If these things troubled my man, the jewel I had purchased in Tunis troubled him still more. How he learned that I had it heaven alone could tell; but he did not fail to come to me at déjeuner each morning and to repeat with unfailing regularity the monition, "If Allah wills, the jewel is stolen." I used to tolerate this at first; but in the end he exasperated me; and upon the seventh morning I showed him the model and said emphatically, "Sidi, you will please to observe that Allah does not will the loss of the jewel—let us change the subject." He gave me no answer, but on the next morning I had from him the customary greeting—and the laugh was all upon his side, for the scimitar was gone.
I say that the laugh was with Sidi, but in very truth I do not believe that this worthy fellow ever laughed in his life. He possessed a stolid immobility of countenance that would have remained in repose even at the sound of the last trumpet. The intelligence which I conveyed to him, I doubt not with pathetic anger, and much bad language, moved him no more than the soft south wind moved the statue of the first Governor-General out by the mosque there. He examined my ravished bag with a provoking silence; muttered a few pessimistic sentences in Arabic; and then fell back upon the Koran and the platitudes of his prophet. If he had been an Englishman, I should have suspected him without hesitation; but he bore such a character, he had been so long a servant of the hotel, he was by his very stolidity so much above doubt, that this course was impossible; and being unable to accuse him, I bade him take me to the nearest bureau of police, that I might satisfy my conscience with the necessary farce. This he did without a protest, but I saw that he looked upon me with a pitying gaze, as one looks upon a child that is talking nonsense.
Although I flatter myself that I concealed my annoyance under a placid exterior, this loss affected me more than I cared to tell. For one thing, the jewel was very valuable (I was certain that I could have obtained a thousand pounds for it in Bond Street); I was convinced, moreover, that I should hardly discover its fellow if I searched Europe through. During my stay at the Hôtel d'Orleans I had kept it locked in a well-contrived leather pouch in my traveling trunk; and as this pouch had been opened with my own keys it was evident that the thief had access to my bedroom during the night—a conclusion which led me to think again of this stolid Moor, and to declare that the case against him was singularly convincing. So strong, in fact, were my suspicions that I made it my first care to go to the maître of the hotel and to demand satisfaction from him with all the justifiable indignation which fitted the case. When he heard my tale, his face would have given Rembrandt a study.
"How?" said he. "Monsieur is robbed, and chez-moi?"
I repeated that I was, and told him that if he did not recover the bauble in twenty-four hours, consequences would follow which would be disastrous to his establishment. Then I asked him frankly about the Moor Sidi; but he protested with tears in his eyes that he would as soon accuse his own mother. He did not deny that some one in his house might know something about it; and presently he had marshaled the whole of his servants in the central court, addressing them with the fierce accusation of a juge d'instruction. It is superfluous to add that we made no headway, and that all his "desolation" left me as far from the jewels I had lost as I was at the beginning of it.
From the hotel to the bureau of the police was an easy transition, but a very hopeless one. A number of extremely polite, and elaborately braided, officials heard me with interest and pity; and having covered some folios of paper with notes declared that nothing could be done. For themselves, their theory was that the Moor Sidi had been talking about my treasure, and that some other domestic in the Hôtel de la Régence had opened my door while I slept and got possession of the ornament with little risk. But that any one should recover the property was in their idea a preposterous assumption.
"It is on its way to Paris," said one of them as he closed his note-book with a snap, "and there's an end of it. We shall, without doubt, watch the servants of the hotel closely for some time, but that should not encourage you. It is possible that the man Mohammed, the porter of the place, may know something of the affair. We shall have his house searched to-day, but, my friend, ne vous montez pas la tête, we are not in Paris, and the upper town is worse than a beehive. I am afraid that your hope of seeing the thing again is small."
I was afraid so, too; but being accustomed to strange losses and to strange recoveries, I determined to venture something in the hazard, and to remain in Algiers for a few weeks, at any rate. The most difficult part of my work lay in my ignorance of the city, and in that matter Sidi alone could help me. Every day we went with measured and expectant tread through that labyrinth of fantastic and half-dark streets, where repulsive hags grin at the wickets below, and dark eyes coquette at the gratings above; every day we delved in booths and bazaars, we haggled with the jewel sellers, we bartered with the gold workers, but to no purpose. I had come to think at last that the loss was not worth further trouble; and had made up my mind to return to London, when I recollected with some self-reproach that I had as yet neglected one of the very simplest means to grapple with the occasion—that I had, in fact, offered no reward for the recovery of the jeweled scimitar, and to this omission owed, I did not doubt, the utter absence of clue or conviction.
When I was yet angry with myself at this absurd oversight I had a second thought which was even more useful, and one to which I owed much before I had done with the matter. I remembered that the French police had set down my loss to the loud talk of Sidi amongst the others at the hotel. Why, then, I asked, should not this man also scatter the tidings that I would give so many hundreds of francs for the recovery of the scimitar? No sooner had I got the idea than I acted upon it.
"Sidi," said I, when he came to me on the next morning, "I have heard much of your cleverness, but you have not yet found my property; now I will give a thousand francs to the man who brings it here within a week."