The just steward
Date: 2025-03-03T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: English fiction -- Irish authors

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Title: The just steward

Author: Richard Dehan

Release date: March 3, 2025 [eBook #75518]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: George H. Doran Company, 1922

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75518

Credits: Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JUST STEWARD ***

THE
JUST STEWARD

BY

RICHARD DEHAN

AUTHOR OF "THE DOP DOCTOR," "BETWEEN
TWO THIEVES," ETC.

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

THE JUST STEWARD. II

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO THAT DAY WHEN ALL FAITHS
SHALL BE MERGED IN ONE FAITH.
TO THE HOPE THAT LIVES WAITING
THE OPENING OF THE GATE.

Beeding, Sussex,
July 5, 1922.

CONTENTS

Book the First:
THE SEEKING

Book the Second:
THE SENDING

Book the Third:
THE FINDING

Book the Fourth:
THE PASSING

PREFATORY NOTE By THE AUTHOR

This is a work of fiction and the characters moving through its Pages are imaginary, save in the instance of Hamid Bey, whose sinister activities were exercised as Commandant of a War Prisoners' Camp near Smyrna in 1917. Care has been exercised to avoid the use of surnames and titles belonging to actual persons. Where these have been inadvertently employed, apology is made beforehand.

THE JUST STEWARD

Book the First: THE SEEKING

I

Beautiful even with the trench and wall of Diocletian's comparatively recent siege scarring the orchards and vineyards of Lake Mareotis, splendid even though her broken canals and aqueducts had never been repaired, and part of her western quarter still displayed heaps of calcined ruins where had been temples, palaces and academies, Alexandria lay shimmering under the African sun. Between the turquoise of the Mediterranean on the north and west, the beryl green of the Delta on the east, and the flaming opal of the Desert south and again east of the Delta, the Queen city of the dead old Ptolemies, set about with vineyards, fair orchards and stately palm-groves stretching in a broad band of shade and fruitfulness from the Lake across the Desert, and fringing both sides of the Nilotic canal, well merited the title: "Queen Emerald of the Jewelled Girdle," bestowed upon her by the librarian who unloaded upon Posterity a geographical treatise in heroic verse.

The vintage of Egypt was in full swing, the figs and dates were being harvested. Swarms of wasps and hornets, armed with formidable stings, yellow-striped like the dreaded nomads of the south and eastern frontiers, greedily sucked the sugary juices of the ripe fruit. Flocks of fig-birds twittered amongst the branches, being like the date-pigeons, almost too gorged to fly. Half-naked, earth-brown or tawny-skinned native labourers, hybrids of mingled races, with heads close-shaven save for a topknot; dwellers in mud-hovels, drudges of the water-wheel, cut down the heavy grape-clusters with sickle-shaped copper knives.

Ebony, woolly-haired negroes in clean white breech-cloths, piled up the gathered fruit in tall baskets woven of reeds and lined with leaves. Copts with the rich reddish skins, the long eyes and boldly-curving profiles of Egyptian warriors and monarchs as represented on the walls of ancient temples of Libya and the Thebaïd, moved about in leather-girdled blue linen tunics and hide sandals, keeping account of the laden panniers, roped upon the backs of diminutive asses, and carried to the wine-presses as fast as they were filled. There would be a glut of the thin sweet drink that was exported in clay flagons with round bases; a vintage as disesteemed in the era of the last Queen Cleopatra by the wine-bibbing Alexandrians, as to-day under the joint sway of the Emperor Diocletian and his co-regent, the swineherd Maximianus.

The negroes sang as they set snares, and the fig-birds beloved of the epicurean fell by hundreds into the limed horse-hair traps. Greek, Egyptian and negro girls, laughing under garlands of hibiscus, periwinkle and tuberoses, coaxed the fat morsels out of the black men to carry home for a supper-treat; while acrobats, comic singers, sellers of cakes, drinks and sweetmeats, with strolling jugglers and jesters, and Jewish fortune-tellers of both sexes, assailed the workers and the merrymakers with importunities, and made harvest in their own way.

Despite the scars left by the siege of Diocletian,—whose clemency in stopping the pillage of the city was recalled by a bronze statue of the tyrant, placed on the summit of a column in the middle of the Serapium,—Alexandria was still not only mistress of her own huge trade in corn, but the port through which the European trade of India and Arabia passed.

The Great Port and its fellow basin of Eunostus were crowded with shipping both native and foreign, the quays were choked with merchandise of innumerable kinds, and thronged with men of all the world's known nations. The copper-hued Egyptian, the diamond-eyed, sharp-witted Greek, the olive-skinned, aquiline-featured Hebrew with his furred robe, high headdress, long beard and side-curls, jostled the supple Italian, the lively Gaul, the slow Boeotian, and the Ethiopian cloaked with leopard-skins, displaying ivory rings in his dark ears, and on his arms and fingers, and ivory suns and moons suspended from a thread of sacred knots upon his naked breast. Here merchants from the scarce-known Tsin State, south of Hind, pig-tailed, slant-eyed men in cartwheel hats of woven grass, embroidered silks and felt-soled shoes—again encountered, on this neutral soil of Egypt, their ancient enemy, the Tartar. Here also were Hindu Buddhist pilgrims wearing yellow robes, and carrying begging-bowls and armpit-crutches, Fire-worshippers in snowy white, and Persian merchants in long-sleeved caftans and tall lambskin headdresses. The nomad of the Desert—his black leather head-veil bound by thongs about his lean, brown temples, his great striped mantle of camel's hair cast about his painted nakedness, bartering spices and frankincense from Arabia Felix, for gold and silver jewellery and strings of pink and blue pearls from the eastern shores of the Red Sea to deck his womankind, rubbed shoulders with the Scythian, thick of tongue, solid of bone and heavy of shoulder, bow-legged with continual riding, his shaggy head protected by a cone-shaped cap of hairy horse-hide, his back cloaked, his feet shod, and his loins clouted with tanned horse-leather, which also covered his brass-nailed shield and sheathed his short iron sword. And among the slaves of many nations, staggering under great crates and bales between the quays and the warehouses, were seen huge semi-naked men with matted yellow hair, and blue or grey eyes; whose white skins were decorated with animals, birds and flowers traced in blue pigment, and upon whose limbs were soldered the heavy bronze anklet and armlet, with rings to accommodate a chain, often needed by the refractory slave.

"They are Britons," the Alexandrians would say, fanning themselves and smiling. "We have mercenaries of the race in our Tenth Legion, but these are dull fellows, too stupid to fight. What can you expect from a country that produces nothing but tin and oysters? Strong slaves and comely enough, but dangerous when goaded. And in captivity they never laugh!"

A charge which could not be laid to the accusers, for ground as they were to the earth beneath the iron heel of a despotic Roman government, the Alexandrians laughed in season and out. They made their successive rulers dread to provoke the onslaughts of their waspish ridicule. Wit was the point of the dagger that could find its way through a tyrant's harness, a venomed jest could make him writhe with much more safety to the community than the contents of the poison-phial dropped into the dish before its cover was put on, and the steward's clay seal affixed. They were tepid in their religion, vain, proud, boastful and spiteful, unstable in their friendships, languid in business, indifferent to reputation, fickle in friendship, furious in lust, unrelenting in vengeance, merciless in jealousy, cold in their natural affections, and faithless in love. They wrote no histories, but had a cultured taste in cookery, perfumes, dress, music and dancing; erotic poetry, and exotic vice; and on the stars of the theatre, of the Gymnasium and the Hippodrome, they lavished all the enthusiasm they possessed. The famous charioteer, the great singer or dancer, the comic actor whose jokes set the whole city in a roar; the unconquerable wrestler, or swordsman, or pugilist who happened to be the idol of the moment, daily walked surrounded by his admirers on the promontory of Lochias, or in the public gardens under the palm-groves, attired in the scarlet robes of the ultra-fashionable, loaded with jewelled necklaces, carrying in gem-encrusted fingers a golden-handled fan of flamingo or parrots' feathers, and wearing scented garlands on his crimped and perfumed hair. Banquets were given to famous fighting-cocks, which, perched at the right hand of the couch of the host, fed upon sesame from golden platters, and sipped distilled water from precious bowls of white and purple Murrhine spar.

Amidst the luxury and corruption of this city, whose roaring floods of traffic rolled between buildings marvellously diverse in their mingling of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Semitic styles of architecture, the clash of creeds was never wanting, and ancient faiths and newer revelations struggled for supremacy. The glorious psalms of David, rising from the Synagogue, mingled with the shrill rattle of the sistrum, and the strains of the hymn addressed to Isis, the goddess of the Throned Moon. Serapis, lord of the under-world, was yet worshipped though the Serapium lay in ruins,—the Persian Mithra had his following, and the annual festival of Pan was celebrated in the temple—wrought in pink African granite to the semblance of a phallus, that dwarfed every other building in Alexandria save the Lighthouse of the Pharos, soaring four hundred feet above its base of Cyclopæan rock. And a purer and more radiant light than that of the Pharos burned in Alexandria, where the Mysteries of the Catholic Church of CHRIST were celebrated in temples converted from the service of the deities of Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

The four hundred columns of the ruined Serapium overhung the quadrangle of thick-walled, buttressed stone buildings where the Christian Patriarch, his clergy, monks, deacons and aspirants were unpretendingly housed. Of his followers, religious and secular, thirty thousand mustered in Alexandria, whilst the lay helpers, organised in the vast Guild of the Parabolani, literally "those who expose themselves to danger" laboured by day and night amongst the miserable, the homeless, the famine-bitten and the fever-stricken, rotting in the purlieus, the prisons and the poorest quarters of the city, sufferers chiefly of Greek and Egyptian nationality, for the population of the teeming Jewish quarter were as always, charitable to their own. Thus Christian schools and orphanages were set up, supported and instructed; hospitals established, staffed and maintained; catechumens brought to the priests for instruction, and the dead buried with all decency by Christian men who went forth in the coarse habit of sackcloth, with the cowl that covered the entire face, and only showed the eyes.

The persecution of Maximianus, much more severe than that following the issue of the New Law of Diocletian, had now exposed the disgraceful practices of these besotted dupes. For weeks past the city had buzzed and stung like a veritable nest of hornets, poked into venomous life by the secret activities of Arius the Presbyter, the open malevolence of the Pagans, and the bitter enmity of the Jews.

The deceased Prefect of Egypt had been a ruler not favourably disposed towards the Christians. By his successor, Mettius Rufus, the savage Imperial edict was ruthlessly enforced.

Christian prelates, priests, monks, nuns, deaconesses and catechumens had been arrested, imprisoned, executed or tortured by the soldiers of the Third Egyptian Legion,—far more accustomed of late years to quelling street riots and displaying their glittering harness and handsome persons at military and civic spectacles, than to making wholesale battues of unarmed and unresisting men and women. Detachments of cohorts stationed throughout Libya were sent to raid the hermitages, monasteries and nunneries on the Nile banks and upon the borders of the Desert. At Mount Nitria and in Scete as at Scyras, they had made many captures; though at Tabenna in the Thebaïd, where the venerable Abbot Pachomius had gathered about him thirteen hundred followers, so stout a resistance was made by the monks, with staves, great stones and boiling pitch and water, that three maniples of soldiers of the Fourth Lusitanian Legion, compelled to abandon the siege, returned, to exhibit their wounds and burns to Perocles, the military prefect of Apollinopolis, entreating him with tears of rage, to send them back in sufficient force to wipe out the shame of defeat sustained at such abominable hands.

All classes of society were sifted by a process which netted a number of suspects. Amongst the labourers in the vineyards, the toilers on the quays, in the thronged marts of commerce, as amongst the crowds at the baths, the lecture-halls, the theatre, the Gymnasium and the Hippodrome, moved close-lipped, silent men in plain clothing, with sharp, greedy ears and keen, observant eyes. These were called The Listeners, and carried in the sleeve short rods tipped with a gilt Roman Eagle, and the maw of that fierce and bloody bird was never satisfied. Apostasy was rewarded by temporary immunity. Obduracy merited what it received, in banishment to the mines, forfeiture of property, exile, slavery or torture to the death. Many persons accused, even before coming into Court, renounced the Faith and reverted to Paganism, or after imprisonment and some degree of torture, sacrificed, and were set free. Yet others escaped into Syria, where the law, though the same in effect, was less unmercifully carried out. But others who held public posts were fettered by their official duties, and even had it been possible, would have scorned to seek safety in flight.

"Whither wouldst thou go, O My Servant
Whom I have chosen to die for Me?"

In the case of certain men and women, wealthy or poor, highly placed or humble, the Voice that speaks to the destined martyr cried and would not be shut out. Thus the comic singer Metras whose impromptu verses were wont to set the whole city in a roar, the famous retiarius Apollos, conqueror in twenty battles against armed gladiators, and the aged historian Sinias, confessed themselves Christians and were dragged away to death.

Hesychius, the editor of the Septuagint, heard the call as he worked amongst the rolls of papyri in his study, and like others, he sustained the ordeal and claimed the crown and palm. And it came to the noble Roman, Philoremus Florens Fabius, Prætor of the taxes of Egypt, and a personal friend of the Prefect: Fabius, who sat daily in public as a judge in Alexandria, purple-robed, attended by lictors, librarii and commentarienses; surrounded by a guard of the Third Egyptian Legion; deciding all causes relative to the taxes, and administering the law....

II

The official and private dwelling of Philoremus Fabius was a handsome building of Roman architecture, situated in the fashionable Street of the Winds, south of the quadruple marble gateway that marked the junction of the city's four great thoroughfares; running east from the Canopic Gate, west from the Gate of the Necropolis; and respectively north and south from the Gates of the Sun, and of the Moon.

Before the gnomon of the sun-dial on the column of the Forum indicated the hour previous to noon-day, a traveller mounted on a large white mule, and followed by an attendant riding a dun-coloured animal, and leading another laden with baggage, reined out of the double stream of horse-drawn, carved, painted and gilded chariots conveying fashionables of both sexes; litters and chairs borne by slaves; burdened camels guided by negroes or Saracens; curled and scarlet-robed dandies walking with boon companions, fiery barbs bestridden by Roman officers; and little asses carrying Copts or Jews,—that ceaselessly traversed the Street of the Winds.

As the small hoofs of the mules slipped on the uneven flagstones before the mansion of the Prætor of Taxes, the man on the white mule uttered an involuntary cry. His eyes had fallen on a square plaque of bronze fixed on the wall beside the courtyard entrance, displaying the device of the Roman Imperial Eagle with the thunderbolt, above the name and official titles of the master of the house. A narrow strip of parchment some twelve inches long, secured by an official seal at either extremity, was pasted across the name of Philoremus Fabius and inscribed with the words;

"SUSPENDED FROM OFFICE UNDER
SUSPICION OF CHRISTIANITY."

The seal was that of Lollius Maxius, governor of Alexandria, a personal friend of the official thus disgraced.

For a moment the rider of the white mule remained with open mouth and staring eyeballs, livid as a mask of yellow wax under the hood of his black riding-cloak of felted camel's hair. His strongly marked visage with its arched black eyebrows, large mobile black eyes and boldly curving profile, showed, like the face of his attendant, the characteristics of the Jewish race. Large rings set with beryls were in his ears, and massive bracelets of gold clasped his swarthy arms above the elbow; while his carefully curled hair was protected from the dust of travel by a square-shaped bag of fine black leather, embroidered with seed-pearls. He endeavoured to control his voice, but it shook as he said to his companion, in Hebrew:

"Now in the name of the God of our forefathers! ... Tell me, O Ezra, son of Ephraim! do I see the thing that is, or that which is not? It may be that the fever I suffered at Joppa still troubles my brain and heats my blood!"

His eyes had entreaty in them as he appealed to the other, and his pallor grew more livid as he heard the reply:

"Health is yours, O Hazaël, son of Hazaël, but misfortune has befallen our master. He is suspected of Christianity, and suspended from office under the Governor's seal."

"Some enemy hath done this thing!" said Hazaël fiercely. "Be the Mighty One blessed that I have speedily returned home! Hold the mule's rein while I knock upon these doors that were never shut till now in the face of Hazaël."

And hastily dismounting while Ezra held the stirrup, Hazaël plucked a metal-shod staff from a bucket-holster slung behind his saddle, and beat loudly upon the bronze doors fixed in a frame of square beams of yellow Numidian marble, until a metal bolt groaned in its grooves of stone, a leaf of the door moved inwards, and the black face of an Ethiopian slave peered out between the valves. White eyeballs and dazzling teeth flashed in the ebony visage:

"By Isis the Dog Star!" he jabbered in his bastard Græco Egyptian, "The Jew Hazaël has come back to us again!"

"Son of abomination, make way!" said Hazaël, violently thrusting back the door upon the astonished Ethiopian, and striding into the vestibule, over a square of mosaic let into the marble pavement, representing a black dog spotted with white, secured by a chain attached to a red leather collar, and displaying a formidable mouthful of teeth as in the act to bite. A second Ethiopian, liveried like the first in a green tunic with a broad girdle covered with plates of silver, stooped low in humble salutation, touching with his yellowish fingertips the booted feet of the Jew.

The walls of the vestibule, from either side of which opened a waiting-room for clients, were painted light red, divided into panels by a vertical ornament, a black caduceus wreathed with a vine. Along the base of either wall ran a broad bench of black walnut, on which sprawled or sat four unhelmed and ungirt Legionaries, of whom two slept on the shady side—for broad sunshine poured through the overhead opening—two were playing dice, with a flagon of Mareotic wine standing between them, from which one or the other drank a draught at every lucky throw—while two more stood on guard, rigid and immovable as statues of men in glittering cuirasses, on either side of the curtained portal leading to the atrium, a hall of some forty feet in length, paved with tesseræ of black and yellow marble, and centred with a square pool, in the midst of which a little fountain played. Yet two other Roman soldiers, with shield on arm and grounded javelins, kept ward outside the curtained entrance of the large apartment at the farther end. When the first two Legionaries with their drawn swords, made as though to prevent his passage, Hazaël said with cutting irony:

"The Prætor Philoremus Fabius labours beneath the displeasure of the Prefect, Mettius Rufus. Thus he is at present a prisoner beneath his own roof. But the Chief Secretary of the Prætor of the Taxes is also an official of the Roman Empire. Until I am deprived of this token of mine office"—he lifted the end of a heavy golden chain that peeped beneath his sheathed beard and lay upon his bosom—"I hold and use it. Lower your swords!"

And he thrust beneath the curtain of many-coloured Egyptian linen, and moved on to the doorway of the room that lay beyond. The guards at this point had overheard; and when Hazaël moved aside the end of his beard and pointed to the broad gold chain of office ending in his hairy bosom, they struck the butts of their javelins twice upon the pavement in salutation, and without a spoken word suffered him to pass.

And so the Jew stepped in, moving noiselessly as some creature of prey in his high black felt knee-boots soled with elephant's leather, and heeled with sections of the nails of the brute, powdered like his skin and garments with the vitreous dust of the Desert and stained with the sweat of the beasts that had carried him.

You saw him as he dropped his great cowled cloak, just within the threshold, to be a man not yet thirty; salient, strong and full of energy, with brawny limbs revealed by the short-sleeved tawny robe hitched mid-leg high by the girdle of hippopotamus-calf hide, that sustained, as well as a wallet and water-gourd, a pair of long sharp daggers and a formidable double-edged sword. From beneath the high, square, fur-trimmed cap that the cowl of the mantle had hidden, a bushy growth of night-black curls, soiled with travel and like the fringes of his tawny robe, tangled with thorns and prickly burrs, fell about his shoulders. He breathed quickly, as though he had been running; and in the stern, bold, swarthy face, and the intent wide gaze of the burning black eyes shadowed under beetling eyebrows, there was sorrow beyond mere words, and devotion too deep, and pure, and selfless to be passionate, as Hazaël after many months stood in the presence of his patron and friend.

The room, or rather hall, had been originally meant for a triclinium, but by reason of its imposing size and height, and the suitable elevation of the mosaic floor at its upper end, the Prætor of the Taxes had set apart the lengthy side-wing and the upper apartments for his private occupation, and transacted here such daily business as did not necessitate his appearance at the Forum. A frieze of lofty height depicted in brilliant hues on a white ground, the combats of the Greeks and Amazons; upon the raised platform at the upper end stood an ivory arm-chair, and a table of ebony inlaid with silver. Small statues of the twelve divinities of Rome, wrought in bronze, ivory or precious metal, adorned the top ledges of two ebony bookcases, set against the walls on the right and left hand, and filled with scrolls that were volumes of reference, and treatises upon Roman Law and Finance.

In the ivory chair sat a man of forty, in a white tunic bordered with a wide stripe of purple, plunged deep in the perusal of a small scroll of papyrus thickly inscribed in the clear rounded characters of Aramaic Greek. An oblong opening in the wall behind him, running from wall to wall of the court-room, gave a view, across an open loggia (where more Roman guards were posted), of the lawns, alleys and fountains of a well-kept garden-enclosure; so that the advantage of light from behind was for the Receiver General of Taxes hearing cases at his table, with the equally desirable boon of fresh air.

No clients thronged to the tribune to-day, vacant were the desks and chairs of his recorders and notaries; the scratch of the ink-filled reed upon the papyrus, the smell of wax tablets virgin of the stylus, the whispering of the clerks and accountants no longer came from the adjoining room....

How pleasantly quiet it was. The reader slightly shifted his feet, shod with cothurni of scarlet leather, ornamented with golden crescents at the instep, upon the dappled leopard-skins that spread beneath his chair. The skins covered a skilfully-concealed trap-door leading down into a strong vault underneath the tribune, where were stored vast sums in gold belonging to the State.

To the man reading and thinking in the ivory chair, and as yet unconscious of the witness on the threshold, the room held no other living creatures save himself and a late butterfly, with peacock wings of gorgeous beauty, that had fluttered in at the window, perhaps attracted by the garlands of wonderfully painted roses forming part of the decorations below the cornice of the wall. A moment the insect wavered to and fro beneath the cornice; mounted—sought to settle—realised the deceit, and would have flown back into the garden, to feast upon the nectar of Truth and Reality—had not a hawking swallow intervened.

There had been no swallows yesterday. To-day, the blue sky above the palms and figs and oleanders, the vine-wreathed sycamores and acacias of the gardens, was alive with the black and white specks of vitality, darting and wheeling, hovering and poising as though sporting with their own swift shadows; hunting their prey of flies, gnats and winged beetles with shrill squeaks of bird-delight—while under the tiled coping of a walled court with a westward aspect, nests were being built in the selfsame spots, from whence they had been dislodged by the gardener's pole earlier in the year.

The swallow's swoop and dart, more rapid than the eye might follow, captured the insect of the jewelled wings. But the man moved; and the startled bird darted upwards towards a brilliant square of blue sky framed in a gilded trellis covered with those deceptive roses, and no less false and treacherous a painted lure than they...

The infinitesimal tragedy was over in a moment. The arrow-like flight cleaved no waves of blue æther, but was arrested by a surface as hard as adamant. The bird dropped close to the foot of Philoremus. He reached down and took it up.

III

It was quite dead, a tiny corpse, a mere pinch of black and white feathers; with its prey—still feebly moving legs and antennae—yet held crosswise in the thorn-small, jet-black beak. What lesson would He Whose Divine teaching the Aramaic scroll of the Gospel of Matthew, the Evangelist, set forth,—have drawn from the desire of the insect for the flowers of delusion, the delirious rush of its swift-winged captor for illimitable space and aerial freedom—arrested by that killing crash against a tinted stone?

Poor tiny feathered migrant from—what wild northern homeland? That of the Alamanni, who built and garrisoned forts of mud and tree-boles on their Rhine frontiers; fierce red-haired giants, savage mercenaries of Rome, like the Gauls with their pointed brazen helmets and painted tunics, covered with cuirasses of leather strengthened with plates of iron, adorned with armlets, collars and bracelets of heavy virgin gold, and perched rather than seated on their high wooden saddles, girthed back on the hindquarters of great horses with cropped ears.... Or perhaps the bird came from the freezing steppes of Scythia, peopled by shaggy savages with flat noses, slant eyes, and hairy legs bowed from continually riding their shaggy little beasts. Or from Britain, a province of which country Philoremus had ruled as a pro-consul under Carausius, who, with piratical intentions of his own, had been sent by Maximianus, co-Emperor with Diocletian, to suppress the Saxon pirates and the yellow-haired rovers from Scandinavia.

The swallow, though fully fledged, was young. This must have been its first day in Egypt. How strange, to have crossed continents and seas for such an end! thought the Roman Prætor, and then his glance reverting to the scroll, found there a saying of the Master:

"Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and not one of them shall fall to the ground without your Father?"

What bearing had the words with reference to the dead swallow stiffening on his warm, living palm? What Divine purpose could be served by such a waste of effort? What wrong had the innocent creature done in hunting its insect food? He read on:

"But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
Fear not therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.
Whosoever, therefore, shall confess Me before men,
I will also confess him before my Father Who is in Heaven."

Perhaps the dead swallow had crossed the sea to bring this message to the disgraced public servant. With the thought a reviving warmth crept about his chilly heart. He looked downwards, slightly smiling, from his tribune to a bronze tripod altar placed upon a square of mosaic in the body of the hall. On either side of the altar a Roman sword and spear were planted upright. Upon the tripod stood a silver-gilt chafing-dish containing several sticks of smouldering charcoal. The dish rested upon a pan of pierced pottery, and near it were three small vessels respectively containing corn, wine and incense; also a bowl of lustral water in which was immersed a leafy olive-twig. A Latin inscription beneath the upper ledge of the tripod might thus be translated:

"O HOLY SABUS DIUS FIDIUS SEMIPATER, BE PROPITIOUS!"

It was the altar on which oaths were taken; solemnly reconsecrated to the Sabine deity on each recurring fifth of June. Perhaps if the thoughts behind the broad brow and the blue eyes of the ex-Prætor had been rendered into speech, they would have run thus:

"Yesterday at this hour I was wealthy, powerful and dreaded: To-day I am an outlaw without rights or possessions, waiting the summons to appear before the judges, who are as likely to condemn me to death by torture, as to send me to the mines or accord me banishment. And why has this happened? Answer, Ego of Philoremus! Because something within me revolts from even the semblance of worship offered to the deities of Rome. Revengeful, lustful, treacherous as Man; subject like him to base passions and earthly frailties; stained with unnatural crimes and vices, I know them to be demons; I will no more of them!"

"The Pythagorean teachings, the sugared theories of the Platonists, the philosophy of the Stoics, I have in turn swallowed and rejected in the reversed condition, as the owl deals with infant moles and mice! Vainly I have sought refuge in the Eleusinian Mysteries. If there were but one snake in the sacred basket of the priestess, what a nest of writhing cobras did I not find behind the Veil! Isis lured, and I sought her; after long weeks of trials and austerities I was conducted to the sanctuary. Initiate, O Mother and Queen of Harlots!—only to be again disillusioned! The religious cults of Syria and Asia Minor, the philosophical speculations of the Gymnosophists of Hind beckoned, and I followed, only to be again betrayed! Yet could I not have concealed my doubts and disgusts, made my convictions march with my interests? This Voice, speaking within my bosom, says emphatically No! Some change has taken place in me, some growth has germinated unnoticed, even as the fields of the Delta rush into life and verdure, when the garment of water is withdrawn from the land by the subsidence of the Nile. This is my right hand with the callosity upon the third joint of the third finger—that reminds me of the signet that is missing from it—the thick gold ring—set with a black onyx carved in intaglio with the head of the club-bearing Hercules,—that was a wedding gift from my wife. But the Me within me is changed—since yesterday—as though I had been touched by the living Hand that over three hundred years ago gave sight to the blind, cleansed the leper, and raised up the dead."

* * * * * * *

A deep voice broke upon the muttered soliloquy. It said in shaken accents:

"O my master!—" and broke off. For the light of joy that shone in the clear blue eyes that turned to him was almost too much for Hazaël's sick heart to bear. He crossed the hall in three long strides, bent his knee at the foot of the tribune, mounted its steps, and kissed with his bearded lips the hand that had worn the black onyx intaglio, even as its owner exclaimed:

"Hazaël! The man I most wanted. Welcome back, good friend, to this house that was my home!"

"Now may the Holy One be blessed and praised Who has led me back to Alexandria in time," responded Hazaël, "to serve my most gracious lord! Well has the Prophet said there is no man so virtuous that he shall escape calumny. Even Philoremus, I knew had enemies. But that does not explain—" he gulped,—"the suspension from office, the soldiers placed on guard over their own commander—or read the accursed riddle of those seals upon the door!"

"The answer is very simple, my excellent Hazaël," returned Philoremus with a quizzical smile. He rolled up and thrust the sacred scroll in the breast of his purple-bordered tunic, and motioned the Jew to seat himself on a stool beside his chair. "If suspension from office be public dishonour, at least it means a private leisure seldom enjoyed. Sit and let us talk, nobody will disturb us! I go before the Prefect of Alexandria to answer to mine accuser—but not before to-morrow at the sixth hour."

"Sir—in the name of the Holiest I conjure you to enlighten me! What is this accusation?" burst forth Hazaël. "Who is the accuser whose testimony hath such credit as to blacken so great a personage as yourself in the eyes of men?"

And as the hoarsely-spoken words escaped the Jew's mouth, that was parched with anguish even more than by the acrid dust of the deserts which he had traversed, Philoremus answered:

"It is said that I am a Christian and I may not deny it. For the man who hath accused me is none other than Myself!"

"Woe, woe!" cried the anguish-stricken Hebrew, tearing his beard and striving to rend the tough material of his garment, while great tears brimmed his under-eyelids and made furrows in his dusty face. He checked the violence of his grief, on seeing a slight shade of disgust pass over the delicate patrician features of the Roman, and smeared his tears roughly away with the back of a hairy hand. "Pardon!" he gasped. "Forgive me! ... Pray, tell me more!"

"First drink some of this wine!" said his master, filling a crystal goblet from a golden-lidded crystal flagon that stood upon the table conveniently at hand. "A Prætor suspended is as good as hanged—in the estimation of his slaves and freed-men," went on Philoremus whimsically, as the Jew gulped down the draught of which he stood in sore need: "and I make no doubt that my rascals have been robbing me—from the noon-hour of yesterday—when I received the mandate of Lollius Maxius, until this moment of thy return. Therefore art thou thrice welcome. For since the seals were placed, and my own guards set over me, I have brooded over the trapdoor of this vault that contains the half-year's tax-money of Egypt—like a hen sitting upon an addled egg."

"Yes, all through the night," he added, whimsically smiling at the indignant astonishment of Hazaël, "until this moment. Nor would the fellows bring me a meal—doubtless they have been too busy plundering me to feed me. A lump of cheese, a barley-cake and this flagon of Mareotic, I obtained through one of my Legionaries, who coaxed it out of the cook!" He added, as the breast of Hazaël heaved, and a hoarse sound like a sob escaped him: "Now you are come to take charge of the Egyptian tax-money, O excellent Hazaël! a weight is off my mind. By Hercules and the Twelve, I find it a relief! Come, be not so cast down!"

The Jew choked out with difficulty:

"To find you accused—proscribed—perhaps ruined—suffocates me with indignation!"

"The Gymnosophists," said the ex-Prætor, "who dwelt upon a mountain in Ethiopia nearly two thousand years ago, and are said to dwell there still, would have asked you why you are disturbed at this intelligence? 'Your patron,' they would say, 'who enjoyed the semblance of Happiness for many years, is now to undergo the appearance of Misfortune.' Happiness and Misfortune being equally Illusions, why on earth are you mopping your eyes?"

He drew a perfumed handkerchief of fine Egyptian byssus from a gold-embroidered wallet of gazelle-leather that hung at his girdle, and said with a smile as he tossed it to Hazaël: "Waste no more time in tears for one who sees no cause. We may thank the banquet the Prefect gives to-night for this opportunity for conversation. May he bring as fierce an appetite to his tunny pickled with oysters, his stuffed and roasted sucking-pig and larded quails and ortolans as I brought to bear on my barley-cake and goat's cheese. Come, my good fellow, own the truth! Did you never yet suspect me of coquetting with Christianity? Think! ... Not even when I have gone secretly forth in a sackcloth gown and cowled mask,—plague or fever having broken out in the purlieus of the city—or in a time of scarcity, when famine pinched the poor?"

The Jew shook his shaggy head.

"Whatever I saw was seen and forgotten, not being intended for these eyes. What presumption had it not been, had I ventured to question the movements of my patron; who might, the noble lady his wife being long dead, have entered without grievous sin into some union of the temporary kind. Besides, you forget, O most excellent! that day now fifteen years past, when a certain Roman officer of high rank, disguised as a Frankish traveller, sought adventure in the Jewish quarter of Alexandria."

"I have not forgotten!" Philoremus chuckled. "We had received intimation the previous year that the Jews of Alexandria were prospering exceedingly. Marriages at the synagogues constantly took place. Births—yours is a prolific race!—inevitably followed each union. Immigrations from Ethiopia and the towns of the Upper Nile continually swelled the population.... Trade flourished. Money-bags grew fat,—and the coins, being put to usury, bred like maggots. Yet no Jew was other than poor—when it came to paying the tax."

"Most excellent, I have observed it!" acquiesced Hazaël gravely, wondering that his patron could so forget the present peril in these memories of the past:

"Therefore, O Hazaël! I came disguised into Jewry with the laudable desire to find out for myself the condition of the miserable and oppressed race. It was a Feast Day, and the narrow and winding streets were foul, and stank exceedingly. But wreaths of anemones and violets ornamented the windows, while fat and soot from myriads of twinkling lamps, shed dubious blessings on the heads of the passers-by. Within each house were displayed rich curtains and costly carpets from the looms of Persia and Babylon. The goodwives spread their tables with finest Egyptian linen cloths, and dishes and cups of silver—indeed—I will not take oath that some were not of gold! Rich jewels twinkled in their ears, and decked their wigs and bosoms, and maidens of Israel were among them, gazelle-eyed, ivory-skinned, beautiful as the virgin daughter of Demeter.... Frown not, Hazaël, for even when my blood was young I knew how to respect the virtue of the women of Israel! Later, when I turned about to retrace my steps, I saw an exceedingly unwashed urchin peering in with longing eyes at a window I had quitted a moment previously. No Jewish maid was the object of the young Hazaël's admiration. On the meagrely-spread table were a dish of lentils dressed in oil and a common crockery wine-jug; some bread cakes, and a large flank of tunny in a red pottery dish, swimming in vinegar."

A spark of amusement kindled in the gloomy eyes of Hazaël. The Roman went on:

"Perhaps that Jewish urchin might have reached twelve years. He was small for his age, filthy exceedingly, and meagre. And he hugged his lean stomach, droning a kind of song with the burden: 'I wish!—I wish!' ... 'And what dost thou wish?' I asked, coming up unseen behind him...."

The stern lips under Hazaël's matted beard were parted now in laughter. He said with a flash of strong white teeth showing in his dark face:

"And I answered: 'I wish it were Sabbath all the week long!—or that I had a stomach like a camel's!' And you asked 'Why?' and I answered, 'Because on Feasts and Sabbaths I may eat my fill at the tables of the Chosen, while on other days I fight with dogs upon the quays for the scraps thrown us by sailors and foreigners. Thus I am empty six days in a week of days, and full to bursting on the Seventh!' Then you, my lord, said to me,—I can hear your voice this moment, 'Come with me, Hazaël, small descendant of Abraham, and thou shalt eat thy fill of lawful food, every day!' And so your greatness took me thence, and placed me in the household of a Jew who served as scribe to you,—and stooped to ask my common, sordid story. And I told thee how, having reached my twelfth year—my good father being a Rab, an interpreter of the sacred books and a pleader before the Courts of my people in the town of Acanthon upon the Lower Nile,—was brought home dead, having been struck upon the forehead by a beam of cedar borne upon the back of a camel led by a Copt.... And that my mother, being a poor widow, had married a cousin of my father. And—that I had found truth in the saying that the breath of a stepfather chills the broth. My broth was not only cold, but salted overmuch with the tears of many beatings. Wherefore I ran away from the village where we dwelt; and begged my way to Alexandria. That was in the third month Sivan, and it was well into the seventh month, even Tishri, before I found," he gulped, "a friend!"

"And I," said the ex-Prætor, "the most faithful and discreet of servants, if a little too peppery of temper at times for the comfort of my freedmen and slaves. You developed with years a genius for the calling of the scribe, akin to that of Cæsar for the command of armies. The most disorderly rabble of ciphers that ever disgraced the pages of a ledger were transformed beneath the hand of Hazaël into legions worthy of Rome! The advancement for which you thank me came as the reward of your own labours. My disgrace cannot blight you,—my fall cannot bring you toppling. All Alexandria knows my Chief Secretary to be an orthodox Jew and devout Christian-hater! In how many of the old street-riots between the Chosen and the monks of Alexandria,—hast thou not played the warrior to the tune of cracked crowns and broken shin-bones, with that great staff of thine?"

"It is true!" A rush of scarlet invaded the Jew's bearded face, dyeing his forehead and injecting the whites of his eyes. He dropped his head upon his breast and stammered:

"It is verily true! Ever since my father—on whom be Peace!—taught me to stammer Shema I have abominated the Christians. Since his death, and mine oath, I have rejoiced with the rest of the Chosen at the revival of persecution, little dreaming that—"

He broke off, convulsed by a shudder that shook him from head to foot. Then he nerved himself, with an effort that brought sweat-drops starting upon his cheeks, and temples and forehead, for a final appeal. "O my loved patron!" he entreated, "hear me! Break the abominable spell that has—I know not how—constrained you to embrace a religion only fitted for unlearned fishermen, common criminals, slaves or unfortunate persons, publicans and sinners—"

"A Prætor of Taxes is a publican, I imagine!..." the Roman official suggested.

"Even," returned Hazaël, "as Leviathan among the lizards, and the Lantern of the Pharos beside a farthing candle or a glow-worm's light. Shall one so illustrious as yourself bow down to the deity that came out of—Galilee? The son of Joseph the carpenter, speaking Aramæan,—who called himself, in the madness of delusion or the blasphemy of possession—the Son of the Most Holy One, the Lord Who is God! Who preached the sordid creed of poverty, humility and love; love not only to kindred and friends, but to enemies, betrayers, traducers, murderers! Who was abandoned in disgust by those who had followed him, and died a shameful death upon the cross!"

Said the Roman, looking out across the loggia at the blue sky and the darting swallows:

"When the white-robed flamens of Jupiter Capitolinus, standing upon the steps of the portico of the temple, bid the Romans come and celebrate the mysteries of their god, they cry, 'All ye that are pure of heart and clean of hands, come to the sacrifice!' Yet Jupiter is neither a pure nor a particularly clean god. And when the white-robed priestesses of Ceres bear the round basket through the streets of Alexandria, do they not scream like so many peahens? 'Sinners, away, or keep eyes on the ground! Only the Worthy may dare to approach us!' Yet those who participate in the Eleusinian mysteries do not return worthier than they went!"

He poured out a little wine, drank, and said as he set down the emptied goblet:

"When that young wolf in the Christian fold, the evil presbyter Arius, gave me the password and the sign, that disguised in the sackcloth robe and masked cowl of the Parabolani, I might mingle with them in the meetings of their sodalities and penetrate even to the house of the Christian Patriarch—the wretch little knew what a burning curiosity was veiled by my expressed desire for his rascally aid. For the Master to Whom the glory of the world was a transitory spectacle—the Teacher Who revealed Himself to the poor and the humble, and opened His Heart as a Gate of Hope to the sinful and despised—discovers in His teaching such absolute unworldliness as to make it starry clear that He came from beyond the stars...."

The ex-Prætor was silent, but his heart added:

"O Divine Man, if only I had known Thee! O Son of God! Who could take upon Thee the burden of our earthliness!—but to have heard Thy Voice! but to have seen Thy Face! Perhaps an hour may come—not too far distant—"

And so wonderful a radiance shone upon the brow and in the eyes of the speaker, despite the ravages of sleeplessness and anxiety, that Hazaël was stricken dumb.

IV

Suddenly the Jew winced as though stung, exclaiming:

"How could I have forgotten? Your son, Florens?"

"Florens is well," said the Roman, "and in safety. Not here," he answered to Hazaël's look, "but at your own house, in the care of your excellent wife. To whom else should I entrust my most valued possession? Florens is not yet a Christian, but I would have him one. This, should I die, is my last command to you. Let me hear you say that I shall be obeyed!"

Hazaël wrung his hands and cried in anguish:

"O, my master! as God lives I swear that I will obey you faithfully! Were the boy to be dedicated to the Evil One, it should be done though I were damned for it!"

"Thanks, my friend!" said the father, with moisture showing in his bright blue eyes. Silently a hand-grip was exchanged between the ex-Prætor and his Chief Secretary. Then the former resumed:

"Further attend. I shall pass from the tribunal of the Prefect to the Hall of the Judges. Should the decision of the Court be that I suffer the extreme penalty, take Florens secretly to the Monastery of Tabenna, in the Upper Thebaïd. Some time will pass before the Prefect of the Stationaries of Apollinopolis sends another force to attack that wasp's nest! You have heard how sturdy a defence they maintained during the recent siege! The tribune in command of three maniples was compelled to withdraw his soldiers. Though at the Monastery of Mount Nitria, and that of Scete, and at Scyras, as at Aphroditopolis, raids were effected without opposition. Melittus, Abbot of Scete, was brought to the tribunal three days ago. He was condemned to be beaten to death with rods. Three of the five monks who were in bonds with Melittus went to the torture. Two novices they sent to the mines, in consideration of their youth. I myself was in the Hall of the Question, sitting on the high seat with the judges commissioned by the Prefect of Egypt. And as Melittus and his monks were brought forward to be sentenced, each one looked up to the right of the Catasta* with a brightened face, and smiled. For He was there!"

* A platform corresponding to our prisoners' dock.

Hazaël started, so full of awe was the ending of the sentence.

"Do you—you do not mean that you beheld in a vision Jesus of Nazareth, the Crucified?"

"Not He!" The ex-Prætor bent his head reverently. "Not the Lord, but one who in visions has often seen Him. The Egyptian, called the Athlete of Christ, the Saint who founded the Monastery of Tabenna which stands between Diopolis and Tentyra on the eastern bank of the Nile. For this house, now under the rule of the venerable Abbot Pachomius, was built upon the ruins of a tomb or temple of the bygone people, where the Saint, to enjoy contemplation of things Divine, lived in solitude as a hermit for twenty years. Now his eyrie is upon a high mountain looking towards the fastnesses of Sinai and the Red Sea. Once, he came down—during the persecution of Diocletian, and travelled to Alexandria with the chain-gangs of Christians, being brought to the city to confess their Faith and die. No man laid a hand on him, though he went in and out of the prisons freely, bringing clothes and food and medicine; tending the sick and comforting the wretched, preaching and exhorting openly, showing himself in the Courts under the eyes of the judges, as though he would have said, 'If ye seek me, come and take me; here I am, here I am!'"

"I have heard of this hermit," Hazaël assented. "He was protected by some great person. That is what was said at the time."

"Then the people of Alexandria spoke truth for once. He was protected by the greatest of all Persons."

Hazaël's face was as a stone mask. He said:

"And so Christ's Athlete shows himself again.... Will he escape this time, I wonder?"

Said the Roman, not observing or perhaps ignoring a peculiarity in the Jew's look and tone:

"He followed the captive monks from Nitria, not only to bear witness to Christ in the prisons and churches, but to confute and crush the heresy of Arius. Each day in the Hall of the Judges he stood up upon the left of the Catasta, wrapped in a white linen cloth reaching from his ankles to his middle, and mantled with the snowy fleece of his long hair and beard. He leaned upon a staff topped with the Cross, and as the doomed were led away he blessed them, crying in a voice that vibrated through the building like the sound of a silver gong: 'Blessed are ye, called by Divine Grace to testify to the Lord, even Christ Jesus! On with a good courage! for to you He holdeth open the Gate of Hope!' None laid a finger on him. But the Chief Judge, in whose full view the Athlete stood, called a lictor and said to him softly: 'Command that man in my name to withdraw himself from the Court!' And the Athlete, hearing this, cried in that voice of silvery sweetness; 'I go from this place, O unjust judge! not at thy command, but because I have discharged the errand of my Lord. My way leads through the Libyan Desert to Scete in Nitria, and from the White Monastery of Aphroditopolis to Tabenna; and from thence I return through the Desert of Arabia to mine abode. Who would overtake me let him follow; who would find me let him seek me in the ruins of the Pagan temple that stands above the Limestone Torrent, under the crown of the mountain that is called Derhor, standing between the Arabian Desert and the Gulf of Heroöpolis, looking across the Wilderness of El Ka to the Mount of Sinai!"

"And he departed?"

"He went out from the midst of us, no man daring to touch even his garment, and I returned somewhat late, to find some tax-gatherers of the Onophites waiting to pay gathered gold into the Treasury of the State. And to these I must administer the oath, first covering my head with the lustrated woollen cap, sprinkling incense on the coals and invoking the Sabine deity.... And, as has been my wont of late, I refrained from doing these things.... Then a man in mean clothes rose up and pointed to me, and cried out: 'Question! Question! Is an oath made before a Roman Prætor valid and binding, when the usage and wont of the sacred ceremonial are scamped after a fashion like this? Dip the olive-twig! Purify the wool with the consecrated element! ... Throw the incense on the coals, therewith invoking Dius Fidius! Or else confess that thou, Philoremus Fabius, art a worshipper of Christ!' Then—I do not quite know what came over me. I threw the cap upon the floor, and said to all present: 'You have heard the Accuser! Now hear me! I am a Christian man!'"

The Jew groaned:

"Madness. Possession! A casting away of reputation, honour, and it may be, very existence! ... And for what? ... You have never renounced the gods of Rome! ... You have never been baptised by a Christian priest, or broken," he spat, "consecrated bread, or drunk wine at one of their accursed love-feasts! You have only mingled among them unseen, in the robe and cowl of the Parabolani. Idly listened to a sermon or two—helped to carry one plague-bit to the hospital.... Listen! ... All may yet be well! ... Only consent to write plainly, stating these facts to His Excellency Lollius Maxius, and to the Prefect Mettius Rufus, and entrust both letters to me.... Upon my head and my son's head be it if you find me fail you! Hasten, O Master! Every moment of delay lessens the chance of averting ruin. For the sake of the boy Florens do this—if you will not for your own!"

"My good Hazaël," the Roman said, as the Secretary thrust tablets and stylus upon him, and drew forward his vacated chair, urging him to sit down. "To my shame be it said, I have already appealed to the friendship of the Prefect, though not in such pusillanimous terms as these you suggest. Until this moment I have waited for an answer in vain. As for the boy, these white hairs that have appeared upon my temples since yesterday, testify to the anxiety I suffer upon his account. Being a child of tender years, you might claim of the State in his name some portion of my confiscated property. But in this case he will be placed under a Roman guardian, and reared in the worship of the gods of Rome. Better be still! Now tell me while there is time, what of your errand to Ælia Capitolina? Did you discover Annius Jovius Priscus, the Senator, guardian of my late wife's property? And does her inheritance, the ancient Israelitish fortress, once given by King Solomon to Balkis, Queen of Sheba, yet stand among the vineyards near Joppa, or has Kirjath-Saba resolved itself into a mountain of disjointed stone?"

The Jew drew a folded skin of parchment from his bosom and gave it to the Roman as he answered:

"I found the man you bade me seek, in the city that was once Jerusalem! As for the tower of Kirjath-Saba, it stands as though fresh wars might yet rage and beat upon its ruggedness, and new nations arise and flourish and pass, yet leave it there unharmed. Here, sent to thee by the Senator Priscus, are the writings made when the Tower with the land about it, was conferred upon the Tribune Justus Martius of the Tenth Roman Legion, by decree of the Emperor Vespasian, on the tenth day of the month of August, in the second year of his reign."

Philoremus murmured, scanning the faded ink characters upon the sheepskin:

"Justus Martius, ancestor of my wife, led a party of Roman Legionaries with scaling-ladders in the siege of Titus against Antonia. He found a breach in the fortress-wall, got through and killed—"

Hazaël nodded grimly:

"Ay, killed the Jewish sentries, and slew the rest of the defenders. That was the beginning of the Massacre and the Destruction—to which that of Nebuchadnezzar the Assyrian, was as a passing shower to the fury of a storm. With this deed I have to deliver back to you the signet ring with the head of Hercules, cut in intaglio upon a black agate, that I carried with me into Palestine; and also my pack-mule's burden of two thousand sestertia, in good aurei of Hadrian, at 30 to the pound of gold; and with the money a message from Priscus."

"Keep the black onyx intaglio in memory of me. The fellow ring—the same head cut in relief—is in the coffer with my dear wife's jewels. Worn by her from her marriage until her death, it will be a precious legacy for Florens. Give it him when he shall have reached the age of nineteen. Take the parchment also and keep it in trust for my son, and the mule-load of money, for I have no need of these." As the sheep-skin vanished under the Jew's upper garment, "Give me now," said the Roman, "the message of Annius Priscus."

"It was: 'Tell the husband of my departed ward to find another steward to husband her vineyards of Kir Saba and receive the grape-money from the wine-presser, for I weary of the dust and glare of Palestine, and desire to end my days in my native city of Rome.'" The Jew added: "I found Priscus setting forth with his household and slaves to take ship for Rome at Joppa. Had I arrived at a later hour, my journey had been in vain. Wherefore, thanking the Most High, Who had aided me in the execution of my lord's business, I accepted the invitation of the Senator to accompany him as far as Lydda, now known as Diospolis; from whence I went to Kirjath-Saba, two days' journey by road. There gushes forth to water the green plains of Sharon a river of fattening for the vineyards that stand about the Tower. Six hundred schaeni of land, I judged, measuring roughly by the eye. The two thousand sestertia I received represent but a tithe of the value of the yearly gathering, judging by the fruit that yet hung upon the vines."

"Old men are easily duped by smooth-tongued stewards."

"The rogue at Kir Saba is a Phœnician, and slippery as an adder. Yet will he not lose the stiffness of his back-muscles and haunches until he shall have sacrificed a goose or two to his goddess Tanit, and caused a slave to rub him with the grease."

A spark of amusement twinkled in the tired eyes of the Roman.

"You beat him?"

"My staff has an affinity with the backs of robbers that may not be denied. This one, by virtue of the authority bestowed on me, I summarily deprived of his office; replacing the thief with one Simeon, a Jew of Joppa, a faithful man and, moreover, a kinsman of mine own."

"That is well if you judge it well. And now let us speak no more of money. My son and his future are safe in your true hands."

"Your son's father were also safe, were he to follow the counsels of his servant," said the Jew with a passionate eagerness. "But consent to exchange clothes,—giving me your purple-edged prætexta—taking this travel-soiled robe of mine, this girdle, sword and dagger—this parchment deed and this purse of money—and topping all with my mantle of camel's hair! ... Let me sit here, covering my head and arms as one that weeps, with the folds of this, your mantle!" He caught up a fur-trimmed hooded outer garment of crimson that lay upon a neighbouring chair. "Pass the guards!—in your disguise the thing may be done, I swear it! Hasten to my house. Give to my wife a written line from me—here are inkhorn, reed and paper—and she will deal with you faithfully even as myself. Consent! Accept!"

"The sacrifice of your life for mine! A thousand times No!" said the ex-Prætor, sternly.

Hazaël urged in a low, fierce voice, illustrating his speech with rapid gestures towards the window; pointing to the helmed head, muscular brown neck and powerful shoulders of the Legionary posted in the loggia beyond.

"My life will be in no peril. I swear to you I will but make sure that you have passed out safely, before I leap upon the guard there, stab one—strangle the other—and escape. Once in the Jews' Quarter I am safe as you will be. By a hundred avenues known to none but the Chosen we can escape from Alexandria. Only consent—"

But the Roman was firm in his refusal.

"Ah, you wish to die, it is clear to me!" exclaimed Hazaël. "The thirst for death consumes you even as those other Christians, who think the heavens will open amidst their tortures and the Crucified appear, surrounded by the Shekinah; and extending His nail-pierced hands to them; whilst hovering angels offer them the martyr's crown!"

"You forget, I am not even baptised," said the Roman. "I have not received the instruction of a catechumen. I have abjured the gods of Rome without knowing whether Christ will accept me.... And yet—and yet—"

His calmness made the Jew shudder. He looked from the window with a glance that sought above the palm-trees and acacias, the blue sky, crossed and recrossed by the airy dance of the swallows, and said with a smile:

"And yet I have never experienced such wondrous peace of mind. An ichor runs in my veins that is clear as crystal, cool as snow and yet glowing as the fire of sunset.... Never have I tasted in my life a joy so deep as this!"

"He is mad!" groaned Hazaël in his anguished heart. But the ex-Prætor was again speaking:

"Listen, most dear and faithful friend! ... Should that thing happen which means that I am not quite rejected, being permitted to die for the faith of Christ,—take my boy, secretly as I have said, to the Abbot of Tabenna, and explain that I wish Florens to be baptised and reared in the Christian faith." He went on as the Jew's face again darkened, and his eyes once more dilated with horror, "Should Florens shrink from the life of a monk, let him be a soldier, like the father who sends him his blessing. Deposit my wife's jewels with the Abbot of Tabenna,—to be sold for the boy's benefit—all save the fellow-ring to the signet I have given you—which is to be Florens' when he is of age. Tell him that the Hercules must stand for manliness and valour; the knotted club for Truth and Honesty; and the lion's skin for the wisdom that cloaks itself against the malice of the world in the experience of trials overpast."

"I will remember!" the Jew said sullenly. "Have I all your instructions? ..."

"There is but one thing more!" the Roman returned, speaking low and hurriedly. "The boy being left with the Abbot at the Monastery of Tabenna, I entreat you to return by way of the Arabian Desert, seek out the hermitage of Christ's Athlete upon Mount Derhor and deliver to the Blessed One a message from me. Say to the Saint: 'I bring greetings from Philoremus Fabius, once Prætor of the Taxes of Egypt in Alexandria. Without having formally embraced Christ, or received the waters of baptism, this man has testified to the Faith and died!' ... Further, say: 'He entreats thee to pray that his sins may be forgiven. And that for him also the Hand that was pierced may open the Gate of Hope!'..." He added, visibly paling as the distant sound of a trumpet broke upon his utterance, "All is now said. And it is well, for that is the trumpet-call of the Prefect's Bodyguard. My examination takes place before the banquet, it may be! Well, well! I have no envy of the flower-crowned guest whose place should have been mine!"

Again the trumpet shrilled, and the two men sat in silence, as the rhythmical tread of wooden-soled, heavy-nailed sandals falling on the pavement of the street drew nearer,—grew louder until the solid walls vibrated: and then—as a harsh voice, echoed by other voices, was heard to issue some military command—stopped dead. The curtain at the portal bellied inwards with the draught from the opening of the house-door: and as the harsh voice issued another command, the regular tramp of the wooden, iron-nailed shoes of the soldiers wakened the echoes of the outer vestibule. The Jew caught his breath, and the Roman, frowning, laid a hand upon his sinewy arm:

"No demonstration of anger," he said sternly, "I forbid it! And now, for this world, my son—for as one I have loved you!—Farewell!"

"And O farewell, my kindest friend!—my generous protector!" stammered Hazaël, with tears raining down his bearded cheeks as they hurriedly embraced. "May the God of Israel so deal with me and mine as I deal with your son! ... They come!"

The trampling iron-shod footsteps halted at the threshold. The metal rings shrieked on the rod as a brawny, red-haired arm, partly sheathed in glittering brass, thrust the heavy curtains back.... Sunlight flashed from naked steel, and the gilded plates of armour. A Roman officer of the Bodyguard stepped into the room.

V

In consideration of great services rendered to the Empire, the ex-Prætor of the Egyptian Taxes was beheaded without torture. The body, exposed upon the public execution-ground according to the law, mysteriously disappeared. It was whispered that it had been spirited away by persons with Christian leanings, and secretly buried in the crypt of some unknown church.

For three days following the death of his patron, the house of Hazaël was strictly closed.... The Jew, with hair and beard sprinkled with ashes, mourned, sitting on the floor in a coarse black tunic, rent at the hem; and observing silence, ate bread and drank water once a day at the sunset hour. He even said Kaddish for his dead benefactor, though an act so presumptuous would have scandalised the Rabbinate. On the fourth day he rose: washed and reclothed himself, and returned to his family as though nothing had transpired. But on a day following the celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, the large white mule on which Hazaël made his journeys, with the beast that usually carried his attendant Ephraim, stood waiting with the pack-mule at the Chief Secretary's door.

A long basket of woven osiers now being brought out by Ephraim and another servant, and carefully strapped upon the burden of necessaries carried by the pack-mule, the Chief Secretary, armed as before, and in the plain travelling garb that he had worn previously, bade farewell to his wife and family; thrust his mighty bronze-shod staff once more into its leathern bucket; and rode out of the City of the Pharos with his small following, by the Gate of the Moon.

A flat-bottomed boat paddled by four negroes, conveyed both men and beasts across the vineyard-fringed Lake of Mareotis, and for some miles south-eastwards along the Canal of Alexandria, between palm-groves, gardens, orchards and the estates of wealthy Greeks, Egyptians and Roman officials. Above Andron, the ancient city fast falling through Roman misrule into neglect and dilapidation, the party landed; Hazaël gave money to the master of the rowers, received his salutations, and the four negroes, reversing their positions, soon conveyed the boat away.

Then the Jew, no longer hiding the anxiety that had devoured him, leaped with fierce energy upon the pack-mule, unstrapped the heavy osier basket and with the aid of Ephraim, carefully lowered it to the ground. With shaking hands he unfastened the lid of the pannier, and as the smiling but bewildered face of a boy of twelve years old looked up at him, with blue eyes blinking in the sudden glare of the sun:

"Now thanks be to the Holy One that all is well with thee!" he stammered. "Not a word, not a movement—your father's true son! See now—this pad from under thy head, my hands beneath thy armpits. Leap—and fresh as a salmon from the British Thamesis—a sturgeon from the Hyperborean Ocean, or a lamprey from Lake Moeris—out you come!"

He hugged the boy against his breast with almost womanly tenderness, and running his hands rapidly over the slight body, assured himself that all was well. Then mounting Florens before the saddle of his own mule, and followed by Ephraim with the other animals; the Secretary, following a southward-running road that crossed some ripening cotton-fields, presently drew the rein, and looked back at Ephraim, saying:

"The idolaters are true to their word. See, there are their tents and camels!"

And he pointed to where low black tents were pitched upon a stretch of scrubby ground lying between the crop-land and the reddish-coloured desert, upon which camels eagerly grazed upon withered vetch and wiry grasses; while a small band of Saracens crouched round a small fire, wrapped in capacious mantles woven of white wool and black camel's hair, their loaded staves beside them, and sharp broad-bladed spears planted haft downwards in the ground near by.

The Saracens rose, seeing men on beasts coming, seized their staves and plucked forth their spears. Then, comprehending who it was that approached, their demeanour altered, and they received the Jew with respect.

"I am Mafa Oabu," said the eldest of the company. "If evil come to thee, or those who are thy companions, I pay to him whom thou knowest, with my life and the lives of my sons!"

He touched himself with the right hand upon the breast and brow, and laid his hands in the hands of Hazaël, as also did the men of his following. Three young camels were chosen for the travellers to ride. Two others were loaded with the water-skins, provisions, fodder, and baggage. Mafa Oabu mounted one of the pack-animals. Two strong young men, marching with the caravan, would ride by turns upon the other, the old Saracen said, when either of them required rest. As for the mules, they remained in the keeping of the Saracens, to be reclaimed upon the return of the travellers. The price of the journey, not to be paid until then, was to be one hundred silver sestertii a day for each of the five camels; fifty sestertii for Mafa Oabu, and a gift for each of the young men.

The departure was accompanied by shrill ululating cries made by the women of the Saracens, who kept veiled their faces, painted like their naked bodies with green and scarlet fishes, serpents and the signs of the Zodiac, and smeared their hair with butter. Then the caravan struck southwards into the Nitrian Desert. That night they encamped under a grove of palm-trees, near a Roman well hollowed in the living rock, amidst the bellowings of the camels, which purposely had not been watered before the start.

Water-skins brought by the Jews being filled by Ephraim, that the pure element might not be contaminated by the touch of idolaters, the Saracens filled their own, and drew water for the camels, which was given the thirsty beasts in a pitch-smeared skin trough. Mafa Oabu took no share in these labours, but prostrating himself upon the sand with his forehead towards the setting sun, remained absorbed in silent adoration. The Jews washed, gave thanks and ate; sharing with the child the bread, eggs, figs and dried fish they had brought with them; drinking a little wine diluted with water, and keeping their own side of the fire. The Saracens washed down their sparing diet of dried bread, dates and sheeps'-milk cheese with a drink of charred corn, crushed, and boiled in water mingled with honey, which they sipped from the shells of young tortoises, showing their white teeth in smiles at the hearty appetite displayed by the child. Yet while the novelty of all about him pleased and excited Florens, he would pause in the midst of a mouthful to ask Hazaël:

"When we reach where we are going, shall we find my father there?"

"If the Almighty so wills!" was the Jew's invariable answer. The young Saracens, whose names were Marduk and Belias, pitched a black tent to shelter the travellers, when sleeping, from the rays of the new moon. Small, marvellously bright and silvery, it hung high in the south, rivalling the blue radiance of Jupiter, the evening star.... In the north-west the Pharos of Alexandria blazed on the horizon at intervals of an instant. Hazaël looked at the distant splendour of the city, and muttered, as he thought of his benefactor murdered there:

"But for the Chosen, and my Miriam and my children, who dwell in the shadow of thy painted temples like to doves among the rocks, I could wish that fire and brimstone might descend from Heaven and consume thee utterly, thou thrice accursed Harlot of the Sea!"

For in the bosom of the Jew, who had witnessed massacres of Christians without a sentiment of pity or horror, the commission of that single crime had caused a strange revulsion. Before he lay down, he looked at the boy, who wearied, was soundly sleeping; and a heavy tear dropped from his stern eyes upon the woollen covering he held back. Then he replaced it over the tossed curls and the flushed face of the sleeper, commended himself to the Almighty care, and stretched himself upon the ground beside Florens.

Rising to repeat the Shema for the first night-watch, he stepped outside the tent to leave to Ephraim, who had also wakened, the freedom of solitude which intensifies prayer. The young Saracens slept beside the pink embers of the fire, enveloped in their mantles of camel's hair. Mafa Oabu did not sleep, but sat apart, alert and wakeful; spear at hand and staff in readiness; his sling lying beside him, with a supply of rounded stones.

Placing ten small pebbles in front of him, he reckoned that ten days must pass before the arrival of the caravan at Memphis. Adding ten more for the return-journey, he surrounded each of the twenty pebbles with five hundred grains of maize, reckoning up his gains by the light of the moon and of the fire—which he often fed with dead wood and dried camel's-dung—regularly discovering to his chagrin that he had not added the sum due for his own labours, and must begin once more. When the stars began to pale towards the dawn, he ceased, and prostrated himself, rising to find Hazaël standing near.

"What do you worship?" the Jew asked him.

"We pray," said Mafa Oabu, "to the Great and Lesser Lights, to the starry Hosts of Heaven and to the Djinns and Afrits both good and evil, that eavesdrop at the celestial gates and thereby learn much of the divine plans of Allah, the Eternal, the Creator of All. The brilliant lights that sometimes shoot across the sky are in fact these beings, driven by the Angels from the celestial threshold, whence their master Iblis, the Peacock of the Angels, was banished when he rebelled against Allah. We also reverence as the holiest thing from Kaf to Kaf, the pure white stone that fell with our father Adam from the Garden of Paradise. It is now no longer white, having wept so much for the sins of the world, and silver bands prevent it from bursting. It is imbedded in the wall of the Kaaba, the Holy House containing more than three hundred and fifty images, built and carved by Seth, son of Adam, and washed away by the Deluge. Later, Ishmael, guided by the Archangel Gabriel, discovered the marvellous stone, buried in the mud left by the retreating waters, and made new images in place of those lost. We call the period at which these events occurred, The Time of Ignorance. You, my lord, being of the People of the Book, the Sons of Isaac, look back with ourselves—the People of the Desert who are the Children of Ishmael—to Abraham, our common ancestor."

"So it is said," observed Hazaël, unwilling to offend the master of the caravan, while he turned aside to spit upon the sand, making a mental act abjuring kinship with idolaters, condemned by the Almighty to burn forever in hell.

VI

Keeping to the south, they passed that day through some long-neglected orchards, lying upon the outskirts of a town almost in ruins, sparsely inhabited by a degraded population of mingled Greek, Egyptian and Libyan blood. Satyrs and fauns in the fig-groves pelted them with ripe fruit in return for a volley of stones thrown by the Saracens.

"What are they?" asked Florens of Hazaël, puzzled at the sight of these strange semi-human beings, sprung from the iniquities of forgotten peoples; covered with hide, and having horses' ears and tails, or goatish horns and hairy legs, ending in cloven hoofs. But Hazaël muffled the child's eyes and dragged him roughly away.

The groves of the dying city left behind, the ground became rugged, bare and stony. That night the camels grazed upon the safsaf weed, after the next they might have to rely upon the fodder they carried. A milky mirage made the scrub-bushes of the distant plain appear as tall as sycamores. Passing through them, they barely reached the knees of the Saracens who went on foot. White snails covered them, glistening like some strange pale fruit amidst their foliage. These the young Saracens gathered and threw into a bag with salt. Thus purged, they explained, these snails were excellent eating either roasted in the ashes or stewed.

On their left as they travelled, a pearly haze tinged with jade-green signified the vegetation of the banks of the Nile. Ranges of low hills in the south were vested in violet, and palest primrose. The sun smote fiercely, yet when the shadows of men and beasts were shortest, the children of the Desert, as though enlivened by the burning atmosphere, quickened their steps and those of the camels and even began to sing. They passed through part of a petrified forest, the thickest trunks of the stone trees being of the girth of a man's thigh. A herd of gazelle broke from covert, Mafa Oabu slung a stone after them, and a doe followed by a young fawn fell with a broken leg. A Saracen slit the throat of the mother, and would have killed the fawn also, had not the boy Florens begged with tears that the little creature should be given into his care.

"It will die," said Hazaël, "without milk to nourish it!" And he signed to Ephraim, who took charge of the little creature, meaning to slaughter it after the ritual of his people, so that it might lawfully be used for food.

They passed Saracen grave-mounds and trains of camels, and rested at another well where were more camel-trains being loaded with iron vessels of water to carry into the Desert to the military outposts. Near the well was a fortress garrisoned by Roman legionaries. Roman officers driving chariots hailed the Jew, with whom they seemed acquainted, to ask the news from Alexandria. The moon rose early, and rode high before the caravan, as the blood-red disc of the sun sank into the invisible western sea. A mist rose from the burning ground about the legs of the Saracens and the camels, so that they seemed to wade through the waters of an opaque milky lake. That night the Saracens ate the meat of the doe-gazelle roasted on sticks before the fire, and drank boiled broth. And Ephraim killed the fawn, and dressed the meat in the Jewish way, saving the delicate dappled skin to make a belt and hanging purse for Florens. But even the promise of the belt did not pacify the boy.

"I would have reared it and tamed it too," he said, changing colour: "You are cruel!" Nor would he taste of the flesh of the fawn, nor had Hazaël, in concern for the boy's distress, any great appetite for Ephraim's cookery.

Dew did not drench the tents that night, nor soak the heavy striped mantles worn by the three Saracens. The breath of the Desert filled the lungs, the sun poured down like molten brass, the hard red ground ascended under the feet, and travelling became difficult, owing to ridges of petrified coral and banks of fossil shells and sponges. Urged by the whistling of the Saracens the camels exerted themselves painfully. This haste was of necessity, as the water began to thicken and grow murky in the goatskins. That night they rested three hours and travelled instead of sleeping. Before dawn they found the track they pursued wind among low broken hills, rising to jagged bluffs and full of yawning chasms. When the day broke, they perceived on looking back, these low hills magnified by a mirage to a towering range of mountains. Florens cried out in wonder. But the old Saracen made signs that the boy should be silent, as Djinni, Afrits and phantoms of the Desert inhabited the chasms, and resented the presence of beings of the human race. Skeletons of camels, and the mummy-dry bodies of men were found upon the track they followed. Mafa Oabu said that these were the remains of travellers who had offended the Djinns.

Now they descended a steep ravine, the sides of which were clothed with petrified forests. The pass ended in desert, the hot reddish expanse of which, was broken by the glittering shield-shaped basin of a lake. This lake was salt, the Saracens explained by gestures, and the travellers, who sickened at the stench and taste of the putrid water in the goatskins, moistened their cracked lips with a few drops, and turned away their parching eyes from the tormenting sight.

At the bottom of the defile appeared now the white tents of a Roman outpost, the eagled standard set up under a little wooden penthouse, close to the quarters of the officer in command. A square wall of rocks enclosed the encampment, which was protected by an encircling trench. Not far off were seen camels feeding, and the low black tents of a tribe of nomads, of mingled Ethiopian and Arab race.

Now soldiers approached bringing water to the travellers, yellow and muddy and full of the larvae of flies. Filtered through a cloth, they drank of it eagerly. The soldiers were fever-smitten, and covered with scabs and swellings, from the stings of poisonous insects which swarmed amidst the herbage on the borders of the salt lake. Red fruit grew on tall thorny bushes, a thin fodder-grass showed with the safsaf upon the arid dunes. Springs of the brackish water were to be found here, by digging holes of six feet deep in the sandy gravel. Wild-duck haunted the lake-borders; those of the Roman soldiers who were bowmen, habitually shot the birds for a change of food. That night a black-and-white lamb, purchased by the Jew Hazaël from the camp of the Ethiopians, was sacrificed to the moon, and eaten by Mafa Oabu and his men.

They filled the water-skins with the turbid fluid, and left the Roman outpost by the salt lake on the following night. The heat grew fiercer towards daybreak. Waves of burning reddish gravel rose about them to the height of the head of a man. Mingled with the gravel were yellow crystals, perfectly spherical and glittering in the moonlight. The boy begged to be allowed to dismount and gather these stones, which the Saracens collected for the adornment of their women. To pacify Florens the Jew bought a handful or so from the young men.

They crossed a low range of broken hills, and at noon saw Mount Nitria and a mirage of two salt lakes. Pied birds of grey-and-white with long tails, appeared towards evening, feeding on minute winged insects that rose from the burning sand, and signalling to each other with sharp, whistling calls. Jackals howled during the hours of rest, and, looking back when they had quitted the place of their encampment, they saw it alive with these foul creatures of prey.

Now the ground became paved with slabs of shining mica. Bushes of wormwood, tamarisks and thorny shrubs with red fruit, eatable by men and greedily devoured by camels, grew in the friable red soil at the base of stony cliffs. Herds of gazelle grazed here. Hills shaped like cones with broken tops rose up on either side of them. Towering rocks of black basalt looked like giant Ethiopians menacing the caravan with uplifted clubs and spears. The full moon rose in radiance whilst the sun was sinking over the unseen western ocean, amid splendours of amber, topaz and ruby, sapphire and emerald.

They marched before day. The Libyan sun had never burned with fiercer intensity. For fear that the boy would swoon and fall from his camel, Hazaël transferred him to his own. The young Saracens ran by the wearied beasts, whistling to them to march in line,—singing songs and jesting clumsily to distract the thoughts of the wearied travellers. Hazaël said within himself:

"When upon the hump of an accursed camel I fry alive in the sun of Libya, shall I be solaced because a cricket chirps at the doorway of mine ear?" Yet he pretended to listen with pleasure, and bade the exhausted child take notice how the shadows of the Saracens gambolled beside them like black monkeys on the rocks. But the boy, feverish from the bites of the swarms of flies beside the salt lake, or sickened by the muddy water, drooped more and more. Sometimes he revived sufficiently to reiterate:

"Shall we really find my father when we reach the journey's end?"

Or he would vary the question by asking:

"Shall I have thy son Levi and thy little Leah to play with there?"

To which the Jew, tender as a woman, and fearful of increasing the child's distemper by thwarting him, would reply:

"If God willed it, thy father would be waiting to receive thee. If the All Highest commanded, thy playmates would be there also. All things are disposed and directed by the Almighty."

"Where is He?" the child asked. Hazaël answered:

"He is at the zenith and at the nadir. He encompasses the world with His fingers, and takes up His abode in the hearts of holy and pious men."

"May a little boy see Him? Shall I see Him?" the child queried.

And Hazaël answered, groaning in spirit at the thought of the eternal burnings destined for the soul of this innocent, who must be reared in the heresy of Christianity:

"The Cherubim gaze perpetually on Him, and know no weariness!"

The child seated on the pad before him, felt the heaving of his breast, turned in his supporting arms, and looked up into his gloomy countenance. Then, seeing the black brows, knotted over the bloodshot eyes, the strange convulsion that twisted the mouth, and the haggard temples and hollow cheeks bedabbled with sweat, Florens grew pale and stared at him in fear.

"Are you angry?" he faltered, and Hazaël forced his brows to unbend, and his lips to smile as he answered:

"Perhaps, but not with thee!"

"That is well," returned the boy, "for I would have you love me as much as you love Levi and little Leah!"

"Then be content," said Hazaël's deep voice, "for even as these do I love thee!"

Yet as he answered in gentle words, the spirit of some dark forefather who served Canaanitish idols with bloody rites ages before the Lawgiver received the Divine revelation upon the holy Mountain of God—tempted Hazaël to pluck away the sinewy arms that sustained the child in front of him—and let him fall to certain death upon the stones beneath the camel's feet.

VII

After another day's journey over stones and thorny scrub-bush, Mount Nitria and her ranges walled out the southern horizon, while the Pyramids of Memphis showed small upon the east. The ascent grew more steep, then the ground sloped down and the camels entered the Natrûn Valley. Here safsaf weed, tamarisk and thorn gave place to olives, vines and harvested fields, upon the drying straw of which, camels, black goats and numerous flocks of sheep were feeding. Presently the valley divided into two: at the bottom of one lay the salt lakes, at this time of the year but six in number. Beside the lakes dwelt colonies of salt-workers who cultivated fields of corn, vineyards and olive-trees along the banks of a waterless channel that had once, according to tradition, formed a branch of the Nile. In the bed of this vanished river, and where some of the lakes had dried up, huge bones of unknown creatures, encrusted with glittering saline crystals, projected from the salt-streaked mud. These, the Saracens said, were the remains of some terrible giants, sons of Eblis, Lord of the Djinni and master of the Afrits. Upon the further range of hills rose the temples, pylons, palaces and streets of Scete, an ancient city of the Egyptians, dedicated of old to the worship of Horus the hawk god. The suburbs to the east were inhabited by Greek and Copt salt-merchants, their families and their Libyan and negro labourers; but the magnificence of Scete lay abandoned to foxes, bats and owls.

The Saracen master of the camels believed this place to be the abode of evil Afrits, and pointing to some pillars of fine dust set whirling by a breeze that was blowing from the north-east across the deserted courtyards and huge empty squares:—

"See!" said Mafa Oabu to Hazaël, "how the Accursed Ones make sport here. Beyond those groves of columns topped with lotus-buds, within those vast palaces are halls where the Sons of Eblis sit on thrones, crowned and immovable with their stone hands resting upon their stony knees.... Women with the heads of cows, carrying the Moon between their horns, look down on them. Troops of peris carrying flowers and ornaments, men with the heads of hawks, crocodiles, and other creatures are limned on the walls.... At night they come to life, descend and serve the Sons of Eblis, who between moonset and cockcrow are released from their bonds of stone. But all the rest of the time the place is but the playground of the Afrits. Evil is certain to befall us if we pause to look on them!"

Right and left of Scete, on the shoulders of the hills, were chapels and rows of cells, wrought by Christian monks and hermits with infinite patience of labour out of the Cyclopean rock. Lower down a stream of pure water descending a rocky gorge, made fruitful the fields and vegetable gardens, the olive-groves and date-palms cultivated by the Solitaries and the "communities with tireless industry and patience; and manured by loads of rich black mud, transported on the backs of asses and of men from the banks of the distant Nile.

Beyond these fields and gardens stretched the great Libyan Desert. To the south the massive battlemented walls of the Monastery of Scete, backed by the distant mountain of the Cow, rose from the summit of a flat-topped mound of red gravel covered with black pebbles.

Seen near, this place resembled a fortress with loopholes pierced in its Cyclopean masonry. An ancient bronze shield depended by two rusty chains from the wall beside the low doorway, through which the venerable Abbot Melittus, with three monks and two novices, had been led away to Alexandria to suffer for Christ: and a stone hammer hung below the shield: but it was not possible to reach the door, because two millstones had been rolled into the entrance before it by the monks: who had then re-entered the monastery by means of a rope let down from a window above the door.

"Beat upon the shield!" Hazaël signed to one of the Saracens. The heathen obeyed, but so long the monks within delayed in answering the summons, that the child, suffering from fatigue, and fevered by the recent bites of the innumerable winged insects that swarmed in the neighbourhood of the salt lakes, began to cry.

This innocent clamour evoked the apparition of a bearded monk at the window over the doorway. After anxious scrutiny and much questioning, the monk vanished. A pale beardless face now appeared at the aperture, and a weak but singularly distinct voice addressed Hazaël:

"O Jew of Alexandria!" it said, "we have now no Abbot of Scete, until our Chapter nominate a successor to Melittus, who hath been called, with certain of the brethren, to reign with Jesus Christ. But for the present, I who am called Paule, serve as Brother Superior. Tell me, therefore, what you seek of us?"

"Nothing for myself nor my companions, O monk!" said Hazaël roughly, "but lodging for the night and tendance for this child, who is weary with travel, and somewhat feverish. He is the only son of Philoremus Florens Fabius, late Prætor of the Taxes of Egypt in Alexandria, who—"

"Let down the basket with Brother Theodore!" interrupted the thin voice of Paule.

Then as a deep basket of osiers, containing a pleasant-faced young monk, was let down from the window by a rope worked by windlass and pulley:

"O Jew, give Brother Theodore the child of the servant of Christ, Philoremus," said the weak voice of Paule. "Happy is the hour that brings us our martyred brother's son!"

Then, as the camel ridden by Hazaël knelt at a word from its Saracen driver, and the boy, whose tears had ceased to flow, willingly submitted to be taken in the arms of Brother Theodore; and even showed pleasure as the basket ascended with its burden through the air,—the Jew, unable to restrain his surprise that intelligence of the manner of the Prætor's death should have reached this distant place, motioned to the Superior that he wished to speak in private. And as the monks drew in the basket at the window, and Paule leaned out, the Jew asked:

"How can it be, O monk, that this was known to you?"

Paule looked down at him with luminous eyes, and answered:

"O faithful man! who for the sake of thine oath doest that which is abhorrent unto thee, didst thou not know that the great Saint, the Solitary of Derhor, rested here upon his way to Tabenna in the Thebaïd? Four days ago he left us, having seen in a vision the confession, the arrest and martyrdom by decapitation of the Prætor Philoremus Fabius!"

Hazaël said, striking his great metal-shod staff upon a millstone so violently that the sparks flew:

"Where now is this Saint of thine? Can a swift camel overtake one who seems to have not only the legs of the ostrich, but the eagle's wings? For I have a message for the man from my master!"

Paule asked, with his luminous eyes bent upon the contorted features of the Hebrew:

"Does the message concern the child?"

"Nay, monk, not so!" Hazaël answered, "for the boy is to be delivered to the Abbot of Tabenna with certain jewels which are to be sold for his keep." He added as great drops of sweat started again upon his cheeks and temples, and his eyebrows knotted like breeding snakes: "He is to be baptised and reared as a Christian. These were the Prætor's last commands!" His great voice leaped up from him like a hound unleashed. He roared, striking his staff upon the stone again. "But better he should die to-night and be gathered to his Pagan ancestors. Yea, better ten thousand times! Monk, do you hear?"

Paule bent his small wrinkled head upon its fleshless neck, and answered placidly:

"Jew of Alexandria, marvellous is thy probity! Wilt thou accept at our hands shelter and nourishment?"

Hazaël glared at Paule with bloodshot eyes, and angrily answered:

"Monk of Scete! I require from you neither compliments, nor anything else. There is a spring beneath some date-palms a bowshot from your monastery. There I and my companions will encamp, unless the trees are yours?"

Paule smiled and said, shaking his bald head:

"Like the crystal water, the fruitful trees belong to none save Him Who made them. Rest there, and to-morrow at the second hour come to me for news of the child!"

That night, whilst the Saracens sacrificed a black-and-white goat in honour of their Moon goddess and to propitiate the Afrits of Scete, Hazaël went apart into a solitary place in the wilderness and prayed to the God of his forefather Abraham. All night he prayed, kneeling with his forehead lifted to the sky, or lying prone with his face in the dust of humiliation. Then, remembering that when Joseph the Zaphenath-Päanea was borne in the second chariot in the royal procession of Pharaoh, the precious images of the false gods of Egypt figured in these displays; and that Joseph, in exercising vigilance over the goods of Pharaoh, was obliged to watch over and faithfully preserve these idols, he rose up and shook the sand of the Desert from his beard and robe.

At the second hour of the day he went to the Monastery. The millstones had been removed from before the door, as for an honoured guest. He beat upon the shield. Bolts groaned in their grooves of stone, and the small but heavy gate swung back upon its hinges, showing a courtyard within a square wall, set about with small cells built of rough stones and roofed with reeds. Date-palms and fig-trees, with a few olives were growing in a grassy enclosure about a stone-curbed well, over which was a wheel with a windlass, chain and bucket. Upon the threshold of the gate was Paule, tall, emaciated and with strangely luminous eyes, standing surrounded by a group of other monks in similar coarse brown habits. The Sacrifice was over, the board was beaten to summon the brethren to the refectory, as Hazaël, frowning, stooped almost double to pass under the squat archway of the gate. But as he rose to his great height the boy Florens came running to him with so noticeable a return of health and vigour, that the Jew could not repress an exclamation of surprise. As Florens caught at his arm, and raised towards the swarthy lips a face all fresh and smiling, framed in fair locks on which light drops of pure water hung glittering, Hazaël asked, looking keenly into the clear eyes:

"What have these monks done to thee?"

The child frowned with an effort of recollection, and said, pulling at a silken cord that now hung about his neck:

"Abbot Paule has given me a silver medal, and also a new name. I am now called Mark!"

At which Hazaël, seeing that the medal bore the Image of the Crucified, and a reverse of the great Apostle of Christian Alexandria; and comprehending that the drops on those golden hairs were the lustral waters of baptism, thrust the boy violently from him. He turned red and said reproachfully:

"Why are you always angry with me now?"

That night the caravan left Scete. Travelling southwards they came before dawn to the camel-route running between the Oasis of Ammon and the Nile, and thenceforward followed it to the east.

Leaving the camels and the Saracens to await them at Memphis, the two Jews with the boy entered the sailing-vessel of some Coptish sailors, who for a certain sum conveyed them up the river to Tabenna. This place, the boatmen told the boy, was once Taben-Isi, the City of Isis. The religious house ruled by Abba Pachomius was built of great stones which had once formed part of the ancient temples. Thirteen hundred monks of the tonsure were under Pachomius in the Monastery of Tabenna; and in the mountains of that region were many other monasteries and nunneries, also seven thousand hermits, following their several Rules in their own cells, there waging war against the world, the flesh and Satan; or living in tombs and caves after the method of the Athlete of Christ.

"Who is the Athlete of Christ?" the child asked the boatmen.

The Copts looked at the Jews, and observing that Hazaël listened, they were troubled, because they were Christians. But Hazaël said to them:

"Speak without fear. As the Most High lives, I will not betray you! This is a Christian child, my master's son, I carry to the monks."

Then the boatmen told of the deeds of Christ's great servant, the Egyptian, who had been born of wealthy parents near Aphroditopolis, and upon their death inheriting their lands and wealth, had given all to the poor, crossed the River, and became a Solitary; living first in an empty tomb in a burial-place hewn by the ancients out of the mountain, being supplied by a peasant man who visited him, with bread, salt and water, weaving ropes of palm-leaves and sleeping on the bare ground.

"Here," said the master of the boat, "the Adversary appeared to this holy man tempting him; and devils, sent by the lord of devils, assailed him with execrations and blows, whilst apparitions continually beset him, in the shape of lions, wolves, hyænas, serpents and other reptiles—which he banished by the power of the Word. Then, still a young man, he went out alone into the Desert and there lived in a ruined temple that was in the mountains above Panopolis for more than twenty years. In time his fame drew all the monks that were then in Egypt, and great folks and the curious, and those who were sick."

"And," said the other Copt, "when the Saint would not show himself to them, they lifted the gate out of its hinges, threw themselves down on their faces, and supplicated: 'Man of God, come forth!' And when he came, he seemed to those that had known him, as young as when he had entered. His look converted, his touch healed, his speech was exceedingly wonderful. And in the might of the grace that was given them, the monks reared a great Monastery near Panopolis that they might live there in holiness and be ruled by this Blessed One. But sixteen years ago he withdrew himself by the Desert of Arabia into the upper fastnesses of the mountain called Derhor, leaving another to be their Abba and spiritual guide. Since when, all here is quiet, though of old, even to men passing in their vessels on the river, the sound of great tumult and hideous outcries used to come down from the rocky eyrie where this eagle of God had made his nest. In the time of the first Persecution of the Christians by the Emperor, he descended from his mountain and went down to Alexandria to minister to the Confessors in prison there. He wished, they say, for martyrdom, but it was denied him. This very year, before the grapes and mulberries were ripe—when the Roman soldiers came to Tabenna, and the monks withstood them with boiling pitch and scalding water—they had sight of the Saint again!"

"His white hair and beard clothed him," the master of the vessel continued, "like a fleece newly bleached. He stayed but a few hours with the monks at Tabenna. Then he came down to the banks of the river, made the Sign of the Cross, lifted up his arms and sang a psalm, both powerfully and sweetly:

'Come and behold the works of God
Who turneth the sea into dry land!
In the river they shall pass on foot;
There shall we rejoice in Him.'

We have no knowledge that any one ferried him over, and whether angels conveyed him we are not able to say! But almost immediately he was seen continuing his journey to Alexandria upon the further bank!"

Hazaël broke out, forgetting his profession of tolerance: "Surely you saw this Athlete, who in three strides can traverse the distance between the Red Sea and the Thebaïd, separate the waters with his staff like the Lawgiver of Israel, and pass dryshod through their midst! Or perhaps he walked on the surface like the Nazarene Prophet, who was skilled in theurgy, and did many wonderful things?"

The Copts were silent and exchanged glances. But now the Monastery of Tabenna appeared in the distance, seated upon the skirts of the mountains, amidst groves of palms and olives, reaching to the river's brink. A great cemetery was near it, with many tombs both old and recent. A boat rowed by Egyptians, carrying a bier, with a corpse swathed and bound with garlands of bay-leaves and myrtle, and surrounded by mourners, now crossed the bows of the sailing-vessel and pulled for the Tabenna shore. Monks in black robes, with a cross-bearer and a boy-novice carrying a thurible waited at the landing-steps to take charge of the body, which was that of a Christian desirous of being interred in the cemetery's consecrated earth. As with the chanting of a hymn, the bier was lifted from the boat and raised on the shoulders of four of the brethren, the vessel containing the Jews and the son of Philoremus, touched the land. The monks moved on, carrying the bier, the mourners followed, and the strangers brought up the rear.

VIII

Seen in the distance the great Monastery of Tabenna was not unlike an Egyptian temple set between the mountain's rocky knees. So great was it that the sight of its fortress-like exterior inspired astonishment. Without the house were fields, gardens and orchards, and the Monastery, built four-square, contained a cruciform Church, a huge refectory where all the monks ate together; a school, a library, and a vast warren of cells where the monks dwelt, illuminated by little windows looking on the inner courtyard. Seats were their beds, for their Rule prevented them from taking their rest lying down: they wore sandals of hemp, coarse habits of black wool with leather cinctures, and skull-caps without nap, worked with a purple cross. The Abbot Pachomius was so bowed with the weight of years, that the upper part of his body was bent into a half-circle, and his face looked out from the middle of his breast. So many and so deep were the furrows upon that countenance—Time might have used it as a sailing-chart. Yet so kindly a smile beautified its ugliness, that the boy went to the Abbot without fear. The faithfulness of Hazaël in carrying out so strictly the commands of his dead master, while he would not even permit himself to enter the Monastery filled Pachomius of Tabenna, as it had Paule of Scete, with admiration of the man.

He said, having received the message of the martyred Prætor from the Jew,—whom he received in the inner courtyard, under a giant baobab that towered above the lofty walls of the building:

"It shall be said of you, O Hazaël, son of Hazaël, paraphrasing the saying of the Master: 'You entered not in yourself, but him who would enter you hindered not!' Verily to one who hath proved himself so faithful in this matter, much shall be given by Him one day."

"All that I require," replied Hazaël, "is a writing acknowledging the delivery of the boy to your safe keeping, and the receipt of these valuable jewels which I now place in your hands. They are to defray the cost of Florens' living and instruction, and the accounts of the rent of the vineyards of Kir Saba, the boy's inheritance, I will render when once in every third year I visit him in this place."

"If it be the will of God, friend," interposed the Abbot gently, "for death spares not even the just."

"Should the Holy One, blessed be He! sever my cord and cause the vessel of my life to be shivered on the well-stones," returned Hazaël imperturbably, "a kinsman will discharge the duty in my stead. Or my son Levi when he attains the years of discretion. Or the son of Levi, possibly."

"By the time thy Levi's son was ripe enough to undertake the business," said Pachomius smiling, as he seated himself on a stone bench beneath the shadow of the great baobab, and stroked the fair hair of the boy who stood beside him; "this little Roman might be a father also!"

"He is to follow his desire, whether he wishes to become a monk or a soldier," returned the Jew, who had declined the Abbot's previous invitation to be seated on the stone bench under the towering baobab. He delivered his master's message concerning the black onyx, and continued: "And now give me this writing of acknowledgment, for I must go upon my way."

The Abbot drew from a leathern wallet at his girdle some squares of papyrus, and said as he took a writing-reed and an inkhorn from a shabby palm-wood case:

"Of eating meat I say to thee nothing. But wouldst thou depart without breaking bread or tasting wine in the house of the Master?"

Hazaël answered, drawing down his black brows and scowling at the Abbot:

"A Christian is a Christian, and a Jew is a Jew!"

Pachomius returned the smouldering fire of the glance with a look of mildness.

"The First of all the Christians was the greatest of all the Jews."

The dark face sneered, and the whites of the black eyes glittered as the strong teeth flashed under Hazaël's tangled beard. Pachomius added:

"Yet in the days of your youth, were you not nourished by a Christian?"

"In those days my master worshipped Jupiter and the other gods of the Romans," said the deep voice out of the thicket of tangled black curls. "If the camel that bore the beam that killed my father, Rab Shemuel, had belonged to a Pagan idolater, I would, in revenge of the mockery wherewith that camel-driver mocked my father, have hated the Pagans, as I hate Christians to this day!"

"So that is the bitter reason of thy virulence!"

Pachomius, seated on the stone bench, had finished the receipt in rounded Coptic writing, and scattered upon it a pinch of sand. He was now waving the square of papyrus gently in the air to dry it. Hazaël went on, standing upright in the sun-blaze, with his shortened shadow squatting like a negro at his feet:

"The reason! And from the cup of my bitterness since manhood came to me, many Christians have drunk death! Now it is clear to you why I accept no seat under a Christian roof, O Pachomius!"

The Abbot's mild eyes looked out of the midst of the many wrinkles, without resentment, only seeing the indomitable honesty of this man. The quiet voice said:

"You were Chief Secretary to Philoremus the Prætor of Taxes. It was easy for you ... I understand! Had you acquaintance with Arius the Heretic?" ...

The deep answer came:

"Monk, I know Arius the Presbyter. And I have aided that treacherous and ambitious priest to encompass his ends,—for the serving of my own, that were righteous in the eyes of Israel!"

"Was it then your aim to destroy your benefactor?"

The question shot like an arrow to the mark. A dark flush rose beneath the swarthy skin, and the mouth under the forest of black tangled hair underwent a grim convulsion.

"The Lord on High knoweth that it was not! For though I was well aware my master went secretly forth in a habit like that of the Parabolani, yet to mingle with the people in various disguises had ever been his secret whim. It was not until I returned from a journey into Palestine that—" he choked—"that I learned the Accusers had testified against him—that I found him a prisoner under guard beneath his own roof—with the seal of the Military Governor upon his door!"

Pachomius regarded the speaker with compassion. He said:

"It may not then be known to you that Arius accused the Prætor in a letter sent to the Prefect of Alexandria purporting to plead on behalf of Christians outlawed by Maximianus. 'For,' said he, 'O Mettius Rufus! if Christianity be a crime, first banish it from your public tribunals. How long is it since your Prætor of Taxes has administered oaths to the public without burning incense, and invoking the Sabine deity? The Prætor's Chief Secretary, Aben Hazaël, the Jew, might be able to throw light upon this question. Indeed, it was from him I gathered these interesting facts!'"

A strange sound issued from the twisted mouth of the hearer.

"O poisonous serpent! Unclean, slavering hound! ... And my master knew of this?"

"Knew, but would not believe that you could be guilty of treachery. Did not Philoremus receive you as cordially as of old?"

The blazing eyes under the fierce black brows were suddenly veiled with water. Hazaël stammered as the heavy drops fell and glittered on his beard:

"He opened his arms to me as a father! ... He trusted me with his flesh and blood, and all the State had left to him.... He never gave me to suspect by a word or even a sign.... Give me that paper you have in your hand, for I am in haste to begone from here. I have yet another errand to carry out for him!"

He struck his staff deep into the sand, took the papyrus, cleared his bleared vision with a sweep of his hairy wrist, and read the monk's receipt. Then he stowed it in a wallet hidden within the bosom of his robe, grasped his staff and looked round as though seeking for something. The boy, who had strayed some distance away during the conversation, was standing before a row of pens containing the pets of the Monastery. Some guinea-fowls, with knobs of horn upon their beaks, and blue fleshy lappets upon the sides of their heads; a large brown-and-white eagle, chained to a perch, who observed his surroundings with half-veiled, ruby-coloured eyes, and a pair of graceful gazelles, brought from the Arabian Desert, enraptured Florens:

"Can they be mine? ... Shall one of them be mine?" he asked breathlessly. Then as the shadow of Hazaël darkened the enclosure, and the Jew's hand closed upon his arm: "You took away the other," the child said with a quivering lip, "and told Ephraim to kill it for supper. But you cannot take away either of these, because they belong to the monks!"

"Even as you do, from this time forth," said Hazaël, with an attempt at pleasantry. "So send a kiss by me to my wife, whom you wept so much to part with—and another to the playmate Levi—and another to little Leah—whom you love best of all!"

Then as the boy hung shyly back, estranged by recent harshness, he caught him roughly to his breast, kissed him, pricking his soft cheeks with the rough beard, and set him down again. The gazelles instantly absorbed him: Hazaël was completely forgotten: or else with the mimetic instinct of the child, Florens feigned forgetfulness.

Then the Jew looked round from his great height for the crooked little figure of the Abbot. Pachomius was standing under the wide-spreading branches of the baobab, with his crossed arms hidden by his wide, loose black sleeves, and his eyes closed as though in prayer. He opened them as suddenly as though he had been touched, and said, as though replying to a question of Hazaël's:

"He whom you design to seek out is in the inner fastness of Mount Attaka, below the dome called Derhor. Take a swift camel with bread, dates and water and a Saracen to guide thee and lead the beast. Follow the Desert to the North for the space of three days.... Climb the path over the Mountains and traverse the Great Valley of the Chariots of Pharaoh towards the rising of the sun. Cross the torrent-beds, and follow the pilgrim-way that leads north over the skirts of the mountains, the Gulf of Heroöpolis being upon thy right. Then pursue the pass that ascends to the west. This summit is the gate of the Outer Mountain, where thou wilt find a spring, with palms, a corn-patch and a garden-plot. This is the garden of the Athlete of Christ, who first broke the ground and tilled it, sowing lentils and vegetables. And though at first wild animals destroyed the crops when they came to drink water, he bade them cease from doing harm in the Name of the Lord! and the creatures obeyed the voice of His Saint. Take what you need of the growing things, they are there for the use of the Blessed One—and the comfort of those pilgrims who from near and far resort to him."

Hazaël saluted Pachomius and said:

"Of the water I shall drink, for the Most High caused it to spring in the midst of the wilderness. But of the vegetables I will not take, for the reason that you know. Farewell!"

"Stay!" said Pachomius with sudden, unexpected energy, "for I have more to say to thee, who art just and unjust, generous and revengeful, savage as a leopard, and faithful as a hound. Hear, thou that consumest the children of Christ in the flame of thy hatred for the man that killed thy father! If thou wouldst pierce the fastnesses of the Holy Mountain and attain speech with its Saint,—be not tempted to turn aside by the sight of gold or beauty! And forget not that to him who endures all things in patience, the Gate of Hope will open at last!"

"'The Gate of Hope!' Who spoke to thee—who has told thee?" Hazaël stammered, growing livid beneath his swarthy skin.

But the Abbot made no reply. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving, as in fervent but inaudible prayer. Some time had elapsed after the tall gaunt figure of the Jew had crossed the courtyard threshold, when the eyes of radiant light reopened in the brown mask of wrinkles, and the Abbot of Tabenna sighed, and rose upon his feet.

"O Keeper of the Secrets of Heaven, and Conqueror of Satan!" he said. "How clearly thy voice came to me but now, speaking at the inner ear. And Thou, O Lord my God! how marvellous are Thy dispensations! Thy Wisdom, how measureless, like the Eternity that sprang from It...."

He made the Sign of the Cross upon his brow, lips and breast, as the board was beaten that called the brethren to the church for recitation of the Second Office. Later he ascended the wall that made a fortress of the Monastery; and looked upon the wide Nile, flowing north-westwards between its borders of fertile land and the sterile sands of the desert, studded with perishing cities and the crumbling ruins of temples; mysterious labyrinths, petrified forests; banks of shells and seaweed, coral and bleached bones of monstrous creatures that bred in the primæval slime before the sea was separated from the land, and their Maker created Man.

The sun of early noon beat down relentlessly. Pulling his cowl over his bald skull and shading his eyes, the monk looked searchingly to the north. In the distance a mirage created a marvellous effect of blue lake, bordered by palaces embosomed in groves that were reflected in the shining depths. The broad stripe of yellow desert lying between the mirage and the habitations, monasteries, gardens and fields that lay about the ruins of the town and the Holy House of Tabenna showed some caravans approaching, but the monk paid no heed to them.

A moving speck, rapidly lessening in size upon the glaring yellow distance, he knew to be the camel ridden by Hazaël. A speck much smaller would be the camel-driver and guide. In three days, travelling at that rate of speed, they would reach the eastward-going track over the mountains, and descend into the valley of the Chariots of Pharaoh. Four days more would bring them to the Gate of the Outer Mountain and the spring of the Athlete of Christ.

"I obeyed," Pachomius thought, "the word of the Saint without question, the message coming to me from him who is the chosen messenger of God. Yet sinful as I am, I question now, and wonder. Why, O Holy One, didst thou but now command me to warn this relentless Jew—who like another Saul of Tarsus digs pits and traps for the destruction of Christians!—as though the stubborn enemy of Christ were to be tempted like a Christian Saint? Surely the Calumniator, knowing this man Hazaël for his own—will not trouble to ensnare him? Never have I encountered a soul more upright—or more remote from grace!"

A thrill Pachomius knew well, passed through his breast into his inner being. Not for the first time by many, a voice well-known, reduced by distance to a gossamer thread of infinite tenuity, spoke at the Abbot's inner ear.

"And if, even as that Saul who slew the Prophets, the Lord hath chosen such a man to be His servant, shall not the Judge of all the world do righteously? And if this man, blinded by pride and wrath, reject the offered grace—turn from the Light, and quit the threshold ere the Gate be opened—shall He Who planted in the human breast the soul—that is a spark of His Divinity—and dowered Man with Free Will that Man might choose Him!—shall He be blamed because His creature hurls back the gift into the Giver's Face?"

"I have erred!" said the Abbot, striking his breast—"O Lord, do Thou forgive thy silly servant!"

And all through the rest of that burning day, Pachomius knelt upon the wall of the Monastery of Tabenna, purging himself of sin by penance, and praying for Hazaël the Jew.

IX

At the spring of the oasis at the summit of the pass leading to the Outer Mountain, bronze-coloured doves, several oryx, and a herd of wild asses were drinking, greyish-red creatures these, white bellied, and marked by a broad black stripe down the back. The birds took wing, the beasts scattered over the plain at the approach of the camel and its two riders, who halted to water the animal and fill the goatskins, and take food and rest.

Bands of painted, naked Blemmyes, the fierce Ethiopian nomads of the south and eastern desert had shown themselves occasionally, but made no attempt to attack the travellers, whom they perhaps judged to be too poor to plunder, or too strong, fierce and well-armed to be despoiled without exacting tribute of life in return.

Before sunrise Hazaël and the Saracen camel-driver, who had agreed to guide him,—struck northwards through a rocky and difficult defile. This was the opening of the road that led to the inner fastnesses of Attaka, that stupendous mountain of pale red granite, streaked with limestone, and sometimes veined with porphyry, from whose summit, it was said, one could view the distant Mediterranean upon one hand; and upon the other look over to the Sinai ranges, across the Gulf of Heroöpolis, that widens into the Red Sea.

The region in which Hazaël now found himself was savage, bare and solitary. At the top of the defile the camel halted and knelt. The Jew dismounted and looked back. A crimson glow spread over the shining waters of the Gulf of Heroöpolis, and every object possessed two shadows; one cast by the sunrise and the other by the moon. The yellow plain of the desert, looking west, exhibited an illusory vista of cool blue waters, out of which rose little islands plumed with palm groves, reflected in the depths.

"Return," the Jew said to the guide, "and wait for me with the camel at the spring of the oasis. Yet first describe to me again, in number and device as I shall find them, the various signs by which pilgrims to the hermitage that is on Derhor, may find their way."

He listened as the guide spoke, storing these things in his strong memory. Here a column of porphyry set up; there a pile of oddly-shaped granite boulders; at the mouth of the defile an arrow scratched on a limestone rock with a lump of crystal; at the parting of ways a rude Cross fashioned of the pieces of a broken staff, and jammed between two great stones.

"Swear to me by your gods," said the Jew when the idolater had ended his recital, "that you have named these marks in the order in which they come!"

"By the Face of Truth!" swore the camel-driver, who was a wild and savage-looking object, with tangled hair smeared with rancid butter; grotesquely painted of face and body; hung about with charms and wearing a waist-cloth of gaudy colours under his mantle of camel-hair. "I have not lied! Follow these directions and you will return to find me waiting for you with the heggin. Yet pay me now the sum agreed, in case you lose your purse upon your way!"

Hazaël reluctantly paid down half, and set out upon his solitary journey.

The steep defile being ascended, the first sign was recognised in the shape of a rude pillar of porphyritic rock. This passed, the surface of the ground began to be more gently inclined. Heat radiated from the huge pinkish-granite boulders that almost scorched the flesh. The ground was covered with blocks of this stone, between which showed the arid yellow soil of the desert. A scrubby bush with black stems set with long white thorns, also tufts of seeding wild garlic and a spiny red-fleshed wild cucumber, bitter exceedingly, with wild fig-trees, grew between the granite rocks. Wild goats with great horns walked upon the verge of towering precipices and bounded from ledge to ledge. White eagles and huge ravens screamed or croaked from inaccessible eyries. The defile being passed, the rocks sank down. Barely a dry weed relieved the barren aridity. The yellow gravelly ground began to billow upwards, and into the troughs of these billows the sun poured down like molten brass.

Climbing over one of these extraordinary ridges, the Jew made an astonishing discovery. It was a dish or charger, circular as a Gaulish buckler, wrought with the victories of forgotten kings, and of the purest gold. The love of the Semite for this precious metal,—of which were carved the lions that adorned the throne of Solomon,—plates of which covered the Temple built by Herod,—and of which the Vine above its chief entrance was gloriously made,—caused Hazaël's sight to dim and his powerful frame to tremble. Such a mass of gold, all his by the right of discovery! ... He threw himself upon the treasure with such eagerness that his foot slipped upon a rolling pebble. He fell—and the gourd water-bottle he carried at his girdle was smashed into bits.

Moments passed before he grasped the full extent of his misfortune. With all his strength he could barely lift the massy charger, which might have contained a wild-deer or a calf roasted whole. Sweat streamed from him, and a raging thirst was aggravated by his efforts. He moistened his throat with a few drops of water left in a fragment of the bottle, covered the golden dish with sand, and marked the place with three stones. Then he rose up and strode onwards. Another defile presented itself before him,—not leading upwards but bending to the north.

To the south another opened, floored with huge granite slabs, frowned on by precipices. At its mouth on the left side was a conical mound of rounded black stones. Night rushed down before Hazaël had decided which of these forbidding roads it would be best to follow. That indicated by the mound looked the worst.... He was beginning to doubt the honesty of the camel-driver. If the hermitage beneath the summit of Derhor was to be reached, he must trust to his own good wits.

He chose the northern defile, and presently—with the rising moon—came into a wide valley walled in by sheer cliff-faces of limestone. At its eastern side rose a precipice of coal-black stone, down which appeared to flow a foaming waterfall. This appearance was caused by snow-white quartz, issuing like a solid torrent from a point high above, and flowing down into the rocky valley. There was no way out of this trap but the way by which Hazaël had come in. With his agony of thirst increased tenfold by the unreal show of water, he lifted his arms above his head and savagely cursed the deceptive flow. And as the echoes of his deep voice resounded from the precipitous walls of the valley, he turned about sharply—for a high whinnying laugh had answered from behind him—and the clatter of hoofs, light and small as an ass's or goat's, followed—galloping over the pavement of broken stone....

"Who laughed there?" the Jew cried, but no human voice answered, and the moon was veiled behind a light cloud that afforded no hope of rain. When the planet looked forth, no sign appeared of the supposed ass and his laughing rider; and Hazaël, suppressing the desire to bestow another curse upon the cheating torrent, made the two benedictions, and repeated the Shema for the first night-watch,—fortifying himself against the attacks of evil spirits within an iron wall of prayer. Then he painfully retraced his steps through the defile previously traversed,—munching the dates he carried in his wallet,—as the dried bread without saliva to moisten it could not be swallowed without pain. And as he went, he slept by snatches,—often wakened from one of these dozes by tripping amongst boulders, or jagged sharp-edged stones.

Walking still with indomitable determination, he had just repeated the prayer for the third night-watch, when he stepped into daylight across the edge of dawn. A dazzling play of colour was smitten by the sunrise from the wilderness of stone beneath and about him. Broad veins of purple and greenish-white porphyry, with red granite, and yellow and black limestone, with outcroppings of snowy quartz, streaked the towering sides of the defile: the stones and gravel beneath his great travelling boots of hippo-hide,—whose heels of elephant-nail kept him from slipping,—was composed of fragments of these. Looking about he came to the conclusion that in sleep, or during an interval of darkness, he had turned aside into another path. This led steeply up, and up,—the vari-coloured rocks closing in until a mere streak of fierce blue sky between the walls at the tops of the defile showed where egress might be obtained. To delay here was to die. Therefore Hazaël determined to go on.

Now, as he toiled upwards under the increasing torture of the sunrays, delusions born of thirst and weariness began to haunt his path. The faces of his wife Miriam, of Levi his first-born son and of his little daughter Leah,—rose up before him in the vivid hues of life. His dead master; the child Florens, or Mark as he must now be called; the monk Paule and the Abbot of Tabenna, moved with him among the scorching stones, on which the lizard rarely basked; and between which a few dry bushes lived without visible nourishment. Through a strange roaring in his ears he distinguished the voices of these phantoms. Sometimes he answered them without ceasing to walk.

He retained by this time barely the semblance of humanity. His eyes beneath the beetling brows were red as those of the captive eagle of Tabenna: and his long hair, and curling beard, uncombed; tangled with burrs; soaked with sweat, and clotted with the dust with which his ragged garments were covered, had the appearance of a wig carved in stone. Blood flowed from cuts upon his gaunt sun-blackened limbs—sustained when he had fallen. He realised that without water he could not now live long. Should there be dew that night, he might find sufficient relief by licking the stones, to endure forty-eight hours longer. Did no dew fall, he might possibly survive yet another day. What grieved him most was, that as the news of his death could not reach Alexandria for a long time after the return of Ephraim by way of the Libyan Desert with Mafa Oabu and the Saracens; his son Levi—who had already begun to study the Mishnah—would not say Kaddish for his father for many moons to come. And the thought of the anguish of his widowed Miriam would have moistened his parched eyelids, had in their dry and gritty channels one single tear remained....

Stumbling amidst boulders, striding from stone to stone, falling, dragging himself to his feet, and staggering on again, the recurrent image of Miriam tormented him more sorely. The fancy that at the top of the pass—where the rocks approached each other so nearly—her well-loved figure would appear with that square of blue sky behind it, became conviction. He bounded on, obsessed by the idea....

"Miriam! My loved one! ..."

He breathed like a beast roaring. His parched gullet and dried-up lungs would barely admit the air. He was bruised from head to foot and wounded in many places; but beyond that square of burning blue he would find—he knew it—home.... Home,—where he was welcomed as a King on each return from a journey,—the rooms festively adorned even as on the Sabbath! the table spread with fair linen, rich porcelain and costly plate,—the dishes such as he loved best; the thin sweet Mareotic wine cooled exquisitely in snow....

"Miriam.... My wife! I come!"

He heard a sweet voice singing.... He was nearing the square of burning blue framed in the porphyritic rock when a waft of perfume came to him, and a figure filled the frame.

X

A woman, but not Miriam. He stared at her blankly. He strove to speak, but his stiff tongue only clicked against his dry palate. His mouth gaped. He drank her in with long pants, veritably as though her beauty had been the luscious wine of Ephesus, chilled with Mount Hermon's snow.

She was draped in a robe of fine Egyptian byssus with crimson and purple borders, fastened about her rounded hips, and drawn over her beautiful bronze-tinted shoulders and bosom in many transparent folds. From beneath an Egyptian headdress of enamelled guinea-fowl's feathers her rich hair, plaited with gold wire strung with orient pearls and other jewels, fell down in broad bands on either side of her small face of purest oval, from which piercing glances were launched as arrows under eyebrows like ebony bows. Her wide silken trousers were red as the heart of a cut pomegranate; yet shot with green and purple in the folds. Her tiny sandals were of white leather, ornamented with golden studs.

"O Isis! Mother of the Dog Star!" ...

She veiled herself at the sight of the stranger. The rich amber and crimson tints of her cheeks and lips, glowing through the diaphanous covering, suggested ripe nectarines in a dish of frosted crystal. Her long eyes, under their jetty brows, were luminous and beryl-green. The voice that issued from her scarlet lips was as the cooing of doves in the sycamores; as the gurgling of waters from the heart of a mossy hill, as she continued: shading her face with an amber-handled fan of red flamingo-feathers, and rocking with her quickened breaths the heavy necklace of huge pearls suspending an emerald talisman between her swelling breasts....

"Pardon, my lord! but you appeared so suddenly! And O, the gods!—being a woman unprotected—and this so wild and terrible a place—"

Hazaël knew that his aspect must be terrifying. But the perfume of roses that exhaled from the fair woman mounted to his brain in waves of dizziness. Hush! Again the doves were cooing:

"I am the wife of an Egyptian noble. We live across the Bay, at Arsinoë, but pass the vintage-months in our summer palace at Aënus. And—my lord is stricken in years and yet desires posterity!—" There was a dancing gleam of mockery in the sleepy beryl eyes. "We have visited the shrine of the god at Pannias, but alas!—without remedy. So my lord commanded me, poor me!—to seek out the dwelling of this Christian hermit, offer him rich gifts, and ask him to pray for us to The Crucified.... Indeed, to be rich and without heirs is sad for the poor old man, is it not? Yet am I to blame for this?" She reared her little head upon the rounded throat, and the beryl eyes blazed angrily. "No, by Hathor! My lord Makrisi has been young and handsome; even, dear stranger—" the feathers of her fan softly touched the cheek of Hazaël,—"as thou thyself! ... Now is he a withered branch. And"—she shrugged—"would even the fields of Egypt bring forth their abundance, without the fertilising waters of the Nile? ..."

Insensibly he had approached, his long, heavy footsteps setting the loose stones of the steep pathway sliding downwards. His bloodshot eyes were at the level of her scarlet lips, between which rows of milk-white teeth were gleaming; his bearded mouth was dangerously near the wooing fragrance of her bosom. She sighed, and warm sweet fragrance assailed his expanding nostrils, and caressed his parched temples and cheeks. And the heat of the morning sun was like the downward draught of a white-hot smelting furnace. And the dazzling blue above and behind her seemed to burn in azure flame....

"O speak again! ... Do not cease!" he heard himself croaking, as though the cool, sweet, gurgling voice had power to quench the thirst with which he burned. She laughed beautifully; and said, pointing with her fan to a great reed pannier with a carrying-strap, set within the shadow of a deep cleft or cave in the face of the porphyry rock:

"See how this surly Saint has treated me, a Princess of the house of Schabak! Look upon this basket of purple figs, and black grapes bursting with honeyed ripeness! and green melons with scarlet flesh dripping with cloying golden juice.... By Phthah! the weight is as much as my black slave Zet can bear, and this man would not even open the door of the ruined temple under the shadow of the dome of Derhor, where he dwells with the Lili and the Lilith—the bat and the screech-owl—and the great white eagles, and the falcons of the rock—or answer me a word. So I wept, I was so angered, and Zet wept also,—for to carry the pannier down the mountain was abominable to him. And when we heard you coming he set it down and ran away. And for this he shall be beaten with rods until the blood runs, when we return home. Why do you look at me so strangely, O Satrap? for I see by your mien that you are governor of a province, in Assyria or Persia possibly? Am I less fair than the women of your country? Have I no beauty in your sight?"

Hazaël answered in his thirst-cracked voice, with reddened eyes devouring her:

"O Princess! Even in dreams I have never beheld a woman to compare with thee! But—but—I am wedded. A fountain springs in the courtyard of my house, and a fruitful vine shadows my threshold; and as apples of gold in a network of silver, precious unto me is the love of my wife!"

He reeled as he spoke and clouds passed before his eyes as though the steam of the blood boiling in his veins had rushed into his brain-pan. Blindly he sought to push them away. And a soft small hand closed on his huge wrist, and his arm became powerless and fell across her shoulder. He swayed like a giant palm-tree whose trunk is sawn through. And with astonishing strength the Princess supported him, saying in that voice like the gurgle of cool waters:

"Thou art famished. Men unfed ever talk of virtue. There are other things in the pannier besides figs and melons and grapes. Rolls of Egyptian flour, white as snow and light as foam-flakes; and roasted quails in peppered jelly, wrapped in fresh green leaves. And meat-balls with spices, cheese-cakes and saffron-curds, and bottles of cool Nile water and also a flask or two of yellow Theban wine. Let us go into yonder cave and eat and drink together. When thou art refreshed, we will talk, or if thou wouldst—sleep!"

And the movement of her lips in framing such words as "eat," "drink" and "together," had infinite allurement, but less than "refreshed" and "sleep." Her utterance of these bewitched and bewildered. Hazaël felt as one smothering in roses, or sinking in the embrace of perfumed arms upon a bosom smooth and cool as silk. And realising in a flash his desperate predicament:

"O Lord my GOD!" he cried aloud, "look upon my shame and see my sorrow! From the evil impulse, from the evil companion: from Satan the Destroyer and from judgment, do Thou in Thy Mercy deliver me!"

Whereupon the Princess Schabak with a burst of high, whinnying laughter, skipped backwards,—and nimbly as a mountain goat—leaped upon a ledge of rock jutting from the cliff-face high above the level of the astonished Israelite's head. At the same time the pannier in the cave fell over and burst open, disgorging a cataract of repulsive creatures; vipers with horns, chameleons with popping eyes, lizards, tarantulas, scorpions and huge brown bats,—which flying round and round in the dazzling sunshine beat about Hazaël's ears with their leathery, hooked wings and entangled themselves in his hair. Deafened, appalled, exhausted and choked with thirst, heat and stench, he fell down swooning,—fortunately for his reason!—within the shadow of the cave....

When he revived, the rocky gorge was filled with the crimson of the sunset. The blazing heat had abated somewhat, the fresh smell of water came to his nostrils, and he groaned and opened his eyes. Then he cried out in thankfulness to God, Who had sent him water in his extremity,—for at the very back of the cave a thread of wet showed on the wall above a natural basin in the rock bordered with delicate black-stemmed green ferns, that contained a draught or two. As the cool liquid flowed down his dried throat; life revived in him newly. He ate of his bread, soaking it, and also took some dates.

Then he found his staff, went up the pass, and squeezed through the narrow aperture. The path now became little more than a goat-walk upon the barren mountain's flank.

A vast prospect spread about and beneath him, upon the right hand of the desert and the Nile beyond it:—with the islands, cities, gardens, palm-groves, temples; the distant cataracts, and the ranges of sandstone and syenite beyond the towns on the Libyan bank. Looking to the east his eye embraced Mount Serbal and the terrible splendour of Sinai, the Tih Mountains and Desert of Sin. Nearer, he looked down upon the Gulf of Heroöpolis,—the town at its mouth, and the city of Clysma upon the plain of the promontory, with the Wilderness of Etnam, and the Arabian Desert beyond.... North to Syria, bordered with the blue fillet of the Mediterranean, his glance ranged; and then with a cool breath fanning his brow, and stirring in the folds of his garments, he lifted up his eyes—and beheld the immense round summit of Mount Derhor, gleaming—white as though hoary with innumerable ages, touched with the fading rose of the sunset and crowned with the evening star. A vast tract of snow-white limestone, not level, but tilted at a steep angle, traversed with innumerable waved ridges, crevices and fissures and resembling a petrified cataract, spread between the traveller and the base of the stupendous dome. An irregular building, like a Pagan tomb or temple, partly in ruins, could be seen upon the dome's eastern side.

Desolation. Not a grass-blade, not a bush, nor tuft of wormwood found nourishment enough to sustain life in all that arid region. Yet here the Athlete of Christ had lived since he quitted Tabenna; eating every third day of dried bread—of which a store was left for him at the oasis every six months—moistening the flint-hard cakes with water fetched from the spring in a heavy stone jar. When the water in the jar came to an end too soon, according to the monks of Tabenna and the Coptish boatmen, the Blessed One would eat the snow if it were winter; or gather the dew,—soaking it up with linen rags, or that porous fungus that much resembles sponge. And these he would suck, to quench the thirst that tormented him, nor would he, were this relief withheld, descend the mountain to fetch more water, until the arrival of the appointed day.

Night fell. So close together and so deep were the fissures in the limestone, that Hazaël determined not to attempt to reach the hermitage until the rising of the moon. So he waited, seated upon a boulder; a strange, wild figure, dishevelled, scarred and bleeding; with battered weapons, and robes dusty and ragged; burning with impatience to do his errand and return to the oasis whilst strength remained to him....

Suddenly the Mount from its base to its summit was girt with sheaves of towering flame of strange and marvellous colours. At the same moment a tumult broke forth of indescribable and hellish violence. Awful voices thundered opprobrium, or wakened the echoes of the precipices and chasms with shouts of hideous laughter, answered by other invisible beings from the fissures in the plain.

"Filthy monk! Scourge of the desert! Master of wild asses! ... Preacher to lizards! ... Awaken! Rise and get you gone out of this place!" ...

"Ah! ... Ah!" ... other unseen beings wailed in chorus: "Shall we never be rid of thee, thou Dweller on the Threshold? Begone! Depart from us! ... Were not the desolate places given to us, and the lands wherein no water flows?" ...

A frightful voice bellowed:

"Drive him forth! Assault him! Torment him with serpents! Worry him with jackals and wild dogs! Borrow the beaks and claws of eagles! Bid the lions devour him! Or if the wild creatures refuse, send against him from the Shrine of Pan another furious Satyr! ... Beleaguer him with phantoms in myriads of forms!"

And dancing fires girt the dome, playing over the moveless waters of the stony cataract, and pale figures of wraith-like mistiness, and dark shapes of mountainous stature seemed to surround and hem it in. And suddenly these appearances sank down and vanished before the terror-stricken sight of Hazaël: with groans, and yells, and blasphemies that caused the hair to stiffen upon his head, and cold sweat to bathe his limbs.

A flood of brilliance dazzled his eyes. From the violet-purple vault of the sky, in which the hosts of heaven were now gleaming, a ray of Light, of indescribable whiteness and luminosity descended, seeming to pierce the roof of the ruined temple beneath Derhor's giant dome. And Hazaël heard the sound of a harp masterfully played, and a man's deep voice singing:

"Let GOD arise!
And let His enemies be scattered.
And let all those who hate Him flee
Before Him!
Let them be destroyed
Even as smoke is made to disappear;
And as wax melteth before the fire—
Let the wicked perish
Before GOD!"

When the psalm ceased the column of light faded into a mild bluish radiance that lingered still above the dwelling of the Saint. Such absolute stillness reigned that the sigh of the night-breeze, and the groan of a metal bolt in grooves of stone, came to Hazaël across the distance. A door swung inwards; a light—not supernatural, but that of a palm-torch,—shone across the threshold, and a voice, strong and mellow as that of a young man, cried down across the steep expanse of sinister shadows:

"O man of Alexandria, seeking here a sinner!—draw near if you desire to, and do not be afraid!"

Hearing, Hazaël rose from the rock he sat on, and cried back in a tone of wrath:

"I am not afraid, O Athlete of Christ!—if it be you who speak to me! But wisdom counsels not to ascend this steep of perilous abysses—at least until the rising of the moon!"

Before his voice had ceased to echo amongst the stony waves of the tilted sea of shadows, the strong melodious voice of the solitary called back:

"The crevices are deep, and strange things abide in them!—and there is peril as you say. Yet if in the Name of the Crucified you struck out boldly among these solid waters, nothing of harm would come to you. For neither earthly dangers nor the malevolence of devils, have terrors for one armed with the Might of the Cross."

