“I don’t think you quite understand my husband,” said Mrs. Greyne, feeling in duty bound to stand up for her poor, maligned Eustace. “Whatever he may have done he has done at my special request.”
“Madame says?”
“I say that in all his proceedings while in Algiers Mr. Greyne has been acting under my directions.”
Abdallah Jack fixed his enormous eyes steadily upon her.
“You are his wife, and told him to come here, and to do as he has done?”
“Ye-yes,” faltered Mrs. Greyne, for the first time in her life feeling as if she were being escorted towards the criminal dock by a jailer with Puritan tendencies.
“Then it is true what they say on the shores of the great canal,” he remarked composedly.
“What do they say?” inquired Mrs. Greyne.
“That England is a land of female devils,” returned the guide as the carriage plunged into a filthy alley, between two rows of blind houses, and began to ascend a steep hill.
Mrs. Greyne gasped. She opened her lips to protest vigorously, but her head swam—either from indignation or from fatigue—and she could not utter a word. The horses mounted like cats upward into the dense blackness, from which dropped down the faint sounds of squealing music and of hoarse cries and laughter. The wheels bounded over the stones, sank into the deep ruts, scraped against the sides of the unlighted houses. And Abdallah Jack sat staring at Mrs. Greyne as an English clergyman’s wife might stare at the appalling rites of some deadly cannibal encountered in a far-off land, with a stony wonder, a sort of paralysed curiosity.