. A movement must be made forward and this time to Fez. Rumour had it that the Sultan was actually beleaguered there. And somewhere out in the wild, fierce country Paul Ravenel was wandering.

“Let us hurry!” said Gerard de Montignac.

The Villa Iris stood in one of the meanest of the alleys to the left of the great landward gate—a dingy, long, green house with all its windows on the street carefully shuttered and something sinister in its aspect, as though it was the house of dark stories. When De Montignac and Ratenay stopped in front of it not a light was showing, but from somewhere far within there came the tinkle of a piano.

De Montignac pushed open the door and took a step down into a long, dark passage. They advanced for a few feet and then the door at the other end was thrown open, letting in a glare of lights and a great noise. Some one with the light behind him came towards them. Beyond that he was an officer in uniform they knew nothing of him until they heard his voice.

“So you have come to see for yourself, eh?” he cried gaily. “But you will do more than see to-night. Such a crowd in there!” and Praslin went past them.