Hazaël shouted back, with a dinning at his ear-drums:

"The Eternal One, who brought the Chosen forth of this land of Egypt,—will guide me safely to thy door! For it is written that He does not forsake the righteous. Have I not in the strength of mine uprightness this day prevailed against a Succuba? Lo! before me the accursed demon fled, showing feet like the split hoofs of goats."

The voice replied melodiously across the distance:

"Blessed and glorified be He Who delivered thee! Glorified and blessed be Christ Jesus, His only begotten Son! Glorified and blessed be the Paraclete, the Comforter! Praised, blessed and magnified be the Holy Trinity, One in Three! Amen!"

Panting with defiance Hazaël thundered:

"The Lord is One! He is holy and His Name is holy, and the Holy Ones praise Him every day! Selah! Blessed art Thou, Jehovah, the Shield of Abraham! And blessed is he who even as Rabba Jehudah, called the righteous, can lift up both his hands to heaven, affirming that not one of the ten fingers upon them, is guilty of breaking the law of God!"

He ceased, and the voice of the hermit answered, saying:

"Nay!—but a thousand times more blessed is he, who,—not daring to lift a finger,—falls down prostrate before his Master, crying: 'Lord, have mercy upon me a sinner!' For it is written that He pitieth the humble, and turns away His face from the arrogant."

Now the moon, in her last quarter, rose from over the Red Sea. The limestone cataract, illuminated, took on a milky whiteness, in which the innumerable cracks and chasms showed like wavy bands of black. Hazaël grasped his staff and strode upwards, confident that within so many minutes he would be pounding at the ascetic's doors. But a dark cloud, not often seen save in the rainy season, suddenly veiled the lustre of the planet, and the Jew found himself standing in pitchy darkness, upon an ascending ridge between two deep chasms, unable to advance, or to retrace his steps.

Suddenly a gust of wind rushed down a cleft in the mountains, dragging at Hazaël's garments as though with invisible hands. A jagged double flash of violet lightning followed. Dazzled, the Jew trod upon a pebble of limestone; fell—and still retaining his grip upon his staff, found himself sliding towards the brink of the abyss upon his left hand. A deafening peal of thunder preceded a flash still more vivid, which illuminated the depths beneath. With starting eyes Hazaël beheld at the bottom of the gulf—which seemed about to swallow him—the monstrous putrefying body of a creature part-human and part-animal. And the thought of tumbling down to wallow in the Satyr's corruption, and share one tomb with the shag-thighed offspring of unnatural and hideous lust, wrought on the brain of the man so that he shrieked in desperation:

"Save me, O man of Christ!—I perish!"

And heard the voice of the hermit answer calmly:

"Man cannot save, but only Christ!"

Upon which, as the lightning hissed and crackled about him like flights of spears steeped in burning pitch and naphtha, and feeling his strength about to fail, Hazaël groaned out:

"Then pray to thy Christ to deliver me!"

And hearing no answer out of the distance, he resigned himself to despair. But from some source unknown, strength suddenly flowed back into him. His brain cleared, and by a sudden muscular effort he was enabled to draw back his body, rise—and stand upon his feet....

"Thanks,—thanks!" he stammered out, as though to the owner of some hand that had plucked him from peril. Then, in sudden anger, he dug his teeth into his lower lip.

The storm had passed. The calm light of the moon irradiated the immovable cataract of limestone: the Jew traversed the remaining distance safely, and stood before the door of the recluse.

XI

The lotus stems of the pillars had been once crowned by the sculptured heads of long-eyed women. These had in course of ages, by some convulsion of Nature or by the hands of man, been broken off. Their shattered fragments lay scattered near, and the stone beams supporting the roof rested upon the stems crookedly. The door-lintel supported a slab still displaying the winged orb of Ammon Ra. But through the symbol of the Sun had been roughly but deeply chiselled the Sign of the Crucified.

Hazaël knocked upon the heavy doors. Of massive cedar-wood strengthened with bronze plates, they would have resisted the assault of a catapult. The melodious voice said from within:

"If thou that knockest art a being of the Pit, begone unto thy master, Satan! But if thou art a son of man, state thy business and be brief."

And Hazaël cried:

"I am no phantom of the Pit, but the man who but now spoke to thee! Verily, as the God of Israel liveth, I speak truth, and mean no harm! Now open the door, O Athlete of Christ!—for I have a message for thee. But first thou must give me water to drink, for my tongue is stiff with thirst."

Upon which the voice said from within:

"Upon the threshold at thy feet in a wooden bowl, is water."

Hazaël groped with his hands, for the shadow of the wide lintel shrouded the portal in blackness; found the bowl, full to the brim; gave thanks, and swallowed the contents at one long draught. The Athlete's voice spoke again as the Jew replaced the empty bowl, inverted, on the threshold:

"Jew of Alexandria, it had been wiser to have saved some of the water. For until the sun sets again, in fulfilment of my Rule which I have taken on me, I neither open the cell door; nor—unless in prayer to God—or in holy songs glorifying Him, or in prophecies inspired of Him—utter one single word, unless He bids!"

With a fierce surge of anger, overpowering his previous sensations of awe, Hazaël struck his fist upon the solid cedar. He kicked it with his heavy boots of hippo-hide, and beat upon it with his metal-shod staff. No sound issued from within, in answer to entreaties or objurgations. Worn out at length, the Jew sat down upon the threshold. But then the suspicion budded that there might be a rearward door of egress, and he dragged himself to his feet and made the circuit of the place.

In vain his toil. No opening presented itself, except a chink one might barely have thrust a hand through.... Stooping and looking through this orifice he obtained a glimpse of the interior of the dwelling, which was filled with a pale, bluish light.

By this light could be distinguished the figure of the aged Christian ascetic, tall, and so emaciated by fasting and watching as to resemble a skeleton clothed with brown skin. A coarse white cloth which formed his outdoor habit had been laid aside, and clad only in a sleeveless vest of haircloth, he stood bolt upright, with joined uplifted hands, and eyes closed in recollection, in a stone niche built on the left side of the door of the cell; which contained nothing further beyond a mat of woven palm-leaves, a stone water-pot lying on its side empty, and a sickle, possibly used by its owner for cutting leaves and reeds.

There was something so grand and imposing about the venerable figure, with its white hair hanging upon its shoulders like a mantle, and its snowy beard reaching far below the waist, that violent words seemed profanation, and Hazaël remained dumb. The impulse to depart without delay was urgent, when on drawing back his head and standing erect, he became aware that the mysterious ray of celestial radiance, sign of the intimate and wonderful communion between this pure and fiery soul and the Divine Spirit from Whom all souls have emanated, had again descended from the heavens upon the dwelling of the Saint. Venturing again to look in, he found the cell irradiated, and felt a mysterious shock traverse him; realising that the eyes of the Saint had opened, and were gazing upon him from their ambush of white hairs. And they were the fiery eyes of a lion, and the radiant eyes of a child, and the eyes of a man who has seen and talked with Angels, so that it was not possible to support unmoved their scrutiny. Yet they were mild, kind and beneficent; and meeting the eyes that peered at him through the aperture, the old man thrice nodded his head. As who should say:

"Although my Rule prohibits me from speaking, it does not forbid me to listen. Say what is in thy mind, and return to the dwellings of men!"

And Hazaël cried to the anchorite through the wallhole:

"O Athlete of Christ!—I am a Jew, and from the bottom of my soul I hate and loathe the Christians, but thou art a just and virtuous man! Now hear my tale!"

The ascetic nodded as though replying:

"Say on, thou hater of Christians! but be not over tedious. For all my time I need for prayer."

And Hazaël cried:

"Listen then! My youth was spent at the town of Acanthon on Lower Nile, my father being a Rab, an interpreter of the Scriptures, and a pleader before the Courts. Small was his wealth, yet great his name, being descended in the male line from Ben-Hadad, King of Damascus, and in his veins on the female side flowed the Royal Blood of Israel. And one day he was carried home to our house dead!—having been struck upon the forehead by a beam of cedar carried through the Lentil Market on the back of a camel led by a Copt. And the bystanders told me concerning the Copt;—that seeing my father fallen and the blood from the wound covering his head, the camel-driver mocked him, crying: 'Which wouldst thou rather have, O Rab? The beam thou hast in thine eye now, or a mote? Answer!' And child as I was, I took an oath to be revenged for that man's hard-heartedness on all Christians. And to this day I have faithfully kept that oath."

He paused for breath and the recluse now answered:

"I know it, O Hazaël! Thou hast been a very scourge of Satan to the Servants of the Lord!"

And Hazaël cried back:

"Hear again, O Athlete of Christ! My mother married again, and my step-father was cruel, and I fled from the beatings and the evil words, to Alexandria. Awhile I hung about the quays, living on stray scraps thrown me there, and in the Jews Quarter, and then I met a noble man, a Roman in the Public Service,—who took me into his household, and fed and sheltered me. I grew up under his roof, and presently became his steward, and zealously I served him, using my power when I might, to keep that oath of mine. And knowing not that my patron had secretly become a Christian,—I brought upon him Ruin, Dishonour, Imprisonment and Death. Dost thou hear?"

The hermit returned mildly:

"Unhappy man, I hear thee. Thine excuse must be, thou hadst no thought of evil towards thy friend!"

"No thought, God He knows! And whether my patron suspected the truth, that I know not. But to the very last—he loved and trusted me! And when he had suffered the penalty of decapitation for his faith—torture being spared him in consideration of great services rendered to the Empire,—I stole his body secretly under cover of night. In the crypt of a deserted church it was reverently burned to ashes. These I placed in an urn—and swore an oath upon the urn in the name of the God of Israel,—that I and my sons and my sons' sons,—while there remains a living male of the blood of Hazaël—will be Keeper of the Ashes and Guardians of their Shrine! And I from the Abode of Shadows, the Lord Most High permitting!—will stretch forth mine hand upon those that descend from me—and counsel them aright! And when the last male of the race hath served and passed,—the debt shall be paid—and I cleansed of blood-guilt towards the man who was my friend!"

"The prayer being made from a repentant heart, hath reached the Throne of the Highest. Is that all thou hast to say, O Jew?"

Hazaël cried angrily to the anchorite through the wall-hole:

"Not so! For I have taken this journey to bring thee a message from my master, the noble Philoremus Fabius, late Prætor of the Taxes of Egypt at Alexandria, who is now amongst the Shades."

From the tangled ambush of his snow-white hair, fixing his radiant eyes upon the fierce eyes glaring through the wall-hole, the Athlete of Christ demanded:

"Was the man baptised a Christian?"

Hazaël answered roughly:

"Have I not said to thee but now,—that without having formally embraced the Faith of the Crucified, or received the waters of baptism,—Philoremus testified to Christianity, and suffered the penalty. Melittus, Abbot of Scete, Peter, the Patriarch of Alexandria, the monks Philip, Ammon and Geta, Theodore and Pæsius and others, underwent death by torture on the same day. In consideration of his great services to Rome, Philoremus suffered only decapitation by the sword. And I am commanded of him to entreat thee to pray that his sins may be forgiven. And that for him the Hand that was pierced may open the Gate of Hope! Dost thou comprehend? Hast thou heard distinctly?"

The head of the Saint inclined in assent.

"And—thou wilt pray as he desired?"

"Ay, if thou consent to forgive the Copt who slew the Rab thy father many years ago. For I declare to thee by the light that is vouchsafed me, that the blow from the beam was given unwittingly; and those who told thee that the man mocked, lied. And cease from saying and working evil against the Church of Christ. For dear to the Lord are His servants!"

And the Jew, struggling with himself, promised; and then cried:

"Tell me, O holy man! what is this Gate of Hope? ... Shall my master be admitted? ... Or—hath he already entered therein? ... I know that thou hast power to vanquish devils, and canst see beyond the Three Veils that baffle human vision. Therefore, answer me, I pray!"

The aged hands stiffened in the attitude of supplication. The eyes of the Saint looked upwards, seeming to pierce through the roof of stone, from which great bats hung in clusters, into Infinite Immensity. Moments passed and Hazaël waited. But when an hour had gone by:

"Wilt thou not speak?" he cried angrily.

There was no answer. Looking more narrowly he could not observe that the breast of the rigid upright figure lifted or sank with the natural act of respiration. He found himself shuddering with terror lest the anchorite should be dead. The weight of vast solitudes peopled only by eagles, bats and diabolical phantoms descended upon him crushingly. And in the voice of a suppliant he entreated:

"In the name of the Most High, give me a sign that thou livest!"

The hands fell apart. The upturned eyes quivered. A long sigh heaved the wide emaciated chest, and the great prominent ribs of the fleshless brown body, tenanted by the fiery soul of the great Athlete of Christ. Without otherwise stirring he reached down, seized a small harp from its place in the niche behind him, poised it upon his breast, swept the strings with his fleshless hands; and chanted in the powerfully melodious voice that had thundered upon the ears of the Jew down the cataract of limestone:

"Not through the wisdom of strange words:
Not by the power of incantations
Have the children of Christ acquired the Mystery of Life.
Nay! but by the power of Faith
Given to us by God,
Who is the Lord and Master of all!

Faith is the Sign of Love
In the Soul made perfect.
The wisdom of the heathen
Is naught but words!
Where is divination?
Where the magicians who were of Egypt?
Where are the phantoms of the errors of the Sorcerers?

Perished, broken, cast down and destroyed!
Despised and contemned utterly
Wherever the glorious Cross of Christ our Saviour
Hath been upraised!
O Tree of Victory!
Triumphant throughout all the earth:
Through thee doth chastity flourish
And Virginity shed its light abroad!

Rejoice, ye martyrs!
By whom death has been despised
Because of the victory
Of the conquering Cross!
Sing, ye innumerable congregations
Where is divination?
Of virgins, male and female,
Who preserve your bodies in holiness
By the Power of the Cross!

O Gate of Hope!
Carved in the Living Rock by the spear of the Roman!
O Precious Blood
Of Him Who was Crucified!
O living Waters!
Mingled in the Chalice of the Sacrifice—
For the regeneration and cleansing of souls!
O little pain!
O despicable torture!
O paltry ordeal
That Christ's athletes endure,
Compared with His—
Who in His Body
Suffered for the sins
Of the whole world!

O great reward!
Inestimable recompense,
O crown of Victory!
Triumphant palms!
Entreat for me, ye legions of martyrs—
Supplicate for me, ye myriads of Confessors—
That like Phileas, Bishop of Thmuis—
Like Melittus, Abbot of Scete—
Like Peter, Patriarch of Alexandria—
Like Faustus the Presbyter, Rachobius and Eodoras—
Like Theodore, Ammon, Philip and Geta—
Like Paesius and Philoremus Fabius—
And like the Jew Hazaël—
(Who, rejecting the Gospel of JESUS
Yet shall perish at the hands of idolaters
For the upholding of His Honour)
Even I,
Littlest among Christ's servants—
May enter in at the Gate of Hope
And drink of the new-pressed wine of Paradise!"

The singer ceased as dawn whitened the eastern sky, and the dome of Mount Derhor was reddened by the first rays of the sun. The harp, clutched in his rigid hands, still vibrated with the last chords struck upon it. But the Saint was once more rapt in contemplation, from which neither appeals nor threats could rouse him. Boiling with indignation at what he had heard, Hazaël shook the dust from his garments, and set off with rapid strides down the crevassed limestone slope.

He returned by the path round the shoulder of the precipice, and through the narrow cleft into the pass where he had suffered temptation of the demon; found some water yet remaining in the cave's tiny hollow, and, eating his last dates as he went, emerged at length from the porphyry ravine upon the desert plain upon whose burning soil he had discovered the charger of gold, saying to himself:

"I will hurry forward to the oasis of the spring,—fasten the camel to a tree there, and bring the Saracen back to assist me. It cannot be meant that so much treasure should be abandoned to serve no useful end! It should realise when sold, at least ten thousand talents. Half of this money belongs to the Athlete, seeing that his dwelling is in the mountain. With the rest I shall enrich myself, and return with my household to Palestine!"

But when he arrived once more in sight of the spot where he had found the treasure, he found there, gathered about it, a horde of savage Blemmyes from the Red Sea wilderness, who periodically penetrated the fastnesses of Derhor by some of the eastern defiles. Enraged at seeing these naked, painted heathens hoisting the mass of gold upon their shoulders, amidst shrill ululations of joy from the fierce, hawk-eyed women who accompanied them, the Jew swung his great staff high, shouting:

"Restore the spoil that another found before you, ye abominable ones!" and charged the Blemmyes, scattering them with tremendous blows.

But the savage idolaters only dispersed like jackals or vultures scared from a carcass, to gather again at a distance; and from thence discharged stones from their slings so skilfully that Hazaël was wounded and beaten to the ground. Then overpowering him, the barbarians strongly bound his wrists and ankles, and drawing them apart, secured each limb to a stake, driven deep into the soil.

Then, concluding that all men returning from the Inner Mountain must needs be Christian pilgrims, the chief of the band set his foot upon the breast of the Israelite and—speaking in bastard Greek—and brandishing his spear with menacing gestures—commanded him forthwith to blaspheme Christ, and abjure the Faith—or die amidst tortures unspeakable.

Upon which Hazaël shouted furiously:

"You ignorant rabble! I am a devout Jew, and will never accept the Nazarite Prophet as Messiah! and I have even brought persecution upon those who worship Him! Nevertheless, for love of Him my master Philoremus Fabius suffered death at Alexandria, and in His name the Saint of Derhor performs marvellous works. And I have sworn before the God of my fathers henceforth to abstain from speaking or doing evil against Christ's servants: yet I am not a Christian, and never will be!"

But the Blemmyes clustered about him like bees, stinging and pricking him with their sharp spear-points, and the savage women, reaching between the legs of the men, prodded him with thorns and tore his flesh with sharpened stones, so that there was not a whole patch upon his body, that was all gory red from head to foot. And they jabbered at him to blaspheme, urging incessantly:

"Execrate Christ and thou art free!"

He whom they tortured shouting lustily:

"Ye vultures of the Desert, I will not!"

Then, failing to work their will, they made upon his body a fire of dried camel's dung, and took the gold and went away.

While to the tortured Jew, dying amidst horrible agonies, it seemed that he saw his master Philoremus, joyful and smiling, standing near a Young Man apparelled in white, and of sublime and radiant visage, who extended towards the sufferer His beautiful wounded Hands.... And amidst a great Light and many voices, One Voice spoke, saying words inconceivably wonderful.... And the bands of mortality were peeled from Hazaël's vision, and his spirit passed beyond the Veil of the Unknown.

* * * * * * *

In the same hour the Abbot Pachomius at Tabenna, being in prayer at the conclusion of the morning Sacrifice, received a revelation and cried out:

"Lord! do Thou multiply Thy mercies upon the Jew Hazaël Hazaël, who rejecting the Gospel of the New Testament, hath yet died for Thee!"

And sending a messenger to the quayside where the faithful Ephraim waited aboard the vessel with the Coptish sailors, the Abbot warned the servant of Hazaël that evil had come to him.... Then Ephraim went forth into the desert with a strong party of armed Saracens on swift camels, and traversing the Valley of the Chariots, and climbing the pass north of the oasis of the spring, reached the place where the Blemmyes had put the Jew to death. The head, limbs and extremities, though scorched and shrivelled, remained unconsumed. The charred trunk had burst asunder, and within the hoops of the great blackened ribs, the indomitable heart of the just steward lay amidst grey ashes; all red, like a newly-quenched coal. Upon one of the dried-up hands hung a tarnished signet-ring that the Blemmyes had not noticed,—or had feared to meddle with, lest it might be a talisman.

It was the signet with the black onyx, given by the Roman Philoremus Fabius to Hazaël.... And Ephraim, taking the ring from the dead hand, scraped a shallow grave in the hot sandy gravel; buried the remains, and made above the spot a great pile of stones.

Then he journeyed back to Alexandria, carrying the news and the ring, and goods of Hazaël; and Miriam and little Leah wept sorely; and the boy Levi said Kaddish for the dead.

Book the Second: THE SENDING

I

John Benn Hazel lived with his mother, and Maurice, his younger brother, at Campden Hill Terrace. Mrs. Hazel was a widow of long standing; well-to-do, well-preserved, well-powdered, dyed and corseted, and experienced in the ways of the world. Formerly, as she admitted, "a frightful flirt," she was still prone to recurrent attacks of the milder kind of friskiness. Of her two sons, she was chiefly mother to the more gifted Maurice—an illustrator of books of the exotic, precious, subtle type—and periodicals of the same pale cerulean hue. Before the War Maurice possessed a Marcelle wave and a Beardsley Line—both attained by infinite perseverance. Later he acquired the certificate of a Pilot-Aviator, and flew a Handley-Page bomber on the Western Front.

Mother and sons agreed marvellously, unless when one of Mrs. Hazel's elderly adorers, persons of ripe years and desirable financial solidity, endeavoured to persuade her to forsake her widowed state. The most favoured of these was a certain Mr. Herman Van Ost, London partner and representative of a thriving and long-established firm of Dutch bulb-merchants. As a stepfather John Hazel would have regarded the Dutchman with more or less placidity. But Maurice found the idea intolerable, and thus the bulb of Van Ost's hopes remained in the shop window; showing a pale green spike at intervals, in earnest of latent possibilities in the flowering line,—but never achieving more.

All three Hazels were members of the same mixed Club,—(who does not know "The Tubs" in Werkeley Street, W.)—and firmly believed the Parish of St. James's the hub of the civilised world. All three were ardent votaries of Bridge; all yearned to be admitted into the inner circles of Society, but were content to grasp at the outer fringe. All three adored Russian Ballet, Musical Comedy, Film Plays and up-to-date Revues. Each revelled in the Tango and thought no fashion in modes, colours, coiffures, furniture, manners and morals, so quite too frightfully fetching as the last. They were of sport, sporting; but their talk turned chiefly upon things of the theatre theatrical; and they always knew to a thousand how much the last Big Production had cost the Syndicate running such-and-such a West End house.

Sometimes they disagreed as to the exact weight of the gloves worn by the French pugilistic champion, and So-and-so, the hope of England—in their classical contest at the Punching Club; or as to the precise source whence Didi Debée obtained her celebrated strings of pearls, or grew warm over the rival merits of famous exponents of the Tango; or contradicted one another touching the precise terms in which Betty Ballorme had notified the Duke of Blankshire that a less economical nobleman would be more welcome in her flat. But if they quarrelled they made friends again over some more recent item of gossip. Jimmy Greggson had got a new gag, or a fresh wheeze in the Second Act of "The Filberts" at Riley's Theatre, just before the famous 'Dance of The Varalette.' Or a new supper-dish or a fresh dance-step would have appeared upon the menu of some eclectic restaurant cum-night-club, run by managers who catered for every variety of taste.

It will be seen that the sons of Mrs. Hazel were happy in their parent, whose business gift was not to be despised. In partnership with a peeress of somewhat clouded reputation she ran a millinery and flower-shop at a double frontage in Dove Street, Piccadilly: adding to her annual life-interest on her late husband's not inconsiderable fortune, a really handsome sum.

Probably her elder son inherited Mrs. Hazel's business aptitude though such a legacy is more usually held to be derived from the paternal side. The product of one of the lesser public schools (Loamborough may be quoted) and graduate of Brazingham University, he decided that it was possible to do Big Things without a string of piffling letters tacked on to your name. So, the City of London happening to beckon at that juncture, he leaped gladly to her grimy embrace, and his thirty-second birthday, occurring on the third of July, 1914, found him formally received and accredited as Junior Partner in the thriving firm of Dannahill, Lee-Levyson and Hazel, insurance-brokers of Cornhill. He was engaged to Beryl Lee-Levyson. He looked forward—under the summer sky fast blackening with fearful presages of tempest—not exactly with rapture, but with content—to their approaching marriage; a house in Eaton Terrace, S.W.,—Eaton Square being the address of the Lee-Levysons—having been inspected and approved, a week before the gates of Terror opened and the world grew pale with dread. In that first fierce spate of blood the elder son of Lee-Levyson, a promising young lieutenant in a crack Hussar regiment, was overwhelmed and swept away. The favourite grandson of Dannahill, Head of the Firm, a Sergeant in a London Territorial Regiment, later rendered distinguished service, and died gloriously on the thirteenth day of the First Battle of the Aisne. That September evening John Hazel got home to Campden Hill unusually late for dinner, bringing with him a clumsy parcel which contained:

Item: one coat highly polished at the elbows, kept for office night-work.

Item: a silver inkstand, a birthday present, inscribed: "From S. and M.H." (Sara and Maurice Hazel) "to J.B.H., July 6th, 1914."

Item: a tinted photograph of Beryl Lee-Levyson, a tall, willowy young woman in narrow diaphanous garments, with tightly-banded hair of pale gold, a bluish-pink complexion, a straight nose with a ripple in the bridge, large and well-opened light grey eyes, and the kind of smile that advertises an excellent set of teeth. It bore the inscription:

"From Girlie, with Love to Her Best Boy."

A box of cigars, a silver cigarette box, some well-browned meerschaum holders, and a burned briar-root pipe, completed the inventory of the property contained in the shapeless parcel which John Hazel lugged up to his room, and dumped upon his bed.

"What are these things?" asked his mother, coming in to tell John not to wait to dress, as she and Maury were going to look in at Riley's to see the 'Dance of the Varalette' once again before Jimmy Greggson went to the Front....

"Of course; good old Jimmy's a London Terrier! ... Did you ask about those? ..." said John, who stood at the looking-glass in shirt-sleeves, brushing his coarse strong curly hair with two big ivory-backed brushes, and meeting the maternal eyes in the mirror with something not unlike a scowl. All the principles instilled at Loamborough, by dint of many poundings, forbade him to embrace his mother and weep; yet strange wild impulses urged him to commit this sin against the Code of Correct British behaviour. He went on, looking at her in the glass, deepening his scowl and speaking gruffly: "They'd be frightfully in the way at the office.... I rather thought you'd look after them until I get back from the Front!"

There was a moment's pregnant silence in the room, while Mrs. Hazel with a wildly thumping heart, was realising how awfully she had dreaded that it would be Maurice who would have to go! ... Then she rustled over to John's side, reached up on tiptoe, though she was a tall woman, and giving him two little pecking kisses on the angle of his blue-shaven brown jaw, murmured something about getting up some champagne to-night to make up for the tinned entrées at dinner, and rustled out of the room—John knew—to tell the news downstairs.

"What? Old J. going? ... Good for him!" was Maurice's languidly-approving comment on the intelligence.

Nobody grumbled, though John did delay to change, and came down arrayed in the gladdest rags his well-supplied wardrobe boasted, to tell his mother and Maurice of Sam Dannahill's glorious death. Such a frightful knock for the Firm, coming on the heels of the bad news about Beauchamp Lee-Levyson!—and how the Boss had taken the grim wire from the War Office "like a regular First Class Old Brick."

Ah, if in that bad quarter of an hour succeeding the opening of the telegram John could have looked through the fortunately opaque glass of the door with "Senior Partner" painted on it,—he would have seen no dignified white-haired City Insurance-broker, telling with a dry eye but a trembling lip how bravely Sam had died! but a frantic old grandsire, tearing his hair and beard, and crying even as David in the high gate-chamber: "My child!—my hope and comfort! O if it had been granted that I might die for thee, my boy, my beloved one!"

Pray observe John Benn Hazel, standing on the Daghestani hearthrug, with his back to the fern-filled fireplace in the Briton's customary style.

You saw him as a broad-shouldered, lean-flanked, deep-chested young man of thirty-two, six feet three in his stockings and proportionately powerful. His huge frame of bone, knit with solid muscle, was sparingly padded with tough hard flesh, covered with dull, dry brown skin that looked as though it needed to be soaked in blazing sunshine to become sleek and soft. Coarse, wiry, curly hair, densely black as the broad beetling brows and the deep-set eyes under them, closely capped his high dome-topped skull, and grew low upon his forehead,—tinged with blue where it was most closely clipped on the temples and about the ears,—and at the nape of the long thick neck, that needed the razor's frequent application even as the strong jaws, the long, deeply-channelled upper-lip, and the chin, quite abnormally long, with a dent in its squared end. His was a huge salient nose, thick and boldly curved, with mobile nostrils; and a large, rather loose-lipped mouth, purplish-red and frankly sensual, with a quirk of humour at the deeply-cut corners, and displaying a formidable array of big white teeth when he laughed. His large, well-shaped ears did not lie sufficiently close to his head for beauty, and the prominent Adam's apple of his muscular brown throat was the despair of City collar-makers; while no glove that hosier ever supplied could be got to button over his great wrist,—the joint of the ulna, Maurice bragged,—being as big as a pony's pastern. His feet were huge and clumsy as his hands, a fact too well known of Mrs. Hazel's Pomeranian. His excellent opinion of himself was much evident when he talked in his loud, deep, booming voice, or laughed at jokes of his own manufacture, which appealed to him more than others. When his sense of humour was really touched, his guffaw was an outrage on the nerves of other people, and fragile articles within reach of his lengthy arms were wont to be swept from shelves or stands. But Maurice was not driven to put his fingers in his ears, on this particular evening; nor was Mrs. Hazel to glance even once in apprehension at her Dresden china shepherdesses simpering on the mantel-shelf.

She came into John's room again that night, long after they had parted, with an excuse about being anxious to make sure,—in case he should not yet have switched off the electric lights,—that his blinds were closely drawn down behind the open windows, and the new curtains of green casement-cloth properly closed. The police had warned householders all along the Terrace. Not in the least deceived, John sat up in bed, looming bigly in a blatant suit of pink-striped silk pyjamas, conscious that upon his pillow was a big wet patch of which a Briton's hardy eyes ought to have been ashamed. The mother looked absurdly young, it seemed to her son,—with her still abundant auburn hair, as yet only lightly crisped with grey,—hanging in a thick loose plait down the back of her pale blue crêpe dressing-gown, as she retreated from the window,—to examine the War-arrangements of which she had had to switch on the light:—pecked him again—upon his forehead this time—and said with elaborate casualness:

"You told us—among other amusing things—to-night at supper"—John was pleased to find that he had been amusing—"about the papers you had had to fill at the Army Recruiting place." ...

"Saying how old I am, and where I was born,—and what my father's nationality was—and what my religion is," John told her with a cheerful grin: adding as she lingered, apparently in expectation: "But the really funny things—regular howlers!—were on the spoiled papers lying about." His big body shook with a chuckle that was not genuine.

"Never mind the funny things just now! How did you answer that question about your father? ... What nationality did you say his was?" Her blue-grey eyes, still brilliant and effective, sparkled feverishly under knitted eyebrows. Her voice was sharp and strained, in the ears of her son. He answered with a dull flush darkening his heavy features:

"I said he was British. Isn't that good enough?" He added as he hugged his great bony knees, and stared over their barrier at the worried face of his mother: "You don't suppose I'd be ass enough to make a false declaration, even though the Pater's governor happens to be a Palestine Jew! Is the old chap still alive, by the way? If so, he must be getting on for a hundred!"

"He was sixty-nine when I saw him at Malta thirty years ago, and taller and broader than any of his sons—as upright as a column. You've a look of him—there are times when I see it!—but you take after your father more! ..."

"At any rate my father was naturalised an Englishman, and Hazel sounds English enough," said John.

"Yes—oh, yes!"

As she drummed on the foot-rail of the bedstead, imparting a rather unpleasant vibration to the tautened nerves of her elder son, John coughed a deep hollow cough to cover his embarrassment, and said gruffly;

"What's the matter with your telling me about my father and his people? I've never asked before, but I think I'd better know!"

"His first name was John, like yours, but the name is really Hazaël. The Hazaëls were wealthy merchants, exporters of produce from the Mediterranean Coast—and wines—chiefly from vineyards of their own."

"That stuff I've seen advertised—Palestine Port, Tokay and Muscatel,—sound and nourishing, twenty-five years old?"

"It's very good—and your father has often told me that even before the Colonies were founded in 1827,—when I've heard there were only ten Jews at Jaffa—his father's father's great grandfather was a vine-grower and exporter of wine. The business originally started in Egypt—they have a business house to-day at Alexandria—and another at Jaffa and a branch at Malta—where your father and I first met."

"Stop! ... What about you?"

"Me.... Oh—well! I was sixteen, and frightfully romantic, and supposed to be going in for what people called 'a decline.' ... Anæmia would be the proper name for it in these days: and Hull, where your grandfather had his place of business, was cold and gloomy; and Malta was supposed to be the cure.... I loved Malta! What girl wouldn't? All sunshine and flowery gardens, and violet sea, and turquoise skies. And all the fruit and' flowers one wanted—and a handsome man to squire one about! For your father was quite charming. He spoke beautiful English, and French like a native; he had been educated at Paris, they said, and when my father told me of John's intentions, I was ready to jump over the moon!"

She broke off, and John roused himself to say:

"Anyway, if the Pater was a Syrian Jew, your governor was British enough! ... Of course I never saw him, as the old man was dead and buried before we went to live with my grandmother. But Symons does sound like a good old English name!"

"That's why your grandmother persuaded your grandfather to adopt it. His real name was Simonoff, and she never liked it! She was a Yorkshire Isaacson!"

There was a pregnant silence before John asked in muffled accents:

"Was my grandfather on your side a Russian?" and was clubbed by the reply:

"He was a Russian Jew from Moscow."

"Oh, come! Don't rub it in!" The bedstead creaked protestingly.

"Dearie, you must have guessed! You've always known that he did business in hides and tallow and tar, between Hamburg and Hull."

"I remember Hull when I was a kid, and the warehouse, and Old Mendel, who used to bring me peppermint-rock when he came to see my grandmother. He managed the business for her, didn't he, until my Uncle Ben took it over? But—my grandfather a Russian Jew! Let's bless our stars he wasn't a German! Where were you married to my father?"

"In a Maltese Synagogue. We lived at Malta until your father brought us to England, to establish a business-branch at Southampton. And we had hardly been settled there a year—you were only three when John died.... Pneumonia—this climate never really suited him! And I went home to mother with you and Maury, a baby of six months old. There was no bother about money. You know your father left us comfortably off!"

John cleared his throat and nodded. The bitterness of the last pill Fate had administered puckered his palate yet. Between the Jew of Palestine and the Jew of Russia, he had been wrought all Jewish. Not a single globule of British blood mingled with the Oriental tide that galloped through his veins. He asked, not wanting to know particularly:

"Did my father's people drop you, after he died, or was it you who decided to drop them?"

His mother returned with a sprightlier air—she was now sitting on the bedside.

"Oh!—well!—it was like this. While John was alive, his father, old Mr. Hazaël, sent me kind messages very often in his letters,—always written to John in Hebrew, by Amos the eldest son. For John came third in the family. Amos and Isaac had been years married and had heaps of children before John met with me. And after John died and we went to live at Hull, the letters kept on coming. It was my father's head-clerk who always translated them—Old Mendel was a learned man!—and wrote back the answers I dictated. Then my father died—poor father!—he never could forgive me for being only a daughter!—and Cousin Ben took the business over—and mother and I, with you and Maury—came here to London to live. Do you think I did wrong in dropping the correspondence? You know how your father's fortune was settled on you two children, with a life-interest for me; we need not go into that! There was nothing more to come to us—under any circumstances! And I wanted my two boys to be brought up as English gentlemen, and I don't think I've done quite so badly—do you?"

Her tone was almost pleading. John reached out a lengthy arm and hugged his mother warmly:

"Not by half, Old Thing! On the contrary. You thought it would be best for me and Maury to be British, and you rubbed it into us that we were, from the time we began to talk.... I remember at Loamborough, a Fifth Form fellow said to me over some rotten boggle of mine at Sunday Ques: 'With that bally big nose of yours, Hazel major, you ought to know all about the Children of Israel—' And, by George! I welted the beggar until he apologised. Later on, when I knew more about the Pater, I told myself that the English strain came from the mother's side. Now you've exploded that idea; I don't know that I mind much! ... Lots of people we're friendly with are as much Hebrews as ourselves,—and taking us in the lump, I call us a loyal lot!" He dug his long chin into the bedclothes covering the big knees he hugged; and went on speaking: "And Jewish blood is strong red stuff to have in one's veins, mind you! Great lawyers, great financiers, great actors, singers, painters, writers—people who are things and do things!—people who count—how many of them have got it!—in bulk or else diluted. And some of the prettiest women—and girls—"

"You're thinking of Beryl!"

"Well, I was thinking of Beryl...—Lee Levyson may belong to a Yorkshire family. He says so, and I've no wish to contradict him. And Dannahill blows a frightful lot about his good old English ancestors. But all the same—" He broke off to smile at his mother, who,—not as a rule demonstrative towards her elder son,—was stroking his big wrist, and half-absently trying to span it with the inadequate measure of her thumb and middle-finger; and ended: "You can take it from me that there ain't a single member of the Firm who oughtn't—if the truth were worth telling—to have a capital 'J' on his disc."

"His disc?"

"Well, I was speaking metaphorically. I mean the round tin identification-tag that's sewn inside of Tommy's khaki jacket, and worn on a chain soldered round his wrist when he's going to the Front. Mine'll be 'Private J.B. Hazel, No. 000, X Platoon, F. Company, 4th Battalion, 448th City of London (Fenchurch Street) Royal Fusiliers.'"

"Do they put all that?"

"I rather think so, with letters for your religious denomination. Con. for Congregationalist, Wes. for Wesleyan, Meth. for Methodist, Bap. for Baptist, P.B. for Plymouth Brethren, C.S. for Christian Scientist, Mug. for Muggletonian, C.E., Church of England, R.C., Roman Catholic; J. for Jew, and Nil if you aren't of any religion. And I'd put down 'Nil' for mine!"

"What made you do that? Why not Church of England?"

"But I'm not Church of anything, any more than you and Maurice or the Lee-Levysons—or anybody!—belonging to the set of people we visit and meet and dine.... Nice, pleasant, sociable heathens—that's what we are, every one of us! We have plum-pudding at Christmas; and salt-fish with egg-and-oyster sauce on Good Fridays; and we drop in at Westminster Abbey to hear the Carols; and at Westminster Cathedral or Farm Street for the Passion Music;—or the Greek Church near the Russian Embassy, because the singing is worth hearing,—and other people go! And we scrum into St. Paul's for a Public Thanksgiving—or a Day of Humiliation, or a big Funeral or any other kind of Function.... And St. George's Hanover Square for Society weddings,—or the Brompton Oratory.... But religion.... Have any of us got it? ... 'You can search me!' as the American fellow says in the revue.... Still, if you'd like me to alter the letters on my disc I don't mind doing it. Only—instead of 'Nil' there'll be a big 'J' for Jew!"

She waxed shrill, driven beyond herself, used words long forgotten:

"But you're not one. You've never even set foot inside a Synagogue. We don't observe the Shabbos—I mean the Sunday!—we eat triphah meat like Gentiles. We're Meshumad—apostates, don't you understand? Orthodox Jews wouldn't even speak to us!—aren't we well enough as we are?"

"Would my grandfathers have thought so? Or my father?" ...

She caught her breath and clutched at her bosom, the deep, slow voice was so unlike the younger John's. Unobservant of the consternation in her face, he went on speaking, gradually recovering the manner and tone most usual with him:

"Alive, they'd have disowned us. Not being alive—what we observe or don't observe, can't affect them! The notion of a dead man stretching out a hand from the grave, and grabbing hold of his son by the scruff to drive the unlucky beggar on in the ancient ruts of his own prehistoric prejudices is exploded. For the dead are DEAD. There's no getting over that! And to let their thoughts, feelings, desires, convictions, influence us in Anything is to my mind, sheer sentimental piffle." John blew himself out importantly and waved away the subject, but came back, having something more to say: "I'm an ambitious chap in my way.... I'd like to make enough money on the Stock Exchange to buy the freehold of Covent Garden; and turn the Market,—the Arcades,—the shops and the Opera House into a Pleasure City,—run on American lines. But I've no ambition to live after I'm dead,—that I know of! ... If I get wiped out at the Front it won't make any difference to me whether they stick a cross over me—or a shield with some Hebrew letters painted on a white deal board.... Beryl can get married the day after if she wants to! ... I shan't ever know she's being kissed by another man. Nor shall I be one jot worse or better off because of the Good or Bad marks set against me. It matters how you live your life, because Morality is necessary—to preserve Health and maintain Decency, and so uphold the Law. But when one dies one's done with!—and the wisest rule of existence is, to live as long as possible, and enjoy things while one can! To succeed, to become famous, that's the only immortality—and to leave a son to carry on your name is a way of cheating Death!" He ended this confession of his creed by saying rather wistfully: "I meant to ask you.... Do you—do you think there's any chance of Beryl's marrying me before I go?"

"To the Front! ... Why shouldn't there be? Why not ask her?" ...

"Thanks awfully for the tip. I will!"

He was cheered by her absolute belief that he could not but prevail. For if she had forgotten her faith, and turned her back upon her people; she was a mother and a loving one. There was motherhood in her face and in her voice as she asked John:

"Haven't you even told Beryl—what you—where you're going, dear?"

"No! so if she's got a white feather keeping up her sleeve for me, she'll be disappointed, that's all! My hat!—listen to that clock striking! Do you understand it's gone two! You won't have any beauty-sleep,—and I've got to be at Regimental Headquarters at ten sharp to-morrow, to get my kit with the rest of the Fourth Battalion, and weigh in at Eaton Square at 11.30 to break the great news and show myself to the girl."

But when Mrs. Hazel had finally departed, John got out of bed, switched on a light and searched on the shelf that contained his private library, for a fat one-volume Encyclopædia that had been a School Prize. After some delving in this mine of knowledge, he emerged the wiser by the information appended:

"JEWS, an Asiatic race (Semitic), descended from the Hebrew Patriarch Abraham. Original stock migrated 2,000 B.C. from Ur in Chaldea, an important centre of civilisation, to the land of Canaan (Phœnicia) and from thence in time of scarcity to the rich pasture-lands of Egypt; from whence tradition has it that their leader and lawgiver, Moses, was divinely inspired to lead them, by way of the Red Sea Gulf and the Sinaitic Wilderness. Through his teachings they renounced polytheism and adopted a monotheistic form of worship. Language, Hebrew, a variant of the Canaanitish branch of the Semitic Group, approximating closely to Phœnician or Moabite."

The richer by this gem, John put back the book, switched off the light and got back into bed.

Sleep delayed in coming. As he stared wide-eyed into the darkness, fragmentary recollections of that long-dead father formed fresh pictures in his brain. He saw a room, with a table laid for dinner with white napery and glittering silver, the high child's chair by which he stood, a chubby boy in petticoats, waiting for strong, gentle arms to lift him to the seat. While the owner of the arms, a tall man, dark and grave, washed his hands at a shining metal laver hanging on the dining-room wall beside the door. The tall man wore his hat during this ceremony, and the towel he used was long and narrow, and had embroidered ends....

A similar laver had hung on the wall in his grandmother's private sitting-room, John remembered; carefully dusted, but never used by anybody as far as he had known. And over the laver had hung a plaque of metal, embossed with Hebrew characters: such a mezusah as one saw affixed to doorposts in the City: thickening as one got nearer to Houndsditch: becoming dense in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel Road and the Commercial Road, E....

He was destined to enjoy no beauty-sleep that night.

For this materialistic, hard-headed, commonplace young City insurance-broker was loyal of nature, capable of warm attachments; faithful in friendship and honourable; according to his somewhat narrow Code. And the country in which he had been reared, the home in which Life had unfolded for his infant consciousness, the associations amongst which he had developed from a gawky boy into a tall young man, were English: and he had not known previously how much that meant to him.

England was John Hazel's England, the City of London his by choice and adoption; the Tom Tiddler's Ground where he, a citizen and a patriot, had meant to pick up as much of the good stuff Money as he possibly could get. He loved Great Britain, her history, traditions, rulers and institutions with a love blind, instinctive, and deeply rooted, that embraced her Colonies and the Dominions Beyond the Seas. He had never lumbered up on his huge feet to do honour to the National Anthem; or cheered the King and Queen and the Prince of Wales, and other notabilities passing in procession to the Guildhall or elsewhere,—or listened to a patriotic speech at a City dinner,—or a West End public charity-function, without a big lump rising in his throat.

And since the blizzard of War had burst upon this, his mother-country, and the new, strange, dreadful life had replaced the pleasant, easy-going old one, his love for England had become a rage. The tramp of martial boots going through the darkened streets; the heavy roll of guns, ammunition and baggage-lorries; the columns of bronzed faces under khaki cap-peaks, streaming under arches of railway stations; the dreadful news bruited by the newspapers, shouted in the streets, clubbing you when you opened your Latest Edition;—the mourning weeds on the backs of strangers and friends; the darkness of streets and restaurants and public places; the thickly-curtained windows of one's own home and one's neighbours' houses; the Spy Scare—and the hovering, haunting menace of Invasion by Aircraft—increased his patriotic fever day by day. Great tears had splashed upon the dirty drab paper he had signed when he enlisted. And they were the tears of an Asiatic;—a Semite whose ancestors had come out of Ur in Chaldea—and whose native language was a variant of the Canaanitish thingumbob. Perhaps no genuine Englishman would have shed them. And yet, some pathetic parting-scenes at Railway Stations had removed John's previous impression that hefty, hardy, masculine Britons are never known to cry.

One is sorrowful to remember that beyond the narrow range of this young man's prejudices, and the stultifying influences of his environment, extended boundless vistas of which a more liberal and comprehensive range of reading;—fuel for the engines of the winged chariot of Thought and Imagination—might have made John Hazel free....

But he lay prone, dull and unimaginative; staring over the bedclothes at the pale watery gleam of the dressing-mirror opposite, while out of the mighty Past—reverberating and flashing to this hour with the thunders and lightnings of Sinai,—Patriarchs, Law-giver, Judges, Prophets and Sages, Poets, Kings, Statesmen, Patriots, Preachers, Warriors, Artificers and Craftsmen of vanished Israel and living Judæa—dominated by One Figure, unspeakably more benign and glorious—looked down in solemn pitying wonder on the young City insurance-broker, who was depressed by the sudden discovery, that not only on the father's side but on the mother's,—he had been born a Jew.

"Never mind, Old J.B.H.!" he told himself encouragingly. "Even if your ancestors did come out of Egypt with Moses, you're a pup of the Big Bull Bitch. And I'll tell you what, my boy! Good old England may count herself thundering lucky, if she gets a few hundred thousand others of the same breed to fight for her in this War!"

II

Panoplied for battle, in shoddy—misnamed khaki—of a deadly stale-mustard hue, bound with braid of whitey-yellow, garnished with the customary brass badges, buttons and buckles, and completed with the brown leather belt, bayonet-sling and bandolier; Private John Hazel—with a wire stiffener in the crown of his cap, and his pampered flesh wincing from the contact of the single Army rasper supplied him (for which, in the first flush of patriotism he had discarded his customary underwear)—presented himself before Beryl, his betrothed.

"Oh, come now, Bur'l!" expostulated Muriel, Beryl's younger sister, compassionate of John's immense discomfiture, as Beryl subsided on the Rossmore couch in tears; and her unlucky lover, standing huge and awkward in the middle of the Wilton carpet, opposing his own full-length reflection in a wall-mirror, realised that the collar of his tunic was strangling, that his hands were bigger than he could have believed them; and that the boots supplied by a grateful country would have comfortably fitted a Brontosaur.

"Tell him," moaned Beryl, "to leave me to my misery!"

"She never used to mind poor Beechy in kharks," the chagrined lover somewhat heatedly protested, on being banished from the drawing-room.

"Beauchamp was so handsome," said Beryl's sister Muriel, with her dancing dark eyes suddenly softening in tears, "and then you know,—he was an Officer of Regular Cavalry—and you're only a Common Tommy. Of course at the bottom of her heart Bur'l loves and respects you—but that's what's the matter, John, old thing! Wangle a Commission as soon as you can manage it"—the term "wangle" was coming into use just then—"do something Frightfully Distinguished—and she'll be as right as rain with you, really she will!"

"Think so? ..." said John, with obviously artificial lightness. "Well, say good-bye to her for me for now, will you! And—my crowd were guarding the line of the South Western until a day or so back—and if I'd screwed myself up to the point of joining up before,—I might have wangled a D.C.M. by dropping on a German in the act of laying a time-fuse bomb in a tunnel. Now they've sent 'em out to Malta to train, and yours truly and a band of other Brave Hearts—late washouts!—are being sent after 'em! So by-by, little girlie—for I've got to buy a Cardigan jacket and a few other things I want. You might tell me Beryl's full Christian name—it's got to go down in my Will, naturally!—and be entered for reference with the Nearest of Kin, at the War Office—so that they can let the old thing know if I get wiped out!"

John felt in a baggy front-pocket for a pigskin note-book, a parting gift from Maurice, and produced it, with a gold-mounted fountain-pen. Muriel dimpled again roguishly, and said with her bright eyes daringly challenging his own:

"We've only one first name apiece—but they're not 'Beryl' and 'Muriel'; nor are they particularly Christian, that I'm aware...." Then the consciousness of their recent loss, and her new black lisse, displaying a generous amount of slender black silk-stockinged leg, failed to subdue her girlish sense of humour. She clapped her hands and broke into a fit of laughter while John stared at her uncomprehendingly, the fountain-pen suspended over the memorandum-book. "Oh, don't goggle at me like that!" cried the girl. "You're too killing for anything! And so is your mother, and so is Maury—and so are Dad and Mater, and nearly every one in our set. And yet I'm Miriam—and Beryl is Rebekah—and poor darling Beauchamp was Benjamin—though they aren't going to have it on his memorial card, or stone! Do we really forget we're Jews—or do we all pretend until it's second nature? And why do we pretend—unless we're ashamed!—and why on earth should we be ashamed, that's what I want to know?"

Thus Muriel, confessedly Miriam; and John had found no better answer than:

"Why you or any of us should be ashamed I'm hanged if I know myself! But if ever I find out I'll write and tell you."

"Don't forget!" said Muriel-Miriam. "I'm coming to the door to see you off. Good-bye for now, J. old Bean! Put one for Bur'l here;—" the tip of a pretty, well-manicured finger indicated a particularly peachy place on Muriel-Miriam's right cheek,—"and another of the same on this side, for me. Ta-ta! I'll send you lots of cigs, when I know where you're training—and parcels no end when you get out to the Front! And tell me you'll go in for a Commission, and get a V.C. or something,—just to brisk old Bur'l up!"

"Oh! Tell her," said John with somewhat forced and clumsy humour, masking the slowly-kindling resentment in his heart, "that I mean to finish up my service in this War a private in the ranks—where I began it. And that when I—if I come back, she'll hear me singing: 'They've All Got a Sam Browne But Me,'—long before I come in sight."

"I shall listen for you!" said Muriel-Miriam, bursting with laughter, "but you don't think I'm going to give that message, I hope!"

She did not pass it on; but her younger sister Ida, a sharp child aged thirteen, who happened to be lingering in the neighbourhood of the umbrella-stand, communicated to Beryl her lover's parting message; to which,—or to the superior attractions of a certain Captain Hawtin-Billson (back from the Front with a shattered left arm and a Mention in Despatches) may be attributed Beryl's subsequent breakage of the engagement between herself and John Hazel, and the return of his ruby and diamond ring....

During the strenuous period of training that followed on John Hazel's joining up, his large reserve-fund of conceit was lowered by the merciless chaff of the ranks, and the vigorous language of his platoon-Sergeant, whose little red-veined eyes, glaring into his own, reflected in their muddiness his puny insignificance.

He learned to put on his puttees properly, clean his accoutrements, make his bed and condense his pack to regulation limits, under the instruction of one Lance Corporal Harris,—an ex-Boy Scout of appalling efficiency—as well as to gulp down his morning mug of tea, in defiance of the probability of the fluid containing in solution an ounce of Epsom salts. And by the time the Fourth Battalion of the Fenchurch Street Fusiliers quitted their training-quarters at Malta, replaced there by a Fifth Battalion created in the interval—and were transferred to the fighting-line in Flanders; he had acquired the soldier's much-prized gift of summoning sleep at will. Also, he had learned to dispense with sleep, were the sacrifice required.... After months of bitter fighting at the Front he had learned to go unshaven, unwashed, and with unchanged linen,—endure the plagues of vermin in a crowded, unventilated dugout—share a fag with a man who had none; smoke the Army gasper in lieu of anything better,—and consume biscuit and bully mingled with dirt, and washed down with burnt-bread coffee; or Pimmington's Perfect Soup Substitute, boiled in a rusty jam-tin over a Tommy's Cooker,—with a gastronomic rapture that a dinner at the Carlton, the Ritz or the Savoy had previously failed to evoke.

Also, John Hazel had learned to hold the Battalion in limitless esteem; to regard the Regiment he had once despised as a mob of clerks, shop-boys and warehousemen—as the pick and pride of the Territorial Forces, and to graft on the slang of the modern Londoner, the polyglottic argot of the War.

Finally, and subsequently to Beryl's defection, he had reconstituted his standard of the Ideal in Woman, after what fashion and under what circumstances may now be set forth.

III

In the April of 1915, east of "that mad place called Ypres,"—a city of ruinous white towers reddened by an angry sunrise, lying ahead and to the left. A grim grey road leading from Divisional Headquarters to the battle-front, a double crescent of blown-in trenches ankle-deep in water, and bottomed with West Flanders mud. A road fanged with the stumps of trees shattered by H.E. and scarred by iron-shod wheels; pitted with shell-holes, and generally knee-deep in sludge of an adhesive character. A road along which progressed, under cover of the darkness, long columns of men, guns and Army-lorries; A.S.C. cars and motor-cycles carrying ammunition, supplies, mails and despatches for the advanced trenches; unless German star-shell or searchlights made it daylight, when traffic stopped dead, to move on when the menace passed.

Day found the road deserted as a rule, though German hate played on it regularly at intervals, with rifle and machine-guns and clouds of poison-gas. But sometimes under the leaden scowl of a rainy day, or the brassy glare of a sunny one, the road displayed a double moving line. This, when one of the myriad little wars, presently to be merged in Warfare,—demanded the attainment of some objective infinitely insignificant,—at the cost of some great sacrifice of human life.

On this particular April day, what time the British line from Ypres southwards was strengthened—in default of missing sandbags—with tins of uneatable jam of the apple-blackberry brand, and equally bad corned-beef: columns of muddy Londoners and Scotsmen with helmets and gas-respirators at the alert, were going up to Support-trenches. Afoot now,—having disembarked at a marked danger-point from the grey Army lorries—or green and yellow motor 'buses that had carried many of the Londoners to business in the days that seemed so dim and so far off. And as they went, though shrapnel burst about them, and High Explosive dug new craters beside old, and wiped out a platoon or so in doing it,—they sang to the accompaniment of mouth-organs; "Keep the Home Fires Burning," or "Piccadilly," or "I Love a Lassie," or excruciatingly-parodied hymns.

But the troops that were coming down from the fighting-line to rest-billets (mostly Canadians, red with rust, muddy to the eyebrows, marching raggedly in companies or jumbled up anyhow in the lorries), did not sing "The Maple Leaf" or "My Little Grey Home." Many wore First Aid bandages smeared with iodine; nine out of ten hobbled and coughed and vomited; and the mucus they wrenched from their labouring lungs was yellow and mingled not infrequently with blood. It was their first experience of a German gas-attack, and the horror of the strange and evil thing was upon them; and the reek of it was in their clothes and breath. Yet those who could—called out cheerfully to recognised friends; or grinned with their cracked and swollen mouths in answer to cheery hails. Their reddened eyes of sleeplessness stared out of haggard, unshaved faces, and their muddy shoulders humped under their muddy kit-packs, as though the muddy ground were drawing them to lie down upon it and sleep. And every now and then one would falter in his stride and smile stupidly; and heavily and soggily collapse in the gluey mush. A comrade who had energy enough left in him would kick and shake such a sleeper into temporary wakefulness; or one of the men who perched beside the drivers of the Hospital cars and ambulances,—R.A.M.C. orderlies or Red Cross bearers, would play the Samaritan thus, when the subject would stagger on, to fall again. Or room would be made for him in some omnibus or lorry where lightly-wounded or badly-gassed men were packed like bloaters in a barrel, and so the game went on.

Private John Hazel, crunching a muddy apple, trudged through the sticky mud as part of a somewhat straggling route-column representing the Fourth Battalion of the Fenchurch Street Regiment. One novel sensation had that morning thrilled the Terriers, stale with the deadly boredom of life in the rear lines. Necks were yet being twisted to get the last of it, and joyous comments tossed it from tongue to tongue. A cow,—hidden away for months by an ancient peasant in some subterranean stable in No Man's Land (whence her milk had been retailed at the price of Veuve Cliquot to the Canadians in the firing-line)—was being brought down to the rear by her proprietor; her late lodgings having been discovered and thoroughly spring-cleaned by a German H.E. shell....

"Moi hoi, if it be-ant a cow!" said a voice that had the roll and twang of Berkshire. "Coosh-coosh, Snowdrop, ole beauty!"

"My Gawd, she don't 'arf look natural, do 'er?" came from a Cockney tongue....

Not a human unit of all those trudging columns but had slewed his head to stare at Crummy, and sniff the homely odours of hay and farmyard-muck that shook from her muddy flanks as she kloop-klooped by. What though she had raw patches of mange upon her withers—testifying to the poorness of her diet and the closeness of her quarters! To men who had not seen a cow, pig, cock or hen for weeks, moving upon that devastated country of once prosperous farms, productive fields, fruitful orchards, and stately rural mansions, the sight was comforting; bringing reassurance that in regions as yet unscathed by the frightfulness of War, yet were to be found quiet and order, laughter and pleasure, savoury food, sleep in one's own bed, and the humble, harmless things of everyday use, that make life sweet by their very homeliness.

Another sensation was in store that day, and though the novelty of it wore off with retrospection, John Hazel's keen enjoyment of the episode never blunted....

Down through the return-traffic on his left hand side, came a stately fleet of motor-waggon ambulances of the Red Cross, British and American; escorted by a train of Auxiliary Army Service cars of all imaginable makes, nationalities and sizes, from the aristocratic Rolls-Royce to the runabout Ford; from the Mercedes-Daimler of the Parisian boulevards to the roomy Schneider touring-car,—bringing wounded from the advanced dressing-stations down to the clearing-hospitals six miles back of the Reserve Lines.

The grey ambulances passed, in a mingled whiff of carbolic and iodoform: leaving a sense of grey paint, mystery and merciful swiftness. The cars, mostly carrying sitting-cases—flowed after them; steering neatly among the shell-holes, picking their way with practised smoothness among the various obstacles encumbering the road. And they left behind an impression of still figures wrapped in brown Army blankets: and grey-green or livid faces with closed or staring eyes, shaded by sacking-covered steel hats or bloody bandages: of an even stronger blast of carbolic and iodoform, and of Beauty, calm, alert, composed and eminently practical.

For all these auxiliary ambulance-cars were driven by women: in the black leather overcoats of Foreign Service, with D.B. Kitchener collars, and plain shoulder-straps with the button of the Red Cross Society's V.A.D. The pick and pride of the Old Country they seemed,—all young, or in the splendour of the early thirties. The best blood in Britain, John Hazel could have sworn,—raced under the sunburn of those quiet clear-cut faces, topped by peaked storm-caps of Navy blue cloth. He saw the neck of the lieutenant leading his platoon blaze red between his sweat-blackened collar and the edge of his tin hat, and the muddy glove swing up in the salute, as a clear voice rang out gaily from a driving-seat:

"He knows one of 'em. Lucky beast! I wonder—" John had reached thus far in his conjecture when a pip-squeak burst overhead with three sharp crashes; and a shell from a German howitzer dropped in an ancient neighbouring shellpit, considerably enlarging it—and producing the fantastic smoke-effect known as "Woolly Bear."

John Hazel bolted the core of his muddy apple, and mechanically made sure that "they" had not got him this time. The head under his tin hat was ringing, his eyes and lungs were full of acrid vapour: but no shrapnel was located in any portion of his frame. The cars were running by as smoothly as ever.... You could see through the thinning fumes the faces of the drivers, set like rock to confront War's risks and chances: and a blatant pride in them surged up in John Hazel and he caught his breath... They were his countrywomen.... Then Wallis, his front-file man, suddenly fell back upon him, knocking him breathless with his pack, and cutting his top lip badly with the edge of his shrapnel hat. With blood running over his long chin, blue and stubbly with bad shaving, John held up Wallis, who was making queer, clucking, farmyard noises:

"Auch—auch—auch! ..."

"The bloody 'Uns," growled John's left-hand man to his neighbour, "'as copped pore Ginger!" and the lieutenant ahead looked around. Wallis had ceased clucking by now; and the hand of John's supporting arm, where it went round across his cartridge-belt under his tunic-pockets, was wet with the usual warm, sticky stuff. And a voice that was clear-cut and ringing called out something, and a car slowed down its speed, and those behind it swept round and on.... And the lieutenant was shouting through the myriad noises of traffic: "If you can, it would be topping of you.... This isn't a healthy road to stop on. Thanks frightfully! ... You, Hazel, hoist him in and catch us up after! ... Forward. March! ..."

The V.A.D. driver had never quite stopped her car, John Hazel remembered. She had checked it to a crawl and he had kept pace with it, carrying the now rapidly-buckling Wallis—whose head had dropped forward, and whose helmet had fallen off—at the full stretch of his long arms since he stripped the pack from him. A Red Cross orderly had taken it together with Wallis's rifle.

"No room behind!" came in the ringing, feminine tones. "We're four over the proper load already! ... This seat beside me ... the orderly can sit on the step. You'll be all right there, won't you, Martynside? Now please lift when I give the word; Go! ... Don't worry about the blood. Lean your head against my shoulder!" She added for the cheer of Wallis, who was trying to say something apologetic: "Quite all right, if you're careful of my steering arm.... Comfortable? ... All right, Martynside! And—don't be too anxious about your friend. We shall look after him!"

Perhaps something in the comrade's gaunt brown face, a flare of wistfulness burning in his big hollow black eyes had drawn the attention of the speaker. As a matter of fact, the way in which her strong womanly shoulder had swayed to meet Wallis's limply sagging head, had given John Hazel a sensation as of plucking at the heartstrings. And—where had he heard that voice before? ... She went on, answering the hungry look in the gaunt black eyes that met hers:

"You shall hear of him, if news can possibly be got to you. I'll send a post-card if you'll give me your name. 'Private John Hazel, No. 000, X. Platoon, F. Company, 4th Battalion, 448th City of London Regiment, Support Trenches, Ypres.' That's quite all right! ... Your Reserve is at St. Jean.... Hang on to this!" This being a thick, squat packet of Dundee Butterscotch. "Good-bye and good luck! ... You'll be coming down this way in a week or two."

"If I don't get gassed or wounded.... Good-bye and thanks tremendously!"

John grinned, showing his big white teeth with the effect of a sudden illumination in his gaunt brown face; and there and then,—with a snort from the now rapidly-moving car, and a nod and smile from the driver,—the little episode had ended. Leaving John Hazel with a pleasanter flavour upon his mental palate than the sour American apple had left in his mouth. Something that was sweet with the aromatic sweetness of the ripe gold-and-crimson pippin whose rich juices have been perfected by the lightest touch of frost. And She had had the frankest and most candid eyes, of the clearest cairngorm golden-brown, that John had ever seen in a woman's head, and a wide, kind, charming mouth, that had shown two rows of dazzling teeth in a parting smile that had crinkled the eyes deliciously at the corners.... And so they had parted; going east and south-west, the V.A.D. to her clearing-hospital, the Londoner with a new, strange warmth about the heart, catching up his Company on the edge of a new-made crater, in time to take over the duty of Harris, now platoon-Sergeant, killed with three other men by a shell from "Silent Lizzie," the terrible 5.9 German Navy gun.

Thus the mantle of heroism had been transferred to the broad, unwilling shoulders of John Hazel, from those of the energetic young N.C.O. who had been to him as a thorn in the flesh. He had loathed Harris, with his pink and white complexion, his auburn quiff, and his appalling, crushing efficiency. And Harris, who as a Boy Scout had passed every imaginable test of ability and gained every badge obtainable,—had warmly abhorred John, as the shrieking example of everything a British soldier should not be....

"It's for your good I keep on what you call nagging at you, Hazel!" would be the introduction to every exordium: "A dirty soldier is a disgrace to his King and Country, and that's what you'd be if you couldn't afford to bribe men you consider your inferiors to wind your puttees tight, and fasten 'em properly, and keep your straps and buckles clean."

Or:

"It's for your good I follow you up, as you express it; and when you're able to make a fire out of mud and rotten beet-leaves, and an 'ot meal out of bully beef, ration-biscuit and an onion, more like an Egyptian 'All professor of ledgerdemang than a British Tommy'—which is like your nerve to use such language, so much the better it'll be for you! Don't tell me you can't keep your puttees from trailin' about your legs like snakes and the rust from disguising the metal on your 'coutrements. Don't say you can put up with 'ardships, and that you mean to stick it, ... To make Bad Better is your duty! and to 'unker like an 'og in the slush of Belgium, when you could sit on a faggot and keep reasonable dryish: and shiver when you could 'eat yourself inside and out by a bit of forethought—is your disgrace and not your praise!"

And Harris would light the fire and set the stew going, or thrust on his unwilling subordinate a portion of his own; and depart cheerfully whistling, and ostentatiously in possession of the equable temper which a Scout must never, never lose!—leaving the prodded object of his zealousness frothing with impotent rage.

Small wonder that the alert personality of Harris, his observant glance, unsparing criticism and unfailing Preparedness in every emergency were,—with his orange quiff and the trench-rings on his little fingers—by Private Hazel utterly abhorred.

After the clubbing of a certain German prisoner who had treacherously shot a comrade of John's, Harris did not hesitate to denounce Private Hazel as "a butcherly brute." Yet dying on the edge of the big new crater hollowed at the roadside by "Silent 'Lizzie," he used his last forces to faintly shout in the stooped ear of his platoon-lieutenant:

"Let Hazel carry on in my place, Sir! He's a filthy fighter—but the best man we've got!"

So, ex-Scout Harris died, true to the last to his ideals, having played the game for his side right up to the end.... And within twenty-four hours of reaching the second-line trenches, Harris's reluctant deputy, saddled with the necessity of keeping up Harris's reputation as a daredevil, had led a company to the support of the front line in the place of a lieutenant wounded—and had won the D.C.M. by a single-handed bomb-attack upon an enemy machine-gun position,—which enabled our London Terriers to charge over the parapet and clear out the wasp's nest. Had been offered and respectfully declined promotion—on the grounds that he didn't like responsibility!—and had subsequently, in the act of drinking tea at the door of the platoon dug-out—been knocked out of action by a splinter of shell.

Thus, adhering in death as in life to his policy of well-meant aggravation, Sergeant Harris came between his bugbear and the promised, longed-for post-card. For if indeed it had been sent, it had never reached John.... Damn Harris! But what good was there in damning Sergeant Harris? Hell wasn't the place you'd catch that efficient young beggar going to. Hadn't he, assiduously as he kept his body, looked after his cocky little soul! In the gusts of fever that shook his brain as he lay in his cot at the Receiving Hospital, John pictured Harris with his quiff all curled and shiny,—dressed in the spruce white clothing of the righteous—heard him with the ears of imagination, shouting hymns that went with a marching swing.

The fever subsided by and by, and, after four months of bitter fighting, Private John Benn Hazel, No. 000, X. Platoon, F. Company, 4th Battalion, (subsequently to a brief sojourn at a French Base Hospital) found himself back in Blighty, well pleased to be alive. He ended his final period of residence as a patient at the Auxiliary Military War Hospital of Colthill in Middlesex, in the July when German South-west Africa surrendered to Smuts and Botha: and was pronounced convalescent by the C.M.O. in the first week of December, 1915; the self-same raw, bleak and nipping day that saw the Fenchurch Streets'—with other British forces transferred to the Egyptian Expeditionary—embark for Salonika.

IV

The bit of shrapnel irritating his left lung,—located there by the X-Ray, but deemed by the surgeons unreachable, had ceased to bother much; and the gas-bronchitis—another souvenir of that mad place called Ypres—had quieted down to a wheezy cough. John was lying back, rather damp and exhausted after an access of this cough, when the Ward Sister in charge that afternoon looked round the screen—there had been three; but two of them had been taken away because the patient was getting on so nicely,—to say that a visitor wished to speak to him, Number Forty—if he felt well enough?

"Tell the old girl they won't allow me to eat anything but apples or Brazil-nuts,—and that I'm not to smoke more than two cigarettes at a time!"

John's homely effort at wit evoked an approving nod and smile from the Sister. She vanished as the Hospital porter, a one-armed ex-Guardsman who previously to Mons had been a famous Regimental pugilist—came stepping lightly as a cat over the highly-polished floor, carrying a 200-weight coal-bucket. As the replenished fire began to crackle and blaze, the Ward Sister returned, ushering a little, frail, bent old man, with flowing hair and a patriarchal beard of the white that has passed into straw-colour; sharp twinkling eyes under penthouse eyebrows lighting a face of innumerable wrinkles, reddish-pink and leathery like a marmoset's. He carried a tall hat in one hand and a brown leather bag in the other, and wore a black velvet skull-cap, greasy with faithful wear. A round-collared, single-breasted overcoat of brown cloth, with yellow horn buttons, revealed the bottoms of shiny black trousers, ending in square-toed, black cloth-topped boots. The boots were clogged with Middlesex mud, as though he had walked from the station. A purple woollen comforter and mitts to match, defied the December blasts.

Firelight played bo-peep on the white ceiling, and chased dodging shadows in and out between the neat beds, ranged along the creamy walls of the long, cheerful ward, and winked in the dark polish of the boards, and was reflected in the glass-topped tables supporting pots of hyacinths and daffodils as well as big blue-glass stoppered bottles of Perox: Hydro: and Mercurial Sol:. But the unexpected appearance of his ancient visitor had cast a glamour over Number Forty. His body lay in bed in Colthill War Hospital. But in spirit he stood in his Grandfather Simonoff's Hull counting-house, a boy of three in diamond socks, strap-shoes and a blue jean round-about, straining his sharp young ears for the rustling of a paper bag.

Peppermint rock, brown or white, was John Hazel's darling weakness. His letters Home, during his sojourn in the trenches, had invariably ended with a prayer for more peppermint rock. And the sight of this queer old man evoked all sorts of pungent memories connected with the favourite sweet stuff. His big black eyes and the sharp little red-veined old eyes met, and something like an electric shock passed between them. And the shaggy penthouse eyebrows of the old man came down, and then shot up to meet his velvet skull-cap—or the cap came down to meet them,—and at the same moment his ears wagged, and John Hazel knew him again. Twenty-seven years were temporarily blotted out, and he was once more a five-year-old—and old Mendel was feeling in the pocket that bulged—and John Hazel found himself licking his lips—but nothing but a blue-spotted cotton handkerchief came out of the bulgy pocket. With this, Mendel—had he ever had another name?—loudly blew his nose, and as the Ward Sister placed a chair, and vanished with a whisk of cotton-print skirts (notably shorter in this December of 1915 than the previous uniform pattern), he uttered something in a strange, unknown and yet familiar tongue:

"Shalôm—shalôm!" He added as he met the astonished stare of John's gaunt black eyes. "You are like your father as pea is like pea; and yet—when I wish peace to you in the Holy Tongue, you don't understand me! A shame and a sin!—but I'm not here to reproach you for being a Meshumad! That's not my affair! You're not my grandson,—the Holy One be praised!"

"Mr. Bartoth—" John had exhumed the other name by a strenuous effort of memory: "whether you are pleased to see me or not, I'm very glad to see you! Do you object to shaking hands?"

"Behold!" Mendel blew his nose again loudly, and said as he restored the blue-spotted handkerchief to the bulgy pocket; "I am 'Mr. Bartoth' to the child I dandled.... You have not kept the good way, but there is a good heart in you.... You sit there with your medal on your breast—" a famous Divisional Commander, visiting Blighty to enjoy a brief leave, had looked in at the Hospital on the day previous, and conferred on Private Hazel—with some laudatory expressions, the Medal for Distinguished Conduct in the Field—"and you're not too proud to offer your hand to Old Mendel—nor you've not forgotten his name! Yet you were a babe of three years when your father died, peace be upon him! and but four when we lost your grandfather, peace be upon him! and too young to say Kaddish; and now that your grandfather and your uncles and your cousins are dead, peace be upon them! you, a grown man of thirty-three, are ignorant as a babe. Shaigatz! But it's no use to be angry. Besides, I must get back to London in time to catch the four o'clock Express from St. Pancras. I came by the 5.48 from Hull and got in at two o'clock noon."

"Haven't you had anything to eat?—Won't you—" John was beginning when the old man, who had sunk upon the chair with a boneless limpness eloquently expressive of his weariness, silenced him with a gesture of fierce abhorrence, and he was fain to hold his tongue.

"I have had all I want. Do you think my wife sent me forth upon this journey without provision for my necessities?" He had unbuttoned the brown coat and was fumbling in an inner pocket, from which he finally drew forth a little packet and a key. "Here—this belongs to you. It comes from your grandfather Eli Hazaël—peace be upon him! and may his soul be bound up in the Bundle of Life!"

John received in his big palm a small but heavy something rolled up in tissue-paper and tied with a little wisp of black floss silk. Without opening, he sat staring at it, while Mendel boggled about opening the shabby brown bag with a tarnished Bramah key.

"How did my grandfather and my uncles and my cousins die?" he queried, rousing himself from a state of mental stupefaction accompanied by a profound physical weariness, a singing in his ears, and a familiar sweetish-saltish taste at the back of his throat. And Mendel looked up from rummaging in the now open bag with his veinous, knotted, shaky old hands, to say resentfully:

"How does any one die in these days except through the War? ... The people of all the nations of the earth are tearing at each other's throats—and not only the young fighting-men, but the children and the aged, both men and women!—these must suffer also.... Soon after the Ashkenazim—" John knew he meant the Germans—"invaded Belgium, the Turkish Army was—what is the word?"

"Mobilised. Yes, the dirty beggars!" said John, employing a less savoury term than beggar, "they've been stuffed up with lies about the Kaiser being a Mohammedan, and they're ready to back him for all they're worth. At Abu Zenima and at Tor they gave us plenty of trouble; and they nearly rushed Aden, last summer, when our best brigades and batteries serving on the Suez Canal had been sent to the Dardanelles. Lucky we gave them a gruelling at Serapeum—and stopped their little game at mining the waterways of the Canal. As it was they jabbed up the Grand Senussi to make Western Egypt hot for us. His Bedwân are sniping at British troops like blazes—our black garrison at Port Sollum are just sitting on their thumbs. But anyhow we're keeping up our end at Anzac and Gallipoli, and my crowd will be helping, I expect, pretty soon. They've—damn this beastly cough! They've—"

"Tsch—tsch!"

John stared as Mendel, who raised himself from stooping nearly double over the bag, gesticulated at him violently with papers in his withered claws.

"Tschah! ... Have I time to hear you tell of what is in the newspapers these three weeks back? ... What I have to do is to make known to you what the British Press thinks not worth telling—the griefs of our people—and the manner of their deaths. The idolaters—accursed be they! mobilised after the Invasion. As their Young Turk Constitution of 1909 made Arabs, Christians and Jews equally liable to military service, your cousins,—like all other young men of the district,—were marched to the recruiting office by the Turkish soldiers who accompanied the mouchtar who came with the lists. They were not allowed to return home for food, or money, or clothing,—or to obtain the blessing of their parents,—but hurried off to the Hân, locked up like animals with hundreds of filthy Arabs: and sent from thence like prisoners—bare-footed and half-naked—to reinforce the garrisons in Northern Galilee. And your grandfather—he was living at the house of his son Isaac, a country place near Haffêd—for years were growing heavy on Eli Hazaël.... Even the strong back bows under the burden of ninety-nine! And the spirit of Prophecy came on him as he watched the young men Elias and Jacob departing,—and he turned to his son Isaac and said: 'They will not return, they are gone from us for ever, and you and your brother will be the next to go!' This was on the 8th of August of the Christian Era 1914, or, as we say, the 30th Ab of 5674.... Meanwhile the German Consul at Haifa is going about the country, preaching to the Arabs how Germans are not Christians like the French or British, but Children of Mohammed the camel-driver, and worshippers of the Black Stone. And that their Kaiser is the Messiah of Islam:—and in all their Mosques prayers are made for the Sultan and Hadji—"

"Bill! ... Haw-haw!" John guffawed, pleased and tickled by his own apt joke.

"Peace, boy! and let me finish. This is no chine to set a Schlemihl grinning. There is blood in it and anguish, and tears! For Jewish and Christian recruits at the training-camps were disarmed and stripped of their uniforms,—(khaki and enveriehs which most had bought new at Turkish value for fear of getting infected garments),—and put to labour under the whips of Turkish gang-masters in the taboor amlieh. Those are the working-corps that are building a new railway-branch of the Central Palestine from El Tineh in Philistia southwest to Gaza and southward to Beersheba—and making military roads for the Turks between Saffed and Tiberias—in case the railways should be cut off by the British by and by! And others are sent to labour at construction-camps at Hebron and Samaria. While at home in the other towns of Palestine and the villages of the Colonies—the goods of Christians and Jews were requisitioned, and silver and gold and jewels plundered; fences torn up and olive-groves cut down, and evil worked in many ways. Worse than all, shame has been brought upon the matrons and daughters of Israel, even such as Esther, the only daughter of your Uncle Isaac, a virgin of eighteen years!"

John flushed dark purple under his mahogany skin and rapped out an ugly epithet:

"Who was the ——— hound?"

"He is one Hamid Bey, a Colonel of Turkish gendarmerie, Vali of the labour-camps near Nazareth—high in the confidence of the Turkish commander of their Eighth Army Corps, and, like all the rest of the idolaters, lustful as an ape. And she—Achi Nebbich! she was as a rose of Sharon! And word came to her brother Jacob, who was working with the road-gangs at Tiberias, his cousin Elias being a labourer on the railway near Beersheba—peace be upon them! Therefore, Jacob, with one Reuben Ephraim—their playmate from childhood, and a fellow-labourer—who had an affection for Esther—as she unto him, poor creature!—broke out of camp and struck across the hills to Nazareth—careless of peril, raging like furious wolves."

"Wish I'd had the chance to make one of the party!" John murmured. Old Mendel's croaking voice went on:

"Now these two had determined to purchase exemption from service,—notwithstanding that they were already enrolled,—for such things can be done where the officers are Turks!—and they brought with them the money, forty gold pieces of twenty francs for each,—that is eighty pieces!—meaning to buy with them the honour of the girl! They found out where Hamid Bey was quartered—in the large new Khân near the Hammâm that is at the north-east end of Nazareth, looking towards the fig-orchards and vineyards and olive-groves that are as a green fringe upon the borders of the Tiberias Road. News had come through that Turkey was at War, and there was terror in the hearts of the people.... First, the French Christian Orphanage—then the Scotch Medical Mission—then every hospital, school, convent or mission in the town had been taken over by the Turkish Army Corps' Commander for military uses—and Jewish and European houses were gutted by the score. The streets were full of howling rioters—there was concealment in such confusion,—so the young men lurked in the gardens through the day, and Jacob kept close to the sentry-posts and heard the password—thus when dusk fell they passed the sentries, and came into the lower part of the Khân. And with cunning they made their way up to the Bey's apartment—and found him there with Esther. Achi Nebbich!"

Mendel's parchment forehead was wet with perspiration. He mopped it and went on, screwing up his nose and blinking:

"When she leaped from the divan shrieking and fell upon her face at the feet of her brother and lover, the Bey's eyes barely followed her,—he was already weary of his toy. He covered the boys with his big German Army revolver—his companion even in pleasure—and told them that he was willing to hear what they had to say.... They said it, and offered the money—as the price—not of Esther's honour—for she was ruined already!—but to purchase her deliverance from slavery with him."

The veins on John's forehead were swollen and blackening. Mendel's voice had sunk to a penetrating hiss.

"The Turk—may Fire from Heaven consume him!—was immovable by arguments and deaf to prayers. He would take the eighty gold pieces—what Turk can resist money!—but his Jewish concubine he would keep also. Then Jacob asked to speak to Esther apart. No farther than the end of the room, distant from the door and windows.... To this the Bey agreed, smiling, turning his tongue between his lips, and—keeping the German Army revolver—they all have them—and Zeiss binoculars!—ready in his hand. Then—Reuben says:—"

"Was it he who told you?"

"Of that presently! Then Jacob embraced Esther and Reuben as one that taketh farewell for a journey—while Reuben watched them shudderingly, knowing what should come! The Turk signed that Jacob should hand him the bag of money—and this Jacob did. Bowing obsequiously before the son of Satan—who, thrusting the revolver in its pouch—gripped the bag, with one hand—and with the other patted the youth upon the cheek that was as fair as Esther's—and touched with the first growth of the black silken down...."

John would have said "Go on," but he couldn't. The little, eyes like glowing embers held him spellbound, as they burned into his own....

"Suddenly Jacob sprang like a leopard on the revolver, wrenched it away and leapt to his feet. The Bey set his whistle to his lips and blew,—and his servants and orderlies came running in tumultuously. But not so quickly but that two shots had cracked out—and the room was ringing!—and the brown cordite smoke hung under the ceiling in a thin cloud, smelling of aniseed, and mingled with the smell of scorched flesh and hair. For—Jacob—peace be upon him!—had thrust the pistol-muzzle close against the girl's temple when he shot her—and fired the next bullet into his own mouth!"

"How on earth did Reuben get off?"

"He cannot tell me. The Lord knoweth! But he found himself running through the night like a deer,—with shots and shouts dying out upon the distance—and when he ran into the dawn of the mild November day, lo! there was blood upon his naked feet! Esther's and Jacob's! ... But why should there have been blood upon his hands, and a dagger in one of them—bloody also? ... He does not know! ... A frenzy was upon him. The country was searched for him, but he had found a friend who kept him well hidden. He was the American Consul at Jaffa, and in the safety of his shadow Reuben dwelt for many days. Then he found means to communicate with his family. From them he learned that Elias—the cousin of Jacob and Esther who was working on the Beersheba Railway,—had suffered the punishment of the falagy. Why? For abetting his cousin—of whose deed he knew not!—in an attempt upon the life of the Bey at Nazareth—"

"What is the falagy?"

"The bastinado. Beating with green rods—asâyisi."

"On the soles of the feet. Oh—well! One's often heard of that, hasn't one?"

"Schlemihl! Are there not beatings and beatings? The asâyisi to punish—the asâyisi to maim and torture! The asâyisi until there is no shape of humanity left in the body, and even the mother of the man would not know the putrid mass of bloody flesh for the child she bore and bred! So thy cousin Elias died. And after that there was no peace for the house of thy grandfather Eli. His son Amos, and Shemuel,—the second son of Amos,—were mobilised to go south with Labour Corps of Jews and Syrians.... Digging trenches for the Turks to hold the railway at El Arish, they dug their own graves, upon them be peace! The two sons of their sister Sara were taken prisoner by the British at Kantara, and related their story, and were kindly used. They joined the Zion Mule Corps and went to Gallipoli. Perhaps they live, perhaps they met their deaths—carrying ammunition under shell-fire on the Peninsula! But they are the sons of daughters—not the sons of sons! To make an end—being warned that the vengeance of Hamid was to fall upon his house, thy Uncle Isaac—the father of Esther and Jacob—took the child that remained to him, even Benjamin, his darling—who was not of age to serve,—and with money and papers hidden upon them, the two escaped in disguise. I will not tell you after what fashion—but wives and mothers are cunning at these deceits when their dear ones are in danger!—and father and son arrived in safety at Beirut."

"And did they get away?"

"Woe, woe! Isaac was recognised by the Turkish wharf-inspector even as he lifted the boy into the boat that was to take them to the American steamer. They were dragged to prison—they died in prison, and that last blow slew your grandfather. Peace,—peace upon them all! The wives of Amos and Isaac live still, and two of Amos's daughters; but what are women to a house that needs sons that are begotten of sons! Now that the old man's white hairs have been brought to the grave by sorrow, the house of Eli Hazaël is represented by whom?" Mendel blew his nose sonorously and finished: "Whom but your brother Maurice and yourself!"

John was conscious at the back of his mind of a tingle of eager—let us call it expectation. He asked, carefully divesting his tone of excitement in any undue degree.

"Do I understand that—there's money in this business?"

"There is much property, both in land south of Mount Carmel, and in the export business-houses at Alexandria, and at Jaffa and elsewhere. There is money lying at the Crédit Lyonnais," John's black eyes kindled. "Also at the Deütsche Palästina Bank Branch at Jaffa,"—John whistled dismally—"and the Anglo-Palestine Banking Co."—John blew a sigh of relief. "And there is the stewardship of the olive-groves and vineyards of Kir Saba—the title-deeds of which property (the original mortgage on it having now expired, and the sum lent having been recovered, with the interest)—must—this is the word of your grandfather!—be formally given over to those to whom it rightfully belongs. Here! Take the documents! Thou hast the ring aready!"

Mendel jumped up quite briskly, and deposited a double-handful of documents, account-books and bank pass-books of foreign appearance and exotic odour, in the hollow where the coverlet dipped between John Hazel's knees.

"A copy of your grandfather's Will is with them—" He picked out a long, tough, yellow envelope, directed in a round Levantine banking-house handwriting to "John Ben Hazaël, Esquire, London, England," and resumed: "This is it. The original is in the keeping of the old gentleman's solicitors, 'Abel Manasseh, Ephraim & Co., Rue Jerusalem, Jaffa.' Reuben,—who brought the news and the papers!—is the junior partner in the firm. There's a holograph letter from your grandfather, peace be upon him! written in Hebrew—and a sheet with a translation I have made for you, seeing that you, Eli Hazaël's heir, know nothing of the Holy Tongue!"

"His heir! ... Look here! ... You ain't talking through your hat when you say there's a goodish property?"

"Your English slang sounds unto me as Hebrew to you, a mere gibberish without sense or meaning!"—Mendel shook off the large, loose grip of the young man from his arm. "The Sons of Perdition—the Turks!—have wasted and spoiled much land that lay under cultivation; and the wine-vaults of the Colonies have been gutted, by those of them who break the Law of their Prophet,—and also by their German Allies. Also, of the money in the Deütsche Palästina little, if any, may be recovered now. But, despite this, and the provision for the females living—there is still a great property! Supposing three hundred and eighty thousand pounds British," the glowing eyes were watching John's face narrowly: "is enough to make it worth your while to live as a good Jew?"

V

"What? ... Who? ... Me! ... Great Moses in the Bulrushes!" ...

"Profane not the name of the Lawgiver," said Mendel sternly. "Is it not reasonable that the father of your father should desire you to cast off your Epicureanism, take upon you the Yoke of the Torah, and cease to become a sinner in Israel?"

"Reasonable—from his point of view! But—Me kiss a Mezuzah nailed on the doorpost, and reel off long prayers in a synagogue with my hat on—and my head wrapped in a shawl!"

"The Orthodox would respect instead of despising you."

"But my own set! What price they, I should like to know?"

"Their price—do you ask their price?" The fierce eyes flashed, the beaky nose looked capable of pecking. "For half of the great sum that is in question, there are not three among your associates—lewd men and loose women!—that would not kiss the buttocks of the Goat of Mendes, and spit upon the Cross! For they are not even Christians. They are as the brutes that perish. And you—another brute!—plant your hoofs and lay your ears back—and bite at the hand that tries to pluck you by the garment back from the brink of the bottomless Abyss!"

"Look here! ..."

Under the accusing glare of Mendel's little red-hot eyes, various deviations from the straight path of morality condoned by John as natural and even pardonable,—assumed a much less harmless character, and even took on an ugly and sinister hue....

Since John Hazel had left school at the age of eighteen, a string of young women of garish attractions and uncommonly easy virtue,—flaunting blossoms plucked by the wayside—in the City or the West End—had succeeded one another in his temporary affections. There had been several more or less quite serious entanglements, one of which had threatened to effloresce in a Divorce Case, but fortunately had not. There had been—previous to John's engagement—numberless rather rowdy jaunts; all-night Launch Parties; excursions to Pleasure Resorts: Seaside-hotel, Thames-side-hostelry-Saturday-to-Mondays,—enjoyed by John as member of an association, small, select, eclectic, expensive; rather artistic, decidedly sporting; semi-literary, slightly theatrical and wholly Bohemian in character,—rejoicing in the title of the Cocky-Locky and Henny-Penny Club.

Not so out-and-out Improper, these gay and giddy galas.... Of course you couldn't take your mother to them! but you could, with a little careful editing, tell her amusing stories about them—now and then.

It was at a symposium of Club members, assembled at a riverside hostelry in the summer of 1913, that John had encountered Birdie Bright. Ostensibly a Beauty of the Chorus, Birdie, a young person of lowly origin, pronounced good looks, accommodating affections and expensive tastes in jewelry, furs, sweets and lingerie, had played the part of Zobeide to John's Harûn Er Raschid—practically until the arrival of Beryl on the scene.

She had vowed herself "broaken harted" in several despairing letters, written in an immense angular hand in ink of vivid green, upon sheets of pink ribbed note. But John had been generous—even Birdie admitted it!—as she took his advice, and put away the consolatory wad of crisp ten-pound notes that had sweetened the bitterness of parting, carefully in the Brixton Branch of a solid and reliable Bank.

Since Beryl's heartless breakage of her betrothal vows, the image of Miss Birdie Bright, previously effaced from the surface of John's heart, had revived in all its pristine charm through the whitewash that had coated it. To a letter from John in Hospital, Birdie had effusively responded—in passionate purple ink this time,—and in a bigger hand-writing than ever. The telegram appointing a day and an hour for her visit to her erstwhile lover's bedside was written, and wrapped round a half-crown in the pocket of his pyjama-jacket, in readiness for despatch.

That wire would have been sent an hour ago—had not the convalescent Sapper of Engineers—to whom belonged the next bed—gone off in such a hurry to the Pictures with his young woman that he forgot—and now Birdie would never get it! Nor would the letter enclosing John's cheque, soliciting from the Secretary of the Cocky-Locky and Henny-Penny Club, re-election as a member of that interesting association, ever be posted now....

Seen through the stern medium of Old Mendel's spectacles, the periodical revels of the C.L.H.P. took on a tinge of hellishness—became a very Witches' Sabbat. And Birdie, viewed through the same merciless, unsparing lenses, became even as one of the harpies that devour young men and lead them in the Way of Destruction.

VI

"And what more is required of you, young man," the harsh voice went on croaking, "in return for this fortune, than to carry out the instructions of your elders: to follow cleanliness; to do justly; to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God! But I have done. Time does not avail for more. Study what is written on that paper I have pinned within the letter in Hebrew. I am old, and the fountain of my tears is dry, but mine eyes were moistened when the good old man entreated of his last descendant—even with his foot upon the threshold of Death.... Stay, I will read to you his letter. Listen to this!"

"John, son of John, my youngest and best-beloved! All thine elders being removed by the Will of the Most High, it falls to thee to take upon thee the Guardianship of the Sacred Ashes, and the Keeping of the Ancient Shrine. Thou wilt not refuse? Oh, child of my child!—the hand that pens this page, before my very eyes into the dust is crumbling. Wouldst thou live as long? Then be dutiful. Wouldst thou be happy? Happiness is the gift of Heaven, but a good conscience brings peace. Seek then the peace, and happiness will follow. If the dying prayer of an old man is granted, Those Others that have been before me may be permitted to guide thee in the Way wherein thou shouldst go. Farewell! Forget not to say Kaddish for thy father's father;—Eli Ben Hazaël."

The voice: not Old Mendel's croak, but a deep voice rolling out of the mist of centuries, wakening sub-conscious memories, thrilling along the nerves to energise long-atrophied cells in the listener's brain, ceased: and the icy thrills left off coursing down John Hazel's spinal column, and his strong, wiry hair left off bristling and lay down. The paper crackled as it was thrust once more into the envelope, and tossed back upon John's lap. John said, clearing his throat and speaking with some degree of huskiness:

"I don't quite tumble to the meaning of all this about the Guardianship of the Ashes and the Keeping of the Shrine, but, of course, I'd say Kaddish for him—like a bird—if I knew it! I'm not quite such a howling brute as you seem to think! Didn't you make me say it for my father when I was a little kid in petticoats? I seem to remember something of the kind."

"Well, if I did, was it not a good deed? But now that you are man grown you have cast off the faith of your fathers. And Kaddish cannot lawfully be said by one who is not a Jew! When you have made up your mind whether you will be a rich Jew—or a heathen no better off than many others—write to me at your uncle's Hull address!" Mendel, who had resumed his seat, snapped his mouth shut, and snapped shut the calfskin bag—and stood up and went on—in the act of buttoning the single-breasted brown great-coat. "As to the Shrine, it's at Alexandria, and the Ashes are naturally where the Shrine is—not that I've any information to give you on that point. But the other—less sacred obligation—you may discharge as soon as you see fit. The accounts and the documents touching Kir Saba—some of them are very old and should be handled carefully!—must be taken to Scotland and delivered to the representatives of the original mortgagor, whose address is there written—by no other hands than your own. A gift of five hundred pounds English has been bequeathed you by your grandfather,—without further condition than that you render him this service. The cash will be paid you by a cheque upon London as soon as I receive the receipt for the documents. You will naturally not part with them without receiving this acknowledgment. Take care! Haven't I warned you?"

John's big fingers were prying into a flat wallet of mouldy parchment sewn with something like ancient silkworm-gut, and containing an oblong of crumbly brown....

"What on earth is it? ... It looks like seaweed.... Or an old felt sole out of somebody's boot! ..."

"It is the original Title Deed of the Tower of Kirjath Saba and the lands about it, granted by the Emperor Vespasian to the Tribune Justus Martius, of the Tenth Roman Legion: on the tenth day of the month of Ab—that is, August, in the second year of his reign."

"My holy hat! That was Anno Domini 70, when the Romans under Titus took the Temple at Jerusalem and burnt—"

"Not burned but demolished, according to Josephus—the walls of the Upper City alone being left standing—to shelter the garrison chosen from the Roman Tenth Legion!—together with the three great towers built by Herod—in order to demonstrate to Posterity how glorious a city had been cast down.... Woe! for the madness and the wickedness of the Pagans. Alas! for the Sacred City, a chattel in the hands of the filthy unbeliever even to this day! Who shall restore the glory of Jerusalem, or give back life to the dead place, or cleanse the robe of snowy wool that hath been defiled by pitch?"

"I've heard you reel off things like this before, haven't I, when I was a little beggar? I say! Do you know this rotten old sheepskin is pretty well priceless? Why, it's about one thousand eight hundred and forty-five years old! Those Johnnies at the British Museum would hand over a pot of cash for it."

"Have I not told you to lose no time in returning the document to its owner? Let him deal with it as he will! There is another parchment, the original Deed of Mortgage dated in your Christian Era 1146. Money was lent by Issachar Ben Hazaël, of Joppa (they spell it 'Jaffa' in these days)—to the Mortgagor, Sir Hugh Forbys, (they write his name 'Hew'), Knight, and lord of the Strong Tower of Kir Saba, in return for the right of user of the Tower, with its groves, gardens, springs and vineyards; and all the 'purtnans' for the 'makyn of wine.' When the cash with the interest, should be recovered, the Title-Deed was to be given back to Forbys.... These later records continue unbroken up to the June of the Christian year 1914. Examine them at your leisure. They are faithfully translated and clearly typed."

John answered and said unto the aged man, not being unmindful of the bequest of £500.

"You make my head spin, chuckling about centuries as though they were marbles! But I give you my word of honour, I'll swot all the documents up. When have I to go down to hand them over to these Scotch people? ... I suppose they do have some sort of a name?" ...

"They are a family of high repute and ancient standing on the Border. The Forbis of Kerr's Arbour, Tweedburgh, N.B. Have you at any time heard of them?"

"Never in my natural! They seem to have been thunderingly pally with us Hazels somewhere about the Bronze Age.... Do you know 'em at all?" ...

"Ask not foolish questions. What are the people to me? For a reason that the documents will clearly explain to you, they have had no intercourse with your family since the time of the Seventh Crusade."

"I wonder whether they'll be likely to know me when they see me?"

"Be not a Schlemihl! Where is the ring?"

"Which ring? You know, my head is fairly buzzing with all this business! ... You've dropped on me like a sandbag out of an Observation Rupert. Here—I've got it! Some ring!" ...

"It is a black onyx, a Greek gem of price, carved with a head of the Pagan Hercules and in an ancient setting of gold. It was given to your ancestor, Hazaël Aben Hazaël, by the Roman Prætor Philoremus Florens Fabius, at Alexandria, in the reign of the Pagan Emperors Diocletian and Maximianus—about the beginning of the fourth century of the Christian Era." Mendel added as John groaned again at this fresh evidence of antiquity, "This signet now belongs to you as head of the House of Hazaël. Let me see you put it on the third finger of your right hand!"

John obeyed. The great ring fitted the big finger as though it had been made for it. The intaglio, worn thin by time and chipped at the edges, was still beautiful, and though the tiny Greek letters at the lower left-hand corner signified nothing to its new owner—the signed work of a master-hand. John commented:

"He must have been a hefty chap, that old Hazaël!"

Mendel responded, buttoning up the brown overcoat:

"Your race have always been noted for breeding men of extraordinary strength and stature. There is a fellow-ring to this, I am given to understand, in the possession of the Forbis family. It is in high relief, this being the intaglio. Remember, you will bequeath the signet to your elder son, after you: as an heirloom which must always be in the possession of the chief male of the line."

"Carrying on as though one was Rob Roy M'Gregor," John remarked mentally. Then as Mendel made a strangle-knot in the purple woollen comforter, adjusted his mittens and was about to re-lock the brown bag:

"Here," he said suddenly, "you had better keep this for putting those papers in. Can't leave them lying about on the bed! It's a bit old, like me, and the worse for wear, like both of us. But I shan't improve, and you're getting over the wound you got"—he jerked his thumb as indicating a locality,—"over there. In the trenches. In Belgium."

John explained at some length, Mendel seeming to expect it—that the bit of shrapnel in his lung-tissue was of exceedingly small size. That the symptoms of slight pain and breathlessness which had persisted long after the healing of the chest-wound, had almost vanished under treatment which had involved absolute rest: the avoidance of talking; a sitting position maintained constantly, and small but frequent doses of morphia.

"Morphia, eh? Dangerous stuff. Done with it now, let's hope!" said Mendel jerkily. "Put back the papers in the bag when I've gone, and mind you always keep it locked! Look here!—I've left you the key. And so you're convalescent!" He went on in quite a different tone, suggesting that he had only dropped in to inquire about the patient's health about five minutes previously: "Well, well! And going out of Hospital in another week—I think you said?"

"Not quite that, I didn't say!" pronounced John in his English. "The C.M.O. pronounces me Posh, and the Military Medical Examination Board'll be sure to certify me Fit for Service. I expect to be drafted out to the Mediterranean pretty shortly—my battalion of the Regiment having got transferred to the Eastern Expeditionary Force."

"Say not to Gallipoli, that shambles whither British soldiers are sent as sheep to the slaughter! Stay, I babble foolishly! Have I not knowledge that the British forces were yesterday withdrawn?"

"The hell you have! Why, where did you get it?"

"I made no reference to the Place of Burning. As to my knowledge, it is common to the elders among our people: a nation that received enlightenment from the Most High in dreams and visions, when the naked woad-daubed savages of these British Isles were howling to the Moon.... Make not calf's eyes at me! ... Did not naked savages cry news for hundreds of miles from hill-top to hill-top in the War with the Booren!—and was not the murder of the Gentile General Gordon at Khartoum known within the hour to the idolaters in Damascus! What I tell you is—there is no doubt at all!"

"But—but—they don't say a word about it in the papers!"

"Prrtsch! Is not that what the papers are for? And now, when do you think to get back to business? I mean business in the City—not that of killing other men. Though, as to the slaying of enemies," added Mendel, with strange yellow fire burning under his shaggy eyebrows, "the Kings and warriors of Hebrew race have slain when slaying was necessary. Saul his thousands and David his tens of thousands and Joshua—who knows how many hundreds of thousands of the Amorites and Canaanites! Nay, in your own veins there runs the blood of famous men of battle. You should inherit, with your frame and muscles, a measure of their fighting blood."

"Can that be why I sing whenever there's a scrap on?" asked John, reflectively rubbing his ear.

"When scraps are on what? Tell me again, employing plainer language," acidly commanded the old man.

"I mean, when I've—not often it's not been—worse luck!" returned the young man in his slipshod grammar, "but now and then—come really to close quarters with the—the enemy, you know." ...

"The Germans? Have no fear!—I am a Damascus Jew and not an Hebrew of the Ashkenazim.... It matters not a yod to me how many you have killed. What is this about singing—when do you sing?"

John scowled and the dark red flush began to creep up under his dull brown skin. He said gruffly, avoiding the inquisitive old eyes that raked him, by looking past the edge of his sole remaining screen down the vista of the long, clean, shining ward, at the big fire blazing in a deep old-fashoined grate....

"Why, at first when I went to the Front—no amount of stabbing stuffed sacks and shooting at dummy men—and bombing others—could"—his prominent Adam's apple jumped as he gulped, and his speech came from him in spurts of broken sentences—"bring me to swallow the idea of—killing them. Well!—first two hours of the Real Thing—I was sick and cold with sheer fright—just gibbering with horror! Then we advanced, went in with the bayonet—and I—began to like it, quite! Though when—some of us—got back and I saw—a—a—Hair and a—a—Blood on my—on mine!—that I'd got to clean off or get Hell from the Sergeant!—I was as sick—I give you my word!—as a chap who's been ordered to drink a tin-cupful of cold-drawn castor without a bit o' lemon to chew. Well, then, you see, as I was retching, comes along the N.C.O. and hands me out some chaff! 'Sick now bedad!' he was a wiry little Irishman, with a brogue thicker than the mud—'Sick, are ye?—the big bucko that was singin' as he hoisted Huns to glory wid the Haymaker's Lift!' Well, of course I thought the beggar was joking—but next time—"

"Ay, yea!—what happened the next time?"

Old Mendel rubbed his withered hands and smiling widely, revealed the fact that his still sound and white teeth were worn down quite level with the gums.

"Next time? ..."

"Next time was—rather a personal affair. Mind you—I've never talked about this to any other Service fellow. There's something different about their point of view. It was in March last—we'd been doing reserves at Richebourg St. V.—in the Neuve St. Chapelle racket, and after the battle we were taking our turn in the front-line trenches and making barricades! Shooting, you may guess, for all we were worth, and Fritz was handing it back with the Mauser, besides throwing 15 and 17-inch shells at us and enfilading our parapet with sprays of bullets from one of their machine-guns. The air was full of bangs and squeals and whistles, and every minute men were toppling over: and the fellow on my right was a pal of mine: we'd chummed up together like—a—like bricks! Well, there was a badly wounded German near, lying outside in the thick of it. Harding—my chum—put down his gun, gave me a wink—went over the top—sniped at like anything!—brought the lousy beggar back—gave him a drink,—put a coat under his head: and stowed him away behind us at the bottom of the trench, to wait for the stretcher-bearers. Then he came back to his place by me, loaded and went on shooting."

"And then?"

"Then, he—my pal—Harding—started rotting in his usual way; and I'd just said to him in my usual way, 'Do dry up, you silly, brainless lunatic!' when a revolver banged behind us, and Harding fell over on me, and I was all one smother with blood and brains—his! When I'd just told him he hadn't—you see the point of it?" John's mouth was stretched in laughter, but he shuddered as though cold.

"He—" Old Mendel's eyes were fierce under their bushy brows as he nodded, saying:

"Day—day! ... It does not need to be more plain. I understand thee clearly. The German lying at the bottom of the trench had shot the man who brought him in, through the head, from behind.... We have wolves in the Anti-Lebanon—and when taken they will fight to the death.... It is wisest to despatch them at once with the loaded club, whenever you find them trapped. But what didst thou do to thy wolf, O David! when the blood of thy Jonathan was wet upon thee?"

"I—went for the brute with the butt,—like mad!—and bashed him into jelly." John shuddered and felt for his handkerchief and mopped his face and neck. "He shot at me—twice—and nearly got me, but I—just bashed on!"

"And didst thou sing as thou didst smite?"

"They—they said—when they got me away, and it took a lot to hold me!—they said I talked a gibberish that nobody could understand."

"But I—possibly—might have understood it!" Old Mendel nodded knowingly and briskly rubbed his hands. "Well, well?"

"Well, after that I made no bones about killing Germans. There were nights when I used to creep out of the trench (nights when there was nothing much doing) with a white cotton Pierrot's costume I'd picked up pulled over my khaki, because of the star-shell showing me up dark against the snow—and until the enemy got too knowing, I made quite a bag every week—of Lonely Fritzes on Advanced Posts. Fellows began to look at me rather queerly. I think I'd got a name for being a bloodthirsty kind of beast. And the officers of my platoon'd say to a man who was noisy and wanting in caution: 'If you let a cheep out of you, So-and-so, during such and such an expedition—I'll tell Hazel to kill you!' and he'd shut up—tight as a box."

"Aha!" Mendel hugged himself with his stiff brown sleeves and chuckled. "I, Jew of Damascus as I am, do not wonder!—do not wonder, knowing the stuff of which thy forefathers were made! Now I should depart, for we have talked much, and the young woman in starched linen is nodding at me and frowning. We Jews daily thank the Creator that He did not make us women: but when there comes pestilence, or War with wounds and fever, He cannot make too many women to satisfy us! Now is there anything more to ask before I leave you?"

"Nothing, I—Here, hold on for half a mo'! There is a question. If I stick to my guns and don't turn Hebrew, what becomes of my grandfather's cash?"

"Provision in the event you name is duly made in the Will. The three hundred and eighty thousand pounds will go to found an Orthodox Jews University that is to be built near Jerusalem—the money being vested in the hands of certain Trustees. There are three Trustees. Lord ——, Sir Arthur —— and Professor ——" the speaker named three names of power—not only in Israel:—"but you will not let the money go to found the University. Shalôm! Is that not all?"

"All—except that I've not yet asked after my Uncle Benjamin Simonoff at Hull."

"Thy Uncle Benjamin prospers exceedingly. Trade failed with Russia when the North Sea Ports were closed; but the warehouses were full—and Government paid much money for tallow, tar, green hides and tanned skins. Benjamin is enlisted in a Home Defence Corps, and both his sons are on the sea, serving in converted Hull trawlers. They sweep for mines, set snares for what they call 'tin fish' and seem content with life.... Woman, I have said that I am departing! Had I not, it is not seemly for your sex to thrust themselves into the private talk of men!"

"But you've been here already over an hour, and the doctors—"

The Ward Sister had swept down on him:

"I go, I go! ... Nay, but, look to the boy! He is swooning! ... Woe to me! heedless and forgetful of his weakness.... I thought but of confuting the errors of an Epicurean—and lo! I have injured the child I loved!"

John, struggling in the clutches of a return-attack of breathlessness, propped up high against hard pillows, tried to tell Old Mendel not to bother, that he, John, was as right as nine-pence, or would be in the shake of a guinea-pig's tail. But the words were lost in suffocating gasps and pantings; from which, administered by Nurse's skilful hands, the prick of a subcutaneous injection of morphia presently delivered him....

The semi-relapse entailed another fortnight in Hospital: its tedium infinitely relieved by the fulfilment of John's promise to swot over the documents and papers in the bag. Which contained, besides a pair of well-darned spare socks, and a clean blue-spotted handkerchief of Mendel's, a bag of brown peppermint-rock, of the highly-flavoured kind most fondly associated by John Hazel with the blameless days of infancy. Alas! that the writer should be bound to the Wheel of Truth as concerning this young man, so unheroic a hero. As soon as he was well enough, he ate it all up.

VII

Three weeks at a Soldier's Seaside Convalescent Home on the outskirts of a West Coast Winter resort, intervened before John's return to Campden Hill Terrace.

It had been strange to recognise upon his mother's cheerful, well-preserved comeliness the strained and sharpened look that is the stamp of War upon the human countenance. Maurice—who was later on to develop into a mechanic-private in what was then the Royal Flying Corps—the chrysalis or pupa-stage of ultimate transformation into a Lieutenant-Pilot—was Overseas at an Advance Depot of the A.S.C. and didn't write punctually. And the double-fronted millinery and florist's business in Dove Street was languishing. Fruit and flowers were only bought to be sent on to the Wounded in the Hospitals. Nobody wanted ravishing hats when the men the hats were meant to slay were being killed in the trenches; besides, British women were all agreed by now that in War-time some kind of uniform was the only possible wear. So Lady Delphinia had departed to France to open a Hostel for Officers at one of the Allied Bases, and the huge benevolent octopus of Organised Activity had enveloped within its tentacles Mrs. Hazel and her set. They spent their days strenuously at various West End Centres, in making every imaginable aid,—from list slippers to body belts, from artificial legs and arms to life-saving waistcoats—for the Fleet and the Forces; and if they took comfort from the knowledge that their neighbours at the trestle-tables in the crowded work-rooms were occasionally Duchesses, who shall grudge John's mother and her intimates the gratification they derived from this fact!

Of the visit of Mendel Bartoth to the Hospital at Colthill, John said nothing to his mother. After all, it was his affair. His and Maurice's—because it was provided under the conditions of the Will of Eli Hazaël that, should the elder of the two surviving male representatives of his House decline to adopt the Judaism of his forefathers (and incidentally forfeit a sum of £380,000), the younger should be offered the fortune thus foregone.

Justice and wisdom went to the making of the Will, with consideration and magnanimity. John was to have two years clear in which to make up his mind. In the meanwhile, there was the acceptable sum of £500 to be earned by taking a run up North as soon as his health was sufficiently restored.

Consequently upon a bitter grey-white morning in the February of 1916, Private John Hazel found himself seated in a grimy third-class compartment of the Kelso Express, steaming out of a vast and murky London terminus, upon the strangest errand of his life.

The thing was real. He might have dreamed old Mendel: but that there could be no doubt in face of all those proofs. The typewritten papers and the queer crumbly parchments were in the brown calfskin bag beside him. And, queerest of all, the ring: the intaglio of the bust of Hercules in black onyx in its ancient setting of pale greenish gold, incredibly battered, was on the third finger of his big left hand....

He squeezed the back sheet of his Pall Mall Gazette into a ball, observant of the inferior quality of the paper—cleared away the clammy fog and grime that obscured the window next him—and settled down to read the News.

Front after front had burst into roaring flame; the brown shuttle of the Army and the dark blue shuttle of the Navy, driven back and forth with dizzying rapidity, wove the bloody web of War upon the loom of Fate daily, hourly, momentarily....

Sir Douglas Haig had succeeded Sir John French in command of our Forces in France in the previous December. De Wet and other South Africans had been pardoned. General Smuts had been appointed to command in East Africa; the Germans had been repulsed at Loos, a Zeppelin raid on Paris had twice been unsuccessfully attempted; the Senussi Arabs had been beaten in West Egypt, the Kut Relief Force were at grips with the Turkish forces;—France was fighting superbly to hold Vimy Ridge her own. And the Military Service Bill was effective in Great Britain; and the final act of the Evacuation, ringing down the curtain on the unsuccessful tragedy of the Gallipoli Peninsula was fading from the minds of men.... A bad, bad business! John commented mentally. He wished the Blooming Bungler who was responsible for all that waste of blood and prestige and money could be jammed into a British trench-mortar of the old-fashioned, big-bellied, Jumbo pattern—and biffed—say 450 yards—into the Turkish lines! And then he fell to staring at the women in blue overalls not innocent of grease, with the initials of the Railway Company in braid that was no longer white—and blue caps with shiny peaks and white braid badges. And the other women who tapped and greased wheels, and rattled along luggage trucks, and trolleys of lamps and foot-warmers;—not forgetting yet other women in dark blue serge uniforms with bright steel buttons, who had clipped his ticket for Scotland when he passed the Barrier.

For London was astonishingly altered by the War. Not only by the temporary War Constructions, the Specials, and the sand-bagging and wire-netting of public and private buildings: not only by glassless windows—shattered walls and holes in the concrete pavement,—wounds torn by High Explosive bombs dropped by Zeppelins and Gothas on the grey breast of the City, that in John Hazel's estimation was built about the hub of the world. The most remarkable of all the War-changes was in the women. In Belgium and France the women young and old had done men's work, and sometimes looked as though they enjoyed doing it. Somehow one expected it of Continental womanhood. But that British womanhood should conduct trams and omnibuses in dark grey jackets with black leather buttons and belts, short skirts to suit, and black leather gaiters, slouch hats or shiny-peaked caps,—intrigued John Hazel wonderfully. A young woman had driven him to King's Cross from Campden Hill, smart and business-like in a yellow oilskin coat, peaked yellow oilskin cap—toujours the peaked cap—big leathern gauntlet-gloves, strap-satchel and general air of confident competency.... She had not overcharged: and had thrust back John's proffered douceur with the succinct statement: "We don't take tips from soldiers, these days!"

And whizzed smoothly out of John Hazel's ken, leaving the young man standing staring after her, with the calfskin bag in one hand and a suit-case in the other; amidst the very audible smiles of the lady-porters and luggage-clerks.

The door of the compartment opened at this juncture, admitting a drab-faced elderly woman in greasy blue overalls. With a grimy duster she flapped the seats of the comfortless third-class, raising a cloud of cindery dust that made the sole passenger sneeze; whisked a collection of orange-peel, nut-shells, toffee-papers and "Puss-Puss!" and "Woodbine" cigarette wrappers under the opposite seat, and fell out again over John Hazel's boots, leaving the atmosphere murkier than ever.

Fear—the acquired fear of encountering the glare of a Sergeant, or the chilly stare of the wearer of a Sam Browne, had hitherto arrested the hand of the Junior Partner in the thriving Cornhill firm of Dannahill, Lee-Levyson and Hazel, Insurance-brokers,—when it would fain have placed on the rubber pad of the Booking Office pigeon-hole, the fare for a First Class Return.

But now, the prospect of a run of some three hundred and fifty odd miles North in captivity so grim, chilly and unsavoury, prompted a young man with muscles still soft from confinement to a Hospital bed, and the kindly coddling of Hospital Sisters,—and with the warning of the C.M.O. with regard to avoidance of bronchitis still fresh in mind,—to extract a soiled ten-shilling note or "pinky" from a pigskin wallet; to project the upper half of his big body from the carriage-window, and endeavour, not unsuccessfully, to catch the eye of the guard.

"Na, na, nae Second Class. Ye'll have hearrd that ava' at the Booking Office!"

The silver-braided functionary, checked momentarily in his stride by the appeal of an agitated old lady, presented his highly-dried and sandily-bearded countenance upon a level with the buttons of John's front tunic-pockets, and inclined a freckled ear to the young man's appeal. The answer came in the droning chant of Berwick:

"Ye can pay the differ between the firr'st an' third-class—I'm no' for stopping ye. Though, ye ken, wi' ilka officer that gets in, ye'll rin the same risk!"

"Of being turned out with a flea in my ear, you mean," returned John Hazel, not unobservant of the mahogany reflet of certain Sam Brownes, isolated or in knots, upon the platform, in juxtaposition with open carriage-doors, or mingling with the scanty groups of would-be passengers under the arc-lights (camouflaged with blue paint) that cast false pallor on the freshest cheek, and made sickly faces masks of Death; and threw long purplish shadows of people and things (at angles suggestive of Futurist Art) upon the greasy asphalte of the Northern terminus....

"O, ay! If ye're willin' to tak the risk...."

The glitter of a certain medal on the Private's breast, and the shine of two parallel strips of gold braid upon his cuff, had caught the sharp grey eyes of the guard. He thrust back the offered note on the confounded John, leaped at his suitcase and tore it from the rack, and shepherded his huge charge through the clank and rattle and roll of luggage trucks, foot-warmer barrows, and lamp-trolleys, shouting:

"Come awa' wi' you, man!—there's a firr'st weel forward, wi' a twa—three women-bodies that would gie guid skelps to the officer that daured look crookit at ony Tommy—forbye a lang black lad wi' the D.C.M.!"

Thus John Hazel, suffering for once from an acute attack of bashfulness, found himself installed in a corner of a fairly-warmed if faintly-lighted first-class compartment, containing in addition to many cloaks, rugs, pillows, tea-baskets, and other cosy accompaniments of travel,—three ladies of uncertain ages, but very definite position in life,—also a Young Person of highly-coloured exotic charms, clamorously perfumed; whose crimson hair was surmounted by a French officer's tasselled képi, and who displayed, below marvellously abbreviated skirts, silk stockings of open trellis-work, ending in such boots of yellow leather with tinsel cross-laces as are commonly associated with Principal Boys in Pantomime....

Of the three ladies, two carried the dark blue uniform of a Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross Society and held officers' rank of sorts, for both were pipped. While the third, an incredibly tall, thin woman, with eyebrows arched and black as musical slurs, pale greenish-gold hair, a white, triangular face, and a V-shaped mouth as scarlet as a Pierrot's, wore upon her khaki sleeve the brassard of the Liberal Ladies' War Service Legion, with the lapel, shoulder and hat-badges distinctive of a Commandant.

All three displayed the roughened hands and damaged finger-nails characteristic of British womanhood at this strenuous period. Theirs was the unabashed and frank regard, born of the calm self-confidence which springs—not from the conviction, but from the established fact of being Somebody in Society. All three were loud of voice, long of limb, easy if abrupt of movement: prone to discuss their own and their friends' private affairs in the presence of strangers; as though the man or woman in the corner, palpably an alien from Their Set, must in consequence be deaf and dumb.

"Howling swells!" was John Hazel's pithy mental comment, recognising upon three of his fellow-travellers the unmistakable cachet of Good Society. "The Mums," he reflected, rather wistfully—one of the Nice Things about John was his belief in his mother—"the Mums would be in her element here!" And he leaned luxuriously back upon a plump cushion that one of the V.A.D. ladies had deftly thrust behind him, in the corner that had been unostentatiously vacated when the big young man, with hollow black eyes and prominent cheek-bones, and khaki baggily hanging upon a huge frame wasted by hæmorrhage and strict dietary, had heaved in sight. And the Commandant handed him the day's issue of an expensive Illustrated Society; saying, with a characteristic emphasis suggestive of large capitals:

"Of course, I really don't believe you'll Cotton Much to this, but it may get you over an hour! Pass it on to somebody else when you've done—I Don't want it back!"

She nodded smilingly in acknowledgment of Hazel's gratitude, and the young person in the gilt-tasselled French képi followed suit by giving John the current number of "Frillies," a purely feminine publication—devoted to the puffing of silk pyjamas and embroidered underwear, with Piffel Pearls (warranted to outshine real ones) and Face Creams guaranteed to remove Complexion Blemishes contracted at Munition Factories, or in Labour on the Land....

Then she suddenly saw a friend, seized her handbag and suit-case, and departed on the corridor-side of the compartment in a gale of violent perfume. John opened the sliding-door, shut the same on her departure; pulled up his rug and began to sip the honeyed sweetness of "Loveliness in Lingerie," and the three ladies, as the savage tang of verbena died upon the air, unleashed their loud, high voices apparently upon the trail of some subject mooted before.

"You have heard that Evelyn Graynger has consoled herself?" asked the startlingly thin woman in khaki, lifting her musical slurs of eyebrows towards the peak of her badged cap, from the back of which a short square veil depended, and momentarily glancing as she did this, at a three-inch band of black crape upon her left arm. "Though I am quite sure that the poor child really did care for my poor Wastwood and my poor Jerry—you know she became engaged to Jerry not long after Wastwood—" She blinked and broke off.

"Really! ..." the dark blue ladies chorused; and the elder exclaimed sympathetically.

"How awfully difficult it must have made their mother's position! Didn't it, Trixie dear?"

"Now Evelyn is going, I hear, to marry the popular Anglican preacher, Mr. Amice-Bellows," continued the khaki Commandant. "He likes to be called 'Father,' don't you know!—and has still a great many wealthy lady-penitents; never having felt any irresistible call to volunteer as a Chaplain accompanying Forces to the Front. He opens Soldiers' Refreshment Buffets with prayer, and figures on Red Cross Bazaar Committees, and visits wounded Tommies in Hospital and all that, and of course there must be people to do these things.... And they say he has a consoling manner with his clients—I should say Congregation—when they're knocked out by Bad News! Though I remember when the second bomb dropped,—I mean in the shape of another wire from the Casualty Department of the War Office—and I was rather off colour in consequence—he advised me to drink a pint of hot water regularly every morning with Bi—something-of-something-or-other stirred in."

The two V.A.D. ladies shrieked. The triangular-faced Commandant in khaki continued, all unconscious that the illustrated periodical bestowed on John Hazel displayed her photograph, with the appended description:

"Trixie, Lady Wastwood. Mother of the late, and aunt of the present Earl. Who has been doing splendid service as a Commandant of the Liberal Ladies' War Service Legion at one of our principal Bases in France, in adherence to the well-known motto of the Legion: Do Anything, Go Anywhere, Stick at Nothing, and Never Grouse!"

* * * * * * *

"Well-meant"—the elder of the two blue women was speaking through her laughter, "but hardly tactful of Mr. Amice Bellows—to suggest that biliousness and bereavement produce symptoms practically the same!"

"Anyhow," the khaki woman's laugh rattled out as though a stick had been drawn over the keys of a piano, "I took the parson's counsel—vicariously. Went down every day to Waterloo Station and poured tea and coffee into thirsty Tommies at a Soldiers' Free Refreshment Buffet—instead of irrigating myself. Found it swamped the blue devils quite as effectually. And"—she touched her khaki lightly—"that's how this—began. Same with both of you—I rather fancy?" ...

"I entered as Probationer at St. Francis and St. Clara's after the Third Reserve Battalion of the Loyal North Linkshires got gassed at Ypres last Spring," said the younger of the V.A.D. women, who had also a mourning armlet, and could not have been older than twenty-two or three. "And I found scrubbing floors and carrying buckets better—oh!—miles better than all the veronal in all the chemists' shops."

"I agree with Cynthia," said the other blue lady, "I think the V.A.D. was meant to keep the women who have lost their all from lying down and dying—or running amok. Hark! Was that a Take Cover?" ...

A detonation in the distance had been followed by a wailing hoot of peculiar ugliness. Silence descended upon the Terminus. Most of the faces that turned to each other in inquiry, seemed to have suddenly been powdered white. The three women in John's carriage betrayed no emotion. They waited in silence, but no second detonation followed. And John Hazel said as his gaunt black eyes, met Lady Wastwood's, that were green and singularly brilliant:

"I think the tyre of a motor-'bus burst—just before they sounded the dinner-hooter at some near-by factory. I know Longmore's Locust Bean chocolate used to be turned out at a place close here."

All three women nodded and smiled in recognition of the soldier's civility. The hollows about his eyes, and under his cheek-bones, the bagginess of his khaki—in favour of which he had gratefully abandoned the suit of Reckitt's Blue flannel with white lapels, and the scarlet cotton necktie of Hospital wear, had—in combination with the medal and the wound-stripes, won him favour in their eyes....

Lady Wastwood gave him another paper, a Morning Post, and the younger of the V.A.D.'s was following suit with a packet of chocolate, when the first starting-gong clangalanged,—the carriage-door was wrenched open, and a tall thin officer, followed by a porter carrying a Gladstone bag and tartan rug, was in the very act of entering when he encountered Lady Wastwood's glance....

VIII

Private Hazel had fainted in spirit at the sight of a Brass Hat, a double row of multi-coloured ribbons, and the badges of a Lieutenant-Colonel; and his ears had already begun to tingle with the expectation of official rebuke—when the officer, arrested in the stride of entrance on the brass-bound threshold of the Railway Company—reddened and paled as he saluted. His singularly unhappy grey eyes had met the eyes of Lady Wastwood. Freezing as green Arctic icicles, they held those of the victim in a hostile and repellent stare. Her mouth, devoid of its V-shaped Pierrot smile—straightened to a frigid line of sheerest disapproval. Her chin combined with the mouth and the eyes, in the admission that somewhere between sickened Earth and revolted Heaven a wretch like this dared to draw breath....

The situation lasted one intolerable moment, its poignancy even penetrating John Hazel's pachydermatous hide. He found himself wincing in sympathy with the sufferer, whose lashed blood rose darkly under his clear nut-brown skin. Still, not a muscle twitched to betray him. His deep-set eyes ranged from face to face of the occupants of the carriage, searching for one gleam of sympathy, possibly. His mouth opened as though he would have spoken, then shut; and his face became as a granite mask. He saluted again formally, backed out, lightly jumped from the step, carefully shut the carriage-door, and walked away down the platform, the laden porter at his heels, as the two V.A.D. women exclaimed in shocked accents:

"How could you? ... Who is he?"

"What rows of decorations!"

"And, my dear!—what can the man have done to deserve a cut like that?"

They of the High Caste paid no heed to John, ambushed behind the current issue of Frillies, with both ears cocked for the name of the protagonist....

"It is Edward Yaill," said Lady Wastwood, as though prefix and patronymic offended the palate, and blistered the reluctant organ of speech. "Colonel Edward Yaill. Of the —th Tweedburgh Regiment."

The younger of the V.A.D. ladies exclaimed, as though in pain for him:

"The Colonel Yaill! ... That brave, unlucky man!"

"And your County neighbour!" This from the elder blue lady, to whom Lady Wastwood returned:

"Yes, when I happen to be in Scotland. But I so seldom am at Whingates now. However, since poor Jerry's successor made a point of my looking up his womanhood, I promised to run up there next time I felt washed out. Colonel Yaill was my fellow-passenger on the Boat for Boulogne one day last March.... Now again we encounter—rather unfortunately for him!"

"Do, do forgive him, next time you tumble against him!" begged Yaill's previous champion.

"Edward Yaill has had a sample," said Lady Wastwood icily, "of what he may expect from me in the near as in the distant future. Let us hope he will be wiser than to rush upon his doom. What wouldn't I have given to possess the Early Victorian stare of my old great-aunt, the Duchess of Strome. She could cut—until you saw the blood!"

"My dear, it was quite bad enough!" the elder V.A.D. assured her. "Mercy! I can't forget his wretched, wretched eyes! I do hope I'm not going to dream of them! There must be something to be said for a man who looks like that!"

The drab-grey terminus was sliding away.... The clank of milk-churns and trolley-wheels grew fainter.... A signal jerked down, with a wink of a red-green eye, the points clicked over, and the Express was launched upon her shining way across a tangle of intersecting metals terminated by grim black signal boxes, and gathering speed,—shot out of the jaws of a Goods Station into the foggy day. And stations were flying past, and the crowded drab streets of mean houses were flowing under the belly of the rushing Express like a river of dirty bricks and mortar,—and the ladies were moving and settling down, amongst rugs, cloaks, pillows, tea-baskets and other accompaniments of feminine travel; hugely amused by the temporary return to the prehistoric joggliness and stuffy safety of trains. And Lady Wastwood had mentioned that she had had two cars crumped by German H.E. in France—and it had transpired that the elder V.A.D. had had hers badly biffed in September outside a Theatre in the Strand when a Zepp dropped a bomb quite near,—and that the younger had hers temporarily put out of action through tyre wear, taking convalescent Tommies for drives—when Lady Wastwood suddenly betrayed the tenor of her thoughts by remarking with emphasis:

"After all, if there IS anything to be said for Edward Yaill, Katharine Forbis will be the first to say it!"

The uttered name plucked at some fibre in John Hazel's brain. He dropped Frillies, and one of the blue ladies reached down a long arm, and picked the paper up, and gave it back to him, with the manner of one well-used to doing these things for sick men. But she looked at Lady Wastwood, not at John, as she did this, saying:

"'Katharine Forbis.' ... You must mean the handsome Miss Forbis who went out to the Front to drive ambulance-cars for her Detachment, some time in last March,—and was afterwards invalided home. Miss Forbis of Kerr's Something—?"

"Kerr's Arbour, Tweedburgh. A quite modern house built against a dear old Border Peel Tower. Twenty miles from us at Whingates. Not as the crow flies, but as the woodcock.... That was my poor Jerry's annual joke. He hadn't a shadow of humour, bless his heart!"

With which pronouncement John perfectly agreed. He had been electrified into attention by a sentence of the previous speaker's, and was tinglingly alert for another reference to a name by now uncannily familiar.... "Forbis of Kerr's Arbour, Tweedburgh" seemed to have plucked at a fibre in his brain. He was made to gnash metaphorical teeth by one or two divagations from the main point, before Forbis cropped up once more. Then came another mental jerk with an utterance from Lady Wastwood:

"As a matter of fact, Edward Yaill and Kathy Forbis had been engaged quite for ages. You understand, I was a County Neighbour then, and saw what was going on. Edward Yaill's Infantry Regiment—'The Tweedburgh Foot-Sloggers' they call themselves—there aren't many of the poor dears left to answer to the old name!—Edward's Regiment distinguished itself equally in the Boer War of 1900. And Edward—with his Majority and a D.S.O.—came back after the War to be made a great deal of—and Kathy—then a quite beautiful girl of seventeen—vows that she fell in love with him then and there. But the engagement didn't come off until years later—and has been dragging on since in a most annoying way. Kathy—one of those Fine People who make sacrifices for others—didn't want to leave her father, a courtly old dear with a beautiful manner! after her mother—a Sweet Creature!—died. So the wedding was continually postponed. The last date arranged being the October of 1914."

Both the V.A.D. ladies uttered sounds of sympathy; and Lady Wastwood went on, while, thanks to the oil-smooth running of the Express,—and perceptions sharpened by War's savage exigencies—John Hazel, ambushed behind the ample pages of the feminine periodical—followed the trend of the high-voiced narrative as easily as though he had been sitting in the stalls at a new play....

"In that August—Edward was then staying at Kerr's Arbour,—came the Bolt from the Blue! ... With the —th Brigade of the —th Division of our First British Expeditionary, goes Yaill, then Senior Major of the First Battalion of 'The Tweedburghs' ... Katharine's pride in him was touching. She said very little, I remember, but her eyes—do you remember her wonderful eyes?"

One of the V.A.D.'s agreed:

"Yes, oh, yes! Quite wonderfully beautiful eyes!"

"'Gold and bramble-dew,' to quote Robert Louis Stevenson's celebrated simile. His wife, to whom reference was made, I believe—was a Scotswoman though American-bred. But to go back to Edward—then Major Yaill,—you will remember—who does not? that at Le Cateau-Cambresis that August his Battalion underwent an Ordeal of Fire. So terrible, that Major Yaill and two junior officers, with a handful of men alone remained. Wounded, his uniform burned to rags—they say he fought like a god or a devil!—he escaped being taken by the Boches. But all the world knows the splendid story. I'm making myself a Perfect Bore!"

The V.A.D.'s assured her she wasn't in the least; and she went on volubly talking, above the oily purring of the Kelso Express.

"Escaped, and wandered, starving, wounded and in tatters; hiding in farmyards and amongst ruins by day,—and tramping, guided only by his luminous compass—at night-time. Fed by Walloon and Belgian peasants who were too scared—poor Things! one well knows why!—to give him even a few hours' shelter. Five days and nights, and he reached the Belgian frontier—passed the guard unnoticed—and got upon the Flushing Boat. And if you suppose that Kathy Forbis fainted when she had his wire, or even Cried for Joy all over everybody, you'd be Wrong. Absolutely!"

John knew you would have been wrong. Under cover of Tailor-Made Talks he nodded his head, with a kind of proprietorial pride in Katharine Forbis.

"What did she do?" asked one of the blue women.

"She simply said 'Thank God!' and went on with her First Aid bandaging. Then—after some delay because of Dutch Neutrality—Edward Yaill managed to get out of Holland and came back home."

"Rather a wreck, one supposes?" hazarded a V.A.D.

"Haggard and worn," admitted Lady Wastwood. "With those hollows in the temples one knows so well, and that queer tense, sleepless look they can't get rid of. One would naturally have expected that He and Katharine would have been Married Instantly. But I have absolute knowledge, that the subject was Never Broached!"

"Rough on Miss Forbis, rather!" hazarded one of the hearers. To whom Lady Wastwood retorted:

"Fortunately for Miss Forbis—as things have now developed! But that she would have jumped with Joy had Edward breathed a hint of marriage—Nobody could doubt who saw her look at him.... Sweetheart and wife and mother, mingled in her expression. 'She makes me want to cry!' said that Old Rip Delaguett. And he meant the thing.... It's odd how those Bad Men adore Pure Women. Let us do Delaguett justice—he swore she was too good for Yaill!"

"Did he agree with Lord Delaguett?" asked one of the blue ladies.

"If he had," returned Lady Wastwood, "Kathy would have disagreed. And one task absorbed him, body and soul. Assisting the Authorities to reconstitute the Battalion that had been wiped out. This was done, and he was offered the post of Second Military Secretary to Sir Charles Carberry at Gibraltar. Wouldn't you have expected him to take the goods the gods provided, marry his Nice Katharine, and sail for the Rock? Kathy would have risked tin fish in shoals!—and a nuptial couch at the bottom of the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. But—"

"But—?"

"But Edward Yaill wouldn't hear of such a thing! Took the post—went out—absolutely fed—simply hated it! Groused away at G.H.Q. until they gave him what he wanted most."

"One can guess what that was!"

"Naturally. Command of the new old Tweedburgh Regiment, and Active Service in France again. 'To get back just a bit on account from those blighters!' he told me: 'I'd take over a Territorial Regiment from Hell. And to lead one's own Border men again is too—'"

"Absolutely topping!" suggested Yaill's original champion.

"You have the expression. Well, one perished to trancher le mot, but in view of Katharine's splendid attitude—"

"Backed him for all she was worth, I'll bet!" said John Hazel internally.

Lady Wastwood's high voice went on, through the Express's oily running:

"Calm, hopeful and encouraging beyond all—one couldn't have ventured to say a Thing! On one point she was adamant—She would do her bit like others. Home Service wasn't enough—you comprehend!—for Kathy Forbis. She had got her First Class Certificate and Qualifications—and went to the Front, dear sweet thing! early in March, 1915, to drive cars for the Red Cross."

"And so Colonel Yaill—"

"Went out again to take over command of his Regiment, Colonel Muir-Rosyll, an old friend of mine—having gone West. And just as though Fate had been lying in wait for Edward!—in September—somewhere South of Loos—the Horror Happened Again!"

"The 'Tweedburghs' were wiped out in the assault upon the village! ... Oh! one remembers...."

The elder of the blue ladies shuddered, the younger bit her lip.

"Swept away.... 'Exterminated'—that's what the newspapers called it. And Edward Yaill's name was on the early list of killed. It seems that he had gone out from Battalion Staff Headquarters—all his officers but two being dead—to take over Telephone-Communication at their Forward Station Dug-out, and got there in time for a terrific bombardment of High Velocity Shell."

"What unutterably Awful luck! Was he very badly wounded?"

"Hardly a scratch on him, when they found him—one has heard so much of the queer fantastic tricks that High Explosive plays. Nearly naked and covered with yellow powder. Quite Dazed—not a notion of his own identity! Which of course was established by a gold curb wrist-chain with an Identification Disc, and an officer's silver whistle with his name upon it still hanging round his Neck—when they took him to a General Casualty Hospital on the Communication Lines. Where the Poor Thing was treated with scores of other Shell Shock cases, until he came round enough to remember his rank and name."

"Didn't Miss Forbis wring out leave and rush from the Front to comfort him?"

"Well, Katharine was badly wanted just then, where she was, at her Receiving Hospital. And personal interests must give place when Duty is in question. I imagine that we're all of us pretty clear on that!"

Lady Wastwood added, as confirmatory sounds came from both her feminine hearers:

"There's no question but her going to him would have saved Yaill. But unhappily, it was not to be. Nice Katharine—poor dear!—was invalided home from the Western Front a month later. Muscular strain, lifting wounded Tommies under Fire. Had to come back for Massage and Electrical Treatment. While Edward Yaill, who had been transferred to a Convalescent British Officers Canvas Camp at the B—— Base (up-to-date place under Red Cross Management, with pines and heather and bracken, and little streams gurgling down steep sandy cliffs)—Edward had been making steady progress towards complete recovery. Until—not quite a fortnight back—he Socially Cut His Throat!"

The ladies exclaimed. The narrator continued:

"Cut his throat by suddenly marrying a Trained Nurse belonging to a Unit of the Red Cross, doing duty at the B—— Base C.O.C.... Having obtained the necessary permit from his Brigadier. Whether the young woman got leave from the Matron-in-Chief on the West Front, or did without it, I couldn't tell you! I think the latter, as she had previously sent in her papers asking leave to retire for reasons of health. At any rate, the ceremony was performed by the Church-of-England Chaplain attached to the C.O.C."

The narrator added, raising her arched eyebrows: "Quite legal, of course, but one Would have expected the thing to have been clinched by a Roman Catholic Priest. Yaill being R.C. like Poor Dear Katherine—to whom, one hopes, her Religion,—always so Much to her—may bring True Courage to Bear the Blow!"

Lady Wastwood added, through her listeners' horrified exclamations:

"Subsequently to the wedding the couple sailed for England, all arrangements having been Cleverly Camouflaged.... Nobody seems to have realised what had happened.... My own enlightenment was to come from Our London Headquarters, where I reported myself yesterday. A Wireless Message had been Received by Our Deputy Assistant Director-General from the Matron-in-chief on the Western Front in France. Our D.A.D.G. happens to be Colonel Yaill's cousin. That's how the item of news got dropped in. And subsequently she 'phoned me in Code at my Mayfair diggings—to say that her Sister-in-law, Lady Ridgely,—Red Cross Commandant of a Tommies' Convalescent Hospital at Coombe Bay, Devon—had encountered Colonel and Mrs. Yaill, upon their honeymoon."

The elder V.A.D. lady moaned despairingly:

"And now he tumbles in on us here—a passenger going North.... How can he? Why, why set foot in Scotland, of all places on the globe?"

The newspaper rustled in a pair of big bony hands, that were shaking with rage as though with ague. There was a roaring in John Hazel's ears.... Spots of red, ringed with paler colour, grew and dimmed and faded out upon the page before him. If the harmless periodical had slipped from his hold, the sight of the mask of murder it had screened might have led to the pulling of the communication-cord and the subsequent appearance of the guard. For the man was not the same man who had shed the black frock coat and silk topper of Cornhill in the September of 1914. He had spilled blood since then, for duty's sake, and for revenge; and found sharp pleasure in the shedding. And much, very much, he wanted to kill Edward Yaill. But Lady Wastwood was answering the two blue ladies:

"That is what I ask myself. Why? and How Can he? ... Unless, indeed, he were going up North to tell—to break the news to Katharine! Or does he possess sufficient Nerve to attend the Funeral?" She added, meeting the ladies' uncomprehending eyes: "Perhaps you have somehow missed the advertisement in Wednesday's Morning Wire! Heading the List of Deaths.... 'General Sir Philip Forbis, K.C.B.' and so on.... 'Result of accident.... No Flowers, By Request.' (He hated paraphernalia!) ... 'R.I.P.'" ...

Under cover of the ladies' sympathetic exclamations, John secured the front page of the Morning Wire without any results. But the "Obituary Notices" in the Illustrated Society of that morning's issue supplied him in full with the intelligence he desired....

At Kerr's Arbour, Tweedburgh, N.B., had died on the previous Saturday, the man John was going up North to meet.

"A notable figure in Society and oldest living representative of one of the most ancient Catholic families upon the Border," stated the chronicler, "has now passed away in the person of Major-General Sir Philip Forbis, K.C.B., C.M.G., etc. Born at Kerr's Arbour, Tweedburgh, 1834, the seat of his family for sixteen generations. Married Muriel Helen (d. 1910), dau. of C. Colleston, Esq., J. P., of Wyond Hall, Norfolk. Edu. R.M.A. Woolwich. Entered Royal Horse Artillery 1852. Col. 1882, retired as Hon. Maj. Gen. 1884. Served in Crimean Campaign 1854-7. Wounded eight times. Medal, clasp and Turkish Medal. Prepared five contingents for the War in South Africa. Upon the outbreak of War with Germany in 1914 Major-General Forbis, having kept abreast of modern military progress, raised and trained a Yeomanry Regiment of Light Cavalry for Kitchener's New Army, three squadrons of which are now serving with distinction in France. The deceased officer met his death, as perhaps he would have chosen,—while leading a charge of the Fourth and Fifth Squadrons, on the Cauldstanes Muirlees Racecourse, ceded by the Local Racing Committee to Government as a Military Exercise Ground."

John thought the Major General deceased must have been a jolly fine old fellow. Mentally picturing him as lightly-built, active, wiry and upright, with a keen light blue eye, crisp white hair and close-clipped white moustache, giving the brusque touch of soldierly decision to an aquiline-featured face of many criss-cross wrinkles. He added a peppery temper when put out, and a light hand on a bridle, before he proceeded to the paragraph below:

"General Forbis' elder son, Captain Mark Forbis of the 'Gray Hussars,' went out with the First British Expeditionary Army in August, 1914, and was killed before Mons, while rendering a service for which he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. The second son, the Rev. Father Julian Forbis, of the Order of St. Gerard (now head of the family), has served with distinction as a Chaplain with the Mediterranean Forces recently withdrawn from Gallipoli. Miss Forbis, V.A.D., has rendered excellent service in France as an Ambulance Driver for the Red Cross Society. She has fortunately recovered from the muscular strain, for the treatment of which she was invalided home some months previously; and pending her return to more active duties, has been assisting the overworked Nursing Staff at Cauldstanes County Hospital."

A paragraph below continued:

"The origin of the name of 'Kerr's Arbour,' which has always distinguished the ancient mansion dignified by the massive peel-tower (built by a certain Sir Hew Forbis in 1147 and which has been for nearly nine hundred years the seat of the Forbis' family), is lost in the mists of antiquity. Owing to the loss of some ancient documents, the Scottish Herald's College and collateral authorities can throw but little light upon the question, when broached. The Forbis coat of arms consists of a shield with three escallops argent on a fesse between two chevrons sable and gules, with the crest of a wolf's head and the motto: 'FORBYS FOES FA.' But that the original founder of the Forbis family was a Roman tribune named Marcus Fabius, who, reared in Egypt by a Community of Coptic monks, brought his Christian faith with his sword to Britain, in the service of the Emperor Constantius, seems to be generally agreed."

John wondered how the bigwigs at the Scottish Herald's College would like a dip into the contents of that calfskin bag of Old Mendel's. Stowed well within touch of elbow, beside him on the seat, it struck him as wearing a consciously-secretive air. For the bag knew all about the antecedents of the Forbis's (going back a whole generation before Marcus F.). It could have told how the Crusader Sir Hew Forbis (whom John would have liked to kick for a family reason)—built the Tower:—and where the bags of French gold came from that paid the architect and the workmen, and quarried the stone, and "bocht ye lyme an ye clypins of a troop of ye Scots Kyng's Horsys ye betyr for to bynd ye same." ... And why Sir Hew called the place Kir Saba,—transmogrified in the course of centuries to quite another name.

But on these points Scottish Herald's College must perforce remain in ignorance, unless Katharine Forbis—of Kerr's Arbour—who had driven a Car for the Red Cross in France, and had got somehow hurt in lifting wounded Tommies,—and had eyes of "gold and bramble-dew"—John Hazel was mightily taken with that simile of Stevenson's—unless Katharine Forbis should consent to share the secrets of the calfskin bag....

Katharine Forbis, the Ideal Woman.... Devoid as John was of any knowledge of her personality, the vague outlines supplied by the gossip of his fellow passengers adapted themselves quite wonderfully to the image stamped upon his mental retina one April day in Flanders on the grim road that led from the British Reserve Trenches to the Firing Line. Had he received that post-card—and it must have been sent, for She had promised—would it have been signed with the initials K.F.?

Katharine Forbis.... Katharine Forbis. What luck if this Katharine were She? He leaned back and shut his tired eyes, and fell to dreaming of this Katharine: a Princess of the North with cairngorm eyes; to whose court was momentarily drawing nearer—out of the Orient from whence all Mystery springs—a swarthy legate,—bringing neither apes nor parrots, embroideries or spices,—but the rare jewel of an ancient oath of fealty, unbroken by the use and wear of more than sixteen hundred years.

IX

Certain passengers travelling by the Kelso Express were presently switched off on a Branch Line, to rumble for a chilly hour in unwarmed and feebly-lighted carriages, between low-breasting heathery hills patched with larch and oak-woods, shagged with gorse and delicately topped with snow. Upon the left hand, beyond the blue-green riband of a river narrowing between its encroaching icy borders; lying between low sandstone cliffs hollowed by spates from the hills, the last embers of a fierce red sunset were smouldering away....

Signs of the Day were apparent, in the significant age or suggestive youth of the plaided shepherds who moved as isolated dots upon the cheerless landscape; their collies bounding at their heels, or harrying flocks of black-faced sheep back to the round, stone-built folds upon the hills. Or in the macintosh and shawl-enveloped women driving shaggy ponies in the farm-gigs; or kilted and breeched, wearing the green armlet with the red Crown and lettering,—carting mangolds or forking swedes, herding rough-coated milch-cows back to the byres—or wheeling red Post Office bicycles up steep brae-roads.

A fanged east wind spattering icy sleet, blew from the North Sea across the Cheviots, and lights began to twinkle from grey stone-built manses and slate-roofed farms. Dark had come down when the train stopped at Cauldstanes, the bleak little granite station of the Border market-town. The dazzling blue-white headlights of a big Rolls-Royce car blazed in the dark beyond the platform fence-rails. A one-armed, silver-badged male servant waited on the wet asphalte under the jumping gas. The Station Master, stout, white-bearded and important, passed towards the rear of the train, demanding a "ledda for Whingates." Presently to return, loaded with rugs, pillows and suit-cases, ushering the sought-for lady,—who said in her characteristically staccato accents as she bade her fellow-traveller adieu:

"Good-night and good-bye, if we never meet again! Though this is a small world, isn't it?—and most roads seem to cross at the Front. No! you are Not to help with the things! ... Mr. Smellie will be so obliging.... And here is Padsworth. Glad to see you so fit, Padsworth. I've not forgotten to bring the artificial arm!"

Thus Lady Wastwood, who vanished away into the conjectural regions beyond the platform fence-rails, tall, thin, triangular-faced, graciously smiling; attended by the laden station-master and followed by the one-armed groom....

A red-cheeked girl in a macintosh and scarlet Tam O' Shanter took the soldier's ticket at the gate in the platform-railing, and cried in a strident key, intended for some unseen ear:

"Mrs. Govan, mem! ... Is Mrs. Govan no' ootside wi' the doug-cairt frae the Cross Keys?"

A voice pleasanter, rounder and more womanly, came back out of the blackness of the station entrance-yard, crying:

"Ay, am I, Leezie! Is Cornel Yaill there?"

Leezie shrieked back as the headlights of the Rolls-Royce revolved, and the big car turning,—backed, snorted, forged ahead and sped away on soundless tyres into the chilly darkness:

"I kenna, but there's a sodger seekin' a nicht's lodgin'!"

"Tell him the Cross Keys wi' guid supper an' clean beddin' is inside the meenute's walk frae here!" called back the matronly voice. "Losh me! Whatna's that?"

As John Hazel stood outside the platform gate, in the wind-blown flare of its solitary gas-lamp, another tall figure in khaki had appeared from the velvety blur of blackness under the eaves of the preposterous little booking-office; and passing close to the head of the quiet beast between the shafts, had halted by the off-wheel and spoken to the driver....

"Eh, Cornel!" the womanly voice went on, "Gude guide us, but ye scairt me sair! Risin' up oot o' the dairk richt under auld Broonie's nose! ... But that the meir kens ye, the puir beast micht have boltit. An' wha' wad manage the Cross Keys then, I wad weel like to know!"

The answer came in a man's deep voice, with an inflection of melancholy underlying its pleasantness:

"I am sorry, Mrs. Govan. But how is it I find you here, on such a bitter night?"

"Huts! The nicht's no' waur than ither for the time o' year," Mrs. Govan retorted from her perch on the driver's seat. "An' the guidman being laid by wi' a sair hoast—forbye a lad we canna' trust wi' a guid beast on a mirk night—there's nane but mysel' to drive ye to Kerr's Arbour!" The speaker added, in the high keening tone which a Scotswoman of her class invariably assumes in speaking of things having reference to death and mourning; "An' haud ye back ae mair half-hoor from ane that's thinkin' lang until ye come to her—I wouldna'! Not to win my ain lad Alec back frae the Front the night!" She went on as the person addressed made a responsive sound of indeterminate meaning:

"But whatna's to hinder ye, Cornel Yaill, knowing the road's weel as yer pocket, frae driving yersel—as ye've done to my knowledge—mony an' mony a time before noo. Up wi' ye!" She relinquished the reins and jumped down, nimbly enough considering her years and matronly proportions, adding as the man she addressed promptly assumed her vacated seat.... "Bid them gie Broonie a het mesh, puir thing, she's nane sae yoong as has been!—and mind ye send her back wi' the cairt early in the morn's morn. She'll be wantit to bring Mr. Kellar, the lawyer, oot on business conneckit wi' the Will! Na, na! I'll no' be needing a lift to the Cross Keys! Here's a soger-man from Lunnon that's bound for the inn, and needin' a wise body to guide him. Gang yer ways wi' guid luck! Gie my love to Miss Forbis!"

The woman added as Yaill tightened the reins, and the mare, answering a whip-touch with an indignant snort, trotted away with the dog-cart into the sleety darkness:

"Your road's lang and ower rough. But, O, Man! there's a braw, braw leddy waiting to greet ye at the ither end!"

X

She was so braw a lady,—not only in the physical meaning of splendid height and just bodily proportion; noble outlines and sweet, healthful hues; hair as richly black-brown as the bracken of her wintry braes, and eyes as tawny-golden as the crystals of her Scottish mountains,—that the heart of the man who loved and had lost her, seemed to shrivel and blister in his bosom, as though some fierce corrosive acid had been poured upon the throbbing flesh....

Again and again he said what he was coming to say, as the willing mare, urged by no sparing hand, made good her journey towards Kerr's Arbour. Straining up steep bare brae-roads; picking her way down slippery descents; plashing through muddy bottoms walled with high cliff-banks clad with funereal firs and shadowy larches, revealed by passing gleams from the dog-cart's lamps. As the high-road changed to a hilly private road bordered by a plantation of conifers backed by a wire park-fence, the beast, which had given signs of distress unheeded by the man—checked at the steep with almost a woman's sob....

Something in the sound wakened a dull pity in Edward Yaill. He got down, and walked beside Brownie, as she slipped and stumbled on stones washed loose by the rain-scour; and as a soldier will, he cursed the badness of the road. It was in a rotten state, compared to what it had been before the War came to take its super-toll of human energy. Sweeping into its huge and bloody maw gentle and simple, noble and infamous, ignorant and learned, penniless and rich. Nothing was the same. Nothing would, could, ever be the same again. Life had been transmuted, not into gold—but from honest silver into a strange, new ugly metal—in this vast, comprehensive crucible of War....

Most hopelessly, irremediably changed of all human beings was Edward Yaill. Once a man meant by his Maker to inhabit an earthly Paradise, by the warm, fragrant side of the tenderest of mates. To that sick-hearted wretch, dogged by a pitiless Fate: outcast, or it seemed so to him—from decent Society: traitor to the woman unswervingly worshipped through the long years of a drawn-out engagement, it was meagrest comfort to know himself blamelessly loyal. Even as a Saint who in the delirium of fever has heard his own crazed voice blaspheming God....

In the horrible wreck and wastage of Yaill's plans, one thought was clear. He must get to Katharine first, and tell her himself before others carried the tale. He looked up at the thin, pale face of the new moon coldly staring down at him between overshadowing branches, and thought it judged and condemned and repulsed him; like the face of the woman in the train. The woman knew Katharine Forbis—might even have written to her. He might find Kerr's Arbour mined, when he got there. A hundred things might have happened to ruin his chances.... What chances he meant he did not clearly know.

Sometimes his mood was cold as he tramped by Brownie, and sometimes hot,—but always he tramped in Hell. He was going—going unless another had been before him, to break the heart of the dearest of living women with five words of his mouth.

"Listen! I have married another!" Afterwards adding: "Even with my soul and body worshipping none but you!" Then—would she die with her great wide eyes reproaching him? Or would she drive him from her with words of scorn? Scornful words would be unlike Katharine Forbis—Katharine who rarely judged and seldom blamed. But the silence in which she would hear him out to an ending, would be infinitely more tragic, unspeakably more terrible than wrath....

Insensibly beneath his feet the steepness levelled. Another mile and Kerr's Arbour would be in sight. But Yaill walked on, now obsessed and held by visions. In mental flashes Katharine came and went.

A hundred times they had climbed this hill together. He felt as though she moved beside him now. He could see the sleet-drops glistening on her smooth cheek, whipped to a sweet carnation by the chilly wind. The scent of camphor from her furs came back to him, with the light pressure of her gloved hand upon his arm. In his ears were the tones of her nice voice,—the frank glance of her fair eyes seemed to meet his, for him were her gay words and her tender ones—like the sweet smile upon her rather large mouth. A smile that expressed its owner's innate conviction—shared by the majority of her acquaintances—that never under any imaginable circumstances could Miss Forbis be unwelcome or undesirable in the estimation of any being she chose to bless. No wonder her wretched Edward was wrung and tortured. In vision after vision she came and vanished, as he tramped beside the now exhausted Brownie under the thin new February moon.

The iron-hard ringing ground, slippery with cat-ice; whitened with powdery hoar-frost; flowed on unheeded under the footfalls of brute and human, who marched together to a worsting Fate. All Nature seemed to reproduce Yaill's mood—the desolate, wintry hills, the eerie scream of the whaups—frozen out of their feeding-grounds in marsh and bogland,—the wailing cry of the hunting-owls, were in tune with him. The skirl of the north-east wind, honed to a razor-edge on the Jutland coast—tanged with the freezing salt of the wild North Sea; mined, patrolled, netted, guarded,—watched from bleak shore to shore, and from the oozy depths, and from the immeasurable heights of Air, by friends and foes, indomitable in hatred,—echoed through the chambers of his desolate heart....

In the Spring of 1910 they had become engaged, and were to have been married in the Winter of that year,—but her mother had died—and Katharine had been unwilling to leave her father, and there had been delays and delays.... And then the wedding had been arranged to take place in the Autumn of 1914, and the War had prevented it—the damnable War!

He ground his teeth, thinking of what the War had done for him and for many another man as wretched—and the distant hooting of the owls, freezing as they hunted freezing rick-mice—and the shriek of the north-east wind—sounded like Irish Banshees wailing the coming death of beautiful love....

For Katharine's love had always been perfectly beautiful. She had been the ideal mate—the sweetheart who never palls. She had fed her lover's heart with the wholesome bread of tenderness, and never let his soul lack nourishment. She had met him full at every turn and exigency of Life—even as they had moved to meet it side by side. In the purest, most spiritual sense these betrothed lovers were wedded—though their ancient Church had not yet made them one.

And now he was hastening to meet her and pull down his tower of love about his ears. Why hurry? whooped the owls and skirled the curlew. If you are going to tell her as you purpose, will you not reach Kerr's Arbour far too soon? But if you have the wisdom that men boast of—take what Life yet may give ere you lose all....

He topped the crest of the final steep, and halted to let his dumb companion breathe awhile.... Now the sharp tuff-tuff of a motor-cycle came out of the distance behind him, and he wondered who was having so cold a ride upon that road to-night. Even from this point he looked on his journey's ending, with the sensation that a man may have in meeting with a dying friend....

Nothing of beauty characterised Kerr's Arbour, an irregular mass of masonry rising from a walled garden-courtyard shut in by high yew-hedges: a stone wall and a porte-cochère of ancient wrought-iron, beyond a bridged dry moat at the bottom of the private road. It showed as a rambling house of Early Jacobean architecture tacked on to the peel-tower reared by Sir Hew Forbis the Crusader, somewhere about 1147. The ancient battlemented tower was squat and clumsy, the rooms with rare exceptions were low-pitched, the ancient casements small, the stairways narrow, and the stone-flagged passages anything but level to the tread. But set in a fold of the snow-tipped hills and shielded on North and East with plantations of oak and evergreen, with the snow-veiled mirror of a little lake, burn-fed, trouty, haunted with heron and other waterfowl,—lying beyond the wintry gardens to the southward; with chilly moonlight on its frosty battlements and lying in pools upon its stone-flagged terrace; and smoke curling from its clustered chimneys; with mingled firelight and lamplight winking from well known windows—it caught at the wanderer's heart as a vision of Home.

He looked up at the black-white sky, and it seemed to his misery, that beyond that inky wrack and livid cumulus—hurrying south like a curse rushing to fulfil itself—dwelt One who in His high austere remoteness looked coldly on the pigmy woes of men. To Whom his pangs were the struggle of the fly in the milk-jug,—the writhings of the worm severed by the gardener's mattock,—the pain of the snail being beaten by the thrush on the stone....

What, O what was it to Him that Katharine's love had always been perfectly beautiful! And that to live beggared of all that wealth of sweetness—perhaps through all the years of life to follow—would be sheer Hell to her lover, Edward Yaill.

Yaill shrieked at the thought, as a man at the stab of the bayonet—and the sweat broke out upon him, despite the cold. His hand went out and gripped the shaft of the dog-cart, so fiercely that the dogskin glove split.... Baulked passion, thwarted desire rent and tore him. Oh, what were Honour and Truth but pithless meanings! He would go down to Kerr's Arbour where she waited, and love and be loved before the ending came. He would drink one draught of the wine his soul and body craved for—before Fate dashed the cup out of his hands.

So said, so it should be done. He took the reins from the hame-spike, and the flare of the wind-blown candle-lamp showed his smile. He sprang to his seat and snatched the whip from the socket, and lashed the mare—who broke into a furious gallop—the cart swinging and lurching perilously behind her as she pounded madly down the steep descent. At the bottom lay the curve of the dry moat, crossed by what had been a wooden drawbridge, converted in the reign of the last Stuart monarch, into an arch of rough-cut granite blocks. Beyond the bridge and a short avenue of beeches rose the rust-red iron gates of Kerr's Arbour, with the arms of the house wrought into their ancient tracery: a wolf's head crest with the motto "FORBYS FOES FA" above a shield with the plain device of three escallops argent on a fesse between two chevrons sable and gules.

The gates stood open for the guest of honour. On their cracked stone pillars, topped with grotesque lead effigies of wolves, each supporting the sword of a Crusader, oil lanterns burned, dangling by chains from iron cressets (meant to hold flares of greased or tarry tow). A dog barked within, and the cracked familiar voice of Whishaw, the butler, snapped out angrily:

"Down, Dawtie! Quiet, bitch! Gin ye dinna ken the Colonel, ye daumned eediot, canna ye haud yer tongue like Laddie an' Bran?"

The dog-cart's worn tyres shirred on the gravel of the courtyard. Yaill leaped down. The heavy nailed hall-door stood wide open. Warmth and light rushed together on the exile, and the scent of flowers, the pretty smells of burning peat and apple-wood, lavender, camphor and sandal from the great Japan cabinets ranged in the hall, came to him in a satisfyingly, fragrant whiff. This was home.... Katharine's home.... And Katharine.... He trembled and a mist blurred his vision—and then his sick heart leaped—because she came.

XI

Came with a rush, and a whisper of silken draperies, straight as an arrow to his starving heart. The chastened passion of her embrace of welcome—the guarded flame of ardour in her kisses—the rapture in her pure eyes told her lover that he was loved as dearly as of old. Unchanged, O God! She who must learn to-morrow, perhaps to-night, to loathe the name of Yaill....

She led him in, moving with the elastic step and upright carriage that gave her, amongst other women, the air of an uncrowned queen. As they passed the chapel door he saw through the stained glass that more lights burned there than the ruby star of the Sanctuary Lamp. She caught his puzzled look, and whispered to him:

"Because my father lies there until his Funeral. Presently you shall see him, dearest Edward. He always loved you like another son."

Her father.... So he was dead, the fine old General. It was true that Yaill had been fond of the dear old fellow, in some remote and shadowy long ago.... Now Katharine was saying, in that blessed voice of hers:

"I was quite sure that when you got my cable, you would come to me, if the surgeons said you were fit. Not unless! ... I made that clear! You understood that, Edward? You would not have been so cruel as to come if it hurt you, dear?"

He moved his head after a non-committing fashion. He had to hide his ignorance of this cable, sent to the Convalescent Camp at the B—— Base, announcing the death of which he now first learned. He realised that he brought with him into this honourable dwelling, subterfuge, pretence, concealment and evasion.... By use of these he must make his way, warily, as over duckboards laid on quaking mud. Presently one would be lying.... Lying to Katharine, the crystal soul of candour and honesty....

Now he was sitting upon her right at the dinner-table, wondering at the keen appetite provoked in him by the savour and sight of well-prepared, well-cooked food. A pink-eyed, silver-haired, Shetland-shawl-enveloped elderly lady, a Mrs. Bell—once nursery governess to the Forbis children, and now occupying an indefinable position in the household,—opposed him upon Katharine's left hand; the carved oak arm-chair usually occupied by the master of the house, remaining in its place at the head of the table; a Persian cat, the dead man's favourite, curled up asleep upon its faded seat.... Nor did the dogs,—a collie, an old pointer-bitch, and a Scotch deer-hound—desert their accustomed posts upon the threadbare patches of the Turkey carpet; though uneasy whimpers testified to their sense of strangeness, and their wistful eyes were always on the door.... Once their tails drubbed and their jaws slavered a welcome, when a thin elderly priest came in, and bowing with the formal grace of the seminary—as Miss Forbis introduced Colonel Yaill to Father Inghame—made a remark about the bitter weather, and took the cover evidently laid for him—upon the right of the master's empty chair.

He was fasting, for a dish of spinach with eggs was brought to him, though Friday's dishes figured on the board. He looked fagged and ate with evident lack of appetite; admitting in reply to Katharine's inquiries that the road to Peelston Bridge was uncommonly trying—even for a cyclist inured to conditions in France. It transpired presently—for the priestly reserve yielded to the charm of Yaill's voice, his courtesy and soldierly frankness—that Father Inghame was not a Secular priest but a Religious of the Order of St. Gerard; who had served as chaplain attached to a Division of the First British Expeditionary Force; received a shrapnel-wound in the First Battle of the Aisne, and had come home in charge of a Hospital convoy. Further, that he was discharging the easy duties incumbent on the resident chaplain at Kerr's Arbour, until his health should be sufficiently re-established, in the opinion of his Superior—to warrant his return to the Front.

"Which I hope may be soon, very soon!" he ended. "For I think that Miss Forbis will not misunderstand me, when I say that I want to get back to real work. To eat the bread of idleness in comfort and safety while brave men are dying hourly in muddy trenches, is not—for a priest who is able-bodied and hardy enough—"

"To subsist upon the rocky biscuit, and munch the iron ration of War!" said Yaill's deep, soft voice with the under-note of melancholy; "Men who have done far less than yourself, Father," he went on, "are content with ordinary War-conditions at home. Would not the charge of a crowded Mission in the East or West End of London—or possibly in a Hertfordshire village, with the certainty of—say two bomb-raids per week, be sufficient to satisfy your thirst for risks?"

Father Inghame returned with a queer hot light burning in each of his hollow eyes, and a flush rising under his sallow skin:

"Indeed, Colonel, you overrate the small part that I have been permitted to play in the opening acts of this unfinished drama of Armageddon." He went on, prompted to pay a genuine tribute of admiration to the distinguished soldier whose heroism was as proverbial in the mouths of men as the record of his misfortunes: "Compared with the experiences that you have passed through, such as have fallen to my lot are, to say the least of them, trivial. Except with regard to the conduct of those Catholic soldiers whom it has been my privilege to confess and communicate. How often when I have passed through the trenches under heavy shell-fire, carrying the Blessed Sacrament,—I have seen them take off their shrapnel-helmets—though shell-splinters were flying about, and machine-gun bullets whistling overhead. And with what childlike simplicity and faith they would kneel in the stinking mud to receive their Saviour! And with what sublime endurance and resignation they have rendered up their souls to God.... All my life long, I shall be rich in such memories: bequeathed to me, not only by Catholics, but by Protestants, Presbyterians, Dissenters, and members of the Church of England,—whom I have seen die with the light of Faith upon their blackened faces—whispering the prayer that was made by God for men!"

"The splendid men!" said Katharine's full warm voice. "Oh! how can we ever be proud enough of these men of ours! Haven't I hugged myself whenever I remembered—'I am your countrywoman, you great dears!'"

Yaill's eyes met hers, and an exquisite thrill was interchanged between them. When they were once more conscious of the outer world, the Father was saying—with some lack of tactful prevision:

"It is said there were a good many Catholics in the rank and file of your regiment. In the First and Second Battalions of 'The Tweedburghs,' in 1914—as in those battalions reconstituted," he hesitated, "after the disasters of Le Cateau-Cambrésis and Loos—I have heard the percentage estimated at twenty-five."

"The estimate is correct," Yaill answered, speaking with admirable composure, though a tell-tale muscle fluttered in his lean brown cheek, and Katharine drew a quick breath of painful sympathy. He added, with a curious intonation: "Yet, despite scapulars, medals, rosaries, badges and other practical life-assurances—the Catholic men you speak of lie under stinking mud with other fellows now. Ha, ha, ha!"

And he laughed with such unnaturally loud and mirthless violence, that Whishaw at the sideboard jumped and dropped a dish-cover, and Katharine's sweet eyes went to him in grave surprise.

Those eyes of Katharine's, "of gold and bramble-dew," never strayed long from the face of her dear one. She was nurse as well as lover, and that strange laughter had filled her with dismay. She wished that the Father had been wise enough to shun the agonising subject. Why had it not occurred to her to warn him not to refer to Edward's terrible experiences, she asked herself, aching in sympathy with Edward's pain. But thin ice is a lure to some skaters,—these not the most brilliant performers. Father Inghame pursued, in a tone that was not untinged with rebuke:

"You would not suggest, I feel sure, Colonel, that the Catholic men of your own or any other regiment regarded rosaries, scapulars and medals as charms and mascots—and not as legitimate aids to faith?"

Yaill's face hardened to a mask of pale brown granite. His fine dark brows drew sternly into line. His grey eyes gleamed, and below the clipped moustache a faint smile hovered. He played with the stem of an antique wine-glass of cut green crystal; twirling it in the long sensitive fingers of a hand as beautifully shaped as strong. And he returned, while feigning to admire the delicate workmanship of the long-dead engraver:

"You are right. I intended to convey no such suggestion." He changed the trend of the conversation by asking the little pink-eyed Mrs. Bell when she had last heard from her son in India. And his agreeable, well-bred tones gave no hint of the frenzy of impotent resentment raging within him against the Supreme Power Who set the pellet Earth with her sister planets, to follow their orbits round the white-hot Sun—and modelled the lord of the world—Man, in the form of the Creator; and set in his breast a spark of Divine Intelligence; and bade him live, and love, and be loved again—O anguish!—a finite being with immortal yearnings—condemned to dwell in the upas-shadow of Death.

To house an immortal Soul in the breast of a pigmy, in the blood of whose veins armies of microbes make War. Whose tiny gullet can be blocked by a swallowed fish-bone; whose seeing eye, that miracle of miracles, by a thorn-prick or a blow can be rendered blind! Whose brain, that has solved the secrets of Creation; reduced the Universe to its chemical constituents; made an ally of the once tameless lightning; abolished Time, and annihilated Distance; set bounds which Plague and Pestilence may not overpass; made ships to fly in Air and sail below water—may by a blow be mashed in its eggshell skull. Or by the detonation of a shell packed with High Explosive, be churned to merest pap of grey matter, dead to sensation, incapable of Thought. Or be so thrown out of gear as to order the body to speech, impulses, acts, in opposition to the Will. Seemingly sane, O horrible, horrible mockery! until the awakening from trance or stupor, or whatever the vile bedevilment may be. From the condition of No. 40, Shell Shock Ward 8, General Casualty Hospital 70—and the state of No. 80, Convalescent British Officers Camp, B—— Base—to the present plight of the complainant; captive within the enclosure of a sacramental vow!

This was the rankling grievance nursed by Edward Yaill against his Maker. The son of a Catholic house, reared in the Faith, loyal to the Church, scrupulous in the discharge of religious duties, he had never for one instant imagined himself at variance with his God. That he could quit the fold of Catholic Christianity on the grounds of intellectual doubt, he knew to be impossible. Like the devils, he believed—even while he revolted. His was the pain of the child who, loving the father, has discovered him to be unjust. The muscle twitched in his lean cheek, and a quiver passed over his stern features as a ripple will traverse the surface of still water. And to Katharine's tender, watching eyes, it seemed that all was not well with Edward. She breathed a little silent prayer to Our Lady for him, and unconsciously her large white hands folded together on the tablecloth. They were beautifully-modelled hands, with tapering fingers, and nails that had been exquisite in pre-War days. The damaged nails that gallant British women were not at all ashamed to show.

Yaill knew that those fair hands had done distasteful, rough, laborious tasks with glorious goodwill and cheerfulness. He loved them and admired them all the more. He could picture them holding up the drooping head of a wounded man—or offering cool drink to the parching lips of the dying. He had sipped sparkling burn-water from their cupped palms many a time on a hot day up yonder on the moors. He had seen them folded in prayer, he had covered them with kisses by her sweet permission. When he had bidden her good-bye upon leaving for the Front—she had taken his head between those hands, and kissed him solemnly upon the forehead—and traced the sign of the Cross there—as his mother might have done, had she been alive. And God, Whom he had served and trusted—had for no fault of his, taken from Yaill who worshipped her—this pearl and paragon among women. And upon this count he held himself betrayed.

There would never be "Nil" upon Yaill's disc, but he had finished with prayer, and the Sacraments, and Mass-going for ever.... Unless—by some marvellous—miraculous happening, the Great Wrong should be set right.

XII

Dinner ended. Little, pink-eyed Mrs. Bell enveloped herself in her Shetland shawls and discreetly vanished, with a plaintive murmur of good-night. Yaill, with set, formal courtesy, giving precedence to the Church—followed Father Inghame and Katharine through a curtained archway communicating with the adjoining drawing-room.

"Thank you, Miss Forbis, but I will not stay for coffee. I have to make a visit to the chapel—and write some letters, and after night-prayers I shall go to bed, for I am beat out. I only wanted to say that Father Haildon, the priest in charge of your Parish Church at Birkleas, will celebrate the Requiem Mass on Monday; and that the Father Superior of the Monastery at Scraeside," he named a place some miles distant from Birkleas,—"will esteem it an honour to be permitted to assist. He will bring a Jesuit priest from London who is staying at the Monastery (Father Bevan, of Farm Place, Grosvenor Crescent)—and all are agreed that ten o'clock will be the most suitable hour. The boys of the Birkleas choir will drive over in the break with Father Haildon; and the lady who acts as organist will take the place of Mrs. Bell. That is all, except to wish you a very good night!" He shook hands with Miss Forbis and moved in the direction of the door opening on the hall, adding: "Mass will be at half-past seven as usual to-morrow. Perhaps—" his eyes went doubtfully to the tall khaki figure and downward-bent, thoughtful face of Yaill, who stood upon the worn tiger-skin hearthrug with a hand gripping the ledge of the mantelshelf: "perhaps as Whishaw's grandson has influenza, Colonel Yaill would like to serve Mass?"

There was an instant's pause before Yaill answered. He stared into the wood and peat fire blazing in the antique bowed steel grate, and seemed as though he had not heard. A log hissed; spurted brilliant flame; broke and fell—scattering sparks upon the old Dutch hearth-tiles. Two or three lodged upon the tiger-skin, mingling the fragrance of the charring apple-wood with the ugly acrid tang of frizzling hair. Then Yaill said, punctuating the sentence with stamps of his boot-heel:

"I fear I must—ask—to be excused, sir."

The priest's response was the gentle opening and closing of the door. Then with her long light step and a whisper of silken draperies, Katharine crossed over and stood on the hearth at her lover's side. He did not move or lift his head, but his starved heart answered the call of her nearness with a leap of fierce delight. His arm went out and round her, and she leaned lightly against him, and whispered against his cheek, close to his ear:

"If you knew what joy it is to me, to have you! ... Dear Edward! I am not much good at words—but you understand?"

He said, stiffening his lips against his teeth to check their trembling:

"No words have yet been made to express what you are to me—Dearest of all women!—and have been always, since the blessed hour when I saw you first!"

She was not a woman from whom to exact caresses. You waited the moment when she was pleased to give. Now she swayed nearer and her bosom brushed his—and the world went dim as they exchanged a kiss....

Last time they had met she had worn a Regulation tunic and short uniform skirt of blue serge, thick high Service boots and a plain blue felt hat with an enamelled Red Cross badge, and had been no less beautiful in his eyes. Now her tall lithe shapeliness was in silken raiment, like the beautiful arched feet in their buckled shoes. The rigorous plainness of her mourning dress added to her beauty, with its pure strong outlines and rich creamy skin. Her high-bred simplicity was the dominant note of her—or was it her generosity, her sympathy, or her piety? ...

A man had once said to Yaill in the early stages of the friendship that had changed so quickly into passionate love:

"She would be enchanting if she were not so holy!"

And Yaill had answered, with his grave eyes following her:

"Holiness is the bloom upon the nectarine."

Well, it was true. She was all the more attractive for the piety that graced her beauty, the devotion that exhaled from her, unconsciously as the fragrance from the rose.... Like Yaill's dead mother, she had no use for a man who was not religious. She had a standard and expected her beloveds to live up to it. And Yaill had done so, according to his lights.

She leaned closer, and her long, beautiful arm curved across his tunic, and her fond hand stroked the ribbons on his breast. Lingering over them, enumerating with silently moving lips the list of her man's distinctions, from the orange-centred blue and red of the Queen's medal of the South African War of 1899-1901, to the red ribbon of the Victoria Cross; the rainbow of the Star of Mons: the blue-edged red of the D.S.O. the white-mauve-white of the Military Cross; and the green, red-lined ribbon of Belgium's Croix de Guerre—with the sweet colour coming and going in her cheeks, and her dark lashes lowered over the shining cairngorm eyes. His sick heart ached anew, she was so wifely; and so womanly in her insistence on her point. For she went on urging:

"Then, I may tell Father Inghame that you will serve Mass on my father's last day in the old home, and in his place? ... He would yield the privilege to no one—unless it were my brother Julian—so gladly as to you. Say that I may say 'Yes!'"

Yaill's deep voice answered, slowly and heavily:

"He was a good man. No better ever lived, I am quite certain. And under most conceivable circumstances—to me his wish would be law. But I cannot take his place beside the altar or even attend at Mass."

He felt her start. She asked him quickly:

"There is some reason—"

"There is of course a reason!" He stirred a smouldering log with the toe of his high boot.

"Your health?" Her voice had the sharpened edge of anxiety, and her bosom rose and fell with her quickened breath. His starved eyes dwelt on the modelling of her wide brows, the black lashes of the sweet eyelids that dropped under his scrutiny, the setting of her head on the throat's white column, the superb width of her shoulders, the arch of her deep chest....

"Your health.... There is more to hear than I have been told—is there not? Don't keep—anything back from me, Edward. Nothing is so terrible to bear as suspense."

"There is nothing.... Have you ever known me keep anything back from you, my dearest?" he asked, in wonder at his own hypocrisy. For he knew that to have answered, "I have lost the Faith" would be to her an overwhelming blow. "Now tell me of Julian. You wrote to me that"—the speaker hesitated, mentally groping, "that he had applied to his Superior General and got leave to volunteer for service as a Chaplain with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force."

"That was in last December. But the permission was delayed, as I wrote you later, and he sailed for Lemnos with the 29th Division a year ago this February. We heard from him next from Gallipoli,—such brave, cheerful letters. But since August 21st.... Oh, Edward!" She caught her breath sharply and paled and reddened. "Since the 21st not a line—not a single line!"

Yaill's forehead knitted in the effort to remember. Thin, thin ice here. He must go warily....

She went on:

"We know from the despatches published in the newspapers and from letters written to us by friends of Julian's, that he went forward with his brigade when the 29th Division fought through the scrub-fire to the top of Scimitar Hill.... When the terrible Turkish shrapnel swept them back down the hillside Julian stayed with the wounded—giving First Aid and comforting the dying. A brother Religious of St. Gerard who was with the Eleventh Division, visited us here afterwards and told us; 'Father Forbis was splendid!' ... 'One of the Church's many heroes!' he called him. But he could enlighten us no more than the people at the War Office.... And it broke my heart to look at Father—as the weeks went by and by without bringing any news.... He bore it in silence, but he has suffered dreadfully. I have heard him over and over, walking up and down at night in his bedroom. And by day one could see him hanging on the hope of a wire from Whitehall. Oh, Edward!—the wire that never will come, perhaps! That last day I saw Father alive, when he rode out with his Adjutant to put the last polish on the Fourth and Fifth Squadron of his Yeomanry at Cauldstanes Muirlees Racecourse—he looked so beautiful that my heart swelled big for pride in him,—and so sorrowful that I had to run away to cry. And he waved to me and rode up the brae without looking back to wave again, and—"

Here Katharine broke down and sobbed, and Yaill caressed his love and soothed her, setting fresh tears running in the channels that had long been dry. She had wept bitterly when Mark had been killed at Mons, though when the Tweedburgh Regiment had been wiped out near Loos, and Yaill had suffered in the blowing-in of the advanced telephone-communication dug-out, the news had reached her on the morning of an attack by German aircraft on the Clearing Hospital, and there had been not a single moment to spend in selfish grief. This last blow, coming as it had, had left her numbed to the centre of her being. Until this moment she had not cried at all ...

Yaill said, when she grew calm at last, lifting his strong brown hand to his lips, and drying with a kiss a shining drop that had fallen on it:

"We must hope for the best for Julian. He may be a prisoner with the Turks, or wounded,"—he spoke hoarsely—"or suffering after some such fashion as—makes it impossible to communicate with—those whom he loves."

"My dear," she said, knowing that his own case rose in mind, "my poor, poor dear!" And the wretched man grew sick at heart and shuddered. The mothering note in her voice called to him across the years of an engagement senselessly prolonged, that he might have heard it cooing to their children, or whispering love-words through many, many wasted nights. And the more hopelessly he yearned to her, the more he shrank from the solicitude in her sweet eyes. He had seen those eyes flame with generous anger, and sparkling with mirth, and dewy with tenderness. Now they were full of sorrow mingled with love for him. He tried to imagine how they would look her scorn....

For when she knew all the truth, she must despise him. That was the thing that made his heart a hell. The knowledge that no one could possibly believe in the innocence of the fellow who had done this hideous, brutal, beastly thing.

"Shell-shock, no doubt!" He heard the voices saying it, and saw the shake of sympathetic heads. "Shell-shock! ... How quite frightfully sad!" And through the eyeholes of the masks of sympathy, pity, commiseration—he saw the wriggle of the little snake of Doubt.

Were the truth known to the world, no one could ever believe it. He would lie, therefore, until it came to light. He would have the joy of these last hours spent beside Katharine, to remember when she banished him for ever from her side.

To Katharine, whose sore heart was eased by that burst of weeping, the joy of Edward restored shone through her sorrow as the sun through a snow-fog or a mountain mist. By and by, when Yaill settled into a well-known arm-chair, she hesitated but another instant before sinking with one swift, supple movement, down upon the hearthrug at her lover's side. He refused to smoke; she knew out of respect for the presence of Death in that bereaved, masterless house. She whispered, leaning her forehead against his shoulder, surrendering her hand to the warm, strong, masculine clasp:

"By and by we will go in together and see him. Shall we not, dearest? He would wish it!"

Yaill muttered, looking at the engagement-ring of Indian turquoises that he had placed years back on the fair womanly hand within his own:

"Certainly. If it will not be—too hard for you!"

"Too hard! O no, dear Edward!" The hearth-blaze lightened on her broad forehead as she raised it. "The hardness will be when he is there no longer, to talk to and to look at and to pray for.... To pray to, as well, being with the Holy Souls. It is wonderful to think now; 'He is with my mother!'"

"And Mark, and your little sister Rosamond."

"And Julian, perhaps. He knows now, whether Julian was killed or taken prisoner.... Turks are cruel to their captives, are they not?"

"Sometimes...."

The muscle in Yaill's thin cheek twitched. He moved restlessly:

"Sometimes.... But do not dwell on these possibilities, or torture yourself with useless conjectures. Even in the shadow of the bereavement that has fallen upon this dear home, we are together.... Together, Katharine!"

She turned and kissed the fine dark khaki cloth of his sleeve, lingeringly echoing:

"'Together.' Doesn't it seem—rather too good to be real? After all that has been—the cruel years of parting, the shock of calamity; the rush and roar of events, the ugly things of War, the horror of dreadful news—the suspense of waiting—for letters from you—letters that never came—"

"I could not—did not—" he stammered miserably and broke off.

Her strong, fine hand closed upon his reassuringly.

"My own love, did I ever for a moment, lose faith in you? Did I ever cease to write, though I never heard? ..."

He groaned in spirit, remembering his discovery of those letters.... Square envelopes containing two or three sheets of ribbed linen note-paper, covered with Katharine's clear free script.... The pocket of an old writing-case of his was stuffed with them—they had crammed that damned Japanese workbox to the lid!

Again she breathed:

"Though I never heard from you I kept on writing. Each letter like a cry from my heart to yours."

Words burst from him:

"As God hears me, I never got one of those letters!"

She drew a troubled breath and said wonderingly, with sweet, perplexed eyes seeking light from his:

"Not at the time they were written, dear, possibly. But your nurse did read them to you, Edward?—as soon as you could bear it, that is."

"Did she?"

"She was very kind. I was very grateful to her."

"Was she? ... Were you? ..."

The sweat stood in beads upon his brow and temples, and his strained knuckles showed white through the sunburnt skin.

"Kind, I mean, in writing to break the cruel truth to me, that you—Edward!—let us forget about this!"

"It will be best," he said in a low constrained tone, not looking at her. "But tell me first what truth she broke to you?"

"The truth—" He felt her warm mouth upon his hand, "that your mind was quite a blank with regard to me. That was the news that came in her first letter from the Convalescent Camp at B—— Base. I have not kept the letter—I could not!—but the date I shall remember always. October 28th, 1915."

It had been true then. The effort to remember; to conjure up figures, faces, associations, places, out of the Great Blank that had followed the shell-burst—had been attended by blinding headache, spasms of sickness and nights of insomnia. Katharine went on:

"I wrote to her—Nurse Burtonshaw—at the Camp,—and thanked her, and said that I would go on writing to you exactly the same. My work involved some risk. If I had been killed, you would have learned from those letters that I never once forgot you, Edward, dear! So I asked your nurse to put them by in some safe keeping-place, and when God in His Mercy should restore my darling's memory, to give them to him, with his Katharine's love. For I never doubted that you would recover, Edward. If I had, for one moment—how could I have gone on working? I must have given up hope! I must—"

The break in her dear voice supplied the missing end to the sentence:

"I must have broken down and died!"

XIII

When a man's own organs, senses, wits conspire against him, in league with an enamoured woman who plays traitress, what earthly chance has the man?

Yaill stared into the glowing rose-red heart of the fire, conjuring up for the thousandth time that part played by one brown puppet of a myriad of puppets similarly attired, in War's dread drama; cheek by jowl, night in and day out—with the grim tragi-comedian Death; whose paces, poses and antics, grown commonplace by dint of familiarity—at length ceased to cause a shudder, or provoke a passing jest....

The War.... A waking nightmare of cold, heat, thirst and hunger; exertion, anxiety, responsibility, fatigue; sleeplessness and NOISE, NOISE, in a ceaseless, maddening crescendo, until that flaming white-hot moment when the German 5.9 H.E. shell blew in the Advanced Telephone Communication dug-out. When consciousness of these things abruptly ceased for Yaill.

So it came to pass that stark-naked as when he was born into this world, save for a platinum disc-chain on his wrist, bearing his name, religion, rank and regiment, and a small gold Crucifix slung by a blackened cord about his neck, Number 40, Shell Shock Ward 8, General Casualty Hospital 70, on the Lines of Communication, came into being. Later on, when the Great Blank had given place to a drab-hued mental twilight, wherein men, women and children; animals, trees and houses could dimly be conjectured or unemotionally discerned; and a little later yet, when one began again to realise oneself a living puppet, playing a dull, dull part in a dreary production called Life,—with some character dimly sensed as missing from the cast, whose presence would have made a world of difference!—Number 80, Convalescent Officers' Camp, B—— Base, began to take what other nurses called a "good deal of notice" of Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw.

You are to conceive of Nurse Burtonshaw as anything but a purposeful Delilah. The piously-reared daughter of one Burton, a respectable West of England dairy-farmer,—calling herself "Burtonshaw" for reasons of her own, while serving in concert with thousands of other admirable young British women, enrolled for Service at Home and Overseas under the auspices of the Red Cross,—how shall she be held blameworthy because there beat under her Navy blue lustre overall, and white bibbed apron with its badge of red twill Turkey, a woman's heart, susceptible to Love....

Does any woman wonder? Does any man ask Why? Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw had washed Number 80; combed him, fed him, dressed him,—and put him to bed again. Administered general massage and tonics, and superintended the ministrations of the orderly-barber, unwearying, for months on end. She had soothed him,—waking from brief daylight sleeps in panics bred of hideous, nerve-shattering visions,—reproductions of such sights,—burned in upon the brain and reproduced by the subconscious memory, as made the nights grim ordeals of dread. She had alternately scolded and encouraged her patient, gaining strength mentally and physically under her unselfish, able care, until she had established herself as the hub of his universe. The sky and sea, the flowers and trees, and that fresh West Country face with its blunt features and well-opened grey-blue eyes, were the only books the patient ever cared to read in. The printed lines, the written sheets, were torture to Yaill's dazed brain and astigmatic vision. So the Commandant's private secretary attended to his business letters, and the correspondence of his friends was dealt with by Nurse....

Upon her arm at first, by her side later, he took his first walks in the Convalescent Camp grounds. When later still, he was taken for drives in the company of other shell-shocked officers, it was Nurse Burtonshaw who persuaded him not to rebel against this order of the C.M.O.... Nurse, who waited for the return of the big, crowded car and unpacked him, smiling, at the gates of Canvas Park Row, the double avenue of roomy tents pitched on the green, tree-clumped slopes rising North of the Base Port, behind the big square stone house where the Staff officers and quarters were,—and the huge, shapeless, plank-built zinc-roofed bulk of the Hospital.

"There now, you're back again and no bones broken. And whether you liked it or not, the air has done you good," she would say cheerfully, unwinding his muffler, knitted by herself in her scant spare time. For all Yaill's personal, immediate baggage had been destroyed by a Boche bomb-raid upon Battalion Staff Headquarters, and as Number 80 never wrote letters, such lacking necessaries had been replaced by Red Cross gifts.

Subsequently, when some battered portmanteaux were received from Regimental H.Q. in France,—but of that later in the chapter.... You are to see Nurse taking off the muffler, over which her patient stared down at her with grey, brooding, mournful eyes. Those eyes followed her about, burning holes in her grey print. If she had established herself as the hub of Number 80's universe, she was none the less the adoring slave of him whom—in private and at his entreaty she called "Teddy."

For Lord help this bedevilled man! he who in all his thirty-five years of life had been "Edward" to all who loved him, holding pet names in abhorrence,—had invited Nurse Burtonshaw to address him by this fond diminutive. "My mother used to call me 'Teddy,'" he would say, with his sad eyes brimming: "and though she has married again—" the poor widowed lady being dead and buried years previously—"and I am nothing to her now, I somehow like to hear it."

So Nurse called him "Teddy," scrupulously selecting moments when they were quite alone and out of earshot. Then Teddy, who was a Border laird of ancient lineage, as well as a Squire in Cumberland, with a solid rent-roll of four thousand a year, some thriving home-farms and a park of many acres, confided to Nurse that he was a poor man—without a rap beyond his pay. But if Lucy had no fear of poverty, shared with a poor broken wretch who loved her—one to whom the love of woman had been a sealed book until he saw her face....

"You're getting too stuck on that Colonel man of yours, Burtonshaw!" expostulated a friend some hours later on, when the day-nurses went off duty. "Because when it comes to kissing Good-night—and I couldn't help but hear!—the partition between the O.C. wards being merely canvas! Of course you can trust me not to talk, though I hope you won't again!—a warm handshake as between friends being properer, and not against the Regulations—which I will say I never knew you go against before. Now own up. Am I right, or wrong?"

"I did, I'll own it.... I do truly feel for Number 80," admitted Nurse Burtonshaw. "He's alone in the world and quite poor, though three hundred and seventy pounds a year, which is his pay—not counting War allowances,—seems like riches to little me."

"Bless me!" cried the friend, "then you've actually clicked! ... He's asked you to marry him? ..."

Nurse Burtonshaw demanded, with rather a defiant flare lighting up her well-opened grey-blue eyes, and with a decided deepening of the steady bloom on her broad, blunt-featured West of England face, nunlike in the setting of flowing white linen hiding the rich red-gold hair that was her one undeniable beauty:

"Do you think I'd let him kiss me—a girl brought up like I've been—unless he'd behaved himself honourable? Not one of my friends can say a word—"

"But what will his friends say about you?" asked the other nurse acutely, "when they hear how you've fixed things? To marry a Regular Army toff, who not so long ago was queer in his head, and had to be mothered and seen to and fed as if he'd been a blinking baby—"

Nurse Burtonshaw asserted:

"He's well, and going to get his discharge next week. They say his cure's my doing. And he's got no friends. He's told me so, over and over again!"

"That makes it better for you. And I'm not saying that you won't turn out a happy pair, not for a minute! Don't lots of patients marry their nurses and live happy ever after? And, whenever I've read your teacup, Fate has seemed to point that way. But as to his having no friends—that won't half wash!"

"And why won't it?"

"Just because your Teddy's a Society Toff, poor or not poor! Belongs to a crack Scotch regiment.... Gets lots of letters in lovely envelopes with the names of topping County places on some of 'em—and coronetted crests and monograms...."

"The smart folks who wrote those letters don't count. Hasn't he told me? 'Not one of them,' he says,—'matters to me a straw.'"

"He may have said so, but are you sure? I'm asking out of friendship. Wasn't there a woman—isn't there a woman who writes as if he mattered to her more than several stacks of straw? Oh, Luce! ..."

Nurse Burtonshaw stood her ground obstinately:

"I've questioned him over and over.... 'I may have liked her, since she says I did,' he says.... 'But all the same, she's less than nought to me.... What did you say her name was?' he asks in that simple way of his." ...

"And did you tell him?"

"What does that matter to you?"

"It'll matter to you one of these days, as sure as I'm certificated! And you told me she'd begged you to keep the letters until he was able to read them without hurting his head. You haven't given them to him! ... Straight—are you going to? Infirmary-trained we both may be, and not Hospital—but I hope we know what's due to the professions to say nothing of the Red Cross! When will you give him those letters?"

Behind Nurse Burtonshaw's blue-grey eyes a red flame kindled. She retorted, confronting her interlocutor:

"When he asks me to! Haven't I told you?"

"Not much, you haven't. And about your first venture—with the Didlick boy—poor thing! Killed at Mons and buried no one knows where—are you going to tell him about that?"

"I—am—NOT! ... Is that plain enough? ... Now let me get to bed!"

When Katharine should learn that those letters, written from her post of service at the Receiving Hospital in France, and later from a London Nursing Home,—and later still from Kerr's Arbour,—had never been delivered to Nurse Burtonshaw's patient, would she believe—Yaill wondered dismally, or doubt like all the rest of the world, the man who had married the nurse?

XIV

He had told the girl, according to her, that though the letters on his disc proclaimed him Catholic, he was just as much a Protestant as anything.... And a Church of England clergyman—not the Chaplain attached to the Convalescent Camp—but the pastor of a Protestant church in the town had been consulted, and under his advice the Special license had been procured:

Yaill had written to his Brigadier and Divisional Commander.... As for Nurse Burtonshaw, she had already applied to the Principal Commandant of the Women's Detachments and the Matron-in-Chief at the Front for her discharge. And obtained it—on account of her health,—she had always been anæmic,—and of late headache and indigestion born of chocolate-creams and cigarettes, of which Nurse consumed quantities when off duty, had troubled her a good deal.

"And besides, duck," she told her pal, "if it comes to choosing between Teddy and my profession, my first duty is to Teddy. I do really think it was Providence prevented me signing on for the Duration of the War!"

And so they had been married only a week ago. O God!—O God!—why had nothing happened to prevent the affair? Why hadn't the officiating Church of England clergyman had a fit or a belated attack of scruples? Why out of all the flotillas of aircraft scouring the charted skies on War's endless business, had not one (preferably a bomb-carrier) crashed on the roof of the church?

They had had breakfast at the Conronne—where Brass Hats and Red Tabs did congregate and foregather. In the private room above the restaurant, looking across the short side of the gardens across the Ouai Clemenceau. The hotel was crowded with British khaki and French grey puppets playing the talky interludes that enliven the grimmest tragedy of War.

Nurse Burtonshaw had looked her best in her off-duty dress of pale blue alpaca, with bishop sleeves, and black Red Cross buttons, a white lawn collar and cuffs to match—a black patent leather belt with a sprig of artificial white heather tucked in it, and a white straw hat with the regulation Service ribbon crowning her wonderful red-gold hair. Her Teddy's engagement-ring, chosen by herself, set with three smallish rubies—did duty as keeper to the plain gold ring he had placed—not quite an hour before—on her large, capable left hand....

The popping of corks, the clinking of glasses, and the polyglot roar of male voices from the restaurant below, discussing the one burning topic of the day in every civilised tongue used on earth saving one, came to them as they ate their omelette and sole matelotte at the round table in the big bay window—looking across the Quai upon the outer Port—crammed to the jaws of the long channel between the light-housed jetties—with Allied steamers of all imaginable grades, types and sizes: from Leviathan troopers, converted Cunarders and P. and O. boats disgorging endless streams of men, horses, lorries, guns and munitions; and Hospital ships ceaselessly swallowing processions of walking wounded and stretcher-cases—poured out from the long khaki-coloured Red Cross trains drawn up at the platforms—to T.B.D.'s, British and French mine-sweepers, submarines, American or Eastern oil-tankers, seaplane-carriers, Wireless Service boats and Canadian or Argentine cattle-ships. With a myriad others brought from the world's airts to serve this single end of War.

Lucy Burtonshaw, now Lucy Yaill,—while eating her déjeuner with an unspoiled appetite, saw with relief her newly wedded husband unmoved by this stirring spectacle; long unfamiliar to one laid-by for months in the placid backwater of the Convalescent Camp. His sad grey eyes swept the wonderful panorama without seeming to take it in. Presently they came back to her; and she smiled into them affectionately, as she laid down her fork, and spared her rather large hand, with its brand new wedding-ring under the ruby keeper, to give his a protecting, reassuring squeeze....

"Ducks!" she cooed. (Lucy could coo.) "Sure all this hasn't given you a cooker of a headache?"

He did not seem to hear. He was looking at the sprig of imitation white heather. She followed the direction of his gaze, and took it from her belt.

"That what you're looking at? ... My bit of white heather! ... Pidge"—Pidge being the Hospital nickname of Nurse Pringle, the pal of some pages back—"Pidge gave it me 'For luck' when we said good-bye to each other this morning. 'Not the real thing, but as near as I could get for two frongs!' she said. Want it, Ducks?"

She put in his hand Pidge's parting gift—a caricature of Nature with its gummed green-and-white paper leaves and bells, and trumpery glass dewdrops—and he stared at it as though it held the secrets of the Past and of the Future both....

Perhaps it did for Ducks. For something wakened in him. Some atrophied nerve vibrated, it may be: some long-numbed brain-cell quickened into life....

Who knows what change took place? ... At any rate, the sight and touch of the little shrub with the white-belled flower that grows amongst the purple ling of Northern moors and mountains, made Teddy's slowly-beating heart perform a curious demivolt. Remembrance began to waken from her hazy trance, or dream, or lethargy.... Somewhere, some time, Some One had given him a bit of white heather.... Some One, some time, somewhere—and the gift had meant the world! The round world floating in her ocean of air, and all the planets swinging in their orbits.... A woman utterly, unspeakably beloved by Nurse Burtonshaw's Teddy ... the woman, whose love had been sweet as the honeycomb of the Singer of the Canticles—fragrant as myrrh and ambergris and frankincense; the utter bliss of the body—the soul's bread and wine....

"How beautiful are thy steps, O King's daughter! ...
How beautiful art Thou, and how comely my dearest, in delights ...
Thy stature like unto a palm-tree ... thy throat like the
best wine ...
Put me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm:
for love is strong as death: ... if a man should give
all the substance of his house for love he shall despise
it as nothing..."

"What are you mumbling, Teddy dear? Sounds like a bit out of the Bible."

He lifted his dropped head and said, regarding his wife austerely.

"It is as a matter of fact, something from the Canticle of Canticles. I once got the eight of them by heart, when I was a boy."

"Oh—well! ... Don't mutter, but I thought it came out of the Bible...."

"It does, as I said.... What are you doing?" For Lucy was twisting and tilting her coffee-cup, and peering into it curiously at each new tilt or twist.

"Laying my cup—trying to read my fortune. Though you can't do it with coffee-grounds as well as with tea-leaves, and even with them I'm not a patch on Pidge. Who's Pidge, did you ask? ... Why, Nurse Pidge, my best pal, who gave me the bit o' white heather.... How you do stare—as though you'd never seen me before!"

She trembled with alarm as she reached over to pat her Teddy's cheek. Had not Nurse Pidge, that seeress of things to come per medium of "Best Household Black" or "Liphook's Luscious Tea-Tips" prophesied truly that Nurse Burtonshaw would reap the whirlwind over those letters in the Japanese box....

She shivered as though a chilly draught had pierced her blue alpaca. Nurse Pidge had not let the topic sleep. She had reverted to it often in that odd argot,—(compound of homely, commonplace, modern English; up-to-date scientific terms; Public School, Clubland and Army slang),—which comes so trippingly from the tongue of the trained nurse of To-Day.

Pidge had quoted her idol Wyers, Oppenshaw Wyers, F.R.C.S., of Harley Street, Lieutenant Colonel R.A.M.C. (T.), Consulting Surgeon attached to the Staff of the Base Hospital of which the Convalescent Camp was an offshoot.

Who has not heard of Wyers, coarse, gross and tubby in his khaki, who showed the tenderness of an angel and the insight of a demigod in his dealings with shell-shocked men—victims of War's dire curse, hysteria—whose limbs and members, flaccidly limp, or strangely twisted and distorted, refused to obey the bidding of their owners' brains. Who, seized by epilepsy, would fall down foaming, or weep and sob like heart-wrung women; or stumble in their gait and speech like the infant members of a Kindergarten; or sit, staring vacantly, lost in a grey dream of infinite bewilderment—as Teddy used to sit—as Teddy was sitting now.....

"Helpless and hopeless, beyond the aid of Science, dead to the voice or touch of old, sweet love, seemingly unhelped by prayer. Until—just as the stopped watch begins to tick on the removal of some globule of oil, or speck of dust that clogged the mechanism—the paralysed nerve thrills once more into life, the unlocated lesion heals, the infinitesimal blood-clot dissipates, and the man rises up, sane, freed from bonds, healed of his infirmity."

Thus Wyers, as many other men no less great have said before and will say after him, honestly trying to deal with the problem that to the end of all Time will baffle the human race: "And how or why that change takes place cannot even be conjectured by any of us wiseacres.... Call it a Miracle if you will,—it's as good a word as any other. But until that Miracle takes place—and the Angel troubles the pool—Medicine and Surgery must twiddle their thumbs."

Were the waters moving now? Edward Yaill's new-made wife asked herself, timorously watching him. When he had spoken in that new, masterful tone—looked at her with that new glance, so cold and keen and observant, a little shiver had run through her underneath her blue alpaca. The Miracle, she knew in her soul, would spell for her Disaster. Secretly she must have wished that the Angel would never trouble the pool....

The best laid plans will gang agley. Nurse Burtonshaw, formally relieved of her duties by ukase from the Chief Matron on the Front in France, had quitted the Convalescent Camp on the previous afternoon. Two or three letters had been brought in on Number 80's breakfast-tray that morning.... A bill from a Bond Street tailor, a communication from Cox's Bank, London, and a square envelope of thick ribbed linen note with the Cauldstanes postmark, addressed in a clear, firm handwriting—a letter that would, one conjectures—but for the interposition of Destiny,—have joined its fellows in that Pandora casket, the Japanese Box.

Teddy, always indifferent where correspondence was concerned, had not had time to read the letters, hurrying to tie the Knot that takes so much undoing. He had thrust his mail hastily into a breast-pocket of his Service jacket—it would well keep till by and by. Now he fished the letters out and laid them on the clean coarse napery of the breakfast-table, with another envelope containing two official leaflets badly printed on thin yellowish paper, duly stamped and viséd by Military Authority, and having names and personal details filled in with red ink. Ensuring to Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Angus Sholto Yaill, etc., etc., late C.O. Tweedburgh Regiment of Infantry, Discharged from the Convalescent Hospital Camp B—— Base, and Proceeding Home on (indefinite) Leave—as to Lucy Alice Burtonshaw T.N. of such and such a Nursing Detachment. Invalided Home from Service in France under the British Red Cross—transit at the expense of the British Government, per steamer and rail to Folkestone, London and Coombe Bay, Devonshire. The passes arrested Yaill's eye. He did not open the letters. He thrust them back in his pocket; and said with a glance at the new, cheap silver wrist-watch that had been the wedding-gift of his bride:

"We have just time to catch the boat without hurrying you, I think, dear!"

And so they had gone out by the Couronne's side-entrance to the debilitated fiacre that waited on the cobblestones in the cold bright forenoon, and for the moment the guilty fears that throbbed under the blue alpaca were lulled to treacherous rest....

Old friends—these chiefly warriors going back on Blighty leave—came up to Colonel Yaill upon the Folkestone boat, with hearty greetings and crushing hand-grips. Service and Club acquaintances saluted and spoke. People were frightfully glad to see Yaill looking so beany, and generally tophole.... Every one was expecting soon to hear of his going back to the Front.... Meanwhile a rest—well-earned, by the Living Tinker!—discreetly combined with recreation, would soon set him on his legs. Country-house Bridge, and pillow-ragging, or London jazz and champagne-parties only good for lieutenants.... A bit of huntin' and a pleasant house-party just the thing, etc., what? ... Shooting and fishing had generally gone to the dogs, all the junior keepers having been called up—but there were woodcock and snipe and hares—that place of yours in Cumberland must be stiff with 'em! and up North—the Gala Water—or at a pinch—(the speaker twinkled knowingly)—the Rushet where it ran through the Kerr's Arbour property,—might supply a decent fish or two....

So, as the Folkestone steamer pushed through the crowded War-traffic of the English Channel waters, chaperoned by the dim grey shape of a T.B. destroyer,—watched from the air by a pilot seaplane,—the desultory chatter ran on.... With a reference or so to the War news of the month-end; the German aircraft-raid on the Kentish coast, the Arabs of the Senussi dispersed in West Egypt, the impending declaration of War by Albania on Austria: winding up with a proposed adjournment to the bar for drinks; though Government-controlled Scotch, thirty-five under proof—and Government-brewed malt-liquor—cursed rotten swipes—eh, what? ...

The speaker pulled himself up with a surprised glance at the fresh-coloured young woman in the white straw hat and the pale blue alpaca gown peeping from underneath a starred Regulation cloak, who had laid her rather large ungloved hand on the arm of the fellow-officer addressed, saying:

"No! ... It wouldn't be good for you! ... Please not, Teddy!"

"Beg pardon, Nurse! ... I thought my friend alone. Didn't seem to realise you'd got him on a lead. Quite right to give me the tip. Colonel, the invitation's off! ... Unless you'll pledge me in something soft; lemon-squash or ginger-beer!—pretty rotten, I expect!—or tea, or coffee. Perhaps Nurse'll join?" He thought as he screwed his eyeglasses tighter: "What glorious hair! ... My favourite colour.... Yaill strikes me as rather a lucky kind of chap!" ...

"No, thank you!" Lucy drew herself up and looked at her husband.

With that possessive hand upon his arm, Yaill hesitated the fraction of an instant, then took the header:

"'No thanks!' for both Mrs. Yaill and myself.... We breakfasted rather late, didn't we, Lucy? ... Let me introduce Major Scales-Packard, my wife...."

"Awfully delighted!"

The eyeglass of Scales-Packard, who knew Katharine Forbis,—leaped out of its orbit as his eyebrows shot up under the peak of his cap. He grew red,—stammered something congratulatory, saluted and speedily vanished. And Lucy breathed more freely. Dimly she sensed that she had stepped across the frontiers of a new, and possibly hostile country. That man, Teddy's friend, had looked at her—when Teddy had introduced him,—as though she had been guilty of child-stealing....

Had she? ... The question probed to the quick, so that she paled and shivered; and found relief in the solicitude her convalescent displayed: permitting Teddy in his new role of guardian and protector, to envelop her in plaids and waterproofs, to find her a seat upon the smutty leeward side of the grimy after-deck saloon-cabin—and supply her with Captain's biscuits and tea, both of War's villainous brand. Her mental qualms would have been justified had she overheard Scales-Packard confiding to numerous acquaintances on board:

"See that tall, good-lookin' man with a blue Hospital brassard? ... That's Yaill, late C.O. of the Tweedburgh Regiment! Gassed and shell-shocked last September somewhere north of Loos.... Married his nurse at the Base C.O.C. and comin' home—poor silly blighter!—to break it to the finest woman God ever made—who's waited for him years and years."

XV

There had been—Yaill remembered, staring into the red-gold heart of the fire, where sapphire and violet and emerald flames played over the burning turfs and hissing oaken billets, making as they devoured them a little purring sound;—there had been a little hitch over baggage when they got to Folkestone. Two heavy strapped cowhide trunks, recovered from Regimental Headquarters; now found to be lacking some necessary red or blue chalk lettering,—were nearly being shipped back to the Base. Battered, mildewed, smeared with whitewash, they presented a deplorable appearance on the truck with Teddy's brand new Gladstone, (War manufacture, of American cloth masquerading as leather) and Lucy's green canvas-covered box.

The keys of the trunks had long been lost,—necessitating an explanation with the Representative of Customs. But Yaill had needed nothing that those leather trunks might contain during the three days they had spent in London, on the third floor of a vast caravanserai of a hotel, looking on the myriad-voiced Strand. But he had sent for a locksmith on the second day, and had fresh keys fitted. And on the morning subsequent to the arrival of the bride and bridegroom at the Tor View Hotel, Coombe Bay, he had gone into the dressing-room adjacent to their nuptial chamber, fresh from his bath, rumpled as to the hair,—and opened one of the battered receptacles in search of a khaki tie. Quite haphazard, and as chance would have it—on the top—between a mouldy Field Service mess-frock, and some khaki shirts with burnt holes in them made by red-hot shell-splinters—he had found a silver-mounted leather photograph-frame, much tarnished, and gone white in spots....

The frame held a portrait of large panel-size, and at the back was a strut to stand it up by. He lifted the frame and set it up against the lid of the open trunk, on the top of the mouldy clothes, and Ah!—what a warm, rich, fragrant gale of memories blew through the man's sick brain and desolate heart as those dear eyes of Katharine's looked candid love into his own! Something like a cry escaped him—he choked it back fiercely....

"Did you call me, Teddy?" asked his wife from the next room, where she sat in a blue Japanese kimono, brushing her wonderful red-gold hair before a modest display of nickel-silver-backed brushes and toilet-bottles. For through the partly-closed door of the dressing-room, or so it seemed to Lucy, she had heard a woman's name.... And to Lucy's Nonconformist mind, the woman a man cries out for must be his lawful married helpmeet; and if she isn't, then the wife has got a (legal, mind you!) right to know the reason why.... "Did you want me, dear?" she reiterated,—and saw reflected in the toilette-glass behind her blue kimono-covered shoulders and round fresh country face—from which the bloom had faded suddenly,—the half-open door of the dressing-room close softly, and heard the key turn in the lock upon the other side....

The chambermaid came through with Yaill's shaving-water, and said that the bath was ready for the lady; and Lucy went at once. Purposely prolonging her matutinal ablutions, so that Teddy had dressed and gone down to the coffee-room by the time she returned, much more composed in mind....

When she came down the wide shallow staircase with its artificial palms in mock-bronze vessels, and British-made Turkey carpet,—he was waiting for her there.... The manager, an alleged Swiss, had given them a table in the window, and—sensing the honeymooners with the infallible instinct of his tribe—enclosed it with lincrusta screens—and placed by each cover a sprig of white heather of the artificial kind. It is strange how Fate and Destiny, twin-balances of the scales in which poor human lives are weighed, will be tipped one way or the other by gewgaws such as this....

Within the glass of the photo-frame, against the knee of the tall, erect, womanly-gracious figure, was a withered sprig of the real white heather, plucked on the moors above Kerr's Arbour, and placed there by Katharine.... Against the raging heart of Yaill lay Katharine's latest letter.... He had found it on the dressing-glass with the notification from Cox's Bank, and the Bond Street tailor's bill.

He knew that letter word for word. He saw the short, poignant sentences in the beloved handwriting written on the walls of the coffee-room, across the imitation-tapestry paper; on the white tablecloth and serviettes; on the alleged Swiss manager's badly-starched shirt-front, and smug dingy-pale face.

He refused ham and eggs; broke War-bread toast, and drank down cup after cup of doubtful coffee, unseen by Lucy, who was fluttered by the observant lorgnette of a large lady, breakfasting with one obese elderly gentleman in the silver-grey of the Local Coast Defence Corps—and two tanned young men in khaki with shabby Sam Browne belts and sword-straps, sufficiently like the large lady, to be, as in fact they were, her sons....

Now the large important lady—upon the shoulder-straps of whose blue serge jacket glittered the four-pointed gold star of a Commandant above the numeral of the Detachment—the honoured title of the Red Cross Society and the name of her County—happened to be Lady Ridgely, Commandant of a Convalescent Hospital for Private Soldiers, a large white mansion standing in neatly-kept grounds, above the Tor View Hotel, on the same side of the Torcliff Road.... For certain reasons of her own Lady Ridgely had taken to breakfasting at the Tor View Hotel; and being a rigid martinet re the observance of Regulations, the sight of Lucy's pale-blue alpaca Foreign Service Off Duty dress had very much shocked her,—worn in combination with an officer so manifestly an invalid: "For even without his Hospital brassard, which he must have forgotten to take off—the man looked simply ghastly, my dear!"

Thus Lady Ridgely afterwards, per telephone, (the receiver being held by her sister-in-law, the Deputy-Assistant Director-General of the L.L.W.S.L. at the London Headquarters)—and a cousin, as Fate would have it, of the protagonist. Of whom Lady Ridgely took no note at first, being wholly absorbed in the blue alpaca—and not unconscious of the fact that its wearer was embarrassed by the rigid glare of her lorgnetted eye.

When at length she lowered the instrument, it was to signal the Coffee-Room Manager, alleged Swiss, who hurried to her side....

"Kindly tell me the names of those two persons breakfasting at the table in the window. The invalid officer and the pale blue nurse," commanded Lady Ridgely. And the alleged Swiss Manager of the Coffee-Room, relieved—for very private reasons, to find another than himself the object of Lady Ridgely's lorgnette—bounded away to consult the Visitor's Book in the vestibule-office—returned with the information, was thanked, and gratefully effaced himself. Subsequently interned under the Defence Of The Realm Act, upon conviction of communication by flashlight with certain undersea activities in the Channel—we are to see his pasty German face no more.

The dreary meal came to an end. When his wife rose, Yaill went with her to the staircase-foot and said in a quiet, level tone:

"You were so—kind as to put some letters of mine away in a box for me.... Might I ask you to be so good as to let me have them now?"

She tried, poor goose!—a mingling of self-assertion and coquetry:

"Give 'em you now? ... I like that tone of yours.... Now that we're married and one flesh ... I'm not at all so sure I shall!"

He looked her full in the eyes and said to her quietly:

"You will go upstairs to our—to your room,—and bring them to me here!"

"Will I? ... Oh! well,—I suppose I must, since you're so set on it."

She dropped her head like a sulky child, and mounted the wide stairs slowly. Yaill stood at the stairfoot watching, while the blue alpaca was in sight. She did not return. He followed, and knocked at the door of their bedroom. She cried "Come in" and he went in, to find her with a tear-stained, sulky, mulish face, standing at the bedside.... The Japanese workbox—a tawdry thing of imitation lacquer—was lying on the counterpane. She gulped to him that she had mislaid the key that opened the stupid thing. He responded:

"Break open the box. I will buy you—others!"

"My hands aren't strong enough!"

She feigned that those broad, strong dairywoman's hands that had put up many a twelve-pound frail of muslin-enwrapped pats for the market,—that had held down delirious men upon their Hospital beds—were too feeble to break the flimsy lock of Japanese manufacture. He accepted her explanation with unmoved countenance.

"Then be good enough to allow me!"

The letters were in his hands. But even as they poured forth from their camphor-scented prison, so from his wife's swollen, trembling mouth poured a stream of wordy defence. He could hear the voice pleading now with its broad, soft Somerset accent....

"How was I to be sure she told the truth? ... And didn't she ask me—and didn't you too—to put by the letters? ... Haven't I said to you over and over, when you swore how much you loved me. 'Tell me, Teddy, on your oath! Are you sure you're not engaged?'—And you always swore you weren't, and that till you met me you'd never known what it meant to love any woman! Am I to be blamed—called wicked and treacherous—because I believed you? Oh, Ted!"

He had ground his heel into the carpet beneath his feet, and set his teeth to keep back the curses he longed to shriek at her. That plump, fresh-coloured, well-proportioned, deadly-commonplace young woman would never know what murderous frenzy boiled in her Teddy's blood, and tautened his muscles then. But he crushed down the ugly, murderous impulse and said to her with elaborate gentleness:

"I do not blame you.... I have not reproached you with—anything. And—I have spoiled your box, and you were fond of it. You shall have one ten times as good as soon as they can send it from Liberty's."

So, with the promise of a new box instead of the smashed one, he carried away his letters, and went up on the moors where he might be alone to read.... And the larks were singing in the pale harebell skies of late January.... And the spicy smell of the larches, the raw-red trunks of the pines, and the rasp of the wintry ling underfoot reminded him of Scotland. And the rust-brown of the frost-nipped bracken was the shade of Katharine's hair. And the colour of the little streams, running crystal-bright over dead drowned leaves and red-brown Devon sandstone had the very, very colour of those beloved eyes.... Stars that would never now look down upon the slumber of their child....

To Wyers of Harley Street, Lieutenant-Colonel (T) R.A.M.C., Consulting Surgeon attached to the Staff of the Base Hospital in connection with the Convalescent Camp at B—— the Chief Medical Officer, was at that moment saying—Wyers having just returned by 'plane from a professional visit to the Front:

"You know Yaill left us for Blighty on Tuesday morning? I'm wondering whether it wouldn't have been better to have kept him on here a bit? Or have sent him to that Hydro at Les Bonnes Eaux."

"Instead—" Wyers flicked off the ash of his inevitable Trichinopoli, and deftly picked up a little sheaf of papers clipped together from the big leather-topped writing-table in the C.M.O.'s official room. He reversed the chart, to glance with cool professional interest at the history-sheet behind it, and turned back to the doctor's card with the inky scrawl beneath the heading:

"Discharged.... Convalescent" ... and the date of three days back.

"Instead of striking him off the sheet with leave to get married! I don't see why not, for my part. He's as well as ever he will be, unless—you know my theory! And marriage may help him. Should, certainly—supposing him to have got hold of a woman of the right sort."

"Ah, but has he? Query,—is she?" The Chief Medical Officer, deftly packing fragrant Navy Cut into a well-burned briar-root, looked up from his deft thumb-work, under an anxiously-puckered brow. "You're not aware that he's married the chart-nurse of No. 8. Hut Ward C.O.C. That little Burtonshaw—you remember Burtonshaw? Blonde and blue-eyed, faintly frisky, but a model of provincial propriety for all of that. And a good nurse—to do her justice!—now discharged invalided, after two years' Foreign Service with her unit of the Red Cross."

"H'm!" The nod of Wyers conveyed his knowledge of Nurse Burtonshaw. "There's only one thing to say for a match of that kind. It may turn out successfully. One hopes of course it will. But for a man of that stamp—ultra refined, highly-bred, and used—going by what one has heard—" whatever Wyers had heard, he retained with Sphinx-like taciturnity,—"to a very different type of woman,—Happiness will not depend on his ultimate return to the normal,—do you follow? But on his stopping exactly where he is. For the Miracle wouldn't benefit him—under the present circumstances. Better for him that the Angel should never trouble the pool!"

Thus Oppenshaw Wyers, who may or may not have heard the name of Katharine Forbis. But the Miracle had happened, Yaill had returned to the normal.... And the thin chance of happiness in an unequal union with the poor thing he had married—lay shattered into fragments at his unlucky feet.

Sitting on a crumbling ledge of the grey-pink cliffs of Devon, he read his love's letters—that had come so much too late. Such fond womanly letters—and gallant and courageous, written from her Receiving Hospital in France, and from the Base—and from a London Nursing Home and from Kerr's Arbour.

Here was one dated from the Receiving Hospital in Belgium in the previous April. It shall be quoted here:

"MY MAN OF ALL MEN....

"To-day I met a Tommy (one of a great many) on the frightfully muddy road that leads from Our Shop to the fighting-line. We were bringing down wounded—(Canadians chiefly). This long-legged, gaunt, black-a-vised man was going up with the Relief. A Jew unmistakably—going by his leading feature—and in evident trouble about a chum who had got crumped. So your Kathy, wangling a spare seat from under an orderly—undertook to convey Private Abrahams' chum back to Hospital...."

Added some hours later:

"There isn't so much wrong—and I'm going to drop a postcard to Abrahams in the Support trenches, to tell him so and cheer his heart. The queer thing about it is—that the moment I saw Abrahams—(whose real name is Hazel)—I felt I knew the man! ... Somewhere, his huge hooked beak and great shoulders have risen up before me. Somehow—this can't be love at first sight, Edward!" Ah, wicked Katharine!—"because my heart is so hopelessly lost to you!—somehow his very ordinary—rather Cockney voice wasn't quite the voice of a stranger. Oddly I felt that I could trust the man!—had trusted him—somewhere, in many a tight place! ... Newspaper has come in.... Must stop here.... Finish this idiotic epistle to-night when I get a chance—"

This bore a date in September, 1915.

"MY PRECIOUS DEAR,

"I've had your last letter. So you're lonely wanting your Katharine! My dear, don't be! I AM with you, though not bodily—yet in heart and soul. Please God—"

There was a break. The handwriting of the rest was shaky and irregular, showing what storms of mingled emotions had swept through the writer.

"This was begun the day before yesterday. I left off to read the News of the War. Read—Oh! my dearest—with what mingled joy and anguish, the story of the combined assault on Loos. My love, my love!—what awful loss! How you must grieve for your glorious regiment! Thanks to Our Lord and His dear Mother! you are alive!—you are alive! The report that you were missing was contradicted in a later bulletin. I've been crying until I'm hideous, for sorrow and joy and pride in you, my Edward! And, for gratitude that you're alive—and longing to be with you.... How I should love to pitch duty to the wide and rush away to nurse You! Wouldn't I? WOULDN'T I?—if it were only playing the game. But I must,—MUST stop here and do my job for the Red Cross. My own Edward—these silly X's are all meant for kisses.... The blots are where I've cried! ... Oh! how I've cried—how I would love to cry all over the shoulder of your dear khaki jacket. With love and such unutterable pride in my dear lover—Your own for this world and the next, please Heaven! Katharine."

The third bore a date in October, 1916, and the address of a Distributing Hospital on a Base in France.

"MY DEAREST DEAR,

"I've been desperately wretched, writing and WRITING and never getting a scrap from you. Now comes a letter written by your nurse. She tells me that your dear eyes can't stand print or handwriting, and that even being read to is dreadful agony. Edward, how selfish I have been—and how stupid, with all my experience of the results of shell-shock—not to realise the extent and nature of my dear one's suffering! Now I beg and command you never to dream of writing until you are fit to! I have asked your kind nurse not even to read you my letters, until you are able to hear them without distress or pain. To think that loving lines from me should cause you suffering, Edward! And yet I understand, my own! how such a condition may exist. For the moment I leave off. They are beating the gong and some signal rockets have just warned us—"

* * * * * * *

Four hours later....

"An attack by German bomb-carrying Taubes on the Hospital, in spite of air-scouts and L——s barrage of anti-aircraft guns. There is a British Army Corps H.Q. close by. I try to think they wanted that—and not really to bomb the Hospital with all those poor, poor bandaged men helpless in their beds.

It was terrific. They got us with H.E. every time—and the Hospital looks like a squashed bandbox. But, you see, in spite of the Boche's worst, your loving Kathy stays alive. Casualties only three, thank God! A convalescent Tommy killed, an R.A.M.C. orderly badly wounded; and a V.A.D. ambulance-driving woman somehow got an internal injury—helping to carry some of the worst cases out of the blazing wards down into the cellars of the Commandant's house—luckily close by.

Be prepared to find my next letter written from London, for I'm going to be invalided back to Blighty. Address, 'Hospital of SS. Stanislaus and Theresa, Copse End Road, St. John's Wood. Care of the Matron.' Don't worry the least bit! ... I'm tophole, though no good for driving. It will be a rest, really, for me. And by and by, if God is good—" crossed out—"He is, has He not saved you, Edward?—I shall come rushing over to B—— and carry you home. Home to Scotland. Oh, my dear, what it would be to have you to myself at Kerr's Arbour! All the memories of our happy days langsyne are waiting for us, Edward,—under the blessed old roof-beams, and on the moors and in the fir-wood—(miles of bluebells, you remember, in May—growing under the black-green trees)—and where wee Rushet winds away between the green braesides, to tumble into Teviot. I've still got some of the primroses we gathered there one April. Oh! the good times, before the dreadful War. Let us both look forward steadily, and hope, and pray, Edward,—that they may come again. If this is a dismal letter, forgive:

Your Katharine."

Another written a fortnight later, from London.

"HOSPITAL OF SS. STANISLAUS AND TERESA,
COPSE END ROAD,
ST. JOHN'S WOOD, N. W.

"My DEAREST MAN,

"The operation—quite a small affair, happily over, and your Kathy pronounced to be well upon the mend. I get the best of care at this dear place, where matron and Sisters spoil me. Everybody in town is overwhelmingly kind, and if I set down all the messages of affection and goodwill that I am charged with for you, and repeated all the admiring speeches that have been made to me about my sweetheart—I should need half-a-dozen sheets of letter-paper to write to you instead of one.

"Are you able to read for yourself a little, dearest, or do you still depend on the kind offices of your nurse? If the answer is 'Yes' to my question, she has of course given you my letters. I have her assurance that she will do this on the very earliest opportunity. For I should not like her to read them to you, you know, Edward! For one thing, my epistolary style is open to criticism—and for another—what I set down for your dear eyes was and will always be meant for no other's. Ah, but you understand!

"This is a dull scribble. But I'll do better next time. Too tired to write another. God bless you, darling!

K. F.

"If only you could write! ... I'm hungering for a line so. But not—not a scratch—if it's bad for you, my own!

"K."

There were many letters, and Yaill read them all, haphazard at first, and then in regular sequence, down to the very last....

"KERR'S ARBOUR, TWEEDBURGH, N.B.

"January 20th.

"Look here, Edward, can't you write, my darling? Your nurse sends me news of your wonderful improvement, for which I thank God, with all my heart and soul! But if you are so much better that you can read without pain and endure being read to, why not a scrap of a line to me? ... It seems to me that I have some right, forgive me for reminding you, to have news of you from your own hand, my dearest one.... Oh! to have to beg the bread of one's heart.... I was proud once—men used to say so. Now I am only your very lonely, horribly unhappy KATHARINE."

* * * * * * *

And yet until a door had clicked open in Yaill's brain, that handwriting had meant nothing. He asked his Maker in the depths of his wrung soul, why that Open Sesame of the bit of white heather—why the leather baggage-trunk with its guarded secret,—why the letter with its cry of wounded passion had come to the man who loved Katharine, too late?

"It seems to me that I have some right...." Proud, delicate-minded Katharine. What suffering must have wrung that sad reproach from her, that cry of a wounded soul....

"Oh! to have to beg the bread of one's heart.... I way proud once—men used to say so. Now I am only your very lonely, horribly unhappy Katharine."

Lonely.... Unhappy, his joy, his treasure, his worshipped one.... Well, Yaill would go to her now, though Hell's gulf yawned between. He had had this in his mind when he passed up the cliff-road, breathing the unheeded spices of the sea and the pine-trees, with the warm morning sunshine full upon his back....

Now, sitting high upon the cliffs with the booming of the Channel waters in his ears and the mourning cry of the hovering gulls about him, he faced a dim crimson sun, going to bed in blankets of grey fog. The letters lay scattered on the grass between his feet. He gathered them up and buttoned them away safely in his pockets. Then he got up and went back to his wife at the Tor View Hotel.

He would say he had been called away on business. She must stay there—the woman who bore his name, until he had seen his lawyers.... He would provide for her generously. Things would be arranged, he told himself as he hurried down the cliff-road in the clammy, blanketing fog....

The excuses were not received as easily as he had anticipated. He had left a sulky, tearful girl alone the whole day. And he came back to a resentful, jealous woman....

He shuddered, remembering how he had bowed his head to meet the storm of reproach.

Well, well! Forget,—now one was here under the dear roof of Kerr's Arbour, by the warm side of the beloved—the perfect, the ideal mate. He looked at her as she sat there by his side with her proud head bent, and the dark fringes of her dreaming eyes lowered upon the soft blush that graced her cheeks,—Love's exquisite carnation flag, always displayed for Edward.

She was happy, poor, faithful soul, with just a little tang of guilt spoiling the happiness. Mark had been killed at Mons, and Julian had been gulped down by the insatiable War-monster; and Death had taken their father and hers, but her man of men was left. How could she help, by his dear side, being a little happy? She turned and gave him look for look, and his strength began to ebb away.

Yaill's determination to play the game fairly was weakening. The barriers were breaking down. His tense muscles twitched, his blood ran liquid fire. In another moment he would have snatched her to him, stifled her surprise with furious kisses—assailed her virgin ears with frantic pleadings—but that a bell clanged at the hallward end of the corridor. Whishaw's asthmatic cough sounded outside,—he knocked and came in.

The old man's lean figure, with its stooping, rook-like gait, was invested with new, dignified solemnity, his well-worn blacks, even the wide-flanged Gladstone collar that framed his frosty-apple chops, and the rusty-black silk neckerchief knotted under his chin, the short end sticking out at a perennial right-angle, while the other flowed over his starchless shirt-front, to lose itself in the hollows of his baggy waistcoat,—were as vestments of one readied for some sacerdotal rite. He carried a three-branched silver candlestick of antique form, with lighted wax-tapers, and a Missal bound in faded crimson leather was tucked under his other arm....

"Ye'll be for the nicht-prayers noo, Miss Forbis? The Father has gane ben the chapell, sae I juist bode to ring the bell."

"We are coming now, Whishaw."

Katharine rose, took a folded black lace veil from the corner of the mantelshelf, shook out its scrolled and patterned length—with firelight flashing through the dark transparency, draped it with one swift upward movement, over her noble head—and held out a hand to Yaill. He cursed the intruder mentally as he got up and the warm fingers met his own—because those wild words surging to his lips had been so baulked of utterance. But he took the Missal Whishaw offered him, and led his love out and down the long corridor—following the lean, black figure with its upheld light over the flagged pavement, whose uneven stones could be felt through thickness of matting and worn Turkey carpeting.

Whishaw held open the Chapel door, Katharine passed in and Yaill followed mechanically; conscious as might be a man in a dream, of the mingled perfume of incense and flowers, of the hollow square of benches in the little nave, framing the long coffin on its black-draped trestles, with the tall brown wax tapers in their man-high wooden candlesticks burning at the head, and the sides, and the feet....

Still as in a dream he bent his knee as Katharine sank down before the Presence in the Tabernacle, and rose up from her genuflection to take his hand again. He felt her lead him up the narrow aisle ... heard her say to that strange, familiar face, young-old, wax-white, framed in the shining oaken wood against the background of the narrow pillow:

"Dear Father, Edward has come."

And he knew as he looked on the still face of the old man, guardian even in Death of his House's honour—that those traitorous words that had been upon his tongue would never be spoken now.

XVI

Katharine said to him next morning as they sat together at breakfast:

"I am glad to hear of a good night's sleep. I fancied that you would rest better in your old bedroom, dear."

Yaill said, rejoicing in the clear sparkle of her eyes, the fresh, sweet tinting of her cheeks, the gloss upon her springy hair, and the dozen other charming signs that proved her an early-morning woman:

"You knew that I should prefer my langsyne nest of old-fashioned rosebud-chintz to any other. When I went inside and shut the door, all the old memories came crowding round me. The great carved four-post bed, the big blaze in the bowed Queen Anne grate, the General's arm-chair opposite mine—"

"Where he always sat, dear love! to smoke that last good-night-cigar, that seemed to have no end." She blinked back a tear resolutely and Yaill said, feeling in the side-pocket of his Field Service jacket:

"Here is something I found last night on the chintz-room chimney-piece." He displayed a blackened briar-root pipe with the initials E.A.Y. engraved on its tarnished silver mounting. "The first birthday-present I ever had from you. And in the camphor-wood William and Mary press"—

"Your dear, shabby old shooting-suit. Lying there ever since August, 1914."

Men know so little even of the women they love. He never dreamed of the kisses and tears, the wild words whispered, the secrets told to that belted Norfolk-jacket of rough tweed, smelling of cigars and heather. Breakfast over, he filled the briar-root and went to smoke it on the terrace, while after conference with the housekeeper, and a brief visit to Mrs. Bell, who breakfasted in her bedroom, Katharine tied on a vast apron of blue and white checked cotton, covered her head with her black lace veil, and went to renew the Altar flowers, replace the burnt-out brown-wax tapers—and sweep and dust the Sanctuary.

Her doubly-sacred duties done, and the prayer that followed ended, her heart flew back to Edward, and she went whither it tugged. He was pacing, bareheaded, on the gravel of the lavender-walk below the flagstoned terrace that ran before the drawing-room windows. His pipe was gripped askew between his teeth,—his hands were driven deep into his breeches-pockets. The frozen lavender-bushes were not greyer or dourer than his face....

"You dear! ... You dear! ... Come here! ..."

She imitated the blackbird's challenging Spring call, a quaintly pretty gift of hers; and he looked up and took his pipe out of his mouth, and his wintry face was gone—and it was Spring. He smiled and beckoned, and she hoisted her carnation flag,—unlatched the French window and was stepping out to join him,—when Whishaw's voice said behind her:

"Miss Forbis, mem, there is a gentleman—"

"A gentleman, Whishaw! But, of course, you mean Mr. Keller."

"I'm no!" Whishaw retorted. "I'm no' meaning the lawyer-body!"

"But I can receive no visitor! At a time like this..."

Miss Forbis' dismay rang in her tones. Her dark brows straightened. Her mouth hardened a little as she turned to confront her servitor:

"I'm no' saying stric'ly a veesitor," Whishaw amended: "A caller I'se ca' the body—gin need's be ca' him onything." As Whishaw showed a card upon a Benares silversalver, his red-rimmed old eyes blinked, and his frosty-apple visage assumed an expression of scandalised dismay. "I'm sair loth to bring my mistress sic' a message, an' the General's corp lying in the chapell—an' the Funeral on Monday,—and yoursel' an' the Colonel set mourning by a maisterless hairth! But the big, black lad in khaki that rode oot on Alec Govan's motor-cycle frae Cauldstanes the morn's morn, is deid set on winnin' an answer from ye.... He says—an' Gude kens!—for a' his medal an' his wound-stripes, the man may be lying!—that ye're prepared to see him, an' hear what he has to say!" He added: "An' I'm boun' to testify, gin he's nae respeckitable the dougs are deceivit; for Bran an' Laddie an' Dawtie are fell freendly wi' the man."

Yaill had approached the drawing-room window, by the steps leading up to the terrace from the lavender-walk. He had heard, and his heart contracted in a spasm of fierce suspicion, and his brows drew down over narrowed, glittering eyes. He watched the face of Katharine as she pondered over the card of the intruder. It at first occurred to him that the stranger had ridden over from Whingates with a note from Lady Wastwood, telling all. He had no sooner dismissed the idea than another took the place of it. That woman, whom he had left at Coombe Bay, had somehow discovered his destination. From her—and from no other—this urgent stranger came....

"You will not think of seeing the fellow, Katharine? ... Under the circumstances you might very well decline." ...

His voice, sounding strange in his own ears, brought Katharine's head round, and called her absorbed eyes back to his beloved face. She said, as Whishaw clacked his tongue noisily against his palate, and fidgeted from one gouty foot to another:

"The name upon this card was familiar to my father. He told me some weeks before his death, that he looked forward with great interest to the coming of a Mr. Hazel—I suppose the Mr. John Benn Hazel of the firm of Dannahill, Lee-Levyson and Hazel, Insurance Brokers, of Cornhill—London—whose name is on this card.... I know it was his intention to offer Mr. Hazel hospitality. His family—I am told they are Jews of Palestine—has been for more years than I dare to estimate—closely associated with our own.... He has a right—should he wish to exercise it—to attend my father's funeral. Should he even ask to see him—I should not venture to refuse."

Whishaw said, straightening his stooping back to soldierly erectness, and holding the Benares tray against the seam of his trouser-leg:

"Vera' gude, Miss Forbis, mem. Will I bring Mr. Hazel here to ye, or show him in the morning parlour? 'My business wi' the leddy,' says he, 'is maist private, ye ken.'"

Katharine's order to show the visitor into the morning parlour was forestalled by Yaill's saying:

"Receive Mr. Hazel here. While you talk to him I shall smoke another pipe in the garden, if I may?" ...

He hardly gave back the smile that accompanied Katharine's assent. She untied her blue apron and laid aside her veil. Yaill touched her hand swiftly with his lips, and went out again into the frosty morning sunshine, as Whishaw quitted the drawing-room, clacking softly yet....

The door re-opened, showing his black, rook-like shape, bald brow, sharp, little red-rimmed blue eyes, and withered-apple-visage, plimmed into an expression of sour disapproval, behind the vast khaki shoulders of a huge man who stooped low upon the room's threshold, saluting its mistress with almost Oriental reverence....

If the accompanying words had been: "Hail to you, O lady!" instead of "I'm glad to have the pleasure—" as John Hazel bent his gaunt shoulders and lowered his square black head before the tall, womanly shape that towered against its sunlit background of terrace and garden, woodlands and snow-tipped hills, Miss Forbis would hardly have been surprised. For his long right arm had shot out and downwards, sweeping back with the fingers incurved, to touch breast and lips and forehead. As he rose up to his great height of six feet four inches, and some invisible, resistless hand—with the weight of many centuries behind it—ceased to press down his head—the glamour of his Eastern salutation fell from him like a discarded robe....

Katharine saw a big, raw-boned, brown-skinned man, of powerfully Semitic type, probably a year or two over thirty; too gaunt to be coarse, and too frankly middle-class in tone and manner to be mistaken for a gentleman. And somewhere—somewhere—she had met the man before....

To John as Whishaw closed the drawing-room door and its owner moved forward with graceful, gracious greeting, the first sight of Katharine brought its disappointing shock. For it was not the woman he had unreasonably expected. Taller—he had only seen the Ideal seated, remember! Older, with great, sad eyes, rust-coloured as the withered leaves, surrounded with brownish circles. The rich carnations that had bloomed in the other woman's cheeks, under the peaked blue cloth storm-cap of Foreign Service, were missing. It was not she, but a woman who was like her! Extremely like her,—John conceded that. But older, paler, graver and more self-contained; without the gay good-fellowship, the heartening smile—the buoyancy—the atmosphere of youth....

And yet, as he stood by the chair to which she had pointed, waiting impassively until she should have chosen and taken her own seat, he knew that he stood in the presence of his very liege lady, whom by virtue of an ancient oath one John Hazel was bound to serve, honour, reverence, defend and obey....

He said to himself that he was glad the real Katharine Forbis was older than that other. More dignified, more reserved, and all that sort of thing. He was saying it again when the tall shape of a man in khaki passed the open window on his left hand,—there were four of these opening like doors on a level with the terrace—and a red spark kindled in John's gaunt black eyes,—because he knew the man again. He would deal with him presently. Meanwhile—he looked back at Miss Forbis, and roughly caught his breath. Who had deemed her less than young, with such eyes of gold and bramble-dew, and such roses blooming in her cheeks, as her wide, beautiful mouth curved in a happy smile. And that she WAS the Woman of the muddy road that had led in April, 1915, to the Fighting Line east of Ypres—there could be no doubt....

"Then it is you!"—broke from him.... "I give you my word that hundreds of times since that day on the Menin road, I've said to myself I'd know you again anywhere—even if they'd shown me your skin on a gate! But—up to this minute I've not been sure. Now I'm certain!"

In the same breath she found him again:

"Private John Hazel, No. 000, X. Platoon, F. Company, 4th Battalion, 448th City of London (Fenchurch Street) Fusiliers! .... Well, I sent the postcard to tell you about your friend.... Wallis—you see I remember his name—shot in the shoulder with shrapnel. He wasn't very badly hurt. What!—you never got my message?"

John grinned, showing his mouthful of big, white teeth.

"No such gay luck! Fritz handed me a Blighty one that same afternoon, and I went down to the dressing-station dug-outs by the Meat-Tray Express—the Wheeled Stretcher Line, I mean!—and then back to the Base by the Gingerbread Chuff. Sucking your toffee.... My word! that was some toffee. I kept the wrapper a long time—till the nurses said it was germy, and pitched it in the fire."

Her heart warmed to the familiar soldier-slang. She gave back his smile frankly.

"I think," she said, "I knew you from the first. But how wonderful that you should be the Hazel. The man my father"—She was graver and older now, with that shadow of grief upon her face "—the man of whose coming my dear father spoke, so often, and with such interest. And now you will never meet on earth. Why, I wonder why?"

"Give it up. Altogether, this is a jolly queer stunt. So queer that I've left off being astonished. Wasn't it one of those old Shakespearian Johnnies who said: 'There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' Not that I'm by way of cooling my heels outside Pit doors to see the Bard played—give me a tuney Musical Comedy or a rattling Revue! But all the same, old W.S. has got a knack of putting his finger on the spot,—now hasn't he, Miss Forbis? ... But you ... I heard of your being invalided Home. A strain, they called it. Did you get it that day near Ypres?"

Katharine smiled. He remembered the smile, breaking over the face like sunshine....

"Oh no! but in the September following, when the German airmen bombed our Hospital. You see, they'd set on fire, and—"

"And you carried a man out. Hulking brute! Ought to have died before he let a woman lift him. And—where were the orderlies, I should like to know?"

The blustering tone angered Katharine. "What business is it of yours?" was written on her stiffened face.

"The man had no choice because he was unconscious, and the orderlies' hands were full. There were precious few of them anyhow.... Army Nurses and V.A.D. girls evacuated the wards before you could turn round. Lifting is nothing really—once you get the knack of it. And—in those days I was as strong as a man. A really hefty man, I mean!" She stretched out a long arm with slow, powerful grace, looking down its fair rounded length with critical approbation, and then rose up, impressing John not only by her splendid height, but by her air of authority, and supple grace of movement. She said, moving to an ancient rosewood writing-bureau, unlocking one drawer of many in its upper part, and taking a letter out:

"Forgive me, if in view of the business in hand I remind you that we're side-tracking. This letter my father received on December 21st. He gave it me to read—it is signed with the name upon your card—'John Benn Hazel.' Do I understand that it was written by you?"

He explained, keeping his big, black eyes upon her:

"From Colthill War Hospital, Middlesex. I was there when Old Mendel—when a confidential clerk in a relative's counting-house brought me—just as he'd received 'em from the East—a copy of my late grandfather's Will, and the documents and other things concerned in this business.... There has been delay.... I ought to have explained that a little keepsake here—a love-token from Brother Boche—" he tapped his big chest, somewhere above the left clavicular region—"kept me from getting on to the job before.... I'm really frightfully sorry!"

"Of course. How could I forget your wound!" Her eyes softened as they took in the two gold stripes that graced his cuff, the bagginess of his khaki on the giant frame, and the brand-new ribbon of the D.C.M. "You have been only recently discharged from Hospital and are hardly quite strong yet. Are you?"

"First-class. It only touches me up in the puff now and then, like hell—I beg your pardon!"

John flushed darkly under his tough mahogany hide, and amended:

"I meant to say that I lose my breath and can't get it back again. But this is side-tracking." It was Katharine's turn to flush. "About—about that letter.... You see, I regularly got the wind up when I sat down to write to your father.... And so—I naturally fell back upon the translated draft of the letter of instructions written by my grandfather before his death and sent me with his Will."

Her doubtful face grew clear.

"At last I begin to understand.... The original letter and the Will were written in Hebrew?"

"Well, naturally, since Hebrew was the old man's native tongue, when he wasn't talking French or Modern Greek, or Arabic or Syriac...."

There was a spark of humour in the visitor's cavernous black eyes, and Miss Forbis' wide, beautiful mouth began to curl a little at the corners.

"This clears the air. Will you think me—I hope you will not think me offensively personal, Mr. Hazel, if I say that I found between your language and the phraseology of your letter, shall I say—a discrepancy that rather mystified me."

"Sure that!"

He pounded his knee as he used the Colonial word that the War has grafted upon our English speech for ever—and broke into his big coarse laugh, stopping short to glance at her mourning dress, and redden to his beetling eyebrows, and the cap of coarsely curling hair that capped his high-domed head, as naïvely as a schoolboy.

But Katharine had forgotten to be critical. In glancing over the letter in the big black handwriting of this big-nosed, black-avised young man, its sentences had once more cast their curious glamour over her. Her lips moved soundlessly as she whispered to herself:

"To the present lord of the Towers of Kir Saba in North Britain, and in Palestine, be it known by the word of Eli Ben Hazaël, present Head of the House of Hazaël of Alexandria in Egypt, and Jaffa in Palestine.

"The sum of moneys lent by Issachar Ben Hazaël, Merchant, in the Year 1146 of the Christian Era to Sir Hew Forbys, Knight, upon the fields, streams, vineyards and groves with the Tower of Kir Saba in Palestine hath been recovered with the interest thereupon due. The Tower of Kir Saba with the groves, vineyards, streams and fields appertaining, stand free from debt. Therefore are the sealed writings returned, with the moneys that are over the sum of the indebtedness: by the hand of a son of the House of Hazaël, who will receive writings of acknowledgment for the same.

"Let the present lord of the Tower of Kir Saba in Palestine and in North Britain duly apprise the writer of this as to when it will be convenient to him, to receive the representative of Eli Ben Hazaël.

Kindly address:

PRIVATE JOHN BENN HAZEL,
CITY OF LONDON (FENCHURCH ST.) FUSILIERS,
WARD NO. 8.,
COLTHILL WAR HOSPITAL,
MIDDLESEX."

XVII

Katharine looked up from the queer, absorbing letter, four pages of big plain note with the printed address of the Hospital, to meet the intent black stare of the representative of the House of Hazaël....

She said, returning the letter to the envelope, and keeping it in her hand as she went back to her chair opposite him:

"Your grandfather—was an old man?"

"He was nearly a hundred years of age, and mentally in topping condition when the War happened and swept away all his sons and grandsons too, except my brother and myself. And that broke his heart. Peace be upon him!" added John without intending it.

"Peace be upon him!" echoed Katharine Forbis. "I think that is a beautiful thing to say. He would have said it for my dear father had he known!" she added. "But they have met by now, in that good place where all good men foregather. Do you not think they have?"

"My grandfather was a devout Jew," said the big fleshy-lipped mouth opposite her.

"And my father was a faithful Catholic," said Miss Forbis. "And Catholics and Jews who have served God according to the light He gave them, are equal in His sight. Do you not believe so?"

"I've never given much time to theological and—ar—ar—dogmatic questions. But at Lloyds it stands that all ships are good ships if the insurance has been paid. Now as to these documents and things—" John reached down a long arm and hauled out from under his chair a business-like bag of shabby cowskin. "Here in this bag you see, I've got the whole caboodle!" (Really this was a very objectionable young man.) "But first, if you don't mind, the rings have got to be verified. That black agate you're wearing—and this of mine...."

He wagged a huge third finger. Katharine repressed a sense of this big, florid, hook-nosed young City insurance-broker's having taken a liberty, when she admitted, glancing at one of the large, beautiful hands lying lightly clasped together on her black lap:

"It is odd. This ring—which is a family heirloom worn up to the day of his death by my dear father—and that you have on, are practically identical...."

"With this difference, that mine is the original intaglio, and yours a facsimile of the design in relief. The 'mate to the gem' I rather think they'd call it." He looked at the black agate with the head of Hercules shouldering the club, and crowned with the lion-mask, once the signet of Philoremus Fabius, given by his patron to Hazaël the Jew.

"Would they? ... Oh, well, it's possible!" Katharine admitted. He went on:

"I was given to understand that this is no end of an heirloom. Been handed down in my grandfather's branch of the family—the trunk, I suppose I ought to call it—since the year 308...." He rubbed the antique greenish-gold setting on his sleeve, and looked at it closely, then drew it from his big third finger, and rose up from his chair.

It seemed to Katharine Forbis as though he would never have finished getting up. With a strange sensation she also realised that she was up against Antiquity and Tradition, in the person of this Territorial Tommy grafted upon a Cornhill insurance-broker; who spoke the colloquial English of the City, mingled with the slang of the camp and the trenches,—as a foreign language painstakingly acquired. Great as was her sense of race, it was belittled by Hazel's, with that history behind him that was written by the Eternal Finger on the living rock of Sinai....

And he was towering over her as she sat there—salient, masterful—endued with an authority ancient as the hills. Saying in his deep bass tones as he bent over her:

"It need not take a moment, Miss Forbis, but the form is absolutely necessary. It proves beyond doubt that you are you, and that I am—whom I say I am! ... May I ask you to hold out your left hand!"

She obeyed him, lightly resting the downward-turned palm of the hand that wore the black onyx upon the upturned palm of Hazel's. Now he brought the faces of the rings together, carefully adjusting them until the intaglio of his own ring covered the relievo of its counterpart, and the gems wedded into one chipped and shabby black onyx square....

"Good!" The young London business man was once more merged in the Jew of Syria. "There could be no proof more convincing than the marriage of these gems." He lifted his hand, and the rings were two again—and Katharine saw him return to his chair and become once more a large young London Territorial grafted on an insurance-broker, of Cornhill, E.C.

"Now I must hand you over these...." He was opening the cowskin bag, dipping in his big hands and bringing out—were these shrivelled things parchments? Wrapped in squares of faded yellowish silk, tanging the homely-sweet atmosphere of the room with myrrh and benzoin and other Eastern odours, spicy, pervasive, suggestive and queer. "First of all—" he handed the surprised Katharine the flat wallet of mouldy parchment sewn with antique silkworm gut—"this contains the original Title Deed of the Tower of Kir Saba, with the fields, streams, wells, vineyards and groves appertaining, granted to the Tribune Justus Martius of the Tenth Roman Legion by the divine Emperor Vespasian, on the tenth day of August in the second year of his reign...."

He paused to explain that the year was A.D. 70, when the old Roman Johnnies under Titus took the temple at Jerusalem, and then dealt with the remainder of the documents from the deed of mortgage between Sir Hew Forbis, and Issachar Ben Hazaël in the year 1146, down through the lengthy list of accounts and vouchers, the latest cleanly typed in purple ink on yellowish Levantine foolscap in the Jaffa offices of Messrs. Abel Manasseh, Ephraim and Co. Winding up:

"And I think you'll agree with me, Miss Forbis,—what with Wars, earthquakes, locusts and dry seasons; the raids of the Saracens and the Third and Fourth Crusades—not forgetting the Fifth in 1197 when Pope Innocent III issued a Bull dooming the people of the Ten Tribes to perpetual servitude,—that during what we Jews have got some excuse for calling the Dark Ages—there was nothing doing to any extent in the wine- and olive-trade."

"You talk," Katharine murmured, "as though all this happened yesterday."

"Speaking in my sense," said John Hazel, "it happened in December last...."

He went on,—seeming to feel his way,—garnishing his sentences less and less with the argot of the City and the slang of the trenches,—falling unconsciously more and more into the dignified archaic English of the translated typescript:

"Christianity had a grudge to work off on us Hebrews. When one of those jolly old mediæval jossers wanted to cleanse his crime-stained soul, he had it rubbed into him at G.H.Q. that the best Sapolio was the blood of a Jew. If kings or nobles wanted to raise an extra bit of pocket-money, they'd only to squeeze a Jew between a brace of paving-stones"—Katharine shuddered—"and drain away the gold. Between imposts and confiscations, spoliations, expulsions and massacres, not only in Syria but in West, North and Central Europe,—we Hazaëls had hardly a fighting-chance to develop our own, or another's property! The lands of Kir Saba had long lain desert round the ruins of the Tower,—when my ancestors were driven into Spain, to join the Sephardim there.... In Spain we struck root and prospered, they tell me. Near the end of the fourteenth century Spain became too hot for us. With luck at low-water-mark and all the hounds of Torquemada's Inquisition baying at our blistered heels, we flew the coop into Mohammedan Turkey—and under the protection of the Infidel we spat upon—Sultan Bayazet the Second—settled on friendly soil and held up our heads again. By the middle of the Eighteenth Century things began to pick up. An astonishing discovery, originally touched upon by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice blazed like a meteor—I've seen meteors blaze in France, but they were nothing to the German star-shell!—across the mentality of intellectual Christendom. 'The Jew pays better as a citizen than as a pariah. Pen him in the Ghetto and he cuts no ice—because Gentile laws cripple his energies. Let him out—he will be more useful still! His money is the golden manure of successful speculation. His Jewish brains are the pith and marrow of every progressive plan. In Law, Literature, Science, Poetry, Music and Art the alien leads—only God knows the reason!'"

The great clenched fist struck the mantelshelf heavily, making its vases of ancient Persian pottery tremble on their ebony pedestals:

"Fools! When He showered these flaming gifts upon the leaders of His Chosen People—did He not know that the Jew of all men would use to most advantage what he had received. So, from the kick-ball of the Dark Ages he has become the hub of Civilisation. The golden grease that oils the World's axles as it spins between the Poles!"

He pulled up and looked at his listener like a man suddenly awakened. His big black eyes burned with a dull red glow in their gaunt caves, and his bluish-shaded temples and prominent forehead shone with little beads of wet.

"These things were nothing to me once," he explained with a rather embarrassed shrug of his shoulders, "and now they pretty well run the show. Awfully sorry if I've talked too much about ourselves, Miss Forbis. But an explanation's necessary, especially after"—his big white teeth showed as he smiled—"our failure to hand in our accounts for nearly nine hundred years. Of course we have kept a base in Alexandria since the beginning of the Fourth Century, and later we established branches in Smyrna, Constantinople, Malta and so on.... But it wasn't until 1833 that we got foothold in Palestine and the vineyards of Kir Saba began to bear again...."

"You make wine there?" Katharine asked with interest.

"We used to, on rather a big scale. We have, or rather, we had vaults on the property, on an area of about 5 hectares—(we use the French method of mensuration)—with cellars and fermentation-rooms for use in vintage time, and an ice-machine and dynamo for running the machinery.... The Turks have smashed all that by now, and blown up the vaults I daresay,—as they did our vaults at Rehon and Zicron-Reuben. But I don't expect they let much of the wine run to waste. There are too many German officers with the Sultan's Army Corps—and our Medocs and Sauternes—sweet wines—to say nothing of our special Tokay—would be likely to appeal to 'em! Now may I trouble you with this cheque for a balance due to you."

He handed Miss Forbis a pale green-and-blue slip, representing a draft Payable to Order upon a London Branch of the Crédit Lyonnais for £8,149.16.10, and requested her acknowledgment for the same.

"Please to write 'Received by cheque—'" (Did he guess what a wonderful windfall that eight thousand dropped into her lap at this pinched juncture, seemed to Miss Forbis of Kerr's Arbour, with an income reduced to microscopic proportions by the War-slump in Home and Foreign Securities.) "That's the best way to word it." He took the acknowledgment from her, adding: "That's posh!—I mean, correct! Perhaps you would kindly keep my card, in case you needed help of any kind—that I could possibly give."

Something in the tone made Miss Forbis look round from the Chippendale writing-chair in front of the old rosewood bureau to whose drawer she had transferred the papers, and the pale green and blue cheque on the Crédit Lyonnais.

"You are most kind, Mr. Hazel, but there can be no legitimate reason why I should trouble you...."

"There's a reason, if it comes to that, and a thundering good one!"

She laid down her pen and turned to him in smiling inquiry:

"We of the House of Hazaël are bound to serve you and yours.... It follows that we do so."

"You do not mean that you are bound by any provision or clause in that old mortgage of the Tower?"

He returned in the calm authoritative tone that alternated so oddly with his modern slanginess:

"I speak of a great debt of gratitude incurred by a remote ancestor of mine to an early founder of your House—Philoremus Florens Fabius, Prætor of the Egyptian taxes at Alexandria—at the close of the Third Century, in my ancestor's early youth."

"'Philoremus Florens Fabius, Prætor of Egyptian taxes at Alexandria.' ..."

She leaned her cheek upon her hand, thoughtfully repeating the name. And all that was noble, patrician and austere in her proud, frank, healthful, vigorous beauty irresistibly appealed to the man who looked on her. Not at all in the sexual sense, though his was a sensuous nature. But once and for all he throned her in his heart as the noblest, dearest, most worship-worthy of living women; and knew that she would reign there as long as life should last....

She seemed to have forgotten John, so unrebuked he feasted, revelling in the grace of the long limbs, the fair hands lying folded together in her lap, the exquisite bend of the musing head upon the long white throat. No beauty she owned but went home to him with a sudden poignant joy of recognition, such as a man might experience, if, after years of hopeless separation, he were to find himself face to face with a beloved friend:—"As if a chap with a bayonet had jabbed me in the ribs!" he thought,—puzzled by the bliss that hurt,—reverting to Private Hazel.... And then he caught his breath, for her eyes had come back to his again. And they were kind as she asked:

"This money—this eight thousand pounds odd, you have just paid me. Can your firm afford to part with so much, when you have suffered such losses since the Turks joined the War?"

"We've got a bit put by against a rainy day." His face was mask-like in imperturbability as he recalled that trifling balance of three-hundred-and-eighty-thousand. Noting the smoothing of the slight, anxious line between Miss Forbis' handsome eyebrows, John guessed that the family were not over-flush. Who knew but that the eight thousand hadn't dropped into the lap of Katharine in the very nick of time. Proving his acumen, for indeed those unexpected thousands were a Godsend. But she was saying with a rather bewildered smile:

"I shall take a little time to get quite used to the idea of having property in the Holy Land.... And how odd that there should be one Kerr's Arbour here—and another over in Palestine—and that my father should never have heard of the existence of such a place!"

"The papers will make all that clear to you.... And—'Kerr's Arbour' is merely a corruption of 'Kir Saba,' as Kir Saba is a contraction of Kirjath Saba. The Tower of Kir Saba in Palestine has given this place its name.... 'The Walled Place of Saba' is the English translation from the Hebrew."

"Good Heavens! ..." murmured Katharine.

The huge dark man got up from his chair and leaned an elbow on the mantelshelf, and went on speaking in a deep slow tone that seemed the very voice of Time....

"The Philistines built the stronghold in the Year of the World 1160—when they came from the nor'west in their bird-beaked galleys, with shields set round the carven bulwarks, and scarlet lug-sails.... They set their ships on waggons drawn by great teams of oxen, and pushed up from the southward into Northern Syria and took the Coastal Plain.... Ashdod was Aasgaard then, and the Sons of Odin held revel there—with deer and hogs roasted whole, and barley-loaves baked in the ashes, and wine and beer and mead. Making sacrifices and libations to the stone image of their bearded long-staffed god, with the high hat and travelling mantle—just as blue-painted Teutons with long yellow hair, worshipped the wooden effigy in the clay, wattle and tree-trunk temples of Alemannia—and under the tall hanging-stones of Britain's Holy Rings.... But it was razed to the ground—I speak of the stronghold later known as Kir Saba—in the time of Solomon the King. And when King Solomon,—peace be upon him!—gave the City of Gaza to Balkis, Queen of Sheba,—woman-like she coveted, and asked, and got for her asking, the new Tower built by the King among the vineyards north of Joppa—that were famous for the greatness and sweetness of their grapes."

He removed a great brown hand from the marble to rub his forehead, and went on in the deep slow tone:

"Long after the glory of the King, like the beauty of the Queen—had passed into a dusty legend,—the Philistines possessed the land once more. And Kir Saba was destroyed again,—and again rebuilt—and burned, as I have said, by the Kharezmian Tartars in the year of the Christian Era, 1244."

He coughed, stuck a thumb in his belt and continued in quite a different tone:

"As for the building as it stands now—supposing the Turks have left any of it,—it dates from somewhere in the Tenth Century, rather more than a hundred and seventy years before the time of Sir Hew."

XVIII

"Ah, yes, Sir Hew! ..." Katharine responded. "Naturally as the builder of Kerr's Arbour, Sir Hew's name is more familiar to us than that of many a later ancestor. I will except Sir Mark, at whose portrait you are looking now...."

Her glance followed her visitor's to a noble Vandyke canvas set in the panelling above the mantelshelf.

"'Sir Mark Forbys,'" John read out from the rusty-gilt lettering beneath, "'Captain-General In The Royal Forces, 1645. Killed At The Battle of Naseby.'"

Below the lettering was the coat-of-arms whose faded gilding shone on the courtyard-gates. The jut of the hooded hearth, below the narrow mantelshelf, showed the coat again, sculptured in bold relief: and wrought in enamel on the guard of Sir Mark's sword—embroidered on the crimson scarf that crossed his breast, and on the corner of the velvet saddle-cloth of the Arab charger held in the background by a handsome waiting page; the three silver scallop-shells on a fesse between two chevrons black and gold, were topped by the crest of the wolf's head, scrolled with its legend, indecipherably minute, or clear and plain to read:

"FORBYS FOES FA"

John's eyes softened as they rested on the brilliant, clear-cut face, of which Katharine's was a softer feminine replica. For all the laces, velvets and silks of his splendid figure in its damascened steel-plate, with the rich brown curls hanging in heavy masses on the rose-point of its Stuart collar, Sir Mark bore the cachet of a dominating race. A proven blade in a velvet sheath, a fighter for all his frippery....

Bringing his glance back from the portrait to Sir Mark's living descendant, John Hazel, with a queer thrill of proprietary pride, promised himself that the foes of this Forbis should not for want of a champion, remain standing upright!

Had she an enemy? If so, let him look out for himself if ever John Hazel had the chance to get at him. And then, with a sudden blinding flare of recollection—as though a searchlight had found at last a thing that had been hovering in the dark of semi-forgetfulness—beyond the range of active consciousness—came the memory of the story heard in the train—the incredible tale of Katharine's betrayal—the dreadful news that soon would have to be broken, that might come crashing down upon her any moment now....

Treacherous hound.... Damnable, lying, sneaking—No! The face of the man seen upon the day before, rose up in Hazel's memory. Not a face easily forgotten. Thin, brown, handsome, refined,—with straight, clear-cut features, and-grey, miserable, desperate eyes....

Again Katharine addressed John Hazel, and he started. His heavy Army boot ground on the kerb of the fireplace as he turned to answer her. In the same instant, beyond and behind her as she sat before him in her chair,—framed in the open glass-doors of the more distant of the terrace-windows,—he saw the tall khaki figure and the haunted face of Yaill.

Their looks met. Something in the nature of an appeal and a reply passed between the gaunt black eyes and the miserable grey ones. Then the tall khaki figure moved on. Not so swiftly but that the sound of his booted footsteps on the terrace tiles reached the keen ear of Katharine. Her head turned the fraction of an inch towards the window ... a wonderful light broke over her, transfiguring, irradiating.... Marvel of marvels.... John Hazel found himself looking for the first time in the face of Beautiful Love.

Love.... Not at all the kind of love familiar to John Hazel. Not the cocktail-kindled emotion of the restaurant or supper-club. Not the love of a Birdie Bright or any of her venal sisters,—but the love of a clean-souled, pure-hearted Katharine for her chosen lover, her one "Man of all men."

Submerged for a moment in a great wave of emotion, John Hazel caught his breath, reddened and gulped. Such facial characteristics as a prominent forehead, tanned and tough-skinned as the knee of a Highlander, and capped with wiry closely-curling hair of inky blackness,—the heavy smudge of eyebrows thatching those glowing eye-caverns—the great salient hooked nose, coarse fleshily-lipped mouth and portentously lengthy chin with a cleft in it—could not be said to constitute a sympathetic visage. And yet, Katharine found herself seized with a sudden, irresistible conviction that this strange young man was sorry for her....

Just as she had caught a passing glimpse of Edward, her man of men, her precious dear one!—pacing the terrace up and down in the nipping sunshine, threading the frosty garden-walks with no better companion than his pipe to cheer him, until his Kathy should bestow her company on him again....

Sorry. Why should the grandson of Eli Hazaël be so sorry for Katharine Forbis? For the man had pitied her—it had been written in his face. Ah, now Katharine understood, and understanding, blushed a little. Mark had been killed.... Julian was Missing, and—when to-morrow's solemn rites should be concluded—and that dear sleeper be carried from the chapel to rest in the Forbis' vault under the shadow of the Tower—Katharine would be alone....

Utterly alone, had it not been for Edward. Oh, thanks to God! for that gift of his faithful love. And what was the deep bass voice of this extraordinary John Hazel saying? She roused herself to attention with a little, secret sigh:

Edward was waiting for her in the garden after long years of separation, but Father would have wished her to be particularly gracious to this queer young man from Cornhill. Father had looked forward to his coming with extraordinary interest.... He would have towed him off to his den; and they would have been boxed up hours together, questioning and answering.... And you would have heard the Jew's big voice booming down the gallery in spite of the thickness of the old oak door....

She broke a silence that grew awkward, saying in her mellow tones:

"About the borrowing of the money for the building of the Tower, here on our Scottish Border, there must be some story.... He—my dearest—" her thought went tenderly to the sleeper lying not far off in the sacred silence of the chapel—"he always said there must be one, and that we should light on it some day. We have our legend about the Roman tribune Marcus Fabius (who must have been a son of Philoremus Florens Fabius). He was bred by a community of Coptic monks in Egypt, and came over to Britain in the service of the Emperor Constantine. But beyond his signature appended to a queer lead-sealed parchment covered with crabbed brown Gothic handwriting—a kind of Twelfth century builder's estimate—kept with other family papers in our strong-room—where the wonderful crumbly Title Deed of Kir Saba and all the rest shall join it presently!—of Sir Hew, hardly anything is known."

"I'll tell you what I've crammed of Hew." The speaker went on, feeling for his sentences, sometimes using the excellent if archaic English of the translated letter, other times reverting to modern slang: "He was a Crusader who had served Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem"—(the thick mouth under the cropped black moustache sneered a little)—"first as page and cupbearer, afterwards as body-squire, and later on as a Knight, in Baldwin's last campaign of 1118. He got what one might call a Blighty wound—an arrow through the fleshy part of the thigh—in 1145—driving the Egyptians under Nureddin, their Sultan, out of the castles and coast-towns of Palestine; and the fever of the country—malaria, we'd call it!—seems to have given him beans. But being recovered of his wound under the care of Issachar Ben Hazaël, who tended him as his own son in his house near Joppa, he rebuilt and adorned the Tower of Kir Saba, which had been held as a fortress by the invading Paynims—that means the Egyptians under the Abbasside—and then 'wearying of Palestine'—this was in 1146—'bethought him of quitting the Holy Land and returning to Britain straightway.' ..."

Katharine was listening, fair cheek on white hand, as some twelfth-century lady of the Forbis race might have listened to the tale of Hew....

"But want of boodle intervened, according to Hew's chronicler. Restoring castles even in those days, sometimes spelt bankruptcy, and 'being impoverished'—I'm quoting from a contemporaneous document—'firstly by the great cost of hewn stone and timber; and secondly by his excessive love of good wine, feasting and prodigality; the shows of jugglers, the songs of minstrels—and the company of the daughters of Delilah, this Knight cast about to raise money upon loan.'"

The narrator broke off to comment:

"A sporty boy, Hew, evidently,—and not the first Brass Hat who's enlivened his H.Q. on a War Front—with imported talent and beauty—of the Musical Comedy kind. So being short of cash to settle his accounts, and charter ships to carry him home, and incidentally rebuild the Tower of Kir Saba in North Britain 'so as to make the dwelling seemly for a lord of his estate,' Sir Hew engineered a loan from the Jew, Issachar Ben Hazaël of Joppa—the Joppa of those days is Jaffa to-day,—and the facts I'm giving are taken from a letter, written in the Twelfth Century lingua Franca, and the usual Gothic hand. I've a translation as well as the original, which of course is our property.... Means nothing to me but brown scratches on mouldy sheepskin, though to my pal Harding, ex-Curator of the Mediæval Manuscript Dep. at the British Museum—it would have been toffee and peppermint-rock. First-class man, my pal Harding—killed last March at Richebourg St. V." He answered Katharine's look of interrogation. "A German prisoner shot him from the rear, in our trenches.... And I went balmy and laid out the Hun! ..."

"You mean that you—killed the prisoner who did it?" Miss Forbis' cairngorm eyes were cold and judicial in their regard.

"Exactly." John nodded, and Katharine told herself that the man was a brute as well as a bounder. "But I seem to have been getting away from Sir Hew...."

"Perhaps you have!" Sarcasm was lost upon this pachydermatous person, who murdered prisoners in calm defiance of the Geneva Convention. "Why did he want to build another Kir Saba here on the Border?"

"Because—though he'd got a Tower here already, he didn't consider it seemly for a lord of his swagger, being only 'of great stones unmortared and unbevelled, standing inside a paled enclosure of wattle and posts and earth.'"

"Then that is why the old chronicles call it a pale-tower?" Katharine's interest was eager and vivid now....

"A pale-tower. I expect so. And the bags of French gold were wanted to pay the architect's fee and the wages of the stone-quarriers; and 'the lime and sand wherewith to mortar the stone, and the cost of the clippings of a troop of the Scots King's horse, the better to bind the same.' So the mortgage of Kir Saba was drawn up, signed and sealed—you've got it there with the rest—and you ought to have a duplicate somewhere! And the bags of French gold were packed in boxes and sent down to Sir Hew's ship. He had three of 'em, high-sterned three-banked galleys with scarlet-lug-sails, to take him and his servants, and his Arab horses, and the rest of his baggage home to Britain—and the one he chose for his own use was called The Scottish Crown...."

"Oh—do go on!" Katharine began to see Sir Hew, healed of his arrow-wound by the Jew's skill, with the brown of Syrian suns on his fair skin, and their bleach on his yellow hair—going home to rebuild his Tower and rear his long-legged, broad-shouldered race of Forbis. "This part of the story is wonderfully interesting. If only Father had been alive to hear it to-day!"

"There's not so much to tell. Hew got ready to sail. Old Issachar Ben Hazaël loaded him with gifts; myrrh and spices, incense and dried raisins,—Egyptian hangings and silk embroideries, mother-of-pearl and turquoises; ivory and rare woods—fresh fruit for the voyage and so on.... And Hew took all that he could get—not that I'm inclined to blame him! But at the last minute he wanted a thing with which my ancestor wasn't inclined to part.... Issachar Hazaël had a daughter.... It seems—" The tone changed.... The sentences came dropping from the heavy mouth like strings of cold, weighty, slippery, polished beads of jade—or so it seemed to Katharine: "It seems that my ancestress and Sir Hew had met at our house—it is our house still!—if the Turks have left it standing amongst the orange and olive-groves to the nor'east of Jaffa. And—the girl was beautiful, and Hew—was a Crusader...."

"He—wished to marry her?" The tone was enigmatical.

"He broached the subject of marrying her—an hour before he sailed."

"With what success?"

"With the—result that might have been expected."

Their looks crossed like swords. And resentment burned in Katharine. She stiffened and drew more upright in her chair.

"The Jew—refused to entertain my ancestor's proposal?"

"Just that. He said to him"—the voice of the speaker changed and deepened:

"'Thou hast the gold and the goods. Depart with that which is thine to the country of thine adoption. When the money is recovered in the fulness of time, the title-deeds concerning Kir Saba will be given back again.... For'"—

The big voice echoed among the rafters of the heavily-beamed room, making a brass Chinese gong hung upon a stand at the further end, vibrate with a faint tenor humming....

"'For by a great oath sworn by a forefather of our race in ancient times, we of the Hazaël are bound to succour the children of thy House unto the final generation. That oath we have kept, and will keep, Sir Knight. But we do not defile the pure stream of Jewish lineage with the blood of Gentile veins. I have spoken!' ..."

Fierce scarlet leaped to the roots of Katharine's hair. As though the speaker had struck or insulted her, she rose from her seat with one swift supple movement,—and so stood facing him, quivering with wrath. He too had risen—and thus the woman and the man opposed each other in a silence that both knew hostile; pregnant with hatred, racial, religious—sprung green and poisonous from the dust of nearly two thousand years....

"He dared to speak so to a Scottish gentleman! A Jew!" ...

The great black eyes beneath Hazel's heavy eyebrows burned like live coals. His deep voice echoed:

"A Jew, Miss Forbis. A representative of the People who received the Law from Sinai. Who possessed, besides the Torah, Literature, Poetry, Arts and Sciences—even when a rabble of Aryan nations, swept North by the besom of some Assyrian conqueror—rolled into the Caucasus through the Pass of Dariel. Verily, verily!—and peopled Russia and Germany,—crossing lakes and seas and rivers on log-rafts and in boats of osiers and skins. And paddling across the North Sea—and building forts of tree-trunks at the mouth of an estuary—laid the foundations of the British Nation of which you boast to-day!"

XIX

So they stood face to face, the Occident and the Orient, until the tact of the woman, the subtlety of the man—suggested the compromise of an exchanged smile.

"After all it is very Ancient History.... I think," said Katharine with a gleam of mirth in her eyes of gold and bramble-dew, "that your ancestor was discourteous, and mine—"

"A little bit premature. Or tardy from another point of view,—in asking for what he'd got already. For Sir Hew and my ancestress had been married a week or so back—by a Catholic friar who had baptised Judith—after having received her abjuration of her Jewish faith. Between them they broke the news to Issachar Hazaël, 'who at first made naught of the Lady Judith's entreaties, but after many tears, embraces and cajoleries, suffered himself to be persuaded to sit with them at meat.'"

"Did he? ... I should have suspected—"

"Rats—if I'd been in the sandals of the Lady Judith—and I'd have made an inner bull if I had! 'He would taste of no dish'—according to my Twelfth Century scribe—but he 'filled an ancient silver cup with the best wine of Kir Saba, and touched it with his lips once: seeming to drink while dropping into the goblet under cover of his beard, which was white as the snow of Herman, and fully an ell long—a ring of black onyx incarven very curiously, having a head of the Greek Hercules-with his club and lion-mask.'"

"The ring you wear. The fellow to my ring! And it was poisoned?"

"This ring I wear—the signet from his hand. There's a little compartment with a spring-lid, back of the setting, so I suppose it held poison—as you say, when he 'did hand the goblet to the Lady Judith, bidding her pledge him. But Sir Hew, stretching forth his hand in sport, laid hold of the goblet, whereupon said Hazaël: "Drink first, my Lady Forbis!" and she answered: "That will I right gladly, O my father! but thou and mine husband must kiss me first!" So she took the kisses and gave them back, and quaffed off the cup right merrily—and died as though she had been struck by lightning, not falling down, but sitting stiff and smiling in her chair....'"

There was a silence in the room. Then Katharine murmured, still vibrating:

"Women knew how to love in those days!" ...

"And men knew how to hate!" ...

"And is that all?"

"All, except that Sir Hew leaped up, and cried, when the corpse fell down out of the chair upon the daïs strewn with lion-skins: 'We were wed by a priest! I dealt honourably by her!' And Issachar said,—and I think he comes out of it pretty well on the whole: 'What is honour in thine esteem is dishonour in mine! For the girl, she was begotten of these my loins.... Take what is thine, Sir Knight, and depart an' thou will to thine own adopted country. I deal as I choose with that which is mine own!' Straight off the ice, I call that. Fine old fellow!"

Katharine said, a little breathlessly, for the thrill of a great tragic happening seemed to be in the air:

"Yes, it was great, and terrible and merciless...."

"Hardly to Judith. When he'd once got her over in Britain, Hew would have gone back to the Beauty Chorus. For I'm not over struck on Hew," said John Hazel with a queer quirk of his fleshy underlip. "He appears to have anticipated the Profiteer's motto of the present date. Perhaps you've heard it? 'Self first, me next, and I'll take whatever's left over!' Now I've gone and made you wild with me all over again!"

His huge size, and his genuine ruefulness, contrasted so queerly that Katharine, still tingling to the finger-tips at the insult to Sir Hew, was forced to smile.

"It is a mercy we are not likely to meet often, Mr. Hazel. We should quarrel inevitably. And yet—" There was sweetness in the smile of her eyes of cairngorm brown as she stretched out her long arm and offered her hand to him, saying: "And yet, in a tight place, I would trust you before most men!"

"Give me the chance, Miss Forbis!" His black eyes flashed in their deep caves as her white hand was engulfed in his huge brown one.

"If there is need," she said, "I will not fail to!"

"It's a bargain then!" said John Hazel, and released the hand. "Now I must be going. I have trespassed on your time most frightfully." He turned and reached down to the floor and picked up the cowskin bag....

"One moment, Mr. Hazel!" For he was striding towards the door, and urgently as she desired to be quit of her strange untimely visitor, the sacred bond of old fidelity, exerted its strong invisible influence between these two, so utterly dissimilar—making her add, even as she laid her hand on Whishaw's summoning bell: "You would—would you not wish to attend my father's funeral?"

"I meant to, whether you were willing or not! ..."

The tone robbed the assertive words of all offence. She answered:

"Thank you. He will be laid to rest in the vault in our little private burying-ground the day after to-morrow. Monday morning, immediately after the Requiem Mass at ten. If it will be difficult or bad for you,"—her glance was kind for the hollow cheeks and the bagginess of the khaki on the great wasted body—"to drive over from Cauldstanes in this sharp weather at so early an hour—I know my father would have been glad to—to have you stay...." She added as Whishaw opened the door: "Perhaps you would dine with us to-morrow and sleep the night here?"

"It would put you out." His vast shoulders filled the open doorway, the lintel of which just cleared his towering head. He added as Whishaw faintly clacked behind him: "It's awfully good of you to suggest finding me a bivvy, but the motor-bike that brought me over here to-day—it belongs to the son of the landlady at the Cross Keys—will hold together long enough—at least I hope so!—to carry me over the distance again. But there's one thing I'll ask you. Not, as a favour, mind you!—but as a right, to let me—see him!"

Whishaw again forgot himself so far as to clack, this time distinctly. Miss Forbis' momentary hesitation was dissipated by the sound. She bent her head in grave assent, took her black lace veil and blue-check apron from the writing-table, saying to John Hazel:

"Wait here one instant!" and quitted the room, closely followed by her ancient serving-man.

As the door shut behind them John Hazel's expression altered. His beetling eyebrows drew into a savage line over his great hooked nose, and his swarthy colour faded to ashen brown. His coarse mouth hardened grimly as he crossed with long, noiseless strides to the open terrace-window, and stood there for a moment, quietly looking out. At the first glimpse the sunshiny terrace showed deserted of the pacing khaki figure.... Then the crack of a kindled match broke the silence. Yaill stepped from behind the buttress that had sheltered him as he had paused to light another pipe. The fragrance of the good weed came to Hazel's nostrils, as their eyes met for the second time that day....

"Did you wish to speak to me, by any chance?"

The great menacing figure blocking the window-frame slewed its head in the customary quarter-turn, and raised ar hand in the usual salute.

"As man to man—not as private to field-officer—I have something urgent to say to you, Colonel Yaill."

A pale light flickered in the sorrowful grey eyes he looked at. Was it irresolution, anger, apprehension? The actual truth he utterly failed to guess. Relief.... The die cast, the doubt resolved, the tangle straightened.... The path clear for the lonely feet till death....

"Have you? Well, carry on! We have no hearers. Will you come outside, or shall I come in? ..."

John stepped back. Yaill entered. The men confronted each other. There was one instant's pause before Hazel said:

"This is Saturday forenoon—"

"Twelve pip emma precisely." Yaill glanced at the cheap new watch upon his wrist. A flush burned his thin brown cheeks as he remembered that the bauble had been Lucy's wedding-gift.

"Twelve Saturday.... The Funeral is to be on Monday at ten o'clock...."

"You are incorrect. Monday at ten-thirty...."

"I aim at being plain and short with you, sir. If by three o'clock on Monday afternoon you have not told Miss Forbis of your marriage, I am going to save you the trouble, Colonel Yaill."

"Indeed?" ... Yaill's face was deathly under its sun-tan. "Perhaps you'll tell me who the Hell you are?" ...

John answered with a grim inexpressive visage:

"You can see for yourself. A London Territorial.... Ranker as long as this blasted old War goes on.... And a kind of—family friend of this house of Forbis.... If you're taking any further explanation—I'm bound to tell you you won't get it here...."

"Very well. Your name? ..." It was the crisp, curt tone that marks the caste of the officer, making the other stiffen against his will:

"Private John Benn Hazel, No. 000. X Platoon—Company F. 4th Battalion, 448th City of London Fusiliers, sir."

"I shall remember. Good-day to you, Private Hazel. And carry on!"

"You may be sure I will!"

The door-handle turned as the short, stern colloquy ended. Both men looked round and saw Katharine standing near the door. Her black lace veil draped her head with mystery. In her hand was a little bunch of purple violets, whose perfume made rich sweetness in the air.... She made a sign to Hazel that he should follow her, gave one swift glance of tenderness to Edward, and left the room, followed by his enemy....

"I was going to give him these. Perhaps you would like to?" she said, putting the flowers in John's great hand. He mumbled something she did not catch, but she understood that he would like to, as she led the way down the vaulted corridor—pausing before opening the chapel door to stroke the decrepit pointer-bitch Dawtie, who lay with her muzzle between her forepaws, keeping guard over the sleeper who would wake in Time no more....

Then she passed into the sacred place; bent in reverence before the Presence in the Tabernacle, and led the way up the little aisle closely followed by John. He heard her say in a low, clear voice, as he stood near the feet of the old man who lay in the long oak coffin:

"Father dear, here is a friend of ours whom you have wished to see! ..."

Just as though the old man lying there had not been dead at all.... He—Sir Philip—must have been a tall man, rather narrow than broad-chested; and in youth his fine aquiline-featured face, now set in the sternness of death, might have belonged to his ancestor Marcus Fabius—that Tribune of Constantine,—who superintended the building of fortified camps on the Scottish Border—and planted millions of barbed iron prongs on the brae-sides and in the moss-hags for the bedevilment of naked Celtic feet.

So John laid the bunch of violets below the stiff grey hands that were clasped over a Crucifix and had a Rosary threaded between their rigid fingers,—and rode back on his borrowed motor-bike to the Cross Keys at Cauldstanes—an ancient stone box full of prehistoric smells (stale beer and boiled cabbage predominating)—and slept in a bedroom with an uphill floor, crowded with glass-fronted cases of stuffed salmon and trout, owls, heron, and moth-eaten brocks and foxes.

XX

On Monday John attended the Funeral, driving out to Kerr's Arbour in the dog-cart, in company of Mr. Kellar, the Cauldstanes solicitor and notary, who had heard, possibly through Mrs. Govan, that the big black sojer-man from London was "somehow conneckit wi' the family at Kerr's."

Khaki predominated, for the General commanding at the P—— Depot attended with his aide-de-camp, and the officers of the Fourth and Fifth Squadrons of the Tweedburgh Light Horse officiated as pall-bearers at the burial of their Chief.... In the company of the handful of troopers detailed to act as escort, John Hazel remained near the door of the chapel throughout the Requiem Mass. Declining with obstinate shakes of the head Whishaw's hoarse-whispered invitations that he should "tak' a move up and sit wi' the family" in the parallel rows of benches close-packed by County friends and tenants, and a relative here and there.... Red Cross uniforms were worn by many among the women,—nor was wanting the khaki of the L.L.W.S.L. If the green eyes of Trixie Lady Wastwood picked out among the troopers on the benches near the west door, her fellow-traveller of two days previously—John remained ignorant of the fact.

Bolt upright against the plastered wall left of the chapel door, his great height lifting him above the heads of the congregation, his hawk-vision showed him through an unfamiliar, glittering haziness—the long coffin covered with the Union Jack, on its black-draped trestles, with its single wreath of violets, gathered and placed there that morning by the daughter's loving hand....

An old-type long brass-scabbarded R.H.A. sword with the heavy-fringed sash of faded crimson, rested on the Red, White and Blue, with the soldier's medals and decorations.... The Burmese War Medal of 1826, the four-barred Crimean medal with its faded blue yellow-edged ribbon, the medal of the Indian Mutiny, ribbon white and scarlet; the Turkish Order of the Medjidie with its star and crimson circle, the Maltese Cross of the C.B., the K.C.V.O., the Belgian Order of Leopold; and the eight-pointed, red-enamelled gold Cross of the Pontifical Order of St. Gregory....

Two figures kneeling on prie-dieux on the right of the coffin nearest the gate in the Communion-rail, drew and held the black hawk-eyes from the beginning of the Rite to its close. A tall brown-haired man in khaki, and a woman in deepest mourning, tall also, and bending like a palm in tempest under her shrouding black crape veil. When the fragrant incense rose at the chant of the Responsory:

"Libera me Domine, de morte æterna."

When the Kyrie Eleison wailed out, and the Paternoster filled the silence; when the priest circled the bier, asperging the feet, the middle and the head of the corpse with the consecrated Water; when the prayer of Hope and Faith ended with the intoned "Amen" and Yaill rose to his feet and stepped to the head of the coffin—John Hazel got up too from the back-bench, where he was sitting: glowering, reluctant but driven on by a Force he could not but obey....

That unseen hand that had thrust down his head when he entered the presence of Katharine had him again in its resistless grip.... He went up the little aisle between the packed benches, moving with long, noiseless strides, and took his place opposite Yaill. Had he been asked why he did this, he would have mumbled that it had seemed only the decent thing to lend a hand, and yet the impulse, rendered into words, would have been capable of a nobler interpretation:

"Thou hast here no son to bear thee to thy tomb. Therefore, let me render thee this service, whom, never having heard thy voice or touched thy living hand,—I, by the oath of my forefather, nevertheless am bound to serve. And after thee those that are thine, as long as life remains to me!"

The muttered word of command was drowned by the harmonium. The troopers detailed as bearers clanked up the aisle, Yaill's hand steadying the coffin as they lifted it—John Hazel taking upon his shoulders his full share of its weight. Seeing the words, "Because thou hast no son," written in letters of golden fire upon the frescoed stone walls, in violet and orange and fiery crimson across the face of the rose-window in the ogive over the West door, as the escort formed in file at the head of the procession and passed out by a side-exit, heralding the bearer of the Crucifix with its child-borne lights, the chanting choir, the tall young officer with the black-craped regimental Standard, and—carried by five tall Light Horsemen and one taller infantryman—its pall borne by officers of the Fourth and Fifth Squadrons—the coffin of their dead Chief....

So they bore him to the little private burial-place at the foot of the wood-shagged hill that rose behind Kerr's Arbour, touched by the long shadow of its Tower when the sun moved towards the south....

Before the steps leading to the gate of the open vault, the escort of troopers halted and turned inwards, making a lane for the dead man to pass through, as they rested on arms reversed. The coffin was lowered, again asperged by the celebrating priest and incensed with the words:

"Eco sum resurréctio et vita, qui credit in Me etiam—si mórtuus fuerit vivet...."

During the singing of the Canticle Edward Yaill led forward Katharine Forbis. John Hazel, standing in rank with the bearers, caught full view of her death-white, tear-drenched face. Something wrenched at his heart as the priest assisting offered her a silver shell of sacred earth, and she scattered some upon the lid of the coffin—from which the Union Jack with the sword and decorations were now removed. Yaill followed suit: some old friends and Mrs. Bell and the lawyer, Mr. Kellar, pressed forward to take part in this significant act. But Katharine's eyes beckoned and Hazel's answered. He held his palm; she poured from the silver shell—and the soil from the Mount of Olives streamed between his fingers in a thin brown stream, dulling the purple petals of the violets....

And then, moving slowly under the weight of the burden, came the slow descent of the steps leading into the vault, where—to the solemn company of the departed—ranged upon rock-hewn shelves in their modern oak or old-world lead, or antique granite coffins,—Philip, last Forbis of the male line save Julian,—supposing Julian yet to be numbered amongst the living,—was joined with the solemn blessing of his Church.

John Hazel's stern black eyes met Yaill's grey ones, as in unison with others they lent their strength to place the heavy coffin on the stone shelf appointed for its repose. When it slid to its place, their glances again encountered. Yaill was livid and spent and panting, for the effort had taxed him. But he gave back the other's look with cold composure, brushing a little dust from his ringed sleeve. Then, only delaying to replace upon the coffin its wreath of violets—he mounted the moss-grown steps—following the celebrant—and drew Katharine's cold hand once more within his arm.

"Attention! Present! ... Slope arms!"

As the ponderous door of the vault was shut and locked, the sharp voice of the commander of the escort broke the awed silence. The trumpeter sounded the Last Post—and three times the ringing crash of the volley startled to flight the rooks of the home-wood and the jackdaws of the Tower. As the small procession of friends, mourners and clergy returned from the burial-ground to the slow recital of the De Profundis, Yaill thought bitterly:

"Out of the depths I have cried, and no One has heard me. Yet, what had I done amiss?"

The County, with genuine regret tinging its discreetly-conventional condolences, rolled away in its landau-limousines or open cars. The officiating priests,—Father Haddon of the parish church at Birkleas,—the Father Superior of the Benedictine Monastery,—his guest the Jesuit from Farm Place, and Father Inghame,—pleaded an engagement to early dinner at Scraeside. The cars that had brought the General and his aide, and one or two elderly County magnates, remained outside the courtyard railings; their owners having stayed to lunch, as did the officers of the Tweedburgh Light Horse. At the board, Yaill did the honours, aided by Mr. Kellar, the Mistress of Kerr's not being present. A strange, ungenial banquet, crowning a strange, sorrowful day, that,—like how many others that had preceded it,—seemed to the host to be woven of the stuff of dreams. Only the rosy Kellar and one or two of the juniors grew merry over the Forbis port, while John Hazel,—who had shortly declined all hospitable offers of refreshment, rode back to Cauldstanes on Alec Govan's rickety "Sunray,"—thinking of the eyes that had silently bidden him participate in the final rite that only the nearest share.

The reading of the Will in the dead man's library followed the departure of the guests. There were a few personal legacies to friends and pensioners. Kerr's Arbour, with its eleven-hundred acres of moss-hag and moorland, its few productive farms and its neglected coverts, would, did Julian live, be Julian's, with reversion to Katharine and her heirs.

Over that windfall of £8000, rosy Mr. Kellar chuckled, or would have, had the solemnity of the occasion allowed. It would apply at this juncture to pay outstanding debts of Captain Mark's,—who had been something of a spendthrift—patch up yawning holes in the rent-roll, where the master of Kerr's Arbour had foregone the rents of such tenants as had volunteered for military service—pay the expenses of the funeral,—and swell with the balance remaining the tale of odd thousands, that, with her mother's little fortune,—would, if invested in four per cent War Bonds—provide Miss Forbis with an income approximating to £700 a year.

"This is a sad day, Colonel Yaill—a sad black day for a' of us!" said the lawyer, as Whishaw helped him into his shaggy overcoat. "But Gude be thanked! the warst o't is ower. We're looking to yoursel' now, an' to Miss Forbis, to bring back life and happiness to Kerr's. Ye'll be blessed in your pairtner—" the good man was sorely henpecked—"a sonsy, sweet body that can be relied on neither to stick nor fling! Not but housekeeping in these times is a trial an' a hertbreik. Mrs. Kellar is sore put to it by the scarceness o' sugar an' fat. She made ninety-eight punds of blackberry-an'-apple jam for the Expeditionary Arrmy last September—an' some clever billie put her up to the eking out the sugar wi' saut. I fand mysel' sadly the warse for having tasted it by accident, an' Toch!—if the lads at the Front get muckle o' that stuff intil them, I tell her she'll be fechtin' on the side o' the Huns. Here comes the meir an' cairt. Is there no one wanting a cast to Cauldstanes? ... Put in the black bag, Erchie Whishaw, no' in the well to be overlooked, but juist between my feet. And Gude-bye again to ye, Colonel Yaill, and an auld freend's love to Miss Forbis! This has been a black sair day for a' of us ... but thanks be to Providence! we're at the end o't!" ...

Yaill thought as the gravel of the courtyard shirred under the wheels of the retreating dog-cart, "More black, more sore than the good man dreams! And my part in it is not yet finished. Old Webster never conjured up a grimmer tragedy. For at ten o'clock I lend a hand to bury Katharine's father. Upon the stroke of three I stab the daughter to the heart. And having killed her love for me—at four—possibly earlier—I say Farewell to God's Forget—unlucky Edward Yaill!"

XXI

He went to Katharine, before three o'clock, in the little oak parlour, a panelled, chintz-hung, feminine nest that her dead mother had loved—looking over the South garden, across the now frozen expanse of a curlew-haunted lake.

She rose up out of her low chair by the hearthside at the welcome sight of Edward, and at her dear look his fetters seemed to fall from him and for one blessed minute he forgot—in the bliss of their embrace....

Attar of roses is composed of two essential oils, both scentless. When these meet and mingle, a divine perfume is born. So from the meeting of two pure and noble souls an ideal passion is engendered. Love that is founded on the rock of Reality,—yet capped with the cloud-domes of Imagination, cloaked with the glamour—exhaling the sweetness of Poetry and Romance.

It may be that these two had loved each other too purely for their earthly welfare. But as they settled into talk, fond, intimate, personal—tinged with Katharine's sacred sorrow, and yet illuminated with their joy—it seemed to Yaill that he had never yet tasted such happiness, as in this long-delayed, long-desired exchange of touch and thought and feeling—this perfect comradeship between woman and man.

Three o'clock sounded from the clock upon the mantelshelf, a Tudor toy in enamel openwork, whose tiny chime had rung for many a lover's meeting—and hastened many a lover's parting—but never heralded one more tragic than was coming now. He raised his head from its sweet rest on her beloved shoulder, and slowly loosed the yearning arms that had girdled her supple waist. Now,—now let the revelation come—the sooner the better. But how to bring it about? ...

Unwitting Katharine assisted here, by telling him how that morning Dawtie, the General's old pointer-bitch, had been found dead and already stiffened at her post outside the chapel door. Yaill said, scarce knowing what he uttered:

"You will be even—lonelier—without her. You must let me find you another dog to fill her empty place."

"Edward?"

Her sweet eyes lifted to his face. She saw him changed—changing. Deep lines graven on the broad brow that had smoothed under her kisses. Folds of bitterness from either wing of the large sensitive nostrils to the corners of the lips.

"Dear Edward, Dawtie was very old, and very seldom with me. And there are Bran and Laddie—if I should need the companionship of dogs. But soon now, very soon—there is nothing to prevent it"—She looked calmly in his face as he knelt on the rug beside her, stiffly upright, not touching her, both hands gripping the arm of her chair—"in a very few weeks—we shall be married, shall we not?"

He did not speak, and her eyes wavered from his, and a blush burned over her whole fair body: for was it not the man's part to speak such words as these? She said again: "Shall we not?" ... There was a terrible pause.... The clock chimed the quarter-hour....

"Shall we not, Edward, loving as we do—after these cruel years of delay?" ...

Unable to credit her own vision, she saw creeping into his grey eyes—was it reluctance, distaste or dismay? ... A shock went through her.... Rushing sounds filled her ears and through them she heard her own voice crying to him:

"Edward! ... For God's sake, don't look at me so! Something is wrong.... My dearest, tell me!" ...

Her arms went out to draw him close, and came back empty. He had drawn back, avoiding them, and risen to his feet. A quiver passed over his thin brown face, such as in windless weather will ripple the sleeping surface of some quiet forest pool. And the question came from her that she had never dreamed of asking:

"Is it that you do not love me—in the marriage sense—any more? Am I nothing but a friend? ... Answer.... I command you—answer!"

Yaill's face was drawn and grey. He said,—keeping stiff control upon the muscles of his lips:

"You are the one woman I worship.... I have never known another whose person so charms me, whose nature so appeals to me,—whose mind is so clear and full,—whose sympathy is so warm, so sweet, whose soul so answers to mine—"

"Edward!" ...

All reassured, she breathed the name in a tone of exquisite tenderness. He made her a sign that he had not done, and went slowly on:

"I have desired—desire you now as man desires the woman he worships. When our marriage was postponed by the death of your mother—when the Regiment was ordered to India and you could not leave your father—when this thrice-accursed War burst on the world in a blizzard of fire and steel, and I had to leave you almost at the church-door—God is my witness that I suffered! Far more than I could tell you, Katharine!"

"Love of my heart, I know it! ..."

He signed to her again for silence:

"Do not interrupt me! All this is hard to say.... But though my heart often cried out to you in those mad years of filthy fighting—living, eating and sleeping—did we ever sleep?—in the company of the Dead—while the world one had known and lived in—the world of pretty women—decent clothes, pleasant week-ends, jolly shooting-parties, sport, play, good hunters and easily-running cars—seemed—except in short flashes of intervals—to have been dead for cycles of ages—I was buoyed up by my hopes of you, my thoughts of you—your letters and our short rare blessed meetings. Glimpses of Paradise to a soul in Purgatory! You will believe that, will you not, Katharine?" ...

One tear glittered on his hard cheek. Oh! to have dried it with her kisses, and whispered comfort to her dearest, wrought to this desperate mood by some unknown cause.... But she sat still as he had bidden, soothed by his words of tenderness, yet with a little shivering premonition beginning to quicken at the roots of her heart:

"Then came the Great Disaster.... Oh! why didn't I marry you, when I got back to England—"

"My love," she said, "my precious dear!—I asked you to, you know!"

He made a despairing gesture of assenting:

"And I would not accept the gift you offered in your generosity—dear love, sweet woman!—best friend an unlucky devil ever had or could have! ..."

"Why?"

That "Why?" came like a moan from her. He answered sadly:

"Because I wanted to go away alone somewhere. To look my new self in the face, or to recapture the lost me. Thousands of men have felt the same—feel like that even at this moment—coming back with raw nerves and jumbled brains out of the hell of War."

"Then God help the women who love them!" said Katharine Forbis.

"They will suffer," said Edward Yaill, "until they have learned to understand the men. As you, pearl of women!—understood me, and pitied me. Can I ever forget that!"

"Stop!" She held up her hand in warning. "Do not praise me. For I believed your heart had changed to me. For a long time I believed it, and suffered horribly.... And then thank God, I found out one day that it was not so." ...

"When I came Home to tell you I had got back the Regiment.... There was just time—we could have made the time—to have got married then.... What stepped in? ... Fate! Was it Fate, Katharine? ..."

She knew their chance of happiness had been baulked again as ever by the inconquerable vacillation of this brave man she loved. But unshaken in her loyalty, she looked back at Edward, repeating with unfaltering lips:

"Just Fate—I suppose. Let us leave it at that and look forward to the Future. And the years we may have to spend together if it be God's Will."

Her voice blurred with held-back tears;

"But—don't keep me waiting any longer, dear Edward! I never have—never could have dreamed the possibility of changing towards you.... But if I get more lonely—if I get much more lonely than I am now—"

Was it possible that cry of tortured womanhood could have come from Katharine? Must she, his proud one, stoop, and stoop to plead? With clasped hands and yearning eyes of pain entreating—

"O Edward! don't keep me waiting long! Think of the years—"

He said with forced deliberation:

"We may even yet have years to spend together—if you have courage to forgive a grievous wrong!"

"What do you mean? ... How have you wronged? ... Have you not told me—"

Her voice had the sharpness of the stab he had dealt her, as she rose up out of her fireside chair.

"I will tell you what I mean—what I meant to have spared you, had not the man who came here yesterday with the documents from Palestine—had not that man threatened to tell you if I did not."

"To tell me what? Let me hear it now! You look ill, Edward!"

"To tell you that I am married!" said Edward Yaill....

As she stood before him, straight and tall, he saw the life go out of her. For an instant he looked on a dead, bloodless thing. Then the banished blood rushed back from about her heart. Her lips and eyes retained the look of life, but the face was a stranger's, and not Katharine's. Nor was it Katharine's voice that said:

"To tell me that you are married? ... Who is she?"

He hardly recognised his own voice saying:

"She is a nurse.... She was attached to the Convalescent Camp at B—— Base."

"Ah! ... And her name?" ...

"Lucy Burtonshaw."

"Ah! ..."

The interjection dropped from her pale lips like an icicle. But her breeding wrapped her in an impregnable mantle of dignity. His sense of her new remoteness was desolating as she asked him:

"And why are you here with me and not with Lucy Burtonshaw? I beg her pardon!—I should have said, Mrs. Edward Yaill. Can you explain?"

"I can explain absolutely. Whether you would believe me—that is another thing!"

"Let—let me think! ..." She put her hand to her forehead, pushing back her hair with a gesture of bewilderment. All her world lay in ruins round her, since those few sentences had fallen from his lips....

Rejected.... Betrayed.... Cast off.... She, Katharine Forbis, so great, so beloved, so beautiful,—the desired of many honourable, brave, high-born, handsome and wealthy men. Edward Yaill had never been told how many aspirants had sought her,—how many brilliant offers she had steadfastly set aside. Choosing for years to walk in maiden loneliness—keeping her priceless treasure of splendid womanhood stored up,—hoarded away to this unutterable end....

She moaned, and put her hand to her heart an instant when he said she would not believe if he explained himself. Nothing cut deeper or more cruelly than that. She said with the calmness of a mortally-wounded gentlewoman:

"I have not deserved that you should so judge me.... Say what you think is to be said for you.... This person—this lady who is now your wife—is the nurse—unless I am mistaken?—to whom I entrusted my letters to keep in charge for you?"

"The same. And she betrayed the trust.... She kept your letters. It was only on Thursday morning they first reached my hands." Always chary of gesture, he stretched them out to her, and drew them back and clenched—and let them fall again. "But for the accident of my getting the last letter you wrote me, upon the morning I was discharged from the Convalescent Camp—I might never have known—never remembered—" His voice broke. He turned away and leaned upon the mantelshelf, and bowed his shamed head over his folded arms.

"Edward! ..."

Her hand went out and lightly touched his shoulder. He thrilled at the tone in which she spoke his name:

"Edward, tell everything, and I will listen! ..."

He said in a choked voice, averting his face from her that she might not see the tears that brimmed and fell:

"God bless you for your mercy to me, Katharine! ... But the story is so wild and so incredible—I dare not hope for your entire belief.... You have believed in my devoted love for you.... I have lived, all these years, for you alone.... Yet last Thursday, when I awakened from that strange illusion—in the room at that Coombe Bay hotel"—Katharine shuddered—"I was married," he made a despairing gesture,—"married to a poor, weak, commonplace girl."

"She is your wife.... You are bound to remember it...."

He said:

"I have done so far more than she deserves.... I have written to my solicitors—have provided for her generously.... Do not think me capable of leaving her to poverty.... But I cannot—will not share my life with her! ..."

"Loneliness can be worse to bear than poverty. And—once again—remember—she is your wife!"

"She is welcome to what good may be got from that position! She has schemed for it—"

"Be just to her.... You have owned to me that you told her you were poor. Why? ..."

"Heaven knows why—or Hell! I have no answer.... But she had only to ask—to make inquiries—to be enlightened on the subject of my money!"

Chivalrous Katharine flashed out in defence of her enemy.

"Do you suppose the surgeons at the Camp would have told her? Or that your medical report would have supplied such details? Or do you think Burke's 'Landed Gentry' is a work of reference accessible to nurses? ..."

He broke out with whirling words—frantic asseverations. He would get a divorce.... A suit for Nullity could be obtained under the circumstances—once the circumstances should be made clear. Another touch of contempt frosted her tone as she said to him:

"The marriage is legal. And though you seem to have forgotten your religion—when you speak of divorce to me, I must ask you to remember that I am a Catholic woman, Colonel Yaill!"

"Forgive me! ..."

He sat down haggard and exhausted.... She, too, resumed her seat, for her strength was failing fast.... And so they sat in a sorrowful-grim travesty of the old happy comradeship. She looked so sorrow-stricken and yet so sweet as she sat there in her mourning for her lost one,—that the heart of Yaill was more than ever tortured by the fierce agony of hopeless love.

"Think!—" he said to her desperately, "for I cannot.... Is there no way of escape from this horrible pitfall into which I have tumbled with open eyes? Think! ... Or cannot you think of anything, Katharine? ..."

She said to him gently:

"Wait.... I will think, and tell you presently.... Only wait and be patient a little, my poor dear!"

For she could not withhold her compassion and forgiveness from this man with the furrowed face of anguish, and the haunted, desperate eyes. No longer her hero, her ideal of perfect manliness and honour,—but a mere man, to be loved and pitied, and made excuses for. Or—her sick heart knew a ray of Hope.... In her white cheeks dawned a tinge of colour.... Was he one of the innumerable, blameless martyrs made by the accursed War?

XXII

She could bear to live if Edward proved a martyr and not a traitor. Oh! let him be the other woman's husband if it must be—as long as Katharine knew him guiltless. She bent her brow and set her rare mental powers of clear thought, reasonable argument and logical deduction, to trace a mean between a biassed partisanship and common justice.... One had known such strange, abnormal things result from shellshock.... And Edward loved her.... Oh! most entirely loved her.... It would be possible to live on, empty of joy, bare of all happiness—if Edward were a martyr.... God send it might prove so....

She gripped the arms of her chair and shut her eyes, striving to reconstruct the situation, assembling all the evidence upon his side; trying to live through all those twilit months the life of the man with the jangled nerves, and the numbed and blunted brain.... Just, generous, noble-minded Katharine, incapable of pettiness, great in her desolation.... She opened her eyes, to encounter the sorrowful stare of his—and began to speak, calmly, almost cheerfully—drawing him on insensibly to talk to her of that day....

That day in September of the previous year, when in those trenches south of Loos the First Battalion of the "Tweedburghs" had been wiped out, almost to a man, for the second time in the War.

"Why should you want to hear that story again—and now?" he pleaded: "My God, don't ask me to tell it now! ..."

But she asked it with her steady eyes upon him; and he obeyed her with knitted brows and twitching lips and cold sweat upon his face:

"The Germans had started shelling our front-line parapet at 5.30 that morning.... At a rough calculation they pounded us with eleven hundred guns.... Half the battalion were in the front line, and half in supports. And we had been given instructions to hold those trenches at any cost...."

He licked his dry lips and threw her a dog-like glance of entreaty. But she waited inexorably and he went on:

"We had taken them by assault and we weren't willing to lose them. Our guns gave back Hell for leather, but we kept getting Super-Hell. News kept coming through to us at Battalion Headquarters, of casualties, fresh casualties.... Always killed—hardly ever wounded! ... My God—my God! ... And at last I and my Adjutant—Cameron-Bain—were left at Headquarters with a few orderlies, cooks and bottle-washers. We'd sent up practically every man through the barrage to help 'em carry on.... And all my officers were killed except two. Jameson and Kinray-Heptown, the officers in charge of the Advanced Line Wireless and Telephone Communications. Don't ask to hear the rest. What good can it do? ..."

"It is my right," she answered him, "to hear this story from you.... And I am waiting...."

So he went on:

"There came a minute when Cameron-Bain and I stared at each other blankly across a pit of horror. We found the Advanced Line Communications getting queer and dribbling into incoherency.... Then they stopped.... And we knew that the worst had happened—though we waited, hoping against hope that Kinray-Heptown would speak again. Then we tossed up a penny to decide which of us— This hurts! ... Must I carry through with it to the end? ..."

Her great maternal heart wept tears of blood for him. But yes.... For his sake she compelled him to carry through....

"I called 'Tails' and won, though Bain swore I hadn't.... Then we shook hands and I went up through the German barrage. Trains of stretcher-bearers and wounded—our stretcher-bearers and our wounded—lay dead upon that horrible road.... And I got to Supports—and found them evacuated, except for the Dead—there were plenty of dead men! Gas was being sent over from our Advanced trench by somebody—the wind being in our favour—if nothing else was! But the German guns kept on sending over High Explosive—5.9 shell—and shrapnel: and the fire of their machine-guns—they were enfilading us from two angles—came at us like a solid wall of lead! ..."

He wetted his parched lips and rubbed his forehead. And still she waited for him to tell the rest.

"I got to the Advanced trenches.... Hardly even challenged! The few men left alive there looked at me as if I'd been a ghost. But they carried on, and I pushed through to the T. & W. dug-out, to find it had been blown in by a High Velocity Shell. Kinray-Heptown, our T.C.O., lay dead—sprawling over the table, his blood and brains and so on—all mixed up horribly with the débris. And his assistant—Jameson—was in the same case. But the Wireless and telephone installations were in working-trim,—so I took them both over—receiving and transmitting messages in Morse Code from the connected Advanced Posts through Cameron-Bain to Brigade Headquarters, until one by one they left off talking, and I took off the head-band and put down the receiver—"

He might have but now come in out of the rain, his haggard face so streamed with wet....

"Because I knew they were all dead and that I was alone.... Then a blaze of hot yellow light filled the place—and the table reared on its hind-legs—and Kinray-Heptown—dead as stone and covered with blood, and with his skull—you know!—I've told you!—Heptown stood bolt upright a second—and then went for me!"

He laughed, the loud, unnaturally harsh laugh that had startled Katharine on the night of his arrival....

"High Explosive plays queer tricks. Another 5.9 shell had landed in the dug-out—and I was pinned down with Heptown on top of me—and the heavy case of the Wireless outfit on top of him—and the corrugated zinc, and sandbags, and earth of the roof on top of all! And I lay there with his awful face crushed down on mine, and remembered," he laughed again harshly, "what a silly kind of ass he used to be.... Always running after new women and howling for sympathy—because he was such a poor devil, without a rap beyond his pay—and hadn't a living relative in the world...."

"Edward! O Edward! my poor love! ..."

He did not hear her voice of throbbing tenderness. He was passing through that unspeakable ordeal again:

"A dismal man. They called him 'Gummidge' in the Regiment, and the nickname fitted the beggar to a 'T.' How I crawled out from under him ... can't imagine for the life of me! Probably my tin hat saved me from smothering.... They say I'd not a rag on when they found me—yellow as a guinea from melinite and smeared with blood—not mine, but Heptown's! Poor devil!—not a rap beyond his pay—not a living soul belonging to him in the world! ..."

He shuddered, and knitted his hands together closely, and so sat rigid—battling with some invisible power that strove with him for mastery of will....

"Edward! ..."

She was kneeling by his chair,—her arms wrapped round about him, her cheek to his,—the swell and heave of her bosom close to his—her warmth and sweetness his—all his once more....

"All is quite clear to me now. You have not wronged me! You are blameless—my man of men! Listen, dear Edward! In some way strange to us, clear to neurologists—when you lay buried alive, pinned down helpless by the body of that poor dead officer, the horror of those dreadful minutes—or hours—stamped his personality—branded it, I might better say—upon your memory so that you could not forget it if you would! The story you told to that poor girl afterwards—your conviction that you were poor, unloved and friendless—all came from that—were part of the strange obsession. Dear, in my eyes you are quite blameless. Forgive me, Edward, if"—he felt the sob she bravely kept back—"in the first agony of hearing what you have told me—I let myself feel resentful towards you!"

"Katharine!"

He drew a great breath of relief, and his load was lightened. She believed.... Oh, wonder of wonders, she believed.... He faltered:

"Then you do not hate and despise me? ..."

Her swift kiss touched his hands. He heard her saying:

"On the contrary, I admire, I love, I worship you!—my hero, my martyr—my King—my man of men! ..."

"KATHARINE!"

In the rapture of that declaration Yaill would have embraced her; clasped her close to his starving heart and covered her with caresses. But she freed herself from him gently and with decision, though he pleaded humbly for a single kiss.

"Dear, when we say Good-bye, then I will kiss you. It is my right, I shall not waive my claim. We were husband and wife in soul if not in actuality—we are parted—not through any mutual change of feeling, but by an act of the inscrutable Will of God. You have a wife—it is for us to remember it!—and so I ask you to go away from here—"

"'Go!' ... Leave you now? ..."

His face grew hard and obstinate.

"Why should I leave you? Do we not love each other? Have we not, as you say yourself, been one in heart for all these years! ... We have done no wrong, so why should we suffer? And, if I leave you, where am I to go? Not back to that woman? ..."

A spasm contracted her white face to a pinched mask of jealousy. He hardly knew the voice that came through the clenched teeth and stiffened lips:

"Why not? She is your wife!"

"My wife through a vulgar deceit. Don't say you hold her guiltless?"

"Almost, if she believed you!" she forced herself to say.

"And this is your love!" he snarled at her, stung to injustice.

She answered—and the voice was once more Katharine's:

"This is my love! ..."

He wheeled to the fireplace and stood in thought, resting his elbow on the mantelshelf. When he looked back at her it was to say:

"And if I obey you now and leave you, what are your plans? What do you intend to do?"

She told him:

"I had made up my mind—supposing you had left me this time without settling a definite date for our marriage—that I would get drafted out to the East to help Hilda. You remember Lady Donnithorpe? She was a great friend of mine, I have often told you, when we were girls together at Chalkcliff—fellow-pupils at the Convent of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart.... Sir Hugo is on the Staff of the Commander-in-Chief at Cairo. Hilda is Commandant of the Red Cross Hospital at Montana—seventeen miles from Alexandria—standing in wonderful grounds. It was formerly, or so I understand—a palace of the ex-Khedive. I could drive a car for them, or nurse—I have my certificate—"

"You seem to have got your plans all ready cut and dried—without much reference to me! ..."

His face was wrung as he looked round at her.

"Don't be cruel, Edward! Do not let me remember by-and-by—that on this day that sees me shorn of everything, you were unkind—for the first time...."

He gave a short, impatient groan.

"Who is unkind to both of us but yourself? But you shall be obeyed—I will leave Kerr's Arbour."

Each of the five words gave her its separate stab. She never winced, but said to him unfalteringly:

"There is a train from Cauldstanes at six o'clock. You could catch the King's Cross Express by changing at Carlisle...."

"And it is now four-thirty."

From habit he had glanced at the cheap watch strapped upon his wrist.... The heavy lines between his knitted brows deepened and a vein throbbed in his temple, as he stripped the poor trinket from his wrist and dropped it into the glowing heart of the fire. The glass burst with a sharp little crack—and the leather strap writhed among the hot, devouring flames so like some reptile dying in torment that Katharine turned her eyes away. As Yaill's hard, level voice went on saying:

"From Cauldstanes, six o'clock! ... Thanks! that train would suit me very well. Please no—don't ring!" Her hand had gone out to touch the stud of the bell beside the fireplace. "Don't trouble to order any kind of trap.... I had much rather walk. Some hard tramping in the frosty air will do me good.... Really.... I should prefer it! ..."

"But—your luggage!" She looked at him anxiously.

"My kit! ..." He could have laughed outright, but he controlled himself by main force, and went on in the same stiff, formal tone: "Send it to-morrow morning by an early train to my Club in Pall Mall. I shall take care to leave it properly addressed, so that you have no trouble of any kind—"

"Edward.... Be just ... be fair! Don't—torture me like this!"

The cry broke from Katharine barely of her volition. She caught him by the wrists.

"How am I torturing you?" he asked her coldly.

"What have you decided to do?" Her eyes were on a level with his, begging, commanding. "Tell me! ..." She caught him by the wrists. "Are you going back—to her? ..."

"No!"

Her hands had been like steel upon Yaill's wrists. Her eyes, tawny and fierce as those of an enraged lioness, were fixed upon his. The pang of pity she had felt for the poor giver of the destroyed watch was lost in her anguished sense of her own despoliation,—her own helpless impotence to hold her usurped rights.... But at that deep, stern No! from him her hands grew weak upon his wrists, and the lioness-fury in her eyes died out and left them tender....

"I have said to you that I cannot share my life with her—the woman I have married. I swear to you she shall want for nothing—be treated honourably! As to my plans—the most definite is to go to the Near East and find your brother Julian. Not to fight with Turks for the Holy Sepulchre. My faith is dead in me. When God gives me back You, then I will be friends with Him! Until then—"

"Oh, Edward, hush! ..."

"I will not shock you more, dearest of living women. Give me that one last kiss, and say: 'Good luck to you on your road!' For at the end of the road I may find your brother Julian. In some Turkish prison—enclosure or labour-camp, working under the lash. Now will you kiss—"

"Not here, dear Edward! ..."

She draped her head with the black-lace veil that had been her dead mother's, and smiled—how could she bear to smile?—as she held out her hand....

"We will say our Good-bye in the chapel.... Come, my dearest! ..."

He could not resist her look, her touch.... Together, they went out....

The fragrance of incense was sweet in the still place, the treasure-chamber of this Catholic dwelling; where you felt the Blessed Sacrament as a guarded Flame, a vital Essence, a Presence mysterious and impalpable, yet instinct with latent Power and conserved Force. When Katharine bowed in adoration of her Lord and Master, Yaill stood erect, silently defying Him,—with set jaws and scowling brows, and hard glittering eyes.

But when Katharine rose, and again took his hand, his icy armour melted. His eyes softened and he yielded to her touch like a big, docile child. She drew him to the small Communion-rail—knelt on the worn red cushion, and was silent; gathering strength to speak, fighting with her anguish; while the haggard frowning man stood stiffly waiting at her side.

A moment more and Katharine's low voice flowed out upon the silence. She said, to the Living Presence in the Veiled Tabernacle:

"My Saviour and my God, Thou seest at Thy Footstool two of Thy servants, who after long years of love and fidelity, and patient waiting and hopes often frustrated, are parted—for life perhaps—as if Death had come between. We do not know—"

The sweet voice wavered and then went on steadily:

"We do not know why we must suffer—we only know it is Thy Will. And we offer Thee—O give us strength to offer Thee! this agony of parting—in submission to Thy Majesty and in expiation of our sins—

"What sins?" Yaill asked her in a deep, stern voice.

She seemed not to hear, and went on speaking:

"The sins that we weak mortals have committed in our lives. And now to Thy care, Who didst offer Thyself a living Sacrifice for the redemption of the world upon the Altar of the Cross—I commend my beloved whom Thou hast taken from me! Preserve him in body and in soul from every sort of danger. Guide him, guard him—lead him upon his path in life.... And if—"

She heard Yaill's boot-heel grind upon the stone, and knew that he was trembling....

"Let this end! ..." he said below his breath. "Do you hear me! End now, Katharine! ..."

But she went on, fighting,—had he known the truth,—for the soul of him, her dearest:

"And if we may never be one on earth, O let us be one in Heaven! ..."

Yaill gritted his teeth savagely, and a rending sob tore through his frame. The tears were streaming down his face as he stammered out to her, gulping and choking:

"Lend me ... hanky ... Kathy! I can't find—"

She gave him her handkerchief as a mother might a child, and went resolutely on to the end of her prayer.

"And now before Thee, here present in the Blessed Sacrament as truly as when Thou didst walk with Thy Beloved upon this sorrowful earth,—I promise to be faithful to Edward Yaill my lover, in body and soul, through Life till Death, and in the Eternal Life! ..."

He gave a hoarse inarticulate cry and sank to his knees beside her. She turned and folded him in her arms, and his face sank on her bosom, and the black-lace veil that draped her head fell over his too. It smelt of violets. His scalding tears wetted her neck.... She lifted his face and kissed him,—with all her soul kissed him. But a fold of her mother's black-lace veil came between her mouth and his.

XXIII

Long after Edward Yaill had gone, and Night had settled down upon Kerr's Arbour, old James Whishaw hobbled noiselessly into the chapel to find Katharine kneeling there. He bent his own stiff rheumatic knees upon a chair behind her, and waited, and said a prayer for the daughter of his dead master, dear to him as a daughter of his own. Her face was hidden in her hands, her lace veil fell over them. No movement stirred its patterned folds, no sigh nor sob escaped her.... She might have been the statue of a kneeling woman, wrought in black marble or ebony.

"Miss Forbis, mem!" the ancient servitor whispered after an interval. There was no response. Grown desperate, he ventured a fresh appeal.

"Miss Katharine! ... Miss Kathy, for your ain sake!—for a' our sakes—"

The quavering terror in the cracked, familiar voice reached her. She stirred, and answered:

"You, Whishaw? ... Am I wanted? ... Who—"

She tried to rise to her feet, but could not. The old man hurried to her and lent his feeble strength to help her, and she rose up and they came out of the church together, slowly, arm in arm. As the door swung-to behind them, she put back her veil and whispered:

"Has Colonel Yaill?—"

The butler hardly recognised the drained white face she turned to him. Her voice was a mere thread of sound, the shadow of itself.

"He has gone this hoor an' mair," he said, "an' a wire has juist come for him. My bairn—Miss Katharine, dearie!—there is anither for him that's gane! An' O I doot bad news in baith, by word the bringer dropped wi' them—"

"Give me the wires.... I understand...." she said. "The messenger has gossiped?"

"They're weel kent for loose-tongued, claverin' bodies at Cauldstanes Post Office," owned Whishaw, adding bitterly: "Nor ye'll no' bind Discretion on Meggy Proodfoot, wi' the King's Croon on her airm." He took the salver with the two orange envelopes from a console table in the hall, and brought it to his mistress, entreating: "Gin' ye could see yer ain face ye wad be frichtit, Miss Katharine. Let me get ye a glass o' wine before ye'se open them, my lamb!"

But Katharine mingled no juice of the grape with this, her latest draught of the strong black wine of Sorrow. She opened the envelope that bore Yaill's name, and by the light of the great wood fire that blazed in the hall hearthplace, deciphered the message it contained.

"This must be re-telegraphed to Edward's London Club," flashed through her mind before the vile sense of the words upon the sheet drove clearly home to her; and then she started as though their concentrated venom had seared to the very bone.

"Have discovered where you are. Return instantly or I shall follow. Your wife, Lucy Yaill. Tor View, Coombe Bay."

A moment Katharine staggered under the shock. Then with the fierce blood burning in her cheeks, she won her shaken composure back, saying as she encountered the Watery blue stare of her ancient servitor:

"There is nothing to trouble us in this. I know it to be not important." And she crumpled up the flimsy sheet and dropped it into the midmost of the fire, adding: "We will not trouble Colonel Yaill by forwarding it at all."

Then she opened the other orange envelope. It held a communication from the Casualty Department at the War Office, and told her with official brevity that her brother Julian was dead.

"Regret to inform news received from eye-witness confirms report that Father Julian Forbis, O.S.G., R.C. Chaplain —th Brigade, 29th Division, Mediterranean Forces, Gallipoli, was killed on August 21st by direct hit Turkish shrapnel shell during storming of Scimitar Hill. No remains recoverable."

She read out the withering message of disaster in a low clear voice devoid of a trace of expression. The butler and the servants who had gathered in the hall broke into sobs and lamentations. But what avail are tears and outcries? They are only of use to vent the sorrow that is neither poignant or profound. Miss Forbis went to the drawing-room and penned some telegrams; one to the Father Superior of Julian's Monastery at Clerport, one to Julian's dearest friend, in the trenches before Arras,—a brief note to the lawyer and notary, Mr. Kellar,—already (through that local Post Office leakage) in possession of the intelligence,—and a third telegram for Colonel Edward Yaill, addressed to his London Club.

And then, moving mechanically as an automaton, she went from the room, encountered Whishaw and gave the messages to be taken into Cauldstanes that night by a mounted groom. The wires to be left at the private house of the postmaster for despatch in the early morning; the note to be handed to Mr. Kellar, sitting with his old cronies over his toddy and his well-loved rubber of whist.

Mrs. Bell, Miss Forbis's elderly companion (worn out by the day's sorrowful ceremonial) had long retired to her room. Time enough to break the news to her upon the following morning. Katharine ordered the wearied servants to shut up the house and go to bed, and herself set the example. But when her tearful maid had quitted her for the night, reluctantly and wistfully,—she could not bear the notion of lying down in that now desolate house to rest. It stifled her. So she dressed again,—threw over all a hooded woollen mantle, took a small electric lantern and went out of the room....

To ascend above the level of ordinary daily existence, to climb a height and draw into the lungs long breaths of purer air, seems to be a craving shared by not only those whose bodies are racked and worn by chronic suffering, but by those others who in heart and soul are wrung by mental pain. The Lawgiver of Israel ascended into the fastnesses of Sinai—not only to receive the commands of the Most High—but to hide his anguish at the backslidings of his rebellious people—turning to unholy commerce with Egyptian god-devils and Canaanitish idols,—from the pure worship of the One God. And His Son was wont to climb the solitary heights of mountains, when He was weary with the healing of multitudes—and oppressed with His burden of human woe! And since His day, how many others have known the need, and sought the same alleviation:

"When on the heights I drink the air
And watch the budding of each star
Out of the dusk, this grief I bear
Is somewhat soothed; my load of care
Lightens, and Thou art not so far—"

Descending to the ground-floor, Katharine, barely of her own volition, passed through a small, heavy baize-covered door at the northern end of the hall. It led into the Tower, and she crossed a great stone-flagged, stone-vaulted room lighted by narrow window-slits high in the massive stone walls, unlocked another door with a key that was in the lock, huge and old-fashioned, but oiled and working smoothly, and came out at the foot of the narrow stone stairway that spiralled, storey by storey, to the top of the Tower.

She was weary, but the turmoil and anguish of her spirit set the claims of the body out of court. She moved on, tall and stern and beautiful, flashing her guiding light on a jutting stone in the wall here, or a broken step there,—just as though she were conducting some visitor to admire the famous view from the battlements.

The young moon of February rode high in the southern heavens. The Standard hung at half-mast from the flagstaff of the Tower. There was little wind to stir its heavy pendent folds, what there was came almost balmily in drifts from the west.

Some belated workman or field-labourer was going home across the policy,—or possibly some gamekeeper or shepherd may have been setting out upon his nightly rounds. The night being dark and still, he sang; perhaps because he was sorrowful, possibly because he was happy; it may have been to cheer his loneliness. But whoever he was, he had a voice; a sweet, if untutored baritone,—and the matchless beauty and poignant pathos of "The Land o' the Leal" beat in wave upon wave of anguish, and sorrow, and yearning, upon Katharine's tortured soul....

"O God!" she cried aloud in her anguish, "I cannot bear it. Desolate, desolate, stripped bare of everything! ... All of them taken!—Mark and my father, and to-day Edward! ... O Edward, my love! and Julian! ... Ah! ..."

And her own cry was flung back from the battlements, so thin, so weirdly eldritch that she shuddered at the sound....

Madness was near my Katharine in that hour of abandonment. But when the wild spirit of Marioun Forbis, whose tragic tale I have not time to tell here, cried to her: "Be bold! One leap will end it!" and the thin ghostly hands of proud, sinful Countess Edith plucked at her garments to drag her to the battlements; and Mistress Juliana, who starved herself to death for grief because her too-severely punished babe had died in a fit in the dark cupboard where it had been shut up after a whipping, lent her impalpable, invisible aid to urge her kinswoman to the desperate deed,—the saintly Mother St. Edward, Abbess of the Brigittine Convent of Syon (stripped of all and driven thence to exile with her Community by the edict of fierce Elizabeth), whispered of submission to the Divine Will. And heroic Madam Lucy—who nursed her smitten household back to life through the days when the Great Plague raged in England,—and only lay down to die at length when all she loved were safe,—leaned to her ear and whispered "Courage!" and countless other noble women of her ancient race gathered about her then....

And at last the memory of her own lost, beloved mother rose up to aid her, and the Mother of All Mothers—pitying her faithful daughter's anguish—interceded with Her Divine Son that the gift of prayer might be restored to ease the breaking heart....

It came like a spate among the hills after long drought, and Katharine fell upon her knees, and leaned her aching head against the rough-hewn stone, and told God all her trouble, and knew that He heard.... Then she rose up calmed and comforted, and so went down the Tower stair and back to her bedroom. And slept and dreamed of a gigantic man,—tawny-brown of skin, and with a vast black beard, fierce black eyes and a great hooked nose exactly like John Hazel's,—wrapped in a vast hooded mantle—carrying an iron-shod staff like St. Christopher's—and wearing immense boots such as are never seen now. He went before her over a desert which she needs must traverse, seeking for the lost Julian—a waved expanse of scorching yellow sand, peopled by ugly Things that lived in burrows, and kept popping up their diabolical horned heads to mock and gibe at Katharine.... Then the Bearded One stood in the midst of a raging torrent (which it seemed that Katharine must negotiate), and leaned on his immense staff to steady himself, stretching out the other hand to help her across.... There was a black onyx intaglio of Hercules in an antique setting of greenish gold on his huge forefinger.... And his vast hand, as it enfolded hers, felt warm and friendly and kind. And she asked, for the black eyes under the dense black brows were more like than ever:

"You're John Hazel, really, aren't you? ..."

And the huge man answered, in a booming bass, showing great white teeth in the thicket of his hirsuteness:

"Nay, daughter of the race of him I loved! But John Hazaël is of me!"

XXIV

Wonderful times, these of which I write, fruitful in world-shaking happenings, hecatombs of slaughtered men; sledge-hammer strokes of Fate and Destiny. Sudden descents of long-suspended swords upon anointed heads. Tragedies, calamities, dazzling adventures, murders and massacres, high deeds of patriotism, stirring deeds of heroism, wakening admiration, pity or terror. Who shall marvel that into this whirlpool of great events the Mysterious Disappearance of A Well Known British Commanding Officer (as recorded by the Press under the above and similar headings) dropped with as little sensation as the fall of a pair of binoculars from an aviator's hand.

"Staying at Kerr's Arbour, N.B."—I quote from one of the newspaper paragraphs, "the officer, a well-known personality in Society, possessing a great record of distinguished service with the famous Tweedburgh Regiment of Infantry, left the house at which he was an honoured guest, after the funeral of Sir Philip Forbis, which he had attended in the morning, and has not been since heard of. It transpires that Colonel Yaill had intended to walk to Cauldstanes Station, for the purpose of taking a late afternoon train to the junction of Carlisle. He had ordered his luggage to be forwarded to his London Club on the morning following, and carried with him nothing but a trench-coat and a walking-stick. The calamity which has again befallen the 'Tweedburghs' since the appointment of Colonel E. A. Yaill to command the regiment, will be fresh in the sympathetic memory of every reader. On September 1915, Colonel Yaill made his way to the front-line trenches through a blizzard of German H.E. and finding of the few living men left in them not one unwounded, took over and carried on the Telephone and Wireless Communications with Brigade and Divisional H.Q. until for the second time the dug-out containing the installations was blown in by a High Velocity shell. Severe shock was sustained by the gallant officer, who was discovered later, alive but quite dazed, and taken to Hospital. Since then he has successfully undergone treatment at the B—— Base Hospital Camp, which he quitted little more than a week ago, with a convalescent discharge. To add to the strange interest, and thicken the mystery of the case, it has transpired that on the morning he left the Hospital Camp at B—— the missing officer was married to a young and attractive lady, by name Miss Lucy Burtonshaw, serving with her Red Cross Unit at the B—— Base Convalescent Camp, as a certified nurse. Up to the present we can only record that whether the disappearance of Colonel Yaill may be ascribed to foul play, or a sudden loss of memory, no clue has been discovered up-to-date which throws any light upon his whereabouts. At his country home, 'The Grange,' Scraefell, N. Cumberland, his sisters, the Misses Olive and Isabella Yaill, are in the utmost distress and anxiety regarding his probable fate. At his Club The Services, in Pall Mall, no communication has been received from him, nor can his brother, Mr. Anthony Yaill, K.C., or Sir Arthur Ely, head of the eminent firm of Ely and Ely, for many years solicitors to the Yaill family, supply any information whatever concerning the missing officer."

Private John Hazel, returned to the bosom of his family at Campden Hill, read this, or a similar paragraph, in the morning Wire, and somewhere towards forenoon of the same day, received a telegram, the perusal of which gave him another unexpected thrill. It ran as follows:

"Can you come? In great anxiety. Katharine Forbis Kerr's Arbour T.O. Cauldstanes Tweedburgh N.B."

He had written a brief, business-like note from the Cross Keys Hotel on the day of his return from her father's funeral, taking leave of Miss Forbis, repeating his offer of service, and enclosing an address from whence, in case of need, he might always be communicated with. Strangely soon the call had come. Strangely natural, as in the run of long-accustomed things it seemed to be responding to the appeal, to answer by the messenger waiting the reply:

"Thank you. Coming by next train."

He pitchforked a few necessaries into a battered suit-case, left a pencilled note upon the lid of Mrs. Hazel's large, responsible Red Cross work-basket—for his mother now invariably left home directly after breakfast, for the Work Rooms in Mayfair—where, in the delectable company of Duchesses—she spent the hours in the manufacture of Life-Saving Waistcoats for the Fleet, and felt Hospital slippers, until six-thirty. Consuming luncheon, carried in a plated box, and rigorously relegated to such forms of nourishment as may without reproach be assimilated by patriotic British digestive organs in War-time; taking a frugal tea on the scene of activity; and returning at seven to partake of a dinner of generous succulence. Having thus discharged his duty as a son, John departed by taxi for King's Cross, catching the very next express leaving for the North....

The room he had previously occupied at the Cross Keys was vacant. He stepped into its queer conglomeration of ancient smells, and the glass-eyed society of the birds and beasts and fishes in their musty cases, and it might have been that he had never gone away, but that Mrs. Govan in person served his supper in the clammy coffee-room, a part-knitted khaki-coloured sock, bristling with steel knitting-needles, tucked under a stout arm, and the ball bulging the pocket of her apron of black silk.

"Eh, dear!" Mrs. Govan had ceased to address John as "Private" since she had realised his somewhat indeterminate yet undeniable connection with "the family" at Kerr's. "Eh, Mr. Hazel! but this is grievous! ... And to think that I met Cornel Yaill wi' the meir an' cart the vera' nicht he cam' down to atten' the Funeral. Gin' auld Sir Philip cud have kent! But Providence was mercifu'. And sair it has irkit me to think o' Miss Forbis a' alane there at Kerr's, like the last aipple on the strippit tree, as I hae said to Govan, an' telegrams rattlin' ower the wires wi' 'Reply Paid' to the lave o' them—from a' the warld and's wife, beggin' an' prayin' till her: 'Darling Katharine, let us come to you, or if not, winna you come to us,' and gettin' answer: 'A thousand thanks, but no. Lovingly, Katharine.' An' sae, when I e'en kent she had sent for ye, I juist drew a free sough."

Evidently there had been a serious leakage from the Cauldstanes Telegraph Office. John mentally registered the evidence as Mrs. Govan continued:

"Ye'll have haird the latest news o' Cornel Yaill, dootless?"

"Has he been found?" her guest inquired, eliciting the shrill disclaimer:

"Na, na! We'se hae the Police traipsin' in an' out the bar makin' their inquiries—an' the wee laddies in the short breeks—the Boy Scouts I suld say! scoorin' ower the face o' the lan', but neither bone nor feather o' the man hae they fand for a' their pains! And mair nor me an' Govan thinks," she pursed her lips mysteriously, "that it'll be no' for's ain guid when they rin the Cornel doon—wherever's his hidie-hole! Weel free o' siccan a mislaird rogue Miss Forbis may coont hersel! Marriet on a stranger wumman—faugh!—an' the bauld, traipsin' craitur huntin' him doon, un' telegrams to the verra door o' Kerr's Arbour. 'Have knowledge whaur ye are. Return instantly, or I will follow. Your wife, Lucy Yaill.' Set her up for a shameless hussy!—an' the brawest leddy in Tweedshire—ay', an' the haill o' Scotland—wi' grand, gentlemen many a ane etchin' to pit a ring on the white hand o' her—"

Mrs. Govan broke off in the midst of her tirade with a sense of genuine alarm. For the blazing black eyes under the heavy brows of John Hazel were sternly set upon her; and the great hooked nose—"siccan glowering e'en, an' siccan a hawk's neb!—eneuch to fricht a body!" seemed fraught with threatenings of doom to come. He said in his deep voice:

"Miss Forbis will hardly thank you for your praise of herself personally, if you couple with it such confoundedly libellous abuse of her nearest and dearest friend."

"Guidsake! ... I'm sure I never thocht.... To be sure naething is kenned for certain.... Ye'll keip it frae Miss Forbis, sir, if I said onything to offend! ..." and the flurried woman bumped down the dish upon the cloth and vanished, leaving John Hazel wondering why on earth he had stuck up for the man.

He slept with the stuffed birds and beasts that night, and next morning, after breakfast, the mare Brownie being under the veterinary for a chill, the old black horse, her stable-companion, having been sent to the blacksmith's for roughing, and Alec Govan's motor-cycle having been requisitioned for the postman's uses—John set out on foot for Kerr's Arbour.

It was piercing cold; the east wind carried the bitter tang of the North Sea, the country lay under a fresh cloak of new-fallen snow, and the chilled thrushes and blackbirds and robins huddled disconsolately in the cropped hedges, and the low bushes and plumps of ivy swaddling old tree-stumps in the plantations by the roadside. As John Hazel's long active legs left the miles behind—what was a road ankle-deep in snow to a Territorial who had wintered in Flemish trenches!—he wondered somewhat as to the nature of the service Katharine Forbis would require at his willing hands.

Help, it might prove, in some further efforts to gain intelligence of the man who had vanished so suddenly.... Who could not be traced, nor ever would be, until the body should be found.... For Edward Yaill was dead, most certainly. Once Katharine Forbis had showed you plainly she despised you, how could you bear to live any more? Yaill had had that much of manhood left in him. So he had gone out with a definite purpose,—and in some dense plantation, or lonely granite quarry, thick-draped with curtains of bramble, had shot himself; creeping well in under the growths to be securely hidden, and died—and there an end of him....

Odd how those miserable grey eyes, with their haunting stare of agony, kept rising up before John Hazel, as he tramped over the hog-backed Roman road over which how many old dead-and-gone Forbis of Kerr's had led their bow and spearmen against the Picts, or Viking pirates from the wild North Sea; or pricked forth to the Wars of Balliol or Bruce—or set out in state and pageantry, with fair ladies in painted litters, or on gaily-caparisoned palfreys—to the Court of the Scots' King at Stirling or Edinburgh. And he wondered at the strange, impersonal love he felt for them, so brave, so bold, so tender, so gallant and gracious—from the Roman Prætor of Alexandria—who had given the black onyx ring to his (John Hazel's) ancestor—down to Sir Rupert the Cavalier, and the fine old General and the lost Julian, and Katharine....

Ah, Katharine! ... Again he saw her noble face irradiated by the glow and glamour, the mysterious beauty that transfigure even a plain woman when she loves with all her soul.

And then the face of Yaill, with its anguish and despair, rose up before him clearer than ever. He heard the compassionate voice of the V.A.D. woman saying:

"His wretched, wretched eyes! ... I hope I'm not going to dream of them! Oh! there must be something to be said for a man who looks like that! ..."

Suppose the man were innocent—the luckless sport of horrible circumstances! ... Had John Hazel been of Scottish blood, he would have said, "I'm fey." Being what he was, he said vigorously, "I'm a bally idiot!" and continued tramping along the snowy road.

Past the hollow way, crossed by a strip of ice, where the snow on the overhanging trees was thawing in long drips and splashes, and the benumbed birds showed more active signs of life. Out of the hollow way, on the left a dense plantation, on the opposite side to, and about a quarter of a mile below the iron gate of the entrance to the Kerr's Arbour private road.

XXV

A whistle shrilled near by, keen, sharp and silvery. John Hazel stiffened at the sound, as a seasoned soldier will. But nothing was in sight but a wee tow-headed laddie, "a kid" John would have called him—in a ragged suit of moleskins, cut down from adult-sized garments, who perched on the topmost round of the hog-backed stile leading into the plantation, and blew a shining whistle, from which a lanyard hung.

The small boy saw John start, and thrilled with secret exultation. To own a silver whistle and have no one to admire you is really little better than having none at all. So he blew again, lustily, with one eye on the big black "soger," and John Hazel pulled up steaming, and passed the time of day....

"Who are you, you queer little beggar, and where did you get that whistle?" he began.

At this the small boy scrambled down from the gate, and came to the roadside. He was a freckled child of eight or so, with wide gaps where first teeth had retired from the conflict, and a nose that sadly needed wiping, and broken festering chilblains on his swollen ears and hands. But his sharp blue eyes were bright on the stranger's as he answered:

"I am nae no beggar ava, but Meggy Proodfoot's wee laddie. An' I fand the bonny whistle in yonner woodie the morn."

By the jerk of the cracked and swollen thumb John guessed "woodie" meant plantation. He said, blowing out his long brown cheeks, and scowling with mock ferocity:

"That's a real soldier's whistle, not a thing for a kid to play with. You should give it to your daddy. He's a soldier, I suppose?"

The small boy returned, grinning:

"I dinna ken—for my daddie is no' a kirk daddie. Some say he maun be Keeper Todd, but my mother says it's no'! She's thinkin' he's the engineer that cam' wi' the steam-thrasher,—an' she ca's me a puir come-by-chance when she has a drappy on. I'm no mindin'!" The freckled face turned up to John's grinned hardily:

"Give me hold of that whistle a minute, you infantile philosopher," said John Hazel, and took it in his hand. It bore the silver hall-mark,—was an officer's signal-whistle. On the butt was engraved in clear fine letters:

"E. A. Yaill (R.C.) Lieut. Col. R. Tweedburgh Infantry Regt."

Here was the clue. Was the secret hidden in that plantation? John Hazel's face became so grim that it terrified the boy.

"Gie me my whustle back, man, an' let me gang awa' hame, noo! Ye'll no tak it fra' me?" he stuttered, blinking back the tears.

"I must take it from you, for I know the man who lost it. But I'll give you half-a-crown instead, to buy another," said John.... "You'll like the new one awfully!" ... John added as the coin changed owners. "And I'll give you another sixpence for sweeties if you'll tell me what else you found in the wood."

"Naething at a' but a bit o' broon cloth—soger's cloth like yon—" A stubby finger pointed at John's sleeve—"stickin' oot o' a tod's howe, an' the bit white string near by."

"You mean the lanyard. Well, then—"

"Eh, then I pu'ed the wee bit string an' the siller whustle cam' oot wi't, an' sae I took the whustle an' ran awa' to pley. An' when I saw ye comin' I thocht ye were the Man. Noo gie me the bawbee!"

"You mean the sixpence! Tell me about the Man you mean,—and earn a shilling instead."

"Ay! The Man was dressed like yoursel is—but grand, like an officer, wi' gowd on his bonnet an' sleeves, an' mair ribbons on his breast. No the day's day, but back in the week, I'm thinkin' it was Monunday!—I seen him comin' doon the road, an' he fleyt me wi' his een."

"He scared you with his eyes? What did you do then?"

"I bude to rin awa' at first, because 'twas gettin' fell mirk-like. An' sair I wantit my tea and lardy-piece. But I didna' rin ower far. I muntit the fence an' keeked roun' a buss, an' saw him loup in ower. An' he gaed intil the woodie, an' cam' oot nae mair!"

Come By Chance pointed with a chilblained hand to the stile of the plantation, and brought the hand deftly back to show its empty palm. The shilling having followed the half-crown into a pocket of the cut-down corduroys:

"Hae ye anither?" the recipient demanded avidly.

"No, but I might give twopence more to hear how the Man came out."

"He didna!"

A shadow seemed to fall on the brightness of the snow, and the wind's bite grew keener. John Hazel echoed:

"Didn't come out? Are you quite sure?"

"Ay, yea! for though I hing aboot to see, he showed nae bone nor feather. An' at lang last—when I'se fell hungert for my piece—an' fain to rin hame to my mither—anither man louped oot intil the road, an' cam' alang by."

"How do you know it wasn't the Man?"

"Because he was no' braw like the ither! He had nae gowd on his bonnet, an' his claithes were hamely like my daddie's,—or they wad be, gin my mither wad own that my daddie was Keeper Todd."

John Hazel suddenly knew that the chill shadow had passed, and that the sun was shining. And he tossed another shilling to Come By Chance, saying:

"There's another bob for you, you queer little rascal. Cut before I change my mind and want the money back!"

And as the tow-headed took to his chilblained heels, revealing in his hurried flight that his shirt-tail hung out through a ragged hole at the back of his corduroys, John Hazel jumping the hog-backed stile, dived into the plantation. Something told him that he would come out much wiser than he went in.

XXVI

The dull tramp of heavy Service boots, following the maid who was that day John Hazel's guide, over the carpeted stone flags of the corridor to the little panelled morning parlour, brought an unexpected, welcome sense of relief to Katharine's overstrained nerves. The door opened, and she moved swiftly to him—stopping him with both hands held out, when he would have made his strange, half-Eastern salutation—saying in her full, womanly tones:

"How can I thank you, Mr. Hazel?"

He answered, tritely and clumsily, but with very evident sincerity:

"By showing me straight off the reel, how I can be of use to you."

Some aching spot in her sore heart was touched by his genuine eagerness to serve her. For a moment she could not speak.... So they stood, her fine white hand engulfed by Hazel's great brown one, his strong black eyes, unrebuked, dwelling on his lady's face.

She looked older, with wide purplish shadows round about her beautiful eyes, and their clear golden-amber changed to sorrowful rust-colour. The clear cream and carnation of her skin was dulled to a pale olive.... The rich brown hair upon her temples, and above her brow, showed here and there a thread of silver. She began, speaking with a curious, hurried breathlessness:

"Mr. Hazel, I know you must have seen newspaper accounts of the inexplicable disappearance of—a friend who—I have no need to hide the fact!—is very, very dear to me.... You must know that I speak of Colonel Yaill. You saw him here the Saturday you came here first, and later at my father's funeral. You—Ah—! ..."

Her eyes were on John Hazel's when the memory leaped into them. They dilated, blazed with tawny fire.... John thought of a lioness.... She snatched her hand instantly away from his, crying:

"What am I thinking of? Why,—it was you who threatened him!—he told me so himself! You said you would save him the trouble if he did not tell me of his marriage. How could I have forgotten? Is my memory failing me? And you.... How could you have come by the knowledge with which you menaced him? ... In Hospital? ... No! Where and how, then? The whole thing is a horrible mystery to me! ..."

John Hazel told her, in a few bluntly-spoken sentences, just how the story of Yaill's marriage had been given him. She heard him to the end of it, and said, with the ghost of a smile:

"So you entered upon your hereditary office of champion, straightway. And Lady Wastwood got the story from her Headquarters—I understand the whole thing clearly! She is a dear, and I love her, but a terror of a talker.... The whole county must have rung with scandal, ages before I dreamed that anybody knew...." She shuddered. "Oh, me! what things they must have said about Edward!—must be saying about him at this moment when he—"

Her voice broke in a sob, and her full heart brimmed over. John Hazel said roughly, for he could not bear to see her tears:

"They may talk, but there's one thing nobody on earth—or elsewhere!—will ever be able to say of him. That he isn't a thundering brave man!"

The sudden, fierce carnation that had flooded the wide oval of her face a moment before, had given place to the olive paleness. Now a faint tinge of the banished red came creeping back again.

"You threatened Edward Yaill—yet you defend him?"

John Hazel answered simply enough:

"I had to see that you were undeceived. You were, first of all, my business. But knowing what shell-shock means—as men have learned to know the hellish thing in this damned War—how, in common justice, can I condemn Colonel Yaill?"

"Thank you! Oh, thank you! That does my heart good!"

The wide, sweet smile curved Katharine's mouth again, and her dimmed eyes found a sparkle to cheer their sombre rust-colour. She went on:

"To know that somebody besides myself pities him—you don't know—you can't know, what it means to me! For no one will have a kind thing to say for Edward. Beyond the newspaper flummery and flapdoodle, there won't be a word, nor a thought, that isn't—merciless to him! ..."

She was sitting now in her hearthside chair and John was standing on the other side of the fireplace. The antique mirror above the little Tudor clock, that had reflected Yaill's thin, handsome face and haunted grey eyes, gave back an image of the huge black head, the portentous hooked nose, and swarthy countenance of this new and strangely dominating force that had moved across the threshold of Kerr's Arbour, out of the veiled, mysterious Past, but a few days previously. His elbow rested on the mantelshelf, where the other man had leaned his: he clenched his great hand as he answered Katharine:

"'Merciless.' ... And why on this rotten little planet should people be merciless to the man?"

"Because"—she frowned and looked at John from between her narrowed eyelids—"because of the odd, clandestine fashion in which—after his strange marriage—Colonel Yaill has gone away.... I am not brilliant, it may be, nor very highly cultured. But I know, and very thoroughly—the world to which we belong. I speak, be it understood, of his world and mine." John felt himself an alien. "The world we choose to call Society. And Society will never pardon nor condone, nor exonerate this act of Colonel Yaill's."

"Do you think the pardon of Society particularly worth having? Do you think the good opinion of a Society as fat-headed, as thick-witted and as narrow-minded as you represent it—matters a tin of ration apple-jam? ... Now listen, Miss Forbis! If you think me rude, an offensive brute, say to yourself, 'This man can't help it! He isn't in Society—but he is out to work for me! The wag of a finger of my hand would bring him from the ends of the world to serve or fight for me!' Please don't interrupt, for time is time—and I have more to say—"

He drew a big breath that hurt his wounded lung, and went on speaking:

"When you sent for me, I believed you thought that Colonel Yaill had put an end to himself. When I saw you I knew you had never for a minute entertained the idea—"

She broke in now:

"Never! The suggestion of suicide has been spread by people who know nothing of the man they slander. In absolute confidence I will tell you now—for how could you be of any help to me unless I absolutely trust you!—Edward Yaill has gone to the East to find my lost Julian—my dear brother, whom I have since heard was killed on August 21st—"

John Hazel's black eyes flashed. He broke in:

"Miss Forbis, something of that sort is what I have suspected."

"Wait," she said. "He told me that he would not return to—to his wife—upon the old footing.... She had cruelly tricked and deceived him—he could not, once he knew the truth—endure to live with her! ... So he made up his mind to go secretly away. He might have applied to the War Office—he has powerful friends at Whitehall—for a transfer to the Eastern Front. Why didn't he? That's one of the things I can't understand! ..."

"Don't you know? ..."

John's big voice boomed out, drowning the little silvery chime of the Tudor timepiece.

"When questions like that crop up, the answer is, shell-shock. A man who is possessed of ordinary, healthy nerves, will act in an ordinary way. But the man who's been subject to the devilries of High Explosive, will pop up queer byways in his impatience of circumlocution—adopt unexpected measures; reach his objective by methods as destructively simple as—the rat's way of getting into a cheese. He might—supposin' he'd been a normal man—have engineered the thing at Whitehall. Being shell-shocked, he simply burns his boats and swims."

Katharine begged:

"Oh, go on! You're helping me!—you're helping me wonderfully. Things that seemed crazy—out of the comprehensible—are beginning to arrange themselves.... Now there's another point. You saw, perhaps, a newspaper reference to Sir Arthur Ely? Well, it has occurred to me as possible that Edward confided his plans to Sir Arthur—that impenetrable sarcophagus of Society secrets. You may have noticed that Sir Arthur's reply to Press inquiries showed a—a considerable degree of reserve?"

John had noticed it. He admired Katharine's cool, clear, masterful way of assembling her evidence, and making her points tellingly, each in its turn. He kept back his own solid piece of conviction until she finished—

"He has gone, I am convinced that I know where—though I can't make out how he managed going.... But one thing is clear. I must get word to him! ... He has gone to find Julian, whom he loved!—my Julian, who was killed by a Turkish shell, in the storming of Scimitar Hill on August 21st. That is where you come in!—that is where you can help me. In getting the news through to Colonel Yaill in case he does not know! ..."

John thought a moment and said:

"We might—in case he has gone out to the East believing your brother to be living—get the news to him per advertisement in sundry foreign rags. Personals, discreetly worded, might do the trick—inserted in French and British papers, published in the Levant,—in Egypt,—and at Salonika, and in such others as are printed and disseminated by the Germans in the Near East."

She caught her breath.

"Can you manage that last stroke? ..."

"I'll not swear I can, but there's a chance I may engineer it. Write out the ads. and let me have them at once! In English, French and German. Worded so that he'll understand.... Some ought to be in Turkish,—and others in Arabic, and some in Egyptian Arabic. For—your man's a bit of a linguist, unless I judge him wrong!"

Katharine's eyes brightened with pride in her man as she answered:

"He speaks most of the languages of the Orient, and Nearer East."

"Good! Now, are you quite sure your brother has been killed?" He went on, meeting her startled look.... "Because the War Office isn't infallible.... A pal of mine—reported dead over eleven months ago—has spent about three in trying to convince the authorities that he's very much alive! Last week he heard from them, asking him to reconsider the matter! and send in another detailed statement; and now that he's convinced 'em of his existence—they've docked his pay for the eleven months he's been officially dead! ... And I know another man, a virtuous unmarried one-pipper,—who gets paid an allowance, monthly, for a missus and three kids.... They don't exist—and never did, but the Pay Department says they do,—and returns him the money when he tries to pay it back! One day they'll say he's robbed 'em—and call a Court Martial—but till then he spends the cash in cigars, and other forms of crime. Not as applicable as the first illustration, but still a case in point." He grinned.... "And hasn't it struck you, that Colonel Yaill, knowing the dudheads at Whitehall—would be likely to go on looking for Father Forbis as long as a chance remained? Now, what about those ads. you were going to write for me? I'm quite certain they ought to go in.... But mind you make it clear to Colonel Yaill that you've no private, first-hand information.... Put it 'Julian reported killed' and then he'll understand!"

She levelled her fine brows and thought a moment, then rose from her chair, saying:

"Would this do? 'Edward ... Julian reported killed Gallipoli, August 21st. Seek no further' or 'Search useless. Send address for communication. K." Then as he nodded his approval, "Very well, I'll write the advertisements at once," she said. "Of course I don't know any Arabic, and my Italian is simply rocky—it always sent Father into fits of laughter.... But my German is passable, and my French is—quite decent.... I was educated at the Sacré Cœur Convent, Chalkcliff—where most of the nuns are Parisian ladies.... Smoke if you care to, while I'm writing.... And do find yourself a comfortable chair...."

She crossed the room to a well-used escritoire, inlaid ebony of Indian workmanship, glancing back to smile at John Hazel as she drew up her writing-chair. Her Persian cat leaped purring on her shoulder, and she rubbed her cheek against his warm silver-grey coat, giving the caress craved by his cattish little soul, before she gently set him down.... Then she began to write, and John sat watching her, revelling in her vigorous, healthful uprightness, and the grace with which her long limbs disposed themselves in the seated pose....

"Don't rush it.... Take your time!" ... He was speaking from behind her. "I'll see that the others are cautiously worded.... A man in disguise as an Arab or a Turk might betray himself unconsciously, if his eye happened to drop on a line that was meant for him, you know."

"'A man in disguise.' ..." She caught her breath. "Oh!—you are wonderful!"

"Not even my mother ever thought that," said Hazel, with his gleaming grin. "But I'm ready to put money on my theory that the Colonel—to get out of England in the quietest way possible—has enlisted in some unit of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force."

"As a common soldier—an ordinary Tommy! ... You think so meanly of him? ..."

For a moment her broad front of displeasure was turned upon John Hazel. Then the anger died out of her as he said quietly:

"I've learned to think a lot of ordinary Tommies, since I've been in this beastly War. And I stick to my opinion—for a reason!"

He got up. His big hand had been in his bulging tunic-pocket. He pulled out a Brass Hat, ignominiously squashed, and with the peak broken—and said as he offered it to Katharine:

"Here's my reason! Good enough, I think!"

"Oh!" she cried, "where did you get that? ... It is Edward's!" ... And snatched it almost fiercely, and crushed it against her breast....

"This too!" ... John thrust on her the silver whistle.... "A child was playing with it near the plantation below your Private Road.... That put me on the scent.... I annexed the whistle—here it is for you!—you'll see his name is on it!—and went in and poked about.... To discover the complete uniform of a British C.O., Field jacket, badges, Bedford cords, and the whole posh kit, wrapped up in a trencher, strapped with a Sam Browne, and stuffed into a fox's hole. Presently when it's dark enough, I'll lug the rest of the kit up to you.... Now, do you think I've grounds for my belief? ..."

Katharine was trembling.

"You frighten me!" she said to him. "The police and their helpers have searched and found nothing.... You come—and these hidden things are uncovered at your feet.... What does it mean? Do you believe that you and I have lived on earth before now? ... Are we taking up old threads that were broken ages ago? ..."

"Not for a second do I believe that!" answered John Hazel. "But that we are influenced and guided by others who have walked this earth before us,—yes!—I certainly think we are! While they were about it they might have shown me where the Colonel got the suit of civvies he changed into when he gave his swank rags to Brother Fox for keeps. Plain clothes!" ... He answered Katharine's inquiring look as though she had spoken. "And pretty well worn.... Don't stop to ask me how I know!" ...

"'Plain clothes'! ... A shabby shooting-suit...." Katharine repeated. "Wait one minute—I must look! ..."

And she was gone.... The sixty seconds were barely ticked off by the gilded arrow of the Tudor timepiece before the door opened to admit her, minus the finds of the plantation,—panting a little, with flushed cheeks and radiant eyes of joy....

"I have been to his room," she told John Hazel, breathlessly. "There is a camphor-wood press there where—since August, 1914,—I have kept the suit Edward was wearing when the War call came to him. Rough grey homespun—with a Norfolk jacket. And the things have gone out of the press. He must have taken them—"

"I'm dead sure he took them! Now another question crops up, Miss Forbis. In these days of Compulsory Service—though the Act's not a fortnight old—how's an able-bodied man in plain clothes to avoid being captured by the Government's Fine Tooth Comb? Tapped on the shoulder by a Recruiting Officer or a policeman—and challenged to cough up his Conscription papers, or produce his Exemption Sheet? What would the Colonel's age be? Anything over the Limit?"

The coarseness of his tone offended delicacy.... Her brows contracted as she answered with chilly dignity:

"He was thirty-nine in May. (Thirty-nine. And he might have married me when he was thirty-one!)" her heart cried rebelliously. What had Edward thought to gain by those continued delays? She had been at her loveliest, she knew, when they had first loved each other.... Twenty-three—and between twenty-three and thirty-one—eight worse than wasted years!

Years lost—foregone—wilfully forfeited.... Her heart wailed like a plover over its rifled nest.... And yet not lost.... Five of them at least had been glorious with happiness. There had been rare glimpses of sweetness even in these last three years of War....

"Forgive me!" she said, wakened from sad memories by John Hazel's taking leave of her. "I was thinking.... I did not hear you.... Must you absolutely go?"

"I must not stay, Miss Forbis. The other things that are hidden in the plantation I shall leave you to find for yourself. The fox-hole is at the bottom of the bank facing south beside a big stone—you can hardly miss it! You will hear from me, when there is anything you should know—until there is, good-bye!"

She said, with her characteristic, cordial imperiousness: "Good-bye comes after luncheon! ... You must not leave this house again without breaking bread! ..."

He yielded, and soon they were seated at a long, well-covered table in a room whose sombre panelling was relieved by inset portraits of dead-and-gone Forbises, glittering trophies of Indian weapons, horns and heads of big game; some fine pieces of Oriental porcelain and a noble buffet of silver plate. That sense of strangeness still remained. Strongly as the good things of the palate appealed to John Hazel's sensuous nature, he found himself swallowing hot savoury Scotch broth—demolishing cold game-pie and salad with the barest appreciation of their excellence—and gulping down the Chateau Margaux of the Kerr's Arbour cellars, as indifferently as though it had been the beer of the canteen....

"Good-bye, Mr. Hazel," Katharine said at parting, "and God bless you! I shall never forget what you have done. Should I hear from Colonel Yaill, I shall communicate to the address you have given me. Should you hear of him—you will write to me here at Kerr's."

She gave him both her white hands, returning his big strong grasp with warm, sisterly friendliness, sending a strange and wonderful thrill through the giant frame of the man.

"May I—" he asked, almost humbly, with his black eyes entreating hers, in the way that a woman who has been wooed can never misunderstand....

"If you wish!" she answered, cordially, and he stooped and touched with his fleshy lips the beautiful hands he held. Then he released them.... He was at the door, looking back at Katharine.... As he turned the handle she spoke impulsively:

"Where are you going?—you haven't yet told me!"

"I suppose because I thought you would guess," John Hazel returned. "The fact is, I got orders yesterday to join my old crowd—the 'Fenchurch Streets'—at Salonika. So I'm going out to the Near East—to look for your friend!"

"Not to fight?" Katharine asked, smiling, though touched by his rugged simplicity.

He answered:

"To do that, and the other job too...."

"It is almost certain that I, myself, shall be going out to Egypt shortly," she told him, "to work at the Hospital of Montana near Alexandria—with my friends of the Red Cross."

He nodded gravely.

"Good luck to you and them! There's a thing I'd like to hear you say, Miss Forbis. Do you mind just telling me to carry on?"

"Carry on, John Hazel!" said Katharine royally.

He waved a hand to her, and was gone. And the great lonely, empty House of Kerr's Arbour was tenfold emptier and lonelier without that vital, powerful embodiment of faith and loyalty....

Book the Third: THE FINDING

I

Weeks after John Hazel had sailed with a draft of leave-expired "Fenchurch Streets,"—to join the Division to which that gallant London regiment was attached—with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Forces at Salonika—and while brave British men in Palestine were cracking their teeth on that hard nut of Gaza—H.M. Transport Loyalty, (an ex-Austrian Lloyd Liner captured at the beginning of the War, and converted into a Mediterranean Hospital ship), sailed for Egypt,—and in the Photographic Puff of the week's issue appeared—under an enlarged snapshot of the pre-War departure of the ex-Austrian Lloyd from Southampton Docks—this announcement:

"POPULAR SOCIETY PEERESS, COMMANDANT OF L.L.W.S.L.,
SAILS FOR EASTERN THEATRE OF WAR."

Another periodical of the type that daily caters for readers of another order, published, under a portrait of Lady Wastwood in exiguous dinner dress:

"TRIXIE MAKES TRACKS FOR EGYPT TO FIND OUT WHY
SPHINX SMILES."

While in the Daily Wire of a few days' later issue was published a brief paragraph to the effect that H.M. Transport Loyalty had been torpedoed on the fifth day of her voyage out to Alexandria; carrying some officers and men of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force returning from sick-leave; a detachment of Military Nurses and fourteen brand-new ambulance-cars; many War Hospital stores and comforts destined for our wounded, together with a complete unit of the British Red Cross.

"Miss Forbis, V.A.D., of Kerr's Arbour, N.B., is included in the list of the rescued, as also Trixie, Lady Wastwood, O.B.E., Commandant L.L.W.S.L., who was on her way to the East to employ her well-known powers of organisation in the establishment of a Hostel for Convalescent Officers (Auxiliary) in the neighbourhood of Alexandria." The famous motto of the Legion is, doubtless, familiar to our readers: "Do Anything, Go Anywhere, Stick At Nothing, and Never Grouse."

The usual boat-drill had not been neglected, and when the alarm had once been sounded, everybody had dutifully turned up at his or her allotted station in overcoat and cork lifebelt, to be not at all astonished by the intelligence that the scare was simply a dud.... No attack upon the part of enemy submarines had been anticipated.... The Loyalty, with her three vast squares of green paint bounding a white-edged Red Cross (outlined at night by brilliant electric lights)—amidships on each side, ought to be regarded as sacrosanct by German submarines.... But of course people understood there were loose mines in the Mediterranean, though the minefields were all known.

Lady Wastwood had rather ruffled the good-humour of the Captain by constantly asking him how he could be Certain of this? But after he had personally conducted the Commandant, life-belt and all—for from this practical insurance Trixie never separated—to his chart-house on the Lower Bridge, and displayed before her green eyes a chart of the Mediterranean, ornamented with designs in coloured inks by the Navigating; Lieutenant—indicating areas strewn with floating mines by the Kaiser and the Sublime Porte, "G.M. at such-and-such a depth, and T.M. at such-and-such another," and illustrated the uses of the telephones between the Wireless Room and the chart-house, and the telegraphs linking the officer on the bridge with the engine-room, and the speaking-tubes communicating with the batteries of quick-firing guns fore and aft,—Trixie's anxieties were completely laid to rest. She thanked the Captain effusively, and with a gracious smile and bow to the Navigating Lieutenant, descended to the saloon-deck cabin,—which she shared with Miss Forbis—to renew her complexion for the 12.30 lunch.

To wash your hands, arrange your hair and refresh your complexion while arrayed in a life-belt being impossible, Trixie removed her practical insurance, hanging it on the cabin sofa-end while she monopolised the looking-glass.

"Of course I am a grouse—and a disgrace to the Legion, I know it too well!" she owned to Katharine, as she intensified her V-shaped Pierrot smile with a stick of scarlet paste, "and instead of playing rounders and quoits and clock-golf—which is exactly the same kind of thing as playing water polo in a wash-hand basin—what I really long to do is to huddle in a deck-chair, and look out for oily streaks and white breaks in the water. But I am the victim of a morbid imagination—that keeps telling me what happens to you when you get wrecked at sea. You go down and come up three times—and see all the events of your past life processioning before you. That must be horrible! And they say it always happens—the people, I mean, who have nearly been drowned—and were only just saved in time!"

"But nobody who has been quite drowned has ever given an account of it," said Katharine, with her wholesome, heartening laugh.

Sea and sunshine had done much for Miss Forbis. Private Abrahams would have recognised her for the bright-eyed, smiling woman he had met that day on the Menin Road.... We cannot always mourn the dead, or bewail the lost that are living; though often her heart cried out in anguish for her dear ones; and waking of nights upon the shallow pillow of the upper bunk in the suffocating cabin, she would feel for a silver whistle she carried in her bosom—and kiss it—and cry herself to sleep again.... Or lie sleepless amidst the creakings, the overhead tramplings and shoutings; the snorting of electrically-driven ventilators; the occasional thump! of a bigger sea than usual upon the bows of the Loyalty, and the dismal sounds emitted by sufferers from the malady of the sea....

"How sensibly you look at things, Kathy dear," said Lady Wastwood, putting the final touch to her Pierrot smile....

Friendly and even affectionate as were the relations between these two women,—no reference had ever been made by one or the other to that February day of Trixie's encounter with Edward Yaill on board the Scotch Express. But the subject was in the air, and both felt it,—and possibly because of this, their conversation was elaborately casual....

Trixie added, as she intensified the eyebrows that resembled musical slurs, with a black pencil: "But really, my stupid nerves are quieting down! The skipper has cheered me wonderfully. There's something so refreshingly bluff and reassuring about a big smiling sailor man with white ducks and an Irish accent,—of the northern kind that one doesn't associate with dynamite and revolvers and masks. He has quite put my idiotic fears to bed. I shall never—AH!"—

A hot, violet-yellow light seemed to fill the cabin, as the terrible detonation shook the Loyalty. The air seemed flame.... Dust filled their lungs and nostrils, and the shattering crash of descending tons of water, mingled with the great cry blended of innumerable voices, that goes up to Heaven from a mined or torpedoed ship.... Then the shrieks and cries ceased, as Discipline asserted itself. Through the deafening roar of escaping steam—and the racket of shattered engines—the bugle sounded the alarm—in deadly earnest now....

"Come!" said Katharine Forbis. She wrenched open the cabin door, letting in a rush of water, seized both their life-belts and gripped hold of Lady Wastwood, who, half-swooning, wavered as though about to fall. Somehow Miss Forbis dragged her charge through a jam of white-faced men and women—along the broad gangway, oddly tilted forwards—ankle-deep in water—up the main companion—tilted too, at that queer forward angle—down which the sea was rushing in a heavy waterfall. Drenched and gasping, to reach the promenade-deck—emerging into the radiant beauty of a Mediterranean day with the shout:

"All passengers on deck with life-belts on! All passengers on deck with life-belts on!" ringing in her ears....

Sun and sea, sea and sun,—and Death at its ugliest—an uncanny combination.... There was no panic after the first outcry and the headlong scrimmage for the upper deck. The deafening boom of escaping steam made it necessary to shout so as to be heard by those who stood nearest.... The forward tilt of the smooth white planks increased momentarily. The Loyalty's bow-plates and forward compartments had been stove in by the explosion. She was settling down by the nose, into the mirror-clear water—while the Military Nurses in their grey cloaks,, and the men and women of the Red Cross stood to attention on her tilting decks—and her officers went to and fro....

There never had been panic, there was even a little laughter.... No fear of horrors of thirst and starvation attending on shipwreck in the crowded Mediterranean Sea.... The low grey hulls of the Loyalty's two attendant Destroyers were visible on her starboard a long way ahead.... They were getting steam up.... "Coming to look after us!" shouted somebody to somebody. Of course they had been apprised by Wireless of what had occurred....

"Great invention, Wireless!" shouted somebody else to Katharine....

Katharine nodded back. She hardly felt depressed.

"B'mm. Hm'm! Oom'm m! ..."

A seaplane came droning out of the bright distance from where the low grey hulls of Destroyers showed, shepherding a stately procession of camouflaged troopers and battleships,—and hovered in narrowing circles over the Loyalty. Her pilot shut off—and his observer shouted something through a megaphone. What he said could not be heard through the roar of the escaping steam. Then he dropped a weighted note and flew away southwards, and the Second Officer grabbed the note and hurried off to take it to the Captain on the bridge.... Katharine never saw him again.... But inside the space of twenty seconds every soul on board the doomed vessel was in possession of the ugly fact....

The Loyalty had got out of her course,—strayed miles from the guarded ocean highway, traversed in comparative safety by the shipping of the Allies, patrolled by British Fleet hydroplanes, submarines and Argus-eyed T.B.D.'s.... She was in the middle of a Turkish minefield, one of those fulminating enemy areas marked out on her charts with lines and letters in coloured inks, that had been displayed by her Captain to the anxious eyes of Lady Wastwood. The powerful magnetos of a German submarine,—hovering in her near vicinity, had caused deviation in the British transport's compasses. Or, there had been a blunder—the truth will never be known....

Of the boats that had got away from the ship,—the first were crowded with women only; the next were packed with women and a sprinkling of men.... They pulled away towards those grey shapes on the southern horizon—topped by columns of slanting smoke—and presently were mere specks upon the straining sight....

As Katharine and Lady Wastwood were helped over the rail into their boat, and it was lowered to the level of the water—something like a shudder went through the Loyalty.... Her stern-ports lifted at a greater angle, and her bows were submerged more deeply. Looking up at her huge grey bulk, it seemed to Katharine that some vast cetacean,—bombed and harpooned—lay dying in agony upon the smooth and glassy sea....

She saw the Captain on the bridge, binoculars in hand, speaking to one of the minor officers. Urged in some way, he shook his head as though in refusal, and as his subordinate quitted the bridge—resumed his interrupted scanning of the distant sea. Perhaps the binoculars had focussed the travelling top of a periscope, and the breaking of white water, miles away to the east....

When the double White Death Streak cleaved the blue sea, and one after another two torpedoes hit the Loyalty on her port side amidships—her bows plunged downwards, throwing most of the people remaining on her decks, into the water. Others clung to her rails and the roofs of her deck-structures, as with a thunderous rattle of scrapping iron, her bowels fell out of her mangled body,—and she dived and vanished in a whirlpool of her own. As her stern heaved up perpendicularly, lifting her huge triple screws sheer out of the swirling water, a Portuguese sailor scrambled up upon her counter, naked as in the hour of his birth,—and so stood poised; his rich brown body gleaming,—his wild eyes and bared teeth glittering in the sun:

"Mao riao parta o' diabo! ... (May the Thunderbolt split you, devil! ...")

He shook his dark clenched fist towards the east, shrieking out the imprecation—meant perhaps for the Kaiser or the Sultan or the Commander of the submarine,—and dived magnificently as the ship sank, dragging down with her the last boats....

And then, through suffocation, and roaring sounds of water in her ears—flashes of sunlight piercing her smarting eyes, wedges of blackness driving over mind and soul—lightning flashes of consciousness—gasped-out prayers to God, wild cries for help,—washed down her choking throat by volumes of bitter waters—Katharine Forbis came up out of the depths—to find herself floating in sunlight and strange silence, on a sea covered with a strange confusion of floating débris....

Not alone, for all the silence. In the company of a good many other people, pluckily bent on keeping their courage up, and other folks' as well. Military nurses and Red Cross V.A.D's, orderlies, officers, sailors, Tommies.... Some of the men on duty forward had been horribly injured by the explosion of the Turkish contact-mine. What could be done for them had been done before quitting the sinking Loyalty. But as the blood from their cruel wounds drained away into the waste of water.... It was not the first time that Katharine Forbis had seen brave men die.... Then a V.A.D. woman perched with two others on a gangway, called to her across a patch of water—a lagoon ringed-in with floating wreckage:

"Oh, do look at the Commandant!—I am afraid she is dying!"

Treading water, paddling with a wooden fruit-dish, horribly hampered by her cork panoply,—Katharine crossed the patch of sea. The thin bluish wedge of Trixie's face lay tilted upwards to the jeering sunshine, against the slab of cork outcropping at the back of her belt. Her green eyes, half-open, looked hard and glassy as enamel—the livid lips were parted, showing the set white teeth....

"Oh try to live!" begged Katharine. "See—there are ships in the distance!" She pointed to some grey shapes moving on the southern horizon under their slanting columns of grey smoke. "The boats that have left us will be picked up—they will be sent back for us! ..."

"No ship commanded by a sane man will stick her nose into the middle of a charted Turkish minefield!" came from a man who hung on to a deck-seat and a wooden hen-coop next them, and had overheard. "When the contact stove in our forward plates I sent out the S.O.S. and got through to the Commander of one of those Destroyers...." He jerked his chin angrily towards some slanting streaks of smoke to the southward. "All he could do was to send that hydro from the nearest Battle Cruiser to have a look at us; explain what kind of a mess we were in—in case we hadn't guessed it already!—and tell us to wait for the boats! ..."

And the speaker, who had been the Wireless Operator on board the Loyalty, whose head was swathed in a bloody towel and whose right arm hung broken by his side,—grinned a forlorn grin, and tightened with his teeth the buckle of the leather waist-strap that supported him on his improvised raft, as Trixie's head fell limply back, and a faint moan fluttered from her lips, that were getting ashen grey....

"Please, please, don't give up!" said Katharine, mustering all her forces. She splashed water on the grey, peaked face and shook the thin shoulder. "Listen to me.... Do you hear? Don't you dare to die! ..."

But not Katharine's utmost efforts could have kept the dwindling life in Trixie, as the hours dragged on, and the blazing sun beat on their misery.... But that her good Angel, or Trixie's, reminded her that the little courier-bag slung about her shoulders, containing her money and papers, accommodated a tiny brandy-flask.

A sickness of sheer despair came over her as she realised that, environed by the unwieldy cork slabs of her life-belt, she could not possibly get at the bag.... Then she remembered, when there had been a moment or two of delay in readying the ship's boat—she had taken the flask out of the bag, and thrust it in the breast-pocket of her serge jacket. With a rush of thankfulness she felt for it, and found it there still.

It seemed long to Katharine before she could unscrew the flask-cap, and force a few drops of Cognac between the other's tightly-clenched teeth. When Trixie sighed, and opened her green eyes,—between her dazed vision and the marvel of a Mediterranean sunset, leaned the even greater wonder of a compassionate human face....

The glory of the sunset culminated to its utmost splendour. Floods of blazing wine of rubies poured into the sapphire bowl of the sea.... The water was calm as a mill-pond,—the air was balmy sweetness—as the evening star kindled, under the round breast of Asia's radiant moon.... And of all the innumerable ships that passed and repassed along the crowded sea-road on the southern horizon, not one altered her course for the castaway passengers of the luckless Loyalty....

They had been so brave, talking and cracking jokes—singing even,—asking riddles, and attempting recitations, "being British" some of them would have called it—up to the last volt of strength.... Towards morning they began to die,—the Wireless Operator leading the way, slipping off quite easily.... A baby went next, the only child on shipboard, and its desperate mother,—the English wife of a native official at Malta—shrieking—cast loose the rope that lashed her to some floating deck-fittings and, clutching the tiny body to her—leaped into the sea. And others died of exhaustion, and yet others; until quavering voices bravely raised in familiar strains of well-loved hymns, were dumb for sheer despair.... But, after all, though not until Dawn had risen over the unseen Desert of Syria—the boats that had pulled away, came back for yet another freight....

"Are we dead, you and I?" asked Lady Wastwood dreamily, waking out of an exhausted sleep, in a cabin of the trooper that had taken the rescued ones on board....

"Not yet," said Katharine Forbis gently, stooping over her. "It seems that God has yet some work in this world for you and me to do!"

"It is a lonely world," said Trixie faintly, and turned her peaked face to the bulkhead, "I had done with it! And—though it sounds horribly ungrateful, dear! I am sorry that you have brought me back!"

"But I am glad you aren't dead," said Katharine, kissing her, "because I love you, and you know that you are fond of me!"

"You saved my life.... I can never forget that," said Lady Wastwood. "My dear! there ought to have been somebody to photograph you doing it! What a success it would have made on the screens! ..." She returned Katharine's kiss with warmth. "It's quite true," she said. "I always have been fond of you,—you dear thing! That is why I was so frightfully down on poor Edward Yaill!"

"Do not—do not let us go back to that!" begged the other, wincing.

"I remember cutting him," continued Lady Wastwood reminiscently, "enough to have drawn blood. My Jerry always said—you remember how keen he was on golf? 'Mums carries too many clubs for one game, and always uses a niblick when it ought to be a putter!' But, believe me,—I really meant well!"

And that was the sealing of a compact of sisterhood between Katharine and Trixie.... For that we have striven for we love as part of us.... And Friendship forged on the anvil of Endurance is a metal that will stand strain.

II

Fresh from great triumphs in France, a Man came to Egypt in June, 1917—burly and square-jawed, clear-eyed, vigorous and outspoken; startlingly young in looks for his fifty-six years,—until he removed his cap and you saw his bald, domed brow. The successes at Romani and Magdhaba and Rafa had whiskers. Plans for the taking of Gaza, that stoutly resisting stronghold of the Turk—long since evacuated by all civilians—had fizzled out; there was a hang-up somewhere, things had to be set going again. He moved G.H.Q. from Cairo to Kelat, in Southern Palestine—a huge wire-enclosed area on the grass-covered slopes within sight of the Mediterranean—and took things in hand. Two Rolls-Royce box-cars carried him and his Staff,—three armoured Fords preceded him as Scouts—and two others followed with Wireless and life's necessaries. So he would appear unexpectedly in various quarters, causing confusion it may be, to commanding officers—and huge contentment to the rank and file.

He looked, upon a certain day in July,—on the positions of the forces attacking Gaza—from an observation-point affording room for three.... The day was misty, the Turkish 5.9 inch guns were silent; no warning drone of propellers counselled care as his binoculars swept the enemy trenches towards Beersheba, noting the railway-system for the shifting of big guns; the defence-works—enormously strong, and a tangle of barbed wire—running from Beersheba down to the sea.

He came down, and went through the trenches asking questions: sat on a gun-limber eating bully out of a tin with a jackknife and commended the Engineers and the Egyptian Labour Corps for the pace at which the railway had followed on the heels of our Advance. Then he went away—and the rations increased in quantity, and later certain trucks came up by railway—containing barrels of a malty liquor much welcome to the thirsty throats of British soldier-men....

Later in October, when the Irish Division, and the Indian Cavalry and the entire strength of the Camel Transport Corps, and the London Division which had fought with the assistance of one John Benn Hazel in France and Macedonia—had been added to the army of strange nations now mustered upon the soil of Palestine,—and the capture of Beersheba, with the well-springs of Sheria and the huge Turkish dumps that lay to the rear of them—combined with a bombardment from the hill tops round about her—from the sea to the West of her and the hot sky above her—had brought the gates of Gaza toppling down,—he swung into the camp of the battle-weary 'Fenchurch Streets,' a stalwart stranger in a battered pith helmet, sleeveless shirt, shorts and canvas shoes; and stooped under the door-fly of a tent full of dusty undersized Cockneys; unwashed, unshaven, bone-weary and just lying down to snatch an eyeful of sleep.

"How's things going, Londoners?" he asked with cheery brevity; and a gaunt brown giant of six feet four with a bristling two-inch beard, and a portentously hooked nose, Acting Company Sergeant pro So and so, sick or wounded—I forget which—recognised him, and said in a big bass voice, displaying a mouthful of large white teeth:

"All the better, Sir, because you've come! We fellows said all along you'd be the man for the job!"

"And, by G—" he said in his deep strong voice, "if you go on doing as you've done at Sheria, it won't be long before we carry through.... See you're wounded.... Anything much?" He laid a finger on a naked brown left arm, knotty with muscle, and decorated above the elbow with a bandage of iodine-smeared gauze....

"Nothing, Sir, thank you, but a bit of a flesh-cut. A German officer slashed at me with his sword, as he tried to shoot me left-handed with his revolver."

"Moral," he said, with his big schoolboy's chuckle, "don't try to do two things at once! And a scratch may turn septic, in this fly-cursed country, so don't neglect it, man! ..."

And he passed on, to gladden the heart of the Battalion Commander with discriminating praise, and drop a few curt sentences;—pregnant with great issues—before he went away. Pausing beside the step of his car to ask with the smile that won the men and charmed the women:

"Who's the big tyke overtopping the little Terriers in F. Company's tent? Not an exotic in this climate, or I don't know what it is to command a Jewish Battalion."

"I think," said the C.O., "you refer to Private Hazel, Acting Sergeant to F. Company in place of Langston.... We call Hazel the 'Lightning Change Artist,' because he's always doing somebody's duty, and doing it uncommonly well too! Killed twelve Turks with the bayonet in the scrapping at Sheria.... Sings as he fights—a habit when he's butchering men...."

"Sings, does he? Curious...."

"Sings in Hebrew, the men'll swear to you. Some of them call him 'The Musical Maccabee.' We've two other Jews in the Battalion, both good men, but he's damned good! ... Peculiar in his refusal of stripes and so forth, else he'd have had his Commission long ago. Has the Distinguished Conduct Medal for something he did in France...."

"Glad to hear that. He seems a hefty kind of beggar. Have noticed that he's wounded.... Would you recommend him for the Military Medal when you're sending in the other names?"

The pleased Colonel reddened through dust and sun-tan:

"Certainly, Sir, with pleasure, if you'll permit me! ... But there are a great many names, and I was rather thinking—"

"My dear Sir, never under any circumstances think that there can be too many names!"

"Thank you, Sir. With regard to Acting Sergeant Hazel.... He has been very keen on leave for Alex., since Sheria—most unusual thing with a man of that sort to risk the loss of a scrap. Some family affair perhaps. Has big interests in Palestine—chiefly wine and olives and so forth. Kind of a millionaire, I am told, in his way...."

"I don't care a Syrian curse about the millionaire! but I'm ready to stretch a point to oblige the man who spits twelve Turks—and sings while he's doing it! He's got a knock from a German, too—and might have put in for a Red Cross bag—a ride in the White train—and a cane chair on the lawn at Montana on the strength of it! So send him down to railhead at Gamli with the wounded.... He can put in three weeks at the General Hospital at Alex, and attend to his business there...."

"Very good, Sir! But it occurs to me that an R.F.C. two-seater scouting-plane in difficulties came down in our lines about an hour ago,—Wing Major Essenian Pasha on board—an Egyptian officer from the Ismailia Air Station—"

"I know Essenian Pasha!" The tone was enigmatical. "Copt or Moslem,—nobody seems certain. Some people seem to think it's a case of being all things to all men. Though,—for my own part—if I had to place him—I'd rank him with the Advanced or Super-Jews. But the man's an incomparable scout, and flies like one of the Sons of Eblis.... Some of his reports have been damned useful! We sent for him to do some special reconnaissance over the enemy's rearguard in the hills. Have Djemal's sharpshooters potted the Pasha? Hope he'd made his observations first!"

"The Pasha's all right, Sir, but his observer was shot dead. Flying-Lieutenant Usborn—there was a regular ding-dong battle over Hebron with some Turkish fighting-planes.... And Essenian Pasha would like us to bury Lieutenant Usborn—and supply an observer to replace him for the home-flight to Ismailia!"

"Well, can you?"

"It appears, Sir, that the Pasha knows Hazel. They foregathered at Salonika a month or so ago. And there being a lot of dysentery among the men of the Pasha's Flying Squadron—and Hazel having dabbled in aviation—five-guinea flutters at Hendon, I suppose!—the Pasha took him on several reconnaissance-flights. By the way, Sir, he has brought in a bit of intelligence.... The Sherif of Mecca's tribesmen are at Diariyeh—among the hills to the N.E. with the Emir Feisal and a host of Bedwân cavalry. And they're waging guerilla warfare against the enemy's rearguards and flanks."

"Good for the Sherif Husain!" The keen blue eyes sparkled. "And news worth having. We shall be able to shift the —th Division outposts a good bit more to the N.E. Where's the Pasha? Marhabâ, Essenian Pasha!"

"Marhabtain Gananâr Saiyid!" came the quick response to the greeting, as he turned to take the report from the dark hand of the Egyptian Flying Officer, looking back a moment later to say to the Colonel, with his parting handshake: "Well, so-long, Colonel! Remember, your next objective is Huj, the terminus of the Turkish branch-rail from Deir Sineid. The Desert Mounted Corps—3 Cavalry Divisions—pushed for there yesterday to cut off the garrison retreating from Gaza. So-and-so with such-and-such another force of mounted troops is working round by sea—to engage the enemy rear-guard at Beit Hannu. Dyemal's Eighth Army Corps on our right flankguard have rolled back towards Hebron." (Fifteen miles north-east from Beersheba, among the Judæan Hills.) "The only Turks now holding their ground are those facing the 53rd Division at Muweileh. They may not have heard of the fall of Gaza—as we have the cavalry between them and the rest of their Army—and Blank smashed the Gaza Wireless installation when he bombed their big mosque! You'll find the road to Huj nicely marked out with Turkish canteens, tin gas-mask-cases, stretchers and trenching-tools, and the terrain fairly continuous in its drop,—about forty feet to the mile.... Don't contemplate much trouble for you from well-posted Austrian batteries. The Warwicks and Worcesters and Australians have accounted for 'em all!"

And as the baking Earth rolled up, blotting out the huge red-hot sun; and the short twilight heralded the sudden swoop of Night on Syria, the Rolls-Royce box-cars carrying the Chief and his Staff moved smoothly on, following the four armoured scouters, and the other Fords swung out and dashed after them.... And the dust of Philistia—watered with the blood of brave men since Wars began on this sad earth—how many times? rolled up and blotted out the moving specks, on the safety of one of which hung the hopes of Christendom.

III

To Katharine Forbis, some seven weeks subsequently to her arrival at the Red Cross Hospital of Montana, an Egyptian Red Cross orderly brought a scrap of paper bearing a pencilled scrawl:

"Am back from the Front Palestine for ten days leave. Can you see me? Important yours faithfully John Hazel."

No more. But enough to call back the carnation bloom to cheeks paled by the sub-tropical heats of Egypt, and self-forgetful labours in the interests of wounded men....

Morning duty, consisting in the conveyance of a motor-car packed with convalescents on an expedition to Ramleh and back,—was over. Miss Forbis had just returned, and was free for the afternoon. In her well-cut white drill uniform-skirt and coat with its shoulder-titles, Special Service badges, and scraps of medal-ribbon, her white blouse with its polo collar and natty black silk tie; her brown silk stockings and tan brogue shoes bearing the unmistakable cachet of Bond Street, setting off the workmanlike ensemble, and her handsome head crowned by a soft white Panama hat of the uniform shape, with the Society's ribbon and badge,—she made a gallant, gracious figure, bringing a mist before the eyes of the big, battered-looking, sun-blackened man,—bristlier than ever about the cheeks and chin, and arrayed in battle-soiled and much-patched khaki drill,—who got out of his cane chair in the wide white marble hall with pleased alacrity, knocking over with a bandaged, sling-suspended left arm, the soiled and dusty regulation sun-helmet he had put down on a little table of inlaid Egyptian work.

And as he saluted her in his Eastern way, now familiar to Katharine, swift strangling emotion caught her by the throat. For a moment she could not find voice. For John Hazel brought the panelled parlour at Kerr's Arbour with him; and set it like a scene between the white marble pillars where whirred the electric fans, between the gilt and friezed and painted walls, and under the fretted ceilings of the Egyptian despot's palace, built on the rocky height at the foot of which break the milk-warm surges of the Mediterranean. And once again the old pain at her heart,—dulled by long months without news; by change of scene and change of work, to an aching sense of emptiness,—woke up and cried for all that she had lost.

She said with her wide heartening smile, as his huge hand swallowed hers, still wearing its tan gauntlet:

"You look wonderfully fit, though you're wearing a sling."

"Fit's the word!" He grinned the big toothy grin so well remembered.... "A walking testimony to the nutritive qualities of Maconochie, tinned salmon, Prynn's Baked Beans, Army brickbats, sticky flycatcher dates and chlorinated Nile water.... For we've travelled a long way since the imbecilities of the Crimea," he said, with his black eyes drinking her in.

"Thank God, we have!" Katharine flushed a little under his strange scrutiny, painfully conscious of the unrelaxing grip of his huge, hard, blackened hand. For John Hazel stood, oblivious of its crushing pressure, drinking in the joy of her near presence, inhaling the rare sweetness of her fair, wholesome womanhood; the fragrance of her hair and breath, and garments, coming to him mingled with the perfume of the half-opened red rose—still dewy in the heart of it—that she had stuck in the buttonhole of her uniform jacket that morning, and forgotten to take out again.

And Katharine upon her side was conscious of a strange environing atmosphere; a virile, heady compound of exhalations from the desert, the march, the bivouac and the battlefield, emanating from the garments and the person of the man. The sun-baked blackness of his skin seemed its natural tinting. Whiffs of the wormwood of desolate places mingled with the aroma of thyme, clover and strong tobacco,—the smell of horses and tanned leather; the sharp tang of melinite, and the penetrating odour of sweating human flesh.

A moment more and he released the hand he held, giving a dismayed exclamation, and taking a long backward step.

"Hold on! What have I been thinking of!" Concern was in his voice. "I'm not fit to touch you! Do you know it's a fortnight since I washed last!" His fleshy mouth twisted in disgust, as he surveyed his martial griminess, continuing: "We've been short of water lately. Only allowed a pint per diem. Strictly for internal irrigation, nothing allowed for the outer man! And when Essenian Pasha dropped me at the Alex. Air Station—and thundering good of him too!—I'd only time to grab a bite of breakfast at the N.C.O.'s Mess Tent—swallow a mug of coffee—tumble into a car—borrowed from the R.F.C. men!—and just chuffle along. Why I was in such a cast-iron hurry—that's what I've got to explain to you. And when I saw you I clean forgot what a beastly sweep I am! I couldn't—" The deep, rough breath he drew added quite plainly, "I couldn't think of anything but you!"

"Don't you imagine, if you and other brave men can put up with Dirt for Duty's sake—that we women—even those of us who don't wear this uniform—can put up with you men? And you can have a hot bath here at any moment, Mr. Hazel." Katharine's full tones were tinged with laughter as she added: "And a second breakfast,—unless you don't mind waiting the half-hour, which will make it the official noonday meal. Now which will you do? Have that bath—or stay and talk to me on, the lawn or in here until the Staff lunch?—at which meal your picturesque battle-grime will make you the admired of all?"

"It's simply first-class here!—a kind of mix-up of the Alhambra at Granada and an Egypto-Grecian temple," he said to her, gratefully sensing the breezes from the whirring electric fans. "And that little fountain, splashing and gurgling—makes a man who was in the Syrian Desert east of Gaza, up to the evening of day before yesterday, marching and swotting Turks on a pint of doctored Nile water per diem—want to stick his blooming head in the basin and drink it all up."

"I—think I'm beginning to comprehend!" Miss Forbis's fine eyebrows relaxed their tension, and the puzzled expression left her face. "You fogged me rather, a minute back—about being in the Desert near Gaza up to the evening of the day before yesterday.... But now—"

"Now you're clear that it isn't a case of bats in the belfry. Haw—haw!" He broke out into the big noisy laugh that had once set Katharine's teeth on edge. "Of course it'd have taken three days if I'd come by the Woggler from Railhead. The Woggler, I ought to tell you, is the Desert Express. Trucks roofed with packing-cases nailed together—nail-ends up—to accommodate the troops. Pullmans,—seats faked with American cloth over a thin film of tibbin,—specially reserved for Officer Sahibs. Not that the Army ain't proud of the Woggler! In its way, it's an epoch-marking, eye-opening Thing. But I happened to be in a dithering hurry. And a chance turned up of getting here by the Air Route, do you see? ... Safe as houses, for we followed the coast and had no scraps—the Turks are very short of fliers!—and we only came down once, for petrol, at a seaplane station near the Rest Camp at El Arish."

The gesture of his blackened hand made light of fatigue, risks, perils and privations attending the long flight from Palestine.... Katharine admired the simplicity with which he spoke, as she said with a touch of reproachfulness:

"It seems very long since you came to me at Kerr's Arbour, Mr. Hazel. And all these months you have never once written—although you promised!"

"I said I would not fail to write—if I had any news for you!"

That deep voice, and the simple words that meant so much to Katharine.... The white marble pillars of the hall appeared to sway and totter. The jewelled plume of a fountain playing in a fretted basin seemed to leap to the patterned roof and then shrink small again....

"Have you news—at last?"

"Some!" he said briefly.

"What?—"

The sudden dilation and darkening of her lovely eyes betrayed the desperate hunger gnawing in her. The eyes fastened avidly on Hazel's blackened face. She held her breath for his answer. It came as he slewed his head,—looking through the triple arch of the Palace vestibule to the green, carefully nurtured lawn, the glory of Montana—whence the smack of racquet upon tennis-ball came, and the sound of cheerful voices, telling of relaxations on the part of the Medical Staff, the Nurses and V.A.D's.

"This—that Colonel Yaill is alive and well. I have seen him!"

"Thank God!" Katharine said, "O—thank God! ..."

She put out her hand to the back of a chair and gripped it to steady herself. When her leaping heart had quieted she addressed herself to a colossal back-view, so shorn of martial dignity by patches of Army sacking, that Katharine's voice wavered between laughter and tears:

"And God bless you, John Hazel, for bringing word to me!"

"I have better than a word!" He wheeled about and faced her. "I have a letter from him for you! ..."

As he drew it from a baggy front pocket of his tunic, the radiance that broke over her was fairly dazzling to the man's eyes.... He trembled as she stretched out both her hands to him, entreating:

"Give me his letter, dear John Hazel! ... Let me hold it while you tell me where you met with him! ..."

The object that caused such turmoil in Miss Forbis's bosom was a single sheet of coarse yellow Levantine paper, folded to oblong shape, stuck in three places along the edge and at either end, with a mixture of white clay and beeswax, and sealed with a ring given to Yaill eight years previously. How well the giver of the old love-token remembered that hexagonal sard, deeply cut in old Roman capitals with the name: "KATHARINE." How dear and familiar the small neat handwriting of the pencilled address: 'Miss K. M. Forbis, Kerr's Arbour, Near Cauldstanes, Tweedshire, N.B.' ...

"The morning after Sheria—before it was daylight"—how she hung upon John Hazel's utterance, watching the movements of his fleshy lips, drinking in every word—"we were cleaning out enemy trenches, and blowing up ammunition-dumps and testing wells for poison, and burying dead Turks—and so forth!—I was passing the Intelligence Officer's tent—quite a toney fit-up on the top of a mound—with a native string-bed, and a camp chair, and a sugar-box table, and lighted candles on that,—for the thermometer was climbing up into the seventies and the front fly was up—for the sake of fresh air.... When I tell you that the I.O. was questioning Turkish prisoners—under a guard of Military Police,—and putting Syrian and Arab scouts through their paces, and interviewing village patriarchs—you'll understand that the atmosphere was—well!—"

"I can imagine! ... But, do please go on!" All unconsciously she cuddled the precious letter to her bosom, holding it with both hands and smiling over it at John....

"Well—as I was passing by and happened to glance in—an Arab dressed much the same as the others—a thin, tallish, sinewy Bedawi in a flowing black camel-cloth mantle, and silk head-veil trimmed with tufts of coloured gimp—and topped by the usual ring of twisted camel's hair,—rose up and made obeisance to the Intelligence Officer sitting at the sugar-box table,—and came out, followed by a brace of others—not quite so well got up. Walking as Arabs have the knack of doing—as if the round world and all that therein is—including the Desert—was hardly good enough to be trampled under the notched iron heels that they wear for killing snakes."

She drank in the words that were heavenly music, bending her high head the better to concentrate her gaze upon the speaker's face.

"And—?"

"Well, the three Arabs—two of 'em not particularly interesting, and the one who'd been talking to the Intelligence Officer—no end posh in a necklace of gold-mounted lion's-teeth, and with strings of blue and red seed-pearls twined in his long side-locks,—the three Arabs were going to where their hairies were picketed—munching tibbin and sesame off a spread saddle-cloth—ragged looking yellowish-grey brutes with ewe-necks, and queerly-sloped cruppers; and high-peaked wooden saddles and big-bitted bridles, jingling with silver amulets and jewellery of sorts.... One Arab had a kind of cage-basket strapped on behind the saddle, with live birds stirring about in it—I thought falcons trained for sport—until they started cooing.... Well then!—in the sudden way it happens in this East of ours,—Day jumped over the Hills of Judea—and the Arabs got their prayer-rugs from behind their saddles, and made ready to say their prayers...."

His black eyes seemed to look past Katharine into the scene that he described. He drew breath:

"I was sitting on a sack of Turkish ration-biscuits—not half bad if you've nothing else to eat!—smoking an Army Issue Woodbine—and though the place was stiff with praying Moslems, I watched these—or rather this one! He washed in the sand—laid his praying-rug diagonally in the line for Mecca, knelt down, and went through the whole programme—praying with his forehead to the ground—praying with his hands to the sides of his head—praying with his body straight, resting on the knees, in the regular Mohammedan way. An uncommonly swanky Arab too!—the stock of his long-barrelled gun inlaid with bits of turquoise and mother o' pearl, a curved nine-inch dagger in a gilded sheath stuck in the front of his girdle—and a long silver-plated ivory-stocked revolver—about 44 calibre I judge—on the other side. I was to left of him: so when he slewed his head over his right shoulder to smile at his Good Angel, I saw the back of it—and when he twirled it back again to scowl at the Counsellor of Evil, I found him staring full into my face and scowling at me!"

"And you knew him!—it was Edward!" Her voice was a song of joy!

IV

"I'd seen that scowl on the terrace at Kerr's Arbour, last February," said John Hazel. "And though he gave no other sign to tell that he recognised me, his eyes flickered for the tenth of a second—and I saw they weren't black, but grey. He took no more notice of me.... He'd finished his prayer, and was squatting down cross-legged—running his beads between his fingers—so I pitched away my fag-end, and began to hum the tune of a song, sitting on the sack of Turkish Army biscuits. It might have been an English hymn—for all the genuine Arabs knew—"

"What was the song?"

"'Loch Lomond'—only the words were altered; to fit the situation—see? Something like this:

'So I took the high-road
And you took the low,
And you got to Asia before me!
And Katharine Forbis sat waiting for news
At the bonny, bonny house of Kerr's Arbour!'"

Muted down to the softness of a mother's cradle-song, the full mellow baritone breathed out the familiar refrain. Bringing tears brimming over Katharine's under-lids,—for by strangest chance the song was one of Edward's favourites, often sung by her to him in the twilight—in the dear familiar drawing-room of the old, distant home....

"So you.... It was wonderful of you to speak to him in that way! ..."

"Not original." He grinned at her. "A variation on the historic Blondel Stunt. Only Blondel was a London Tommy,—and Cœur de Lion a British Brass Hat, camouflaged as a Son of Islam. He took it like a rock, only I saw his eyelid quiver. Yes'm!—that descendant of the Prophet winked at the infidel with the eye that was next me.... Then I did a bit more of the Blondel dodge...."

The smile ceased to quirk the corners of his fleshy red mouth, as he sang under his breath in the full sweet baritone:

"O Julian her brother was killed long ago!
So seek you no further to find him!
And give me a letter to take to her now
Where she's working for the Red Cross at Alex.!"

"And what then? ..." Her colour came and went.... "Didn't Edward—didn't Colonel Yaill manage somehow to speak to you privately? ..."

John Hazel shook his head.

"Nix a word! He's far too old a hand at the risky business of walking about in another man's skin, to give himself away in that style. He got up and shook off the dust,—stepped into his loose gazelle-leather boots,—rolled up his carpet, mounted and rode off with his two Arabs—leaving me chewin' the rag! And yet I knew it was Yaill—and that he'd got my message!"

"What did you do then? ..."

"What did I do! ..."

Forgetful in the excitement of his story, of his damaged left arm, he had released it from the sling, and used it freely, in the supple illustrative gesticulations that bespoke his Eastern blood:

"What? O, I sat tight on the sack of rooty, and smoked another fag, until the sun got too hot even for me! Then I got up and stretched myself, and caught my chameleon—who'd been trying to desert—and put him back on my sola topi. We all wear chameleons on our helmets, khaki drill or the tin basin variety—the beasts are champion fly-destructors!—and I believe that's how dragons, and wyverns, and other metal wild-fowl of that kind came to be worn on Crusaders' helms as crests.... Then I hied me back to my bivvy—it was in a cave of the Wady Sheria, and had been used by the natives for keeping goats—and other lively skippers!—and breakfasted with some mates of mine—chaps belonging to my Platoon. I think the menu consisted of rissoles, made of bully-beef with onion, biscuit-crumbs and sand-flies; the bottom of a tin of Dundee marmalade,—more sand-flies!—burned-bean coffee, and dates—with sand-flies again. Barely finished when we got the route. Our Division were to follow up Djemal Pasha's Eighth Army Corps—what was left of 'em—over the hills towards Hebron, and before my company marched off, a message came for me. The Intelligence Officer wanted to speak to Acting Company-Sergeant Hazel—"

Her eyes flashed comprehension:

"Edward! ... My letter! ... Ah! I understand! ..."

He nodded:

"It was the one way to get the thing to me without drawing suspicion.... And it was given me in a similarly—unobtrusive style. It lay before the I.O. on the packing-box table with a lump of mica schist on top of it for a paper-weight. Says Intelligence: 'Acting-Sergeant Hazel, I believe you have undertaken to forward this? ... The writer is much obliged!' So I saluted, and stuffed it in my pocket, and—"

"Oh—what?" cried Katharine Forbis, for the brown face had changed to an ugly livid colour, as John Hazel swayed giddily and caught at a column near.

"Nothing much! ... Got the sun on my head a bit yesterday. Right as rain in a minute—if—if I may sit down? But ... don't wait.... You haven't read your letter! And you must hate me for keeping you from that!"

He sat down heavily in the chair she drew to him, feeling her cool firm hand touch his wrist and her long womanly fingers encircle it, hearing her worshipped voice speaking close by:

"If one can hate one's kindest, truest friend, who has done so much—so simply and unselfishly—"

He shook his dizzy head in his heavy buffalo-like fashion,—and muttered through the whirring of the electrically-driven ventilating-fans:

"What have I done? Nothing much, anyway!"

"You have flown to me out of the midst of battle, bringing Edward's dear message.... Wounded and with a touch of fever, or I don't deserve my nurse's certificate! Do you call that nothing? ..."

"Little or nothing!" He shook his great black head doggedly as Katharine went on:

"And I take it as my right! What claim have I to such service?"

"Every claim," said Hazel's deep voice. "Every imaginable right!"

"And—" Her voice broke between tears and laughter:—"And you encourage me in selfishness. Why, I haven't even asked you if you wouldn't like a drink! ..."

"A drink!" he said with his old grin, though the brown of his face still showed faded, and deep lines showed by his jaws and at the wings of his great hooked nose. "A brandy and Polly with a lump of ice, and a ring of lemon in it. Offer me one now, Miss Forbis—and hear it boil as it goes down!"

"You shall have it." Katharine said laughing, though once her lip would have curled in scorn of the vulgarity of the ex-insurance-broker. "But first you must come to the Out-Patient's Department, and let the Surgeon in charge there look at this arm.... A mere nothing, perhaps, as you say"—for John was beginning to explain about its being a flesh-cut.... "When was it dressed last? ... The day before yesterday! ... That's quite enough.... You will come with me! ..."

So John Hazel, thrilling with well-concealed joy at being the object of his lady's solicitude, was towed away to a tile-lined, cement-floored Department on the Palace ground-floor, where the sword-cut on his left arm, looking rather angry—was bathed and cleaned, iodined, and strapped up by the doctor and nurse on duty there.... And the longed-for goblet of iced brandy and Apollinaris having been produced and duly disposed of—John Hazel took leave of Miss Forbis and went upon his way.

"Where shall you be? ... What address will find you?" she asked as she gave him her hand in farewell....

"I'm supposed to be quartered at a General Hospital at Alex.... Number Thirty-Seven," returned John. "But I'm not due there until to-morrow morning, and I'm going to wangle leave to live and sleep at my own house...."

"Your house! ... Have you a house at Alexandria? ..."

"We have had a house at Alexandria for more than sixteen hundred years!"

Again Antiquity rose up and confronted Katharine in the person of this big young man of powerfully Semitic type. He went on:

"Of course I never saw it until the Division came to Egypt. I went over from Kantara, and entered into possession a week or so before we got the route for Palestine.... I like it! ... You would like it.... It is the kind of place that's bound to interest you—for several reasons.... One of them being that it's a wonderfully preserved example of Roman-Egyptian Domestic Architecture. A relic of Alexandria—as Alexandria used to be...."

Katharine said with her characteristic sweet heartiness, though Yaill's letter was burning to be read:

"I should love to visit your house at Alexandria—if I may bring a friend with me? ... Lady Wastwood, who came out with me on the poor Hospital ship Loyalty and has been very ill here. She is convalescent now and helping us in the Secretarial Department, until she is fit to take over her own work. And I believe she is rather keen on ancient inscriptions, cat-headed goddesses and crowned uræi—and all that sort of thing."

"Then will you both honour me by coming to tea with me in the City to-morrow?—Numero VII, Rue el Farad,—I'll have a car waiting for you at the Palace gateway by sharp half-past four."

He smiled, well pleased, as Katharine consented; and heaved up his great body, and reached for the battered drill sun-helmet, as the silvery note of the luncheon-gong sounded from the long corridor crossing the bottom of the pillared entrance-hall.

"That's settled then.... Thanks all the same!—but I won't stay to luncheon.... Do you think I don't know how you're longing to get rid of me—and run away and shut yourself up, and read what you've got there! ..."

His black eyes went significantly to the outline of Yaill's letter, thrust by Katharine between the buttons of her white silk blouse, when—at some juncture of the wound-dressing in the Out-Patient's Department—she had come to the help of the surgeon and charge-Sister with deft, accustomed hands.

Her fine brows frowned a little at the familiarity, but there was no use in being angry with the man. John Hazel was just—John Hazel—Miss Forbis told herself; as standing in the sun-blaze on the doorsteps of the Hospital, she watched his great figure stride down the sanded avenue of swaying casuarina-trees, on the way to find the borrowed car left waiting at the entrance-gates.

Women and doctors and V.A.D. members were streaming towards the Palace from every quarter,—but for Katharine the Staff luncheon-gong issued its second summons in vain. She was hurrying down a shady side-alley of cypresses and tamarisks—ending in a pavilion of marble fretwork—covered with the royal mantle of a great Bougainvillia—standing in a riotous tangle of November-blooming roses,—a dear resort of hers and Lady Wastwood's in their free unworking hours....

"Oh! just like a girl of nineteen!" she murmured, conscious of the thrill and tumult of her fair soul and pure body as she drew Yaill's letter from its fragrant hiding-place.

Ah, my Katharine, but there you were wonderfully mistaken. Miss Nineteen would have failed to experience one-tenth of your blissful emotion as you kissed the folded sheet of coarse Eastern paper,—broke the clay and beeswax seals bearing the impression of your love-gift, the cut sardonyx—and read the words penned but a few days previously by Yaill's beloved hand.

V

"A Camp In The North Syrian Desert,
—th November—the Month of Asphodel.
"KATHARINE, MY SWEET WOMAN, MY DEAR LOST LOVE."

So wild a surge of memories came over her that her eyes were momentarily blinded. He dated from his camp in the Desert, as a pearler on some plunging lugger in the Indian Ocean may top his home-destined scribble: "The Open Sea...."

She dried her eyes, and the lines were clear again. Something that the folded sheet had contained had dropped out. A white flower scarcely yet withered, and a little string of beads of some sort. She thrust them in the envelope—and the envelope in her bosom—and went on to read.... And the page exhaled the wild strange odour of the acrid dust of the Desert, mingled with the scent of horses and camels, of saffron and resin, tobacco and thyme and myrrh....

"Twice I have seen your advertisements, my beloved. In a Greek gazette in a café at Constantinople. Again, in an issue of the Lisân-el-Arab, a vernacular paper published at Damascus; once again on a torn scrap of a captured Turkish news-sheet, on the floor of the maktab of the Governor of Akaba—the seaport at the head of the Gulf, where the Fleet of King Solomon unloaded their freights of ivory and ebony, gold and spices and apes and peacocks, close on three thousand years ago.

"How did I come there? do you ask me, Katharine. What was I doing in the hall where the Governor gives audience to the Bringers of News from the Desert—sitting on the Carpet of Interrogation, smoking the argili that aids thought? Because I was one of them—am one of them!—a petty chief of the Hejaz Bedwân, able to speak a little English—a spy set to supervise the doings of the spies.

"Well, I picked up the paper, as became a scrupulous Mohammedan. Who knew that it did not bear the letters of The Sacred Name! And I kissed it, and burned it on the charcoal of the brazier, under sharp eyes that had not glittered on the message it brought to me. Though the Governor of Akaba is one of those few men who share my secret. Had One great man not known it from the first, it would not have been possible to have vanished into thin air with such celerity.

"You never doubted for a single moment, sweet friend, dear comrade! that I had gone to look for Julian. Had I believed you would think otherwise, I would have managed to write to you.... But not to write was wiser—and the plan matured so suddenly.... When I took my last kiss from you, and went out of the chapel at Kerr's Arbour, I was uncertain what to do.

"Then through the jungle of my thoughts I saw a way blazed for me. I went to my room, and took from the press an old tweed shooting-suit, and hung the things on my arm, under my waterproof trench-coat. I took my stick, and shook hands with Whishaw, and said Good-bye to him. His old eyes were red with tears, and my grip thanked him for them. Then I climbed the private road, and turned at the brae-top to take my farewell look of Kerr's Arbour. And oddly enough, the refrain from 'Loch Lomond' kept droning in my head. You were taking the high-road of Duty and Honour—and I was taking the road of subterfuge and concealment. But not, God knew! for any base end of mine! He Whose Hand has torn us apart—two lovers married in heart and soul—if ever lovers were,—my Katharine!—He must be just to me! Harsh though I knew him,—yet even then I saw He had tempered His harshness with mercy. For you, O my dearest—you had believed in me!

"So I took initiative from that, and followed the plan I had thought of. I changed in the plantation opposite, but rather below, the gate of Kerr's Arbour private road. Then—seeing no one but a child—I came out of the plantation, having buried my khaki kit in a biggish badger's burrow. Cauldstanes people knew my face—so I struck across country for Stotts Junction, some twenty miles farther South, where—as of course you know—the Carlisle-bound trains stop. I got in at midnight—the time most favourable—as a troop-train of dingy second-class carriages and the usual string of cattle-trucks lumbered in.

"Troops were entraining, the —th Lowland Territorials, bound for Havre, Marseilles and the East. In the seething turmoil of my mind, some vague idea of enlisting as a ranker had been uppermost. I dismissed it as I sat waiting for the next Carlisle-bound train.

"My twenty-mile tramp to the Junction had cleared away the brainstorm. I realised that I had acted without reflection, like a savage, or a child. Stuffing away the khaki husk of Edward Yaill in a red-hot hurry,—changing into the old tweeds, and launching back into the world as an unobtrusive civilian, was, in a country in a state of War, and under Martial Law, about the crudest and riskiest mode of escape I could have chosen.

"But I got to London safely without being asked for papers, and slept at a coffee-house in the King's Cross Road. Next day, quite early, I saw Sir Arthur Ely, told him my plans (which he did not approve of), left in his care my keys and private papers; and by an ante-dated cheque which he passed through his bankers—obtained sufficient ready cash to carry on for a couple of years.

"And then I telegraphed in Code to a man I loved and honoured. You know him. He showed me much friendship when I was in the East. He wired back, appointing a place and an hour. The straight, piercing look of his full eyes under their thick lids—the grip of his hand, and the sound of his deep voice, rolled back the years—they always did—and made me a boy again. For I was little more when, eighteen years ago, I brought a despatch from my Colonel to his Headquarters at Fort Atbara. I was a lieutenant on his Staff when from the hill-top behind Kerreri—he—the Sirdar—swept Omdurman with his binoculars. A mud-walled Mohammedan city—I have been back there since I left you, Katharine!—with a great host of white-robed Darweeshes in battle-array before it—and the whitewashed dome of the Mahdi's tomb all gleaming in the sun.

"He is dead—and in him England has lost much more than a great War Minister. She has lost her truest friend. He heard my story out and believed me,—even as you believed, my true love! He was ready to help, upon condition that I followed up definite lines....

"Arab co-operation being essential for the crushing of the Red Crescent, and the liberation of Northern Palestine and Syria—a door lay open towards the East for a man such as I was—such as I am! who does not greatly fear peril, having no great use for existence. To whom hardship signifies little, comfort and pleasure not being for him. Who welcomes loneliness because denied the one companion with whom life would be Life indeed.

"So I got my Mission from my Chief of old,—he being willing that my six months of Home leave, and the indefinite period of Home duty destined to follow it,—should be merged, for an equally indefinite period, in a Mission connected with the Secret Intelligence Service of Great Britain in the East. Now you know why I was sitting in the audience-hall of the Governor of Akaba when I saw that torn fragment of the Turkish news-sheet lying, and picked it up and read, for the second time, your message to me.

"Twice then I have seen your message, and once I have seen You. You were driving a Red Cross Daimler car, full of Hospital convalescents, six weeks ago near the ruins of Canopus, by Aboukir. I was not an Arab of the Hejaz on that never-to-be-forgotten morning. Perhaps I was that coffee-coloured Copt—in the blue cotton galabiyeh of the Egyptian Labour Corps—squatting on a sandheap near a gang of others busy at excavation.... Or I may have been the Australian Dinkum who leaned against a Ptolemaic pillar smoking a cigarette.... You remember that his felt hat was slouched so as to hide his eyes!

"I do not smile, though I write cheerfully. Imagine what it would feel like to have a farrier thrust his steel pincers into your breast and twist your live heart round? Well, that is what I felt that day when I saw you at Aboukir. And yet I did not yield to the desire to speak to you—or try to see you, or communicate with you in any way. For to do that might have balked me of reaching my end,—prevented me from doing what I am more than ever bent on.... Had not Hazel recognised me that day near Sheria, I swear to you I would have resisted—until the finish. Perhaps I have drunk in a belief in Destiny from the Arabs. But I feel that man John Hazel is linked up with my Fate!

"So I write: and this will be conveyed to him through the officer representing —th Division, British Secret Intelligence, who firmly believed me,—until I disillusioned him—to be the Emir Fadl Anga, a pigeon-fancying petty Arab chief of the tag-rag-and-bob-tail of the Sherif of Mecca. Fortunately for my peace of mind! For the time is ripe.... I have traced a leakage of information from Headquarters in Egypt to its source in a native officer who holds the confidence of the British Government—and now move to the centre where the spy's activities are manifested. On the completeness of disguise—not only the garb of the outer man,—and the technical proprieties of speech and bearing—but the mentality distinguishing an Arab nomad from a city-inhabiting European—hang the two issues:—that a traitor should meet the fate he richly merits,—and that out of the barren desert of my life I may gather a joy for Katharine.

"For Julian is alive!—sweet friend, lost sweetheart! He sends you the Rosary that comes with this. He has been shifted four times since the Turks took him prisoner on the Scimitar. From Gallipoli to a War Hospital staffed by German surgeons, and Bulgarian and German nurses of the Red Crescent, at Constantinople. From Hospital to a filthy Prison Camp near Smyrna. From Smyrna to Belemeki, a small and even filthier station in the Taurus Mountains—the headquarters for labour-gangs of prisoners working on the uncompleted tunnels of the Adana and Constantinople rail. From thence to Beersheba and Shechem. He is now at Shechem. In such misery and under such privations that to describe them would harrow you uselessly.... I do not mean to try.... But this you may know: that the starved and vermin-ridden mob of tatterdemalions,—British Yeomanry, Regulars, Australians, Indians, Jews, Frenchmen and Roumanians—who swelter and starve and toil at Shechem under the loaded Turkish hide-whips would be in infinitely worse case, but for the self-effacing tenderness of the priest whom even the Turkish guards have learned to respect. Recent negotiations between the Allied Governments and the Porte have brought about a movement towards the release or exchange of many of these prisoners.... But for some reason,—the name of Father Julian Forbis has been omitted from the official lists of those selected for exchange. His physical sufferings, I have learned, would have been lessened if he would have consented to be removed from the mud barrack-prison, and quartered in the huts of the Wired Enclosure east of the town with the officers,—who receive less villainous treatment—and are more decently housed than the men.... It was like the Julian whom we know, not to desert his charges; knowing his presence to be some check upon the inhumanity of Turkish officials, and the brutality of Turkish guards. Pray for your living brother, my beloved,—for it may be God will hear you! and for me who am no better than dead though living,—being cut off hopelessly from you.... If in dreams I kiss your eyes, and your sweet mouth,—and the soft little place under your chin, you cannot be angry.... For I have nothing left on earth but my one hope of rescuing Julian, and my dreams!—and they come every night, Katharine!—such cruelly-sweet,—vivid dreams of you and you, and You.... E.A.Y."

There was a postscript above a rough ink outline that suggested something familiar to Katharine:

"I picked the flower I enclose with the Rosary a day or so back at your Tower of Kir Saba, little thinking how soon I should be sending it to you! The Turks holding Jaffa have fortified the Tower on the E. and S.:—fixed an aërial for Wireless on the top of it—driven their trenches through the gardens and vineyards—cut down the olive-groves covering the hillside N,—and used the vaults as dumps for the storage of cartridges, H.E. shell, bombs and hand-grenades.... There is something of Kerr's Arbour about the place, despite the second, smaller Tower to the W, the round bastion at the middle of the eastward wall, and the absence of the buildings later reared against the keep.... So there, my Katharine, stands your ancient heritage, its feet deep in blossoming asphodel, and tapestries of grape-vines—now laden with ripe fruit—draping its Time-worn stone...."

The withered flower the envelope had contained was the snapped-off top of a slender green stem, bearing white blossoms in branching clusters; lily-shaped, and exhaling a delicate fragrance, recalling the scent of freesia to Katharine.

The Rosary was a hempen string, with brown-black shiny seeds of the oval type of canna Indica, arranged in the familiar decades—with black lupin-beans for Paternosters—ending in a Crucifix rudely hacked from palm-wood—fruit of hours of secret labour with the prisoner's pocket-knife....

Katharine knew that Julian must have blessed it, before sending it to Edward. Thenceforth in daily prayers to the Mother of Consolation, for her dear ones living and dead, she would use instead of her own Rosary this:—made even more sacred by the sorrow of the sender and the maker's martyrdom.

VI

In search of Lady Wastwood, temporarily busy in that Department, Katharine later on betook herself to the cool and pleasant quarters on the Palace second floor, devoted to Secretarial Work and Accounts.

"Be good enough to explain why you cut the Staff lunch to-day?" Miss Forbis said with severity, as Trixie's white triangular face and bright green eyes came out of a big parchment ledger to smile a tired welcome at her friend.

"Because of the food!" said Lady Wastwood briefly.

"The food is ripping!" pronounced Miss Forbis.

"I admit that! It's seeing you other people eat it that I mind!"

"So you avoid meals, and live on eggs and coffee, and fresh dates, and figs and bananas and grapes and custard-apples. You'll be in for Gippy Tummy if you don't take care!"

"Precious Person, I will take care. But fruit is so simply gorgeous here!—and it reminds me of Old Diplomatic Service days at Constantinople and Calcutta, when I and Wastwood used to eat figs and mangoes and fresh-picked oranges one against the other, for bets in gloves. And neither of us died—though I suppose we ought to have. Don't go, my dinkie! I'm nearly done!"

And Trixie, coming out of the big ledger with a sheaf of pencilled extracts, arranged a huge sheet of foolscap on the blotter and began to write, while Katharine waited, looking out of the window across the lawns and the elaborately-cultivated shrubberies to the line where the blue sea,—traversed by innumerable Allied steamers,—and the bluer sky, threaded by French and British aircraft—met and mingled beyond a wide expanse of light brown sand-dunes, and a belt of casuarina-trees, and tall, waving palms:

"Report On The Working of the Red Cross Motor-Ambulance and Cars For the Month of October, 1917.

"During October our 11 Cars used for General Administrative Work and for the Conveyance of Convalescents, ran 9576 miles on 636 gallons of petrol, making an average of 15.05 miles to the gallon.

"159 Convalescent Patients were taken out for Drives, and nearly all of them given tea at the Nouzah Gardens—"

"I wonder," Katharine began, after watching the long thin hand move over the paper for a minute or so, "whether you ought to be doing that?"

Lady Wastwood's incredibly arched, impossibly-black eyebrows moved nearer her green-golden hair.

"Because my heart goes biff after a ducking, I resolutely decline to be treated as an invalid. Isn't it bad enough to know that another woman is doing my work of organisation at the Convalescent Officers' Hostel at El Naza—and doing it on rottenly unimaginative lines! A woman more than a dozen years younger,—who learned from me in the days of flapperdom how to camouflage a shiny nose? No, you mustn't try to take my work from me. It helps me to forget my unrealised visions of green lawns of rabbia shaded with palms and dotted with snow white sleeping tents, and golden haired English nurses in pale blue linen overalls, ministering to hundreds of weary War-worn men."

"But the nurses mightn't all have been golden-haired," objected Katharine.

"Peroxide," said Lady Wastwood, brainily, "is fairly cheap in Egypt. And I know a Contractor who would have supplied it in seven gallon glass jars." Her small triangular face regained its old vivacity, and her green eyes their brilliancy as she pursued: "Then, I meant, to have a restaurant built far out on the sea shore, where the surf ran up under the tables as the patients sat at lunch, or tea. Rowing, riding and fishing, camel-rides and picnics would have been part of the treatment under my régime. And now—" Trixie's voice wobbled a little and she cautiously dabbed with a minute lawn handkerchief at the corners of her bright green eyes—"when I think of all those Convalescent Officers and what they have lost through Me, I get pippy. To have pulled the thing through and made a success of it would have got back my credit with Wastwood and the boys."

"My dear!" Katharine began, and hesitated: "You don't believe really—"

Trixie dabbed her eyes again,—and dabbed her nose as an afterthought, and resolutely put away the handkerchief.

"I don't quite think Wastwood—my husband—would judge me hardly. He took me three times round the world with him, and though I was a jelly of terror all the time at sea, I somehow managed to camouflage my cowardice. It's only when I remember how I groused on that ship that I imagine I can hear my Jerry saying to his brother: 'Old Man, I don't half like to say it, but the Mums is rather letting us down ... What?' And Wastwood—"

"If Wastwood or Jerry said anything so unjust," Katharine broke out, "they ought to—to be thoroughly well spanked—both of them!" She went on as Trixie reluctantly yielded to laughter, "I don't know whether you've found it out yet,—but Nurse-Superintendent Bulleyne is in charge of No. 2 Ground Floor Ward at the Harem. And she has told Lady Donnithorpe and every one else here how—when the Incendiary Bomb from the Zeppelin dropped through the roof of No. 100, West Central Square—where you used to have your Red Cross Work Rooms,—and killed two poor orderlies, and dear Alicia Macintosh!—you went into action with sand-boxes and water-buckets, and fire-extinguishers,—and saved the place from being burned out! ..."

"That was nothing to brag about," declared Trixie. "Things that go off with a bang and a piff never much frighten me, and anyone with an iota of sense knows what to do in a fire. But shipwreck"—she shuddered "and drowning—"

Katharine saw the look on the white triangular face, and came to Trixie's side protectingly. Ever since the sinking of the Hospital Transport Loyalty, the terrible experience had been renewed in Lady Wastwood's nightly dreams. She looked frailer and more startlingly attenuated than ever, as she sat among the ledgers heading a fresh sheet of foolscap:

MONTANA WAR LIBRARY—AUGUST, 1917

Requisitions received ........................... 288
Hospitals, Depôts, etc., supplied ............... 73
Bound books ..................................... 1,000
Papers .......................................... 1,190

Lent to Patients, Montana, and Auxiliary Canvas
Convalescent Camps, Boulboul and Osra

Magazines ....................................... 1,866
Penny Stories ................................... 647
Periodicals ..................................... 8,904
Bridge, Whist and Poker ......................... 10,966
Blighties ....................................... 19,230
French and Italian Books ........................ 30
Political Economy, Works on ..................... 1
Poetry .......................................... 4
Classics ........................................ 0

GIFTS OF BOOKS FOR THE MONTH

The Kiss That Changed The World—By Massy
B. M'Dudgeon ............................. 1 copy

Pond and Pink Powder—By Gertie Stumps ... 1 copy

Sermons For War Time—By the Bishop of
Bayswater ............................. 100 copies

"Come now, you really have done enough. Stop at the Bishop."

"I wish he would pay the freightage on his stupid sermons. Forty piastres to pay on the parcel. And he expects to be thanked for it. Well, I'll knock off if you'll come and laze with me for a bit in the garden.... Do I shine? I feel like it!"

Trixie gathered up her long thin limbs, stood up and produced a vanity-case.

"Here and there.... But every one does.... I'm beginning to get used to it. No! I'm not coming to smoke your new Macedonian cigarettes, and have iced-tea with lemon in the garden this afternoon. You are coming to tea with me, in the house of a great friend of mine."

"Who is your friend?" asked Trixie, intent on the little circular mirror.

"A Jew."

"I rather like Jews. Where does your friend live?"

"Numero VII., Rue el Farad, Alexandria. His house," Katharine went on, quoting John Hazel, "is one of the few relics extant of the ancient city, a wonderfully-preserved example of the Roman-Egyptian Domestic Style."

"'I guess I shall admire to come,' as that American Nursing-Sister said when you asked her to drive to the Antoniadis Gardens. And is your friend like his house—a wonderfully preserved example of the ancient what-do-you-call-it style?"

Katharine answered promptly and warmly:

"He certainly is a wonderfully-preserved example of unspoiled Faith, and unstained Honour, and old-world Loyalty."

"How nice!" said Lady Wastwood, sweetly. But she said to herself: "I would never have believed it—Kathy Forbis being Kathy Forbis. But—if she is able to forget poor Edward Yaill, even for a wonderfully-preserved example of all the old-world virtues, with shiny jet-black curls and a curly profile—it would be—for her, poor girl—rather a good thing."

VII

He was not in the waiting car before the guarded entrance to the Hospital, as Katharine and Lady Wastwood gave the pass to the sentry, and stepped forth upon the dusty metalled road.

The car proved a large, white-enamelled Clement-Talbot of some 22 h.p., luxuriously appointed and finished exquisitely as a gun. The chauffeur was a mahogany-skinned, almond-eyed Egyptian, in a crimson felt tarbûsh and snow-white silver-braided native livery. The attendant, a grave, middle-aged man, with long curling side-locks and olive aquiline features,—who stood by the car door, imperturbably waiting the arrival of the ladies, wore the plain black kaftan and high black felt cap distinctive of many middle-class Jews in the East.

The machine ran like oil along the seventeen miles of dusty metalled roads lying between the green foliage and verdure of Montana and the great fortified Egyptian seaport,—in its environs of palm-groves and fig-gardens, tennis-lawns and golf-grounds; its streets (roaring with motor-lorries; grid-ironed with tram-lines; rattling with hack-gharis and arabâyis full of English, French or Italians, their drivers kept from running people over by the red-fezzed mahogany-hued Military Police)—traversed by swinging processions of laden camels, strings of tiny overladen donkeys, Arab hawkers, stately veiled women with clashing silver anklets, Anglo-Egyptian ladies in last season's Paris fashions; soldiers of the Egyptian Army, sherbet and sweetmeat and coffee-sellers; gangs of blue-uniformed Turkish prisoners; working-parties of the indefatigable little men of the Egyptian Labour Corps; portly native stockbrokers or merchants in the red tarbûsh and single-breasted blue frock-coat; saisis, vendors of antiques made yesterday, Dagoes and Bedwân chiefs; verminous and crazy beggars; impish native youths and urchins pressing copies of the Alexandrian Post, and the Egyptian Mail, John Bull, La Bourse, the Messagéro, the Sydney Bulletin and the Palestine Gazette, upon tall Australians in slouched felt hats, New Zealanders in red-banded smashers, lean, bearded Indian Lancers, little Ghurka Riflemen, and newly-arrived Tommies with comparatively pink-and-white faces; respectfully lavish of drinks and sticky native sweetmeats to veterans bronzed to the colour of their own khaki by the suns and dust-winds of the Desert and Palestine....

A huge, endless, living screen-picture, various and polyglot, backed and reinforced by an infinite variety of smells.... Colours of all imaginable hues; scents and reeks, stinks and fragrances. The hiss and purr, the nasal whine of Oriental tongues, mingled with the Western click and rattle, and the clang and ring of the dominating North.... Pierced by the all-pervading yell, for backsheesh, Backsheesh, BACKSHEESH!—the never-ceasing slogan of the dominated East.

Beyond the crossing where the Road of the Rosetta Gate debouches into the Rue Sherif Pasha,—whither Trixie's inward being yearned because of the cream-puffs, pink-melon ices, and Persian tea to be had at Groppi's Restaurant,—the big white car swirled into the Rue el Farad, past the beautiful tree-adorned and well-kept grounds of the Armenian Church and School.

The thoroughfare occupies the ancient site of the Street of the Four Winds, south of where used to be the quadruple marble gate, the Tetrapylon, turning off the ancient Street of the Moon. No asphalte was here, but pavement of huge blocks of ancient flagstone, not all cemented together, on which the traffic of the city, the motor-lorries, hack-gharis, country-carts and trains of laden small-hoofed donkeys, made an atrocious sound.... Tall palms, overtopping the roofs of the houses set at intervals on either side of the thoroughfare, spoke of garden-grounds behind them.... Here and there, built into a courtyard-wall, some chipped and broken column, or capital of Græco-Roman carving, some incised stele of yellowish limestone-marble, black basalt or the red granite of Assouan, incised with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the symbols of the Sun, and Moon Mother, spoke to the remoteness of the city's antiquity....

Midway of a courtyard-wall, forbiddingly high and thickly whitewashed, before a high closed portico having a deep square depression on the right-hand as though a sculptured slab or plaque had been removed from beside the entrance, the Clement-Talbot stopped. The heavy, green-painted door bore, in its central compartment of white, red Hebrew lettering instead of an Arabic inscription; the Roman numerals VII. were on a small brass plate above the heavy metal ring surmounting the huge clumsy lock, a lock straight out of The Arabian Nights....

The grave attendant got down and opened the car. Alighting, Katharine and her companion passed in, over a square of ancient mosaic, representing a black dog spotted with white, secured by a chain attached to a scarlet collar, and displaying a formidable mouthful of teeth.

The vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was of yellowish Numidian marble, yet stained a faded red in places, and showing traces of having been divided into panels by a slender incised ornament, partly obliterated, but recognisable as a black caduceus wreathed with a black vine.

And the vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was long rather than wide, and ventilated by horizontal apertures below the roof, filled in with metal lattice-work. Through a similar but larger opening overhead poured the golden sunshine of the November noonday,—making a thick black strip of shadow beneath the long wooden bench that ran along the right-hand wall. The air of the place was cool and sweet,—in spite of an array of native shoes,—of all grades and descriptions from jaunty red morocco with pointed turned-up toes, and heels with sharp rims of brass or steel for the killing of snakes and scorpions,—to venerable footgear of soiled buff or yellow leather,—and the clumsy hide sandals commonly worn by peasants,—ranged along the left-hand wall. Even as she observed the rows of shoes, Katharine's keen ears were greeted by a curious deep-toned humming—as though innumerable, invisible bees, of Brobdingnagian proportions—were gathering honey from conjectural flowers in the near neighbourhood....

The negro porter who had opened the door, a huge Ethiopian of ebony blackness, dressed and turbaned in snow-white linen, salaamed deeply to the ladies; displaying as he did so a mouthful of teeth as dazzling in whiteness and sharply-pointed as those of the mosaic dog.

Then the negro shut the heavy door and locked and bolted it. They heard the car snort and move away as the metal bolts scrooped in their ancient grooves of stone. But, as they glanced back, towards the entrance, the imperturbable attendant in the black kaftan waved them forward to where another man, exactly like himself in feature, colouring and costume, waited as imperturbably on the threshold of a larger hall beyond. On its right-hand doorpost was affixed a cylinder of metal repoussée, with an oval piece of glass inset—something like a human eye. And the big invisible bees went on humming as industriously and as sleepily as ever:

"Bz'zz'z! .... Bzz'z! ... Bzz m' m'm! ..."

Perhaps it was the bees' thick, sleepy droning that made Miss Forbis feel as though she had previously visited this house in a dream, in which,—though the mosaic dog had certainly figured, together with a negro who had opened doors,—the rows of shoes along the wall, the figure of Trixie at her side—the two dark, ultra-respectable men in black tarbûshes and kaftans had had no place or part. Only John Hazel had bulked big.... He was there,—beyond the grave Semitic face of the second Jewish secretary—on the farther side of the torrent of boiling amber sunshine pouring through a central opening in the roof of the inner hall that succeeded the vestibule of the mosaic Cerberus. An atrium some forty feet in length, paved with squares of black and yellow marble, with an oblong pool in the midst of it—upon whose still, crystal surface pink and crimson petals of roses had been strewn in patterns,—and in the centre of which a triple-jetted fountain played....

"Bzz' zz m'm! ..."

The humming of the unseen bees came louder than ever, from a doorway in the wall upon Katharine's right hand.... A wall of black polished marble, decorated with an inlaid ornament in porphyry of yellow and red and pale green. The curtain of dyed and threaded reeds did not hide what lay beyond the doorway. You saw a long, high-pitched, whitewashed room, cooled by big wooden electric fans working under the ceiling, and traversed by avenues of creamy-white Chinese matting, running between rows of low native desks; before each of which squatted—on naked or cotton-sock-covered heels, or sat cross-legged upon a square native chintz cushion, a coffee-coloured, almond-eyed young Copt, in a black or blue cotton nightgown, topped with the tarbûsh of black felt or a dingy-white or olive-brown muslin turban; murmuring softly to himself as he made entries, from right to left, in a huge limp-covered ledger, or deftly fingered the balls of coloured clay strung on the wires of the abacus at his side.

"Oh! ... Wonderful! I'm so glad you brought me!"

Lady Wastwood's emphatic exclamation of pleasure in her surroundings brought cessation in the humming,—caused a swivelling of capped or turbaned heads all down the length of three avenues,—evoked a simultaneous flash of black Oriental eyes, and white teeth in dusky faces lifted or turned.... Then at the upper end of the long counting-house, where three wide glassless windows looked on a sanded palm-garden (and the leather-topped knee-hole tables, roll-top desks, copying ink presses, mahogany revolving-chairs, telephone installations, willow-paper baskets, pewter inkstands and Post Office Directories suggested Cornhill and Cheapside rather than the Orient)—one of the olive-faced Jewish head-clerks in kaftans and side-curls coughed,—and as though he had pulled a string controlling all the observant faces,—every tooth was hidden and every eye discreetly bent on the big limp ledgers again....

All the Coptic bees were humming sonorously in unison as Katharine went forward to a lofty doorway, framing brightness, where waited to receive her the master of the hive....

The light being behind him may have exaggerated his proportions, but he seemed to Trixie the biggest man she had ever seen, and nearly the ugliest. Close-curling coarse black hair capped his high-domed skull; and his stern, powerful, swarthy face, big-nosed and long-chinned,—with a humorous quirk at the corners of the heavy-lipped mouth that redeemed its sensuousness—was lighted by eyes of the intensest black, burning under heavy beetle-brows. His khaki uniform, though of fine material and admirable cut, was that of a common ranker, and a narrow strip of colours over the heart, and the fact of his left arm being bandaged and slung,—intimated to Lady Wastwood that Katharine's Jewish friend had already served with some degree of distinction,—and had been wounded in the War.

As he advanced to Miss Forbis, plainly unconscious of any presence save hers, Trixie's observant green eyes saw him bend his towering head, and sweep his right arm out and down, with slow Oriental stateliness, bringing back the supple hand to touch breast, lips and brow. Whether or not he had raised the hem of Katharine's skirt to his lips and kissed it, Lady Wastwood could not definitely determine. She was left with the impression that he had done this thing. And—as he rose up from the deep obeisance, there sounded in her ears these words of salutation spoken in English by a deep voice, with the timbre and volume of an Arab war-drum:

"Hail! Lady of the noble house of Philoremus Fabius. Be welcome to this dwelling, the cradle of your race. Mine to-day as my forefathers' through bygone centuries, since your footstep crossed the threshold, we are stewards, and you are Queen!"

VIII

He might have been quoting from some classical play, it occurred to Trixie,—perhaps he was an actor, this colossal khaki man.... Though Katharine had certainly said that he had offices and warehouses in the city. That was his counting-house, that populous hall, where rows and rows of Coptic clerks did sums in huge ledgers. And Katharine was presenting him as "Mr. John Hazel." And he was saying to Lady Wastwood, the usual civil nothings, in the voice that had the resonance of a Somali war-gong, the deep vibration of a Dervish battle-drum—and the clipped accent of the ordinary middle-class Londoner.

"Frightfully glad to meet you.... Miss Forbis said she'd bring you.... Won't you come inside? This is my room!"

"What a room!"

The exclamation came from Lady Wastwood, but the room's owner looked at Katharine. The stamp of her approval was evidently required.

"You like it? ..."

Katharine answered, with a long-drawn breath, in utter sincerity:

"—Much more than like it! It is—perfectly wonderful!"

It had probably once served as the triclinium of this ancient Roman house. Of spacious width, it might have been some sixty feet in length, and twenty feet from the mosaic floor to the frescoed ceiling, representing a sky of intense blue, with stars of rusty gold. Framed, the blue starry sky, in a square of trellised roses, their hues faded and dimmed by the passage of centuries, the yellowish marble showing in patches through the gesso groundwork—as through that of the deep frieze below the Attic cornice,—painted by some ancient master in the noon of Alexandria's heyday,—and representing in hues still fresh and brilliant the Battles of the Greeks and Amazons.

Below the frieze an ebony shelf supported a collection of Oriental pottery and porcelain, interspersed with antique vases and statuettes in ivory and bronze. Down one side of the long room were glass-doored book-cases, built in recesses,—and cabinets stored with objects of beauty and rarity. A wide divan strewn with silken cushions and covered with brocade of Damascus, ran along the opposite side and under the window at the upper end,—where the floor—raised some eight inches, made a kind of daïs, upon which Persian carpets of beauty and evident value were laid....

The window, glassless, and closed at need, with delicately-carved wooden lattices, ran across the upper end of the room, nearly from wall to wall. Where the window ended, a door between twisted pillars of red and green serpentine—such as were set between the frames of the window-lattices—led to an open loggia, supported by slender columns. From the window and through the door—across the cool blue belt of shadow made by the fluted tiled roof of the loggia—were the green lawns and springing fountains, the groves and alleys and shrubberies of a well-kept and spacious garden; over whose fruit-burdened vines and fig-trees hosts of finches and orioles and fig-birds kept up a perpetual chirping and twittering.

It was restful and cool in the wide, lofty room,—would have been so had no wooden fans, driven by electric power—kept the air in continual movement underneath the frescoed ceiling. The heavy door at the hall-end being shut, the hum of the busy Coptic bees of Hazaël & Co.'s counting-house could not penetrate, where after months of keen anticipation John Hazel welcomed his liege lady, with outward stolidity and grave, rather clumsy politeness—masking the shy rapture—say, of an Eton Fourth Form boy doing the honours of his study to the prettiest sister of his chum.

"Now, where'll you perch?" he said to Lady Wastwood, after carefully installing Miss Forbis in the divan's right-hand window-corner. He was hospitable in the extreme, Trixie decided, and any thing but well-bred. How odd that such a man should possess sufficient insight and discrimination to admire Katharine as profoundly as John Hazel evidently did....

"By the way, Mr. Hazel," Katharine's fresh voice called to him, as he found a suitable resting-place for Lady Wastwood—and Trixie's observant green eyes saw him jump, and flush under his mahogany hide; "I've seen your name starred in to-day's paper. 'Commander-in-Chief's Despatches retelegraphed from Whitehall. Recommended for the Military Medal, Acting Company Sergeant John Benn Hazel—448th City of London (Fenchurch Street) Royal Fusiliers. Extraordinary valour displayed at Sheria.... Twelve Turks bayonetted, one after another....' Congratulations with all my heart!"

Her long arm swept out to John, and he took the hand, reddening, and promptly returned it, stammering: "Awfully obliged for what you say!—but as regards the M.M. there's no accounting for the way they have of ladling out these tin-and-gilt things. Mean well and one's obliged, but the men who earn 'em never get 'em!" He smote his giant palms together, evoking a terrific detonation. "Sorry if I made you jump." Nervous Trixie had done so. "But this is how we do in the East when we want 'em to bring tea!"

Two blue-shirted, white-gowned Egyptian boys and a bulky middle-aged negress, black as coal; with a high silk turban of rainbow hues, a skirted yellow over-robe, full striped trousers of orange and green, and clashing rows of bangles, responded to the summons, setting heavy silver trays, laden with good things, many and various, on inlaid ebony stool-tables before their master's guests.... The arrival of the trays heralded the entrance of an elderly lady, sad-faced, olive-skinned, black-eyed and white-haired, attired in an old-fashioned grey silk gown. As "My Aunt Esther," their big host referred to this lady, presenting her—against all the rules of precedence, first to Miss Forbis and inversely introducing Lady Wastwood.... With whom the sad-faced elderly lady shook hands cordially, though she had curtseyed ceremoniously and profoundly as she had taken the hand held out by to her by Katharine....

The tea poured out by the sad little grey lady, was Persian, and far superior to Groppi's, in Trixie's opinion,—as were the cream-tarts and pistachio-nut, and date-cakes,—the delicate Egyptian rolls and creamy curls of butter, the pink-melon ices and sherbet of fresh limes, and newly-gathered grapes, figs and oranges.... Indifferent to the possible result of an attack of Gippy Tummy, Trixie enjoyed herself, listening with amused interest to Mrs. Hazaël's gentle chatter, as the little lady's thin hands, loaded with magnificent rubies and emeralds, darted about amongst the cups....

In fluent English, spoken with a strong French accent,—both languages having been acquired in her girlhood, she explained—at a Maltese Convent boarding-school, where she had spent eight years,—she entertained her guest with arid recollections of the Early Eighties, mingled with more welcome details of the cost of housekeeping in the East.

It appeared that the negress,—whose name was Fatmeh, and who came from Upper Nubia,—was responsible for the making of the cream-tarts and the date-and-pistachio cakes.... But the crowning culinary achievement of Fatmeh was kunaféh, which could not be properly offered with tea, being a dinner-dish; made of sesame-flour, clarified butter and honey, with eggs and raisins, and fried in a pan.... If Miladi would honour the house by coming to dinner, the hostess added, the kunaféh should be forthcoming, made and fried in Fatmeh's finest style....

"You are quite too infinitely kind, Madame," Trixie responded, and as she abominated pancakes, the description of kunaféh left her chilly. "But though to dine with you would give me the greatest pleasure,—my acceptance of the invitation must naturally depend on the engagements of Her Majesty over there...."

And the Commandant's smiling nod indicated Miss Forbis, seated in the divan's opposite corner, drinking Persian tea out of exquisite porcelain, and revelling in the beauty of the gardens,—where palms tasselled with golden fruit, and laden fig-trees on spreading trellises, and sycamores draped with grapevines heavy with purple clusters, made islands of shadow and fruitful luxuriance,—while shrubberies of myrtle and rose and oleander invited the footsteps of stranger and habitué to explore the winding pathways that threaded them—under the hot blue sky of the November noon....

"You call her Queen? ..." The lustrous dark eyes of the white-haired lady studied the fine face, and dwelt on the superb lines of the gracious womanly figure for an instant before she said: "And you are right! C'est une physionomie très noble! I have seen Queens and Empresses in Europe—and here in Asia, who would have looked like peasants beside her! ... As for the arrangement of the date—that is not for me to make—or for my nephew. It is she who gives orders—in this house!"

"But I thought that like myself, Miss Forbis was a stranger! I understood from her," said Trixie munching her third cream-cake, "that though Mr. Hazel is a great friend and pal of hers in England, she has never visited this house before."

The reply was given with Eastern dignity:

"When I, who am fifty-eight, was a child, her father came to Alexandria. My grandfather, who was then living—entertained him as a King.... His daughter has never entered the house before,—and the house is the house of Hazaël. But the stones of it would call to her 'Mistress!' if the lips of Hazaël were dumb...."

The sudden fire that had lightened in the soft dark Eastern eyes died out of them, and the olive face resumed its sad tranquillity. But not before Lady Wastwood had realised a piquant, baffling strangeness, in the relations between Kathy Forbis and these Alexandrian Jews....

"One has one's own secrets wild horses wouldn't drag from one," was her quaint mental comment, "and so, of course, have others. But mysteries and Kathy Forbis don't seem to go together. Why—"

Trixie broke off, for at that particular juncture the huge left hand of the little Syrian lady's big black nephew was coolly drawn from its supporting sling, and stretched towards a dish of fruit upon a tray that stood near. And there came to the Commandant's ears the full, warm voice of Katharine:

"No, thanks! I learned to distrust green figs the first week I spent in Egypt. And—I think you were told yesterday at the Hospital not to use that wounded arm! ..."

"You see, I forget," said the big man, very humbly and apologetically. "It's only a flesh-cut, and doesn't hurt, as I told the Assassin-in-charge. And I'm left-handed—like the Hun who slashed me with his sword as he tried to pot me with his revolver. Has it been dressed since yesterday? ... Oh, yes, I had to report at the General Hospital this morning, and they looked to it all right. And I kiboshed the C.M.O. about my living at home. They're fearfully crowded for space at the General—and don't want well men blocking the wards—luckily for me...."

He laughed, and as he stuffed his bandaged arm back into the sling, the gleam of a ring on the third finger of his left hand,—a great antique ring in a pale greenish gold setting, attracted Trixie's eye. The eye gleamed,—for a similar signet was always worn by Katharine. Could it be,—Oh, really!—it couldn't—Couldn't be possible!—that Edward Yaill's successor would be this colossal Jew....

"Of course, being a woman myself," Trixie reflected, "I ought to be used to women having—even before the War came to effect a fusion between the classes—such astonishing, Extraordinary, INCOMPREHENSIBLE tastes in men! And naturally, after being engaged to Yaill all those years—an officer of the old Conservative type,—thoroughbred to the backbone, conversant with Society, high-tempered, rather irritable, affectionate, gentle, tinged with Celtic melancholy; this man—what is he?—must be a complete change. Dressed as a Territorial Tommy, living as an Alexandrian Jew merchant, talking in the shibboleth and with the accent of the modern City Nut,—the young man of the Theatrical Syndicate and the West End Supper Club—dashed with something out of the Book of Kings! Dear me! I'd like to shriek with laughter—if I didn't feel nearer shedding tears of vexation at the idea of my splendid Kathy caring for the kind of person who says to a woman 'Where'll you perch?' when he wants her to sit down."

Preoccupied with the absorbing theme, Trixie returned but absent replies to Mrs. Hazaël's mild observations; and conversation languished between the pair. Until the Commandant's languid attention was prodded to wakeful keenness by a chance observation on the part of her host's aunt....

"I do not know, Miladi...." This in reply to some reference to the wearer of the ring similar to Katharine's. "My nephew John Hazaël was educated in England. He has been in business in the City of London—he never was in Egypt until he came here with the English soldiers, to fight the Turk who has driven us from our homes in Palestine!" The sad dark eyes lightened fiercely, the drooping figure straightened, the toneless voice vibrated with passion as Mrs. Hazaël went on: "Before then I had not seen my brother's son. Indeed, knowing him to be Epikouros,—I had thought of him but little! Imagine what for me it meant to find John Ben Hazaël the image of his grandfather! ... For they are alike, Miladi—as citron resembles citron,—though the years of one were a hundred, and the other is but thirty-five. True, he has not learnt to observe our ancient customs, nor has he been reared according to the Law. He is blind to the beauty and splendour of the glorious Hebrew religion. But even as a myrtle in the midst of the Desert remains a myrtle,—John Hazaël, the eldest son of John, the son of Eli Ben Hazaël,—will live the life and die the death of a good, believing Jew!"

"To know that," Trixie returned, conscious of feeling her way amidst unseen pitfalls, "must be a great pleasure to you, Madame...."

"I do not look for pleasure," came the sad-toned answer. "And comfort there is none for me, whom the Turk has stripped of all. When this terrible War broke out in Palestine, Miladi, I had a husband,—and two sons,—and a daughter!"—A convulsion rippled under the olive skin of the withered face as the waters of a lonely forest-pool will stir on a windless day.... "My son Jacob they took first,—to labour with the road-gangs between Sailed and Tiberias.... My daughter—my Esther, my darling and my treasure—the golden joy of her father's heart—"

"Pray, pray, do not tell me!" Lady Wastwood whispered entreatingly, for the speaker's dark eyes were bloodshot and her mouth had twisted in the involuntary grimace of weeping with difficulty restrained, "I can guess something terrible.... Please believe that I deeply feel for you!—I who have lost husband and children too! ..."

"'Husband and children! ...' Achi nebbich! ..."

The little grey woman bowed her lace-draped head, and folded her jewelled hands in her grey silk lap as she continued:

"But such deaths were those of my loved ones, Miladi, that nothing that you could imagine could approach the terror of the truth! Yet it might have been worse—oh, infinitely!—had not Jacob possessed the courage of a lion. He shot his sister, Miladi, in the room of her destroyer,—and turned the pistol on himself and died also! ..." There was a clang of pride in the dull tear-soaked voice. "Then Reuben Ben Ephraim—who was with Jacob in the den of the hyena—Hamid Bey Effendi—Commander of the Turkish soldiers at Nazareth"—there followed some rapid guttural words in a tongue unknown to Trixie, probably a bitter Hebrew curse upon the hated name.... "then Reuben, seeing both dead, escaped by the Mercy, and sent word to us, me and my husband—in our house near Jaffa—of what had befallen the children of our love! ... And hearing that the vengeance of Hamid was to be wreaked upon us, my husband Isaac, the uncle of John Hazaël! ... may Peace be upon him! as it is our custom to say—Isaac escaped to Beirut with our last child, Benjamin. Miladi—the fierce wolves seized them. They both died in prison at Beirut—under the Turkish rods! ... The young child first, Miladi—under the eyes of his father.... Then the father!—Peace be upon them both! ... And the shock of the news killed Eli Ben Hazaël, for he was close upon a hundred.... Thus am I widow, and childless, and fatherless in this house that has sheltered my people for more than sixteen centuries. Ah, Miladi!—I have made you weep! ... I have no tears—they were all shed long ago!" She rose, a little tragic figure in her old-fashioned silk gown, and held out to Trixie a withered, jewelled hand. "My nephew is looking at me.... He wishes me to show you the garden, while he speaks of business with Mademoiselle Forbis...." A slight cry escaped her as her eyes went to the window, and a faint gleam of pleasure lightened in their hopelessness as she lifted the wasted, glittering hand: "See! O see! Look, Miladi! ... Look, my children! ... Once again, the swallows have come! ..."

There had been no swallows a moment previously. Summer in the North, warmer that year of 1917 than in the three preceding, had delayed their autumn journey overseas. Now the deep blue sky above the tamarisk and acacia Nilotica,—the vine-draped sycamore figs, the tall imperial palm-trees, the orange and lemon groves, and the myrtle and rose-thickets behind the house in the Rue el Farad, were crossed and recrossed by innumerable downy black-and-white bodies, borne upon darting, quivering pinions, and the continuous twitterings of the fig-birds were drowned by their shrill squeaks....

From the eaves of the round-tiled roof of the loggia, where some old nests were yet remaining, a rope of swallows swayed and dangled; clinging one to the tail of another—the weight of the whole rope sustained by the first usurper of the disputed nest.... A moment more and the feathered rope resolved into its original atoms. They rose in a cloud,—squealing, wheeling, hovering and poising, and launched themselves in joyous chase of the flies and mosquitoes, whose deadliest enemies they are....

And then one of the darting things—possibly a new-fledged stranger—keen on the capture of some gauze-winged morsel, flew in at the window, and hawked about the room....

The blue sky frescoed on the ceiling by the ancient artist, framed in its trellis of dimmed and faded roses, must have deceived the eager bird. Its upward flight ended in the tiniest thud possible.... Vitality quitted its infinitesimal being.... It dropped, a mere puff of black and white feathers, at Katharine Forbis's feet....

"Again.... Each year, the same thing happens! A bird is killed—just in this way. It is sad, but there's no help for it...." sighed Mrs. Hazaël. "Throw it away, dear Mademoiselle, it is only a dead bird! ..."

But Mademoiselle, who had picked up the tiny body to cherish and croon over, did not follow her hostess's advice. To sense the divine quality of maternity inherent in Katharine's beauty, you had to see her petting an invalid, or a child. Or as now, with some helpless, injured creature,—looking at it under drooped eyelids of soft solicitude, cherishing it with compassionate touches of deft, womanly hands....

Those kind hands had touched John Hazel, yesterday, in helping the Hospital surgeon and Sister with the dressing of his wounded arm.... It was not until their contact had sent shocks of keen, scarce bearable delight thrilling through nerve and tissue, that John Hazel had discovered—what you have guessed ere now....

All the night through he had lain awake, living those moments over, and over!—cursing himself for a fool thrice soaked in folly, a bally idiot, and a presumptuous cad.... But daylight had found him no whit more wise, nor one iota less besotted; even more gnawed with desperate hunger to feel her cool breath fanning his bared shoulder, and know the rapture of her touch again....

Now the soft, compassionate eyes, the tender touch and the sweet solicitude were given to a bird, while the man hungered. John Hazel, one is compelled to own—was keenly jealous of the stunned swallow—as the thorn-like beak opened and shut, and the sealed eyelids quivered apart—and Katharine's cry of womanly joy greeted these signs of life....

"It isn't dead, dear Madame!" she cried gaily to the Syrian lady, as she dipped a finger-tip in a flower-vase that stood near, dropped some water in the open beak, and wetted the velvety head.... The swallow quivered in her palm, gasped convulsively and swallowed the water; swallowed another drop given in the same way, and regaining strength, struggled to free itself from the protecting hand....

"Kiss it, Trixie, and give it a message for its little brothers! ... Now you shall go, my dear," said Katharine, when, Lady Wastwood having dutifully kissed the top of the bird's head, she touched the featherless, velvet crown with her own lips. Then, still cherishing the struggling bird in her cupped palms, she passed through the door at the head of the divan, stepped out upon the loggia, and with a sweep of her long arm, sent the captive, squeaking with rapture, to rejoin its long-winged comrades in the playgrounds of the air.

"How's that, Umpire?" she called to John Hazel, following with attentive eyes the rocket-like upward rush. "It rather sets one thinking"—she broke off in the middle of the sentence as John stooped beneath the lintel of the doorway, and joined her on the loggia.

"Thinking of what?" he asked, for her face was grave and troubled.

"Of prisoners and captives," Katharine answered, "and what they must feel when their fetters are broken and their dungeons lie behind them, and the free sky is over them and the free earth underfoot.... Talking of earth, I rather think you promised to show me your garden, or if you didn't I should like you to.... Your aunt has spirited Lady Wastwood away—" She nodded at Trixie's tall, thin retreating shape, upright and workmanlike in its badged, light-weight smasher hat and short-skirted khaki cotton-drill uniform; as side by side with Mrs. Hazaël's black lace mantilla and old-fashioned trailing grey silk gown, it turned the corner of a myrtle-hedge, and was lost in the shrubbery. "And I rather want to consult you.... There's a seat under that moss-cup oak—it is a moss-cup, isn't it?—it's getting beautifully cool, and the tree looks nice and shady. And you could smoke—or I could—and talk comfortably there...."

He got her green-lined sun-umbrella and insisted on holding it over her, as they crossed the verdant, well-watered lawn to the patriarchal moss-cup oak of Miss Forbis's desire. A curve-backed, scroll-ended seat of red granite stood under its wide-spreading branches. Near the seat was a great bed of balsam and heliotrope.

"Oh, sweet, sweet!" He had gathered a huge handful of the fragrant-flowered, nettle-leaved plant and laid it on Katharine's knee as she seated herself, and her sentences were broken with rapturous sniffs. "How I—do—love—the smell of heliotrope! ... I thought it heavenly in England,—but it was nothing to this! ... And the view of the house from where I sit! ... Who would have dreamed that behind the hideous whitewashed wall of your courtyard, so much of the wonderful lost city of Alexander the Great, and of the Ptolemies, in whose Museum Euclid and Aristophanes, and Hypatia were Professors,—lay snugly tucked away!" She went on wistfully:

"Tell me why I feel as though my heartstrings were tangled up in the foundations of this dear, dear house of yours, and there were memories and voices in the stones of the walls! ... Why don't you smoke? ..."

"I will if I may.... It'll keep off the mosquitoes. May I offer you one?" He produced a case.

"No, thanks! I'll smoke mine. Yours look good, but too large and solid for feminine creatures to appreciate. Though when I worked at the Front in France, I've been glad to fall back on Army Gaspers. Or ten sou packets of the rank Régie beloved by the Poilu."

"You used to smoke before the War?" He asked it as he gave her a light, and she answered, as the Turkish tobacco kindled, breathing out a delicate puff of the fragrant bluish vapour:

"After a luncheon or dinner-party, one smoked—just to keep other people in countenance. But afterwards—in France—and here, to quiet one's jangled nerves!"

"You don't look like a woman with jangled nerves," he said, considering her steadily.

"Perhaps not, but still they play up sometimes.... Look at the swallows—they've already begun to build! In the corner of the window of that big upper room with three large windows latticed up, and groups of columns between them—and a dome, rising behind the pediment—it is a pediment, isn't it? that long triangular stone? ..."

The deep voice said to her:

"No one ever uses that room where you see the swallows building. It is kept locked all through the year except on one day...." The great brown hand pointed to the three windows below the pediment, the deep voice so like and so unlike John Hazel's went on: "There is an altar in that room with a Christian shrine beneath it.... We strip the gardens bare each year to make the chapel beautiful,—we who have been Guardians of the Shrine for more than sixteen hundred years...."

"But—but this is a Jewish house! ..."

"That is quite true." The brown hand waved. "The house belongs to Jews indeed, but it was not theirs always.... Nor do we break the Jewish Law in honouring the dead. Should you, who are of his race and faith, desire to visit the chapel ... here is the key.... Whenever you will, I am ready to take you there."

IX

He rose, and took from his pocket, and held out to Miss Forbis, a flat metal spatula of Eastern make, attached to a silver chain. She looked from the clumsy object in the big brown hand to the grave face above it, whose dense black eyes had a reddish glow; and saw that his temples and blue-shaven upper-lip and jaws glistened with points of moisture, though the sun had but the tempered heat of these first days of November, and a sea-breeze coming out of the West whispered among the leaves.

"How am I of his race?" she asked, after a moment's hesitation. "Please be good enough to keep the key.... One of these days I may muster curiosity to visit the shrine in the chapel. Just now, to tell the truth, I want more to talk to you. I've put it off, as one does dodge sorrowful things, but now I've got to tell you...." Her voice wavered and her lips were tremulous. "It has to do with the letter you brought me from Palestine...."

"I am quite as anxious to hear as you are to tell me. But first, Miss Forbis, you must visit the shrine in the chapel. You ought to have gone there before, but you wished to see the garden, and your wish is a command here,—I could only obey! But now—"

He offered her the clumsy key, coolly and imperturbably. There was incredulity in her tone, as she inquired:

"You don't mean that I must go, whether I wish it or do not?"

"I am sorry to coerce you," he said with stern distinctness. "You must understand that. But, before we hear the Sunset Call to Prayer from the Mosque of Sidi Amr, it is necessary that you should visit the shrine. Understand me—it is incumbent upon you as the representative of your family. You have to!"

"'Have to! ...'"

She rose to her feet, and her angry eyes swept over him contemptuously. To be ordered about by this man was intolerable—absurd.... They faced each other, and the old gulf opened and yawned between them—as it had in the drawing-room at Kerr's Arbour, eight months before.

"'Have to!' ... You rather forget yourself, don't you, Mr. Hazel? ..."

"I do what is my duty in enforcing respect to him!"

He drew himself to his towering height, folded his great arms, and looked at her calmly.

He spoke again, and the profound tones vibrated through her, like the sound of a Buddhist temple-bell....

"Through the centuries since he died for the Faith of the Nazarene, Christian priests have blessed his ashes on one day in every year. Not even when Alexandria lay in cinders and ruin, was there lacking a son of the Hazaël to guard his relics here. But since Marcus Fabius the Tribune came here on his way to Britain with the Tenth Legion of Constantine,—and the son of Marcus, Florens Fabius—journeyed from Rome twenty years later,—and the Crusaders Fulk and Hew came eleven hundred and sixty years after, and Bishop Ralph in 1809, and Philip in 1881, to kneel before his shrine; no heart filled with his blood has beaten in the lonely chamber, no lips warm with his life have touched the chilly stone."

The clang of the great voice ceased to oppress her sense of hearing. She bent her noble head in splendid humility, a great lady, rebuked by the descendant of an Hebrew steward, and said:

"You have reproached me very justly. My only excuse is—that I did not understand!"

He went with her across the lawn, and ushered her through the loggia door into a passage, and up a wide staircase leading by one short flight of steps to the single floor above. She took the curious Eastern key he silently offered her, and put it in the lock of the door he had stopped at. The lock yielded easily....

"Won't—won't you come too?" she whispered, oppressed with an increasing sense of awe, and John Hazel's voice answered from behind her:

"We are the Guardians of the Shrine, and yet we may not enter. It would not be according to the Law!"

Thus Katharine went in alone, her heart-beats quickened by the startled whirr of wings, as the busy swallows quitted their nest-building in the upper corner of one of the three tall windows, filled in with lattices of carved and painted marble, and looking on the garden, now all golden in the rays of the westering sun.

The ceiling rose to a frescoed dome, with an opening at the apex. The spice of incense and the perfume of flowers yet sweetened the still air of this place of memories. It was a revelation of wonderful art, its dome and walls covered with ancient frescoes, representing in all the opulent symbolism of early Christianity, the anchor, the palm, the Dove with the olive-branch; the Vine, the heavy ear of Wheat, the Fish, the Chalice encircled with rays of glory,—the Good Shepherd carrying His lamb. The carved and inwrought and costly screens of cedar and ebony-wood were all inlaid in mother o' pearl, silver and ivory. Nothing had been spared in money or labour, to perfect this—the replica in miniature, of the interior of a Coptic Christian Church. Save that seemly, exquisite neatness, and scrupulous cleanliness reigned here instead of dust and dirt, spider-webs, and bird and bat-droppings; and the disquieting disorder which too often, in the East, prevails in such a sacred place....

Katharine passed over the mosaic floor of red and green porphyry and grey crystalline syenite, and through the central opening in the latticed outer screen. The gates stood open, showing an altar, wrought of black Egyptian basalt, standing under a baldaquin of inlaid ebony-wood borne on four carved and inlaid columns, the rich embroidered curtains of the baldaquin being drawn back. Four man-high candlesticks of silver, holding great unlighted tapers, were set one at each corner of the basalt altar. On the altar was an upper covering of rich silk, embroidered with gold. On this were a censer of silver open-work, a silver-gilt or golden incense-box, and two golden candlesticks of magnificent workmanship flanked the usual copy of the Four Gospels, sealed in a gold and jewelled case.

Three silver lamps hung before the altar. In the central lamp alone burned a tiny votive flame. The altar was not raised above the floor.... Its front was uncovered, and a small square opening in this resembled a doorway.

In the cavity revealed by the opening stood an alabaster urn of funerary type and evidently of great antiquity. Katharine, kneeling on the upper step of the little sanctuary, could, despite the tempering of the light by the screens and window-lattices, clearly distinguish below the Greek monogram of the Sacred Name, in irregular lines of incised Roman capitals,—still rusty-bright with antique gilding,—the epitaph in faulty Latin:

"MARTYR CHRISTI, AMICVSPAVPERVM.

EGO PHILOREMUS FLORENS FABIVS. CLARISSIMVS. PRÆTOR VECTIGALIVM ÆGVPTORVM. ALEXANDRIA. SEPTIMVS ANNO AVGVSTI MAXIMIANVS ÆGYPTI IMPERATORIS. QUE VIXIT. ANN. XL. MENS. V.D. VII. MENSIS OCTOBRIS IDIBUS. PORTA SPEI INTROGRESSVS SVM."

A rough translation of which might run:

"The Martyr of Christ, the Friend of the Poor. I, Philoremus Florens Fabius, of Senatorial Rank, Receiver-General at Alexandria of the Taxes of Egypt. In the Seventh Year of the Reign of Cæsar Maximianus, Emperor of Africa. Aged Forty Years, Five months and Seven Days. On the Ides of October, Entered in at the Gate of Hope."

X

Katharine Forbis came out of the chapel, noiselessly shutting the door behind her, and stood, looking silently down at a man who knelt there. He raised the head that had been bowed nearly to the floor, and rose to his feet at the sound of her footstep, removed his cap, and, standing aside made room for Miss Forbis to pass him before he re-locked the door. Then he followed her downstairs, through the passage and doorway leading to the loggia, and back into the garden they had left....

Copts with tied-back sleeves and tucked-up gelabiyehs were moving among the flower-beds with wheeled tanks and syringes, setting water running in the channels bordering the paths of the rose-alleys and shrubberies. Already the perfume exhaled from wet rich soil and dampened petals freshened the air, and the sultry heat had abated. Coolness was coming with the short Eastern twilight, the sky above, and to the west, was streaked with pomegranate and amber; the elongated shadow of the house, with its dome and pediment and flat loggiaed roofs, stretched dusky-blue over the grass to the foot of the red granite seat under the moss-cup oak.

Katharine's heliotropes were lying on the seat, faded already but still exhaling sweetness.... As she lifted them from the hot red stone, the faint south breeze brought to her across the crowded buildings, and the traffic of Khedive street, the mellow voice of a muezzin from the minaret of the Mosque Sidi Amr, crying, as it cries thrice a day, from thousands of minarets in four world-continents:

"Allah is most great! I witness that there is no God but Allah! And Mohammed is the apostle of Allah! Come to prayer! Prayer is better than work! Come to salvation! God is most great! There is no God but Allah!"

When the voice from the mosque, and its myriad human echoes had vibrated into silence, and the distant noise of the crowded streets had rolled back into hearing again,—Katharine said to the man who stood silently beside her, his khaki cap dangling from his big right hand:

"Mr. Hazel, you have to forgive in me an indifference that may have wounded you. But until I found myself in that chapel, in the presence of the reliquary urn that speaks of his martyrdom, my ancestor was no more to me than a legendary old Roman, who lived and died in a remote Past, in a distant part of the world. But since I said a prayer for him before that altar, it was—as though he had only died a month or two ago! ... Now, it crushes me to realise that through more than sixteen centuries, you and yours have guarded those ashes in the urn! ..."

"It is true. Since the forefather of Ephraim—you have seen Ephraim—it was he who attended you here from Montana—brought back the ring to Alexandria, and the widow opened the sealed packet—the wishes of the Founder of the House of Hazaël have scrupulously been carried out. There has always been a Christian hand to clean the lamp and feed it with oil daily, and place fresh flowers in the vases on one day in the year.... Though I have heard that in the days of the Great Earthquake—when fifty thousand people perished in the fire or were buried beneath the ruins,—there was no oil for the famine that then prevailed...."

The deep monotonous voice that spoke in somewhat archaic English—was and was not the voice of John Hazel.... And suddenly, with a shudder and a crisping of the nerves as she looked at and listened to him,—Katharine doubted whether he realised that he was speaking at all....

"Chosroes the Persian King," the deep voice went on, "laid siege to the city,—and the Arab Amru, general of Omar's Saracen armies,—wrested it from the Persians and held it:—but before the urn,—hidden in a secret chamber of this dwelling, the votive lamp burned still! And as a weaker hawk by suddenness snatches a quail from a hawk that is by far the stronger—and as the stronger pursues and wrests it from the first, even so the Greeks took Alexandria by cunning from the Saracens—and the Saracens won her back again—yet the lamp went on burning, for the hands that tended it were faithful, and the children of Hazaël's children's children were sedulous to do his will. Then in the Fourteenth Century of your Christian Era came the Crusaders and sacked and spoiled the city. But the lamp was not quenched even then! ... Nor when the French seized Alexandria—nor when the British took and held it—nor when they ceded it to Mehmet Ali—did the lamp cease to burn.... Jewish oil is very good, and Jewish hearts remember! The Past is living as the Present in the mind of the Jew. The negress whom you saw to-day, and her husband Zaid, are Christians. It is they who are entrusted—like their forerunners, with the keeping of the place...."

His tone changed. He spoke now in his own clipped and slangy vernacular.

"By the way—I want to say—with reference to the apology you were—so—gracious as to offer me, that I think it was awfully ripping of you! But for a thing I said, a bit back, that rather rattled you.... I don't apologise at all! ..."

"Dear John Hazel, I haven't even asked you!" In her frank, womanly, impulsive way, she stretched out a hand and lightly pressed his. "I have learned from you the priceless worth of Jewish loyalty and Jewish honour;—and a devotion for which I don't know even how to begin to express my gratitude and esteem! Unless in some way like this—"

He started, and his dark hand clenched; for carried away by an irresistible impulse, Miss Forbis had bent aside and brushed it lightly with her lips. The instant the impulse had had its way she realised her mistake.... For the man's great frame quivered from head to foot as though the ague fit of fever were upon him.... He mastered the trembling with an effort that left him rigid; and said,—his face yet stiffly averted and his black eyes bent upon the ground:

"You asked me a good many months ago,—I don't mistake—for I remember everything you've ever said to me!—if I thought that you and I had ever lived on earth before now?" He went on as she bent her head, sensing the movement rather than seeing it. "What I said then, I say again! ... I don't believe either of us is by way of making a second visit to this little old planet.... But somehow we are influenced by those who have passed on! Not by the hanky-panky, table-rapping, automatic pencil-scribbling Spooklets you summon up as with your thumbs crossed,—points downwards—and your little fingers jammed against those of your right-and-left hand neighbours,—you sit round a rubber-covered table in a stuffy, darkened room.... Spirits of dead poets who've forgotten how to turn a rhyme!—dead historians who mix up Alexander the Great with Napoleon the Little—and perpetrate howlers that would disgrace a Fourth Standard Board School kid.... Dead Editors who can't spell for peanuts.... And dead chemists who're knocked out by the formula of H2O!"

He moved behind the seat and sat on the other end of it, crossing his long legs, slipping his left arm from the sling, and nursing a big-boned knee in both powerful hands as he went on:

"Put it that those who carried in their blood the germs that you and I have sprung from—living on the Other Side as conscious Intelligences,—are permitted by the Divine Power Who rules things visible and invisible,—to sway us, help us, prompt our actions, check our impulses and desires—and you have what I believe, concentrated down to tabloid form! On the whole, your Catholic faith in Guardian Angels isn't much unlike it. Only, instead of a bright-winged spirit hovering somewhere near me, I've felt as though a big old man, dark and strong, like my father,—was keeping his eye on me.... And the bias of the lead he gave,—quite definite when you shut your eyes—and felt back in the dark of your mind along the spider-thread that led to him,—was definitely for Right and clearly opposed to Wrong! ..."

Hugging his knee, he looked for the first time directly at Katharine, since that swift incautious touch of her lips had levelled the last barrier, and turned his blood to flame. There was no shamed consciousness in the pure eyes that met his.... She listened, and his thoughts were mirrored in the swift changes of her face....

"I didn't shape out this theory of mine, till I was getting close on thirty. I'd lived all my life amongst Christians and Jews who faithfully believed in Nothing!—and what one saw, and touched and tasted was quite enough for them and for me! That I ran anything but straight, there's not the least earthly use denying...." His memory went back to Birdie Bright, and others of her liberal sisterhood, and a dusky flush burned under his tawny, sun-baked skin. "But when the War broke out, and I joined the London Terriers—and saw men dying in the mud of France and Flanders, as up to date I'm seeing 'em die in the dirt of Palestine!—the advantage of living clean and being ready to answer to one's number came home to me as it never had before.... And Life was sweet, because it was so damnably uncertain! ... Men dealt Death every hour to the son of some mother, and no one could have guessed when it mightn't be his turn! Fellows used to tell me I killed men as if I liked doing it!—and I'm bound to admit I did! ... They said I sang as I fought,—in Hebrew one learned bloke swore it was! Though, as I hardly knew a word,—it couldn't have been the truth. But this is true, that in the blinding thick of the scrap I'd feel that big man near me.... I've seen him—or as good as!—signing and waving me on.... And when I came back to Hospital, and got that letter from Jaffa, and took over the Title Deeds, and the Guardianship of the Ashes; and put on the onyx signet-ring—"

"Then?" Her clear eyes were intent upon him....

"Then, instead of one old man, big and dark and brawny, strangely dressed—standing somewhere back of me, grimly willing me on; I seemed to be—I seem now!—to be looking back through Time down an interminable line of such men.... And the biggest of all the big old men is right away at the end! ... That's all! ..." He put down the knee he had nursed.

"We Catholics believe that the souls of our dead love us and pray for us; and by Our Lord's permission—may sometimes help us in need. Do you think—do not answer unless you wish!—that he—your Big Old Man—ever suggests answers to you? ... Or prompts you with knowledge having reference to bygone matters? ... Forgotten, old, long-buried things, of which you could not otherwise know? ..."

"I think—" He turned his face to Katherine, and it was no longer stern and grim, but wore the toothy, cheerful grin of Private Abrahams—"that sometimes that Biggest Old Man of All is quite close to me. Towering up over my head, and sticking out all around me! And the thing he wants I've got to do, and the line he points I follow. And have to until Kingdom Come, and All the Rest, Amen! ..."

"Is he huge and tawny-brown with coarse curls of jet-black hair—and a great beard—and a fillet of white leather, set with green stones—round his forehead? ... Has he a face much like yours, but stern as Destiny? ... Is he wrapped in a great black mantle with a hood like a Dominican's? Does he wear immense thigh-boots and carry an iron-shod staff? ..."

The memory of her dream, months back at Kerr's Arbour, had prompted Katharine's question. John Hazel turned and looked at her in utter amaze.

"That's how I see him, but how do you come to know? ..."

"I don't know,—but I saw a man like that in a dream, once.... I seemed to be in danger, threatened by evil beings, and he came to the rescue. That's absolutely all! But, let me out of the depth of my own ignorance, give you a word of warning. This strange gift of yours ought to be held reverently. Kept a profound secret, and never under any circumstance? whatever submitted to a stranger's control. You understand?"

"All right! I'll be wide—O!" His black eyes snapped as he answered, and she went on:

"Now to come back to usual things, look at this flower, and tell me whether you know it?" She was holding out to him a withered spike of multifold white blossoms, exhaling a faint and delicate smell:

"That lily-thing...." He took it carefully in his big fingers. "All through October it was blooming in Palestine. Acres and acres of it—all white and yellow—when I left the Front to come down here. Smells nice!" He sniffed at it cautiously. "Something between a West End church got up for a Society wedding,—and the hall of a house blocked up with florist's boxes—where there's going to be a first-class funeral.... Presently, when the Spring comes along, there'll be scarlet tulips, and rose and purple anemones, and pink-and-white turncap lilies, and flowers I couldn't as much as name to you—miles and miles of 'em swarming over the plains, and covering the knees of those old Judæan Hills. The name of this is asphodel. I forget who told me! Where did you get it? ... I haven't seen it here! ..."

"It came in the letter you brought me from Palestine...." She took back the withered flower and slipped it back within her blouse. His eyes followed it, and she went on: "It is of the letter I wanted particularly to speak to you. For it tells me that Julian—my brother—is alive! ..."

"And a prisoner! ..." He spoke with certainty....

"And a prisoner at a Turkish labour-camp!"

"What are you going to do? ..."

Her bosom heaved in a perplexed sigh. Her broad brows knitted, and her clear eyes were clouded as she turned them upon John:

"Move Heaven and earth in any way possible to get my poor boy out of that earthly hell! Meanwhile one must wait, I suppose—"

"Does it strike you as a case likely to benefit by waiting?"

"No!—and in spite of that there is nothing to do but wait. Unless—unless you, who were so prompt to help in those troubled days at Kerr's Arbour, could suggest any—definite plan of action to me now? ..."

"I'll do my best, you may be sure!"

"I know you will," she responded gratefully. "But first I must put you in possession of the facts. Julian—"

"Is at Shechem.... I know it already.... No!" For her eyes had cried out to him "Edward! ..." "From another informant than Colonel Yaill. The airman who brought me here,—an Egyptian reconnaissance-officer I met at Salonika—happens to be on special duty at the Palestine Front just now.... Wing-Major Essenian Pasha.... Perhaps you've heard the name? ..."

She thought, and answered:

"Yes, I have often seen it mentioned in Despatches, in association with feats of aviation; bombing-raids carried out single-handed for the most part; dazzling reconnaissances over strongholds held by the enemy...."

"That's my man. 'A vivid personality,' my mother'd have ticketed him.... He was an officer of the Khedive's Artillery in prehistoric ages—at the time of the Egyptian Army Revolt under Arabi Pasha. That was about 1881. And he was with Hicks Pasha's Expedition in 1883—against the Mahdi—which got wiped out by the Baggara near El Obeyd.... He had a command under Baker Pasha in 1884, and was with the Dongola Relief Advance,—and with the Khartoum Column in 1897 ... Emin Pasha was a pal of his—and Gordon thought no end of him.... When the South African War of 1900 broke out he'd retired—was living at Ismailia—as a wealthy Egyptian ex-officer of Engineers.... Took up aviation and started a Flying Club here in Alexandria about 1911.... Gave the Club an aërodrome—with hangars and everything!—the big place you've seen near the Water Works,—and another at Ismailia where he lives—and another on the Upper Nile! ... And as he flies like Satan, the Government snapped at him, when he volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps in 1914...."

"He must be a brave man! ..."

"Got nerve enough for anything! ... And to look at him you'd guess him to be thirty-five as the limit.... Yet there are old men here in Alexandria who've known him since they were gay young Johnnies,—and they're ready to bet their wigs and false teeth that he's always been the same! ..."

"Could Essenian Pasha be of use in this particular emergency? ..."

"You mean your brother's case? ... He had the facts from me at Salonika.... I said the brother of a friend of mine—a Chaplain serving with the Expeditionary—was missing since the storming of Scimitar Hill and supposed to have been killed.... And I mentioned his being a Catholic priest, and added his name, and a few particulars. For instance, I'd heard from the landlady at the Cross Keys, Cauldstanes, months ago, that Father Forbis was very handsome. 'As like oor Miss Forbis as gin they were twins'—I can't do her Scotch for peanuts, 'but blue-eyed and wi' fair hair.'"

"It is true. Except about us being so much alike," she said, her eyes now openly brimming over. "For Julian has almost the beauty of an angel, and when he sings, the voice of one. My father worshipped him.... So did Mark—and I for that matter! ... So did the priests and the students at the Seminary, the Prior and the Fathers at the Monastery, and the officers and men of the Brigade with which he served.... You should see the letters they wrote me when his death was reported. And now!—Don't be scared!—I'm not going to cry."

She brought out a little filmy handkerchief and dried the tears bravely, and put it away again....

"Crying isn't of any use. Forget that I was stupid enough to shed tears!—they are over and done with now. Tell me how your friend of the R.F.C. could help us in this strait?"

John Hazel hugged his knee again, and said, with knitted eyebrows:

"You mean, how I think, and he believes, he could help us,—since he dropped down in our lines the day after Sheria. He'd been doing a lot of reconnaissance over Hebron and Shechem, and a shell from a Turkish A.A. had burst near them—and Captain Usborn of the Engineers, his observer—was lying over, stone-dead—behind his Lewis gun.... Shot through the head. See—this is the bullet that did it!" He slipped two fingers inside a front-pocket of his tunic, drew out and showed her the dented cone of lead....

"Isn't that," her fine brows frowned, "rather a gruesome relic to carry? ..."

"Well, you know!—that's as you happen to look at it. I wasn't out for mascots—the thing came my way, and so I just froze on.... And"—he dropped the bullet back again, "then Major Essenian Pasha sent for me, and asked me—I'd flown with him several times near Salonika—"

John Hazel spoke in a low voice calculated just to reach her ear:

"He asked me whether I'd replace Usborn on the flight back to Ismailia,—if permission could be wrested from the Powers that Be? ... Then he went on to tell me of something he'd got from an Arab, with reference to a British prisoner in the labour-camp at Shechem. A Catholic priest, a tall fair man, astonishingly handsome,—who was suffering brutal ill-usage at the hands of Hamid Bey...."

"'Hamid Bey!'" She caught at the name. "Colonel Yaill speaks of that man in my letter.... He is the Turkish Commandant of the prison-camp at Shechem." ...

"He ought to be Commandant of a Division in Hell, going by what I've heard of him! By the way, may I ask you not to mention his name in the hearing of my aunt.... For we Hazaëls," said John with a bitter sneer—"have a little family score of our own to settle with His Excellency, Hamid Bey, Miralai of the Shechem Prison Camp...."

"I shall not forget. I will make a point of being careful! ... But forgive me if I ask you again, how you think this officer—Major Essenian Pasha—could help my brother now? ..."

"Well, for one thing, knowing the lie of the camp pretty well, the Pasha could carry a passenger.... A man who'd be prepared for risks—to some place in the neighbourhood of Shechem. At night, of course I mean,—and drop him there quietly, and fly back at a stated hour—and pick him up again! He could even—given a suitable machine, made to carry more weight and bulk than a mere two-seat scouter—pick up two men near Shechem—and take them to the British lines!"

She drank in the words, her fascinated gaze fixed on the long mahogany-hued hawk-face, which held her with the unwavering stare of its glowing black eyes. She asked with a catch in her hurried breath:

"And the—the 'man prepared for risks,' who would undertake to venture—?"

"Disguised as a Bedawi of a tribe on good terms with the Turks.... I know enough Arabic to get on with. That takes the edge off the risk ... lessens the handicap! Call the chances seventy-five to one against—" said John Hazel coolly,—"and I suppose you wouldn't be so much over the estimate! ..."

"But"—she heard her voice coming from a long way off, out of a breathless stillness: "where is the man who would undertake so perilous a thing?" Edward! her heart throbbed in her, he is thinking of Edward! ...

John Hazel answered quietly:

"You see the man here! ..."

"You? ..."

Her heart gave a great leap against Yaill's hidden letter, stopped—and then went on beating again:

"You mean yourself?—and I thought—"

"I told you I estimated the chances against, at seventy-five to one. So it isn't quite the sort of job you start another man on! It's the kind of thing you calculate to carry through on your own hook. The only thing that badgers me is the chance that your friend the Colonel—"

Their eyes met. He went on, slowly syllabling the words:

"Might be—calculating to play his own game about when I start mine. And for us to clash—"

The startled intake of her breath did not escape him. She finished:

"Would be fatal.... Yes—I can understand! ..."

"For us to clash would bally well upset the apple-cart. You've no idea when Colonel Yaill—"

"He has not named a date! ..."

"But he is going to have a shot at getting your brother out of that labour hell at Shechem...." He studied her face, with its clear eyes and sweet determined mouth.... "And he's told you so in confidence—and you're not going to give away the show! ... Of course you're right! Still—you'll own—it's a bit of a handicap.... 'Too many cooks....' But I'm forewarned, so we'll hope the broth won't be spoiled! Wish we could send the Colonel the tip—but in that line there's nothing doing! One thing I'm sure of. He'd know me again wherever he happened to knock up against me!—and I'd know him if I saw his skin nailed on a gate!" She shuddered, and he added, as a short, slight, dark-skinned officer came out at the lower door opening on the loggia, ushered with scrupulous respect by the black-robed Ephraim. "Now,—may I present to you Major Essenian Pasha? ... He has something to say to me on the quiet about this—projected excursion, or he wouldn't have dropped in here! ... Lives at Ismailia, as I've said.... And before him, better drop no hint of knowing what I've told you.... I'll explain later, why I think it best...."

She said, proudly rearing her beautiful head on her long white throat:

"You need fear no incautious betrayal of your confidence from me...."

XI

John Hazel got up from the granite seat, saluted Miss Forbis, and moved with long strides across the lawn, to meet the visitor....

With strained interest Katharine watched the meeting. The Egyptian Flying Officer, a dark-skinned, bright-eyed, wiry man, whose short and slight, but muscular and active figure was set off by his well-cut uniform of khaki cotton-drill,—said something in a rapid undertone as he met Hazel. Hazel replied. Their colloquy lasted barely a minute, but to Katharine, vibrating with the sense of great issues, it seemed as though the few words spoken by the Egyptian had settled the question at stake.

Then both men crossed the greensward together, the top of the Pasha's sun-helmet barely on a level with Hazel's middle arm. Hazel presented Major Essenian Pasha. The Egyptian bowed like a Frenchman, from the hips, and was profoundly honoured to meet Miss Forbis, of whom he had heard so much from Lady Donnithorpe. And Katharine, responding with her high-bred grace and composure to his frothy compliments, found herself at once repelled and attracted by something in this man.

Small, alert, dark-hued as bronze, with the long, narrow eyes, the wide brows and curving profile of the statues of the Egyptian god Horus, Essenian Pasha might have been barely past thirty, and certainly conveyed the idea of mental vigour, abounding health and restless vitality.

"I had the pleasure some years back," he said to Katharine, "of meeting in Cairo an English officer who may be your relation! Captain Mark Forbis, of a regiment belonging to the Brigade of Guards.... He was for a short period, A.D.C. to the Commander-in-Chief at Ismailia. Captain Forbis was exceedingly handsome. May I say, although he was a blond man, and blue-eyed, that I detect a remarkable resemblance to him in you...."

Katharine answered as the speaker waited, with his gleaming eyes upon her:

"My brother Mark held a Captaincy in a well-known Guards Regiment, the 'Cut Red Feathers.' He was killed at Mons in August, 1914." She added, of purpose, "My younger brother Julian is a Catholic monk of the Order of S. Gerard. He served as a Chaplain with our troops at Suvla and Gallipoli...."

The Pasha's beryl eyes suddenly lightened. He said in his most suave and dulcet tones, his slender fingers smoothing his clipped black moustache:

"Your brother has then undergone some terrible experiences. May I venture to ask if he was present at the assault on Scimitar Hill?"

"He was with his brigade when the 29th Division fought their way up through the scrub-fire." Too late she caught a warning glance from John Hazel's sombre eyes.

"He was not wounded? ..."

"I—hope not! I—I believe not...."

"It must have been a great joy to welcome him back again!"

"It would be, if—"

"If I had!" the sentence would have ended.... But she broke off, her cheeks and the rims of her delicate ears and her fair temples crimson. Yet, after all, why should she prevaricate? What matter if the man did know, thought candid Katharine? Was he not going to help Julian—at least, according to John Hazel? Why, then, had John enjoined reserve and secrecy? ...

Her quick flush faded, but it had not escaped the observation of Essenian. The Horus smile on his dark, smooth lips was subtler and more insinuating, and the gleam between the lids of his long-lashed eyes more languid than before, as he said:

"I understand. Though the Allied Forces have been withdrawn—and the Campaign of the Dardanelles is relegated to the pigeon-hole where Whitehall keeps its failures—your brother has not been lucky enough yet to obtain leave? ..."

He seemed to be probing, with his bland, persistent questions and veiled looks of sympathy, in Katharine's aching heart. She gave a little, irresistible shudder. He saw it, and continued in his smooth, caressing voice:

"Or possibly the duties of a priest detain Mr. Forbis elsewhere? We Easterns have a proverb—it may be new to you:" The insinuating tones were even more gentle and velvety:

"For a plain man to become a priest is robbery of one woman. For one handsome man who becomes a priest a hundred women are robbed!"

The tone, rather than the words, conveyed something indescribably offensive. John Hazel started, palpably, and his scowl was thunderous. Wrath surged in Katharine's blood and she tingled to the finger-tips with a momentary, almost ungovernable desire to strike this man's smooth face. Scandalised at herself, furious with him, she commanded herself sufficiently to say in cool unruffled tones, rising from her seat:

"Charmed to have met you, Major Essenian Pasha.... Mr. Hazel, ever so many thanks for showing us your beautiful house. Now I must go and say good-bye to your aunt, and collect my friend, Lady Wastwood, for we are due at the Hospital. No!—please don't come with me—though you might 'phone for the car! ..."

"Mine is at the door.... I should be honoured and charmed if Miss Forbis and her friend would use it!" came in the soft ingratiating tones of Essenian....

John Hazel, already striding towards the house, halted and wheeled, looking at Katharine. Something in the expression of his black eyes conveyed the warning: It would be wiser not to snub this man! And, with revolt and distaste thrilling in her blood, Miss Forbis forced herself to smile and be gracious, and accept the officious offer of the Pasha's automobile.

"One moment, my King of Damascus, while I instruct my chauffeur where to take the ladies, and call for me later.... 'The Palace, Montana,' is it not?" Essenian said to John Hazel, glancing at a platinum watch in a band of grey gazelle-leather, strapped on his slender dusky wrist.

If a second rapid exchange of glances between Katharine and Hazel did not escape his observation, he gave no sign. He smiled, and went back across the lawn to the house, a small, slender figure, moving with short rapid steps, almost mincingly, and—for the Pasha's presence oppressed her physically—Katharine could breathe freely again....

"Miss Forbis!" John Hazel spoke quickly and in an undertone: "It's for your own sake I presumed to dictate to you just now in the matter of accepting the Pasha's civility. You see, when you let out your brother was a priest, you put Major Essenian wise to the prisoner's identity. Can't very well snub a man when he's going to risk his life for you! And the thing's fairly settled. We leave Ismailia Air Station for Shechem at the latest," he glanced at his wrist-watch, "by three to-morrow morning!"

"To-morrow morning! ..." She caught her breath, and he could see her heart's tumultuous throbbing under the thin white silk of her dainty blouse.

"Oh dear John Hazel!" she said with passionate fervour, her wide eyes, their irises mere tawny circles round the dilated pupils,—fixed upon his swarthy, excited face.... "May God protect and keep you!—and help you to save him!—my dear old Julian—my poor boy! ... Tell me how long I have to wait before I may hope to hear from you! How and when shall I hear? ..."

"If things go wrong I can't answer for your hearing...." John grinned with the grin of Private Abrahams.... "Unless they let me come back from the Other Side to report! But if things go right,—and we get your brother out of that"—he did not finish the sentence, "I pledge you my word you shall hear from me within twenty-four hours of the snatch!"

"Thank you. And—Mr. Hazel," she was holding out two letters, one inscribed only with a name, the other addressed twice over—once in a large, ornate, feminine hand, to "Lieut. Col. Edward Yaill, Kerr's Arbour, Cauldstanes, Tweedshire, N.B." and again in old Whishaw's staggering round-hand to "Care of Miss Forbis, No. —th Unit V.A.D. Royal Red Cross Society, Care of the Commandant Convalescent Hospital, Montana, Alexandria, Egypt."

"Were these a charge for me?" he asked.

"Yes. I am going to ask you to take them with you, in case you should again meet Colonel Yaill. One is my answer to the letter you brought. There is a line in it for Julian.... You see," she turned the envelope, "I have sealed it with my onyx ring. That is Julian's really—and a day may come when I shall be able to hand it over to him! The other came yesterday with my mail from Home.... I do not know, but I imagine—it is from the lady who—is Colonel Yaill's wife...."

"Righto! I'll take 'em both along. If I can't get 'em where they ought to go, you shall have 'em back anyway."

"Thanks!" She drew a breath of sheer relief as he took the letters from her. Ah! my sweet-hearted Katharine. How womanfully you had striven with the urgent desire to tear that buff-coloured envelope, leprous with stamps of different hues and scored with many postmarks, into a thousand infinitesimal pieces; and how thoroughly, as things turned out,—you would have been punished if you had....

"Does it strike you as it does me," John glanced at the concave impression of her ring, "that just about here is where—" He stooped his tall head nearer and dropped his voice to a tone even lower, "that just here's where the signet both of us wear may be useful! Don't take any screed you get from me as Gospel truth—because it happens to be signed 'John Hazel'! Even suppose you got a line from me, saying, 'Come at once!'—don't come unless the paper bears an impression of this...." He thrust forward the big left hand that wore the onyx head of Hercules. "Stuck underneath the signature, in sealing-wax, or clay, or mud—or bread, even.... And test it by the ring you wear, before you accept it.... And seal your communications to me in the same old way. Do you tumble? I mean—do you say 'Done!'"

"Done! ..."

"And—you trust me? ..."

"I trust you absolutely! Even though you sent for me, not saying why I was needed, the signet-seal would be enough—I'd say 'Julian,' and come! ..."

"Then that's arranged! ..." He saw in the sudden change of her face that something menaced. Even before he turned his head the smooth voice of Essenian said, a long way below the level of his own great shoulder:

"I have given the necessary instructions to my chauffeur. He will take the ladies out to the Hospital, Montana, and come back to pick us up, at the 'Aviators' Club.' For, remember, you are engaged to dine with me there, my King of Damascus, and sleep at my house at Ismailia to-night.... I have obtained you the necessary leave from your C.M.O. at the General Hospital." He turned to Katharine, and the beryl eyes and the dazzling teeth gleamed together in the bronze face as he resumed: "Dear lady, do you wonder why I bestow that title on our friend? ... Because it belongs to him. He descends—although he may not know it—in an unbroken line from Hazaël, King of Damascus—the son and successor of the Scriptural Ben-Hadad—against whom Shalmaneser II. of Assyria waged war, in the year 842, before your Christian Era. In one of the cabinets in that room"—he pointed to the windows looking on the loggia—"is a clay tablet inscribed in Semitic—Assyrian-Cuneiform,—an heirloom preserved in your family," he looked at John, "for many centuries."

"How tremendously interesting!" Katharine commented, doing her best to be pleasant with this man, for whom she had conceived, what she was wont to term, one of her loathings: "My brother Julian used at one time—I suppose he has forgotten it all now!—to dabble a good deal in Semitic—tell me if I pronounce the rest of it badly!—Assyrian-Cuneiform. He was secretary and amanuensis to the Father General of his Order, Abbot Lansquier, of whom perhaps you may have heard."

"He is a great man. I have heard of him," said the Egyptian, quickly. "He would be interested in this tablet. It is," he went on addressing John, "a letter from Achab, King of Israel, in answer to some communication from Hazaël.... Your late grandfather and I were much interested in deciphering it at one time. We translated it into Hebrew, French, and English—and though I might miss out a word occasionally, I could repeat the substance of the letter by heart."

And he began to repeat in his smooth voice:

"Now let us measure our strength together against this scornful King of Assyria, fat with the conquest of Tabul, and Milid, where are the silver, salt and alabaster mines. I, the King of Israel, with two thousand chariots and ten thousand soldiers, and thou the King of Damascus with seven hundred horsemen and twenty thousand unmounted men. And thou and I will be brothers, and thy son shall take to him my daughter; and the dowry I will give him with the Princess shall be twenty talents of gold, twenty-three thousand talents of silver, five thousand talents of copper, with coloured raiment from Egypt, mantles adorned with embroidery, a jewelled diadem, an ivory couch, a parasol of ivory studded with jewels, all which shall be delivered thee in Damascus, in the chambers of thy palace there. This is the word of Achab, King of Israel, to Hazaël the King of Damascus."

As the Egyptian repeated the final words, looking at John Hazel, Katharine, whose eyes had followed Essenian's, recognised with a thrill of alarm, the now familiar transformation of the swarthy face with the great hooked nose, into a mask of stone. The light died out of the man's black eyes. He seemed to be mentally searching. She knew that he groped for the end of the spider-thread that linked for him the Present and the Past.

Essenian, in the same instant, saw the change and stopped in sheer amazement. He was about to speak, when the monotonous voice came from the mouth of the mask:

"So it was, and there was a compact, and peace between Hazaël and Achab; and Istâr the Princess of the House of Israel, was wedded to the son of King Hazaël. And Achab and Hazaël went forth together to meet the King of Assyria; and he fought with them and defeated them, and destroyed with weapons sixteen thousand soldiers, and took eleven hundred chariots, and four hundred and thirty horses, and all the treasures of their camps. And he drove King Hazaël from the Fortress of Mount Saniru, and laid waste towns and villages, and hemmed him in Damascus, even the city of his glory. Its gardens of trees he cut down. And he slew the King with a stone from a war-engine, even in the Court of his Palace; and his son reigned instead of him, and paid tribute to the King of Assyria. But the Queen said, 'Must I bear a son to the son of him who has been worsted in battle?' And she ceased not—day nor night to taunt—him, like Lilith—who—"

The voice faltered, broke, and stopped short. And Katharine, noting Essenian's rapid breathing, guessed, despite his well-maintained composure, that curiosity and interest raged in him.

"Is there no more, my King?" he almost whispered. "Think again.... There must be more to tell!"

"And the Queen, Istâr, said: 'Woe is me! For the star of this house is declining, and the days of its glory are done! I cannot go back to my father, for Achab has turned himself to idols. But if this that I bear in my womb be a son, he shall worship the God of Israel in His Temple at Jerusalem.... For there is none other than Him!'" The dragging voice stopped.

"And then ... what more? There must be more!" urged the Egyptian, avidly.

"I—I—cannot! ..."

John Hazel stared glassily at Essenian, and as Essenian looked back at him with long gleaming eyes of beryl, he lifted a hand to his forehead as though bewildered, and a dew of fine globules of perspiration broke out and glittered upon his temples, and cheeks, and jaws.... And, then, stirred to solicitude, warned by some inward voice to interpose, Katharine stretched forth her own hand and touched John Hazel lightly on the hand he lifted, saying in her clear, full, womanly tones:

"Mr. Hazel!"

"You ... you wanted me?"

He asked the question dully, but in his natural, ordinary voice. His black eyes lost their glassy stare as they encountered Katharine's.... And holding them with her own bright, steady gaze, she spoke to him again.

"It is getting late. Will you please find your aunt and the Commandant and tell Lady Wastwood that a car is waiting; and that we have only sufficient time to get back to the Hospital by seven!"

"Certainly. In half a jiff! ..."

He shook himself, and moved off with his lengthy strides in the direction of the shrubbery. And the beryl eyes of Essenian were on Katharine, scintillating evilly, and the smooth lips were stretched in that inscrutable, hateful smile....

"A very remarkable type of man—our good friend Hazel!" Essenian said, still smiling; and Katharine returned in cool, unruffled tones:

"Remarkable, and interesting."

"You find that? ..." What hinted meaning lurked behind that smooth interrogation? "Physically and psychologically, I myself find him quite uniquely interesting. His is a curiously dual personality; does it not strike you as being so? What wonderful powers of clairvoyance are his! What a link between the Seen and the Unseen, such powers might forge, for one who could employ them well! A Seeker after Wisdom, such as I am myself...." He drew out a fine white linen handkerchief exhaling some delicate essence, and passed it over his face, and dried the palms of his dark hands. The hands shook; their owner was the prey of some overmastering agitation as he went on: "But why should I speak ambiguously to one who understands? I saw him pass into the trance, from which you roused him by the exercise of your will.... You who can control—naturally you desire to keep to yourself, such a gift as Mr. Hazel's—a source of knowledge beyond all estimate...."

He went on, with increasing earnestness and persistence, as, conscious of increasing dislike and resentment, Katharine looked at him without making any reply:

"Miss Forbis, you may not know that I am rich.... Whether you are so yourself or not, ladies appreciate exquisite jewels, and I own many that are unusually fine.... Gratify me in connection with my desire to see your friend in a similar condition to—that I just now had the privilege of witnessing! Permit me to question him—and name your price! ... Do not be offended, I entreat!" the Egyptian pursued, warned by the flush on Katharine's cheek, and the frown that gathered on her forehead—"There may be something in which I can serve you.... If so, command me.... I ask no more! ..."

He changed his tone as John Hazel returned, accompanying Lady Wastwood and Mrs. Hazaël.

"I mentioned to you a little previously that—several years ago,—your late brother, Captain Forbis, honoured my poor house at Ismailia by being my guest. May I hope that you will similarly honour me? The gardens are really worth seeing.... Though the house, naturally, does not boast the interest attaching to this...."

"You are most kind, Essenian Pasha," Katharine returned, somewhat hesitatingly, conscious on the one hand of the insolence of the native who had presumed to offer her a bribe, painfully sensible, on the other, of the fact that Julian's freedom possibly depended on the co-operation of this unspeakably objectionable man. "But the time at my own disposal being so exceedingly limited, it would be impossible to give you a date."

"My profound regrets!" He bowed from the hips with his acquired French elegance. "Though I hope that a day will come yet when you will consent to honour me! Most of the beautiful English ladies who have visited our country have praised the house and garden.... Must the dwelling be darkened, and the trees about it wither, because denied the presence of the most beautiful of all! ..."

The flourishing Eastern hyperbole was delivered with Essenian's velvety softness, and accompanied by a display of glittering eyes and teeth. And Katharine, stifling her acute dislike as might best be managed, thanked the Egyptian in some formal phrase of polite regret and gratitude—cut short as John Hazel returned accompanying Trixie and Mrs. Hazaël, by the less formal utterances of leave-taking.... Mrs. Hazaël, in taking Katharine's offered hand, made the slight curtsey appropriate to Royalty. And Katharine, as she bent to kiss the little lady's cheek, was conscious that Essenian's strange eyes leapt out of their drowsy languor into glittering curiosity.

She had longed to give John Hazel another hearty hand-grip, to have whispered another parting word,—but the Egyptian intervened....

It was Essenian who conducted Miss Forbis to the car, a palatial Daimler of huge size, enamelled black and violent red; overloaded with solid silver and ivory fittings; lined with primrose satin brocade upholstery, and driven by a handsome Italian chauffeur.

"How gorgeous! And in what native taste!" cried Trixie, delightedly as the springy yellow cushions received her. "And does it belong to the Egyptian Flying Officer—the little, purring Pasha with the extraordinary eyes? I shall call him 'The Basilisk' because he reminds me of one!"

They had quitted the dust and racket of the city, and as they passed through the Rosetta Gate, and out upon the Aboukir Road, and were in the quiet suburbs on the east, near the European cemetery, Katharine rose and looked back, and gave a cry of admiration. For Alexandria,—with her domes and minarets and huge square blocks of modern buildings,—bathed in the rose and amber light of an Egyptian sunset—was beautiful with something of the beauty of the Past....

"That is something to have seen," Katharine said with a sigh, as she dropped back on the springy primrose cushions. "Thank you, dear Lady Wastwood, for a wonderful afternoon! You have been happy, haven't you?"

"Quite amused," Lady Wastwood answered. "And if I haven't been quite happy, well, then neither have you!"

She moved nearer to Katharine, and took her hand, and patted it, affection mingling with solicitude in the green eyes that questioned the face of her friend.

"I won't make pretences to you, dear Commandant," Katharine returned after an instant's hesitation. "I have cause to be happy, and cause to be anxious. And the anxiety weighs so heavily that Happiness kicks the beam."

Trixie patted her hand again, and said as the car bowled along the Aboukir Canal Road with its charming country villas shaded by palms and casuarina-groves:

"If I can help in any way, you promise—you will let me? Won't treat me like a stranger—will give me the chance I'd like.... To show you that I don't forget—what I can never speak of, but what I live through in my dreams—nearly every night! Promise! For I am a lonely woman, Kathy dear, though I keep my end up and don't go round howling for sympathy!—and I am truly fond of you."

"I promise, dear friend. And I would tell you now what the trouble is—because I trust you absolutely—where I myself am concerned! But I am not free to give away the confidence of another."

"Meaning the Jew Colossus with the great hooked nose," said Trixie mentally. And Katharine went on:

"You're looking better. You've not had that dream of late. Probably because it has done you good—sleeping in the open."

For Lady Wastwood and Miss Forbis shared one of the roomy sleeping-tents in the grounds of the Palace, distinguished from other similar groups as the "V.A.D's Annexe."

"I shall hate it when the rains come and drive us back indoors," Trixie responded. "And to-night at any rate I shan't dream of shipwreck,—I shall dream of The Basilisk! That man gives me cold shivers all down my spinal column. Why, I couldn't exactly explain. Some people have a horror of cats—the gentlest and most faithful pets to those who love and understand them. Others simply abominate dogs—I'm not keen on them myself! But my feeling for the little Pasha isn't one of those mild antipathies. Shall I tell you what those basilisk eyes of his keep saying to me? No!—it's all right—the chauffeur can't hear! They say: 'My dear lady—I'm a wealthy Gyppo Notability, esteemed an Ace of Aces in the hand of the R.F.C.... I've a chestful of decorations—all earned brilliantly. But my Mother was a Tigress—and my Father was a Snake! ...'"

"Est ce que les dames feront un petit tour en campagne, ou retourneront elles directement à l' Hôpital?"

"Will the ladies take a little tour in the country, or return directly to the Hospital?"

The question, asked in French through the speaking-tube fixed above the seat in front of them, made Katharine and the Commandant start. Briefly informed of the ladies' desire, the Italian turned the car upon the sanded road curving past the Khedivial Palace; and after half-a-dozen miles, swept round in a northward curve and presently was climbing a gradient between the orchards of peach and apricot trees, the fig-groves and pine-woods and gardens of beautiful Montana, gleaming like a fairy palace of rosy mother o' pearl in the fires of the sunset; on the square green promontory at whose shoreward base break the pearl and sapphire surges of the Western Sea.

XII

"The name of Forbes is common enough in your North Britain—the name of Forbis sufficiently unusual, to put me on the scent. And—one looks for the lady in these affairs!" purred Essenian, as he left the house in the Rue el Farad with John Hazel—profiting by the coolness of the evening to walk to the Aviators' Club. "Let me add, your taste is unimpeachable. I have never seen a handsomer Englishwoman than your friend."

Now he pursued, in his smooth, book-learned English, drawing out a platinum cigarette case—opening and offering it to John:

"Take one. The Macedonian leaf failed last year, but not so the crops of Shiraz, grown and ripened side by side with the purple-petalled afiyûn. You perhaps may not know this Club..." he added a little later, as they entered the wide, cool vestibule of a handsome granite building in Sherif Pasha Street. "No! Well, I anticipated you would not! ... Originally an association of mere amateur civilians, meeting periodically to exchange experiences—the Club has become,—since Government took over our aërodrome and hangars—you know them!—near the Water Works due east of Aboukir Road—a resort for Flying Officers of all grades and branches of the Service.... Since then, if much more social—we are a damnable lot more noisy and a good deal less exclusive.... Still, our Club remains distinguished by its European comfort, and its excellent cuisine!"

The dining-room into which a demure Levantine waiter ushered Essenian and his companion, was perfectly ventilated by electric appliances, and open along the whole of one side towards a sanded court containing a fountain, a great many long cane-chairs and several palms; and of the many small tables dotted over the spotless matting covering the floor, the majority were empty, though apparently reserved for diners. A few were already occupied. With the men who sat at them,—officers of the R.F.C. from the land-stations in the neighbourhood, and others of the R.N.A.S. from the sea-plane-stations at Ramleh, Port Said, Wara in the Delta,—and the seaplane-carrier anchored at the moment in the Port, Essenian exchanged nods and salutes of smiling courtesy. Several of the younger men stood up to greet him—though none approached the table where the Egyptian airman sat with a long-legged private of Territorials, wearing the badges of a London Regiment....

The temperature of the room approximated to that of London in July, thanks to the incessant movement of the wooden ceiling-fans. The dinner began excellently, with hors d'œuvres of giant prawns, miniature cucumbers and fresh olives, and a shell-fish of delicate flavour, served on miniature mountains of finely pounded ice. A Comet hock accompanied, and a clear soup was succeeded by a turban de turbot, perfectly cooked, and a curry of tiny whitebait-like fish from the Canal.

Roast lamb and duckling followed, both of remarkable succulence, and John Hazel, who had lived for weeks on bully-beef and onions, tough Palestine goat-mutton, and slabby rice-pudding speckled with the bodies of defunct flies,—having—in the unavoidable absence of these—cheerfully battened on iron rations, the bottom of a tin of jam and a handful of sticky dates,—yielded now to the immemorial allure of the Egyptian fleshpots; and attacking dish after dish with the ferocity of an ogre, slaked his huge thirst with repeated draughts of the well-iced champagne supplied....

The magnificent red roses massed in a crystal and silver rose-bowl in the centre of their table, and the gratification of satisfying the hunger that raged in him, prevented him from grasping a fact to which he awakened later,—when quail from Upper Egypt with egg-plant and quince salad, and snipe from the marshes of the Delta succeeded the lamb and duckling, and he paused to gather breath.... For Essenian sat smiling on the other side of the roses, before unused cutlery and silver, and an array of wine-glasses innocent of wine.

"My hat! Pasha, what must you think of me?" John began, nearly dropping the fork and spoon that were lifting a plump quail from the offered dish: "This ain't your Ramadan, is it, by any chance? No, of course, that comes in May. Has anything put you off your feed, or don't you ever eat?"

"Have no anxiety on my account, my King of Damascus," returned Essenian, narrowing his long eyes as he smiled upon his guest: "I am well, and that I continue so, I owe to precautions which may seem absurd to you. But every advantage we enjoy in this world has to be purchased—and I purchase vigour and health at the expense of my appetite.... Pray do justice to the quail, while I follow my usual rule."

He clapped his hands, and an Egyptian body-servant, who had stood immovable in the background, holding a silver tray, moved noiselessly forwards and set before Essenian a goblet of crystal and a long-necked crystal beaker;—together with some small covered dishes of delicate porcelain, revealing when the covers were lifted—nothing beyond a few fresh dates, a small, snow-white cream cheese, and a delicate napkin, enveloping a round cake of bread.

"Distilled water and freshly-gathered fruit, with bread of the purest sesame-flour.... Of these, in limited quantity, I may eat twice in the day. Preferably, at dawn, and after sunset; though by religion I am no more Moslem than I am a Christian," said Essenian, daintily filling the crystal goblet, "or a Parsi, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a Jew...." He broke bread.... "What is this? ..." He turned with feline suddenness on the dusky servant who stood behind him, and said harshly, speaking in Arabic: "There is error! The sesame has been mingled with wheaten-flour. It is impure.... I cannot eat of it! ... Take it away at once...."

"La yâ Sidi—Allâh yisallimak!" the man protested, paling under his chocolate skin.

But Essenian had sniffed the bread-cake remotely and delicately as a fox might sniff at some slily-poisoned titbit, and now replaced it on the dish, and thrust the dish away....

"Carry it to the cook and inquire into the matter!" He said to Hazel, as the servant removed the dish and vanished straightway: "Do not be disturbed on my account! To one so well schooled in abstinence as myself, it would matter little if the meal consisted only of dates. Mixed in a draught of this pure water, a few drops of an excellent tonic (to the virtues of which I am a living testimony) will more than supply the deficiency.... Meanwhile, do not neglect our chef's excellent omelette soufflée. Or the bombe glace of custard-apple on which he prides himself.... And then—since I know better than to offer cheese to a man who has been 'fed to the wide,' with that as an article of Army rations,—I will join you in a cup of Arabian coffee, black, thick and bitter as the nectar of Mocha should be."

He took from a front pocket of his Service jacket a little case of shining yellow metal, and opening it, showed three slender crystal vials, reposing in a velvet bed. He unstoppered one,—tinging the air laden with the savour of meats and viands—with a whiff of something delicately pungent—rather suggesting the fragrance of lemon-plant to John.... Then with dainty, scrupulous care, he dropped seven drops into the goblet of distilled water; re-stoppered the vial, wiped the lip with a green leaf, returned the vial to its bed, and pocketed the case,—watching through narrowed eyelids the turbid changes taking place in the clear liquid, until as it deepened from cloudy red to clearest ruby, he glanced across the rose-bowl to encounter Hazel's eyes....

"A pretty colour, is it not?" he said critically, holding up the goblet. "Now I will drink, and you must join me. I hope you do not find fault with our Club champagne? ..." He continued, signing to the attendant, who stood ready with another napkined bottle: "That you have been drinking came from von Falkenhayn's Headquarters in Transylvania,—when we bombed him out of them in the summer of 1916.... That defeat of the Vulkan Pass must have been a crushing blow to the Emperor's magnificent favourite,—coming after the tremendous failure of the Second Attack on Verdun."

To the rout of the Vulkan Pass, John knew, Essenian's prowess had contributed. When Roumania had joined the Allies in the August of 1916, and massed her Army on the Carpathian frontier for an invasion of Transylvania, Essenian had acted as Wing Commander of a squadron of Allied Aircraft, acting in concert with a Roumanian Army Corps,—and for his services had been distinguished with the Order of the Roumanian Crown. At Salonika, later on,—for the first time meeting Essenian—John had encountered the French observer who had accompanied the Egyptian's flights.

"They are greatly strong in artillery, the Austro-Germans of von Falkenhayn! ... We are not so.... The Roumanians are only strong in men. As we march on they retreat,—for two weeks it is a triumph.... Then their von Falkenhayn gives the signal, and their guns begin to play on us.... I who speak have been under fire!—was I not in the advanced trenches at Verdun with my storming-party, before I joined the Service Aëronautique! But this was super-gunnery—a torrent of steel and fire and German High Explosive, sweeping—as with the Devil's broom—the mountain-passes clear! All through October continues the fight—every day we are flying! In fog, and rain—zut! rain of shrapnel and fog of poison-gas—we never cease to fly.... When we are not observing—we are bombing! Or making more rain on the Austro-German Divisions—a rain of steel flechettes! Me, I am no coward! but whenever M. Essenian Pasha says to me: 'Prunier, this, day or night, my friend, you accompany me in my avion....' I say to myself as we used to say with my storming-party at Verdun: 'Ça va barda, mon ami! Prepare ton matricule!' For M. le Major will fly with a broken wing, or a bullet through the petrol-tank, and all the juice running! ... C'est un as! ... He puts in me the fear of God—that man who has none at all! ..."

Meanwhile Essenian ate of dates and cheese sparingly, sipped his tonic drink appreciatively, and waited for the man on the other side of the crimson roses to talk.

"Here is the port." He added as the servant filled Hazel's glass from a cobwebbed and ancient-looking bottle: "Don't drink yet. Let us follow the ancient fashion, the first glass of the bottle to a lady's health! ... I propose: 'The beautiful Miss Forbis! ...' What, do you break the glass?"—for John had nodded, and his huge brown fingers had snapped the stem of the wineglass like a match-stick as they set it, emptied, down. "Take a fresh one,—finish the bottle,—and meanwhile try those cheroots.... Or the others—excellent Havanas, though I smoke cigarettes for my own part, or else the water-pipe—our Egyptian ârgili. Ah, here is the coffee," said Essenian pleasantly, as the Egyptian servant previously dismissed, re-appeared at his elbow with another tray. "Black as the eyes and perfumed as the breath of the brides who lead the sons of Islam into the green pavilions of Paradise. Though," he smiled amiably at John over the cigarette he was lighting, as the attendant removed the empty bottle and placed a flask of Benedictine with the coffee beside the guest—"your personal predilection leans to something statelier and less seductive than the gazelle-eyed, moon-faced haura of the glorious Koran.... What says our Saadi: 'The tresses of Beautiful Ones are chains upon the Feet of Prudence, and a snare upon the wings of the Bird of Wisdom..... We Easterners hardly credit the existence of Friendship between those of opposite sexes," pursued the Egyptian, letting the sentences trickle over his smooth lips as though they had been honey, "and yet, subsisting between an intellectual man, and a mentally-superior woman, it may be productive of more lasting gratification than the merely sensual tie."

"What are you getting at, Essenian Pasha?" asked his guest, bluntly.

Essenian had paused as though inviting a reply, and this was the response forthcoming. A faint line showed between his smooth black eyebrows and his tones were less sweet and liquid as he resumed:

"But this,—that such a union between man and woman might lead to great discoveries—in those psychological regions which we are beginning to explore. Two such adventurers, mutually keen, mutually gifted with spiritual perception, bound by sympathies unblunted by the earthly passion of love, might pass back along paths long buried beneath the débris of extinct civilisations—trodden by the footsteps of generations who went before them, to the furthermost limits of the Mysterious Unknown."

He waited. This latest opening proved no whit more successful than others previously given. John Hazel continued to drink, and smoke, and answered nothing. To pry out the diamond hidden in this lump of living clay,—to wrench open the rugged valves of this human mollusc housing the pearl of priceless knowledge,—was going to be more difficult than Essenian had thought....

"Your friend, Miss Forbis," he resumed, and now the heavy eyes were on him, "strikes me as possessing an unusual degree of psychic force and energy, in combination with her remarkable physical beauty and charm. That she is less handsome than her brother, one would be disinclined to credit, were her own testimony not corroborated by the evidence of T.R.S. 43."

"And who might the gentleman you mention be, and what the—what does he know about it?" demanded John Hazel, regarding his host with a decided scowl, and speaking in an aggressive tone.

"T.R.S. is a Turkish Renegade Spy whom I recently met and interviewed at the B.S.I. Office Ismailia," returned Essenian smoothly, "on a subject of vital interest to your attractive English friend.... 'Describe,' I said, 'this British priest who lies in prison at Shechem,' and the man answered 'Mashallah!' Describe the Archangel Jibrail when he came from the Ninth Heaven to announce to Mary the Pure One the Miraculous Birth of the Messiah—between Whom and the touch of Satan, at the moment of His Nativity—the Lord of Creation interposed a veil!' He was quite serious—Turks are idolaters of physical perfection.... Incidentally, he wound up with a few details concerning the—disposition, and predilections distinguishing the Turkish Lieutenant-General of gendarmerie who is at present Commandant of the Prison Camp at Shechem,—which throw a rather lurid light upon the conditions there...."

He chafed his delicate finger-tips softly against each other as he leaned both elbows on the cloth and smiled over the roses into Hazel's gloomy eyes.

"Hamid is a—let us say a protégé of the notorious Djemal Pasha, once Turkish Minister of Marine—now Commander of the Fourth and Eighth Turkish Army Corps. Of mean birth, a Turk from Crete—he bids fair to out-Djemal Djemal.... I need not remind you that Crete is—the country of the Minotaur! ..."

The speaker's beryl eyes shone green in the light of the electric globe-lamps. His voice had a little poisonous hiss through its delicate silkiness.

"Since the prison camps of Beersheba were shifted to Shechem, their Commandant has a narrower field for the exercise of his peculiar bent.... According to my Turkish spy, he has what you would call 'a down' upon your friend's brother,—whose refusal to be removed from the Barracks to the wired camp set apart for the officer-prisoners has offended the Bey.... Perhaps the presence of the priest is a check upon his usage of the soldiers, whom Father Forbis nurses in fever and other sickness, and for whom he has obtained consular funds for the purchase of medicines, charcoal for fires, meat for broth, and so on...."

He satisfied himself by a swift glance that John was absorbed in listening, and resumed: "Turks are—Turks!" He made as though to spit, but checked himself, and went on: "You have said to me: 'We Hazaëls have an old score to settle up with Hamid....' Two years have not changed the Bey. He is still the Minotaur! ... And unless Fortune, or," he shrugged "the favour of Heaven, operate in the interests of this brother of your friend, his may yet be the fate from which self-slaughter saved your Cousin Jacob—Catholics being forbidden that last resource of the desperate.... Escape from torture or degradation by the Gate of Suicide...."

XIII

Drifting down a sluggish stream of drowsy after-dinner reflections; brooding between a bellyful of varied meats, and a brain addled with wine;—lost to the guiding, dominant idea of the Big Old Men, ranged one behind the other like a sculptured procession of Assyrian planet-gods, reaching back to the Beginning of Actualities whence looked down the Biggest Old Man of All—John Hazel had been recalled as suddenly as though a 5.9 shell had exploded in the Club courtyard, and starting to his feet, upset the chair he had sat on; its fall—with the crash of a breaking glass—making the men at other tables look round.

"In peril such as this, and you sit here drowsing!"

It rang in Hazel's singing ears—the voice of the worshipped woman. And in a moment the gorged Sybarite was gone. With a curt apology he resumed the chair the Club attendant had picked up and now replaced for him. A cool, resourceful man, instinct with force and energy, sat looking at Essenian across the rose-filled bowl.

"If things are as desperate as you've said, why not have told me? Let's thrash this out, Essenian Pasha, please!"

"With pleasure, but I must first know how Miss Forbis discovered that her brother was living. For that she knows, in spite of her very remarkable reticence,—was plain to me to-day. Was it you who broke that news to her? ..."

"No ... She told me! ..."

"When? ..."

"This afternoon! ..."

"That is curious! ..." The tone was incredulous.... "Through whom did she learn the fact?"

"Couldn't enlighten you! ..."

"How long has she known? ..."

"I'm unable to say! ..."

Scrutinising his guest between narrowed eyelids, sifting the unwilling replies with inquisitorial care, it was patent to Essenian that John knew, but would not tell. He tried again with no better result.

"Has Miss Forbis by any unlucky chance, embarked—any other person—in an effort to rescue her brother from the prison at Shechem?"

This time John flatly lied:

"No! ..."

"That is well. I should certainly withdraw from the attempt if its success were to be so handicapped."

"Handicap or none, whether you withdraw or not, I'm entered for the running!"

"I did not say that I withdrew. On the contrary!"

"Good egg you! Now—"

John poured out a brimming glass of iced mineral water, emptied it, and finished as he set down the empty glass:

"How far is Shechem from Ismailia?"

"Following the old Pilgrim's route overland—a distance of about 232 English miles. As the crow flies—or as I shall fly"—Essenian smiled—"about 195 miles...."

"Thanks. When can we start? ..."

"For Shechem? ..."

"For Shechem! ..."

"That depends!" said Essenian with his titter, as John glanced at his wrist-watch, and then at the elaborate clock,—mounted in captured German gun-metal—that occupied a bracket over the door of the dining-room: "That depends on your readiness to accept my conditions! ..."

"'Conditions'? You wait till now to talk of conditions!"

The black eyes were full on Essenian, and they had an angry stare.

"I have purposely waited until now! ..."

The cool, sinister strength that lay behind Essenian's veneer of finical affectation, came home to Hazel as it had not previously. This was the Essenian of his French observer-mechanic, the man who had flown with a broken wing-stay, and a leaking petrol-tank, through the hellish Austro-German fire in the battle of the Vulkan Pass.

"To push an advantage, consolidate a position and advance to a point beyond is the science of warfare, and the secret of social influence. Shall we discuss these conditions in my private room upstairs—or would you prefer to stay here?"

John, looking round, saw no occupied table in their near vicinity, and grunted surlily:

"Here's good enough for me! ..."

"My own experience supports your view.... Here is quite good enough.... For the arrangement of the details of a plot, for the carrying-out of a delicate and dangerous discussion, the ideal place is—under the electric lights in the middle of a drawing-room, in the stalls at a theatre—in the dining-room of a Club or restaurant, or in the Throne Room at a Royal Levée...."

"Then let us get to biz. You've sprung a surprise on me—at the last minute...." John added, fixing his heavy black stare on the gleaming green eyes of the tiger-snake ambushed behind the roses; "Still,—trot out your conditions! ... How much do you want in cash? ..."

"You are rude, Mr. Hazel.... But the young are always insolent!" Essenian gave the little bleating laugh. "I want no money of you.... Rather I am what the British merchant would call a warmer man than you are, in spite of the fact that you inherited from your grandfather more than three hundred and eighty thousand pounds...."

"Upon conditions, Pasha! upon conditions!" jeered John, grinning over the table; and roused to sudden venomous wrath, Essenian hissed at him—leaning over the crimson flower-hedge until his fierce breath beat on the other's face:

"Do I not know you have accepted those conditions? ... Are you not living—in some degree—in your grandfather's house as a Jew? ... Have you not the letter 'J' instead of 'Nil' on your identification-disc? ... Do you not wear upon a chain about your neck an enamelled Shield of David? If you die, or are killed—will they not bury you, if anything be left of you to bury—under the Mogen David as they bury a Jew?"

The sudden transformation of the languid, smiling oval into a face of bitter fury evoked a sudden flash of intuition that made Hazel say:

"You seem to know something about it.... Do you happen to be Hebrew yourself by any chance? ..."

"You are perspicuous." The face was bland again. "I am in fact descended from an ancient Israelitish family of Elephantis. Not all the sons of the Tribes followed the Law-giver out of Egypt. Many had grown to love the land and—its many gods were good to them.... So they stayed and prayed to the many, instead of following the One...."

"I know. Lots of shirkers stopped behind to make bricks for Pharaoh, and to-day their descendants are laying sleepers, or digging trenches, or piling shells for the good old British Government."

"You have perfectly mastered the shibboleth of loyalty, Mr. Hazel...." The dark lips curled contemptuously. "I congratulate you! But it is hardly necessary to maintain the pose. There is no third person present, and I speak as an Asiatic to an Asiatic, as a Hebrew to a Jew.... For many years I have served the British Government in our East. These," he touched the rows of ribbons on his tunic, "testify to the truth of what I say. While Britain's aims and my own interests are synonymous, I shall continue to serve her...."

"I should jolly well hope so! It's a cleaner job than plotting for the Kaiser's dirty pay."

"And a more profitable—for Germany is finished. A burst bladder, like her sister State with whom she hoped to dominate the world. The sun of Russia sets in a morass of blood and mire and filth unutterable.... Britain and France have reached their apogee of greatness, and must now inevitably decline. The Ottoman Empire fights to her fall. From the Farther East the Power will arise that will sweep armies like straws before it—and entangle the necks of the Northern nations within its weighted throwing-net! But of this another time. Let us come to my conditions.... Do not interrupt me until I have said my say! ... I am no Spiritualist—I laugh at those who bear the name as babes, who try to peep behind the curtain when the showman is admitted to the courtyard of the harîm to amuse them with his Shadow Play of the puppet Kharaguz. But in Spiritism I believe.... Is it not the corner-stone of all revealed religions, that deep conviction of the existence of a World Unseen! ... I have myself made efforts—and not all unrewarded! to lift the border of the Veil that hides the Future—to pierce through the thick mists that screen the terrors of the Abyss Beyond...."

Artificial as were ordinarily the speaker's tone and bearing, he spoke now, and looked like a man stirred to the very depths. His hands vibrated, Hazel thought, like the limbs of a weaving spider. He breathed quickly,—and a hundred lines, furrows and crowsfeet previously unnoticed, appeared crossing, re-crossing and puckering the dark skin of his agitated face....

"Mediums and clairvoyants in the European capitals—have I not seen and heard them? With what result? This, that a few threads of truth, undeniable and genuine,—were woven into a tissue of lies! Seers and Descryers here in our East—with them I have fared better. They only practise for the Initiate—they scorn to prostitute their mystic gifts to the uses of the common herd. But by the greatest—one day you shall meet them!—never have I known done what you did to-day in my presence.... I mean—when you so marvellously supplied the context of that cuneiform letter, filling up with a bridge of Truth the gap between the Known and the Unknown.... How strange that Eli Hazaël never dreamed of your astonishing faculty! How wonderful, the combination in your person of the temperament of the clairvoyant with the physique of the athlete! ..."

"Why keep on calling me a medium and clairvoyant when I'm nothing of the sort! When I tell you I've never dabbled in that sort of thing. And what is it—about the letter? Do you mean your translation of the wedge-writing on the tile in the cabinet, that you reeled off this afternoon? ..."

The Egyptian's eyes stabbed at John's face out of deep caves that had suddenly hollowed about them. But he could not doubt the look and tone of absolute sincerity. He blinked and muttered:

"You do not deceive.... You are speaking truth! ... By the Fire that burns without Heat or Smoke!—you are an extraordinary young man! ..."

The room had gradually emptied about them: they sat in a desert of unoccupied tables, from whose cloths soft-footed Levantine and native waiters were clearing wineglasses, coffee-cups and empty liqueur-bottles,—decanters, fruit-dishes, plates, and ash-trays full of burned matches, and the stubs of cigars and cigarettes....

"You have not sought the terrible Gift—yet it has come to you. You are not of the Baal Obh, who evoke the voices of departed spirits from corpses and mummies—or of the Yideoni, who utter oracles and prophesy, by putting into their mouths a dead man's bone. You are a Teraph—a living Teraph—not the head of a first-born of a first-born—prepared with salt and spices, having under the tongue a gold plate on which magical formulas have been engraven.... And it is she, the handsome Englishwoman, who controls the Man and the Power! Who says to your mind, as the Chinese fisherman says to the tamed cormorant: 'Dive!' ... And at the command you vanish into the Unguessable!—you return, carrying in your pouch a fish from the Sea on which swims the Serpent that bears up the Throne...."

He drew towards him an unused plate, reached with a shaking hand for the part-emptied port-bottle, poured a little into a glass, and dipping in a finger, rapidly traced in thick red wine upon the shining white porcelain a square, divided into nine smaller by horizontal and perpendicular lines....

"Dastûr. By your Permission, ye Blessed Ones!" John heard him mutter, as he scattered a drop or two of wine at each corner of the figure and filled in the squares with numerals.

"What are you up to, Essenian Pasha?" John leaned across interestedly. "Looks to me like hanky-panky of the Egyptian Hall kind."

"It is the Budûh of el Gazzali, a figure much used in our East. Only instead of letters I am using numerals. Tell me, my friend—for of course you are acquainted with it—what is the month, and the day, and the hour, of the English lady's birth? ..."

"Damned if I know! ..."

"How can I believe you do not know, when she is so intimate a friend that she wears a facsimile of the onyx gem that is on your hand now? ..."

"Why she has it I couldn't say.... It's an heirloom in her family.... Now cough up your conditions, for I've waited long enough. What do you want me to do in return for taking me somewhere near the Prison Camp at Shechem, dropping me and picking me up—at a given hour—with another man in tow? ..."

"Consent to be again—for me—as you were in the Rue el Farad." The Egyptian obliterated the figure on the plate with a sweep of three fingers, pushed the plate contemptuously from him and sat erect in his chair. "Use your power—pass behind the Veil as you did this afternoon. Here as you sit at this table—it can easily be managed. For one half-hour!—" He pointed to the round-faced gun-metal timepiece solemnly ticking over the dining-room door. "A quarter even—calculated by that clock...."

"But haven't I already told you that's all tosh about my being clairvoyant? ... Can't—"

"Muakkad! Yes, you have told me, but I have eyes and ears.... Think, O man! ..." Both supple hands darted at John over the roses.... "Lord of the Daystar! cannot you understand? Would it be no help to the success of this expedition if I were able to send you in advance to the Camp at Shechem? A spy no sentry can arrest—no walls keep out, no bullet silence.... Who hears—sees all and remains invisible as the Afrit who flies by noonday, or the Angel who witnesses sin!"

"But you.... Where do you come in? What's your particular little stunt, Essenian Pasha?" The voice was heavily, oppressively surcharged with suspicion and doubt....

"I will tell you, you who suspect one who has served you and eaten and drunk with you. This is the year of Fate for me, this of the Hejira 1335—by the Kalendars of the Ifranjis 1917. This coming First of Safar—their November Sixteenth—is the beginning of the month of my dread.... All may yet be well with me—for who knows his danger is armed against it. And to have lived as I have is to have learned to value Life! Only a few years more to wait until great chemists have grown wiser.... A little, little span of years,—and Man, created but to perish, will have done away with Sickness and abolished Old Age,—and finally conquered the Enemy, Death.... Listen! ... I cannot be killed whilst flying—the Signs are all against it. But in a year that has its birth in el Dali and el Jadi—in a month that has the signs Akrab, and of the planets Mirih,—I am in danger from a man and a woman. Peril had threatened me the other day, when I dropped down in the midst of your lines—and its source had been removed and my breast was broadened.... But the Shadow still broods—the Finger points—and I must know who these Two are—the people who menace me!"

"What happened before you landed in our lines, Essenian Pasha?" John's interest had been prodded into life by the previous reference. "Three days ago—or about—when the Turkish Anti-Aircraft guns peppered you over—Hebron, wasn't it?—and Captain Usborn was killed.... You see, I've been wanting to ask you about that poor bloke. How did he get his gruel? ..."

"How?" The crouching khaki figure sat erect and the snaky eyes glittered angrily. "You saw the corpse.... You handled it. A shrapnel bullet killed him. And it was not at Hebron it happened,—but at Shechem."

"That's odd! ... You said Shechem at first.... And—it wasn't a shrapper! ..."

"What do you mean? ..." The voice was a snarl.

"Well, you see, I've got the bullet...."

"Where? ..."

"Here.... In my pocket.... And—the queer thing is—it's a revolver-bullet. Not a German—it isn't nickel-coated. Might have come from an English Webley of ordinary Army size."

"Show it me!"

John produced and handed over the little blunted cone of metal. The deadly cold of the dry finger-tips that touched his in taking it reminded him uncomfortably of the contact of a snake. He watched as they turned the bullet about, and then held out his hand for it.

"You want this back again?" the harsh voice asked.

"Rather, if you don't mind!—" John grinned. "It's my latest mascot." He took back the bullet, avoiding the other's touch, and dropped it in his pocket again.

"How did you get it?" Avidly the sharp glance had followed the action. "How can you be certain—that it is the bullet that killed the man?"

"I helped to lift—the body—out of the observer's cockpit, and mine was the head end...."

"Th' h h! ..."

It was a sound like the hiss of a snake, betraying desperate interest.

"He—Usborn—had been shot through the head.... There was a scorch on the left temple. On the right—a clot of brains and blood. And—when I took hold of his head the bullet came away with that, and dropped into my hand. That's curious, now I come to think of it ..."

"What is curious?"

"That burn on his left temple...."

"Perhaps the bullet was incendiary. The Germans use such things."

"You forget! I've got it—and it isn't!"

"Ah!" The voice had recovered its suavity. "I am now able to account for its being a revolver-bullet. There were German officers on the defence-works at Shechem—that they have strengthened since the evacuation of Beersheba. And as they directed the gunners—we circling the while and reconnoitring—Usborn also photographing—they potted at us with their revolvers now and then...."

"How high were you flying?"

"A mile. I remember I looked at the indicator the moment before—it happened."

"You're kidding, Essenian Pasha.... You know lots better than I do that the range of a revolver taking a bullet of this calibre would be barely 1,550 yards...."

"Wannebi!" Foam stood on the writhing lips, and the veins on the back of the clenched hand that shook at John across the roses stood out against the bronze skin like knotted blue cords. "By the Prophet! though I am no son of his,—you, Hazel, tax my patience.... Usborn is dead, and buried two marches from Sheria. Let us discuss the cause of his death when we have time to lose. Aid me to gain enlightenment as only you can aid me!—and I help you to rescue this Christian priest—this tonsured Franghi dervish—from the barbed-wire cage at the Prison Camp of Shechem. Is it agreed? Speak, for suspense devours my liver!"

"All right." John glanced round at the clock over the door of the dining-room. "Nine-fifteen. I'm at your disposal till the long hand marks the half-past."

"Give me time to get something I shall need from my room, and swallow a draught of stimulant." Essenian beckoned one of the Levantine waiters, gave a rapid order in his fluent French and clapped his hands for his own man.

"Saiyad, I am here!" The Mohammedan body-servant who had waited, erect and immovable in the background appeared at his master's elbow. "What does my lord command?"

"Go to the room where I sleep, and bring me the velvet case from the table at my bedside."

"My lord has said," the man quavered, paling under his coffee-coloured skin, "that the low-born may not lay a hand upon the Eye of Radiance, but at peril of blasting as by fire from the skies!"

"Unless thou art commanded. Go, and return in safety!"

The servant vanished and Essenian commented, with his little contemptuous shrug:

"Even as the beasts are the rough and unlettered. What says Shaikh Saadi in The Garden of Roses? I would quote the original,—but it may be you do not know Arabic sufficiently well to appreciate the pun."

"Some play upon wahish and wahsh, I suppose?" Hazel suggested, unexpectedly, as the servants stripped the table and fenced it round with screens. "What's your poison this time? Something extra special?" he inquired, as Essenian, with a shaking hand, drew his little case of medicines again from his pocket and half-filled a liqueur-glass from another of the vials it held.

"Something I seldom need to take, my King of Damascus. Unless after severe physical exertion,—or unusual mental strain. To your health! Sirrak!"

He swallowed the colourless, scentless contents of the liqueur-glass; drew a deep breath, squared his shoulders,—and under the surprised stare of John, became the man he had been....

"That is good! Now we get to what you call 'biz.' ..." He was smiling again suavely as he took a shabby green velvet case from the willing hands of his servant, banished the man beyond the enclosure of the screens with a look and a brief order couched in the vernacular,—and placed the case carefully on the cleared table-cloth before his guest.

"Fine stone! What is it?" John asked curiously.

"A beryl, merely. Do not touch it with your finger lest the contact dim its brightness."

Essenian had opened the case out flat upon the smooth white linen surface, disclosing a sphere of radiance, resting on the slender base of a little metal stand.

"Sit easily in your chair," he went on; "rest your hands on either side of it.... Ah, I had forgotten! Where are those mallâhe?" He took a pile of common native glass salt-cellars from a corner of the table, where a demure-faced Levantine waiter had just placed them. "Raise yourself on the chair a little. So! Now sit down again." John complied, finding the seat rather higher than it had been before. "Now I place one of the mallâhe under each leg of the table...." The table kicked four times gently. "Now the Earth-currents cannot deviate astral—or Other Influences—and the table is not too low. You are comfortable?"

"Fairly cushy, thanks! ..."

Dentists had asked John a similar question.

"You are not nervous, Mr. Hazel? ..."

"Why on earth should I be? ..."

"There is no reason. Look at the beryl, and do not remove your eyes."

"All right, I'm on! ... Mind! From the word 'Go!' fifteen minutes."

"Fifteen minutes.... Look steadily in the beryl. Now give the word!"

"Go! ..."

* * * * * * *

Resting a hand lightly on the table, on each side of the little cup-topped pedestal supporting the gleaming, spherical stone, John leaned forwards, steadily looking in it,—and the fold between his beetling eyebrows smoothed, and the spark of excitement that had kindled in his black eyes slowly smouldered out....

He had gone much further than he meant to have done, but there had been no help for it. Katharine's desperate need of help, the more desperate need of Julian, had thrust him over the edge of this pit the astute Egyptian had dug. But whether Essenian were a wizard or a charlatan—and at moments John was inclined to the wizard idea—he had struck a bargain with the man, and he meant to stick to it. So he held himself motionless, breathing easily, letting his mind range whither it would, as he stared in the depths of the stone....

He had thought it shallow, and it was unfathomably deep; clear, and it was opaquely green as sea-water.... And yet translucent as sea-water can be,—with smooth swirls and rounded folds below the jewelled surface—suggesting veils wrapped on veils, hiding some mystery....

He checked an inclination to yawn. He was feeling sleepy and stoggy. To keep awake he clung to the details of a certain September evening in 1914. News had come that day to the office of the death of young Dannahill,—and he, John, had returned by taxi to the family roof-tree, to break to his mother and his brother Maurice—Maurice who was now piloting a Handley-Page bomb-carrier 'plane on the Western Front—the news that he, J.B.H.,—the John of the "Tubs" Club in Werkeley Street, the John who was a votary of "Tango" and Progressive Bridge; who talked knowingly of Russian Ballet, Musical Comedy and smart Revues; the John whose cherished ambition was to make a pile big enough to buy Covent Garden and turn it into a Pleasure City to be run on American lines—was going to the Front.

He—the said J.B.H., had dined, and was comfortably full, after the lean weeks of bully beef and rubber-tough Palestine mutton.... And he had had a deuce of a lot of hock, of Heidseick Dry Monopole, and three, or was it five Benedictines with coffee, to take away the bitterness of that over-lauded Arab stuff....

Enough, perhaps, to make an ordinary man squiffy, but J.B. Hazel was no ordinary man.... In fact, going by what Essenian Pasha said,—was that Essenian Pasha talking? ... Or whose was that voice, mumbling, mumbling.... Not in Arabic, of which John had a smattering, or in Hebrew—he knew a little Hebrew—

In whatever language the voice was talking it was trying to push John over the brink of Things Normal, into the abyss of Things that are Not.

The launch of a battleship at Portsmouth Dockyard, witnessed years previously, now came vividly back to the protagonist; a picture thrown by the passing moment upon the screen of Memory. As Royalty with mallet and chisel had severed the cord supporting the bow—weights, whose fall knocked away the last dog-shores propping the Dreadnaught, her vast steel hull had shuddered visibly.... The thin wind keening through her glassless upper port holes and along her vast unfitted decks—gaily beflagged, and speckled with adventurous human pigmies—had sounded as though she wept.... Then a hand had touched an electric stud—a bottle in a ribboned net had crashed against the cliff-like bows of grey-painted steel, figured with Roman numerals—and the giant, vibrating from stem to stern, had begun to slide down the well-greased slipway,—towards the oily-looking expanse of chill green water, speckled with floating chips and orange-peel—smoking with little drab-white curls of clammy Solent fog....

And John Hazel was the ship ... the sinister, relentless will that thrust him down must be resisted.... He would not go! ... Had he not promised somebody called Katharine...

Who was Katharine? ... He was rushing to the dreadful brink.... Without the anticipated shock or jar, he glided smoothly over....

* * * * * * *

"The big Inglizi soldier is very drunk," a Levantine waiter—one of a silent group gathered near the dining-room door, whispered to a comrade behind the shoulder of Essenian's Mohammedan body-servant. "Hark, how he snores behind the screens!"

"I do not think the tomi drunk," whispered a countryman of the Levantine's, speaking the same bastard Turkish-Egyptian dialect. "For when the Effendim called for sealing-wax I peeped between the screens, slily, and the Inglizi seemed to me more like one drugged with the smoke of henbane sprinkled on the embers of a charcoal fire.... Thus did he sit, with open eyes, staring into that thing that shines so.... And—and the eyes were empty as the eyes of a dead man—it was not good to look in them!"

"O son of a Maghribi dog! What is that to thee?" Essenian's Mohammedan body-servant, who had overheard, hissed fiercely at the offender. "Since when hast thou found it good for thee or thy like to speak of the doings in this house! My lord and his guest confer together upon matters too high for thee. What has it to do with thee if they practise the es Semiya? Do not persons of known probity work magic both White and Black—and cast nativities! Cudgel thy stupid wits and tell me how long since thou didst stop the clock there? ... 'An hour-and-a-half....' Watch now for the signal! ... When my lord's hand flickers between the screens, the weight is to be set a-wagging.... Have the ôtomôbilyâ ready at the door—the Effendim travels with the Englishman this night to Ismailia—I, Yakub Ali, sitting in front with the wûgâkgi who drives,—running on the solid earth made by Allah for the sons of Adam—instead of flying in the air like a Jinni of the Jann."

Book the Fourth: THE PASSING

I

In the Central Range of Western Palestine is an ancient Samaritan township, the Shechem of the Patriarchs. High set above shore-level, sheltered by mighty mountains on the North, East and South, looking down a wady beaten in by-gone days by the hoofs of the cavalry of Omri,—rutted by the silver and ivory chariot-wheels of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel,—across low, undulant hill-ranges, to the twenty-mile distant sea.

High set above sea-level, it lies on the floor of a long, fish-shaped valley, between two towering limestone mountains. Distant a mile-and-a-half at their summits, their bases nearly meet. One is Ebal, the other Gerizim. They are the mounts by which the Chosen stood to receive blessings and cursings.

The Samaritan Temple, that place of sinister mysteries, once stood where are now great terebinth-trees, shading the ruins of an ancient fortress upon Mount Gerizim. The rock of their Place of Sacrifice shows its channelled surface above ground. To-day, a man standing with the wind at his back, upon the crown of Ebal or Gerizim and speaking loudly, would be heard at the summit of the opposite Mount, and in the streets of the town....

The town, upon which the towering limestone heads of Ebal and Gerizim and their fellows look down sternly, was in its heyday a place of wealth, where luxury and lust ran riot, and men and women walked in purple robes, or were carried in ivory litters; crowned with high jewelled head-dresses, dust of gold powder lying thick in the spiral curls of their jet black beards, and the frizzled waves or towering coils of richly-luxuriant hair. Now their ancient place of abiding is set about with ruinous stone mansions, girt with groves of waving palms, fig-trees, olives and mulberries. Mean dwellings crowd on narrow vaulted streets, under whose pavement you can hear the water rushing. For there is no lack of water in Shechem. The crowded mud Barracks behind the bazar has a well of pure water in its courtyard. So cheap is the element that no one grudges this solace to the prisoners of War.

Before the War the chief seat of the Turkish administration in Palestine, the old town boasted a population of some 25,000 souls. Thinned by conscription of the younger Jews, Samaritans, Arabs and native Syrian Christians, it might have contained some fifteen thousand, counting the garrison of Turkish infantry officered by monocled and braceleted Germans,—when the fortified area of Beersheba fell to the strategy of Allenby, and the routed left wing of the Fourth Army Corps of Djemal Pasha, with the formidable motor-driven siege-guns from the boasted stronghold fell back in rout and confusion upon the area of Shechem.

Some directing Teutonic mind ordained, weeks previous to the evacuation, that the Allied prisoners from the camps of Beersheba and its vicinity, packed on Railway cattle-trucks or Army motor-lorries,—should be transferred by railway to the town of Shechem. It was to be converted by German gold, forced labour and modern resources, into a stronghold of Ottoman power, against which the expeditionary army of Britain should expend itself in vain....

There are already British War prisoners in the mud-walled Barracks at Shechem, built round the courtyard containing the well. When on these hunger-gnawed, vermin-ridden men rolls the flood of human wretchedness from the camps of Beersheba and its neighbourhood,—they are to learn the bitter truth that there are grades in Misery.

For a squat, sandy, pale-eyed Lieutenant-General of Turkish gendarmerie, who acted as Commandant of the Beersheba prison-camps, now supersedes the tyrant who has ruled at Shechem. The inmates of the prisons there have been robbed, stripped, and beaten. They have slept in tattered blankets upon mud or stone floors,—lived on a daily quarter of a coarse brown loaf per soul—and a handful of beans in oil.... They have undergone insult, and occasionally kicks and blows, but Home parcels have occasionally reached them, and though pinched, they were not famished.... Now the parcels are looted or their contents rendered uneatable.... A loaf is shared amongst twenty men, the pannikin of boiled beans yields each a bare spoonful. Driven out at dawn by Turks with loaded hide-whips, to dig trenches south and east of the old fortifications,—make emplacements for Austro-German artillery, and lay down a system of interchangeable rails for the Krupp motor-guns,—they are herded back at night to the filthy pens where they are packed so closely that they cannot lie down to sleep without lying on each other. Whence in the mornings men suffocated by the press of the bodies of their comrades are taken out dead....

These victims belong to the rank and file. Some officers are quartered in the old stone-built prison. Yet others live in Turkish Army tents in a barbed-wire enclosure at the eastern end of the town. A ramshackle hut serves as their mess, when they have anything to mess on. But they are not too crowded for decency, and sickness spares them. Presently the officers are drafted away, four only remaining,—and the congestion at the mud-built Barracks is somewhat relieved. But Hunger, Overcrowding and Dirt have bred Dysentery, septic skin-eruptions and Typhus Fever, and these claim their victims by the score.

The Hospital near the new Turkish Barracks by the Arsenal, staffed by the German Red Cross and the nurses and orderlies of the Red Crescent,—being crowded with Turkish and German wounded—cannot admit more than a few of the gravest cases of dysentery. The typhus patients are removed to the Hospital under the auspices of the Established Church of England Missionary Society, and another,—devotedly tended by the Catholic Sisters of the Cross. Helpers come from the Mission House of the Latin Patriarchate, who unweariedly give their services wherever there is need.... But desperate indeed would be the plight of the War prisoners—save that through the blizzard of misery raging through the mud Barracks—the courage and charity of one man shine like a steadfast star....

The man is a Catholic chaplain who has served with the Expeditionary Forces at Gallipoli; has been taken prisoner and kept for awhile in Hospital at Constantinople; has been drafted to Smyrna, and later, by such haphazard chance as governs the lives of prisoners, has been shifted to Beersheba, and thence to Shechem.

Unweariedly he alleviates, whilst sharing, the common misery. Shaking with fever, hunger-bitten to the bone, ragged as any scarecrow, red-eyed with sleeplessness, he moves from room to room distributing such poor comforts as are obtainable. Helping the convalescent, ministering to the sick, dispensing the Sacraments of the Mother Church to the Catholic dying—cheering those of other creeds with the words that are of God....

On a day in November, half-an-hour later than the morning prayer-call from the minaret of the Great Mosque that was once a Church of the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre—you are to see Father Julian Forbis going his daily round.... The mud-walled courtyard is closed in on three sides by the mud-built Barracks, and on the fourth by a high wall topped by rusty iron spikes—a wall in which there is an archway closed by a double gate, flanked on either side by guard-rooms. Over the gateway is the office of the Turkish Commandant.

To-day the courtyard of the mud-built Barracks is full of sunshine and packed with prisoners. Lying, squatting or standing, the majority are squalid spectres on whose gaunt frames their foul and tattered clothing hangs baggily, though some are bloated like the corpses of men who have been long drowned. Though the assemblage is sprinkled with Roumanians, Syrians, Jews, Armenians and Arabs,—these last having a dungeon to themselves, of unutterable filthiness, the bulk are of the rank and file of Britain's Crusading Forces. Australians, Indians, New Zealanders, and British Territorials.... Actors, clerks, printers, shopwalkers and jockeys; farm-labourers, electricians, gardeners, photographers, bakers, University students,—representatives of every class and calling. One and all strung to endurance by the spirit that makes heroes of ordinary men....

The shadows of Ebal and Gerizim as yet fall westward. Their towering summits and those of the lesser mountains, and the minarets of the Great and the two smaller mosques look down into the dirty mud-walled court, baking in the rays of the early sun, though the November nights are chilly. Every stench the prison fosters seems intensified by the heat. The loud buzzing of millions of flies mingles in a bagpipe-drone with the noise of many voices, Eastern and European,—talking in half-a-dozen languages and a hundred dialects—and the hubbub has for its accompaniment the thudding of distant guns. From the southwest, where the 54th British Division is engaged with the enemy between the sea and Gaza. Nearer South, where a bitter struggle is being waged by British Cavalry, armoured cars, and the bombers and machine-gunners of the Royal Flying Corps, for the possession of Junction Station—the next point after the fall of Gaza, of tactical importance in Palestine. From the hills towards Hebron those enemy forces, who have previously retreated to this vantage, have descended into the Coastal Plain, to relieve the pressure and stiffen the resistance of their comrades by demonstrating a counter-attack. For if Junction Station, the key of the northern railway-system, with its vast dumps of rolling-stock, supplies, War-material and its camps of prisoners, shall fall into the hands of the British—Jerusalem will be cut off from communication save by Wireless with Turkey and Germany....

Day wears apace.... The winged hordes of Baal Zebub, like the humans whom they feast on, are making the most of the sunshine. Fat white maggots that will be flies presently,—and vermin still more loathsome—crawl in the dirty straw on which the prisoners are squatting or lying. Deep in the well the clear water shines like a huge blue eye, reflecting the shadowless heavens above.

A man hanging over, seems to stare in the water, apparently sheltering his eyes with both hands from the glare. He has the crowned wings of the R.F.C. on the shoulder of his ragged shirt of khaki flannel, and the clear water of the brimming well reflects the three chevrons and crown of a Flight Sergeant, tacked upon its tattered sleeve. Also the glittering lenses of a small pair of folding binoculars, cunningly concealed by the curve of their owner's hands.

"What be 'ee lookin' vor, Tom?" cautiously whispers a freckled trooper of Devon Yeomanry, digging a painfully sharp elbow in the airman's lean ribs.

Barney Mossam takes it on himself to answer,—being the accredited wit and jester of the knot gathered about the well. He is a little, broad-shouldered, bow-legged London Territorial, with a nose that has suffered in bouts of fisticuffs; a carroty head, a broad humorous grin, and a squint that points a joke. He speaks with the thick catarrhal snuffle of the East End. Even in khaki his type proclaims him of the Race of Costermongers.... Covent Garden Market is thick with Barneys, all alike as peas from the pod....

"Ticklebats, my flash top," says Barney winking, "kind you used to ketch a while back, wiv' a bottle tied on a string." He adds in a thick whisper directed at the ear of the absorbed Flight Sergeant, "Wot d'yer pipe, old Sky-gazer? Thinkin' it's abaht time we 'ad another look-in from ours affectionately the Two-Faced Nightingale?"

"Ay. Unless he happened to come in the night!" The cautious whisper of the reply only just reaches the ears for which it is intended....

"I 'eard a 'plane go singin' over 'ere 'bout twelve-thirty by my gold ticker," says Barney. "But she was one of them there seaplanes wiv' little canoes instid o' wheels. There ain't so many 'Un 'planes abaht as there used to!—an' Turkey 'planes is gittin' as rare as—as glass in the Strand an' Covent Garden Market—after the bloomin' Zepps and Super Goths 'as paid the usual mornin' call...." His thick whisper is barely audible even to the other: "Reckon that's why it pays Old Two-Face to play the double game. Wiv' a patent trick lever-switch—Gorblime 'im!—but 'e's clever! to cover the Union Jacks on 'is under-wings with Red Crescents when 'e tips the stud.... 'Wish I 'ad a Turk face to pull over my reel one! Wouldn't take me long to 'op out of 'ere! Wonder if 'e 'as the syme dodge fitted on 'is top wings? Give one o' my last three fags—I would!—to find out 'oo 'e is!"

"He's not an Englishman, thank God! He's pretty nearly a black one. Dark as a Gyppo—or a Hindu. The other was white. Inside as well as out. That's why he was murdered!" returns the Flight Sergeant in his wary whisper, without lowering his hands....

"Some blokes gits all the fun. 'Ow come you to see it, Sergeant?"

For once the Cockney's jest provokes no appreciative smile. The thin hands sheltering the prized binoculars shake.... The whispering voice shakes also—and its hurried sentences are punctuated by the thudding of those distant guns....

"I've told you.... It's just a week since.... I was up in our room there," the speaker contemptuously jerks his ear towards an upper window of one of the Barrack buildings—"looking through this little Zeiss glass that magnifies by 20. (I've told you how I took it off a dead German airman at Huy.) ... And the Two-Faced Nightingale—hovering not more than four hundred feet above the Square in front of the big Khan,—was picking the place, damn him! where he'd settled to drop his despatch-bag. He switched his Red Crescents on over the Union Jacks—and the stunt brought the usual roar of laughter from the people. Every one was out to stare,—the streets as far as I could see, were packed, as well as the roofs.... Then he dropped his bag, plumb for the square,—swung round and steered Southward. And,—keeping the glasses focussed on them, I saw his white observer stand up, lean forward and touch him on the back. He looked round and his white teeth flashed in his face sort of spitefully.... The other fellow was handing him out cold truth in ladlefuls, shaking his fist and raving like mad. Then—it happened before you could wipe an eye! He—the pilot—cut out his engine—turned round, and I caught the glitter of a revolver in his hand. Then came the flash and the crack. And the white man buckled up in the bottom of his cockpit—and the Two-Faced Nightingale switched on and flew away South. And nothing was left on the blue sky but a puff of brown cordite."

"The murderin' dawg!" Barney carefully moves from the coping-stone of the well a burnt match, and a wisp of straw, that some eddying draught of the hot breeze might carry into the water. "No fear of 'im gittin' copped. This 'ere queer go wot we calls Life's more on the lines of a Drury Lyne Autumn Show than I twigged when I rallied up 'long o' my pals on Fust Nights outside the good old Gallery Entrance. On'y it's turned the wrong w'y raound. Vice gits all the limes from both wings, an' all the clappin' from the Pit an' Gallery. An' Virtue kips on the bare boards of a stinkin' Turkish barrack-room, or 'unkers in the stinkin' mud, and 'unts things wot 'ops and crawls." He goes on, talking to himself, for the airman, staring in the reflected patch of sky is suddenly absorbed to deafness. "S'trewth! Wherever it does pay—off of the boards of a Theayter—the 'Eroic Line don't go for nuts—not 'ere in Palestine!"

"Ye are richt! It pays nae better than it paid twa thousan' years agone. But which is it better to be on—the de'il's side—or the Lord's? I wuss to Him some voice frae Heaven wad speyk an' answer me! ..."

The utterance—unmistakably Scotch—breaks in several feet above the level of Barney's monologue. He looks up at a tall, gaunt, red-haired Scot in the Border bonnet and ragged khaki kilt, and badges of the Tweedburgh Regiment, and says with his characteristic wink:

"'Ullo, Corp'ral Govan! Thet you? ..."

"Nae ither that I ken...." He is quite young, but he moves like an old man, as he lets his long length slowly down on the mud beside the Cockney, unheeding the invitation to take a straw, and hugs his hairy knees. "Man! I wad gie the twa dirrty Turkish notes in ma pooch, an' a guid British florin to the back o' them, to be anither chap than Alec Govan the day. For I have seen what a man may scarce see, an' keep his brain frae madness—ay! an' his tongue from cryin' oot on God!" He rocks himself in silence, then says with a stifled groan: "Man! dinna gawp at me. Do ye no' ken I hae been wi' Ullathorne? ..."

"Ullathorne. That's your chum, ain't 'e? Wot abaht 'im?"

"Hae ye no' heird?" The long Scot stares at the Cockney wonderingly.

"Nuffin' but that 'e didn't come back last night wiv the workin'-party. 'As 'e turned up?"

"Ay. They pitched him back intil oor room last nicht—a' the green rods had left o' him. Weel I kenned they would do their warst once they got their chance." There is foam on the livid lips. "They drove him oot wi' the rest o' us to the Defence Warks yesterday mornin', though he had the fever on him sair, an' couldna' stand alane.... Weel, weel I wat why!" He is shaking as though with ague. "An' he staggered an' reeled, an' knocked up against ane o' the sentries—an' Hamid Bey was standing by wi' some of his gang o' police.... By the grin on the pasty face of him, ye could tell he was oot for murder. An' he ordered Ullathorne a hundred strokes for brutally attackin' the man. They held us up an' made us watch whiles they laid on to him. O Christ Jesus! ... First on the feet, twenty-five strokes—then the back an' belly an' breist.... An' when he fainted an' lay for dead, they drove us oot wi' their whips an' left him lyin'; an' when we came back for the nicht-shift he was gane awa' from there.... In the mirk o' the nicht, as I hae said, they flung him in amang us,—nakit as a new-born wean—an' his raw flesh hangin' in strips. As though the butcher had stairted to collop him—an' changed his min' aboot it. A braw sicht for the mither that bore him, an' the lass he should hae wed!"

"Gorblime the bloody beasts!" says Barney, gulping. His coarse hand touches the thin arm in the tattered sleeve with the Corporal's stripes, and does it gently too. "Will Ullathorne live? They don't often live—our own chaps—do 'em?—though Turks seems some'ow diff'rent."

"He was deein' when they broucht him back, puir lad! I hae left him barely breathin'.... Father Forbis is wi' him noo.... Ullathorne is nae no Catholic, but the Father has the Gift o' the Word. Sune—sune he will be dead, my chum that I made at Gallipoli, the last o' the auld company left aiblins mysel'!"

No tears come to the burning grey eyes that stare into vacancy.

"A' nicht I held him i' my airms! His bluid is wet upo' me. An' I made a sang to sooth to him—we Govans aye had the bard's gift, they say, in the braw auld days. And when he is dead—for I promised him!—the haill Barracks shall hear't. The bonny sang o' the Christian men killed by the Turkish hound!"

"Look wide O! One o' them Mo'ammedan guards 'as got 'is ugly eye on you," urges Barney, apprehensive that the recklessness of grief may bring Govan the fate of his friend. "While there's life there's 'ope! ... Pre'aps Ullathorne might git round yit!"

But Govan shakes his haggard head:

"I doot—I doot it sairly. But what can be done Father Forbis will dae. He promised me he wouldna leave him as lang as there was breith i' him. An' Forbis aye keeps his word. Here he comes! Luik at's face..... Ullathorne has passed to his Maker!"

The Scot starts to his naked feet, and Barney Mossam sits up and salutes, as through an archway on the ground-floor of the sordid block of buildings opposite comes the figure of a tall, emaciated man, followed by a burly, slovenly Turkish soldier and a grotesque, hunchbacked shape,—recognisable only by the voluminous folds of the coarse biscuit-coloured veil that covers its head, and falls to the hem of its soiled blue cotton robe—as a Syrian peasant woman.

"Good morning, Mossam!" The intonations of the priest's voice, and the smile that curves the mouth hidden by the reddish-golden beard, and lights the sunken blue eyes, are very like Katharine's.... "You are up and about again! ..."

"Couldn't lay up in the lap o' luxury no longer, Father!" drolls the indomitable jester. "A man in my condition 'as to 'ave exercise to sweat the suet off 'is bones."

The bones show as though the tattered uniform hung on clothes-props. The priest glances at them compassionately, and then with gentle friendliness at the haggard faces that turn to him, as he picks his way delicately between the prone and squatting men.

"Move!" says the Turkish military guard in the greenish-yellow khaki served out to the Ottoman forces in the War with Serbia, a huge posta whose fez sits on the extreme summit of his pointed head like the red-paper-cap on a bottle of liquorice-powder,—who wears good boots stripped from a British prisoner: and who speaks a bastard mixture of bad Turkish and worse Arabic: "Haide git! Make way for the kassis and the woman! Imshi! Must ye be as the beasts?"

For a hyæna-like yell of joy has greeted the discovery that there are oranges in one, and almonds and walnuts in the other, of two heavy palm-fibre baskets carried by the misshapen, limping being who follows behind the priest. The wretched creature is one of those nondescript hangers-on that in the negligent East haunt such places of misery as the mud Barrack-prison,—gaining a meagre subsistence by washing the prisoners' tattered linen, running errands to the bâzâr,—boiling broth or carrying water for the sick and convalescent, and, when the guards can be bribed into acquiescence—washing and laying out the bodies of the dead.

Bundled in her soiled rags—shrouded in the voluminous veil that hides a face so disfigured by accident or disease, that no European who has glimpsed can think of it without a shudder, and Orientals express their abhorrence by spitting on the ground—the Mother of Ugliness—thus nicknamed by some coarse wit among her countrymen—passes without insult, ill-usage or outrage, where no other of her sex, unprotected by deformity and hideousness, could have escaped....

"Orangees. Glory be to God!—an' where did yer Reverence git thim?" asks the owner of the unmistakably Irish voice, stretching gaunt hands, shaking with fever, for one of the luscious golden globes.

"A friend brought them," briefly answers the priest, as he distributes the fruit and nuts generously on all sides.

"God bless the friend! ... An' that's yourself, I'm thinkin'," grunts the Irishman, driving his teeth deep into the juicy fruit.

"No, Sullivan, it was not I. You see the giver...."

"The Mother av' Ugliness, bedad! More power to her!" splutters Sullivan, as the priest points to the crooked shape swathed in its sordid veils.

"She has earned a prettier name here among us," says Father Forbis, looking round at the faces,—pinched and white, or livid, or fever-flushed, that crowd about him, and speaking with mild authority. "She shall be called henceforth The Mother of Kindness...."

He turns to the shrinking creature at his heels and repeats it in Arabic.

"Sidi!" the woman implores in muffled tones, trembling so that the folds of her coarse veils wave as though some vagrant breeze were stirring amongst them:

"I have spoken! By you and other British in this place—" He looks round sternly at the men, "the old name is forgotten. She is the Mother of Kindness.... Let all of you remember that!"

"We'll not forgit, yer Reverence! ..."

"Verra weel, Sirr! ..."

"Sure we'll remember, Boss! ..."

"A' right, Sir! ..."

"Han, Hâzrât! ..."

"Right O Father! ..."

"A'ay, Zur, for sure! ..."

"Yea, verily, it shall be as the Sahib orders!"

They answer him in a hundred voices, resonant bass, or cheery tenor, coarse and refined, illiterate or educated,—flavoured with the accent and in the dialect of every shire or county in the United Kingdom—every country of the Dominions Overseas. And standing in his ragged clothes, with a battered enamelled can of broth and another of barley-water dangling from one lean hand, while the other eases the heavy weight of a wallet of canvas, broad, slung about his thin shoulders, and containing such medicines and dressings as may be had—the Father surveys them smilingly—but with the spark in his blue eyes that they know can leap to flame....

You are to see him as a tall, emaciated man of twenty-nine or thirty, chalky-pale with famine and worn with lack of sleep. Eagle-featured, broad-browed, blue-eyed; with long, untrimmed hair and tangled beard of ruddy yellow-brown. Without the eight-pointed black metal star on the lapel of his tattered khaki jacket, or the wisp of Roman collar that still hangs about his neck, or the bartered Breviary and Office book that bulges a front tunic-pocket—a ragged strip of purple stole between its well-thumbed pages—you could not fail to recognise the Religious by vocation; the cultured priest, the man born to dominate, sway and rule.

"Haide! Let us go!" growls the Turkish guard, thrusting two oranges and a handful of nuts in a pocket of his soiled tunic, and kicking a man squatting in his path less viciously than as a matter of form.

And the little procession of the tall priest, the red-fezzed guard, and the bundle of soiled feminine clothing—brought up in the rear by Corporal Alec Govan, moves towards the ground-floor archway on the other side of the courtyard.

II

"Sirr!"

"You, Govan? ..." The priest glances back as he passes out of the sunshine and smells of the courtyard into the squalor and reek of the fetid passage, and the guard, kicking out a palm-wood stool from behind the heavy wooden-locked door, squats down upon it to crack and eat nuts....

"Ay, Sirr.... It is a' ower? ..."

The priest gravely bends his head, and the red light in Govan's eyes is momentarily quenched in bitter waters, as he goes on, gulping his agony down:

"I weel kent that was sae, or ye wad no' have left him. Did he no' speyk ane worr'd o' his mither, puir cratur!—or o' the lass he bude to marry—or o' me, his frien'—before he passed?"

"He spoke of one Friend—just at the last—even a better one than you were," says Father Forbis, gently touching the man's clenched hand. "He Who was scourged by Roman rods for poor Ullathorne and you, and all of us. Who died that we might live with Him for all eternity. Where Death cannot come—or cruelty—or suffering...."

"Ay, Sirr.... Ye are verra gude. We a' ken that o' ye!"

"And God is good," says the priest, "though Man may make men doubt it. Where are you going? ..."

"I am ganging back to Ullathorne. He maun be washed an' straikit an' berrit dacently. He maunna be pitched intil a hole like a doug!"

The priest shudders and his face contracts painfully.

"Very well. You shall have what little linen I can find, and all the help I can spare.... I must finish my rounds among the sick men now.... But, Govan! ..."

"Ay! ..."

"In the name of the old friendly days—" The thin but powerful white hand goes out and rests on the other's shoulder,—"when you and I—two long-legged lads—tickled trout in the Rushet and went rabbiting on the high moors—and made toffee over the stove in the harness-room at Kerr's Arbour—and for your own sake and the sakes of all here!—let me beg you not to provoke the evil man who has us in his power, by a rash display of the wrath and scorn that can do no good—to him!"

"Meanin' Ullathorne! I hear ye, Sirr." A strange smile shows on the grimly-set mouth, and the dour grey eyes sullenly shun the appeal of the blue ones. "Wi' your leave I will be ganging back to him the now.... He aye likit me to make queer sangs to sooth to him in the lang hoors when we lay in the trenches at Gallipoli. An' I hae a sang—the queerest ane o' a'—he wad fell like to hear! Guid day to ye, Sirr!"

He salutes, with the strange smile fixed upon his face, wheels about, and strides out of the fetid passage-way back into the sunshine, and the priest's heart sinks within him as he goes. Fresh furrows line his high, white brow, and anxiety deepens the caves about his eyes, as he says—speaking in Arabic to the bowed figure waiting humbly as a dog at the bottom of the broken staircase:

"He is mad with grief. God pity him! ... Follow, and give what aid thou canst, O Mother of Kindness!"

"If the Sidi would graciously—not call me by that name...."

The timid whisper barely reaches the ear it was meant for. They have moved farther down the murky, fetid passage-way, blocked at its entrance by the burly body of the nut-cracking Turkish guard. Father Forbis asks in surprise:

"Why not, when thou dost merit it? ..." And she answers:

"Sidi, in ugliness there is Protection! Could a woman—with two eyes and a whole face—instead of a half-one—dwell in this evil place one hour—and fare forth unharmed? ..." She makes as though to pull aside her veil with her dusky, slender fingers, but does not, and goes on in the same swift cautious undertone:

"True, there are British soldiers here, and nearly all that I have met were respecters of decent women! But when even the British soldiers are beaten and tortured—made the sport of devils in forms of men!—what can avail a woman better than to be hideous? Sidi,—if a Turk thrust forth a hand to pluck aside my veil, he—he!" she chuckles with a dry, clacking, mirthlessness, "see you—he retches and spits and curses—and does not do it again! Shâf—Shâf! ... See, O see!"

She pulls the veil ruthlessly from the left side of her hidden face and shows to the priest's pitying eyes the ruin it has concealed. The scar of an old burn puckers the olive-tinted temple and cheek that have caved where the bone has been shattered—the blinded eye has vanished under ridged folds of skin. The bridge of the nose—enough left of it to show that the feature has been of the curved Semitic type—has been ruthlessly shattered;—the upper lip, torn partly away, has healed into shapelessness.... He does not see the other side of the face—and the woman evinces no desire to show it. But the little ear, daintily formed and shaded by hair that is yet jet-black and silken—shows that the Mother of Ugliness may once have been beautiful....

"A gunshot wound—and a terrible one." He says it to himself ponderingly.

"Nay, Sidi. The weapon was a revolver."

"What say you? ..."

The priest starts. He has spoken his thought in his English tongue, and this Syrian woman has answered in her own. And it is the Arabic of the cultured classes, not the peasants' primitive speech. He looks at her, and she draws her veil over the poor ruined face that may once have been lovely and goes on speaking in her cultured Arabic:

"Verily, Sidi! A revolver-shot, fired so near that the muzzle touched the skin. There was little time—" She gives her dry, rustling chuckle. "Little time, and he wished to make sure. He did not mean to miss! ..."

"A heartless crime, O woman! But thou dost forgive the doer?"

"He was not mine enemy!" she says with her mirthless laugh.

"Thy lover.... And jealous.... Forgive him all the more for that having loved—he hurt thee in his frenzy. This was" (of course, the woman is old) "done many years ago?"

"Ay, Sidi! When I was young." Her laugh is like the crackling of burning brush.... "Three years ago—no longer! And he who did the thing was my brother, not my lover," says the flat, toneless voice from within the folds of the veil. "And jealous truly—but for his sister's honour. He dared not slay mine enemy—a Zabit of the Osmanli,—for that would have brought sword and fire and destruction upon our house. My lord understands? ..."

"Surely!"

"Therefore he gave me the wound thou seest—and thinking he had killed me,—he shot himself to escape death by torture and degradation. May God reward him a thousand-fold in the bosom of Abraham! ..."

The priest starts slightly:

"Thou art a Jewess?"

She is silent....

"Or perhaps a Samaritaness, like that woman of this city, who near two thousand years ago held drink to the parched lips of a Traveller beside Jacob's Well?"

"What I once was does not matter, but I am no Samaritaness!" There is something like resentment in the faded, toneless voice.

"Thou art Charity's very daughter to the sick ones in this prison. For one para that they give thee, they get ten piastres back. Dost thou think that I am blind?" Smiling, he shakes his finger at the Mother of Ugliness. She bows her head and answers, trembling like a reed in the wind:

"Nay, Sidi.... I have feared not! ... But for the love of Him Whom thou dost serve—seem to be blind a little longer! There is" (another spasm of trembling passes through her)—"There is no medicine for the wretched like helping Wretchedness! Here I am somewhat.... They do not shrink from me. Me whom the children in the streets hoot and run from!—at whose hidden face the women in the doorways spit and point their amulets, lest its influence blight before birth the unborn babe in the womb! And—were I driven from this place—" The faint voice is silent:

"Be it so, O Mother of Ugliness! Henceforth I am dumb as to thy virtues, and blind to the beauty of—thy deeds! Come—and I will give thee some linen for the swathing of that poor broken body that was a live man yesterday. What ails Thee, O woman? What dost thou fear? ..."

For the bowed figure crouches down, shaking as though with ague, a mere heap of sordid clothes on the filthy floor at his feet. A stifled voice falters out:

"Didst thou not hear the bugle? ... The gates—the gates are opening! ..."

They are, indeed, with a clanking of rusty iron bolts in stone groovings; with a turning out of the slovenly guard from the bare rooms flanking the high archway of the gate. With a stiff uprising of the lolling, nut-cracking posta at the doorway—a susurrous of fierce whispers—a nameless commotion of hate and fear and loathing unutterable—amongst the packed bodies of the prisoners squatting, standing, or lying on the beaten mud pavement of the prison courtyard....

"The Bey!" The thick whisper reaches the priest and the woman, flung over the shoulder of the Turk as he stands at attention in the doorway: "Hamid Bey Mutasarrif comes, bringing a Mushir of the Almanis to inspect the prisoners...." He adds, under his hurried breath: "Allah and the Prophet of Allah be with me, Hasan Ali—and deliver me from smitings this unpropitious day!"

The guard have turned out. They raggedly present arms, and Hasan Ali, and such others of his fellows as are on duty in the courtyard—or posted at the portals of the mud Barrack-buildings—shoulder their Sniders or more modern Remingtons with the smartness engendered of fear; as a squat, sandy officer of Turkish gendarmerie—topped with the ugly khaki compromise between the turban and the helmet—patented by Envey Bey in 1912—and adorned as to the epaulettes with the two stars, and as to the cuffs with the four longitudinal gold lace bands and the three diagonal gold bars of a Turkish Lieutenant General—walks with a tall, brick-faced—very much decorated German Staff officer, in amongst the stenches of the crowded prison-yard.

Several persons succeed these. Two German Staff officers of inferior rank to the first, evidently his aide, and a secretary, come swaggering and chatting behind their Chief. A bearded Turkish Surgeon Major, fat and apoplectic, in black gauze spectacles, waddles after—with a nondescript Greek person, evidently of the interpreter-class. And a half-company of Turkish mounted gendarmerie troop after, rather stragglingly. The big bushy-bearded, red-fezzed men, uniformed in old-time dark blue Hussar tunics, with orange and black facings, braided pantaloons and long shiny thigh-boots, are all well-armed with Winchester repeating-rifles, and carry big German Service revolvers in holsters at their belts.

There is a dull shuffling sound, mingled with thuds and stifled swearing, as the Turkish guards, with assiduous kicks, and blows of the rifle-butt, assist sitting or lying War prisoners to assume a perpendicular position; and herd their charges into rank right and left, leaving a central avenue down which the Bey and the visitors may pass. Holding his breath in an agony of suspense as he peers into the crowded courtyard over the broad shoulder of the soldier blocking the passage, the priest scans the faces that he knows for signs of coming storm. As the squat, pale-eyed, bow-legged Asiatic, uniformed in greenish khaki-drill, wearing with clownish awkwardness the wide-thighed riding-breeches, the belts, pouches, and gauntlets of russet leather, and the polished riding boots with silver spurs, that set off the tall soldierly figures of the Germans, steps with them across the threshold of the prison courtyard it seems to every prisoner that the very sunshine fails of its warmth, and the faint hot breeze blows cold....

The Bey looks about him with a pale oblique slyness, his cigarette elaborately poised between his thick gloved fingers, and says, speaking in Turkish, (which language the priest, held for months in durance vile at Constantinople and at Smyrna, has relieved the tedium of prison-life by studying, and fairly understands):

"Good-morning, my children!"

"Good-morning, O Bey! ... May Allah favour your Excellency," lustily chorus the postas. But at the sound of the hated voice the faces of the prisoners have darkened threateningly, and the silence that falls on the tainted enclosure is heavy as a pall.

"Your Excellency wished to inspect the British men before seeing the British officers. These guests of our Empire"—Hamid's leering smile and the glitter in his pale flat eyes show the Bey's enjoyment of his own sarcasm, and the stiff faces of the German general and his aides-de-camp and secretary exhibit a faint grin as he continues: "—these guests of our Empire are not at work to-day.... It is a holiday for them. They sit and chat and eat fruit," (his sharp glance has lighted on the scattered nutshells and orange-peel), "and smoke tobacco about the well in their courtyard. Your Excellency sees!—a capital well! ... Praise be to Allah for the blessing of pure water! Show the well to his Excellency.... Make room, O you there! ..."

A gap being made in the ragged ranks by postas with the rifle-butt, the brick-faced German general stalks to the low parapet of the sky-reflecting eye of clear water, and pronounces it in Turkish of the Prussian brand, to be an exceedingly good well. The Bey, pretending to look at it too, enriches the water with his chewed cigarette-end; and spits in it slyly behind the back of the German general—to the chuckling delight of his immediate following—and the more controlled amusement of the German aide-de-camp and secretary. As for the Greek interpreter and the fat be-goggled Surgeon Major, whose pharmacopæia is limited to Epsom Salts, pills of a rending nature, sulphur and iodine; who knows no disinfectant beyond chloride of lime, and never heard of sterilisation; whose surgical equipment is limited to a saw or two, some needles, a scalpel—all beyond words unclean!—lint made by Turkish ladies in secluded harems; sticking-plaster of the most adhesive kind, splints and First Aid bandages, these two parasites fairly wallow in enjoyment.

The dirty bit of buffoonery is such a success that Hamid Bey is about to repeat it, when a heavy blow upon some dense, non-reverberating surface arrests him in the act. He starts, and looks round for the offender. So do the German officers, though their hard eyes are expressionless, and their sunburned faces as blank as brown tiles. So do the parasites, so do the military police of the Bey's escort, and the postas of the guard. Then as the dull, pounding blow is repeated on the sill of a second-floor window of the mud wing facing the entrance-gates of the courtyard, every eye rolls up to there expectantly and men hold their breath.

Crash! ... The weapon falls again.... It is the leg of a wooden stool, gripped in a fist that is strong and hairy ... and a face—unmistakably a madman's now!—appears at the window above. And in the hush that falls upon the parched courtyard, a crazy voice begins to sing—the leg of the stool coming down with a terrific crash at the end of every line:

"Say, ye Deid that hae gane before us!
(Mithers too, that conceived an' bore us,
Prayin' at hame an' greetin' for us—)
What for the Hound wi' the jaws that tore us?—
What for the Turkish Hound?

What for the beast that killed Tom Warren?
Nichols, Greenbough, Smith and Beeching,
Austin, Frenchard, Lark and Mansur—
Hear ye no their voices answer—
'Hell to the Turkish Hound!'"

The storm has broken with a vengeance. But even the white-faced priest, peering over the unsteady shoulder of the scared Turkish soldier, is carried away by the tingling excitement of the thing. Knowing that the gates of Terror are burst open—and that Vengeance shall issue forth....

Upon the wild, discoloured face with the glaring eyes, all other eyes are glued expectantly, as through the rictus of a dreadful laugh that is stamped upon it by Insanity, it sings to the wild droning tune—to the accompaniment of the wooden club upon the crumbling window-sill—its rhymeless hymn of hate. Faces nearly as ghastly as the singer's appear at and crowd the windows of the Barracks. And in time to the crazy chant; the crazy buildings, the mud-walled and paved courtyard begin to shake with the measured stamping of the prisoners naked feet:

"What for the Man that made of Arthur,
Thomas, Chauncey, Dee, O'Brien;
Brown and Somers, Davys, Brenon,
Custance, Trevor, Ricketts, Blanchard;
Foltringham, Bellayse and Bidmead;
Jones and Kirby, Evans, Foljambe—
Meat for a Turkish Hound?"

The place is thick with dust now; men's lungs are choked and oppressed by it.... They stamp—nothing can stop them stamping in time to the blows of the stool-leg on the window-sill of the room where lies the shapeless body of the comrade whom the asâyisi have beaten into pulp.

"What for the deil that killed Ted Ullathorne—"

* * * * * * *

The wild song breaks off here, as the madman ducks below the level of the window-sill—and a cry of rage goes up from a hundred throats as he rises again, with the disfigured body in his arms, its head lolling helplessly beneath his own.... Then—a German Army revolver cracks—and with blood pouring over the face that is still laughing dreadfully, Govan, with his awful burden, reels back into the room....

III

The voice of a German officer breaks in, giving a sharp order in Prussian-flavoured Turkish. There is a rush of zabtiehs and postas to the door of the building where the madman is.... As they jostle in the filthy entry, the boots of those who have got in first, thunder on its crazy stairs; and savage shouts and the tumult of a desperate struggle break out in the sordid room where Govan—bleeding from a bullet-wound in the head—but equal to a dozen men in the strength of his insanity—stands over the disfigured corpse laid out upon a dirty sack.

In the mud courtyard below, as Hamid Bey, with the German officers; his following and escort of police are retreating discreetly backwards to the vantage of the courtyard gate—a prisoner with a savage curse, dashes a handful of muddy orange-peel full in the livid face of Hamid. The Bey, smothered with filth and choking with rage, jerks his revolver from its holster, and promptly scatters the offender's brains.

Were the Bey unaccompanied, a volley from the Winchesters of his escort would silence for all time the rioters about him. But the German commander has previously informed him that on the morrow the War prisoners under his jurisdiction at Shechem will be deported for purposes of exchange....

Wild shouts, and British cheers break out.... Old War-slogans are heard again.... There is a furious rush of naked feet, but the Military Police and the postas of the guard beat back the unarmed mutineers with rifle-butts, and drive them back on either side, clubbing and kicking them. But less because of this the tumult is quelled than because a tall, ragged man with long tawny hair and beard has rushed from the archway of one of the Barrack buildings; and bringing, in this desperate hour, the authority of the priest to reinforce the influence of the friend and helper, exhorts, implores, commands the maddened prisoners to submit to the brutal authority they have no power to resist.

They are not cowed, but they obey. The clenched hands drop whatever missiles they have chanced to seize on,—their owners, in a storm of kicks, curses and blows with the rifle-butt, are herded back into the Barracks by their guards.

Barney, the jester, for once at a loss for a gag, huddles on a sack half-filled with straw on one of the wooden platforms,—six feet wide and two above the floor—a couple of which, running parallel, longitudinally divide each room. Divided into sections by upright planks, each section of platform accommodates or discommodes six War Prisoners. Perhaps Barney's room, and others on the upper floors are a thought less vile in flavour than these on the lower storeys. He smokes his last remaining fag, then whistles a dreary ragtime, staring through the barred window in front of him at the unbarred window of a room that is over the courtyard gate....

It is the window of the Commandant's office: the bare, seldom-used room where, on Sundays, as a signal favour,—the priest has been allowed to celebrate Mass and hold a Bible-class, and on rare occasions an impromptu smoking-concert has been given. It is full of Turkish postas in khaki, and the braided blue of the Osmanli gendarmerie. It is at first not possible to get a glimpse of what is going on inside, but in obedience to some order the window is cleared of the bodies blocking it.... Now it can be made out that the officers are Hamid Bey and the German general, seated with the secretary and aide at a table, before which—with two troopers of Mounted Police behind him, stands a tall, pale, emaciated man with long red-gold hair and beard.

The man seems to be answering a series of interrogations. He asserts, he denies emphatically, he pleads, but he does not cringe. Driven to silent frenzy by the difficulty of seeing, and the doubtfulness of the trend of the events that are taking place in the room over the gateway, Barney looks at his neighbour, the Sergeant of the R.F.C.

"Sergeant!"

"Eh?"

The Flight Sergeant's broad hands are sheltering his eyes as he lies on his stomach on the platform. The little folding binoculars that magnify by 20 are solving for their owner the problem of the Commandant's Room.

"D'yer pipe wot's goin' on? In the office over the gytew'y? Where 'Amid, blarst 'im! an' the two German orficers is settin' at the table and the Father standin' up in front? ..."

"Ay. They're playin' a scene out o' the Old Testament!" says the Flight Sergeant, with a sarcastic twitch of a muscle in his thin cheek.

"Wod'jer call it? ..." Barney breathes hard....

"The Scapegoat!"

"The 'ow much? ..."

"The Scapegoat. The beast the ancient Jews burdened with the sins of the congregation—and drove into the Wilderness every year. Only—the Padre's the Scapegoat—in this case."

"'Oo? ... Not Father Forbis?"

"Father Forbis right enough! 'Left—turn. Quick—march. Party—shon!'" mimics the Sergeant, as the high fair head and stern aquiline profile of the priest, with a zabtieh's fezzed head before, and another behind him,—passes across the field of vision limited by the frame of the window, and by the opening of a door an angle of light is thrown on the whitewashed office wall. "Now the sira-châwush is ordering out the Prison Guard escort.... It's all over.... They're taking him away! ..."

"Dismissed after interrygation.... That's all.... Cheero! In a minnit 'e'll come back through the yard-gyte an' go to 'is quarters as gay as a bloomin' bird...."

Barney defends his opinion with desperate optimism. But his heart is sinking leadenly and a lump is in his throat.

"All serene! Have it your own way. You'll see which is right of us!" The Sergeant cautiously raises himself up. "Do you hear the escort's looted British boots trampin' down the stairs? Now they'll either turn in here or march out at the Main Entrance. And if they do that, there'll be no Mass for the Catholics on Sunday morning—and no Prayers for the rest of us when Mass is through. And no one to get us the allowance from the Consul. And a dog's death for the sick, ay! and a dog's burial. There! ... Do you hear? ... That's the outside gate shutting..."

"Yus. O my Gawd! Shall we ever see 'im agyne?"

The inner gate of the Barrack courtyard has not opened. The sentries posted right and left of it maintain their position unmoved. But the groaning of rusty bolts in stone grooves, and the sound of the ponderous outer gate of the Main Entrance opening and slamming, falls, heavy as a clod of churchyard clay, on the hearts of many men.

For their priest, their helper, their counsellor and friend has gone from his place among them, and the blank he leaves is beyond mere words to express. And even worse than the sense of loss is the cruel uncertainty. Wondering, conjecturing, they lie on their verminous benches as the long hot Palestine day creeps to the sunset hour. The prayer-call from the mosques heralds no supper. Prisoners who resent massacre and villainous usage must, in the opinion of the Bey, have been too lavishly fed. The soldiers of the guard divide the beans in oil; and Barney Mossam, tightening his belt, is more than ever certain that Virtue, outside the walls of the T.R. Drury Lane—is not a game that pays....

The breeze freshens, the great bats come out to steal fruit, and the lesser ones to hunt moths and mosquitoes. Night suddenly unfolds her wings—and down comes the Dark. The jackals howl on the confines of the town, and the pariah dogs bay hideously. The Turkish equivalent for Lights Out! is sounded by the prison boruzan. Silver clear, the trumpets and bugles of the German-Turkish garrison challenge the echoes of Ebal and Gerizim. The radiant Hosts of Heaven come forth, and the moon, in her last quarter, hangs over the Hills of Gilead.

Sleep has come to the prisoners. The mud walls shake with their snoring. Only a few are wakeful. The Flight Sergeant is one of these. Towards the middle of the night a 'plane goes over Shechem:

"A raiding or reconnoitring hydro from some carrier in the Mediterranean? No! There's no rattling from the floats. It is a land machine...."

The airman leaves the crowded bench, and steals to the window. In the white effulgence of the moon all objects stand out clear. The German look-out with the telescope on the minaret of the Great Mosque of el Kebir.... The hooded searchlight with its dozing and waking guardians, on the balcony lower down.... A little figure moving on the ragged shoulder of Ebal.... A child? ... No! a woman—scrambling up from limestone terrace to terrace.... He forgets her, for, with the deep, vibrating song that he remembers—into the field of his vision swims The Two-Faced Nightingale....

At about a thousand feet up, she circles smoothly above Shechem. The search-ray from the balcony of the Great Mosque slashes at her viciously. Its fellow from the flank of Gerizim, leaps out, but sinks down again. Her pilot fires an orange light—and the scimitars of radiance from the Mosque and the Mount return to their scabbards; no strings of green rockets explore for the range of her—and no shells from the anti-aircraft guns in the Square of the Khan scream up at her winged shape....

As the biplane hovers against the jewel-bright blue of the Eastern night, the little Zeiss glasses tell their owner that her pilot has a native observer. A big Arab in a striped mantle, and headcloth bound by a rope.... Now her pilot fires a second orange light, drops his weighted despatch-bag, banks and climbs, launching at a dizzy height into a descent of sweeping spirals.... Evidently he is going to land somewhere in the neighbourhood of Shechem....

There is silence as the engine is cut out.... The big 'plane dives out of sight behind the shoulder of Ebal, where the lowest tiers of greyish-yellow limestone terraces are merged in the sandy, rolling plain....

The Flight Sergeant holds his breath and waits, his eyes glued to the binoculars. In a wonderfully short space of time the aëroplane, a powerful tractor biplane of D.H.6 type, climbs into his field of vision,—rises in wide, masterly spirals, banks, turns and flies away Westwards,—leaving the Flight Sergeant wondering with his chin upon the window-sill....

For the Two-Faced Nightingale has shed her observer, the big man in the striped Arab abâyi and roped kuffiyeh. Puzzled, the Flight Sergeant creeps noiselessly back to his place on the wooden platform, and lies awake, chewing the cud of mystery, for the rest of the long miserable night.

IV

Dawn brings surprise to him, and the other War prisoners of the Barracks. After the distribution of the morning half-brick of gritty black bread, they are given a second ration, and told to get ready, as they are all going away.

To this end they are presently mustered in the courtyard, carrying their various packs and bundles. Sick and well, unwashed, haggard, unshorn; on naked feet, or feet that are bandaged with the remnants of puttees. Some in tattered khaki tunics, others in cast-off German or Turkish jackets; many bareheaded, others covered with German military caps or broken sun-helmets,—as sorry a collection of scarecrows as Turco-German neglect and brutality can make of two hundred and twenty brave men.... A Turkish bimbashi of infantry, attended by a châwush, gravely pretends to inspect the French and British prisoners. In the name of his Empire he bids them farewell. Some try to raise a feeble cheer when both sets of big wooden gates are thrown open,—and they see a string of some half-dozen German motor-lorries waiting in the sunny road. Sick and well, they are marched forth under guard and packed into these vehicles,—those unable to stand being carried out by postas. Then, followed by some weeping wives, the Arabs, Jews and Armenians, chained neck to neck in double file,—are led away—a disconsolate procession, bound for no man knows where....

Even as they leave the foul place of their captivity, the Barracks is filled from wall to wall by an entering battalion of Turkish Reservist Rifles, part of a Brigade hastily summoned by Von Kressenstein from the Caucasus, to be launched on the journey to Mespot, and now brought down here. Swarthy, hairy men, armed with the old long Martini, some covered with the fez, others with the drill enverieh, some shod with sandals and leggings, others with German Army boots.

Thus, the Railway-line from Shechem not being available—it was extensively damaged a little while back by British bombing aircraft—and on the repair of it many of these War prisoners have bitterly toiled!—they are bumped over villainously bad roads to railhead at Nakr—en route for the fierce red city of Aleppo, where as they are now aware and Heaven knows how they have got the knowledge!—the sick and disabled are to be picked out for Exchange to England, via Smyrna—and the able-bodied (such as they are!) sent north to Belemkh, a station in the Taurus Mountains, headquarters for gangs of War prisoners working on the rails....

The villainous road that buckjumps through the tumbled Palestine landscape is crowded with Turkish Field, Horse, and Mountain Artillery, conjured back from Mesopotamia by Von Kressenstein, and rushing forward to the defence of Junction Station South. Battery after battery rolls by in the blinding dust; guns and waggons pulled, and riders carried by tough Anatolian horses, bitterly ill-used and evidently poorly fed. But not the roll of iron-shod wheels and the clatter of iron-shod hoofs, nor the roar of human voices talking in many Oriental dialects, nor the curses and jeers and viler things that are hurled at the prisoners in the jolting lorries, can shut out the savage, irregular thudding of Turkish Krupp 75 mms., Turkish Mountain Artillery, and machine-guns; and the steady, dogged slogging of British Royal Garrison Artillery motor-howitzers; British Field Artillery eighteen-pounders; and the clat-clat-clatter of Lewis machine-guns, waging bitter battle in the west and south....

At Nakr, where there is to be a delay of several hours, owing to the detrainment of forces from Mespot, they find a composite train of second and third-class compartments full of Turkish War Prisoner guards and their commanders, and horse-trucks, packed with British officers, waiting under steam for a German Staff Deputy Director of War Prisoners,—and a Controller of Transport,—who are going to Aleppo and thence to Smyrna to arrange the conditions of their exchange. The British officers are the recent captives of the stone-prison and the wired enclosure at Shechem. Very sunburnt are they:—very haggard, weary, thirsty, shabby and ill-shaven, and burdened with tattered valises and heterogeneous odds and ends of personal property, but bright of eye, elastic of bearing—full of the indomitable spirit that from the days of Agincourt and long before them—has been the birthright of their warlike race.

Crowding like schoolboys at the half-doors of the padlocked and guarded horse-trucks, they shout cheery greetings, salutations and scraps of information to the rank-and-file, clustered like swarming bees on the grilling stretch of platform beside the iron track....

"Hear the guns, W. and S.? Putting the wind up Djemal, aren't we?"

"Halloa! Mossam of B—— Company, my late Platoon! I've not seen you since I launched you with a note to the O.C. the water-camels at Rashid.... Have you got hold of a new song, or are you still denying relationship with Potsdam?"

"Aren't you Jollife, you chap with the Turkish fez and your eye in a sling? My Orderly in front of Gaza! What price that leg of roast goat with the skin and hair on? I'll bet you'd tuck into it quick enough now—if you got the chance!"

A graver, older officer leans out and calls to the soldiers:

"Can any of you men give us news of Father Forbis? We've been on the look-out for him since we heard we were to be moved."

"The Padre! ... Where's the Padre? ... What are you shaking your heads about? Damn you, you hairy brute! Why do you savage the man? ... What the hell has he done to you? ..."

Thus the ringing British voice, sharp and acrid with indignation. For Barney Mossam, screwing himself up to answer, has been clubbed by a posta's rifle-butt full in the mouth. He spits out blood and broken teeth, and grins pitiably; and for his sake and his comrades', the officers address them no more. Now the Turkish Station-Master and the German R.T.O. who is his master, appear on the platform, as the Deputy Director of War Prisoners and the Controller of Imperial Transport and their escorts arrive on the scene in German Army motor-cars. They board the dirty first-class compartment specially reserved for them. Their orderlies and servants stow away their luggage, the signal falls—and the train—with a non-commissioned officer on the platform of the corridor-car conveying the German officials—armed with binoculars and sharply on the look-out for British bomb-carrying aircraft, jolts over the warped, unevenly-laid metals for El Fuda Junction and Deraa, the first stages of its journey North....

An Arab horseman, stationary beside the track with two mounted companions, controlling his fiery dapple-grey mare with a master-hand upon her jingling bridle—resplendent with the gold and silver jewellery lavished on horse-furniture by the wealthier Bedwân, gravely salutes with his long lance tufted with sable ostrich feathers, as the composite train jolts out of Nakr. And the Deputy Director of War Prisoners and the Controller of Imperial Transport, sitting opposite one another in their dusty first-class compartment, with tall tumblers of Munich beer, (iced, in this land of dust and drouth) on a table fitted between them ... smoking the fat cigars of Hamburg and discussing German Military Supremacy and German World-politics—gravely finger the brims of their sun-helmets in recognition of the salute....

"Wer ist es! Who now, is that Arab? ..." asks the Controller, whose bulging, light-grey eyes are sharp-sighted behind their tinted glasses. "A personage of some consequence, by the gold embroidery on his burnus judging; the gold twist in his head-rope, the gold-hilted sword in his waist-cloth—and the also-with-precious-metal-enriched trappings of his Blauschimmel mare."

"He," the Deputy Director replies, "is one of the lesser Emirs of the Irregular Cavalry of the King of the Hedjaz, who—as the Herr General Controller knows,—secretly under British leadership—upon the City of Mecca seized in June and annexed Akaba in July."

"And is now wrecking trains on the Hedjaz Rail, containing German Ottoman forces, under the very noses of our Allied patrols,—blowing Turkish Railway-bridges with charges of nitro-glycerine sky-high—and in the North and East our rearguards harassing. Donnerwetter! Why is this rogue of an Arab not in fetters? What makes he, hanging about trains containing military officials of the Fatherland?"

"Because, Herr General, the Emir Fadl Anga and his followers are of those who the solid worth and philanthropic aims of Germany recognise, and scorn the windy emptiness and rapacious greed of England, the Great Swashbuckler.... They what we Germans have done for the Turkish Army also see—and are convinced that under similar auspices, Arabia, hand in hand with Egypt and India, might become a powerful and war-capable State. Emir Fadl Anga estimates the number of his party—headed by a nephew of the Mecca Sherif—as very considerable. 'They are many,' he in his Oriental hyperbole, says, 'as the stars of Heaven, or the Desert sands!' Also, information has by him been supplied, which, had the difference between German and Arabic clock-time at our Shechem Headquarters been better understood—might have resulted in a Handstreich very gratifying to Imperial Majesty at Berlin. The officer guilty of this so gross ignorance was brought to a drumhead Court Martial and degraded, the Herr General will be pleased to hear! However, the Emir's intentions were agreed to be excellent, and he has now brought us a basket of carrier-pigeons from his Chief, the nephew of the Sherif—and the Emir is to convey back with him of these birds a similar basket, trained at the Nazareth Headquarters of the Herr General-in-Chief, Liman von Sanders—as soon as the pigeon-master-Sergeant with them arrives.... Also, this is good beer! What does the Herr General say to another bottle?"

"Ja, ja. Mit Vergnügen. It is hellishly hot! ..."

The Emir Fadl Anga, ingenious purveyor of genuine but post-dated intelligence—salutes gravely, and wheels his dapple-grey about as the composite train bumps out of Nakr. A muscle in his lean, dark cheek jerks, and his thin lips under the Arab beard smile scornfully—as his glance falls on the rank-and-file of the War Prisoners—clustered on the platform beside the iron way....

They are hot, faint and weary under the bite of the sun, amidst this jumble of naked hills, on whose chalk and limestone knees they have driven elaborate systems of trenches for the enemy, under the lash of the loaded hide-whips. But Barney Mossam, with a split top-lip and a scarlet gap where several front teeth are missing, is making a gallant effort to buck the others. In the middle of a spirited rendering of "I HAVEN'T seen the Kaiser for a VERY long time. He's the leader of a German Band, an' he AIN'T no cousin of mine!"—breaks in the fierce interruption of an Arab voice, bitterly abusive:

"You—O you! Sons of farrâshes prostitute concubines!—silence that brother of howling apes!"

Thrusting his lance-butt in the embroidered leathern bucket, Fadl Anga leans low from his saddle—appears to pick up something, no doubt a pebble—rises erect, and hurls the missile savagely into the brown of the crowd of men. It hits Barney, who picks it up, and white teeth flash in the black beards of the other mounted Arabs, and a laugh goes up from the Turkish guards, who are smoking and chatting and eating water-melons, as the supposed emissary of the traitorous nephew of the Sherif of Mecca touches his mare with the sharp edge of the broad copper stirrup—and with a ringing shout of "Allah ho Akbar!" gallops down the rocky road towards Shechem, followed by his two companions, and leaving Barney Mossam gaping—with an embroidered Arab purse—heavy with Turkish silver coins, clutched in his hand....

Long before the composite train went jolting out of Nakr the keen grey eyes under the kuffiyeh of Fadl Anga—eyes less miserable now that by day and night sharp danger gives a spice to life, so empty void of Katharine—have assured their owner, Edward Yaill,—that Julian Forbis is not with the officers in the cattle-trucks any more than he is with the men clustered like swarming bees upon the grilling platform, beside the iron track.

V

The weather changes before dawn. Soggy clouds roll inland from the sea, hide the sky of Eastern azure, blot out the shining faces of the stars and invest the pale beauty of the Queen Planet of Night with the flowing sable veil of a recent War Widow. It has come on to rain—a slashing downpour of Palestinian intensity, under which the wadis speedily become shallow cataracts of khaki water—the trenches slashed in the terraced Judæan Hills, and manned by Turks, Germans, or British Crusaders—mere troughs of sandy or chalky mud.

Sangars ramparted with boulders may offer some practical assurance against shell-splinters or bullets, but against rain like this they offer no security. Bivouacs built of stones, and roofed with ground-sheets may in some degree keep out the rain, but they freely admit the cold. A Scotch mist, clammy, freezing and blinding in its damp opaqueness blankets the Hills of Ephraim, and broods over the Maritime Plain, as on the edge of one of the limestone terraces that fringe the robe of Mount Ebal,—a big, brawny Arab sits—nursing a badly-ricked ankle, and swearing in the fruitiest vernacular of his adopted land.

It is lucky for the Arab in the brown camel-hair shirt, striped abâyi and roped white linen head-cloth, that he has no audience but the scorpions and lizards sheltering from the slashing downpour under the grey-white boulders—as he rocks himself and nurses his ricked ankle—and curses his luck. Presently, as the Scotch mist lifts, and the plain is irradiated by the watery moonlight, he sets his teeth for an effort and crawls to where a bundle tied in native cloth, and a long, metal-tipped Arab walking-staff lie on the chalky, puddled plain where they fell when he dropped them from the machine at the beginning of the volplane, and screwed himself as the plain rushed up, to wait the throttling down of the engine—the long, smooth final glide—the flattening out following the pilot's raising of the lever—and the slight jarring impact of the thick-tyred wheels with the ground....

"Now jump!" the sharp, strident voice of the Egyptian called when the expected shock seemed imminent, and John Hazel set his teeth and jumped promptly. Aware even before he crashed to ground that the word had been given too soon. Even as he sprawled on the chalky plain, with all the wind knocked out of his body—the machine just missed landing on top of him. How he rolled out of the way of the thick squat wheels, and the steel framework of the under-carriage of the biplane, a powerful and heavy machine of D.H.6 type—he does not know now....

Sick, faint and shaken, he picked himself up, but not before Essenian, lithe as an acrobat, freed himself from the safety-belt, jumped out, adjusted the controls, and swung the big propeller. As the engine started he leaped back to his seat, looked round at Hazel, shouted "Good-bye!" and opening the throttle, raced over the plain, and rushed up into the air as though pursued by a fusillade of machine-gun bullets.

"Damn and blast the Egyptian beast!" John snarls, and, as the ricked joint rapidly swells to cricket-ball size, swears again, and thinks as he rubs it, "Might have guessed he was out for some treachery or other. Though how could I?—until he signalled to the enemy over Shechem by firing the Verey light, and gave away the whole show by dropping a message-bag! Making me swear before the start by all we Hazels hold most holy, never by word or sign to let out anything I might see him do. Consequently I'm his confederate—tarred with the same brush. And now I know he murdered Captain Usborn! It was his own revolver-bullet I showed him at the Club. If ever I get out of here I stand some chance of getting shot myself for being back at the Front on the quiet when I'm supposed to be on leave in Alex. But anyhow I hope I'll see Essenian Pasha get his dose of British lead before I do. Unless I get a chance to settle him myself. Wouldn't I let the beggar have it! Right in the neck—where Winnie wore the beads. But what a flier! Holy Smoke! what an A1. flier! Unless he's a devil, which I trend to believe!—there's not a man his match."

The rain that began at two a.m. by his wrist-watch (hidden under a broad band of untanned sheep-leather, laced on John's big wrist by a slender thong) shows no sign of abating. Fitfully and at intervals through the night, those guns in the west and south have held debate. Now they begin again with redoubled energy. John has seen as the D.H.6 travelled through the clear azure Palestine night, how the enemy's line has been thrust back from Gaza towards Jaffa. Now with a great blowing-up of Turco German ammunition-dumps, Junction Station,—key of the northern railway system—announces to the echoing hills the success of British arms.

"Good for us!" John chuckles, rather drearily—as the sullen sky in the south is illuminated by Aurora Borealis-like effects of orange, green and crimson—and Brock-like sheaves of flame spurt from the horizon to descend in gold and silver showers. "Djemal Pasha's Fourth Army Corps seems to be getting it rather badly. We're putting the breeze up Von Kressenstein, unless I much mistake...."

Even as John Hazel hugs the thought, the train containing Djemal Pasha's German Corps Commander is rushing towards Jerusalem. The Turco-German Army, broken in two, is retiring eastwards upon the Holy City and north-west through Ramleh towards Tul Keram. The brigades that rolled into Shechem overnight—rested and fed, are rolling out again. Fresh batteries from the Caucasus, diverted from Mesopotamia, new battalions of infantry of the Redif and Mustafiz, and brigades of irregular Cavalry from Kurdistan and Northern Albania, are swarming down to reinforce the Nizam and its Ikhtiât.

Dawn comes with cessation of the freezing, pelting rain and the sun glows fiery red through the curtain of leaden-coloured mists that yet hang over the Mediterranean. Wounded and stragglers on foot, German Army motor-lorries laden with escaping Teuton officers, begin to arrive at the Holy City. It is whispered in Jerusalem the Weary that the days of Ottoman rule in Palestine are numbered, that the German, Turkish and Austrian officials and residents are even now preparing to quit the town. And indeed German depots are hurriedly emptied; sugar sold as cheap as the dirt that is in it—long held-up flour and cereals disposed of in haste. From the high towers of the City and from the Mount of Olives one can see the roads that are muddy now—and will be dusty presently, crowded with lorries, carts and pack-animals carrying fugitives with their baggage, munitions and essential stores, north to Shechem or east to Jericho....

John, unaware of this, yet senses great happenings, as he stands propped on his Arab staff, cursing the temporary uselessness of a man with a sprained ankle-joint. He must lie up somewhere until the anguish abates and the cricket-ball reduces. A hut—there are clusters of drab-white specks, indicating a village on the northern fringes of the stretch of plain—boulder-strewn, bush-dotted, thinly grassed, thick with tufts of mandrake and tall blue Campanulas, and knee-deep in growth of late-blooming, white and yellow asphodel—on which Essenian elected to come down.... Westwards towards the sea there are other, larger villages. South there is a broad defile, curving east between humpy limestone hills, leading, John knows, to the town of Shechem. Over him rises the huge and bulky Shape of Ebal, three thousand six hundred and ninety feet above sea-level. From terrace to terrace, a path winds up to her towering rounded crest between hedges of tamarisk, broad-leaved grey-green cactus, and prickly pear plentifully laden with knobby red fruit. On her summit the map has shown John the ruins of an ancient fortress. Near the top, on this, the west side—stands a little whitewashed cupola surmounting a wall of mud and stone encircling a Moslem well.

Water is there; and hidden away with his revolver and cartridges on John's big person, is a case of First Aid necessaries, a small flask of brandy and some meat-lozenges in case of need like this. He determines to crawl up to the place of the well, hide, and doctor himself for a day, or even two days until the sprain is reduced, and he can get about.

"Hard luck," he mutters to himself, "but there's no good in grousing.... Now buck up and help me—O all you Big Old Men!"

But the Big Old Men give no sign, and their descendant, shouldering his bundle (to bear out his role of Arab there ought to be a donkey or a woman to carry it), limps, leaning on his staff and sweating with pain, up the narrow pathway leading between the hedges of cactus and prickly pear.

Blood-red, the Sun rises over the distant horizon, the glittering drops upon the leaves, the drying puddles under John's naked, slippered feet are reddened by the reflection. From the broad, prickly leaves the wet begins to steam; the tufts of snapdragon, pink and crimson, white and yellow and orange; and the blue campanulas, growing in the tissues of the rock, stand gallantly upright, refreshed by the dampness; the lily-like asphodel exhales its delicate, characteristic smell.

There are goats on the Mount, John notices, presently. Their droppings are thick upon the path he climbs. He hears them bleating, and sees them, feeding under the ruins of the Fortress. Indeed, the next wind of the path brings him out upon a ledge where a heavy-uddered female is cropping the thyme that grows there, with a jet-black kid nuzzling at her side. If one could catch the mother, thinks John, the question of subsisting here for days would be easily settled. Prickly pears are eatable.... Goat's milk is good.... There were lots of milch-goats in the caves of Sheria, and modern Crusaders, dry with the drouth of battle, and as yet uncertain whether the enemy had not poisoned the wells—milked the goats into their tin hats and other receptacles, and drank and were mightily refreshed. If only—even as John licks his lips, the too-nimble dairy, skipping from ledge to ledge, recedes from view. Bleating, the little black kid scrambles after her—and the Moslem well near the summit of Ebal seems farther off than it did before.

John sees now a path, branching off to his right hand, which may lead to the hut or cave of the goatherd. He strikes out upon it, and makes some progress, until the curve of it, trending southwards, suddenly shows him a narrow road, deeply rutted with broad-tyred wheels, and pitted with hoof-prints, leading up the Mount from its base on the south-eastern side. The erect brown figure of a sentry—reduced by distance to the size of a doll—stands out against the background. A Turkish Artillery waggon is jolting up the steep roadway.... John hears the panting of the toiling horses, the creak of the straining rope traces, the jingle of chains and the cracking of the drivers' thick-lashed whips....

From behind a bush he now looks down into a sangar built of boulders, sheltered at one end with green tarpaulin and full of Turkish machine-guns. The tarpaulin quivers with the snores of sleeping gunners, whose legs project beyond it, and from a nest of camouflage lower down the mountain, the blunt nose of a howitzer snuffs at the sky.

Still farther south a Field battery of Krupps has been posted on the flank of Ebal; the whinnying of horses eager for their morning barley and forage comes from a hollow where the Turks have stabled their teams, the smell of some aromatic burning wood spices the air with sweetness. Blue smoke columns up from fires of hidden bivouacs. There are picquets along the foothills, and on the plain are outposts. The Mount—except on the west and north whence danger is not apprehended—has been converted into a veritable wasps' nest.

Holding his breath, John Hazel turns, and noiselessly retraces his footsteps between the cactus hedges and along the path to where it first branched off. As he sets his lame foot gingerly upon it, he encounters a veiled native woman, toiling upwards, who carries—not an excessive burden in this land of laden women—a bundle of canes, and an empty gourd, and has a coarse jar of red earthenware balanced on her head.

Perhaps the earthen Jar contains water, or milk, or laban, that mixture of excessively sour milk with finely-chopped mint, peculiar to Syria. The bare idea intensifies John's thirst.

"O my mother!" he begins in quite passable Arabic: "In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate—"

"Ai—e!" The woman has started and dropped the gourd, and stands before him trembling, "What—what wouldst thou?"

"Somewhat to wet my throat. Thou lookest on a thirsty man. Hast thou, by any lucky chance, drink in the vessel?"

"The vessel is empty. See you, I have spoken truth!" She takes the jar from her veiled head and turns it upside down, and John's heart sinks to the bottom of his famished stomach. "May God relieve your need! ..."

"Allah favour thee! Black is my fortune. Thou seest," he thrusts out the swollen foot with the bulge at the side of the ankle-joint, "what evil has befallen me through a slip upon the Mountain side."

"It hurts thee? ..." He cannot see the hidden face, but in the faint voice there is a note of pity....

"Wallah! It hurts like very hell! Worse than the hurt is the lameness. Now hear! By the life of my head I say: If thou, being a woman, couldst help it somewhat! ... If thou knewest a place of shelter where I could lie and tend the hurt, and—and—have somewhat to eat and drink while it was mending, for this I would pay thee. By Allah! I am no beggar, I!"

The Fellaha thinks, while a little dusky hand holds the edges of her veil together. Then she says faintly:

"Ala râsi. I have—I know of a place of shelter. It is not very far from here. There thou couldst lie, it is a cave between two boulders and I would bring thee food and drink."

"Allah requite thee, O my sister! ..."

"Come, then, Sidi!" She returns her empty vessel to its place upon her head, with the deft, accustomed swing of the Eastern woman, and moves on before him, striking into another lateral path, a mere goat-track to the unpractised eye, that scores the mountain-side, running north. For perhaps a quarter of a mile her little bending figure hurries along and the tall Arab, leaning on his staff, hobbles painfully after. Where the cave between two boulders is—and less a cave than a hollow under a projecting ledge of nummulite limestone—he finds her waiting him....

"In here, Sidi!"

"Call me not Sidi! I am no person of degree." John thinks it well to try on the woman the story he has invented. "No person of degree am I. Only Ali Zaybak the Bedawi, a man who once had three camels, and ten sheep, and five goats, and a father and two brothers, and a wife also; and now has none; my brothers, my wife and two camels being killed and all the rest lost...."

"May the Dispenser of Mercies atone to thee, O Ali Zaybak!" says the thin faded voice from under the woman's veil. "How came about thy loss? From whom dost thou claim the blood-wreaks?"

"From the Inglizi, (English) the thrice-accursed ones! who came flying over our village—we dwelling in the Shadow of Allah in the caves of the Wadi Sheria—I and my brothers having bought exemption from service with the Army of the Osmanli (Turks) with the savings of all our lives."

"Ay, ay," the thin voice assents, bitterly. "Few and small were the gold and silver coins remaining on thy wife's head-tire, when the Dispensers of Exemption had signed thy card."

"Verily, Allah be my witness! and it is a black shame to take the money that was the woman's marriage-gift. We were then very poor—but we had the three camels and the sheep and the goats also—though the beasts were little and thin. Then came the War, rolling all about us—with marchings and counter-marchings of hosts of men—and we sent my brothers south so that they might sell to the Inglizi soldiers before Gaza, all the olives stored in old oil-tins, and all the oranges, and tobacco, and grape-treacle, and figs of last year, that the Almani and Osmanli had not taken away...." John cannot for the life of him restrain this vitriolic touch. "And they went, and made much money—the Inglizi being fools and wealthy, moreover—as all these sons of Sheitan are. This was in the month Shbât; and coming home my two brothers encountered Fate, in the person of a Commander of the Almani (Germans), who seized upon the young men—they being far from their native village and not having their warakas of Exemption on them—and sent them to dig trenches at the Bir-es Saba Works."

"A bitter tyranny the Most High beheld, and will avenge upon the doer!"

"Then there was fighting at the Wady Sheria—because having taken the strong place of Bir-es Saba, ay! and the ridges down to the sea, the British desired the Place of Good Wells." John is beginning to believe in Ali Zaybak, the Bedawi farmer, to the point of getting hot over that individual's fictitious woes.... "Came they—they came, and were as hornets about us, their killis bursting with stench, and smoke, and ruin—and their Devil-Birds fighting the Devil-Birds of the Almani, and driving them down out of the air. One dropped an egg of Eblis that killed two of our camels, and broke the leg of the third. My father cried out on Allah and fell face downwards.... So my wife cried out and fell, and when I went to lift them, lo!—they were dead.... Yet was there no wound on either.... Wallah! Upon neither was there a wound! ..."

"Well do I believe thee. I have seen Death come after that fashion many times since the beginning of this War. What more, O Ali Zaybak? ..."

"This,—that my goats and sheep being gone from me—for the Osmanli took them when they retired before the Inglizi—I have come to Shechem to seek my brothers, if haply they be alive and there! ..."

"Ay, but why seek them on the Mount of Cursing, and not within the town? ..."

Woman-like, she has put her little wasted, dusky finger on the weak spot in John's trumped-up story. Having done it, she goes on, as he racks his brain for a sufficiently-convincing figment:

"Thou wilt do this to-morrow, O Ali Zaybak the Bedawi, when the swelling of thy joint hath abated and thou art rested and fed. So creep in here between the stones—there is a sheepskin thou canst lie on—and in somewhat less than an hour I will come back to thee with food and drink."

"May Allah prolong thy years, O woman!" says John with the extravagant hyperbole and the sing-song inflection proper to Oriental gratitude. "May thy fortune be doubled upon thee, and, fair as thou art already, may the radiance of thy beauty out-dazzle the full moon!"

She gives a queer little rustling laugh behind the folds of her coarse, yellowish head-cloth.

"Sweet words, sweet words from a widower bereaved in Shbât! Belike," she cackles again, "thou hast come to the Mount of Cursing in search of another bride? Dost thou lust for the Unrevealed? See, then, O Ali Zaybak! what beauty hides behind this screen! ..."

And accompanying the words with a swift revealing movement, she whisks back the heavy veil from that mutilated left side....

"My God!" John very nearly exclaims, bleaching under his natural mahogany-colour, for a man old in War and hardened to the sight of wounded men may yet sicken at the sight of a woman mutilated like this. But he swallows the exclamation, and substitutes:

"I—am sorry! May Allah pity thee, poor soul! ..."

"And increase the wisdom of the Sidi! ..."

The Fellaha is re-veiled and between the pendent linen folds comes her little rustling whisper; chilling the blood of the pretended Ali Zaybak, under the now nearly vertical rays of the blazing Syrian sun....

"Who, desiring Secret Intelligence for his War-Chiefs of the British Army, ventures into the midst of the enemy, disguised as an Arab and alone! ..."

The words drop, coldly as lumps of hail, on the adventurous heart of the man. Discovered, and in the first hour by a Syrian peasant woman.... He forgets his pain, and drawn to his full height, fixes his black eyes threateningly upon her hidden face.

"What sayest thou? Hast thou no fear?"

"None—of a British officer, nor of a British soldier!"

The words, spoken in English with a Syrian-French accent, are such an unexpected shock, that John jolts temporarily back into his own adopted tongue:

"How the hell—ahem! How did you know—I'm—what you say I am?"

"Because" the voice is soft and refined, though it is thin and toneless: "Because—sir!—when I showed you my face—you did not—spit like a Mohammedan, or laugh like a German! And who"—the voice suggests the shadow of a mocking smile—"who but an Englishman would venture here—so ill-disguised and speaking such bad Arabic, and carry himself so confidently as almost to deceive me—in spite of the testimony of my two good ears—and my one very good eye."

The poor face she has shown to John is blind on that shattered left side. He knows a thrill of pity even as he asks:

"You won't give me away? ..."

"If 'give away' means to betray—no, I will not betray you!"

"Thanks. You're out Scouting on your own," says John, "unless I'm very much mistaken?" He adds still in English, as she lets this broad hint pass.... "Since we're to be pals of sorts, do you mind telling me your name? ..."

She gives her faint little whispering laugh.

"Ay, surely. It is Ummshni.... 'Mother Ugly' in your English tongue. In Arabic, 'Mother of Ugliness.' ...!"

"But—but I can't call you that! ..."

"You must. It is my name here. For you I have no other."

"Then shake hands, little Ummshni," John says promptly, and thrusts out his own huge, brown right hand.

"Need we?" She hesitates....

He says, encouragingly:

"Just once. To seal the bargain and show we're pals!"

"Once then...."

She hesitates an instant more. Now from enveloping folds, a small, shrunken, dusky hand steals out, and is engulfed in John's. And then a breathless cry, not loud, nor shrill, but terrible in its dire, agonised intensity bursts from the mouth of the distorted face that is mercifully hidden by the veil....

"God of my fathers! Who art thou?" The gasped-out words are once more Arabic. "From whence didst thou get the Ring of the House of Hazaël? ... Thy face, too.... It is the face of Eli! Thy voice.... Do not deny it! ... Thou art of the Blood! ..."

"Since you know it already I'll tip you the garden truth. I'm John Benn Hazel, old Eli's grandson from London. But who in the name of—wonder—are you? ..."

"Thy—thy unhappy Cousin Esther!" The words come stumblingly, between terrible, dry sobs.... "Oh, do not check me. Let me weep! I have not for so long! ..."

"Now by—the whole blooming, blessed row of Big Old Men, back to the Very Biggest!" John says between his teeth, as leaning on his heavy staff he stands staring blankly down at a little heaving bundle of coarse and common feminine drapery that crouches at his big sandalled feet amidst the short thyme-scented grass, "This is—this is the cherry in the cocktail! Just when I'd begun to think I wouldn't carry through—comes along the very sort of little woman to help me! This isn't Coincidence or anything like it. This is—just—Fate! ..."

"Help thee?" Her sobs have abated, she lifts up her bowed, head. "In what manner can I help thee? I can feed thee, tend thy hurt and hide thee. But there is something more than these.... Tell me what thou wouldst do? ..."

"Save a man!" No one is near, but he whispers it, stooping over the little figure. "A War Prisoner they've got here. Get him out—and get him away! ..."

"Yes—yes! Willingly will I help thee. Hath an Hazaël ever failed to answer to the Call of the Blood?" The little dusky hand clutches at his brawny wrist. She rises, and her eager breath mingles with his, and an eye diamond-bright, black as his own, flashes between her veils.... "What strength I have—what cunning and courage—are thine, to the threshold of Death and beyond it. But—but, John, my cousin! If I help thee to free thy man—thou must needs deliver mine."

"I'm not sweet on conditions—they're things that handicap. Who's your man?" The tone is decidedly gruff.

"He is an English officer.... There is no other in Shechem since the big German petrol lorries rolled out this morning. For the Turks have sent them all away ... I heard, to Aleppo."

"The hell you say! Forgive me, little Esther, but this is—pretty rough! For I'm here—bad Arabic and all—on the track of a British War Prisoner."

"Tell me his name," says the thin rustling voice, shaken still with emotion....

"Julian Forbis.... Father Julian Forbis," John answers, and she falters:

"O my cousin! in thine hour of need and mine the Most High, Blessed be He! hath verily sent thee. For—for—thy man and my man—are one! Come now to the secret place where I dwell alone with my sorrow. There we can talk freely—it is safer than here. Thy hand on my shoulder—what a big hand, like that of our grandfather Eli! ... Lean on thy staff, but on me too. I am stronger than thou wouldst dream...."

VI

The line held yesterday by the Turco-German forces has bent northwards at its western extremity, and southwards at its eastern end. Jaffa, the ancient Port of Jerusalem, has been occupied by Allenby's forces. Junction Station, the key of the north, now being in British hands, the enemy's Army, cut in two, has retired partly east into the mountains towards Jerusalem, and partly northwards along the Coastal Plain. The nearest line upon which its several portions can re-unite is the line Tul-Keram, Shechem. Reports from the Royal Flying Corps indicate the intention of Djemal Pasha and the other Corps Commanders to evacuate Jerusalem and withdraw to organise on the line Tul-Keram, Shechem.

It being vital to obtain a hold of this invaluable artery of thoroughfare, which traverses the Judæan range from north to south from Shechem to Jerusalem,—our Advance has wheeled to the right, and struck into the Hills with the object of wresting from the enemy the Jerusalem-Shechem Road.

At the eastern end of the long fish-shaped valley, whose sides are shagged with olive-woods and running with springs, and in which lies Shechem, is a grassy, level expanse in the shape of an isosceles triangle—one of its longer sides being the road that runs east and west past the new Turkish Barracks, the Arsenal and the Hospital—and the other the road that—north of this—passing the Mohammedan Cemetery and the ancient Tombs that are upon the fringe of the limestone robe of Ebal, runs into an ancient Roman road, that completing the shape of the isosceles, goes north along the eastern flank of Mount Ebal to the little hamlet of Sichar, and south to the Holy City,—leaving on the left a Mohammedan well that has been built over the Tomb of Joseph, and some quarter of a mile farther on, a hillock shaded by mulberries and figs, and covered with ruins, enclosing Bir Samariyeh, or the Samaritan Woman's Well.

The top of the triangular patch of waste ground ends at the very gate of Shechem, being lost in the great mounds of immemorial ashes, brought down in ancient days from the Temple on Mount Gerizim. Wild fig and mulberry, olive and tamarisk—and thickets of the zizyphus set with formidable thorns, that give the tree its name of Spina Christi—make a shabby jungle of the Ash Heaps, haunted by kites, crows and owls, pariah-dogs and jackals, who come to feast where the offal and refuse of the town are thrown. Here, too, lepers congregate; sick animals are thrust to die, dead ones are thrown to bleach and putrefy; and sometimes—even before the War—bodies of people robbed and murdered, or too destitute of friends to be given burial—huddle amongst the rank weeds and tangled undergrowth, or lie stark and dreadful, with blind eyes beaten by the lashing rains of Palestine, or staring at its pitiless sun.

When Allied War Prisoners first came to the town of Shechem, the isosceles triangle of waste ground—its shortest side indicated by the road that runs by the Tomb of Joseph towards the Well of the Samaritaness—was enclosed within a twelve-foot double fence of German barbed-wire, for the keeping of certain French and British officers, who declined to give parole. These lived in Turkish Army tents and messed in a ramshackle wooden hut near the eastern end of the enclosure; their rations, such as they were, being brought from the Turkish Barracks twice a day. Those officers who gave parole, causing less trouble to the authorities—were somewhat better treated, it may be allowed. The old stone prison near the Suk was alloted as their quarters. They were permitted to take exercise within certain bounds, even to visit the Latin Fathers, and the headquarters of the Protestant Mission, and better their diet by making purchases in the town bazar. To-day, Shechem, with her numerous mosques and her flat-brown roofs embowered in orange and pomegranate-trees—is bursting full of Turkish troops, and their German military masters; and destined ere long to rival Tul Keram as an Army H.Q. No British War Prisoners are left in her since the exodus of early morning, save four Berkshire and Devon Yeomen lying desperately sick at the Turkish Hospital—two London Territorials, and three Indian troopers in the charitable care of the Sœurs de la Sainte Croix....

Ah, and the solitary captive of the leaky wooden shanty in the Wired Enclosure, from which the Turkish Army tents have been removed, leaving round yellow patches of parched and trampled grass. Saving the Bey, certain of his German friends, several Mounted Police, and a guard of infantry from the mud Barracks—no other persons in Shechem suspect that Father Julian Forbis did not leave yesterday for Aleppo with the other British officers,—though possibly that dust-like one, the Mother of Ugliness, may have a certain inkling of the truth.

Upon a native anghareb, a short-legged, palm-wood bed-frame with coarse sacking laced upon it, he lies within the hut that used to be the Mess. Although it leaks in the winter rains, its timbers are of solid oak, and its door is heavy, and secured on the outside by a huge wooden lock. A padlocked iron fetter on the priest's ankle is linked to a chain finishing in a ring, running on an iron bar,—the ends of which, being bent, have been driven into the corner-posts at the end of the hut that is farthest from the door. Having thus secured the prisoner, the bash-châwush of Mounted Police went away with his troopers and the escort. That was yesterday morning, possibly in the neighbourhood of nine o'clock. The common watch of gun-metal on the priest's wrist has stopped—as the result of brutal usage.... He can only calculate Time by the prayer-call from the mosques of the town....

No hint of the possible length of his confinement has been given, the bash-châwush being an old hand and quite thoroughly understanding the torture of Uncertainty. No food was brought the prisoner yesterday or to-day; they have not even given him water.... Nothing has passed the man's lips—since on that morning of the Bey's visit he broke fast with the thin boiled wheat-porridge and the black bread on which War Prisoners are fed.

Mere hunger he can endure.... As a Religious of a strict Order he is well inured to fasting. But the thirst, aggravated by mental distress, sleeplessness and anxiety, is torture. His lips are cracked, and his throat and tongue so dried and leathery, that the effort to speak above a whisper would be positive pain.

The two narrow apertures that serve as windows are some eight feet above the floor-level. It is not possible to see out of them. Through chinks and knot-holes in the walls of stout though ancient timbers—it might be possible to get a glimpse through the twelve-foot fence of barbed-wire—out upon the road running east from the gates of the city, and the road running north and east by the Wadi Farab to the Jordan Valley, and southwards from Shechem to Jerusalem.... But the man chained to the iron bar lies in a feverish stupor on the sacking of the anghareb. There are strange noises in his ears like the clamour of voices in many tongues—like the clatter of innumerable hoofs, the rattle of wooden wheels and the vibrating grind and din of heavy motor-traffic; but he is too faint and weary to be curious as to their cause.

We know, that even as reinforcements of Turkish troops of the Redif and Mustaphiz are being rushed from the Caucasus to form reserves upon the fissured Plain of Ephraim—has begun the exodus of such inhabitants of Jerusalem as are not strict Mohammedans—or known to be Turco-German in views and sympathies.... Since the noon prayer-call, vehicles of every type, loaded with fugitives of the better class, have been rolling into Shechem, the roads leading to the town are blocked—a haze of dust envelops everything since the sun dried up the torrents of rain that fell at break of day....

Came yesterday, Von Geierstein, the once famous War Minister—now Field Marshal and Commander-in-Chief on Germany's Battle Front in Asia—post haste from his Great Headquarters at the red city of Aleppo. To meet Enver Pasha, Djemal, and the other Turkish Commanders at Jerusalem, harangue the defeated generals, and reorganise the Turco-German War Plan on more successful lines....

Fallen into eclipse at the Court of Berlin as the result of his military failures at Verdun, horribly disconcerted by the disaster of the Vulkan Pass, inexpressibly sickened by the taking of Beersheba, the fall of Gaza and the loss of Junction Station,—the brilliant ex-favourite of Imperial Majesty (whose ambition has had more to do with the kindling of the brand of War than that of any other man in Germany—saving Von Tirpitz)—after warning Enver and Djemal of the uselessness of endeavouring to hold Jerusalem now the Gaza Line has been broken—left the Holy City this morning for Shechem, in his Œstler-Daimler, another with his Staff Officers, following, half his escort of armoured Scheff cars preceding him—the remainder, with his servants, bringing up the rear.

Even as the Governor, Izzet Bey, and Ali Fuad Pasha, Commander of Turkish Forces in the Holy City—issue the proclamations of their masters to the people, our troops are pushing up the passes into the Judæan Highlands; the sound of British guns comes even from the Vale of Sorek, thenceforward the din of battle grows louder hour by hour....

Already in Shechem, in Samaria and in Jericho—whither the Latin, Greek, Armenian and Coptic Patriarchs have been forcibly deported, with other ecclesiastics and notables, and wealthy Zionist Hebrews—the reign of terror that has prevailed in Jerusalem since Turkey joined issues with Germany—has begun. Ten Turkish pounds are asked, and got, by Mohammedan drivers for a seat in a carriage. Large numbers of the wealthier inhabitants, with the remaining chiefs of religious communities, have been warned by the Turkish Police to be in readiness for exile. No more vehicles being available for the transport of the victims, Djemal Pasha—venomous always, seasons the order with the intimation that the deported population will be compelled to travel on foot....

Spies swarm everywhere. Fear presses like a heavy hand upon the public mouth. Arrests, confiscations and requisitions redouble—populations quail under the lash of tyranny. Gallows are set up at the Jaffa Gate—there are hangings and shootings daily. The bodies of the victims of the last battue are left exposed for hours, to impress upon the population that, after four centuries of oppression, the Tartar is not disposed to surrender one of the Holy Cities of the Turkish Caliphate without a final orgie of extortion, brow-beating and blood.

The day wears on, no succour comes, and the priest's stupor of exhaustion deepens. Towards sunset there is a heavy knock upon the door of the hut.

"Come in!"

The captive's first effort to speak aloud results in a croaking whisper. The heavy Turkish lock scroops in its wooden mortice, and something like a smile twitches the lips of Julian Forbis. Is it not the very brutality of irony to knock upon a starving prisoner's door?

Now the door swings inwards, letting in a wedge of noon-tide brightness, but the visitors delay a moment on the threshold. And a strange voice says, as though in answer to a question, speaking in cultured Arabic, softly and melodiously:

"No! Nothing may be done in the Holy City; the influences there are too adverse. But at Banias!—and here on Mount Gerizim—"

Even as the utterance strikes with a strange, premonitory shock and thrill upon the consciousness of the prisoner, the door is pushed open to admit three men.

Two German Staff officers, tall, burly and swaggering, and a slight man, dark-hued as smoke, bearded, and of forbiddingly handsome countenance, arrayed in a dazzlingly white brocaded silk kaftan, girt with a gold embroidered crimson cincture, and a flowing kuffiyeh or head-drapery of the same fierce sanguinary colour, bound with a thick twist of silver and gold cords.

Two German officers of inferior rank, with a lieutenant and sergeant-major of Turkish Mounted Police and several troopers, are seen beyond the threshold. Now the heavy door shuts the four men in together.... The priest lowers his feet to the stamped earth floor and rises to receive the visitors. But so weak is he that he totters, and sways as though about to fall.

His giddiness passing with the dimness of his sight, he discerns that one of his visitors is the tall, sunburned, trap-mouthed German general who visited the Barracks yesterday in company of the Bey, and whose order put the period of a shot from a gendarme's repeating Winchester, to Govan's crazy song.

His companion is a handsome person, as yet in the early fifties, superbly built and of heroic size and stature. The grey-green Field Service dress suits him to admiration; not a button or buckle is out of its true alignment; his gloves, belts, revolver-holsters and boots are of immaculate earthy-brown. His spurs are of steel and gold; his single-breasted Norfolk-shaped Service jacket shows, as does the other man's, the narrow silver lace, the crimson collar-edging and shoulder-cords of the Great General Staff—the Iron Cross dangling at the buttonholes of both by its ribbon of black and white. Both wear the ribbons and brochettes of many decorations. But the taller man displays, in addition to these, the Order of the Prussian Black Eagle with diamond swords, hanging by a swivel under his collar-hook. And noting this distinction, together with the wearer's physical beauty—for he is yellow-haired, blue-eyed, straight-featured, handsome still, as the Viking hero of some old Teutonic Saga—it flashes on the priest as his own blue eyes, set in hollow caves of exhaustion and hunger, encounter the visitor's—that the man can be no other than the fallen favourite of the Emperor of Germany, now Commander-in-Chief of his army in Palestine....

Nor is the priest's conjecture wrong. It is the man, weary and disgruntled, sick with conscious failure, savage at the fancied triumph of old rivals and ancient enemies—wounded in the one vulnerable spot of his hard, vain, shallow heart by the death of his son, a brave young Flying Officer—killed in a duel with a British airman in January, 1915.

He spent last night at the old Army Headquarters, the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria Hospital on the Mount of Olives. Ah, with what heartiness has Von Geierstein cursed the Turks as he turned his back upon the Holy City; as his fleet of cars ate distance upon the road to Shechem—where he is to dine, and sleep, if he can. He is keenly alive to their military blunders. For there are good Teutonic brains behind the brilliant eyes that light the handsome face to which he owes his rescue from bankruptcy—and his subsequent promotion from the rank of Chief of the General Staff of the 4th Army Corps, Magdeburg, to the dignity of Prussian War Minister—and the more dubious position of alter ego to William of Hohenzollern.

Over, over, the meteoric and splendid career. Fallen, beaten, ruined. Rich in the world's goods still, but bankrupt in the world's envying admiration. Left by the tide of Success on which he has floated so buoyantly,—he sees himself once more high and dry on the mudbank of Failure—not by the utmost expenditure of cleverness to be floated off again. His magnificent blue eyes are dark with wrath. He grinds his teeth, eminently white, and all his own—as he devotes the Ottoman Allies of Imperial Germany to the uttermost depths of Hell.

Unlucky favourite! never again to draw all eyes in the White Hall of the Imperial Palace at Berlin, while morning sunshine, streaming through the tall windows, shines upon the opening Session of the Reichstag—makes glittering play with the silver livery of Prussian State flunkeys, and strikes multi-coloured sparks of fire from the decorations and military orders of the members of the Federal Council, ranged on the left of the Throne. Never again to stand, the dazzling centre of a blazing constellation of Generals, by the daïs under the black, red and white Canopy—topped with the blazon of that Bird of ill-odour, whose greedy claws and rapacious beak, and insatiate maw are not yet glutted—though twenty millions of men and women have perished to slake its quenchless thirst for human blood.

"The Herr General Von Krafft, that you speak good German has informed me, Reverend Father? ..."

His own English is guttural, but passably decent. The priest, master of several dead, and some half dozen modern tongues, replies as well as his parched throat and palate will allow. His German, the distinguished visitor concedes, is very good for an Englishman....

"Though you belong to a Scotch family, I am given to understand by the Herr General.... I am deeply grieved that your much-desired reunion with your relatives has been farther delayed by your own unfortunate lack of tact. I refer to your regrettably-insolent treatment of the Bey, Our Ottoman Ally, who should command respect."

He is sick to nausea of Germany's Ottoman Ally even as he says it. His handsome lips twist with hatred of all things of the Turk Turkish, under his glittering up-brushed moustache. He is revolted by the fetid, stifling hut, by the pallid prisoner chained to the dirty native bed, but most by the sense of Failure dominating everything....

"Over, over, over!" says the voice that is always in his ears, sounding above the roar of moving Divisions and the crashing of artillery from the workshops of Krupp and Skoda, keeping time with the throbbing of the blood in his temples and the irregular beating of his wearied heart. "Beaten, beaten, beaten! ... Fallen, fallen! ... Total Kaput! ..."

"Sir—"

Not "Your Excellency" or other flattering title. Under his lowered lids, set thickly with dark lashes,—they accused him of using cosmetics, in his younger, more effeminate days,—he looks at the wasted, high-bred face, and meets its pure glance. His dead son, killed at twenty-two in the air battle with the English aviator, had eyes like this man's.

"Sir, an accusation similar to this was brought against me yesterday in the presence of," the blue eyes go dauntlessly to the other German's face, "General Von Krafft. I said then, as I reiterate now—that the charge is without foundation! As a man of honour and a Catholic priest, I deny it absolutely. I can bring creditable witnesses to refute it whenever there is need."

"Kindly name your witnesses. Where are they to be found, sir?"

They have all left for Aleppo, the priest remembers with a shock. He says, with a sinking heart:

"The guards of the Barracks would give evidence in my favour."

"It is they who accuse you! and I myself heard you-with-words-encourage, and saw you by gestures stimulate the mutineers to fresh acts of violence!"

The harsh voice of the Bey's friend, the tall brick-faced General, says this with a rasp of something like ill-will. The priest draws himself proudly up and meets the glance of the false accuser.

"Sir, I can only say that you—are mistaken."

"Prisoner, though you be a priest, you shelter yourself behind a lie!"

The white face flushes scarlet, and the blue eyes blaze indignantly. He draws from his tattered tunic-breast a small wooden Crucifix, touches the Feet of the Victim with his pale lips, and lifts the Crucifix high. As he does this the dark bearded man in the white silk kaftan and crimson kuffiyeh glides hurriedly towards the door.

"So help me God, I have spoken the truth!"

Very quietly the words have been uttered. Thrusting the sacred symbol back within his breast, he confronts his enemies, awaiting what may come. The momentary silence past, the highest in military rank addresses the priest grandiloquently:

"Prisoner, as the Military Representative in the East of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Germany, I assure you that investigation will be made into this affair. But as the testimony against you is absolutely unshakable," the tall and splendid personage who speaks gracefully salutes the brick-faced general, "it is equally my duty to tell you that the decision of your judges will go against your oath. As a guest of the Turkish Empire you will naturally be considerately treated—"

The blue eyes meet his again.... Gott im Himmel! how like the dead boy's.... The white lips smile ironically.... The weak voice rings strong:

"Your words sound like sarcasm, sir, to the guest of the Turkish Empire, who has been confined without food or even water since early yesterday...."

VII

The stuffy interior of the prison hut swims about the priest as he speaks. He sees a look of something like irritable compassion cross the handsome face on which his eyes are fixed. Its owner regrets the oversight, and will give orders that it shall not be repeated. Even as the prisoner voices thanks, he has a fleeting glimpse of an ugly, mocking grin on the flat brown features of the brick-faced German General. He hears a little, hateful, malicious laugh from the dark, bearded, white-robed personage who stands in the background.... He sees him approach the brick-faced man, and whisper in his ear.

And his ordinary senses, wrought to preternatural acuteness by suspense, hunger and sleeplessness, and that sixth sense which belongs to some anointed Servants of Heaven, warn Julian Forbis—have warned him since the mysterious shock and thrill that accompanied the stranger's entrance—of something more than sinister—more than terrible or dangerous, in connection with this white-robed, bearded man. He feels, emanating from his personality, an aura of sheer Evil—poisonous to the soul's health, paralysing to the will....

"I—"

His voice dies away. He is dizzy with weakness. Lights flash before his eyes, the hut spins round, and the two tall German officers and the man in the red head-drapery seem to join in the giddy whirl. Now he staggers, and sinks down fainting, his head and shoulders resting against the framework of the bed:

"It is damnable!" impatiently says the wearer of the Order of the Black Eagle, pulling out a gold pocket-flask, and finding it to be empty. "The man is dying—useless! See if there be not water somewhere. Tell somebody to bring some here! ..."

"Immediately, Excellency."

The flat-faced general is going to the hut door when the wearer of the red head-drapery gracefully interposes:

"What says the Shaykh? ..."

"Excellency, that wine will be better than water!—and that if you will observe a moment's silence, I will undertake that some shall be brought...."

"Indeed. Most exceedingly interesting, my very dear friend Sadân! ..."

A meaning look is exchanged between the two German officers. Smiling, the smoke-dark, bearded man steps into the middle of the floor-space, faces to the East, and looks back at his companions, saying in a sharp, clear tone:

"Uskut! ... By your Excellency's leave, I must strictly enjoin respect—and silence...."

He lifts the long, wide ends of his gold-embroidered girdle, with them covering his dark, slender, joined hands, and turns to the East again, saying: "Dastûr! By Your Permission, O Ye Blessed Ones! ..." Their spurred heels aligned, their hands rigidly at the salute, the two officers standing behind him, erect, unwinking and stiff, might be mistaken for coloured statues—save that their broad chests heave slightly with their noiseless breathing, and the glittering hairs of the Commander-in-Chief's moustache bristle like the whiskers of a watchful cat. There is a sobbing gasp or two from the fainting man lying propped against the anghareb; from the man in the red head-drapery, whose joined, covered hands are lifted—comes a sibilant low murmuring, but in the hut there is no other sound....

Until with a sharp, hissing final utterance, that might be the close of an invocation, the covered hands of the Shaykh are lowered. He bows his red-veiled, gold-crowned head over them, and turns round with a flashing smile:

"Kolossal! Wunderbild!" the Germans mutter, relaxing their attitudes of stiff respect, and exchanging glances of awe and astonishment....

For whereas the dark hands beneath the girdle-flaps were empty, their slender fingers, now uncovered, are seen to be enlaced about the stem of a glittering beaker of delicate, iridescent glass or crystal, brimming with pinkish-tinted liquor that diffuses an exquisite bouquet upon the mouldy atmosphere of the hut.

"It is nothing, O my lords! The Messengers are swift-winged and duteous," he says with his glittering smile....

Both Germans hugely admire the marvellous glass vessel, but neither is over-eager to handle and examine it. Or, when pressed, to taste the fragrant wine, which the Shaykh Sadân proceeds to pour down the throat of the swooning prisoner, lifting his head and shoulders with an ease that shows the great strength latent in his own small-boned Asiatic frame and delicate extremities....

The glass is nearly empty now, and between gulps of strange, poignant, reviving sweetness, Julian Forbis is coming to the use of his wits again.... As he sits up, then staggers to his feet by the help of a hand—he knows not whose!—except that it is small and strong, and that its strength is as unexpected as its deadly, stinging coldness—the Shaykh Sadân turns away and empties the remainder of the wine upon the beaten floor. A light flame flickers unperceived upon the spot as the earth drinks the liquor.... The Shaykh, smiling, offers the empty goblet to the German Commander-in-Chief.

"Beautiful indeed. And of immense antiquity. The value of this must be great, very great! ..."

Somewhat reluctantly the Chief has taken the thing, but its strange beauty and evident rarity tickle the connoisseur. It is thin as a soap-bubble, and as light. It might be blown of melted jewels—so dazzling are its minglings of ruby and topaz and jacinth,—of sapphire and emerald and dusky amethyst. Flawless, it rings like a bell as he taps it with his finger-nail. Now, wearying of the inanimate toy, he looks about for a shelf or table, but finds none; the hut being innocent of furniture other than the bed, a battered metal bowl lying in a corner, and a bottomless palm-wood stool....

"Permit me, O Excellent Lord!"

Seeing the Chief's evident difficulty, the Shaykh Sadân relieves him of the fragile goblet, and with supple ease and a graceful carelessness, sets it down upon the unsubstantial air. Where it stands a moment—under the surprised observation of the Commander-in-Chief and his satellite—until, with a slight yet perceptible shrinking of its outlines, and dulling of its jewel-bright colours—such as might have been observed in the soap-bubble to which it has been likened—it delicately vanishes away....

"Himmelkreuzbombenelement!" sputters the brick-faced general. His dull eyes protrude with genuine alarm, and his morale having deserted him, he makes a hasty movement in the direction of the door.

"See now, you have scared Von Krafft," says the Chief with a laugh that is not quite natural. "A hundred years ago, in England or in Germany, they would have burned you for that, O Shaykh Sadân!"

"It may be, O Excellent Lord!" he answers with the smile that is so ingratiating and yet so sinister. "But not in Egypt—nor in Arabia, where—when the Lands of the North were girt with ice, and inhabited by savages, the Divine Art of Magic had for cycles of centuries been known.... Lo! the good Shiraz wine hath worked its own witchcraft. Speak to the priest now—and he will hear and understand...."

"Prisoner, listen to me and prove yourself worthy of the consideration I have shown you. Admit frankly, that as a Catholic ecclesiastic, you have so far forgotten your cloth, and misconceived your duty, as to egg on the Allied War Prisoners of Germany and Turkey to insult their conquerors.... Append your signature to a confession of your offence, and in return take my assurance that what mercy it is possible to show you shall be extended forthwith...."

The priest's thin face is suffused with crimson as he listens. He is bewildered; that wine was strangely potent in its effects. But his candid eyes rest quietly on the Chief's angry face and he answers without passion:

"Sir, you have already heard me declare most solemnly, that I am guiltless of inciting the prisoners to rebel. Against their torture, and outrage at the hands of the Bey, I have protested strenuously, and will continue to do so as long as I have voice."

"You persist in accusing the Bey of crime and violence?"

"Most certainly and most truthfully I do!"

"Das ist nicht wahr! Have I not already the testimony of my Staff Officer? Added to that of Hamid Bey, who is an honourable man. Consider, if you exhaust my intolerance, what fate awaits you! Admit your guilt, sign the paper, and you shall immediately be released from this vile place, and admitted to parole."

"Sir, as a priest I refuse to accept your offered conditions! My body is your prisoner—my soul is not in your hands. Beware what you do! ... I refer my case to my Bishop—to the Latin Patriarch, and the other high Catholic dignitaries in Jerusalem...."

"Were you in Jerusalem at this moment, my good sir!—they would be equally impotent to assist you." As the priest does not know that these ecclesiastics to whom he refers have been forcibly deported from the Holy City, the barbed point of the jest is lost on his ignorance. "For even if your protest reached them—which is unlikely!—after what fashion would these persons enforce their authority? ..."

"I do not know! ..." The voice breaks upon a note of anguish, and the priest's head droops for a moment on his breast. He lifts it, and his hoarse, faint voice gathers power and rings out bravely. "But one thing I do know, that He Whom I serve and trust in, will not desert His poor servant in this extremity."

"Your faith is more admirable than your wisdom, sir. But I will waste no more words upon your obstinacy. Understand, that if when I leave you," for he has lent his ear to a soft whisper on the part of the dark man in the red kuffiyeh, "the Shaykh Sadân will, of his goodness, endeavour to bring you to reason. If he does not succeed—I wash my hands of you! The Prison Commandant Hamid Bey,—whom you have so vilely slandered,—may deal with you as he will! ..."

A terrible shudder convulses the priest's thin frame. As the heavy tread of the spurred boots shakes the crazy floor, words rush to his lips that—were they uttered—would be a cry of surrender. The footsteps reach the door, the door opens, but still his teeth are clenched and his lips firmly shut. His soul, beaten upon by gusts of terror, striving in blackness jagged with infernal lightnings, is like a ship in the fury of a cyclone. Of all the great and noble things—that are jewels in the crown of classic Literature, of all the texts of Holy Writ—of all the liturgies of the Mother Church, with which he has stored and enriched his memory—only six words come to him in his dire necessity:

"Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine!"

The door opens. Red sunset dyes the floor. The long shadows of the two German officers appear to stretch across a pool of blood. Now the door is shut, and Julian Forbis is alone with him from whom his spirit and flesh shrink in an agony of terror and loathing—all the more that his person is superbly handsome, that his smooth, cultured voice is exquisitely melodious—that from him radiates a power that allures, and persuades and charms.... He does not mock or gibe now. He is all delicate sympathy. But the priest traces the outline of the sneer through the smile of the Shaykh Sadân, and the mockery that grins behind the compassionate mask.

"O Darweesh of the Inglizi, listen to the words of the Shaykh Sadân of the Beni Abba, a poor recluse of the Desert of Igidi! For believe me—I speak as a friend, and not as an enemy!" murmurs the smooth caressing voice,

"Unhappy man, be not bigoted! ... This obduracy works to your own undoing. The great pity I—Sadân the Shaykh—feel for you—compels me to speak thus! Surely the garment of a priest is cut of the cloth of tasalidn—the rendering of obedience to superiors—and tahammul, endurance of injury.... And is not the heritage of the Prophets, Wisdom? And to prefer life to Death—is not that wise? ... And who gains Wisdom but at the cost of Sacrifice—ever since in the Spring-tide of the World, Isis—the Sister-Queen of King Osiris of Egypt, yielded her beauty to the Angel Amnaël, one of the Fallen Sons of Radiance,—in return for the secrets of Magic and Chemistry.... Consider, also, that by this great Chief, on whose breath hangs thy life, but little is required of thee? Nothing injurious to thine honour, or inimical to British interests in the East. Yield, as under the death-threat!—for verily the mercies of a furious elephant—or a hungry lion—were preferable to those of Hamid Bey.... Bear thy share! ... Do as thou art bidden—and solace thy soul by saying: 'This would I not have borne!—that would I not have done.... But He Who ruleth all things willed—and it was so? ...'"

Smiling, the speaker ceases, receiving answer:

"Sir, I have no need for sugared sophisms, nor specious consolations.... I know too well the source from which they come. Set my hand to a lie will I never!—nor shield the crimes that a tyrant has committed—to save my body at the cost of my soul!"

"'Your soul!...'"

The last two words are re-echoed by the Shaykh with delicate contemptuousness.

"Who barters in souls in these days, O priest?" he asks with terrible contempt, shrugging his supple shoulders. "For verily in the market they are as a worthless drug! ... Come! ... Decide, for I waste my kindness on you. What is your answer? Yes, or No? Here are paper, pen and ink." He draws an Arab writing-case from the folds of his girdle. "Write now, and sign...."

"No!"

Julian Forbis adds in a hoarse whisper—for the strength of the strange liquor he has drunk is ebbing out of him, as his numbing hand gropes blindly for something in his breast: "Tempt as you may, I shall not yield!—He Whom I serve being my helper! 'VADE RETRO SATANA! RECEDE A ME, MALEDICTE DIABOLI! IN NOMINE PATRIS, ET FILII, ET SPIRITUS SANCTI. AMEN....'"

In faith and courage he rises above his bodily weakness. He plucks from its concealment the hidden Symbol, and lifts it high as he utters the terrible words. And as they vibrate upon the sultry atmosphere, there goes forth a terrible, ear-splitting cry upon it, and a gust of air icy as the breath of the Polar frost, and dry as the wind of the Sahara—moans through the darkling place. He is alone, the Enemy has left him, and as Night falls, he sinks down senseless on the crazy floor of the hut.

VIII

On the summit of Ebal, a little east of the ruined fortress, is the wreckage of Khirbet Kuneisch—in Syrian Arabic, "The Little Church." Some twelve feet distant from the skeleton of its tiny sanctuary there is a tomb hollowed in the living rock.

And in this place the Mother of Ugliness dwells alone with her sorrow. Secured against the intrusion of the curious or thievish (did either discover the jealously-guarded secret) by the belief common to Syria and the East generally, that Afrits, ghouls, and vampires inhabit such ancient tombs.

Goats are cropping the short, sweet herbage. They are Ummshni's and come—like the willow-wren and chiffchaff, the robin and the yellow-and-white European wagtail—at her low, twittering call. Others, feeding lower down on the wild gum-cistus and the thyme that clothe the crumbling limestone terraces, have recognised their mistress, and follow her footsteps, as, with the big hand of the lame Arab leaning on her frail shoulder, she toils up the path upon Ebal's northern side.

"See, here is my little house, O Ali Zaybak, Bedawi...." Panting, she shows him a broken flight of limestone steps descending to the eastward-facing entrance of the tomb.

Supported in deep-cut grooves, on either side the low square aperture that serves as the entrance, is the circular stone employed of old times as the door of such a burial place; a block of the shape and size of a millstone—having no central hole to admit the shaft. A knob that projects from the surface of the stone some three or four inches below its upper rim, and another at an equal distance above its lower rim, can be used as the fulcrums of the human lever, that when necessary, rolls back the stone. From within, the tomb can be opened or closed in the same way.

"Canst thou roll away the stone, cousin?" asks Ummshni-Esther, "for 'tis a task that tries me sorely. Yet must I ever close my little house in this fashion when I leave it,—more need than ever now since Turks came to the Mount!"

"But if they came when thou wert here, and found the door open?" asks John Hazel, from midway down the steps.

She nods her head, and from between the folds of the Syrian veil comes her dry, rustling chuckle.

"Knowest thou what I would but need to do to send them down the Mountain quicker than they came up it? Even step boldly into the doorway, and—by the sunlight if 'twere day,—or by the flare of a brand from my fire if it were night—unveil and show them! This—that makes the Turk spit, and the German show his teeth in a grin, and the Englishman say, 'Poor devil!' or 'Poor thing!'—and all three hurry away from the sight. My one-eyed, crumpled face, that save thyself, O John my cousin! and one other!—is the best friend I own. What, dost thou hold back at the threshold until thy hostess bids thee enter?" For as the great stone rolls groaning into the opposite groove, leaving a narrow irregularly-shaped entrance, John has turned towards her, reaching up a long mahogany-coloured arm and huge hand to help her: "Verily then, in the name of Him Who sent thee, be thou welcome under this roof!"

So the two, so strangely met, so far apart and yet so nearly related—pass into Ummshni's strange, desolate home—out of the early morning sunshine, for it is barely seven o'clock. Three milch-goats with their kids troop after, their little split hoofs making a soft pattering; and at a sign from his cousin, John Hazel closes the entrance with the stone....

It is not dark within the tomb, nor is there any closeness in the atmosphere. This has a pleasant, dry coolness that is soothing, like the tempered light. Both the air and the light come through long cracks and chinks in the roof of limestone slabs, dressed with the hammer in bygone centuries, and intersected by glittering streaks of crystalline carbonate; and the sloping sides that, like the roof, Nature has thickly clothed with bracken and bramble. The place may be about ten feet in height—and owns three rooms or mortuary chambers—in whose sides are shelves, hollowed in the limestone rock—to receive the embalmed and swaddled bodies—of which (if any have ever rested there), the passing ages have left no trace.... The third chamber is some thirty feet in length and reaches under the ruins of The Little Church. Here, within a hearth of mud and stones, a wood fire smoulders; its smoke escaping unnoticed through a hole in the roof above it into the nave of the ruined building overhead, that is thickly mantled with tamarisk, and choked with cactus, prickly-pear, and the spina-Christi thorn. Various cooking-pots and vessels hang from pegs driven into chinks in the walls of limestone. Here are a stool or so, and a small folding-table. Here, too, a native bed—brought up here piece by piece—stands on one side, with some coarse woollen coverings folded on it. Some clean, but ragged draperies of blue cotton-print, and veils of coarse towelling such as Ummshni wears,—hang on a cord stretched from wall to wall, with a thick overgarment for use in winter, an Arab abâyi of woven camel's hair.

And that is all. No anchorite could own less than little Ummshni, but the poor soul makes John welcome with what she has.

She makes him lie down on the anghareb—folds the camel's hair mantle into a pillow for his head—milks the goats, and brings him a bowl of the thick, frothing-white, pleasant beverage. He empties it and says, setting down the bowl:

"Thanks, O my hostess! May milk never be wanting in thy house! ..."

"May God bestow upon thee long life and prosperity!" returns the thin, shadowy voice, in the set terms of the response to the formal expression of gratitude: "You have honoured me! ..."

"By your life, O lady! I have honoured myself! ..."

"By your eyes, O my guest! I am the distinguished one!" She laughs her queer little dry laugh, and says, kneeling by the hearth, and rousing the embers into a glow by puffs of breath from between her veils, and bits of dry fuel discreetly thrust into the reddest places: "Yet why should thou and I talk as Mohammedans? Are we not Jews?"

"Well, I dunno! ..."

"Thou dost not know? Not even that this is New Moon? Wouldst thou not be in Shool this morning, if 'twere possible?"

"Well, I can't say for sure. That is, about myself. Of course, I'm certain about you and your mother! ..."

"Ah'h!" She winces as at a sudden knife-thrust and sinks back on her heels, trembling visibly. "The beloved one—is—is alive?"

"Alive and well, that is—as well as she can be! ... You didn't know?" John asks in surprise.

"How should I know within a year? ... News filters in but very rarely." She masters herself, rises to her knees, and goes on coaxing the fire, but the reddening embers hiss as her tears keep dropping on them from underneath her veils. "And it is best she should believe that—that I am—that I died when Jacob! ... O, my cousin, have pity! ... Let us speak of her no more! ..."

"All right. Count on me! ..."

He watches as the little flitting shape glides about the dusky chamber, and in and out of the narrow door,—bringing to feed the fire,—more dry fuel, of which she has a heap in the outer chamber, that serves as a store-room. From whence, presently conjuring ripe figs and olives; fresh eggs, green coffee-beans, salt and rough sugar, and a little stone mortar and pestle; some flaps of unbaked native bread and a wooden dish of goat's-milk butter, she boils the eggs; roasts and pounds the coffee; bakes the bread upon a metal cone placed amongst the embers; and assembling the constituents of a decent meal—including a jug of fragrant coffee, and another of boiling goat's milk, upon a little battered metal tray—sets it upon the little table at his side, and brings him a bowl of water, a bit of soap and a coarse, clean cloth.

"Washing and—benediction, Cousin John."

He washes and mumbles something, reddening under his head-cloth.

"Now eat and drink, mingling the coffee with milk in the good French fashion." She gives a small sigh. "Would I had better to offer thee! But than this there is nothing else."

"The tucker's A-1. But you—"

"Trouble not for me. I am a Syrian woman.... I eat my food after the man has fed...."

Intuitively perceiving that she shelters behind this excuse her sensitive horror of her own disfiguring mutilation, John protests no further, but applies himself to the eggs, coffee, bread and butter and fresh fruit, with hearty good will.

When he is satisfied she clears away; pours boiling water into a big earthen bowl; fetches lint, bandaging and arnica from a burial-shelf where she seems to have some store of things like these, and tying back her long sleeves in true Fellaha style, by knotting the ends and slipping them over her head, addresses herself to the fomenting and bandaging of the sprained ankle, saying:

"If thou hast tobacco with thee, smoke, O my Cousin John!"

And so he brings out a packet of maize-leaf paper, and a bag of good Arabian tobacco, stowed away with divers other requisites upon his large person, and rolls himself a thick cigarette. She gives him a light with a flaming stick from the fire, as he is feeling for his matches; and at his:

"Thank you, little Esther!"

—bends her poor face low over the damaged ankle, to hide the tears that will break forth anew. For thus did old Eli Hazaël speak to his daughter's child, and this deep voice is very like his: and the familiar words re-open deep, unhealed scars in her wounded and suffering heart. Thus there is deep silence in the tomb, broken only by their breathing; by the flitting sound of Esther's movements within the cool, dusky place—and by the soft munching of the three goats and their kids in the outermost chamber—where a heap of grass and herbage has been heaped to meet their needs. Indeed, this newly-found friend who has come into the desolate creature's life, as though dropped from the skies—which in fact he has been!—is so silent that Ummshni looks up in wonderment. John is smoking his strong Arab cigarette with deep, regular inhalations of enjoyment, and staring at a piece of ancient sculpture that catches the sunshine—still that of early morning, that falls through an aperture overhead more strongly as the Day-Lord climbs higher in the eastern sky. It is the bust of a man, nearly life-sized; carved in the shallowest relief, and bearing remains of colouring; surrounded by a half-circle of reddish rays, from which, possibly, the gold has centuries ago faded. His head is noble, haggard and mild—the long tresses of waving, reddish-yellow hair mingle with the beard, which is slightly pointed—the splendid forehead is deeply scored with lines, there are premature markings of care about the eyes. These are blue, and austere under dark, widely arching eyebrows, though the stern lips smile sorrowfully. Under this ray-crowned half-length—which is bounded by a line of blackish colour—is roughly chiselled the Sacred Monogram. Below the letters of the Holy Name is the date of the Year 400 of the Christian Era. As the lengthening ray reaches this, the soft voice asks from between Esther's veiling draperies:

"At what art thou looking, my Cousin John? ..."

"Just at—that." He points to the stern and gentle Face rather awkwardly.

"It is the Messiah of the Christians. Didst thou not know?"

"Well, of course I'm aware of that. Only, as you're a strict Jewess, it struck me as somehow curious to see it here."

"It is of great ancientness. It was here when this grey, evil world was young and golden-haired, and perhaps even more evil than it is now."

"Then it was pretty rotten! But, in fact, I was thinking as I looked at that sculpture, that the man who did it must have seen the ah—the Original. Though unless he happened to have a dream or a vision, the date quite puts the lid on that idea."

"If by chance it should be really like the Founder of Christianity, He hath a servant who resembles Him. For—that is the very face of the man whom thou and I would deliver! He lies in the hut of the Prisoners' Field, with the high fence of barbed-wire about its edges—that is beyond the gate of the city, opposite the Mohammedan Tombs. And—and," there is a quavering break in the faded voice, "since yesterday before the Prayer-Call they have not given him food or water—obeying the strict orders of—one whom I dare not name!" Quick panting breaths heave the wasted bosom under the old blue cotton garment, the little dusky fingers clutch nervously at her coarse veil. "All day I waited near the gates—thinking by some cunning wile, some secret bribe, such as hath often served before now—to win over the Turks on guard to give me entrance. But, though they licked their lips at the promise of wine and tobacco, and sweetmeats, and love-messages to be carried to the women of the Suk and the Bazâr—they did not dare to let me in. O, my cousin, I fear for the life of the Master!—I fear! ... And all night I lurked near, hiding whenever they changed the guard, in some covert of the Waste Places where they throw the city refuse—and jackals and owls and pariahs and lepers and malignant spirits dwell. And when the day-brow lifted I left one to keep watch—even a poor leper woman who is faithful. And I bought meat, and wine, and came back here to boil soup and milk for him. For to-night I shall try again," her glance goes to the bundle of canes she has leaned up in a corner, "and this time, by the help of the Most High!—this time I shall not fail!"

"Look here, aren't you ever afraid?" John asks, in mingled pity and admiration.

"Oh, yes, I am always terrified!" Her veils are shaken with her trembling and he can hear the chattering of her teeth. "Ever since I took upon me this work of helping the miserable and those who suffer, I have been frightened, John my cousin,—to the very core of me.... But I go on! ... There is no choice!" She wrings the little, shaking, dusky hands, and now once more quick sobbing shakes her. "Were there not things to do—sick folks to serve—dangers to evade or face—what were life worth to The Mother of Ugliness? Think, O think! ..."

Looking at the little quivering thing crouching down beside the now faintly glowing embers, John thinks, and comprehends, though not quite all.

"When I recovered sense and partial sight—after the horrors of which thou knowest!—it was to find myself in the house of a good, poor Jew of Nazareth, whither—may the Holy One reward his charity! he had bribed the soldiers to carry me under cover of night. They, who were bidden—I being as one dead and covered with blood—to dig a pit and cast me in with quicklime—were glad to be saved the trouble at gain of certain moneys. Later, by the secret sale to another man,—a Hebrew jeweller,—of an emerald necklace I had worn on the day when the sabtiehs arrested me—and which I had stitched into my clothing in the first hours of captivity—I know not whether it was overlooked or whether they did not dare to seize it—because!—" she does not finish the sentence—"I repaid the good Jew, though I found it hard to thank him. Hard as I find it even now...."

There is such tragedy in the low, whispering voice, such blistering truth in its plain, naked utterances, that John Hazel shudders as he listens to her....

"For I desired to die, when I did not remember Jacob! When I thought of him—what I wanted more than Death was—" A coal-black diamond-bright eye, sends a shaft from between the veils straight into the man's eyes. "Thou knowest. Three little words will hold it all:"

"Revenge on Hamid...."

Her veiled head nods at each slowly-uttered word.

"Verily, ay! but I did not want to say it. For that it was possible to endure this ordeal of Life. To kill him in some slow, strange, unimagined way, I would have given"—she laughs dryly. "What had I left to give, my soul being dead in me,—my body the foul thing his touch hath left it!—and the face my mother used to kiss, a mask to scare babes and men? Then I said,—I will wait and hate! ... Patience and hatred may bring me that I crave for. Meanwhile, keeping near him—I will succour those whom he hath wronged, feeding my hungry hatred with their curses—until the day comes when I shall hunger no more! ..."

"And surely the day of reckoning will come. Only be patient a little longer!" says the deep, stern voice that Katharine Forbis knows.

"How like thy voice is to our grandfather's. Almost I could believe that Eli spoke then! How strange, that he and thou, so greatly resembling, should never have met," sighs the woman beside the fire. "Of Hebrew hast thou any?"

"None but a word or so."

"Well, well, it matters not! Go on speaking in Arabic, or in the English that is thy home-speech—or in French if it pleases thee—thou art Hazaël in any tongue."

"It pleases me best to listen to thee. Tell me now, after what fashion wouldst thou have thy vengeance? ..." The man's voice sinks lower, and his face is very grim.

"My cousin, let us not speak of it!" she entreats in a whisper. He sees a wave of trembling pass over the fragile creature, huddled in her coarse disguise beside the rude stone hearth.

"Yet when a man bitten by a mad dog, goes to a Pasteur Institute for inoculation, he must—if it be possible—take the head of the dog." The fierce black eyes are upon her, and their strength seems a palpable weight bearing upon her frailness. "Since the beginning of this War, surgeons have attained wonderful skill in building up the bodies and faces of men, that other men have broken. When thou shalt go to the greatest of these, saying: 'Give me back my beauty!' I promise thee, little Esther, thou shalt carry the head of the dog!"

The big teeth gleam in the dark face, and she answers with her chuckle, the thin derisive cachinnation that is so far removed from mirth:

"And if such a miracle might be wrought, could thy great surgeon's scalpel cut from my woman's soul the scars that make it hideous? Could he burn from my memory with his electric wire, the things that I have borne? Could he set my feet amongst the flowers on the hills near Kir Saba, with Jacob's and Reuben's, and Leah's, and little Benjamin's—and brim my heart with the happiness that was Life's golden wine? Could he give me back my father and our grandfather, the good old man who so loved me? How strange it is to remember that if I had not vexed my mother—and worn the chain of emeralds that were old Eli Hazaël's birthday gift, that day the zabtiehs seized me, walking in the olive-groves near my father's house at Haffêd—I should have had nothing of value to sell for the wherewithal to live."

"It was Fate! Tell me, my little Esther, how old art thou?"

She laughs in her strange way.

"On that day—the thirtieth of Ab, in the Year of the World 5674,—the 8th of August, 1914—as thou wouldst write it—I was eighteen, my cousin John...."

Sickened to the very core, the man can barely keep back a groan. Twenty-one last August, and "beautiful as a rose of Sharon," to quote Old Mendel, and aged, withered, warped, body and soul, into the Mother of Ugliness. Words escape him, born of a sudden thought:

"Jacob and thy Cousin Eli are dead, like thy father, and our uncles, and our grandfather and thy little brother Benjamin. But—but Reuben the son of Ephraim lives. Has no one told thee?"

"Verily, I knew it. But"—her head is bowed and the words come faint between her veils—"the young girl whom Reuben loved lives no more. Even though thy surgeons might work the bodily miracle. Even if the herb Forgetfulness sprang from these stones, I would not gather it, and lose the memory of certain things that have lightened my labours, and sweetened my sufferings in this cruel place. As for my vengeance—more than once I have been very near it! Wilt thou believe?—I have opened mine hand and let the thing go!" The little dusky hand quivers into sight, shuts, opens and vanishes. "So—and so—the sharpness of desire for Hamid's blood having abated, since—since I came—to the knowledge of him!"

The little hand waves from the covert of her veils towards the ray-encircled head, past which the illuminating beam of sunshine has travelled. John, seeing this, says with something of astonishment:

"Knowledge of—the Christ? ... And thou a Jewess?"

"I speak of the servant, not of the Master, good Cousin John. For that stern, beautiful face is strangely like his whom thou didst come here to seek."

"I'll make a note of that. It may be useful." John Hazel's strong black eyes glue themselves upon the Face upon the wall, as the Mother of Ugliness goes on, whisperingly:

"This I have thought, seeing the life of the Sidi who is His servant. Thou art listening? ..."

"Verily, my little Esther. For it is needful for me to hear these things concerning the man."

So, with a full heart trembling on her timid lips, sometimes speaking in her swift, cultured Arabic, sometimes in her English that is tinctured with a Parisian accent—always speaking of the priest as the Sidi, or the Master, she tells John all she knows, up to the moment of Father Julian's arrest.

"And what happened then?" John asks.

"They took the Master to the—the Bey's room, over the gateway. The—the Bey accused him of pricking on the prisoners to rebellion. A German officer who was there bore testimony that the Master had so acted. He boldly—for he is as a lion, without fear—denied this, in the face of his enemies. All this I heard from a Turk, a posta of the guard at the Barracks. The man loves a shameless woman of the Bazâr—and—and I carry messages between them, no office being too low for Ummshni, the Mother of Ugliness. Can dirt defile dirt?"

In her faint voice she asks the bitter question. John says, grinding his teeth:

"Damn it, Esther, drop that! I can't bear it!"

"Swear not, my Cousin John, but hear. He—" John knows she is speaking of Hamid—"He says to the Master: 'You tell me this, that and the other thing I do, gives offence to your Christian Messiah. I pay no heed, and, He lets me alone, because He has no power to punish me. For it is Allah and Allah only who rebukes the evil and rewards the virtuous. And to prove this, I shall put you under guard—in the barbed-wire enclosure where we kept the British War-prisoner officers. There is plenty of room to walk about, and a wooden hut where you may sleep. You will have grass, and clean air, but nothing to eat or drink—unless you sign this paper that I have here—saying that you repent of the slanders you have spoken against me before my face. Sign it now in the presence of witnesses, and you will be sent down to join the other War Prisoners at Smyrna. Do not sign it—and you will be taken to the wired enclosure, and any one found giving you food or water, will be beaten to death with asayisi. This will give your Nazarene Prophet, Whom we Turks and the Kaiser of the Alamani and his officers—who are all good Mohammedans—esteem very highly!—a chance to prove how great He is, and how He values you—by keeping you alive....'"

John licks lips that have suddenly grown dry.

"And what did Father Forbis say to this—not particularly original devil?"

"He told Hamid he was an ordinary priest, with no pretence to extra sanctity, and that if this was a challenge to the Christ, he as His servant refused to take it up...."

"And then?—"

"'Deprived of food,' the posta says the Master said, 'I perish like any other miserable mortal. Yet if it were my Maker's Will that I should live through such an ordeal—I should live! ...'"

"Some priest that!" John imagines a voice like Katharine's saying 'I should live!' and a thrill goes through him. "And Hamid?—"

"Hamid said: 'We will wait and see!' and all the Germans laughed. It is a phrase well known in England? ..."

"And dam' well hated too! But your Father Forbis is a peach.... Worthy to be his sister's brother...."

"She is so beautiful and noble? ..."

"All that," says loyal John, "and more! ..."

"Ah! I am glad. For I have thought much since I have known the Sidi, and learned in watching, somewhat. This amongst other things: that to be abject, ill-used, poor and despised, even as a lame sparrow in the sight of men—and to go about doing good, with one hate in the nest of the heart that chirps for vengeance, that is human, human enough! But to be all this, without hate or bitterness—to be wronged and pity the wronger!—being sinned against, to pardon and love the sinner, this is Divine! ..."

The softly-breathed words fall upon the air like scattered rose-petals, diffusing sweetness as they fall.

"If Jesus of Nazareth were not the Son of the Most High, O John, my cousin! after no other fashion will He come when He comes. Taking nothing from the world but a crust, and a garment to cover Him. Seeking the things that are held despicable by men. His Gospel Love, Forgiveness, Sacrifice. His only diadem the Shekinah. His path beset by thorns— His triumph Failure.... His end a gibbet! ... What other could it have been?" ...

John admits....

"No other. For if there's one thing more prejudicial to a man than sheer Disinterestedness—I'm at a loss to name it! The world must have a motive—and it likes a mean one best. I don't pretend I've ever gone particularly deep into the subject, but I've sometimes thought—that if it were possible to see Jesus of Nazareth clearly for the Christians—we Jews might find Him to be very much a Jew!"

"Perhaps we shall see Him so, one day! ..."

She rises with noiseless, supple ease, and takes her bundle of sticks from the corner.

"Thou art weary. Deny it not, thy jaws ache with yawning, and already I have seen thee nod.... Take off thine upper garment and head-cloth, for it is warm here. Lie down and sleep, though the bed be somewhat short for legs as long as thine. For I have things to do—for the Master! 'What things?' Oh! the man! ever asking questions! ... Broth to make, milk to scald, these pipe-stems," she shows her bundle of new, clean canes, five feet long, bound by a generous length of red India-rubber tubing, "to fit together after a plan. The Master shall not die of hunger to-night, the Most High being my helper. For I shall be helped!" She nods her small, veiled head. "It is borne in upon me, since I have found thee, the Bedawi who did not spit when I let him see my face. There is another Arab here," she gives her dry little rustling chuckle, "an Emir with his following. He did not spit or curse, either, and his grey eyes said, 'Poor thing!'"

"The hell you say! ..." John, who has been horizontal, sits up suddenly and blurts out in English. "Forgive me, little Esther, but I happen to be on the track of an Arab with grey eyes. Where does the bloke hang out?"

"If thou speakest of the Emir Fadl Anga, he who lodges at the Khan et-Talab under that title—having with him two Bedu of the Beni Asir, and the horses of all three—"

"Good egg!" John sits up on the string bed in his brown camel's hair kumbas, grinning joyfully, and hugging his knees: "Does one of 'em carry a reed-cage chock-full of pigeons, strapped back of his saddle? Think!"

"Ay, verily, the Emir Fadl Anga being pigeon-master to one of the Princes of Mecca. Or such is the story that is told in the Bazâr." There is incredulity in the weary voice. "He hath brought the birds as a gift to the German General commanding at Nazareth, for use, so they say, in the Intelligence Department there. When the pigeon-master Sergeant Major comes from Nazareth, he will take them—and leave a cage of birds that have been trained by himself. All this I had in the Bazâr.... Where art thou going? ..."

John, lowering his feet to the stone floor, and reaching for his Arab head-cloth, very decidedly replies:

"To the Khan et-Talab, to dig out my man. For he's my man, this Fadl Anga."

"And how wilt thou get to the Khan, lame as thou art?"

"I dunno!" John gingerly tests his bandaged leg: "You've handed me a poser. What's to be done?"

"What wouldst thou do, if it were possible for thee to go? Think now and say! ..."

He rests his brawny arms upon his knees, and says, slowly, as the fierce light in his black eyes dies out and leaves their surface dim and lustreless:

"I'd find out which was Fadl Anga's room—loaf into the courtyard among the horses, camels, goats, Arabs and Fellah grooms—squat down under his window, and sing—not out loud, but just between my teeth—"

Sagely she nods her little veiled head:

"Bouche fermée,—some English song that is a sign agreed upon between you. Sing it me now, for I will go, and carry thy disguised Englishman the message, while thou remainest here—watching the soup that it be not burned or boil over."

For all unnoticed while they talked, she has set a covered earthen pot containing water, and some kind of meat that she brought up with her, and has chopped fine and mixed with herbs, amongst the glowing ashes; and a faint steam, not unsavoury, is already beginning to spiral through the hole in the knobbed lid.

"Is it agreed upon? ..."

"I should smile! ..."

She understands the odd utterance as assent and says with a diamond sparkle between her veils:

"Now sing me thy song. And give me thy message, but otherwise advise me in nothing of how I am to do. For, verily, I am the Mother of Cunning as well as the Mother of Ugliness, and have carried the lives of many men between these hands of mine!" Laughing softly, she stretches them out. "And they are not as big as thy hands, my giant Cousin John."

"You blessed little brick!"

He reaches out and captures in his own, one of the little dusky hands, gently squeezes it, lets it go, and takes from his neck a square of parchment that hangs there, suspended by a slender green silk cord. On one side are two interlaced triangles outlined in thick black ink. On the other a square containing Arabic letters of the Sacred Name—within a double circle in which have been traced and thickly inked—the Signs of the Zodiac.

"That's that! ... Makes some Arab amulet, doesn't it? ... I cribbed the figures from the title-page of Pittaker's Almanac, and the Name off an inscribed tile. Two letters are stitched inside this—I've another letter hidden away inside my tarbûsh, but that I'll deliver myself to Father Forbis. Meanwhile, you're to get this somehow into Fadl Anga's hands. If—but mind you not unless he tumbles to the first bars of 'Loch Lomond.'"

"Is it 'Loch Lomond'? That was one of the English songs we learnt to sing at my Paris boarding-school," says the Mother of Ugliness. "Hear now, O my cousin, if I remember it aright? ..."

She has a little faded voice, sweet but thin, and in this she sings to him the familiar refrain of the ballad that—hummed by a battered private of London Territorials—sitting on a captured bag of Turkish Army biscuits after Sheria—conjured up the chintz drawing-room at Kerr's Arbour, and Katharine Forbis singing at her piano in the twilight—before the stern, absorbed eyes of an Arab who knelt at prayer....

So it follows that, having taken a sparing meal of bread and fruit, and milk, the amulet containing the letters being hidden upon her person, and the song stowed away in her head, Ummshni-Esther sets forth, under the blaze of the sun of twelve o'clock midday (going by the watch under Ali Zaybuk's sheepskin wristlet, which is set at European time). He limps to the entrance of the tomb to let her out, and stands watching until the little slender, veiled figure—wrapped in the ample outer garment of coarse yellow-white sheeting, worn by Syrian women, passes from his sight.

"Good luck to you, you regular little Maccabee!" he mutters. "Now all You Big Old Men, butt in and help her! ... It's up to you to help her.... For she's thoroughbred to the backbone, if ever a woman was...."

"Thud, thud—thud! Thud thud thud—thud! THUD!"

The guns are still arguing heavily and persistently—in the hills west of Jerusalem, and in the vicinity of Hebron.... South, over Junction Station, the inflated grey bulks of three observation balloons wallow against the cloud-piled horizon, over the huge ark-like hangars that kennel them, as the experts in the dangling baskets read off, and transmit to their Headquarters by Wireless, the silvery flashes of helios from the hills. A Fokker biplane of pusher type with a Falk machine-gun mounted in her bows, is trying to drive down one of the observers; the rattle of the aviator's weapon sounding like the clickett of a typewriter. While a single-seater monoplane Taube with a "Roland" bomb-dropping device, is endeavouring to deal in a similar manner with the other O.B.'s, and a British Anti-Aircraft gun mounted on a motor is spraying vicious little shells of H.E. and shrapnel at the Germans, from rapidly-changing vantages upon the ground below.

Even as John gets interested in the battle, the Fokker, hit in her petrol tank by a projectile, suddenly vomits flame, and drops like a singed moth, downwards. The Taube departs in haste for Hebron—seeing a half-squadron of D.H.6's coming over from the aërodrome near G.H.Q. further down south.... Germany has few eyes in the air in these days, and the Turk is well-nigh wingless. But difficulties of transport threaten to hold the British up at Nebi Samwil; and knowing this, the enemy's resistance stiffens. The sun will not sink on Ottoman dominion in Palestine, while the Turco-German forces hold the Jerusalem-Shechem road.

There is a glorious view from the summit of the Mount of Cursing, silvered with streams on her lower slopes, clothed with her groves of olive and almond, fig and apricot, orange and pomegranate, as high as there is soil enough to hold their roots. Through a gap in the Hills of Galilee, snow-crowned Hermon stands out in splendid relief against the deep blue sky. East, across the Jordan, are the Mountains of Gilead, Osha's summit conspicuously capped with a streaming panache of cirro-stratus; the coastal Plain of Sharon rolls emerald to the turquoise lip of the Mediterranean, and the huge bulk of Carmel thrusts out into the glittering distance a fortress defying the uttermost assaults of Time.

"Some view!" John comments, baldly, in his acquired idiom, narrowing his eyes under the hand that shields them from the sun. Yet in his heart he is drunken with the beauty—captive forever to the spell of this land of Palestine....

"Thud, thud! ... BOOM! ..."

A colossal tree-shaped column of woolly brown vapour rises in the west where lies Jaffa. "We" are blowing up Turkish ammunition-dumps and provision stores.

"Rat, tatt, tatt—tatt 't tat!" go the machine-guns in the hills to the south....

"Thud, hud, thud 'd 'd! ..."

Great happenings are in the air. Trained as John Hazel is in the unimaginative school of London's Stock Exchange and the City, his keen Oriental brain is quickened to this consciousness. Time, after many ripening centuries, is giving birth to The Event foretold by and foreshadowed in prophecies, dreamed of by vision-seers. Can it be that after all these centuries of exile, Christianity is to give back Palestine to the Jews? ...

The onyx ring attracts the man's black eyes as he brings down the hand that shaded them. He tells himself that, after all, he wasn't quite such a blooming mug as little Esther thought. He remembers binding a cotton rag about the finger that wears the ancient heirloom, on the eve of the start from Ismailia. Somehow, the rag must have come off, either before, or when, he jumped from the aëroplane, at the signal of Essenian.

"The treacherous Egyptian brute! One of these days—" There is a promise in the hiatus that bodes ill for Essenian. There is also a token, adhering to the ring, that bodes not over-well for John. Only a speck of bright green sealing-wax, sticking in a fold of the lion-skin of Hercules, that was not there when its wearer left the house in the Rue el Farad, to dine with the Pasha at the Aviators' Club.

IX

The Khan of et Talab, or The Fox, is a thoroughly Oriental caravanserai; flat-roofed, two-storeyed, and built upon three sides of a square courtyard. The ground-floor rooms are deposits for travellers' baggage and stores, the windows of the guest-rooms look out upon the courtyard, the fourth side of which is a row of stables, with small rooms above them for Arab and Fellah camel-drivers and horse-keepers, cooks and scullions, and the tag-rag-and-bobtail of the Khan.

The rooms occupied by the Emir Fadl Anga, pigeon-master to the nephew of the King of the Hedjaz—purveyor of Intelligence to German Headquarters at Shechem, and owner of the dapple grey Arab mare, are upon the top floor, and possess the exclusive monopoly of the roof. Thus the smells which rise from the area of the courtyard and the harsh cries of itinerant fruit and sweetmeat sellers, pedlars of fish, hawkers of bread and vegetables; with the wrangling of servants and horse-boys, camel-drivers and muleteers, washermen and scullions, are somewhat tempered before they ascend to the nostrils and ears of the Emir.

The room is large, whitewashed and fairly lofty, with a cool tiled floor, on which are spread a few mats and Damascus carpets. Some stools, a few cushions, a low table; a carved chest with a huge, wooden lock, and the inevitable divan, are all its furniture. Opening on a broad balcony communicating by a staircase at each end with the housetop and the courtyard, the high, wide window is also the door.

On the right-hand side of the divan nearest the window, the Emir lies outstretched; pillowed on the embroidered saddlebags which contain his travelling-gear, and smoking his water-pipe. Its flexible tube snakes over the smoker's body, down across the dark red tiling; the roseleaves dance in the water that fills the glass vessel, the blue-brown incense of the good Persian tobacco spirals up from the burnt clay bowl. The carrier-pigeons in their reed cage upon the shaded balcony outside coo slumberously. The argili gurgles as is its wont—the flies that blacken the remnants of the midday breakfast of soup, chicken stewed in rice, pancakes fried in fat and honey, melon and figs—maintain a steady, persistent buzzing, and the rapid, minute tap-tap-tap of small hard objects hitting the clean starched cover of the divan never ceases. For, if the King of the Fleas of Palestine reigns—as is reported, at Tiberias—Abu Brârit, the Father of Fleas, lives at Shechem.

Of the Emir's companions, a tall, grizzled, elderly Bedawi in a purple and black jelabia with an ample white jerd swathed over an orange silk kuffiyeh, and a short, broad-faced young man, dark-skinned as a roasted coffee-berry, with a fine mouthful of dazzling white teeth, and flashing black eyes, in a thin kaftan of black camel's hair over an under-robe striped red and white, with a kuffiyeh of white, bound with a green head-rope—the junior squats on his heels beside a little stove of burned clay in which glows charcoal, which is placed on the broad balcony outside the window-door. On the stove boils a coffee-kettle of repoussé metal, whose fragrant vapours mingle with the smells of the Desert, and the smoke of the Persian weed. Meanwhile the little porcelain coffee-cups in their repoussé metal holders, the coffee-pot, the mortar in which the berries have been crushed, the brass pestle belonging to it, and a lime-bark box of broken candy-sugar, sit naïvely on the floor. That the son of the Shaykh Gôhar, a noted leader in the guerilla war between the King of the Hedjaz and the Sultan of Turkey, should preside over the coffee-pot, is in strict accordance with Bedwân etiquette. For to drink coffee that has been prepared by a woman, is a thing derogatory to masculine dignity. Hence Namrûd, his striped mantle doffed, squats on his slipperless brown heels beside the burning charcoal, and watches the bubbling pot.

The coffee boils, the smoke spirals up from the thin, well-cut lips, closed on the amber mouthpiece of Fadl Anga's argili.

Of what is Fadl Anga thinking, as the roseleaves dance in the bowl? Some ancient Arab palace with palm-gardens and apricot-groves sheltered from the sandstorms of the Dehna by forests of cedar and oak-trees, shielded from the burning winds that blow from the Gulf of Aden, by the mountain-ranges of Hadramaut? Of his horses and hawks, pigeons and hunting-leopards, or of some slender bride, with gazelle-eyes and henna-reddened fingers, and the rounded oval face that Eastern Asiatics liken to the full-orbed moon....

Actually, Fadl Anga is watching a man in a shabby grey tweed shooting-suit, burying the Service uniform of a British field-officer of infantry, in a fox-earth in a wood. A plantation of snowy Scotch firs knee-deep in wintry bracken. He has rolled the things in a trench-coat, strapped with a sword-belt. Now he savagely jams them down, and rises from the burial of Edward Yaill, panting and with a streaming face, though the wind has the nip of February.... He rubs the dry dust from his hands—crashes to the stile through the frosty covert—leaps out on the high-road. And goes his lonely way, oblivious that the end of the lanyard attached to the silver whistle sticks out among the briars for Meggy Proodfoot's wee laddie to pounce on by and by....

The flies buzz, the pigeons coo, the roseleaves dance in the water-bowl.... Now through the smoke comes the low command in the Bedwân dialect of the ancient Semitic language that is even more archaic than the Babylonian Semitic of 6000 years ago:

"O Gôhar, Shaykh of the Beni Asir! and thou, Namrûd, son of Gôhar! hearken to my word! ..."

"We hear, O Emir! ..."

"Friends, I have taken tracings of the despatch that was in the bag, dropped by the airman who came at dawn yesterday, and before sunrise I launched near Mount Gerizim, a pigeon carrying one of these for British Intelligence Headquarters at Lydd. The wise old blue dîk with the crumpled foot, who has served us well before, is my messenger. Now, here for safety's sake, is a duplicate tracing for each of you."

White teeth gleam in Namrûd's brown face as he takes the filmy square of tissue paper, touches it to his forehead, and says:

"O Fadl Anga! by thy favour, there is no place like the inner whorl of the ear-rim, for hiding a paper rolled up within a lump of bees-wax."

"O Fadl Anga!" the Shaykh's mimicry of his junior's self-important tone is really creditable, "by thy favour, since the clipping of the ears of spies hath not gone out of fashion, I will hide the tracing thou hast given me, in a place that is of all the safest, even beneath the eyelid of this my left eye."

"I will remember, O Gôhar! Yet a little pride is permitted when a young man hath carried out a stroke so cleverly." Namrûd's black eyes glow gratitude as the Emir continues: "Yesterday there was consternation at the Shechem Headquarters of General von Krafft, Chief of the German Secret Intelligence Department on this front, when the bag dropped from the aëroplane was opened, and found to hold a dummy message. And last night there was a smart young orderly Staff Sergeant-Major of the Department—who was exceedingly sorry for himself."

"Thou shouldst have seen, O Emir! to taste the jest of it. By Allah! 'twas like a monkey trying to carry two watermelons in one hand. Under the archway of the Street of Mabortha, looking on the Square yonder," the dark hand of Namrûd waves towards the rearward wall, "by the fifth hour after sunset I fell upon my prey."

"Had I not known, I had been gulled even as the German." The tone of the Shaykh is not untinged with fatherly pride. "When the old woman passed, and squalled like a peahen at the gleam of the white face under the archway—and then took courage because she found it fair! ..."

"Thou hast the wrong end of the stick, O my father! She dropped in the mud a letter she was carrying from her mistress, the wealthy young widow of Abu Husain the jeweller, to the handsome soldier of Germany, who waited under the arch."

"So, so, that was it! And was there a letter? ..."

"Nay, she could not find it, having trodden it into the mud.

"True, it rained heavily yesterday morning. And what kind of a tale didst thou spin to tangle the dupe?"

"But this, that having seen him thrice, close upon the blink of dawn, standing at his post under the archway, the jeweller's widow had fallen into the very rage of love. 'Her eyes, that were like torches, are extinguished with weeping. Verily thou wouldst have pity on her, O Sidi! if thou couldst see. Woe's me! this letter!' (Thus I, the go-between,) 'May the mercy of Allah defend me if I have lost it! for truly she knew no better, poor demented creature! than to wrap up in it a costly ruby ring! ..."

"Ha, ha! ... That was well thought of!"

"It made my gull begin to hunt about in good earnest, and, under pretence of the ring's having rolled, I lured him farther down the street. While with his little electric torch he was groping amid the stenches of the gutter, I heard the song of the Bird while yet afar off.... But cackling of lust and vanity, and greed, now in one of his fat red ears—now in the other, I deafened him,—else at a move, my grip had fastened round his throat.... Then the signal pistol cracked, and the orange light flared, and he grunted an oath: 'Boppis'—what tongue is 'boppis'? ..."

Fadl Anga laughs.

"'Potzblitz,' it may have been...."

"And, like the pig he is, he charged for the archway, knocking all the breath out of the old woman, who had got in his way. And while we twain rolled among the garbage on the pavement, I, dealing him scratches and cuffs, and squealing,—but not too loud! the second cartridge cracked out, and the bag dropped into the Square...."

The Shaykh takes up:

"And I ran out from my lurking-place and changed it for the dummy, ere the German floundered, snorting, from under the archway.... He will be wiser in future,—if they ever trust him further." Gôhar lights another powerful cigarette. "He will lend his ear to no sugared tales told by old women—when next he is waiting for despatches to drop out of the sky...."

"It may be so. But once a fool, twice a fool. That is my experience," says the quiet voice of the Emir. "Now, friends of mine, be it understood! Our work here is done, with the capture of the despatch, and the proof that Essenian Pasha is a traitor to England. To-night we throw the salaam to Shechem, taking with us the English priest."

"Wallah!—but that is good hearing!" The Shaykh Gôhar nods beamingly. "My blood warms to the word of a raid. Look at the boy!"

Namrûd is wreathed in grins as he squats on his heels—clearing the boiling coffee with a dash of cold water, splashed in at the critical time.

"He is thy very son. Now, tell me once more, O Shaykh Gôhar! what the War Prisoner officer told thee yesterday. Secretly, at the Mahatté (Station) of Nakr, before the German Mudîr came."

"Masha'llah! At thy behest, O Emir! ..."

And the lean-faced Shaykh, sitting on a carpet beside the divan, in his purple and black silk jelabia and silver-corded orange head-drapery, smoking innumerable cigarettes of strong Arab tobacco, re-commences the low-voiced tale:

"Thus, as I made pretence to bargain with him for a silver cigarette-roller he had, that I said had caught my fancy, he stoutly maintaining that he did not wish to sell—the English officer said to me secretly at Nakr: 'The furrow watered with our sweat shall yield us no harvest—yet are we not losers but gainers thereby. Since, refusing to give our parole to the Turks, they shut us up in the barbed-wire enclosure without the eastern gate of Shechem, we have taken it by turns to scrape out a tunnel—working in shifts throughout the nights, and taking it in turns to keep watch. From the wooden hut on the east side of the enclosure to the wire-fence is seven paces of a man. Inside the hut we began our tunnel, covering the hole with planks nailed together—scattering earth upon these, and setting the anghareb over the top, the better to hide the place. Two days ago we tunnelled under the wire. Now we are well under the road that runs by the Tomb of Yûsuf to the Well of Yakub, and so passes into the Shechem-Jerusalem Road. We are three paces south from the Turkish sentry-box that is outside the wire there. We should have broken through to-night!"

"That would be the night of yesterday," Fadl Anga murmurs, loosening his lips from the long amber mouthpiece.

"Masha'llah! 'But,' saith the English officer, 'that we heard we were going to Aleppo for Exchange. Now, finding thee a friend in disguise, we would have thee know of the tunnel, lest haply other War-prisoners—British or of the Allies—be put in the Wired Place. Remember, the hole begins under the earth-strewn planks that are beneath the anghareb in the wooden hut that used to be the Mess, The tunnel passes three paces south of the Turkish sentry-box that stands outside the wire. Four paces from the wire, where the broken-down Turkish grain-cart stands upon the road—it hath stood there ever since the Taking of Beersheba and no man sets hand to it!—under the grain-cart is where we should have broken through.' Wallah! And they would have thrown the salaam to the Turks and departed, but for the news of the Exchange."

"Praise be to God for men of good wit! Did the officer say no more to thee?"

"This, O Emir! that they had scratched the story with a nail on the inside of a metal bowl and left it lying in the hut for the next British prisoner. In the bowl are written the times when the Turks go the rounds by day and night; and the hours for relieving-guard, and divers other things time served him not to tell."

"But which," interrupts the younger man, proudly, "I, thy son Namrûd have since found out...."

"Hence, to thee we owe it that we can make the essay to-night, O Namrûd, rightly named 'The Hunter'! Is the coffee ready, thou cleverest of spies?"

"O Haji," Namrûd answers, tingling with the praises of his hero, "the coffee is ready even now!"

The Emir wears a flowing kuffiyeh of vivid green silk secured by the octagonal gold and silver head-rope, over his black felt tarbûsh, so the title bestowed by the Shaykh's son is no empty compliment. The long Arab jubba under his loose, open jelabia is of white silk, delicately stitched, the jelabia is of heavy black brocaded silk, tagged with gold at the seams, his red Arab slippers are gold-embroidered, there are diamonds in the hilt of the curved, gold-sheathed dagger his girdle supports. It must pay uncommonly well to breed carrier-pigeons for the nephew of the ex-Sherif of Mecca, now by the right of descent from the Prophet; by the strength of the sword (and the brilliant brains of an Oxford graduate) Commander of the Armies of Arabia and of the Hedjaz, King....

Now Fadl Anga lifts his slender, muscular frame, tense and wiry even in repose, higher against the saddle-bags and takes from the dark hand of Namrûd the little half-filled cup. The young man serves the Shaykh, his father; then, but not until formally invited, fills his own cup, and they drink ceremonially. Twice the cups are replenished; then Fadl Anga says, as Namrûd refills the clay bowl of the argili and puts, with his tough-skinned fingers, a bit of glowing charcoal on the top:

"Didst thou go to the mashásheh in the Bazâr, as I bade thee, O Namrûd?"

"Wallah! As thou didst bid me, I went to the mashásheh in the Bazâr."

"And didst thou buy the drug—the sweet conserve of hashish? And of the tobacco-seller, giving him the discreet wink, the cigarettes that are drugged with opium?"

"Verily, O Fadl Anga, these things I got, after the magúngi and the tobacco-seller had denied for a long time that they had any. And—Wallah!—the cost of both was as though I had bought jewels."

"It may well be, O Namrûd, yet I grudge not the money."

The Emir puts by the mouthpiece of his water-pipe, and takes from the young Arab chief a stout package of thick, rank-smelling cigarettes, with a Turkish label on it, and a little sticky cardboard box of square, dull greenish jujubes, saying with the smile that curves his finely-cut mouth under the short henna-dyed beard, but never reaches his grey eyes:

"For, to a man who would pump a spy, or stupefy a sharp-witted jailer, either of these were worth a handful of jewels."

"Masha'llah!" grunted the Shaykh, sending out a volume of cigarette-smoke. "Have I not proved that true?"

"Many times, O Shaykh Gôhar, and I also. Now, son of my friend and ally, go thou to the bath, which as thou hast found out, the Turkish Yuzbashi (Captain) who will be in command of the guard at the Wired Enclosure to-night, uses to-day,—his duty commencing after the hour of sunset,—and challenge him to a bout of wine and tobacco and salt stories to-night in his tent. His tent is on the left-hand side of the Enclosure and serves by day as his office. He smokes opium, and his sergeant, who is his crony, is a drunkard, and they leave the onbashi (corporal) to take roll-call and go the rounds, whenever the two are minded for a fuddle"—

"All Turks are dogs and sots!" the Shaykh says succinctly. "Thou dost not forget the number of the guard at the Enclosure, and the places where they are posted, O Emir?"

"They are inscribed in the register wherein I set down such things." Smiling, the Emir lightly touches his forehead. "But if thou wilt hear—"

"Masha'llah! Let it not be said that I doubted thee." The Shaykh holds up a lean, protesting hand. "I, who am as a suckling compared to thee in wit-craft, and the science of hiving knowledge in the brain."

"Yet will I rehearse to thee here in the room, what Namrûd learned, and thou didst tell me last night on the housetop. Listen. On guard at the Wired Enclosure, all told, thirty-four men. By daylight at any hour, eight Turkish postas on sentry."

"By Allah! Plenty to guard one Englishman."

"As follows: One outside the Wired Enclosure at each corner. One in the middle of each long side, north and south, and two at the entrance.... The guard-tent is opposite that of the Yusbashi.... Roll-call is in English time, 7.30 a.m. and 8 p.m. The rounds of inspection are 9 p.m., 12 midnight, 5 a.m.... Three times between sunset and sunrise. The châwush (sergeant) makes them, if he is sober. At other times the onbashi (corporal) is left to carry-on. The guard is relieved every seventh hour, counting from sunset to sunset."

"Good! But there was no need to repeat it all. I am humiliated by thy grace and courtesy. Now, boy, thy lesson!"

"Hear then, O my father!"

Smiling, the dark-skinned Namrûd begins:

"There are eight postas continually on guard-duty at the Wired Enclosure. One at each corner outside, and one in the middle of each long side, where there are sentry-boxes." His dazzling teeth flash, and his black eyes twinkle as he adds demurely: "I have not heard the Emir tell that! There are two more postas on duty at the entrance. Of the eight men all told—who will be on sentry from sunset to daybreak—seven smoke tobacco and drink wine, but one does neither. He is the priest of his platoon, and a Darweesh of the sect of El-Hoseyn, the Prophet's grandson, and neither eats, drinks, chews nor smokes, any of the Forbidden Things."

The Shaykh rolls his eyes cynically and spits:

"Wallah! By the life of thy head! A Darweesh and an abstainer! ..."

Fadl Anga asks, narrowing his eyes to a grey, glittering line:

"Thou art sure? ..."

"I have the testimony of the seven who are his comrades. Not all of them love him, but notwithstanding, not one can pick a hole in his coat."

"It needs a woman's little fingers for work like that!" suggests the Shaykh, hopefully. He pitches his last cigarette-stump backwards over his shoulder, muttering: "Dastûr. By your permission, Ye Blessed!" in case of offending some Afrit of the house, and rises from his carpet saying: "O Namrûd! it is time for sleep. Leave we the Excellent One to rest. Fresh talk will come after. And there are yet two hours to pass before thou goest to the bath...."

And so, with formal exchange of courtesies, and high protests against the Emir's uprising, the Shaykh Gôhar and his son assume their slippers and depart; leaving behind them the perfume of sandal and musk and myrrh, mingled with the wild chamomile and wormwood of the Desert, and the odour of dressed gazelle-leather. And Edward Yaill is free—for an hour—to sleep and dream of Katharine....

It is grilling hot in the upper room of the Khan of the Fox, and the mingled stenches of the courtyard intensify as it approaches high noon. The fleas hop, the flies buzz over the unremoved débris of the midday breakfast.... Sleep still delays, though Yaill has trained himself to summon the Healer at will. In his brain the memory of a familiar refrain thrums in insistent, maddening repetition. He must yield, or sleep will never come. So under his breath he hums "Loch Lomond" so softly that the hairs of his henna-dyed moustache scarcely flutter to the measure. And then, for a few moments, he appears to doze. Until wakening, he stretches out a slim sun-browned hand, as one who wistfully beckons, and whispers, yielding to the craving of body and soul:

"Katharine, Katharine, where are you hiding? ... All night and all day I have felt you near me. Come out and show yourself, my Sweet, my Sweet! ..."

But Katharine delays to reveal her bodily presence, though that strange haunting sense of her nearness does not abate.

Yielding to the divine spell, Yaill holds out his hand, palm upwards. A pause, and he feels the light pressure of fine, smooth fingers. Hers! ... He shuts his eyes, and her breath is cool upon the quivering eyelids. Now she bends over him, and for one rapturous instant, her mouth is upon his. Now the illusion passes, but it leaves his heart hungering. He cannot thrust the thought of Katharine from him. He abandons the idea of the noonday siesta. He will write to his lost love.

And so Fadl Anga, otherwise Edward Yaill—takes from his girdle his Arab pen-case, feels in a pocket within his kaftan for a roll of coarse yellowish paper, tears off a suitable square, and begins to write, using in correct if uncomfortable Oriental fashion the palm of his hand for a desk.

"DEAREST OF WOMEN,

Here in this Samaritan Khan of The Fox at Shechem, I write to you—my two Arabs—Namrûd, the Hunter, and his father the Shaykh Gôhar, of the Beni Asir, having gone about their business, and left their supposed Chief in the state of 'kef!' Kef proper, meaning a full stomach, a divan, coffee and tobacco—incidentally everything else that affords gratification, notably wine—and the Daughters of Eve. I have eaten a greasy Syrian midday breakfast, I lie on a divan apparently stuffed with radishes, and evidently populous! I smoke excellent tobacco, and Namrûd's coffee corresponds in quality, but there is no wine, and the One Woman earth carries for me, her lonely lover, is some three hundred miles away.

"Beloved, these scrawled lines may never reach you! But there is news and I must write.... Yesterday, the War Prisoners in this place, with the exception of some few too sick to be moved, have been deported via Aleppo to Smyrna, for purposes of Exchange. Your brother's name has again been excluded from the list. Hamid Bey accuses him—I heard last night—of instigating certain of the rank-and-file to mutiny, and the slander is supported by witnesses suborned by him.

"Julian has been secretly removed from the Barracks prison, where up to the present he has been confined. We could not trace his whereabouts at first, but lighting on the fact that 34 Turkish rank-and-file were still assiduously guarding a wooden hut at the eastern end of the rectangle of wired-in ground outside the east gate of the city where War Prisoner officers are no longer—we came to the conclusion, now proved correct—that our man would be found there! Pressure so monstrous has been brought to bear, to compel him to sign a paper, exonerating Hamid Bey from certain charges at the expense of his own integrity, that our attempt at rescue will be carried out to-night....

"Shall we succeed or fail? What has Fate in store for us? The answer to the question lies upon the knees of the gods. You would scold me well if you were here, for so Pagan an utterance—"

The moving pen is arrested. The keen ears of Fadl Anga have heard the soft padding of naked feet upon the balcony. The paper on which he writes vanishes, and with magic celerity a half-written Arabic poem takes its place upon the palm of the Emir's slender hand. The pen moves from right to left, as a shadow falls upon the paper. The voice of a Fellah servant breaks in upon the poet's reverie:

"O Saiyid! O Emir, this slave craves permission to remove the dishes! Also there is a woman below in the court-yard...."

The flies rise with a roar from the rinds of the melons and the greasy remains of the dishes, as the blue-shirted Fellah waiter deftly lifts the tray, and poises it upon his head.

"A presumptuous one, who knowing that at this hour thou wouldst be in the state of Kef, or under the influence of the Healer, yet clamours to be brought before the Presence. Wilt thou that I bid her begone?"

"A woman, sayest thou? Who is the woman, and what is her business with me?"

The question is put with low-voiced indifference, the Emir's half-closed eyes surveying the ceiling, now blackened with a moving pattern of flies.

"O Emir, it is the Mother of Ugliness! ..."

"'Ummshni,' sayest thou? ... And who is Ummshni? ..."

"O Prince, Ummshni is known to every one. Ummshni is—Ummshni. Touching her message, which greatly presuming, she dared to send thee—"

"Out with thy message, O father of fools unborn!"

"O Master and lord, the message was this, thy slave kissing the dust beneath thy feet for the sender's presumption: 'Tell the Emir Fadl Anga that his greatness takes the high-road and my humbleness treads the low. But, in the matter of the lost carrier-pigeon of whose whereabouts my lord deigned to question Yuhanna Nakli, the Samaritan divineress in the Bazâr—"

"I remember. Bid the messenger of the Samaritan divineress come hither!" The long lashes veil the Emir's grey eyes, and as he speaks with languid pauses between the words, he hears the measure of that well-known refrain in the throbbing of his arteries and the beating of his heart: "Take away the dishes and send her up here. Or—" There is a whiff of myrrh and sandal as the tall slight figure in, its rustling silken garments rises from the divan: "Here, from the window, point her out to me!"

"O Prince, behold the daughter of Sheitan! dancing and singing to the camel-men and horse-boys in the haush below."

The tall figure of the Emir steps out on the balcony as a guffaw of coarse merriment comes up from the courtyard borne on a stronger wave of stinks.

X

A circle of Fellah grooms and Arab camel-men, coarse-mouthed, evil-eyed, old in the ways of vice—are gathered about a little creature in the dingy blue print robe, yellow-white outer-robe of sheeting and coarse double veil of the Fellaha. To the majority of these Ummshni is known, not so to the others; who crowd round, eager to taste the joy of baiting the veiled woman who has ventured alone into the crowded court of the Khan.

"Hail, O Beauty, in search of a lover!" jests a squint-eyed Arab. "Couldst thou not pay an old woman to tout for thy customers? Has business been so bad that thou art driven forth under the eye of daylight? Nay then, show thy face for a foretaste of pleasure. Insh'allah!—unless thou art ugly as a daughter of the Jinniyeh, here is Abu Mulâd the Tuareg camel-man, ready and willing to take thee on!"

"The Daughters of the Jinniyeh have legs shaggy with hair, and not seldom one eye in the middle of the forehead," squeals a scullion, as Abu Mulâd, a huge and hideous Tuareg from Central Sahara, whose face, arms and legs are dyed with indigo, whose back hair is plaited in tails with straw, and whose top locks are hogged like a cob's mane under the black tribal head-cloth, is thrust into the forefront of the circle by a dozen officious hands. "While this moon's husband fell down dead for sheer joy when his bride was first unveiled to him. Is it not the sheer truth, O Bestower of Delights?"

"Verily thou dost not lie, for once, O Kasib the scullion!" says a thin but audible voice from behind the close-drawn veil. "Wilt thou risk the same fate, O Abu Mulâd the Tuareg? Then—then put forth thine hand! ... Or—shall I save thee the trouble? See then the face that killed a man upon his wedding-night!"

With a thin, shrill cackle of derisive laughter, she draws the screen of coarse towelling. Abu Mulâd stares, grimaces behind the strip of black cloth covering his mouth, curses and spits copiously.... While the little active figure, galvanised into sudden activity, revolves before him in an impish dance, chanting to a weird, unholy tune, words in a strange, unknown tongue:—

"O, you rode the Desert and he flew the Air!—
And now he has sent me to find you;
A message from him, and a letter I bear—
From the bonny bonny Maid of Kerr's Arbour!"

There is something so gnome-like about the little capering figure, revolving lightly as a withered leaf, or an eddy of Desert sand, upon the unclean litter of the courtyard of the Khan, that—and there is not one man of all the throng who does not believe in witchcraft—even those who know Ummshni best, quail at the possibility of falling under some evil spell, blasting in its effect upon the body as upon the soul.

Kasib the scullion claps his hand before his mouth, as do a dozen others, invoking the Protection. But Abu Mulâd is of the type of man that, ordinarily slow, dilatory and lumpish as a buffalo, is rendered tigerish by fear. He shakes in his hide sandals and bleaches under his indigo mask as he splutters through the V-shaped gap between his filed front teeth:

"Be thou accursed, thou one-eyed sorceress! abominable ghoul, conceiver by the seed of devils! Insha'llah! this good blade of mine shall purge thee of thine evil blood!"

Not a man puts out his hand to save the woman, as the Tuareg leaps upon her, grasps her frail shoulder, and the curved iron knife flashes out, when a sharp clear voice, with the unmistakable ring of authority in it, arrests the lifted hand.

"Shwai!"

The whites of eager eyes roll, as the dark, excited faces are lifted to the balcony where stands the Emir Fadl Anga. Now his sharp, authoritative voice rings out again:

"Release the woman and bid her come up hither. Who shows her violence will reckon with me!"

The Tuareg's heavy blue fingers fall from the slender, bruised shoulder. Ummshni mutely salaams to the imperious Presence above, and moves with her customary, artificial limp to the outer staircase leading to the balcony, as the crowd of idlers, frustrated of the pleasant thrill that is born of the sight of bloodshed, disperse to their various quarters.

Imperiously beckoning the woman to make haste, the Emir moves back into the room, and presently the shadow of the little feminine figure is cast across the balcony and the three-inch high window-sill, that is grooved to receive the heavy shutter that closes the room at night....

With a strange premonitory thrill, Yaill speaks to the little creature:

"Enter without fear, O Mother of Ugliness!" He goes on as her fragile, dusky arms curve out, the hands touch the veiled brow in the Eastern salutation from an inferior, and noiselessly as a moth she flits into the room: "And without fear—for here we are in privacy—tell me who taught thee that song?"

"O Saiyid!" How faint and whispering a voice is hers.... "I learned the song from a big man—-a soldier of the Army of Ingiltarra—who sat on a sack of biscuits after Sheria, and hummed while the Sons of the Desert made the Prayer of Afternoon."

"Where is the man to be found?"

"Saiyid, he lies in hiding in a tomb upon Mount Ebal, having been lamed in leaping from a landing aëroplane. His liver is charred with anger at so untoward an accident. Strong is his brain to help thee plan, and strong as iron are his hands—that could choke the life out of an enemy's throat—even as a child twists a rotten cucumber. But he is lame!" Yaill marks the falling note of anguished pity in the voice. "He can but limp upon a stick, he cannot leap or run...."

"Tell him from me.... Stay! ... Tell me first how thou didst encounter him?"

"Sir," Ah, the woman knows too much, she is actually speaking English, "Sir, to me, a woman of many sorrows, secretly dwelling in that desolate place of which I speak, he came as a stranger seeking succour. Then, by the Will of the Most High, was discovered between us kinship: the bond of religion, the call of race, and the unbreakable tie of blood."

"Madam—"

"Give me not that title. I am no man's wife!"

"Then, Miss Hazel—"

"Chut! Call me only Ummshni." A black eye sparkles at Yaill from between her veils and a little finger, slender and supple as a lizard's tail, signs to him to beware. "I heard a footstep overhead, but now!" the thin voice whispers, reverting to Arabic, "And it did not pass on, and see there—that hole!"

With an upward gesture of her supple hand she barely indicates the whitewashed ceiling, in which there is certainly a hole, rat-gnawed, or made by human hands for spying purposes—and reaching to the surface of the flat mud roof above.

"O Ummshni, there is a hole indeed, cleverly made for eavesdropping, but the man who keeps guard above it is a follower of mine. Stay—thou shalt prove it so!" Fadl Anga whistles, shrill and sharp, the call of the pigeon-master; and there is a rap on the roof above, and an answering, echoing call. "Now take a message for thy man. Tell him from me, that since by Fate he is doomed to be out of the adventure—"

"Give me a message worded in some other way. I will not wound him so!" There is sensitive pride in the thin, whispering voice. "And first let me discharge mine errand. Here are the letters I spoke of in the song."

"Give, then," says the Emir briefly....

She draws from beneath her coarse white outer robe John's square of sewn parchment-paper, inked with the signs of the Zodiac, touches with it her veiled forehead, and offers it in both her outstretched palms.

"The letters are stitched within, I was to tell thee. And that one of them comes from the hand of her—who is dearest to thee of all!"

A great wave of emotion goes through Yaill, as he takes the inky double square of soiled parchment-paper. His hand trembles for a moment, and there is a dimness before his eyes.

"Thank—"

"Do not thank me, sir," the little creature quietly says in her Paris-learned English, "I acted in obedience. Shall I not carry out the orders of him who is Head of my House? Now give me the message to carry to John Hazaël in the Mountain, for at dark I have business that brings me back to this town."

"Shall I write, Miss Hazel, or shall you remember?"

"It will be safest not to write, and I shall not forget. Tell me in English, time and all.... It will be clearer for John Hazaël, I being commanded to repeat your very words."

"Then tell John Hazel from Edward Yaill that I have received the packet, and that as earnestly as ever man thanked man, I thank him for what he has done! To-night, between twelve-thirty and two o'clock—European time—we break into the Wired Enclosure. We have learned of an easy way to get in; and except for one man, who cannot be dealt with, I think we can dispose of the guards."

"To-night between half-past twelve—no! ... Twelve-thirty and two o'clock you break into the Wired Enclosure, having learned of an easy way to get in...." The tone is studiously calm, but the throbbing of her heart shakes her. "Is that all, or is there more to tell? ..."

"There is a tunnel running from the wooden hut that was used as a mess-room by the English officers. Do you follow? It begins under the bed that is in the hut, and running eastward, passes under the broken cart that stands near the side of the road. Five paces from the sentry-box of the man we cannot deal with—the Darweesh who neither drinks wine nor smokes."

"Nay. But it may be—" The talk has swung back to Arabic, and the voice that is thin and soft as a trickling rivulet of hill-water, sounds as though Ummshni's hidden mouth were smiling behind her veil. "It may be that Ishak Baba the Darweesh, who drinks no wine nor tobacco, and cannot be drugged into blindness—hath no strength to refrain his lips from the offered goblet of love?"

"Ah! So there is a weak place in his priestly garment, that," Yaill remembers something the Shaykh Gôhar has said, "that the little fingers of a woman might widen to a hole?"

"Verily, O Emir! To-night when the Dark comes, Ishak Baba going on guard at sunset—it is a pact twixt him and me, that I, Ummshni, may feed the—the English prisoner, if—if a shameless woman of the Bazâr, a gipsy whom Ishak Baba loves—visits the Baba in his sentry-box. I, Ummshni, keeping watch the while."

"Isht! (Bravo!) O woman of a thousand! Hast thou carried the assignation to the gipsy courtesan?"

"Nay, not yet."

"Then, do not carry it!" The Emir's grey eyes gleam, under the green silk kuffiyeh that drapes his tarbûsh, and the thin lips under the henna-dyed beard curve into a smile that shows his white, rather irregular teeth. "One of my men will keep the love-tryst, walking with a mincing, womanly carriage—and swathed in the white izar. Was the gipsy not to pass the Baba on his beat, dropping an almond or a flower, and before he wheeled about, slip into the sentry-box? Dost thou nod? Ay, I well thought thou didst, it is an ancient game!"

The Emir's white teeth gleam in his red-dyed beard, and Ummshni gives her little mirthless titter.

"As my lord says, the game is old, but while Earth spins between the Poles it will not lack for players. One thing there is to ask...." The voice falters and the little figure trembles. "Thy man ... He will not kill the posta?"

"Nay. Do not tremble. He will only gag him well, and bind."

She gives a small sigh of relief.

"There will be the green rods for him, the luckless one! when the prisoner's escape is discovered."

The Emir's thin eyebrows mount in his bronzed forehead. He says in his languid, high-bred tones:

"So there be an escape to find out, I am even content that he should taste the asayisi. I do not love Turks."

"Nor I, Saiyid! But—" and another wave of shuddering goes over the little shrouded figure: "since the ninefold curse of War fell upon this my unhappy country, I have seen such rivers of blood flow—"

"O lady, the whole world bleeds; nor shall its wounds know stanching until the enemies of Peace are brought low. They are the Turk and the German, and yet another who wears the skin of many races, and plots evil in many tongues. He works underground, and flies by night, and does not show his face in sunshine; but when his hour comes, he will be revealed! Russia has the disease of him—and Ireland is rotten with him!—and in India and the Far East the papers that bear his teachings are cast abroad, and carried on the winds, and shower down like the falling leaves."

"And here. Even in this town—"

The black eye sparkles between the folds of coarse towelling, and the grey eyes lighten in an answering look.

"So! ... Thou couldst tell a tale—"

"Saiyid." The eye-gleam is hidden in the folds, the tone is humbly deprecating. "I am only Ummshni. Who looks over his shoulder when a thing so despicable limps by with her basket or sharbi?"

"I understand. Now, attend. Tell your John Hazel that we four men—I with my two Bedwân and Father Forbis, ride out of Shechem before dawn, having the password and making the pretext, that a carrier-pigeon being to fly for Mecca at daybreak, we mean to launch her from the Mount. There is a good chance that—Shechem being full of strangers—the fourth mounted man of us shall pass unobserved. But, in any event, for us there is no turning. Dost thou understand?"

The lean sunburned hand touches the butt of one of the Emir's silver and ivory-mounted revolvers.

"O Saiyid, I understand!"

"Good. Tell John Hazel to wait for us a mile west of Shechem, where the Road of the Wady Azzun—going to Jaffa, turns southward through a deep defile among the hills. Is that clearly understood, or shall I repeat it?"

"It is understood, and John Hazaël will meet thee, where the road of the Wady Azzun, going to Jaffa, turns southward through the defile among the hills."

"Can he, being so lame? ..."

"He can if I say he can. I will see to it!"

"Then we will leave it so. Near the mouth of the defile, is a Turkish Army Service motor-lorry. It broke down there yesterday and it is there to-day. Let Hazel wait in the shadow of it, for the sound of our horses. If we can get a spare horse we will bring it. If not, one of those we ride will have to carry two men. For Hazel is our partner in the adventure. We are not going to leave him in a hole!"

"I hear, O Saiyid! and I shall not forget. By the broken Turkish lorry where the road turns south, running between the walls of the defile.... It is for Jaffa that you ride?"

"For Jaffa, where the British are.... Naturally."

Nationality unconsciously asserts itself in the tone. She answers in her whispering accents.

"There are British, five miles nearer here than Jaffa, striking north from the Cross-Roads of Gilgal—over the levels, and again west at Nebi Karen.... For there is the Tower of Kir Saba, and Kir Saba is the Headquarters of—what you call—a Mounted Brigade.... Not of soldiers from England—but British of the Dominions—and yet not Australians, though looking like them.... Dark, stern-faced men with crimson bands and little green tufts on their soft brown hats—riding little, thick-necked, active horses, sitting not loosely as does the Arab, but close, as though horse and rider were one."

"They are New Zealand Mounted Rifles. You have certainly a gift for detail, Miss Hazel."

The grey eyes of the Emir lighten appreciatively under the Hajj's green turban. The little veiled creature, as unmoved by his praise as she was by the Tuareg's insult, goes on with what she has to say:

"'Anzacs,' that is their name. And since yesterday their Headquarters is Kir Saba, whose Tower stands north from the Cross-Roads two miles upon the slope of the hills. The Turks and Germans drove their trenches through the vineyards and gardens, but, though they emptied the vaults, and wine-cellars, and broke the refrigerating plant, they did not cut down the orchards and olive-groves that stretch for miles over the Hills. They were wire-fenced and gated in the time of Eli Hazaël. Lest the wire should not have been cut, or the locks of the gates broken,—I will place in thy charge this key that I have here."

She is holding out to Yaill a clumsy metal spatula, evidently the work of an Eastern hand.

"There are other keys upon the ring," she shows the slip-ring of copper wire on which some smaller metal spatulas are strung. "They are the keys of the habitable rooms that are on the Tower ground-floor. We lived there part of every year, during the Spring and vintage. Turks having been there—" the slight inflection given to the word conveys a contempt that is boundless; "the rooms may contain nothing that is fit for usage; yet were it otherwise, all is at the service of my lord."

"You are very kind!" Yaill says, more than a little awkwardly, for one to whom the sonorous speech and stately bearing of the Bedwân are second nature by now.

"By the Saiyid's leave," again Yaill has the impression that the hidden mouth smiles coldly, "I speak of another—to whom the Tower belongs."

"Ah, yes, of course."

Yaill is suddenly switched on to a fact he has forgotten:

"Of course, the Tower of Kir Saba and the land about it, have been for many generations the property of the Forbis family. And Father Julian is the only living male heir. But how do you know?"

There is pride in the low voice that answers:

"Saiyid, though but a woman, I am of the race of Hazaël. For sixteen hundred years and more our men have been Keepers of the Tower and Guardians of the Shrine. Thou wilt deliver the keys to my lord? It is a promise?"

"It is a sacred promise. Pardon that I forgot!"

"Now I go back to carry thy words to John Hazaël on Mount Ebal. Then I return to Shechem. At sunset Abu Ishak goes on guard, at the end of the Wired Enclosure where the wooden hut is, and when it is dark, I feed the prisoner."

"Is it wise to risk so much for that?"

"Being a man," the little voice is very cold, "the Saiyid speaks man-fashion. Being a woman, descended from Her who is the Mother of all men save Adam, I speak after the manner of my sex. How shall the lord of Kir Saba ride for life—and over the hill-roads—if he be fainting? Will he not sit the saddle better if he be strengthened with broth and wine?"

"O daughter of our Mother Eve, wise art thou, and full of forethought! One thing before we part. What time shall the gipsy-woman come to the sentry? It shall be for thee to say!"

She thinks an instant, then says:

"When the boruzan of the guard sounds his bugle, and the lights of the camp are darkened, let her come, stepping softly, and pass the Darweesh on his beat—dropping a white flower, or a piece of white paper—and then slip swiftly as a snake, or a lizard, into the sentry-box. When the Baba returns—"

"In the hope of finding waiting—the only one of the Forbidden Things he hath not power to forego—he will kiss a gag of oiled camel-hide, smooth and tight-fitting and greasy, instead of his gipsy's hot, painted mouth. She will come when they sound 'Lights Out' at the camp of the Wired Enclosure.... And so, good-bye, Miss Hazel," says the Emir Fadl Anga, and his sorrowful grey eyes are kindly as they rest on the little shape. "Forgive me for asking the question, but under the circumstances—seeing that we clear out of here to-night—what is to become of you? ..."

"Of me? ..."

She gives her queer, rustling laugh, and by the sound of it he knows himself in the presence of a despair that is greater, because more hopeless than his own.

"What becomes of the Dust when the puff of wind hath passed over? Does it not settle down again—to be trodden underfoot by men?"

"But," Yaill feels something like awe of her, so small, so desolate, so set apart, enfolded in her tragic sorrow, "at least, in case of trouble at the gates to-night, you had better let me give you the pass."

"I am Ummshni.... I need no pass! ... Again I am like the Dust in this—that when men tread me underfoot I am carried on their sandals, wherever I would go. Farewell, O Saiyid! May the Most High preserve you and your companions—and grant my lord deliverance by your brave hands, to-night!"

And she is gone, and Edward Yaill takes a dagger from his girdle, and rips open the inky, stitched-up double square of tough parchment note.

Two letters tumble out of it into his eager fingers. One is in the familiar, beloved script of Katharine Forbis, the other—the buff envelope, blurred with postmarks, patched with stamps and scrawled with re-addresses he thrusts carelessly into a pocket within his silk kaftan.

One shivers, contemplating the loss of that wonderful buff envelope, and the consequent slip between the cup and the lip. But Yaill has no thought but this! To him, on the eve of the Great Adventure, has come a God-speed message from his love....

"My Man of all the Men that walk this world!" she cries to him. "My full heart lies between your darling hands to-night. And your dear, dear letter—O Edward! I have it close to me. It lies where my own love's head rested when we said 'Good-bye.' You remember that sweet, sad parting in the chapel at Kerr's Arbour? ... I shall never smell violets again, or put on my mother's black lace veil to wear to Communion, without going back in memory to that day ..."

It is a long letter, written all over eight pages, and running along the edges of the filled sheets. Love and solicitude and anxious wistful yearning, overflow into the smallest corners, curling and flourishing like tendrils of the vine. It is not a high-browed letter, nor even a passionate one, though pure womanly passion throbs through it from beginning to end. It is Katharine in her fullest expression—and than Katharine, Edward Yaill, her lover,—asks nothing better for this world and for the next.

"Dearest," it ends, "John Hazel has promised to get this letter through to you, and the other that I have written for Julian,—and yet another that was sent to Kerr's Arbour for you. How strange that at the parting of our ways, so true a friend should have risen up to help us. With you I feel—more strongly than I can say here—that this man is linked with my Fate! With 'our' fate, I would once have said—but must not now, Edward. Ah, though I do not speak or write thus, I always think in the plural, dear! ...

"My own, though you make so little of it, you are in danger. An accent misplaced, an unguarded gesture—a twitch of a muscle—might bring you Death. If it add to your peril to give you this—John Hazel has my authority to destroy it, this letter that I have kissed where your dear, dear hands should touch! Julian's Rosary and your bit of asphodel I keep where I can feel them, as I go about my business of driving cars in Egypt for our Red Cross. Thank God, I have lots to do! And I do it, as well as I can, with both of you tugging at my heartstrings,—lie down to sleep with a prayer for you on my lips—wake in the night, crying for joy, because I have dreamed that you are safe, and we are happy as we used to be. And rise to another day of anxiety and loneliness....

Oh, well! it can't go on for ever! Even suspense like this must come to an end. God keep you both, my Precious Ones! and bring you back safely to—

"Your loving, faithful, anxious,
"KATHARINE."

Yaill reads the letter three times and kisses it lingeringly. Then he puts it carefully away. With certain other documents, maps and diagrams of fortified places, tracings on silk tissue-paper, and two or three other letters in Sanscrit and Arabic, in a small flat case of tough glass, double, and metal-jointed; covered with green gazelle-leather, stamped with an Eastern design. The flat paper-case closes hermetically; and a twirl of a stop-screw liberates the acid contained in a reservoir at the top. Thus, its contents may be destroyed,—or rendered completely illegible, at the will of the agent who carries the case....

At the last moment Yaill remembers the buff envelope, brings it out, turns it over and sniffs at it.... It exhales no cheap and violent perfume, displays no gaudy monogram.... The handwriting, large, flourishing and square, is quite unknown to him, and yet—as it lies under his incurious eyes, the image of his wife, Lucy Yaill—once Burtonshaw—is flashed upon his brain.

He will not open the buff envelope just now.... The thing with its English superscription, being dangerous to carry, he puts it away with the other papers in the glass-lined case, one twirl of whose lever-screw can blot out words, penned in the sprawling hand, that mean Hope renewed, Happiness restored, Union with the woman so faithfully loved, a blessed possibility—granted that Katharine's tender prayers for her beloved's protection and safety are heard, and answered soon....

XI

A huge Arab, mounted on a very little ass, ambling along the stony roads while a woman trudges in the dust behind him, is so common a spectacle in Palestine as to occasion no remark. Were the positions reversed,—did the woman ride the donkey and the man tramp after, then by so unprecedented a breach of etiquette, popular comment would naturally be provoked.

After the fashion indicated above, Ummshni, conjuring the little beast from some source unknown, has conveyed her man to Fadl Anga's appointed meeting-place, a mile west of Shechem, where the road of the Wady Azzun, switchbacking down to Jaffa—or more properly Gilgal—turns southward, running down a steep-sided defile among the hills. There, where the broken-down Turkish motor-lorry stands by the roadside, she has left him, taking with her a cherished asset he has carried hidden about him, in the shape of a pair of insulated wire-cutters. Her parting words still sound in his ears:

"Thou art the Head of our House, my cousin. Bless me before I go! ..."

Now John tingles with a scalding sense of her worth, and his own unworthiness, as he remembers how he put his heavy hand on the small veiled head, and muttered some incoherent words. Then she turned, and went from him so quietly that he has barely realised the risk that she is taking. Now that she has gone, it comes sharply home to him, and salt stinging moisture gathers under his eyelids, and a lump is in his throat.

The little donkey, hobbled by Ummshni before she went, to prevent its straying, grazes contentedly by the roadside, where rich green weeds, and grass and brake, and clumps of late-flowering asphodel betray the presence of moisture in the soil....

The sides of the hill-pass opening here, are chocolate-brown where the soil shows bare, as those of any cliff at home in Devon or Somerset, and trickling with little streams, thick-fringed with maidenhair.... Snapdragons of many hues, cyclamen white, and violet, and pink, spring in the crannies of the rocks, with the purple amaryllis, and a smell suggesting violets is sweet upon the air.

It is close upon the hour of sunset now. There is a great view here, from the top of the stiff up-gradient that climbs up from Shechem to plunge in a long series of downward curves, westward towards Jaffa, until, Gilgal reached—it turns at an acute southward angle and leaps the Cana Road. Nobody comes, though Turkish cavalry patrol the wadys at irregular intervals, and there are outposts with machine guns among the hills. Save for the thudding of those restless guns south-west and east, it would be even sweet and peaceful. For the air is divinely spiced with that rare perfume that is so like the smell of violets; the orange-winged Syrian blackbird pipes out his good-night song; and every thorn, or wild-olive, or mulberry-tree of all that mantle the sides of the defile, seems to accommodate its pair of bulbuls, warbling and jug-jugging in the very rage of ecstasy—sometimes breaking off to mew—after the provoking habit of nightingales. And John Hazel lights another strong Arab cigarette, swings himself to the driver's seat of the broken-down Turkish motor-lorry, and for a brief space, listens and smokes, and thinks....

He recalls the great experiences of War, forgetting War's miseries and discomforts. The social joys of the camp-fire, the long, confidential talks of the bivouac, the short, hard hand-grip pals exchange before going into action; the parting kiss that a soldier may set on the lips of a dead or dying friend. Men have seen men's souls face to face in the midst of hideous slaughter—in the pauses between horrible explosions—and until the heavens are rolled up as a scroll, and the sea is dry from shore to shore—and the Earth stops spinning between her poles, they will not forget these things.... Perhaps not even then....

And then John's thought goes back, as it has not done for long, to the thriving Firm of Dannahill, Lee-Levyson and Hazel, Insurance Brokers, of London City; and Beryl Lee-Levyson, John's former love—Muriel, Beryl's sister, and his brother Maurice—now piloting a Handley-Page bombing 'plane on the Western Front, Old Mendel, and Miss Birdie Bright, pass in imagined rotation over a stage, oddly backed by a composite drop, in part representing the Underwriting Room at Lloyds, the Office in Cornhill, and John's bedroom at Campden Hill....

Dannahill, still haggard from the shock of his grandson's death, (the wire had only come from the War Office that September morning) and Lee-Levyson and Copples the Senior Clerk, are shaking the Junior Partner's hands, as he comes out of his stuffy little office with his working coat in a brown paper parcel, containing a lot of odds and ends, some pipes, and Beryl's tinted photograph in a flamboyant silver frame. John is in a full suit of pink-striped silk pyjamas, and there too is Mrs. Hazel, John's mother, handsome in her pale blue crêpe dressing-gown, with her still abundant auburn hair in a thick plait down her back. To her John hears himself saying in his acquired British accent:

"Anyway, if the Pater was a Syrian Jew, your governor was British enough, anyway! Symes sounds like a good old English name."

And the answer comes like a douche of cold water on his secret hopes—like a crunch on the pill deftly concealed in the middle of a spoonful of jelly:

"That was why your grandmother adopted it. After your grandfather's death, of course. His name was Simonoff.... A Russian Jew from Moscow...."

The chill of the cold water, the bitterness of the pill. How John Hazel has shivered at the one and grimaced over the other. Some shock! to learn that between the Jew of Palestine and the Jew of Greater Russia he has been wrought all Jewish. That not one globule of British blood mingles with the strong Semitic tide that gallops through his veins....

And now—though his big body sits still and smokes, his spirit is abroad to-night on these hills of Samaria. He snuffs the sweet wild November breeze with wide, distended nostrils, and shows his big white teeth in a silent laugh.

This Hither Asian land of Syria.... How he has despised and belittled it—this Garden of Miracles from whose teeming soil—burrowed by a nation of cave-dwellers and idol-worshippers, and tracked by the footprints of nomadic shepherds—prophets, sages, seers, philosophers, poets, musicians, artists, architects—leaped into birth at the Divine Bidding, while as yet the world was a jungle of ferocious human beasts.... This Palestine, no bigger than the County of Middlesex, in Religion, History, Science, Law, hygiene and moral teaching—has she not ever led the way and pointed to the zenith? What if her star, after long eclipse, should now be in the ascendant? Strange, strange, if after all the centuries of war, exile and oppression, Christian hands are to give back Palestine to the Jews! ...

He hugs himself, muttering:

"A hell of a country to get hold of you, and no mistake about it. But she is IT, this little old Palestine! She's got it in her to whack the globe—given the men and the money. I'm one of her men.... I've got some money. And it's going to be spent with lots more to set her going again. Golden blood pumped into her veins to set her heart beating—and make her buried splendours, her Temple with its golden dome, her matchless Holy City—her towns, and gardens, and hippodromes and palaces jump out of her yellow soil as quick as mustard-and-cress." He chuckles. "I'm a bit potty! ... 'Fey,' a Scotchman'd call it.... I feel as if all my Big Old Men—those dead old Hazaëls—right away down from the Kings of Damascus who laid siege to Ahab, King of Israel, and afterwards joined up with him against the Assyrians!—were alive and swarming over these hills of Samaria to-night...."

Perhaps the man, in his normal state, is oblivious of the postscript he supplied to the story of the inscription on the tablet. He may not know the blood of the Hazaëls is tinctured with the Israelite blood of Istâr the Princess, daughter of Jezebel of Tyre and Ahab of Samaria. Half a mile north of where he sits on the lorry,—parallel with the road to Gilgal, runs the great seaward-going road of the Wady-es Sha'ir, forking off at Anebta, past the Watch Tower hill of Omri, to Carmel and the sea.

From her nest of purple cushions in the high balcony-window of her ivory palace at Samaria, Jezebel, Ahab's Queen, daughter of King Ethbal of Sidon, looked—when her people's god, red as though dyed with the blood of the murdered prophets—was blotted out of sight by the rising curve of the earth.... Famine withered the rainless land, and beasts and men were perishing, as the Prophet of the Most High lay prostrate on the summit of Mount Carmel, pressing his face against the sod....

"And while he turned himself this way and that," as a worm might writhe in anguish, the little cloud rose out of the sea. And the troubler of Israel rose up and sent word to King Ahab:

"Prepare thy chariot and go down, lest the rain prevent thee!"

Over this broad Road of the Wady-es Sha'ir, the fleet horses of Ahab's jewelled ivory chariot thundered, as "the heavens grew dark with clouds and wind, and there fell a great rain." And the King raced down to Samaria before the pelting storm, while the lean prophet, the swift Hound of God, scoured fleetly on before....

And Elias, being threatened with the vengeance of Jezebel, because he had killed the priests of her golden temple of Baal Zebub, fled south to Beersheba, and being miraculously fed, journeyed to Horeb, and lived in a cave. And after the Vision on the Mountain, returned by the Divine Command through the desert to Damascus, and anointed Hazaël of Damascus to be King of Syria....

Now John, lineal descendant of the race,—inhales the rank smoke of his Arab cigarette, and pursues his train of thought. Sitting on the broken-down Turkish motor-lorry, with knees drawn up to his long chin, and his long arms hugging them; with his Arab head-cloth pushed awry, and prickly burrs tangled in his coarse black hair, that is powdered with limestone-dust like his mahogany skin—the huge man with the great nose and the fierce black eyes that blaze under their bushy, knotted eyebrows, is an awesome spectacle—having much more in common with the lean and dusty Prophet than with his own remote ancestor the Baal-worshipping King.

He is engaged, as he sits there, in a death-struggle with the strongest and most ruthlessly selfish of all human passions. That smell of violets brings Katharine back—dwarfing as great artists will—every other player on the stage of his mental theatre. He sees her on a certain February day, standing in the chintz-hung drawing-room looking on the terrace at Kerr's Arbour, with a bunch of greenhouse violets in her beloved hand....

"I was going to take him these.... Perhaps you would like to?" she had said, giving the violets to John.... Then he followed her up the little aisle of the chapel, and stood with her beside the General's long coffin, looking down at the grand old face, and the rigid clasped hands....

"Father, dear, this is a friend of ours, whom you have wished to see!"

Again he hears her, speaking as though the old man were not dead but in a quiet slumber. She touched his hand in showing him how to place the violets under the rigid fingers, that held a Crucifix and had a Rosary threaded between....

On that first day she seemed to John, older, graver, sterner than afterwards, when Edward Yaill came upon the scene. He remembers how their eyes met, and she kindled into beauty. He recalls his brief, stern interview with Yaill, and that parting "Carry on...."

He conjures up the Funeral, and Katharine veiled and draped in black—offering him in a silver shell some earth from Palestine to sprinkle on the coffin. He recalls her summoning telegram, and the finding of the khaki kit of the "Missing British Officer" hidden away in the fox-earth in the wood. He glows again with joy as she comes to greet him at the Hospital, beautiful, strong and womanly, in her uniform of cool white drill. He welcomes her to the cradle-house of her Roman race, the House of Philoremus Fabius, on the ancient Street of the Four Winds, now lost in the Rue el Farad. Again he waits for her outside the Chapel of the Shrine, again they sit on the granite seat under the moss-cup oak. And once more he thrills exquisitely at the velvet touch of her warm, sweet mouth upon his clumsy hand.

It was a cruel thing to do, but she had no thought of coquetry. He knows that the kiss was a belated tribute from a woman of her race, to the last male Hazaël but one. That she looked past the recipient of the kiss to the huge, swart, bearded ancestor, who first held the onyx ring in trust, guarded the Title Deeds, and preserved the house at Alexandria—and the Tower of Kir Saba in Palestine, to be handed down, a sacred charge—by his children's children, and their children, down to the present day.... A tribute of gratitude and respect, that kiss, and nothing further. But it was set by a woman's mouth upon the hand of a man....

He knows that there is no hope for him, this ungainly worshipper of Katharine, even though her lover should never be free to marry her—though the tie that binds Yaill to Lucy Burtonshaw should endure for both their lives. He, John, has hated Yaill with the virile strength of jealousy. He has conquered that baseness in himself.... He hates the man no more.... He has risked and borne much to carry Yaill her letter. He has been even warmed and heartened by his enemy's gratitude:

"Tell him that I have received the packet, and that as earnestly as man ever thanked man, I thank him for what he has done! ..."

But even with Yaill's message fresh in mind, John is not cured of hoping. He hopes—and sets his huge foot upon the neck of his hope—while yearning over it as a man may yearn over his first-born. For this that has come to him is the knowledge of true Love, and even as Jacob in old days wrestled with the Angel,—John Hazel strives with his masterful, bright-winged passion—not trying to detain Love, but rather to compel Love, by force of thews, to go....

The blood-red sunset glorifies the West, fills the defile from cliff to cliff, and now smoulders out in amber and jade-green, peacock blue and rose-madder. Grey twilight comes—and the birds are still, as a giant owl flies over, and sinks, as a shadow sinks, amongst the shadowy trees.... No one draws near. The cavalry patrols of the Turk are oddly infrequent on this particular Shechem end of the Jaffa-going road....

John gets up and shakes his dreams and hopes and memories from him, as a swimmer emerging from a sluggish stream might shake off clinging weeds. His hopes are scarcely weeds. Rather are they trails of blossoming lotus or water-lily. But lilies or weeds, they hamper. And there is work to do.

He stretches himself, shakes his giant frame, pitches away the stump of his cigarette—gets down from the driver's seat, climbs into the body of the lorry and proceeds to inspect the boxes that form its load. They are heavy wooden cases roughly dovetailed together, painted a dirty stone-blue and grossly daubed with the Crescent and Star in bright vermilion paint. They are branded with the initials of the Turkish A.S.C., carry the stamp of the shell-factory at Makrikeui, and belong to the 2nd battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment, (Headquarters Salonika) of the IIIrd Ottoman Ordu.

John thinks it would be as well to have a look inside a few of those blue boxes, with the assistance of a spanner, and his pocket electric torch. He looks about for a spanner and presently finds one in the tool-box aft of the driver's seat. It is a large spanner of good steel, and—in the hands of John Hazel—makes a most efficient substitute for the key of the Turkish lock. The nails draw, the wood splinters, the lid is lifted.... The box—instead of being full of packets of Mauser cartridges, proves to be packed with metal spheres the size of biggish cricket-balls, painted a bilious brown....

"Bombs ..." With a thrill of pleasurable recognition John picks up one of the cricket-balls and weighs it in his hand. "Our make too. Some find!" he thinks. "Now, where did they get these? ... Snapped up a string of mules at the tail of an ammunition-convoy, or found 'em in some abandoned dump on the Peninsula, when the Expeditionary Army evacuated Gallipoli! ... Anyhow they come in handy. Damned handy! ... Let's look in another box...."

He breaks open four more, with the assistance of the spanner. Two out of the lot hold bombs, British-made, pitched in higgledy-piggledy, with the recklessness that may be born of Mohammedan fatalism. The others prove to contain paper clips of cartridges, marked for use in the 1890 pattern Mauser magazine-rifle of 7.56. mm.

Two boxes of British bombs, at this especial juncture, come to John Hazel as manna from the skies. If there is a weapon the ex-insurance broker of Cornhill prefers before all known devices for killing other men—that weapon is the bomb, of the cricket-ball, hand-pitched variety, that makes of one long-armed man, the equal of many men armed....

At Rondes Poix in the March of 1915, a party of Fenchurch Street Fusiliers being hemmed in at an advanced post by the enemy, Private Hazel and Private Spurge—a rival star-artist in the line of effective bomb-throwing—kept the Hun at bay for eleven hours by pitching cricket-ball bombs.

Again, in the April of that year, east of "that mad place called Ypres," John, possibly urged to derring-do by the urgent spirit of Sergeant Harris, and armed with a bag of bombs of this variety—crawled through a hole in the enemy's barbed-wire, and single-handed—argued in such wise with the Germans established at a certain machine-gun position, that the Fenchurch Streets—charging over the front-line parapet at the critical moment, were able to clear three hundred yards of the trench in question, and held the same triumphantly for the rest of the fighting day. The D.C.M., that silver disc bearing his Sovereign's bust, which he calls his "bit of tin" and is secretly vain of,—was subsequently bestowed on Private Hazel when a patient at the Auxiliary Military War Hospital, of Colthill, Middlesex, in recognition of this feat.

"Given they're not duds," he murmurs now, lovingly toying with the spring-pin of one of the cricket-balls, "I could hold up a half-battalion of Turks with these, until the cows come home! ..."

He looks up to his left and right, roughly estimating the height of the defile, the perpendicular walls of which are somewhat lower on his left than on his right-hand—and calculates the width of the road here at under twenty feet. More like eighteen-and-a-half. Well, given that to-night's attempt at the rescue of Father Julian Forbis does not prove a washout—here is the wherewithal to keep the road, in case of a pursuit....

Twilight creeps on. The crickets chirp, and noiseless as a shadow, the great owl slips from the thicket and takes his soundless flight. The little owls hunt in the grass for frogs, lizards and beetles, and the great bats come out of the crannies in the rocks to gorge themselves with fruit.

For a while the guns have ceased to argue, and the night is still and breathless; not the clear violet night of Syria, radiant with dazzling silver light of moon and starshine, but a moonless night of semi-obscurity, and diffuse and formless shadows, with menacing rumbles of thunder in the east, where sheet-lightning flickers now and then. Venus suspends her sapphire lamp above the hills of Judæa, and the Pleiades shine almost directly overhead. Bright-armed Orion rises in splendour over the ramparts of blue-black cumuli that brood in the east over the Mountains of Gilead. Low down, through a jagged cleft in these, twinkles the star Y Crucis, that forms the summit of the Southern Cross....

No trot of hoofs on the stony road draws nearer from the eastward; no clink of spur on scabbard, or bit against chain-bridle, tells of the approach of a cavalry patrol along the Jaffa Road. There are yet three hours and more to wait for the sound of hoof-beats coming from Shechem, that may signify the escape of the prisoner from the Bey's wire cage.

Does all go well? Has Esther Hazaël carried out her stratagem? She has shown John how—when the Dark comes down—she will feed the prisoner. By a device almost absurd in its direct simplicity—used, in this Eastern land, millions of times ere now. Women are cunning in such tricks, and full of subtle resources.... Well for men that it is so!—especially in time of War....

Ummshni is at her business now. John feels certain. He nods to himself, solemnly, and sitting on the lid of one of the broken bomb-boxes, folds his great arms, narrows his eyelids and sends his Thought ranging abroad in search of her.

Perhaps he sleeps and dreams, sitting there. Who knows whether he does or does not. But after some moments of silent concentration, he sees his messenger go forth. A tiny thing—human in form, light as a puff of thistledown, no bigger than a locust—it leaps down to the big Jew's knees, and thence to the bottom of the lorry; drops from it into the dust and scours down the road. Swift as the wind, it passes over the highway—reaches the west gate of Shechem and slips through a crevice in the ponderous iron-studded timbers, lodging between the sandalled feet of the Mustahfiz infantry guard.... Now it goes by the Khan of the Fox, darts through the square where the archway is (under which the Orderly Staff Sergeant Major of the German Intelligence Department waited for the dropping of the despatch-bag from the Two Faced Nightingale), traverses the town, thronged to-night with variously attired strangers of many nations, and—lightly as a withered leaf, and inconspicuous as a dust-swirl—traverses the main thoroughfare of the ancient town.

Shechem is packed to the walls to-night with the exiles from Jerusalem. And in addition to these, with strangers in foreign clothing, diverse in type, sinister-faced and stern-eyed, speaking unknown languages.... There are many Turkish officers, young and old, in uniform and out of it, and German officers of many ranks and decorations, accompanied by women, painted and overdressed.

So many strange feet, bringing strange dust from strange lands. Yet the little thing no bigger than a leaf finds a way between them all. Now it spins out at the east gate and rolls down the rutted road towards the Wired Enclosure.... Here storm-lamps hang outside the guard-tent and on either side of the entrance. The officer's tent is lighted within, but unlike the tent of the postas, it is furnished with a door-flap. From inside comes the sound of laughter, the clinking of glasses, and unmistakably, the rattle of shaken dice. Near the gate, in conversation with the bash-châwush of the guard, stands a tall, thin, elderly Bedawi, known to the reader as the Shaykh Gôhar.

"Nay, nay! Do not trouble the Yuzbashi." He waves a hand in the direction of the tent whence comes the convivial clink. "The affairs of the humble must wait upon the leisure of the great ones. Yet if thy dignity were not lowered by the mention of a hundred piastres—one lira Osmanli—" Gôhar carelessly displays the coin.

"O my friend! O my soul!" hiccups the bash-châwush, who at this early stage of the evening is only amiably drunk. "I will do thine errand with gladness for friendship's sake only!" Having duly received and pouched the coin, he adds: "Now tell thy business to me."

"Briefly, it was but to ask thy Yuzbashi to accord me the watchword, the Emir Fadl Anga having cause to pass the gates to-night. In thine ear, O friend! he hath a pigeon to fly at dawn for Mecca, and he is minded to loose the bird from the Mount."

The bash-châwush nods and disappears into the tent, whence, sung in a high nasal tenor voice to lute-accompaniment, issue the unblushing erotics of an Arab love-song. The Shaykh turns to one of the postas lounging near the guard-tent, and smilingly offers him a handful of thick Arab cigarettes.

"Dost thou use the Consoler? ... Take, then!"

"May Allah make it 'take' upon thee, O generous hearted one! ..."

As the handful changes owners, and other soldiers look out of the corners of their eyes and sidle nearer, the Shaykh plunges both hands into deep pockets beneath his mantle, and draws them forth generously filled with the thick, strong cigarettes.

Upon the return of the bash-châwush with the information—willingly placed at the service of the Emir—that the pass-word of the night is "Baal Zebub," he, too, accepts a handful of the cigarettes that are so heavily drugged with opium. And then the Shaykh Gôhar, with ceremonious farewells, stalks away from the Wired Enclosure, knowing his work begun.

XII

Since the departure of the Shaykh Sadân, the man who sank fainting to the floor of the wooden hut has moved once only. It was when he revived, dragged himself to his knees, and while his strength sufficed—lifting his clasped hands above his head—sent forth his soul in prayer.... Exhausted then, he collapsed once more, and dropped forwards, falling with outflung arms across the palm-wood bed-frame, and for how long he does not know, was lost in unconsciousness.

When sight and hearing return to him, thick darkness presses on his burning eyeballs, and the "Lights Out" of the Turkish boruzan is ringing in his ears. Half kneeling by the anghareb, half lying across it, his face is turned towards the east wall of the hut. Through a biggish knot-hole in the planks, he has found it possible to see—given sufficient light outside—beyond the barbed wire fence a circumscribed patch of the south-going road, the tumbled hills in the distance and the dome of the Tomb of Joseph in the foreground.... These intermittently blotted out by the figure of the Turkish sentry, passing to the end of his beat at the south angle of the Enclosure, or passing back to the angle at the junction of the road that leads to the town's east gate, with the Jerusalem-Shechem Road.

Even in darkness, the edges of the knot-hole are outlined by a fitful glimmer. The flash of an electric torch, the twinkle of a firefly, the ray of a shooting-star—there are many in this month of November—find their way through the knot-hole in the wall.

But the knot-hole is no longer there. They have stopped it up from outside! he thinks, and a groan breaks from him. He has borne so much that this little thing—fresh evidence of studied malice on the part of his jailers—hurts, like the brutal tearing of a bandage from a stiffened wound.... He shudders, hearing a curious, scratching, rasping sound, mingled with low whispering:

"Sidi, Sidi! ... Sidi, Sidi!"

His blood freezes in his veins. What is that strange, soft voice, and where does it come from? Can this be another essay on the part of the Shaykh Sadân? He waits for the next move—setting his teeth, steeling his soul with faith in his Master. Now, now, the whispering comes again:

"Sidi, Sidi! Do you hear me? O Sidi, are you there? ..."

It is the thin, rustling voice of the little Mother of Ugliness. He utters a stifled cry of joy, and dragging his chain with him, rolls off the anghareb, and in his weakness, sinks down close to the hut's east wall. Passing his thin hands over the wall in the darkness, he encounters a projection. The end of a long rubber-covered cane, from which the whispering comes:

"If the Sidi hears my voice, let him be pleased to answer! It is Ummshni! ..."

"I hear," he calls back through the improvised speaking-tube. "May God reward thee, gentle heart! How didst thou find me out? ..."

"How, is a long story meet for telling elsewhere. Has the Sidi a bowl, or other vessel? If not let him set mouth to the end of this," the speaker taps on the tube gently with a fingernail, "and I will pour milk through the canes. Tap thrice when I am to pour! ..."

He does so, and the tube is slowly tilted, and a cautious trickle of boiled goat's milk flows over his parched tongue. He sucks for life, and when he has drunk:

"Rest now," says the whispering voice. "It is ill to take overmuch at the beginning. Next time I will give thee broth, and afterwards good wine. For the Sidi must be strengthened against the hour when for the prisoner comes Rescue. Let him tap thrice on the pipe if he has heard...."

He taps on the cane-lined length of rubber tubing.... The little voice goes on:

"Listen, my lord! ... At midnight thy friends will come to deliver thee. So, when thou hast well taken the soup and wine, lie down on the bed and rest.... Sleep if thou canst, but not too sound. When there comes a scraping in the earth under the bedstead, rise up and move aside the anghareb. My lord has clearly heard? ..."

He signifies assent, and the voice goes on whispering, sending a reviving stream of Hope into his empty, sapless heart, that is invigorating to his drooping spirit, as the milk to his famished body.

"Lift up the anghareb, and thou wilt find a hole in the earth under it. Planks covered with earth hide the hole. The hole is the Gate of Hope for thee!—the Way that leads to Freedom! Does the Sidi understand?"

"I do, and thank thee from my soul! ... Who are the friends, Ummshni? I only have known of one beside thyself. But no word has reached me from that man, since the War Prisoners were shifted from camp at Beersheba to the Barracks here at Shechem!"

"Thou hast four friends here besides myself!"

He did not know he was so rich, and a thrill of joy goes through him.

"The chief of them is Edward Yaill. Thou dost recall that name? Ay! Then comes John Hazaël...."

That the prisoner has no knowledge of John Hazaël, his silence seems to testify.

"It does not matter!" The little voice is dry. "The friends to whom we owe the most are often strangers to us. Now it is time to give thee the broth!"

He sucks the life-giving stuff through the tube. With her womanly, maternal solicitude, she checks him after a little:

"Stay, now.... The Sidi feels his strength increased? ..."

He does, and says so gratefully.

"Then—lest it make the Master sleep too heavily, I will not give him the wine yet. Now let him lie down awhile on the bed that is in there. I remain outside, watching. What says my lord?"

"The sentry.... How is it he does not see thee? ..."

Something like Ummshni's little rustling laugh comes through the rubber-covered pipe-stems.

"Love hath no eyes, it is often said. Since a white flower fell on the dust in the dusk, and a light foot went past him, is Baba Ishak, the Darweesh, blind—and dumb as well, ah-hah! Now he is at the other end of his beat, his face set to Ebal, and the Tombs of the Sons of Mohammed. He is waiting Opportunity, as a dog near the butcher's shop.... When the butcher looks the other way—or goes into the house to speak to his wife, the dog sneaks round the doorpost and—his head is in the scrap-box! Sweet,—the first greedy crunch, and gulp.... But then comes the butcher's chopper—down on the dog's skull! Now lie thou down and try to sleep. I have said I will keep watch here! ..."

Holding his chain so that it may not clank, Father Julian creeps back to the verminous bed, and tries to do her bidding. But the throbbing of his anxious heart and the roaring of the blood in his ears make sleep impossible. The cheap gun-metal wrist-watch that he wears has not been taken from him, and it has been kept wound up—it is ticking companionably now. Four matches are left in his box. Sheltering the flame within the coat that serves him as a bed-covering, he strikes a match, and looks at the watch. It is twenty minutes past ten o'clock, and Deliverance comes at midnight. How wait through the long hours, for that knocking under the floor?

The Darweesh who is imâm of his platoon, and can resist all the Forbidden Things except the Cup of Beauty, stands at the north angle of the Wired Place, looking towards the Tombs. In his hot thick hand is a white rose, sweet and musky-smelling, in his nostrils a whiff of sandal and some pungent Bazâr perfume. The Baba is a little man, and his inamorata a tallish woman, but she looked a strapping wench to-night, as she passed him at the other end of his beat, with a whispered word and a dropped flower, and a provocative flash of her gipsy-eyes from the folds of her white izar.

He wheels, smacks the butt of his Mauser rifle with the flat of his broad hand, and licks his thick lips longingly. Turning out his sandalled toes—for the second-line troops of the Redif stick to the old-fashioned chariks, with bandages wound round the leg from the calf down—he marches towards the sentry-box where Delilah waits for him.

There is little breeze on this muggy night of scant starshine and blotted shadows, but a south-going waft sends a withered leaf or a torn scrap of paper scurrying at Baba Ishak's heels along the dusty road.

"Tr'rp—tr'rp—tr'rp!" ...

A tiny sound, and yet it irks and fidgets.

"Trrp—tr'rp ...!"

Whatever it is, it scurries past, as the Darweesh halts before the sentry-box. Snuffing the clamorous perfume of the Bazâr with an anticipative smile on his thick lips, he stands on the threshold and peers into the darkness.

"Inaini!" he coos, amorously to the odorous obscurity. "My soul! My eyes! Thou hast come to me! Tell me that thou art there? ..."

Undoubtedly Inaini is there, he can see her white figure plainly against the shadowy background. It is late in the day for Inaini to be coy, but too early not to humour her. He stretches out a greedy, perspiring hand. It touches the folds of her izar. Stung to enterprise, prodded by propinquity, the Baba puts down his Mauser, carefully leaning it against the side of the sentry-box, and blunders forwards. Aha! At last he has her, the willing prisoner of his eager arms.

Mashâllah! how the gipsy hugs. All the breath is squeezed out of the Baba. What is this that coils about him, binding down his arms? Not a rope? Chok! chok! He opens his jaws to expostulate—and a gag of oiled camel-hide is deftly slipped between them—and strapped uncomfortably tight at the back of his bull-neck. Swiftly his knees are bound, and then his ankles, and he is tenderly lowered to the bottom of the sentry-box.

The love affair of the Baba and the gipsy has ended with dramatic swiftness. Now the dark figure of a man steps out of the sentry-box, picks up the Mauser and resumes the beat of galloping hoofs coming along the Shechem road, and gleam glints on the bandolier taken from the victim, it shows the face of Namrûd under the khaki enverieh. And caught in some stray backwash of the sickly breeze that carried it, the tiny thing like a withered leaf, flits down the road again.

XIII

Whether John Hazel dreamed or not, things have happened as he has seen them. Conscious thought returns to him, sitting on the box of bombs. His lungs fill with a deep breath. He yawns hugely, blinks his eyes, squares his shoulders and looks about him. The constellation Orion blazes over Gilead, the Pleiades are hidden from sight by sombre clouds. There is a strange glare in the sky over the crest of Gerizim.

In mid-song the bulbuls have fallen silent. Even the pariah-dogs and the jackals are still. There is something abroad upon the air to-night, that weighs upon the spirit of humanity, and daunts the creatures, soulless as we imagine, with the sense of evil, nameless and unseen, but dominant and powerful to harm....

And now the man who listens at his post hears the quick beat of galloping hoofs coming along the Shechem road, and thrills with expectation:

"That's them!" In moments of keen excitement John's grammar is apt to fail. "Them, for a quid! Or the Colonel hasn't pulled off the snatch, and has had—"

He breaks off as the horsemen round a curve of the road. Where a patch of the grudging moonlight whitens the ground, he makes out that there are only three of them. No! Four—! Three riders in ample, flowing Arab dress, and a fourth in the close-fitting kit of a European—who reels and sways unsteadily in his saddle, and would fall—but for the help that another gives—with a hand that is sometimes at his back, and sometimes at his bridle.

"By God!—"

With a great exultant throb, John swings himself down from the lorry upon the road, as the riders check the gallop of their eager, snorting horses.... And the hot, white limestone dust of Samaria rises in pungent clouds.

Now through the dust an immense hand finds, grips and wrings the priest's, and a deep resonant voice, not like any he has heard before, and yet not strange, says rapidly:

"Thanks be to the Most High, my lord is delivered! Now, from the servant of his house, let him take this. It comes from the Sister of my lord" (a crumpled envelope is thrust into Julian Forbis's palm), "by the hand of John Hazel!"

"A letter from my sister.... Sir, may God reward you! You must be John Hazaël, I think! Though I never heard that name until to-night, while I live I shall always bless it!"

The voice sends an electric shock volting through John. It is like the voice he loves, as a man's may resemble a woman's, deeper, stronger, and hollow with fatigue. He returns:

"My lord is right. I am the man John. Youngest and last of all Hazaëls of the line save one only.... But all the Hazaëls, from the first to the last, do battle for my lord this night in Samaria. Now let my lord ride hard for Kir Saba. Though his enemies pursue they shall not pass here! For, God so willing, I, thy servant, will keep this road barred!"

"My cousin John! ..."

He hears a timid call he knows, and turning towards the quarter whence it comes, traces it to its source in a small rebellious bundle, held on the front of an Arab's saddle.

"O John my cousin, dost thou hear me! Entreat the Most Excellent One to set me on the ground!"

"Mr. Hazel, with your good leave, I mean to take this lady to Kir Saba." It is the voice that spoke to him last in the chintz drawing-room at Kerr's Arbour. Dimly seen in the hazy moonlight, the eyes shaded by the silken kuffiyeh meet John's, and although they are blazing with the fierce joy of the successful raider, he recognises the eyes of Edward Yaill.

"Nay, nay! I would remain here with John Hazaël," the little creature pleads in her distress.

"Thou wilt go with my lord and be his handmaid. When he needs thee no longer, then return to me. Hearest thou, woman?" the deep voice says, and Ummshni, bowing her veiled head, humbly answers:

"O Head of our House, I hear! ..."

"Farewell then, little Brave One!"

In the dark John reaches out, and pats her small cold hand.

"Not in this world, nor in the next will this that thou hast lone go unrewarded. What is that? ... Cavalry on the road!" His hearing, in this strange exalted mood of his, being even keener than Namrûd the Hunter's,—has warned him that a body of mounted men, coming from the direction of Shechem, are pushing along the road. He relapses into his ordinary, natural tone, as he says with a slap of his heavy hand on the flank of Fadl Anga's thoroughbred: "Ride for Kir Saba, Colonel Yaill, and all good luck to you!"

"Thanks, Mr. Hazel, and good-bye. Though I would prefer your coming with us. You could take Namrûd's horse—and he and I would ride and run by turns. Not the first time we've covered distance that way!"

There is an unalterable decision in the answer:

"Much obliged, Colonel, but I've arranged to stay."

"Good luck, then, and good-bye. You will shake hands at parting? ..."

The huge hand of the big Jew, and Yaill's leaner, slenderer, smaller hand, meet and grip hard, then John steps backwards.

"Ride like old hell, the lot of you. I stop—to carry on!"

A clatter of hoofs and they are away, in a cloud of the dust of Samaria, flavoured with the chamomile and wormwood of the desert, the acrid sweat of man and horse, tobacco, attar of roses, and leather tanned by Bedwân with bitter laurel-bark. John Hazel looks about him, fills his lungs with deep breaths and calculates his powers. How if one man were able to move the lorry across the road!

He frees himself from his Arab head-cloth and mantle, ties the ends of the long sleeves of his kumbas together, slips the knot Fellah-wise over his head, and pulls up the camel-hair shirt to mid-thigh. Even as the lean, tanned Prophet girded himself for the long race from Carmel up to Samaria, before the King in his ivory chariot—and the rainstorm hurtling on the heels of the King....

Now he swings himself to the driver's seat, manipulates the steering wheel, and lifts the starting-lever. Now he gets down, spins the crank, and heaves at the near fore-wheel. The lorry shakes, the ponderous armoured wheel moves—and the sweat pours off John Hazel. He sets his teeth, and braces himself again, using the sound, uninjured leg as fulcrum of the lever. With a sound like the dumping of a load of ancient iron on the scrap-heap—the Turkish ammunition-lorry moves across the road....

Just in time, for the clink of cavalry chain-bridles and scabbards, and the clatter of hoofs come nearer with every instant.... John fills the breast of his Arab shirt with bombs, and stands up on the lorry, in the straddling but purposeful attitude attributed to the Colossus of Rhodes.

"Old Harris and the chaps of my platoon used to call me a dirty fighter," he thinks, reverting to the vernacular of his adoptive land. "Well, this is going to be the dirtiest fight I ever put up. O all you old Hazaël men, back to the very oldest, help me to keep the road that leads to Kir Saba, for to-night! ..."

Rattle and clink. The creak and wheeze of straining leather. Half a squadron of Turkish Mounted Police spur round the bend in the road.

Well armed, well mounted, big and bearded Turks, the pick of the Bey's squadrons of mounted gendarmerie. The darkness hides the crimson fez and the smart Hussar uniform of dark blue with red and orange braiding. But what light there is is caught and given back by long shiny jack-boots—and the barrels of Winchester repeating-rifles—and eyes that glitter in swarthy faces that are ablaze with the hope of a reward.

Crash! ...

A bomb falls in the middle of the road in front of the squadron-leader, and explodes with a shattering detonation that calls loud echoes from the hills. The squadron-leader's jaw is torn away. He and his horse go down, the poor brute screaming in a pool of his own innocent blood and vainly struggling to rise upon his shattered forelegs.... Two of the other riders are wounded by flying splinters. Crash!—another bomb falls and detonates in the road....

"A Forbis! A Forbis! May Forbis foes fall! A Forbis! A Forbis! ..."

With this strange foreign slogan the Hills of Samaria ring, and a volley from the Winchesters of the Bey's men rattles back in answer. Bullets flatten on the rocks—pass through the sides of the lorry, shiver the lamps, rip the front hood, and dent the engine-bonnet. A second Winchester-volley clatters amongst the rocks—when a bomb, hurled by a phenomenally long arm, falls in the midst of the squadron. And the Bey's Mounted Policemen scatter and retreat in confusion, leaving dead men and horses behind them on the road....

John draws breath. A revolver cracks behind him—a bullet sings past his right cheek—and another, whistling through his hair, burns as it scores a furrow in the scalp at the top of his head....

"Bloody close! And fired from behind!"

He looks round, and is shot at from the original quarter to intimate that the retreat was only a feint. The baffled force of gendarmerie—trained scouts for the most part—mountaineers and hunters, has split into two parties; the hardier spirits—as the breaking of branches and the fluttering of birds scared from the coverts testifies—are scrambling down the steep face of the defile, from the northern side of the road.

Again a revolver-shot cracks out behind John. He slews his head and catches a glimpse of the man who fired, crouching behind a boulder, on the Jaffa side of the lorry.

Crash! crash! ...

Two bombs greet the renewal of the attack upon the Shechem side.... Three, hurled one after the other with dazzling rapidity, explode in the covert that clothes the cliff-face. Another hits the boulder by the road, and lessens its proportions. But the sharp brain behind it has foreseen that it would come.

Lying on his stomach, the Bey's man crawls to the opposite side of the highway. Crouching in the shadows, he waits unseen. The scene is handsomely illuminated now by bonfires among the brushwood. Bombs explode east and west, the arms of the giant on the lorry whirl like the sails of a windmill. It is at this juncture that John begins to sing....

Never did light of moon and stars shine on a grimmer spectacle. Foul with grime, whitened with dust, smeared and raddled with blood from his scalp-wound, the leaping fires on either hand show him black as a fiend from hell. The Bey's gendarme is a plucky child of Islam, but he shudders. What if no human, killable man, but one of the demon Sons of Iblis be he who is capering and dealing Death on the Jaffa-Shechem road to-night? Streaming with sweat, stricken with deadly fear, he gasps:

"Mashallah! I invoke the Protection of the Most High against Satan the Stoned! ..."

And springing up, sets a foot on the wheel, and leaps into the lorry. Next moment, locked in a wrestling-hug, two black shapes strive together, while the zabtiehs hold their fire for fear of hitting their own man.

The struggle is over in less than half a minute. The Turk is strong, but in those great and ruthless hands, he is dealt with easily. His foot slips in his opponent's blood, for the giant is bleeding freely from chips in various places. He yells as he is bent back.... Then his spurred feet are lifted. He is tossed out of the lorry, landing on his head—and as John continues bomb-throwing—loses temporarily, all interest in the fight....

Now comes from the Shechem side, a charge of mounted zabtiehs. John sings as he pulls pins,—pitches and proves the impotence of flesh and blood, human and equine, pitted against H.E. The police are shooting freely but wildly from behind and before him. Right and left he gives them the last sigh of No. 1 box—and is diving into the other—to rise up armed, when a bomb, that has fallen in the roadway without the customary explosion—is picked up by a plucky zabtieh and hurled back into the lorry....

John realises as the projectile falls amongst the boxed explosives that the fight is over. He leaps from the lorry on the Jaffa side, and knows no more. Miles away southward, as the huge detonation shakes the hills, and avalanches of débris tumble from the cliffs, a Gunner Officer of a Field Battery of the 52nd Division, holding the mud village of Mughar, says to his colleague indifferently, shutting his night-glasses:

"The Huns are having the time of their lives to-night in Samaria. Regular posh firework-display to-night on the Shechem-Jaffa road. Now they've exploded an ammunition-dump, or something uncommonly like it! Hope it's wiped out a few more Turks!—there are plenty of 'em to spare!"

XIV

For Katharine Forbis those two days of suspense, so fraught with fate for the two she held dearest, were ordeals of anguish only made bearable by the work that filled the daylight hours and the sleep, begotten of the work—that came to her at night. On the morning following the bomb-fight on the Shechem-Jaffa Road, the Base was ringing with the seizure of Junction Station; the sensational escape of Von Kressenstein's train, and the taking, by cavalry charges from the north, of the strong place of Mughar—a mud village on a hill, converted into a veritable wasp's nest by Turkish mountain-howitzers, Turkish machine gunners and Turkish riflemen.

The temper of the enemy stiffened. Resistance still was stubborn—difficulties of transport still held up the Expeditionary Army in full sight of the Jerusalem-Shechem Road. Yet it was the Day of the White Arm.... Three Captains' Crusaders of the Bucks Hussars and Dorset Yeomanry led the dazzling charges that cleared the way for the 52nd Division, and made of Mughar "not a sweet place to look at," as an English War Correspondent put it pithily—for many Turkish heads being cleft in twain after the approved mediæval method—the place wanted a lot of cleaning up. One of the glorious Three—son of a great English Statesman, himself an Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs and one of the Chief Whips of the 1915 Ministry—was shot barely twelve hours after the victory. And before sunset on this day, a distinguished Jew; financier, soldier, sportsman, philanthropist—met death almost within sight of the Colonies founded by his family on the Plains of Sharon, and south of Jaffa the Beautiful....

On this same date Maurice Hazel, piloting a Handley-Page bomber on a raid over the Hindenburg Line, was killed by a hit from German shrapnel.... And Lady Wastwood, reading the War News in the late edition of the Alexandrian Courier and crying over men who had been ancient flames, and boys who had been her dead boy's School-chums—came on this undistinguished item among the casualties, and recognised the name.

"'Maurice Benn Hazel' ... Kathy's huge Jew friend mentioned having a brother Maurice in the R.F.C. As I really want an excuse for a word with Kathy, I'll look her up and mention the thing. Though it seems rather like making use of the poor dear boy! How callous we're all getting. But I suppose we have to be, to carry on at all!"

With which conclusion, the day's work being over, Trixie removed the traces of emotion with powder, and betook herself in search of Katharine.

She found Miss Forbis in the rose-garden pavilion, reading letters from England that had come by the afternoon's mail. Time had not served until now to open them, and the first envelope had contained a type-written enclosure within, a communication from Sir Arthur Ely, appended here below:

HOLBORN COURT,
November 3rd, 1917.

"MY DEAR MISS FORBIS,

Knowing you to be working with the Red Cross at Montana Convalescent Hospital near Alexandria, and in the hope that Colonel Yaill—from whom I have not heard since he left England last February, may have communicated to you his present address—I have thought it best to send you the enclosed copy of a letter recently delivered at his Club, and opened by me as his solicitor—having authority from him, in his absence, to deal with his correspondence, and administer his business affairs. I am sufficiently old a friend of his and yours also, to add my heartiest congratulations to you both.

"Very sincerely yours,
"ARTHUR CAMERON ELY."

Here is the enclosure:

"PARK AUXILIARY MILITARY HOSPITAL,
"HOODING,
"SUSSEX.

"November 2, 1917

"DEAR SIR:

"A friend of mine who you met under the name of Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw at the Convalescent Officers Camp, B—— Base in November 1915 has asked me to write you her hands being full at present and feeling herself unequal to the task.

"The fact is that while finishing her three years service as a Probationer at the County General Hospital Leam Somerset in 1913 she was married on the strict Q.T. at the Registrar's Office Leam to Private J. Didlick of the 5th Lancers a young man known from childhood and objected to by Lucy's parents on the grounds of his being the son of the local baker and too much given to drink. In August 1914 Private Didlick went to the Front with the First Expeditionary Army and his name duly appeared upon the list of Killed after the Battle of Mons. Nurse Burtonshaw regrets that she omitted to mention this at the time of your marriage her hands being so full just then.

"I will not detain you further except by saying that in April last on the eve of the Battle of Arras Private now Lance-Corporal Didlick with several other British prisoners escaped from the zone of fire where they had been kept by the Germans at forced work and very badly used Corporal Didlick particularly being covered with boils and weighing only 8st. 31bs. when drafted Home and later on sent to this Hospital I could hardly recognise him. Later I communicated with his wife and advised her to break the news to you her proper place undoubtedly being by her poor husband's side. Her hands being full she has put off writing up to the present. Now at her request us being old friends I have taken up the pen.

"Mrs. Didlick earnestly hopes you will regard bygones as bygones and requests me herewith to enclose your cheque received for her last quarter's allowance regularly forwarded since February by your Solicitor, Sir Arthur Ely to whose care this communication is addressed. In case of loss in the post things being so uncertain in War Time I have sent another letter similarly worded care of Miss Forbis, Kerr's Arbour, Nr Cauldstanes Tweedshire, N.B.

"I remain, Dear Sir,
"Truly yours
"DOROTHY PIDGE,
"Certified Nurse ——th Nursing Unit R.R.C."

"P.S. Excuse the liberty but I do hope you won't be hard on Lucy! She means well but hasn't a particle of moral backbone."

If Katharine perused this queer letter with mingled sensations, amazed joy and unutterable relief ruled predominant above all.

For it was over, the haunting day and nightmare of loss and separation. Her bosom rose upon a long breath of relief, as the burden passed away. The barrier dividing Katharine from all she held dearest, had vanished at the wholesome touch of loyal Nurse Dorothy Pidge.

"Thank God! and thank you—you honest-hearted woman! Now to tell Edward—if I knew where to reach him!" was her thought. And the claws of suspense fastened in her soul anew, and that moment's joyful lightening of her heart made the weight that burdened it even more intolerable to bear.

Not the cool sea-breeze that stole through the fretted sides of the Khedive's marble pavilion, the beloved haunt of her leisure, nor the fragrance of the November-blooming roses that climbed its walls, and wreathed the balustrade of its terrace with trails of pink and orange, cream and white and crimson; not the nightingales that sang in the moss-cup oaks, nor the orioles that built amongst the vine-trellises—where the fireflies would twinkle and gleam at dusk when the nightingales sang their sweetest—could bring soothing to her tortured mind, or rest to her overwrought nerves.

"I can't—stand—much more!" she said slowly, speaking aloud of purpose, for the sheer relief of speech. "We have all got a point beyond which we break, and this is my breaking-point. Oh! for some news of those three men of mine!"

Edward Yaill, Julian and John Hazel.... She saw them individually, each reduced to the size of a gnat, at the end of a long vista, striving, and striving desperately, yet unable to meet and touch. She saw them in the midst of a cloud of other human gnats, buzzing and stinging.... She saw them borne down by numbers—she saw them emerge triumphant. She saw—

"Darling Kathy, do unclench your hands and iron out your forehead," said the welcome voice of Trixie at this juncture: "Even a woman with your appearance cannot afford to go on, looking like Lady Macbeth, Clytemnestra and Antigone, rolled into one, for long!"

"Did I ... Do I?" Katharine asked absently....

"You both did and do," Trixie returned. She came and sat on the balcony near Katharine and touched her lightly on the shoulder with a long, thin but sympathetic hand. "You're rather a terrifying person when you look like this, but I have a reason for being venturesome. May I broach a subject I've avoided for ages? I need hardly explain, I fancy, that the subject is Edward Yaill?"

Such burning colour flooded the face now turned to hers, that Trixie experienced relief from forebodings that had haunted her. The colossal coffee-coloured Jew with the coarse black hair, Cockney accent and huge nose was nothing to Kathy! She always had had that wonderful look when you mentioned Edward Yaill. She was unchanged... It upset you to imagine that women like Kathy altered. It did you good to find out that she stuck to the old love....

The subject broached, Trixie told her tale. Faithful to the motto of the Liberal Ladies War Service League, "Do Anything, Go Anywhere, Stick at Nothing and Never Grouse!" she had, pending her return to active usefulness, been "rummaging out" cases in the General Hospitals who wanted extra visiting, letter-writing and bucking. And at No. 11 she had come across a Nice Man, newly convalescent from a collection of intestinal symptoms prevalent among the Expeditionary Forces,—assembled by the C.M.O. under the heading "Bilharziosis," and simplified to "Bill Harris," in the mouths of sufferers therefrom....

"A Sergeant of the 'Tweedburgh Regiment' transferred— Don't ask me how! to a Lowland Territorial Battalion, and perfectly devoted to Colonel Yaill. Nearly cried when he talked of him. Desperately keen to get a letter written and smuggled Home—for of course the Censor wouldn't dream of passing it!—to Yaill's sisters at his place in Cumberland, and another to Miss Forbis, 'her that the Colonel ought to have been married on—saying the Colonel is alive and serving with the Secret Intelligence Corps in the Front in Palestine.'"

"Dear Lady Wastwood—"

"My child, don't put me off with interruptions! Of course I explained to my poor sick man that the letter couldn't be properly engineered, and might do Colonel Yaill harm if the contents got out. But I told him you were out here, and should have his information. The man swears Edward to be an intrepid Scout, famous for making his way through the Turkish Lines, on foot or mounted on a swift horse, sometimes alone!—sometimes with two companions.... He has been seen in Cairo dressed as a French Staff Officer—we know he speaks the language perfectly!—and in Constantinople as a Greek Interpreter to one of the Embassies. And here in Alex, he has gone about disguised as an Arab—or a Gippy of the Labour Corps—"

"I know it, dear Lady Wastwood, I was almost sure of it before!—I have been certain since John Hazel came back from the Front four days ago, to tell me—"

Trixie's green eyes enlarged under their arched black eyebrows, that so much resembled musical slurs.

"Of course! I might have known. Do go on, like a Precious Person! If a sieve about my own affairs, I'm a tomb for the secrets of others!"

So Katharine, knowing this to be true, told Trixie the reason of her anxiety. Characteristically the long thin finger pointed to the doubtful spot:

"It's thrilling in the extreme. No wonder you're in tatters with anxiety. But I can't help seeing that it's rather fatal to have two different people plotting to save one man. Almost like a brace of dentists tugging at a single tooth, isn't it? Why couldn't they have Joined forces and worked it as a Syndicate? That's what your John Hazel will try for, I feel it in my bones. One thing I must say! I do wish the Basilisk hadn't anything to do with it! That oily-tongued little Egyptian Flying Pasha gives me the creeps! But the main thing just now is to buck up, and believe that everything will come off rippingly. And I have a feeling in my bones it will!"

"And if it doesn't—if the news is the worst that can be told, I hope that I shall be brave enough to bear it!" said Katharine. "I hope that I shall never swerve from the belief that Love—as it exists between clean-souled men and women—isn't only for this world! And that the pain of frustrated earthly passion may be so mingled with the Faith that looks forward,—forward and Heavenward!—that parting for this little life may be robbed of its bitterest sting!"

"My dear, I can't climb up to your level," said Trixie, blinking her green eyes and pursing her V-shaped, Pierrot mouth. "This world—when my husband and boys were in it—was good enough, I'm ashamed to say! And if they were back, I'm not going to pretend I should bother much about Heaven, and I do hope you've too much sense to believe that I should! But this business of yours will be pulled off all right. I feel it in my bones, and they never deceive me. Your brother Julian and your friend the Jew, and poor Edward Yaill—whom I treated so frightfully out of pure championship for you when he fell over my feet into the Express for Carlisle—that he fell out again!—All three will get safe out of the place with the name that reminds me of Sunday School examinations. And you and I will be standing here, like the heroine and her bosom-friend in the scene that comes just before the return of the hero in what American people call a four-mile-reel-scream, when a letter or a wire will bring the glad news. And you will read out the letter to me as they say the film people do it, keeping your features intelligently in play, and saying anything that comes into your head. Like this: 'Pepper, mustard, Cerebos, olive-oil and salad dressing! Piccalilli and catsup. O, Harrods! ... After all these months of beastly eating—tinned brawn for lunch again!'"

Trixie's well-meant nonsense served its end, for Katharine could resist no more and burst out laughing.

"You dear!" Miss Forbis's laughing eyes were soft as she passed an arm round the long narrow waist and warmly kissed the thin white cheek. She added, as Trixie returned the caress: "You're priceless to me, Commandant! When I feel down, or get the blues—with reason or without them—you're a better pick-me-up than all the Worcester sauce in the world."

"Horrible stuff!" Trixie made a grimace, "I've always loathed it. Once I had a dear old friend who drank herself to death on that. Her husband—lucky man! never suspected until she died—and they found the chimney in her dressing-room simply blocked with empty shilling bottles. Who's that? Di ê di? Have you a message there? ..."

A cautious footstep on the gravel path, badly neglected since the War, and overgrown with patches of rafia, had first reached Lady Wastwood's ears. Now a man—recognised by Katharine and her friend as the dapper French-speaking Italian chauffeur who had driven them from Alexandria three days previously, in the Daimler car belonging to Essenian, stepped from the trellised shade of a path into the light of the rose-wreathed doorway, and saluting the ladies without speaking, held out a letter to Katharine.

News....

Something in Katharine's bosom leaped.... She felt stifled, as though the fretted, sun-flecked walls of the Khedive's rose-pavilion were those of a brick-built prison, impervious to light and air. But with an effort she mastered herself, and took the offered letter—hoping the Italian did not note the trembling of her hand.

It was a square heliotrope envelope, violently scented with some clinging Eastern perfume that revolted Katharine. The address to "Miss Forbis, Convalescent Hospital, The Palace, Montana," was typed in vivid violet ink. Unwilling to open the letter in the presence of a stranger, Katharine hesitated, looking at the Italian:

"Is there any reply to this? ..."

Lady Wastwood had spoken. The Italian answered in his nasal French, looking at Katharine:

"The car is waiting.... If Mademoiselle would read!"

Katharine, conscious of the unsteadiness of her hands, opened the type-addressed envelope. The sheet of paper it contained bore this message:

"Come at once. Urgent! J. H."

The four-word message and the initials beneath were typed in violet ink. Underneath was an impression in coarse green sealing-wax of the onyx signet-ring....

Katharine was silent, mastering her deep excitement. That green seal seemed to burn through her eyes and sear her brain as she stared at it. Again she heard John Hazel saying:

"Suppose I were ever to send a line saying 'Come at once!' ... Well, don't come!—unless the paper bears an impression of this, in sealing-wax, or clay, or bread or mud.... And test it by the ring you wear, before you accept it...."

The test could be made at once. She glanced at the signet on her left hand and then at the Italian chauffeur. His round, black eyes were fixed on her, watching her eagerly. She spoke to the man in quiet, level tones:

"I will come in a few minutes. Be good enough to wait for me...."

"As Mademoiselle desires." The Italian's bird-bright eyes snapped excitedly. "I will go back and wait for her. But—" he shrugged and spread his olive hands, "we have a long way to go. Mademoiselle understands that, naturally...."

"I understand, and I will come in five minutes," Katharine said, with her tone of calm authority.

"My dear—" Lady Wastwood asked anxiously, as the Italian saluted, wheeled and went out of the pavilion: "You've had news!—I see it in your face."

"No news!" Katharine said. "But a summons, most certainly." Days previously, she had taken a careful impression in scarlet sealing-wax of the relievo head of Hercules upon her black onyx signet. Now she took from her cigarette-case the card bearing the impression, and laying the letter on the marble table the pavilion contained, placed the card face downwards over the green seal on the heliotrope paper. The surfaces of paper and card met and wedded, as the green relievo sank into the scarlet intaglio, and the two Hercules' heads became one.

"I'm fearfully impressed." Trixie's eyes were circular with interest and curiosity. "But what on earth is that for? ..."

"Just to make sure," Katharine said, turning away, "that the message that says, 'Come At Once. Urgent!' is really from John Hazel. Now I must go. I've a suit-case ready packed in our sleeping-tent, and the Commandant has been prepared against my being called suddenly away. As for the duty, Molly Lyne-Soames carries on instead of me. She's prepared—a regular brick of a girl!—and so—this until you next hear from me!" She caught the astonished Trixie in a warm embrace, kissed her thin cheeks and left a tear on one of them. "God bless you, you kindest of women!" she called, turning on the threshold of the rose-pavilion to wave her hand. "And so good-bye, until we meet again!"

And flushed and radiant, Katharine was gone, taking with her in her haste a trail of a thorny climbing rose that had clung to her as though to keep her, and leaving its crimson petals scattered on the stone. As her light hurried footsteps died away—a little puff of the westerly breeze swept the card and the heliotrope letter, with their green and red seals, off the marble table to the floor—and hurried them into a corner as though their work were done.

XV

Near where Ismailia sits amidst her flowery gardens and tasselled avenues, on the edge of the scorching Desert of el Jifar, is an arid rectangle of sand east of the Canal, above Lake Timsah, used at the time I write of as an Air Base. Beyond Essenian, there were no native officers serving at the Air Base, though the indomitable Gyppos of the Labour Corps were employed at the aërodrome in building hangars, and cleaning the machines. Here rows of 'buses, both B.C.'s and D.H.6's—used for reconnaissance on the Canal, along the shores of the Red Sea as far as Aden—and over the Front in Palestine—were ranged in readiness in front of their great hangars, and observers in double-breasted tunics of drill or serge, with shorts and forage-caps—or yet more simply and economically attired in flannel shirts, canvas shoes and sun-helmets—stood on the summits of wooden towers, combing the blue with high-powered binoculars for enemy aircraft, in watches, relieved at three-hour intervals....

Not without reason had the Pasha boasted of the beauty of his villa, a white marble palace of Arabian-Turkish architecture, standing well back from an avenue of casuarinas, embowered in trailing roses, clothed with imperial Bougainvillea and shaded with trees, rising from the green velvet lawns that carpet what was a rectangle of barrenness wrested from the Desert twenty-three years ago.

Within the palace, suites of rooms—used in the Oriental style as reception saloons or bedrooms—according to the needs of the moment—were furnished in luxury rivalling the most modern of Parisian hotels. Soft-footed, low-voiced servants, chiefly Mohammedans, dressed in speckless white, and moving like automata, waited upon the master's guests and did the master's will.

Here Nasr Ullah, the Pasha's elderly body-servant and confidential messenger, ruled with rigidity, taking it out of his subordinates when the Presence dealt hardly with him. In two rooms of the vast warren of rooms opening on a rearward court, his "house" and a small brood of sturdy boys were accommodated. A little dark Moslemah the wife of Nasr Ullah, well dressed and laden with solid silver jewellery. Plain, with projecting rabbit teeth, and shallow forehead; meek, dutiful, pious and greatly given to prayer. A grave for the secrets of her husband Nasr, who was occasionally burdened with a conscience, whose smarting called for soothing feminine balms.

He stood on the threshold of his outer room, in the mild, pale hour when the stars were flowering through the last glow of the sunset, and his tall white turban was pushed awry, and his high forehead was ridged with care.

"'Tis a tyranny to force a man of kindly heart towards God's creatures, to scatter poisoned barley for the birds," he said uneasily. "And the carrier-dove is the Bird of Nun, that went forth from the Ark and brought back the olive-leaf, and a dove was the bird that the Son of Mariam—when as yet but a babe of tender years—playing with others who knew not His holiness—wrought by the riverside of clay."

"And the boys laughed and mocked Him, because He had made one bird instead of many. And He was not angry, but said, 'Do ye then as I do!' And then He clapped His hands and the dove flew away. Did it not so, O my father?" a thready voice piped.

"Since when," asked Nasr Ullah with affected sternness, "have the babes permission to lift up voice when their elders take counsel?" His lined face softened into tenderness as the child clinging to the mother's skirts hid his head under her veil. "Remember, O woman!" he went on, "I have said the white powder is a deadly poison. If a speck, such as would lie safely hidden under the finger-nail—find a way into the child's milk-bowl, I were without a son."

"It is all in there.... I boiled the barley until soft, and drained the water away carefully—emptied the paper-packet of powder in among the barley and stirred the barley well with a little stick. Then I burned both the paper and the stick, as thou didst order. Remains for thee to break the pot to sherds when—when thou hast finished. O my misfortune! What a task! My lord, Nasr Ullah, who hath the pride of princes!—to creep about under cover of night—from the courtyard of the Commandant-Sahib to the haush where the Ifrangis keep their swallow-boats, scattering poisoned barley for pigeons with messages—"

"Hûs! ..."

She had raised her usually quiet voice somewhat indiscreetly, and the toddler, youngest save one of Fatimeh's brood of four, scared by the unusualness of this demonstration, lifted up his own voice in a lusty howl.

"Hus—sus! No one is vexed with thee, my joy!—nobody is angry! Run out and play with the little grey goat awhile before thy sleep-time comes!" And as the boy with a shrill joyful chuckle toddled over the threshold to seek his playmate, Nasr Ullah promptly clapped the door to and shot the wooden door-bolt, and not content with this, pulled the heavy leather curtains that kept out chilly winds and June and February samûms, over the doorway and the latticed window-screens.

"By the life of the Prophet—peace on him!—by thy head! speak lower. What Afrit hast thou vexed—throwing away the carrot-tops and the water that washed the dishes?" he demanded of his now hysterically-tearful wife. "Is this my house, whom I deemed discreet as Kadijah—peace be upon her! Raising the voice like a woman accustomed to go unveiled? Trumpeting secrets as it were on the very housetops! Wouldst be a widow? 'Nay?' Then shun the road to mourning! Wouldst die thyself, knowing thy four sons cast out—to whine for faddahs and broken bread at the doors of the khans and mosques.... 'Nay' again? ... Then even hold thy tongue. And, Fatimeh my beloved—" Nasr Ullah's lean, dark, muscular hand caressed the woman's small head, adorned with a smart black silk kerchief with a brightly coloured border, and a forehead-string of coins—all gold ones, though their value was but small,—"vex not thy soul overmuch about the doves and pigeons. Are not their numbers countless as the numbers of the flies? And tell me, my olive-tree, fruitful in bearing—my Garment of Comfort," his tone had become wheedling, "whether any of the veiled women serving about this house be one-eyed? Wallah! I jest not! It is a new order of the Presence that all such are to be dismissed!"

"How soon?" Another tempest seemed about to shake Nasr Ullah's fruitful olive. Her bosom under its many serried rows of solid silver necklaces began to heave again. Her heavy anklets clashed as her small, henna-stained feet shifted nervously on the whitened clay floor of the family living-room where the charcoal stove daily burned, and the cooking-pots stood against the wall. "How soon?"

"By Allah! no later than an hour after sunrise, and that delay is granted as an especial grace."

"And the mother of thy wife—the grandmother of thy children—the guardian of thy house's honour—what of her?" demanded Fatimeh; "Is she not one of the many decent ones upon whose eyes the flies have sat in childhood? Is—"

"Wallah! I had forgotten her," exclaimed the man in dismay. For the mother of Fatimeh, at that moment congenially engaged in crooning the latest new baby to sleep, in the inner room dignified by the title of the harîm, had suffered in early youth, like many other Egyptian women of the lower classes, the loss, through ophthalmia, of one of her eyes.

Now a faint grin showed on the face of her son-in-law, even in the midst of his perplexity, as he said:

"Rebuke is justly mine, wife, that I did not remember it. But by the border of thine usbêh I swear it! Thy mother sees more with her one eye than other women with two. Yet would I not part with her. She is wise in dealing with the teething-troubles of the lesser babes, and her slipper hath more sting in it than thine, for the ruling of the elder. We will send her away to thy brother at Kantara until this scare of one-eyed women is over and done. Meanwhile,—" he glanced over his shoulder at the door, and sitting on the hard-cushioned divan that ran round three sides of the whitewashed room, drew Fatimeh to sit beside him; "meanwhile I would speak to thee of Khalid thine eldest. Where is the boy to-night?"

"He is gone with his brother Amru to lay snares for fig-birds in the orchard. They must be set at moon-dark, for the birds to enter them at dawn."

"He is a born hunter. Seven years old this month of Safar, and witful as he is handsome—the praise be unto Allah Who makes them of all kinds! Wife, if I told thee that the Presence, seeing the boy so ripe for his tender years, and of goodly promise, had bidden—"

Nasr Ullah's tone had been studiously commonplace, but the ridges in his high forehead had deepened, and his eyes had an anxious stare. He winced as his wife without a word slid from the divan, and next instant lay prostrate on the white-washed floor, with her forehead on his feet.

"Nay, nay! ... My pearl, my joy! ... Take it not so hardly! ..."

"O Everlasting, spare me this! O husband, in pity, hear me. Hast thou forgotten Nasi, our joy and my firstborn? He would have been nine years old, this Nile-Rise.... Hast thou forgotten? Ay, ay, it was the old cry; 'This boy was stupid—that one showed fear. This must have known sin,—for he could see nothing at all in the ink-pools or in the Eye of Radiance.' So the Presence takes my Nasi, and gives him gifts and praises his excellence, and one day he comes home, crying 'My head, my head!' like the son of the woman who fed the Prophet El Jah, peace be upon him!—and three days later, thou, weeping bitter tears, dost hang my green-striped shawl over the shabid of his tiny bier."

"Peace, wife!"

Sweat broke forth and stood on Nasr Ullah's face. He wiped it with the sleeve of his white kaftan, repeating:

"Peace, woman! ... It was a fever the boy had caught.... Dost thou not remember what the hakim said? ..."

"Ay! But I had watched by the bed of my sick child, and shuddered at the visions he told of in his ravings. O, Husband, I have sat in the house one year, and thou hast said in thine heart, 'She is forgetting' ... Yet all the time—" She sat upright on the floor before him now, her strained eyes glued upon his worried face, and the swift words poured from her without his opposition.

"Peace! thou sayest. How can there be peace in this house where soothsayers and necromancers come and go, and the sand-tables are forever cast, and fresh boys are brought each new day to peer into the ink-pools.... Lo! I will speak my mind. Ten years I have been thy wife, and a duteous and a silent, but a mother in fear for her flesh and blood hath the courage to defy Shaitan...."

"Be not disturbed.... I will find some way. The boy shall be sent to El Kantara with thy mother."

"And when my Agib is of likely age, will not the ink-pools claim him? Will the Presence have bowels to spare a child, who in all these years hath loved no woman?"

"Nay," was the reply. "What need hath He of women, who is in love with Life? ..."

"'Tis true. Save when the Inglizi ladies come with their menfolk to see the house and gardens, and eat fruit and drink iced sherbets, and say 'charmin'—charmin'' and 'rippin'—rippin','" thus the better-half of Nasr Ullah rendered the English slang, "no woman ever comes here. What now?" for the knee on which she rested her arm had jerked slightly.

"I had forgotten. He hath said but now—that a woman comes here at midnight! No râziye of the Bazâr, or other of the shameless, but a lady-Sahib from the Palace of Montana at Iskanderieh.... The car brings her by the fifth hour.... The gates are to be open. When the car has passed in, the gates are to be shut and locked...."

"Ya rabbi!" The exclamation broke from the woman involuntarily. "After all these years—it may be that He changes.... How old is He, husband? Canst thou not even guess? ..."

"Perhaps He is less old than He pretends, but He is many years older than folks believe Him. Of that there is no doubt at all...."

"And it is done by devilry? Witchcraft and spells—and philtres?" The woman breathed quickly. "Say, is't not?"

"God knows! But from whomever the Presence buys his youth, He pays a heavy price for it. See how He lives! Even as one who carries in his breast a stolen jewel, and goes in fear lest it be snatched from him. The pleasures of the belly—He must shun them. The joys that are tasted on perfumed cushions—He must fly them one and all. It is tyranny. Yet He thinks He is envied. He is only wretched when Those I may not speak of, ask—too high a price for the magical drugs...."

"The drugs. The devil-brews that keep Him youthful, who else would be as dry and wrinkled as the mummies of the ancient Kings?"

"Verily. And—one thing I have seen of late—" Once launched upon the sea of Confidence, Nasr Ullah grew less fearful. "Whether Protection fails him, or the philtres lose their power, I know not—but—He grows old!"

"I too!—" Her eyes grew large with awe. "I have fancied He is somewhat changed...."

"Chut! Do not interrupt. It goes deeper than the skin—this change that I have seen in him. His moods vary like those of a pregnant woman; he frames designs and throws them aside as a monkey plucks, and bites, and casts bananas away. He does not even hate as He used to hate. Once—if an enemy rose up in the path, he removed that one with his own hand, and troubled no more about the affair. Or said to one he trusted, 'Kill!'" the tone was studiously smooth, the speaker's face expressionless—"and that man or that woman died—more quietly than the bowab's daughter who ate the nectarine. But now—since the killing of Usborn Sahib by a Turk in Palestine,—and the night he dined at Iskanderieh in the company of the big Jew Tomi—the Presence talks of nought but sprinkling poisoned grain for carrier-doves and dismissing of one-eyed females—and my heart is stricken with fear for my lord! Spells, and charms, and philtres bought from Those in the Distant Places will not avail forever against the day of Fate. Azrael will come behind my lord with a touch upon the shoulder. The Black Camel of Allah will tread upon his heel. Then—even at a breath—the House of Life will crumble!" Nasr Ullah started to his feet as a silvery sound, momentarily increasing in volume, rolled into the stuffy closed room, and hummed about their ears. "It is the gong from my lord's room. He calls, and I must go! ..."

He added, slipping the earthen pot of soaked and poisoned barley within the bosom of his embroidered vest: "Sleep well, my wife, if I see thee not ere morning. And call in the children—it is time they went to rest! ..."

XVI

This was another moonless night, with Orion glorious in the East, and the Great Bear blazing on the northern horizon, as the headlights of the high-powered Daimler car, driven by the Italian chauffeur, flashed on a high, wide porte cochère of white-painted wrought iron, and the horn sounded a well-known call.

The massive gates were opened and shut by a hand-worked windlass, over which ran an endless chain. Two white-clad negro porters worked the winch, the gate slid smoothly back in its groovings. The car rolled in, and the gate was shut as it passed up the avenue.

The Arabian-Turkish palace seemed to sleep under the starshine of the November night, wrapped in its royal mantle of roses and bougainvillea. Heavy drifts of perfume were carried on the languid air-waves that came from the south-west at intervals, swaying thick-foliaged branches and sighing amongst the leaves. Not a blue-white gleam of electric light or even the flame of a candle twinkled through the pierced lattices, as Katharine, alighting from the car, observed with some surprise.

The wide-leaved doors of the house stood open. On the steps and in the vestibule were drawn up a double row of native servants; lean, dark Mohammedans in high starched turbans, kaftans and baggy trousers of snowy muslin, displaying gorgeously gold-embroidered vests.

One elderly man stepped forward, salaaming low to the visitor, with the words:

"O lady, God give thee a happy night! His Presence awaits thee."

"Carry thy lord salutations from me," Katharine answered in her laboured Arabic. "Say that—that I have come in answer to the message. Is the Saiyid Hazel here in the house?"

The elderly man salaamed again and answered smoothly:

"Surely, O lady, the desire of thine eyes and thine heart shall be granted! With your coming a blessing hath entered these doors...."

The Italian chauffeur now appeared behind Katharine, carrying the suit-case. A servant stepped forward and took it, as Miss Forbis said to the chauffeur in French:

"I don't yet know whether I shall need that case. Leave it in the car, please, and let the car be waiting. I may return to Alexandria to-night."

"But, Mademoiselle!—" the Italian began, when a look from Nasr Ullah silenced him. He saluted, and muttering: "As Mademoiselle commands!" turned and went out and down the steps. But he left the suit-case in the servant's hands—and the hall-doors were shut and locked after him. And the fragrance of the jasmine and roses of the garden gave place to another perfume, heavy too, but sickly-sweet with sandal and henna, the fumes of burning pastilles, and all the strange suggestive odours of a shut-up Eastern house. And glancing at the now barred doors and the double row of gleaming eyes, and imperturbable dark faces, Katharine Forbis felt a little, chilly shudder creep over her and stir amongst the roots of her plentiful dark hair.

"A goose walked over my grave, then," she told herself, smiling bravely, fighting back the sinister sensation, as the elderly major-domo addressed her again:

"With permission, a message for the lady, from the Presence. The Presence took food, as is his wont, a little after sunset. It is now the fifth hour, and supper has been spread, Ifrangi-fashion, in readiness for the lady's coming. If the lady will deign to take of it, I pray her follow me...."

"Thank you, but I need nothing," Katharine answered, as the man prepared to lead the way down an interminable-appearing hall. "And—I prefer to stay where I am." She moved to a carved ebony seat, and spoke to the man again, this time in English. "Please ask Essenian Pasha and Mr. Hazel to come to me here. Unless—" She started as the thought occurred to her, and ended: "Unless they should happen to be engaged with—some one who is ill...."

"Aiyân...." The dark eyes under the much-ridged forehead were wonderfully observant. The nasal voice belonging to the eyes spoke in the English tongue: "Surely there is one here who is ill exceedingly. The Presence and the Saiyid Hazel have many fears for him," Nasr Ullah added as the colour ebbed from Katharine's cheeks and lips and her hand clenched involuntarily, "but by the Favour of Allah—he is not like to die...."

"Take me to him.... Now, please! ..."

Miss Forbis rose up, tall and impetuous, motioning to Nasr Ullah to lead the way, scattering her scruples and her fears to the winds like withered leaves. Which of her beloved Two lay in some darkened room of this strange house? Julian or Edward? Edward or Julian. Well, in another minute she would know....

It occupied several minutes. The elderly Mohammedan produced an electric torch, and by its radiance led her through a vast suite of apartments on the ground-floor, their Arabesque Ottoman elegance grotesquely overlaid with fashions imported from the West. A curious jumble of furniture of many different styles and periods was revealed by the blue-white torch-flare—overcrowding the wide and lofty rooms. French Directoire and the First Empire shouldered the Georgian Regency, Early Victorian tables and Berlin wool-work settees were reflected in splendid Venetian mirrors, and electric bulbs depended from cut-glass chandeliers. Later Rococo—overlaid with Art Nouveau and camouflaged with Futurism; Cubist pictures, Cubist draperies and cushions of Cubist designs, gibbered mockingly in Katharine's face as the electric torch led the way.... And the stuffiness bred of Eastern neglect hung heavy on the atmosphere, and dust rose in wreaths from the velvety carpets under the lightest tread.

The last door of the last suite led into a wide corridor paved with black and white marble. Midway down, the elderly servant stopped at the grille of a lift and switched on the electric light. He snapped off his torch, pushed back the sliding-door, followed Miss Forbis in, shut the grille and started the elevator—a costly thing in nickel and enamelled iron—conveying to Katharine the momentary impression that she was calling on a London friend in a Sloane Street or Mayfair flat.

The lift stopped at the top floor after traversing three storeys. The Mohammedan showed Miss Forbis out, and opened a latticed door at the end of a short passage. She drew a breath of relief as the night-air flowed about her, and the rose-scents of the dew-drenched garden rose up in delicious clouds.

She was passing over a slender bridge, connecting the roof of one of the wings of the Pasha's showy villa with that of another building, evidently much older, distant perhaps some forty feet from the ornate marble palace, and covering a considerable area of ground in its rear. Built in the old windowless Arabian way about an oblong courtyard, and crowned by an open court or pavilion of green and white marble, its outer walls were pressed upon by closely thronging trees. Casuarinas and moss-cup oaks, peppers and tamarisks and tall waving palms made coolth and greenness round it, and nightingales were singing from the trees that girt it round.

The bridge, of latticed iron, painted to dazzling whiteness, ended under a pointed trefoil arch where heavy curtains hung. The Mohammedan servant who showed the way was beckoning to Katharine—lifting a gleaming, gold-embroidered fold, signing to her to pass. She drew in a deep breath of fragrance from the garden, and the song of the bulbuls rose in a crescendo of sweetness as she glanced at the starry sky. Then the dark hand signed to her—she passed under the archway, and the curtain fell behind her with a soft, thudding sound.

She stood on the threshold of an oblong room, or rather, court, of pierced and latticed marble, covered and adorned with mosaic, running nearly the whole length of a side of the Arab house. Open to the sky overhead, and enclosed by curtains of thick gold-embroidered silk, hanging under trefoil arches between groups of slender pillars, it had a long divan of dark, rich brocade running along one side. Two silver lamps of antique design, swinging by chains from slender rods, mingled their mellow radiance with the starlight. At the farther end, closed curtains under a higher arch showed the entrance to another court—or possibly an enclosed apartment—beyond the pavilion that was canopied with the sky.

The floor was of ancient Arab tiles, wonderful in colour. Rare and beautiful prayer-rugs were laid on it here and there. A pedestal of serpentine supported a great porcelain bowl in which a little fountain played, and goldfish were swimming. Clusters of lilies of Amaryllis type, thick-stemmed, fleshy, purple and white and crimson, exhaling a heavy, languorous fragrance, stood in jars of ancient cloisonné upon inlaid ivory stools. In the centre of the room stood a broad divan, piled with great embroidered cushions. Beside the divan was a tripod of ebony, supporting something that looked like a green velvet jewel-case....

A slight man in Eastern dress, his black tarbûsh turbaned with snowy muslin folds, his long-sleeved kaftan of orange-red opening to reveal a longer-sleeved garment of white, a jewelled pen-case glittering in the folds of his green silk girdle, rose up from the divan as the curtain fell—and advanced to Katharine....

"Dear lady, my poor house is highly honoured—" he began:

"Is Mr. Hazel here, Major Essenian?"

In her surprise at finding the Pasha alone, Katharine's hurried query broke in upon the Pasha's formal welcome, scattering his elaborate sentences to the winds.

"Mr. Hazel—" He affected for a moment to search his memory. "Dear lady, I am sorry, but—" His shrug said "No! ..."

"Then why did your chauffeur bring me the letter from him?" Katharine demanded, looking down from her superb height upon the suave and smiling face.

"From Mr. Hazel?" Essenian asked with maddening blandness. "Did he bring you a letter? ..."

"You know he did! ..."

"Ah yes, of course, I know!" admitted Essenian, his long eyes narrowing as they encountered Katharine's. She mastered her anger, knowing its display incautious, and said with rather a poor attempt to smile:

"You must make allowances, Pasha, if I seem excited and nervy. But—I have been on tenterhooks since the day we met. The 15th—and—isn't this the 18th of November? ..."

"Certainly, going by your Western calendar. But in this house that lies hidden behind another that is full of barbarous Western inventions—Western customs do not prevail, and Western fashions are abhorred. You are in Egypt when you are here...."

"The room is perfectly beautiful. But I can't spare time to enjoy it. I can think of nothing but the matter that brought me here to-night. Last night, rather"—Katherine glanced at her wrist-watch—"because it is getting perilously near one o'clock in the morning. Once for all, I ask you where you got the letter that your servant brought me at the Hospital, nearly five hours back? ..."

"It was placed in my hands by Hazel, to be delivered in case of emergency."

Katharine's clear eyes questioned the dark face. Its narrow eyes met hers, glittering imperturbably. She resumed, with a little sickening thrill of hatred of the man:

"Then—the emergency has occurred? Be good enough to answer another question. Did you take Mr. Hazel to Shechem, as he told me you had arranged to do?"

"Certainly. We made the trip in record time." The long beryl eyes shone green in the mingling of lamplight and starlight, the smooth dark lips curved as Essenian smiled. "Following the old Pilgrim's Route at first. Doing the journey—about 195 miles, as the crow flies—in something under three-and-a-half-hours, and reaching Shechem just before dawn."

"And—when you got there—what went wrong? For something has gone wrong," Katharine said breathlessly—"I feel it in the air about me, though your face tells no tales."

"'The face that tells tales is a man's worst enemy. The face that hides secrets is a man's best friend.'" Essenian quoted the stale truism gently and suavely. "But will you not remove your outer wrap and take a seat on the divan?"

He added, as Katharine unfastened a cloak she wore, an ample double cape of Navy blue serge, lined with dark crimson silk, and dropped it from her shoulders, and moving with her supple grace to the divan, sat down:

"I returned here yesterday, arriving before sunrise. To remain in Palestine would have been useless. To be candid—"

"Oh, my God!" said Katharine in her anguished soul. "Does this man ever speak candidly?" But she looked at him and waited—summoning up all her reserves of self-command and patience, seeming a calm-eyed, superbly-moulded goddess, attired in a well-cut uniform of white cotton-drill.

"I had arranged to return to Shechem," he went on, "before sunrise on the 18th. There is still time to reach there while the day is yet young. But something unfortunate happened just before the landing. In fact, Mr. Hazel has had an accident—"

"An accident. Of what nature? ..."

Katharine's brows contracted and her colour faded. Essenian pursued in his suavest tones:

"Let me explain. To repose a confidence in you, which I feel will not be misplaced." Would the man never get to the point? "I employed at Shechem, a device of my own invention—which has been approved at Headquarters by my Chief. By a simple mechanical appliance—merely a spring-switch and lock-clip—I can change the number and colour-plates on the main-planes and tail of my machine. You understand? The Red, White and Blue is replaced by the Red Crescent. Imagine the advantage to the aviator of a simple device like this!"

"But the type of your machine. You can't change that!" Katharine spoke wearily.

"I cannot, naturally. But our captured 'planes are generally brought into use. And—I do not remain sufficiently long over an enemy stronghold to give time—" the speaker shrugged and ended—"for exhaustive scrutiny. Let me be brief—"

"I beg that you will! ..."

He recognised in her voice an accent of entreaty. It was what he had waited for.

"I dropped—in my strictly temporary role of Turkish aviator—a dummy despatch-bag into Shechem. Then I flew north, to a patch of level ground between Mount Ebal and Samata—where I had planned to drop my man. As I passed south of Mount Ebal, I saw"—he was telling the story plainly at last "there were enemy batteries upon it. Mountain Artillery of the Mustahfiz—machine-guns—a howitzer—the Mount had been converted into a fortress of defence! And, in my surprise at the discovery, I acted without due caution—or rather, I acted as I had arranged to act—without deviation from the first plan. I climbed, dived, and came down west of the Mountain—giving Hazel the agreed-on-word to jump, when I should touch the ground. But—as a result of the surprise, I suppose—I gave it prematurely—"

"And Mr. Hazel jumped—before you touched the ground!" Her voice was very stern and deep. Her wide gaze held him. "Answer my question plainly. Has he been killed? ..."

"No. But he has sustained some hurt. I do not know its nature. My military duty forbade me to remain."

"I—understand. You flew away, leaving your passenger in difficulties! ..."

The deadly contempt of the tone bit like frost at 15,000 feet, the splendid wrath of her cairngorm eyes told him that he, Essenian, was a creature infinitely mean....

"I flew away. As you remark." The glittering eyes met hers at last, and the lips smiled cruelly.... "What would you have?" He folded his slender, dark hands within the shelter of his sleeves. "Can men fight against Destiny?"

"Men can fight against the temptation to do base things, and sometimes fight and conquer. And now—" Anger and grief were in her tone, "what will become of him? ..."

"Of your friend? ..." He stood imperturbably facing her, his dark hands hidden in the sleeves of his orange-crimson kaftan, and the delicate mingling of golden lamplight and silvery starlight threw his shadow over the rich, pale carpets, and the exquisite Arabesque mosaics, of green and blue, and amber, that covered with their tracery the exposed spaces of the floor. "How can I say what has or will become of him! ... If you choose, it is for you to tell me...."

An almost insupportable sense of the speaker's insincerity went through Katharine's being like flame, and the agony of suspense long drawn-out, spurred her—as Essenian had calculated it would—to reckless utterance....

"How can I tell you? You play with me, Major Essenian, knowing as you must, that if I could find out what has happened to my—to my friend and my brother I would do so at any sacrifice! ..."

"Then," said the Egyptian, gently and mellifluously, "place yourself before the case that is on that tripod, open the case and look in the spherical beryl it contains. I will not touch it lest you should suspect me of some trickery. Indeed, I will remain at a distance while you look.... All I ask is—that you will tell me truthfully what you see—if Sight be vouchsafed to you! Judging by what I have witnessed I believe you will be favoured. No sacrifice is needed.... You have only to look! ..."

He lowered his voice almost to a whisper, yet every word came to Katharine's hearing with a distinctness that oppressed.

"After our meeting in Mr. Hazel's house at Alexandria, where I had witnessed such a striking manifestation of his clairvoyant powers, he dined with me at my Club, and after dinner—in my eagerness to pursue further the investigations that absorb me—I persuaded Hazel to look in the beryl that case contains. He passed with ease into the condition inseparable from Vision—but to my questions I received no satisfactory replies. Now that you are here," the voice was hurried, "the hour and the conditions alike being favourable, stretch out your hand, open the case and—look in the crystal ball!"

"Do you really think that I should see—things? Find out what is happening to—friends at Shechem?"

Essenian's orange-red draperies rustled as he moved nearer, saying:

"I do not 'think.' ... I know that you would! ..."

Holding his breath, he saw her white figure shift its position on the divan. Now her white hands hovered like wistful doves about the velvet case on the tripod—now the moony brightness of the great spherical beryl shone forth as though some lesser star of the innumerable hosts of heaven had fallen upon the tripod in the Arabian room.... Now he heard her say—speaking to herself rather than to him—with a fluttered laugh of nervousness:

"You know, I won't have anything to do with this if it's dabbling in magic. But—just to look in the beryl can't be much harm...."

"No, no! What harm could there be? But wonderful things are seen—sometimes—by gifted people. And you—I would stake half that I own on the certainty that you have the gift! ..."

He moved softly here and there in the background as Katharine, absorbed, bent over the beryl. Now he loosened a silken cord, and shades descended, covering the silver lamps. He moved his dark, supple hands among little brazen vases of Benares-work ranged upon a stand resembling a Hindu altar, and a slender column of incense, heavy and fragrant, rose up and climbed, spiralling and twisting, towards the great stars that looked down from Heaven's violet dome. Presently he heard Katharine whisper to herself as a woman speaks in dreaming:

"The Church forbids dabbling in spiritism and magic. But just—once to look—can't be so very wrong! ..."

And now Essenian spoke, seizing the appropriate moment, almost as he had spoken to Hazel at the Club:

"Wrong.... How should it be wrong? Do not touch the beryl—that is imperative. Neither bend so close above it that your breathing dims its light. Sit comfortably, rest your hands lightly on either side of the tripod. You are not afraid? Why should you be? There is absolutely no reason.... Only look steadily in the beryl, do not remove your eyes...."

If Katharine had seen Essenian's, as they narrowly observed her, she might have recalled a speech of Lady Wastwood's, made a few days previously. For they indubitably resembled the eyes of a cobra, and his soft noiseless movements were horribly tigerish. But she knew nothing but the cold, gleaming sphere upon its little cup-shaped metal pedestal—and the smooth twists and coiling folds, suggesting veil upon veil of mystery—that were beginning to reveal themselves beneath the pale-green, shining surface that at first had seemed opaque. There was a singing in her ears, and she heard her heart throbbing, but as though it were the heart of some one else beating a long way off. Edward's? ... Julian's? ... Neither of these, she thought.... The heart that called so far away was John Hazel's.... What was he doing? Where was he? What had happened to him? Summoning all her strength, she willed herself to see....

"Oh, oh! Take it away! ... Hide it from me! ..."

Katharine was moaning, and begging not to see. And the Egyptian, ashen of hue, dabbled with sweat, vibrating like a wind-blown reed—was bending towards her, greedily drinking in the disconnected utterances that broke from her—when she sighed deeply, lifted her head, and fixed her eyes on him.

"Go on! Go on! Look back to the beryl!" He lifted his slender clenched hand as though he would have struck her. "Do you want to ruin all? Why do you stop? ..."

"Because it makes my eyes and my head ache so...." She opened and shut her eyes once or twice, and rubbed her forehead with her handkerchief. "And because what I saw was horrible—that was why I stopped!"

"What did you see? ..."

"The inside of a wooden hut. Dirty and sordid—with no furniture in it except a native bed. All seen as by daylight, through high-powered binoculars. And—on the bed—chained to it—" She shuddered—"Something shapeless—something bloody—something terrible—that once may have been a man—"

"Was it your brother?"

"No, thank—"

"Hush! ..." He stopped her with an imperative gesture. "How do you know that it was not Father Forbis? ..."

"Because Julian is very fair, with reddish hair and beard. The monks of his Order wear the beard like the Franciscans."

"Was it John Hazel? Answer! ..."

"I dare not say! ..."

"You know it was!" He almost spat the words at her.

"Perhaps. Oh! what have they done to him? ..." Katharine's nerves were thrilling—little intermittent shudders passed over her, cold damps stood upon her skin, and her heart shook her as she sat. She fought for composure, steadying her lips, drying her dewy temples with her handkerchief, "I have seen things in War," she panted, "but nothing worse than that! Pray order the car!—I must go back to Alexandria." She repeated, thinking he did not hear her. "Have the kindness to order the car! ..."

He had moved round in front of her, and stood regarding her with his arms crossed upon his breast. Now he said in his velvet tones: "Not until you have looked again in the beryl, Miss Forbis. And for me—for me, this time!"

"You threaten to detain me here against my will? I should not advise your trying it!" She rose up, dwarfing him by her superb stature, adding as she lifted her mantle from the divan: "You do not suppose that my friends at Montana are ignorant of my whereabouts? Besides, your car was challenged at all the guarded barriers, and more than once stopped upon the road here by patrols of Military Police. The chauffeur supplied your number and name, and I naturally took care to give my own, 'Sergeant-Motor-driver, K. Forbis, Number 61, —th Unit, V.A. Department, Red Cross....' This is the Twentieth Century, Major Essenian...."

"I threaten nothing. I suggest nothing," the supple hands were extended towards her, palms uppermost, "I have no designs against your honour. I am of those who see the grinning skull behind the Face of Loveliness and the asp that conceals itself beneath the blossom of the rose." He spoke rapidly, illustrating his sentences with swift, expressive gestures: "I merely entreat of you, at this juncture in my fortunes—a man beset with dangers from sources all unknown!—look in the beryl! Ask of me what you choose—I am wealthy enough to give it you!—but first look in the beryl, and will to see my Fate."

"Very well." The womanliness inherent in Katharine stirred her, in spite of her dislike, to pity the desperate anxiety patent in the Egyptian's twitching face, and nervous, appealing hands. "But your attempt at coercion was as misplaced as your suggestion of bribery. You will not repeat either, if you are wise. Since you entreat it, I consent to look once more in the beryl. But first—order the car...."

"I am your slave, and all I possess is at your service!" He took a silver rod from a stand, and struck a small gong. It had a wonderful resonance, and the sonorous note evoked, spread in waves increasing in volume, until, the limit of its power reached, the sound ebbed away.

"That was to summon the car. Now, look—" Essenian threw fresh incense on the burning embers in the censer on the altar, muttering an invocation in his own tongue: "O ye Influences, be propitious! O Tarshun, O Taryushun! Come down! Come down! Remove the veil from the woman's sight. Show her my Fate in the Eye of Radiance. Hear, O Arhmân! Great Prince—thy servant calls! ..."

Bending over the beryl, resting her hands on the tripod, turning a deaf ear to the inward voice that warned her not to look, Katharine saw in the body of the stone, framed in silky, shining skeins of semi-opaque lustre, a little oval vignette of her own face, crowned by the slouched felt uniform hat, with its badge and ribbon banding, backed by the purple splendour of the jewelled Eastern sky. She put up a hand and removed her hat, and tossed it aside carelessly, without removing her gaze from the sinister, gleaming sphere.... Then the pale face with the intent eyes faded from vision, a wider space began to clear between the silky folds....

"Essenian Pasha—I will to see the Fate of Essenian!" she repeated mentally, concentrating her powers. The will to see became intense. She forgot her loathing of the man, muttering incoherent things, shivering with suspense behind her: "I will to see! ... I will to see!" she told herself over and over. And Seeing came as Katharine framed the words, with dazzling, illuminating clearness. As previously, she might have been looking through high-powered binoculars.

She saw a whitewashed brick courtyard, clean and bare and sanded, in early daylight, with blank brick walls on three sides, and plain brick buildings on the fourth side, where two sentries with fixed bayonets guarded a door. Drawn up in the courtyard in two lines, a company of R.F.C. officers, N.C.O.'s and men, stood at attention. The door opened, the sentries presented arms, and a Sergeant-Major and party of Military Police, with fixed bayonets, led by an officer wearing a Staff brassard, and followed by four other Police, carrying a plain, wooden coffin—marched into the courtyard, escorting a prisoner.

The prisoner was Essenian—in khaki as she had first seen him—save that his multi-coloured rows of ribbons, and the badges on his uniform, had been ruthlessly slashed away. The man himself was altered, shrunken, aged beyond believing. His grey face with its glittering eyes staring from caves that had been dug about them, lifted as the Sergeant-Major touched his shoulder—took off his cork helmet—bandaged his eyes carefully—opened his khaki tunic and hung a white-painted metal disc immediately above his heart....

Now they were putting down the coffin before a blank wall. Now the little shrunken figure stood against the wall in tragic solitude—the Sergeant-Major was placing seven men in line confronting it, taking their rifles from them, and showing them, one at a time to the officer with the Staff brassard....

"Ready...! Present....!"

The rifles had been given back, and seven muzzles steadily pointed at the white disc hanging on the doomed man's breast. In another second—sharp stabs of greenish flame leaped beyond the shining bayonets, light puffs of brownish smoke rose against the dazzling blue sky seen above the wall....

The shrunken body lay huddled up, in an odd unnatural attitude, in a dark red puddle that soaked away in the sand. The officer with the Staff brassard approached it, drawing his revolver.... He stooped down, straightened himself, glanced back at the Sergeant, and slipping the revolver back into its holster, gave an order, wheeled sharply and walked away. And as he did this the whole scene blurred and vanished. With a slight, sharp sound like the snapping of a crystal rod, a jagged fracture showed down the middle of the Eye of Radiance. The Beryl had become opaque as a lump of volcanic glass.

VII

"What have you seen? ..." A fierce breath beat on Katharine's cheek, and a steel-strong grip was on her arm, as Essenian's swift whisper assailed her ear: "Deny not that you saw!—the stone splits—that is enough!—it means the end for me! I am deceived—" the shrill voice cracked despairingly—"I to whom They promised Life—Life prolonged beyond the age of elephants—Youth that should keep its freshness like the flower in the block of ice. Speak, woman, say what you have seen, or by Eblis! I will make you! I am strong yet, and if Azrael's hand be at my throat, you shall feel mine at yours!"

Even as he leaped, Katharine swung out a long arm, striking him across the body, breaking the force of his leap, as she remembered to have once done when a savage cat, crossed with the wild breed, had crept up behind, unnoticed, and sprung upon her to bite.

"You native cad!" rang her clear disdainful voice. "Are you out for murder?"

"I am out to make you tell me—" Breathing unevenly, he stood back from the divan, his supple body tense for a second spring, his glittering eyes watching her: "What have you seen in the beryl? Answer!—it is my right to hear!"

"But not your right to lay hands upon an Englishwoman," Katharine retorted, tingling with insulted pride. "Do not attempt it again, because I carry a revolver, and like most women who have served in this War, I have learned to use it well!"

Brave words, yet her head was swimming as she spoke, and her heart throbbed suffocatingly, and the hand that gripped the butt of the little Colt's revolver, shook with the rigor of fear. The strange and terrible experiences of the night—horror of Essenian's vicinity and touch, the strain of long anxiety and protracted fasting—were beginning to tell upon Katharine. She despised women who fainted at dreadful sights or in perilous situations, and yet—she realised herself not far from fainting now....

Air—she was famishing for want of air! though the room was open to the stars and the night-winds—though the curtains behind that tigerish orange-red figure were bellying and parting, blown inwards under their pointed triple arches by a gale she could not feel. She could see the branches of the thronging trees—the lateral limb of a towering moss-cup oak swaying strangely under the weight of a climbing brown figure. She caught the flash of eyes and teeth in a shadowy face topped by a white sun-helmet—and ran towards the archway as a man leaped into the room....

Others followed, dropping from the great elbowed tree-limb to the wall, and jumping through the archway.... Men in the well-known khaki drill, with sun-browned or pale European faces under their sun-helmets—and the red brassard of the Military Police....

"Sorry, but I have to arrest you, Major Essenian, in the name of the King...."

A young Lieutenant of M.P. with a tooth-brush moustache of undeniable ginger was pressing a folded paper on Essenian and mopping his own dripping face....

"Warm work, shinning up trees in this muggy Egyptian climate. But I fancy we've dropped in just at the right time... Certainly for the lady. Sergeant Whitmore, look to the lady. Handcuff the prisoner, Corporal Rose. And, Major, remember that anything you say will be used against you in evidence."

"There will be—there will be a formal Court Martial?" He raised his face, the grey face, pinched and sweat-dabbled, that Katharine had seen in the vision of the Stone: "I demand it!—I demand it! Whatever the charges on this warrant which I have not read, remember!—I can disprove them—I can confute them—establish my honour in the face of the world."

"You'll be lucky if you do! No, you can't change into uniform. One of your servants can pack a kit-case, and leave it for you at the Military Clink. That's your address—while you require one. Hit that tin gong, will you, Corporal? It'll fetch some of these Gyppo fellows to show the way to the hall-door."

"I can guide you, Mr. Martyn!"

"Holy Smoke, it's Miss Forbis from Montana! How in the wide— I beg your pardon!"

The Lieutenant—not so long ago a convalescent patient at the Hospital, broke off the end of the question, reddening, but Katharine answered with her broad, sweet smile, looking in the boyish face with candid cairngorm eyes:

"How in the wide did I come here? Well, I'll tell you strictly in confidence—in return for a lift back to Alexandria. Can do? ..."

"Can do! Off duty—as soon as I've delivered the goods at the M.P." His glance at the goods was highly expressive: "'Hê intē! Ya rajîl!" This to an elderly Mohammedan servant with a much-ridged forehead of anxiety—Nasr Ullah, summoned in haste to the Pavilion by an alien stroke upon the Presence's gong. "Oh, you! Show us the way downstairs!"

"I will go, I will go! Do not handle me roughly.... Remember that I am an old—a very old man! Miss Forbis, I knew your father once! Speak for me! Use your influence! Remember," the quavering voice broke in a fit of senile coughing, the manacled hands extended to Katharine in supplication, looked like those of a mummy, so discoloured and shrunken were they: "You do not answer? You triumph in my downfall?" The narrow eyes glimmered hatred out of their deep-dug caves. "Do not forget your brother, and your friend, Mr. Hazel—whose fate is practically in my hands!"

"Their fate is in the Hands of God," Katharine answered gently, moving beyond the reach of the withered, trembling clutch. "Like yours and mine, and that of every other creature. Good-bye, Major Essenian...."

He made no reply. He was muttering to himself, and looked, indeed, an old man. His head fell on his breast as the word to move was given—and the party of policemen, with the orange-robed figure tottering in their midst—tramped over the white bridge in the bluish-pale light of the small hours, and followed by Katharine and the Lieutenant, went down through the airless house....

When the tail-light of the last of the string of the four Military Police cars had winked past the turn in the avenue, and the porte cochère was closed, Nasr Ullah went back to his "house" and found her waking. She hastened out of the inner apartment and ran to him in alarm.

"Oh, my eyes! Oh, my husband! Alhamdolillah thou hast returned to us! Little sleep have we had this night. Strange scrapings at the back of the house, and whistles as of Afrits talking.... The children woke and wept, and I scarce had wits to lie to them—thinking the Servants of Eblis were carrying the Presence away! ..."

"The Presence hath gone, sure enough, but Inglizi soldiers took him. Always I have known," said Nasr Ullah, "that some day the soldiers would come. They followed the woman secretly, climbing the trees like monkeys, and leaped in upon the Presence when she cried out.... Perhaps she was a spy—God knows! ..."

"Praise be to Him the soldiers took thee not also! Tell me—in this matter of the pigeons.... Didst thou—"

Nasr Ullah shook his head:

"My heart was straitened when I left thee,—but Allah enlightening me—I dealt wisely. For at the compound of the Commandant—at the Headquarters of Intelligence and at Garrison Headquarters—one grain of barley threw I at each place,—and picked it up again! Then, burying the pot and the grain in a place where none will find them—I returned at the fourth hour, and said to the Presence—'Lo! I have done thy bidding, in the casting of poisoned barley.' And in this I spake the very truth, yet Nûh's birds are safe for me!"

"It is well. The Compassionate shielded thee. Think you, my husband, the Presence will return?"

"I think not, but if he does, he will not find Nasr Ullah. The Eye of Radiance is broken, so even did he look in it he could not find me. The Englishmen have opened his maktabs and taken all his papers. Come, let us take the children, and thy jewels, and our money and the best of the clothing and go away from here!"

"When the fleas leave the cat, he is dead!" said Fatimeh acutely.

"No flea am I!" denied Nasr Ullah stoutly. "Forty-two years have I served The Presence, and by Allah! I have served him well and faithfully. Now, I shall serve Allah, Who is the better Master, and my sons shall grow up without knowledge of ink-pools and wizardry...."

"And the bag that is buried under the bed hath enough in it to buy thee a homestead. Verily the Beneficent hath hearkened to my prayers. Go we by day, or now?"

"Now. Make haste and dress the children—hide thy jewels about thee." He looked round for something to dig with, and picked up a big brass ladle. "Strange, how a man may feel like a thief in digging up his own hoard!"

"Will there—is there likely to be a Court Martial?" Katharine asked the Lieutenant, as some hours later, a Police Ford Car, diverted from official use for the purposes of chivalry, ran between green fields of fodder on the road by the Canal, and the Lieutenant—having fed his charge with sandwiches of cold chicken, hard eggs, ripe figs and bananas, and hot coffee out of a thermos—was pressing Turkish cigarettes on her and offering a light.

"Something in the nature of one, possibly. But precious short, and to the point. I'm not broaching official secrets!—but the evidence is solid. We've had quite a cloud of witnesses to prove that the Pasha has been playing the kind of trick with the British Government that he tried to play on you. There were two of our Secret Intelligence men, in Shechem, one of 'em a prisoner in the Barracks and the other in disguise. And he was twice seen by these chaps to shed despatches into the town-square...."

"But weren't the despatches dummies?" Katharine asked.

"That was the tale he fed 'em with at H.Q., but it won't wash!"—the owner of the ginger toothbrush shook his head: "We've got hold of the last lot and they're genuine enough. Seditious propaganda—from centres in the Far East—that's the sort of stuff he's been dropping in Palestine.... What's more—it has just come out that he murdered his observer—the S.I. man who was shut up with the other War Prisoners in the Barracks saw the thing done—in mid-air over Shechem—just as he'd focussed his binnics on Essenian's machine. 'The Two-Faced Nightingale,' the War Prisoners used to call her—because of her transferable number and colour-plates—a clever invention of the Pasha's, you see...."

"But I thought they'd approved of the invention at Headquarters? ..."

Said the Lieutenant, with a shrewdness that went curiously with his youthful face:

"Oh, right enough, the Brass Hats approved of the invention! But they didn't approve of its being approved of," he twinkled at the alliteration—"by the fellows on the other side. The man's a dud! And he's jolly well earned what's he's going"—he looked at his wrist-watch—"what he's bound to get—half-an-hour after morning gun."

"Boom!"

Even as the Lieutenant spoke, the radiant air vibrated, and flocks of swallows, newly arrived, scared by the detonation, rose and wheeled shrieking over the Fortress of Alexander's Town....

The Hospital was already astir as Katharine passed in. She did not go at once to the sleeping-tent she shared with Lady Wastwood, but passed the white rows of canvas dwellings, and turned into the dewy, deserted gardens, where odours of Eden breathed from the newly opened roses, and all the thrushes and blackbirds and bulbuls were singing in chorus to greet the birth of another day.

Her glance sought the table where she had left the card and the letter. They were not there. Lady Wastwood must have taken them. One could always count on Trixie for such kind, considerate acts.

She threw down her hat and the serge uniform-cape on the table and stepped out upon the terrace to drink in the sweet coolness, resting her hands on the balustrade as she looked out over the gardens, and the Khedive's boasted tennis-lawns of rafia—beyond the belt of palms, evergreen oaks, tamarisks and stone pines and rustling casuarinas, that clothe the slopes of Montana, to the changing blues and beryls of the classic Western Sea.

Among the cistus-blossoms at her feet, the early bees were humming; orioles were busy weaving their nest in the overhead vine. A light step sounded on the mosaic floor behind her. Trixie had come out to look for her. No—not Trixie! A sudden shock passed through her. Her heart leaped and seemed to stop, then went on beating furiously. She felt, without knowledge, that Edward Yaill was near....

Waves of carnation swamped her creamy fairness. Great waves of joy surged in her heart. She held her breath and looked down at the white hands folded before her on the creamy stone of the balcony....

The hand that lay uppermost wore the ancient gem of Hercules. Now a breath fanned upon her neck, the subtle scents of the Desert surrounded and enveloped her, an arm in a khaki sleeve gently stole round her, and a familiar hand covered the onyx ring.... Yaill's hand. Beautiful and strong, masculine and soldierly even in its slimness, scorched to the colour of lion-hide by savage Asian suns.

"O! Edward.... O my man of men! God gives you back to me! ...."

"Sweetheart! Dear woman! I had not hoped for this! ..."

Wonderful, unexpected boon. Heaven's manna to the starving. His Katharine's heart upon his own, her lips as freely yielded as though the hateful barrier had never risen between.... Soon he would wake, Yaill told himself—to aching desolation. But for a little he would take what Katharine granted him.

"Julian? ..." She started in his arms.

"Julian is safe, my sweetheart, but not yet fit to travel. I left him in the best of care, at G.H.Q. at Lydd. The General got me a passage down by one of their coasting sea-planes. A Sopwith from the 'Raquin'—and she did it in splendid time, too! Another kiss! ... For a fellow who has lived on memories of kisses—since that day we parted at Kerr's Arbour, Katharine! How your letter brought the whole thing back, when it came to me at the Khan at Shechem...."

"By John Hazel? ..."

"A woman brought it, certainly—but Hazel sent it me...."

"Dear Edward, where is he? You do not answer! ..." She drew away from Yaill, looking in his troubled face. "Where is John Hazel? ..."

"I would give much to tell you! ..."

"You mean that he is dead? ..."

"Frankly, we fear the worst. When we escaped from Shechem, Hazel was lame through an accident. He would not hamper us—he stayed behind to keep the road. The road to Kir Saba.... It runs through a defile among the mountains—just where a Turkish ammunition-lorry had broken down...."

"Go on! ..."

"For long after we had passed we heard bombs bursting. There seemed to be any amount of fighting going on at that point on the road. Then there was an explosion—the lorry had blown up sky-high. We learned that the day after, when a British scouting-'plane came back from reconnaissance in the neighbourhood. There were—human débris upon the road—and several dead horses. If Hazel is dead—and I fear he is—he died as a man should die...."

"But if he is not dead?" Her great eyes held his: "If he were imprisoned in—a wooden hut, chained down upon a native bed—"

"What do you mean?" Yaill started. "Have you dreamed you saw him so? There was a wooden hut in the War Prisoners' Wired Enclosure at Shechem. Julian was there when we found him—chained as you describe!"

"It was not Julian whom I saw—somewhere between midnight and two o'clock this morning—but John Hazel...." She shuddered, "John Hazel, so brutally ill-used—so frightfully disfigured, that the thing chained to the anghareb was like anything but a man.... Yet I knew him. You cannot mistake his eyes, once you have seen them. He is alive—and a prisoner. O Edward, it was no dream!—I tell you that I saw!—"

"Since you feel like that," Yaill caught fire at the flame of her intense conviction, "I'll go back—in another skin—and fine-comb the Front for him."

"Dear, dear Edward! That would be great of you!"

"Not it. I am the man's debtor. He brought me word of you at Sheria, and afterwards at Shechem. Shall I ever forget the thrill it gave—the sight of that envelope with your handwriting!"

"Ah, but there were two letters...." Remembrance flooded her. "Didn't you read the other? I don't believe you have!"

"Frankly, there was no time. But I have it here upon me."

He felt in a baggy side-pocket of his khaki Service jacket, pulled out a crumpled buff envelope, and held it out to her.

"Read it now, Edward! O Edward, read it! ..."

He looked at her whimsically, and opened Nurse Pidge's letter. When he began to read, Katharine was standing. When he looked round, she was seated in a chair. He crossed the floor and knelt by her, and her yearning arms went out to him, and drew him home from exile, to the shelter of her breast.

XVIII

Towards dawn, following the bomb-fight on the Jaffa Road, those masses of sulphurous cumulo-nimbus, piled over the Hills of Gilead, move without the push of a wind behind towards the damp rain-clouds rolling inland from the Mediterranean, and there is a great thunderstorm over Shechem. Forked lightning strikes and splits the rocks, the echoes of Nebo and Gerizim bellow in answer to the rattling volleys of cloud-artillery. Wadis and passes became foaming cataracts, field-bivouacs are flooded—men and guns are bogged in the foot-deep mud of the hill-roads—and supply-columns of British A.S.C. hopelessly held up in the vast cotton-soil morass that was yesterday the Maritime Plain.

By noon of the next day the sun regains sway, and the smells of Shechem their wonted potency. Save for one Turkish sentry at the gate, the guard has been removed from the Wired Enclosure. In its littered desolation an offence to the eye—in its neglected filth an outrage to the adjacent organ, it lies and steams and festers under the baking rays; and all the winged legions of Baal Zebub seem there to be holding revel—especially in the neighbourhood of the wooden hut.

A couple of hours after noon the Enclosure is visited by the Bey. The posta at the gate stiffens to the salute as Hamid passes in with the gauze-spectacled Medical Officer and his bilious-looking secretary, his nondescript Greek interpreter, and his usual following of big-bearded, red-fezzed zabtiehs, armed with German Service revolvers, and repeating Winchesters.

The fog of flies about the wooden hut thins a little as the visitors approach its entrance. The heavy door—broken now—stands as wide as though no prisoner were within worth keeping. The odour of corruption fills the place. The Bey spits, the Turkish Medical Officer in the black gauze spectacles furtively sucks a formamint lozenge, and conveys one to the interpreter—the Secretary holds his nose....

The wooden bed has been dragged aside from the patch of ground it covered, where shows the mouth of the tunnel, which has been hastily filled up with brickbats, sand, and gravel. Flies rise in a roaring cloud from the bedstead as the visitors enter, and the Bey, with a pale twinkle in his oblique sandy eyes—the inevitable cigarette poised between his thick gloved fingers—perpetrates one of his inimitable jests:

"Come, see a greedy dog we have in here—a Yahudi of the Yahud, who has eaten stick till his belly burst, and now can eat no more! ..."

At which display of wit the fat, goggled surgeon squirms with laughter, the secretary and the interpreter, faint with mirth, retire to the threshold, and even the flies buzz as though they too appreciated the jest....

The Thing that lies upon the bed looks as though it, too, joined in the merriment, for its teeth are set, and the swollen lips drawn back—the Medical Officer learnedly explains—in the rigor of the early stages of tetanus, so that it grins from ear to ear. A mountainous bulk of bloody flesh, clothed in a garment of feasting flies, and bound about with an iron chain that is padlocked under the anghareb—he is no more than the caricature of what was once a man.

A man who has suffered the extremest punishment of the falagy. Who has been beaten by the lithe green rods on the feet and legs, on the belly and breast, on the loins and thighs and face.... Beaten to kill by relays of men, skilled in the use of the asayisi, and yet, for a wonder, is not dead....

Labouring breaths issue from the bloated lips, and puff from the split nostrils. In the glazed eyes staring from their bleeding orbits, black fire smoulders still.... He is even capable of a croaking sound, which he reiterates at intervals, with his bleeding eyes begging at the faces of those beside his bed....

"So' ûk sû! ... So' ûk sû! ..."

All the Turkish the sufferer knows: "Cold Water!—cold water! ..."

"O Jew! you will get no cold water between here and Hell. But stick—plenty more stick, if you are noisy." Thus the Bey, illustrating the humour of the words with eloquent pantomime.

"Do not beat me any more!" the wretched being on the bed stutters in broken Arabic: "Do not call the soldiers—beg the Bey to be merciful!" Bright red blood jets between the clenched teeth—his cracked tongue being moistened with this, his utterance becomes clearer: "Tell Hamid Bey if he will let me go, I can pay—I can pay him well! ..."

"Thou canst pay? That is speaking Osmanli sense." A flat pasty face with oblique, pale, lashless eyes, and sandy eyebrows, replaces the spectacled surgeon's. "How canst thou pay?"

"By—telling—but I will tell no one but the Bey—where the money has been hidden away! ..."

"Hidden money—and where!" Sharp greed wakens in the pale eyes. They dig in the smouldering black ones as if treasure lay behind them: "I who speak am Hamid Bey. Now, Jew—out with it!—where is the money?"

"I will tell—I will tell, but only to the Bey," moans the voice between the clenched teeth. "Send away thy people.... Fasten the door lest they creep back and overhear. There was a whole bag of English gold! I brought it to buy the freedom of the Nazrâni priest—and coveting the money, buried it—where I will tell thee...."

"Peki! Very good,—all right!" The Bey turns upon his men, and dismisses them with an injunction to keep well out of earshot, then kicks-to the broken door and returns to the side of the anghareb.

The fear of desire thwarted grips him now, for the face is contorted in a ghastly grin, and the black eyes are rolling in their bloody sockets. He stoops over and shouts in the bloated ear, "Wake, dog! Tell now—or I call back the soldiers. Tell of the hidden gold! ..."

"I will tell! ..." The mountainous body heaves, the flayed muscles stand out on the huge arms like thick blue cordage.... "Stoop lower! Bend thine ear close! I buried—I buried it—"

"Where? ..." The thick yellow-pale ear approaches the grinning teeth. "Where didst thou bury it? Ai—y! ..."

The beginning of a shriek of pain is choked in the Turk's fat throat, even as the big, white teeth sink into a bulging fold of it—between the ear and the collar. Their owner growls as a savage dog might do—and with an effort that rends the tattered flesh, drags an arm from under the chain that binds him down—and with a second wrench, releases the other....

Now both big hands are gripped round the Bey's throat, and his pale eyes bulge, and his pasty face is blackening. No sound escapes his gaping mouth, from which the saliva streams. And the blood from the great artery, bitten through; like a torrent of warm and sticky rain deluges the face and breast of his enemy.

"I buried the gold," the voice croaks in the now discoloured ear, "in Esther's tomb. Dost thou hear me well, O Hamid? But I have brought thee a gift instead—the gift that many have had of thee. Even Death at these hands of mine—murderer, fornicator, lecher! Another twist yet for thy fat neck. For Jacob! ... This for Esther!—this for Julian Forbis! ... And this last of all for John Hazaël—who takes the head of the dog! ..."

The strength is ebbing from the great hands.... The fingers relax their hold upon the throat of the dead body.... Now with the head bent under it at a suggestive, ugly angle, it drops with a dull, heavy thud, upon the blood-slimed floor.

XIX

The sun of a day in the second week of December, 1917, rose on the last day of Ottoman dominion in the City that, since fifteen hundred years before the Birth of the Saviour at Bethlehem, has been, at regular intervals, the storm-centre of the world.

Panic followed on the arrival of some disintegrated units of a Turkish transport-column with the news that the British occupied Hebron; that their Advance held the Railway, and would soon be within sight. "No lie," as ancient Fuller says, for the London Division was at Lifta.

Hence general stampede ensued, and Turkish postas of infantry, indifferent alike to the loaded whips and the curses of their officers, shed packs, bandoliers and rifles, and fled incontinent. There was a running to and fro of Jewish and native Syrian citizens. Wives and daughters called to husbands and sons, and brothers—long hidden in underground vaults, or unsuspected attics, "The Turks are running! Deliverance has come! ..."

By two o'clock noon Turkish troops, mounted and afoot, muddy, weary and thoroughly disgruntled,—Field batteries, machine-gun companies, baggage-lorries and ambulances of the Red Crescent—poured through the Jaffa Gate from the west and south-west.

"Gitmeya mejburûz—we have to go!" the postas called to wounded comrades leaning from the Hospital windows, and the muddy torrent rolled through the streets of the Holy City, and out at St. Stephen's Gate upon the eastern side.

Towards dark, the Governor Izzet Bey went to the telegraph-office, discharged the staff of trembling Turks, smashed the Morse instruments with a hammer, and leaving in charge of the nervous Mayor a letter of surrender—borrowed the Cape cart and team of an American resident, and left for Jericho.... And by seven a.m. on the anniversary of the day of the recapture of the Temple from Pagan Seleucids by Judas Maccabæus in 165 B.C. the Ottoman inundation had drained away into the sombre depths of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, over the ancient Roman bridges of the Jordan—and cowed and bullied citizens who had been beaten, dragooned and plundered—were mustering courage to plunder in their turn.

The eagles of the R.F.C. wheeled in the azure overhead, but no pageantry of any kind marred the entry of the Conqueror.

For years the gathering of more than three persons together in one place had been punished by the Turkish police with fines, imprisonment and beatings. Now the Turk had been thrust out, but Fear lingered still. For, as the British Commander-in-Chief—preceded by his aides and Staff, and accompanied by distinguished representatives of the Allied Nations,—passed through the Jaffa Gate on foot, the huge concourse of pale and hollow-eyed residents and townsfolk mustered on the roofs and gathered in the streets—witnessed the thing almost in silence. Dumb, for the most part, pallid, immobile, like people carved of stone. Only, when from the Gateway before the Tower whose foundations were laid by David—and whose walls were reared by Suleiman the Magnificent—the Proclamation of Religious Freedom was read in the Four Languages, a sob like the breaking of a great wave broke from innumerable breasts, and eyes that had been dry for years were wet with tears at last....

The work was done. By strategical pressure, without the graze of a bullet on her sacred walls, the Holy City had surrendered. He did not linger after the reading of the Proclamation. He received in the square behind the Citadel the civil and religious notables of the City—the Mayor of Jerusalem, the Shaykhs in charge of the Mosque of Omar and Aksa, the Rabbis of the Spanish, German and Syrian Synagogues, the Fathers Representative of the Syrian, Greek, Abyssinian, Armenian and Latin Catholic Churches (their Patriarchs having by the Turks been forcibly deported)—the Anglican Bishop, the American Episcopalian—and Dissenting Ministers....

The brief ceremony over, he passed away as he had come, with his following, through the Gate of Jaffa; his soldierly tread sounding over the deep-buried threshold crossed in past ages by the war-horses of David, the chariot-wheels of Solomon and Nebuchadnezzar—the slave-borne litters of the Pharaohs, the tyrant-Kings of old Assyria—as by the golden-studded white bull's hide sandals of Alexander of Macedon, and from thenceonward how many conquerors more....

Freedom and Peace came to the War-ridden City of the Prince of Peace with the Wire Road and the Pipe-Line. To a mixed and breathlessly-waiting queue of strangely-variegated nationalities, (per medium of a standpipe, an A.S.C Sergeant and a turn-tap) the Nile waters—cool and pure, if strongly flavoured with chlorine, were dispensed, and sent flowing through Jerusalem.... Fulfilling the ancient Egyptian prophecy, that when the waters of the Nile should flow into Palestine—there should arise in the West a prophet, one Al-Nebi, who should capture the Holy City that sits on three limestone hilltops of old Judæa—and deliver the land from the loathed dominion of the Turk.

This having yet to be done, he went away to do it! perhaps with a passing smile at the breach in the City Wall made for the theatrical entry of the German No-Emperor in 1898. His was the motive power behind the long lines of moving men toiling northward under their packs through the mud of Judæa, the long trains of groaning baggage- and water-camels, the processions of waggons drawn by complaining mules, the caterpillar-wheeled lorries, carrying tons upon tons of food and ammunition, the Staff cars carrying red-tabbed officers swiftly from point to point....

He was consolidating his positions on the Jerusalem-Shechem Road, and thrusting his cavalry over the Jordan, while a Sergeant and file of Military Police combed Alexandria for a defaulting London Territorial, Acting Sergeant John Hazel, of the Fenchurch Street Regiment,—who had failed to return to the Front at the end of the fortnight's leave. He was moving on Bethlehem, while the defaulter lay delirious on a string-bed, swathed in sheets of wet boracic wadding—in the house of a Jew of Shechem. One Benjamin Sebastia, a small dealer in precious stones, and a loyal friend to Esther Hazaël—otherwise known to readers of this tale as the Mother of Ugliness.

The cellar in Benjamin Sebastia's house had often served as a hiding-place, being clean and dry and fairly free from stinks. Through its thick stone walls no curious ear could catch the sick man's ravings—when he called on certain Big Old Men to come to the rescue—or poured mad love-words in the imaginary ear of a woman named Katharine....

It seemed, he thought, poor crazed and suffering wretch! that he had kept back from a man named Yaill a certain letter and, carrying out a rescue by his own unaided hand, had claimed reward of this service from the aforesaid Katharine. Through the long days and the longer nights, when the scourge of self-reproach for this imaginary baseness bit deep into the tortured soul housed in the tortured body, the woman who sat beside him never once failed to answer:

"But, John Hazaël, my cousin, thou didst not do the thing!"

"Did I not? ... Is that true?" he would ask her over and over. "But I wished to, I desired to...."

"And desiring, thou didst resist."

"That is good—if it be true...."

"It is true. Does Esther ever lie to thee?"

"No!" he would groan, lying there in his helplessness. "Now tell me again how I was found, and brought to this place?"

"When—" (she would lay fresh pieces of soaked lint on the huge, swollen body, or ease the perpetual, torturing thirst with some cool, refreshing drink.) "When I ran away from Kir Saba, back to Shechem, I found—"

"That I," there is a smile on the shapeless mouth—"that I had kept my word to thee, and taken the head of the dog! I think the people did not weep? ..."

"Nay. It was as the passing of a plague—the lifting of a shadow—and the soldiers who had guarded the Wired Place openly rejoiced. Many being set down for beating, and fines, and so forth—because of neglect in the matter of keeping watch, on the night of the Sidi's escape...."

"They got good rest that night, I think? ..."

"So good," she gives her little rustling laugh, "that all of them swear they were bewitched, or that some friend of the Sidi's drugged the rations sent from the Barracks—so that they slept like the Seven, and waked to find him gone. So they were glad the Bey was dead.... Especially the sabtiehs of his command were glad, for their old bimbashi is now Commandant—and his name hath favour among them—he being a merciful man."

"A merciful Turk is a rare bird," the formless mouth says grimly. "And so—no suspicion attaching to her name—or thine—the Dervish remaining silent—thou didst bribe the Gipsy woman of the Bazâr to go with thee to the hut in the Wired Place, and take my body away...."

"Paying a price to the soldiers in the name of certain Jewish townsfolk, who—it being known among them that thou wert a Jew!—would have buried thee decently. And when—thinking thee a corpse—I leaned over thee to cut away the knotted rag that hid the Signet of Hazaël, from the cord by which thou hadst hung it round thy neck—I saw, by the Mercy of the Most High!—that thou wert still breathing. And even as I myself was brought into this place of hiding, I and Inaini the Gipsy, carried thee here that night.... Some help I gave in the sickness of her child, she hath never forgotten. May the Most High reward her! ... What had we done without her strong arms to lift thee, and her poultices of healing herbs.... Now sleep, for thou hast talked enough! See how thy poor heart shakes thee! ..."

"One question more...." The puffy lips are blue, and he labours in his breathing: "When shall I be able to stand again on these elephant's feet of mine? ..."

She swallows her tears and answers:

"Soon, it may be.... Only be content, only wait a little longer!"

And propped on high-piled pillows, he promises obediently, looking down his long misshapen bulk at his huge distorted feet.

"Very well! I will wait a little longer. Thou hast money to meet the charges?"

"Plenty as yet, my cousin—without touching the sum that was in the belt thou gavest me to keep. Tell me one thing.... If thou couldst be moved—whither wouldst thou be carried, we escaping under cover of night from this unhappy place? ..."

"To somewhere near Jerusalem," says the thick voice, feebly.

"To Jerusalem? ..."

She starts and looks at him, but the black eyes under their calloused lids are fixed upon the opposite wall.

"I said to somewhere near there. I may not go to the City until I get a message from One who is my Friend...."

"He has come there with the British since the Turks were driven out of the City? ..."

The black eyes slowly move to meet hers. He shakes his scarred head:

"Nay. He has been waiting there for long—a very long time.... But when I get a Sign from Him, then I must go up...."

"There is some great reason compelling thee?"

"There is something waiting for me at Jerusalem. I was told it that night in the wooden hut. Tell me"—the voice is like a child's—"if I cannot move, how shall I obey the Sign when it comes to me? ..."

She soothes him, thinking that his pain and weakness make him wander.

"Leave all to me. To-morrow may find thee strong. Only rest and sleep now! ..."

And he sleeps, with heavy broken breaths of utter exhaustion and weariness.

XX

He is kept concealed—for though Turkish vigilance is somewhat relaxed in Shechem—there would be short shrift for the slayer of Hamid, were he known to be living still. Perhaps it may be because of this, that though his wounds slowly heal, John grows no stronger. A Jewish surgeon, related to Benjamin Sebastia, who is brought by stealth to see the patient, examines him, and goes away, shaking his head.

"Too late! It would always have been too late, however soon you had called me," he says to Sebastia as he takes his leave. "The man must have had a giant's strength to live through such an ordeal. My brother was a powerful man, yet he died under the rods.... Heart a wreck! ... Lungs.... Pff! ... May die at any moment! ... Shalôm! To the Downfall of the Ottoman Power, and the Restoration of Jewry!" and he drains his glass of Palestine Tokay and refuses his fee, and goes. And his verdict is cautiously broken to John Hazel, who comforts weeping Esther, declaring the opinion of a Hebrew in a kaftan and fur hat and side-curls, with a Paris Diploma—not worth a British damn! He is even a shade better next day, as though in sheer defiance of the owner of the Paris Diploma and the side-curls and kaftan....

He has known how the months change by the flowers that Esther brings him, and others that Inaini, smiling, produces from the folds of her veil. Great clusters of crimson anemones, crocuses, purple and white; grape hyacinths, tulips and daffodils—and it is March. More anemones of varied, jewel-bright colours, purple, pink, and crimson; jonquils, and white and yellow Marguerites. Yellow, blue and lilac lupins—narcissus and violets, iris and cyclamen—and wealthy April's here.... He likes the anemones and looks at them for hours, drowsily turning them in his well-nigh helpless hands.... For the creamy ones are like Katherine's skin, and the rose-red are her blushes, and the brown-gold are—or so he thinks—the colour of her eyes.... The rows of velvety hairs that fringe the centre of the corolla are black as her eye-lashes—black as her hair.... But the scent of violets brings her back, complete in her sweet womanliness, with the Chapel and Kerr's Arbour for a background to it all....

Now come great sheaves of lilies, phlox and gladioli, and it is May, the Month of the Rose. Masses of perfume, colour and fragrance are brought to the cellar in the jeweller's back-yard. And John plays with them, or stares at the whitewashed wall, or listens as Esther reads to him from a copy of the Jewish Scriptures, a volume belonging to their host, printed in Hebrew and Arabic. The Messianic Prophecies are what he hears most gladly, and oftenest asks for. One day as she closes the Book at the end of a passage from Isaiah:

"And He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities, and the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed."

"That—that is why it was said to me that night!—" she hears the slow voice whisper: "'Thou hast suffered for obedience to thy father's fathers, and for the keeping of the Oath, and for the love of one woman. But I, that I might do the Will of My Father—and thy Father—and for the love of all mankind.'"

"O my Cousin!" Habitually now, the soft Arabic speech flows to and fro between them, "Who was it said those words to thee? ..."

"It was on the night—" the scarred head turns on the high-propped pillow—"the night after the beating. My hands and feet were torture, and I had a great thirst. And there came a light on the wall of the hut, and Somebody spoke to me, and the blood cleared from my eyes, and I saw Him then...."

"Who—who was He?" She draws an awed breath.

"He said He was my Friend—and I believed Him. You could not see Him as I did—and doubt any more. Dost thou recall the fresco in the tomb on Ebal? It is not like—how could it be His likeness? But the man who made it had seen Him in a Vision, and caught the faintest shadow of His look."

"I—do not understand...."

"It does not matter. But that is why I was so sure I should not die just then.... I cannot yet enter Jerusalem, for there is blood upon my hands that has been shed in vengeance—but, I am to wait near the City until I get the Sign...."

"Dearest, art thou quite sure—"

"I doubt not, being certain. Now, having breath enough—I would speak of other things. When I am dead, thou wilt write and tell the things to my mother—and go to thine own mother at Alexandria. She is wealthy and so art thou, thou dost need no provision, so the Fortune of Eli Hazaël, our grandfather, will go to build and endow the Hebrew University."

"But thy brother, Maurice, what of him?"

"It is borne in on me," the black eyes are momentarily dimmed, "that Maurice is dead. I have felt it for a long time. My mother must be sorely grieved. He was her dearest son."

"Art thou not dear to her also?" Esther asks sadly.

"She will sorrow for me too—but not as she does for Maurice. And she has a good friend, an old flame,—a Dutchman in the City, Herman Van Ost his name is—and she will marry him now. She would have married him years ago, but Maurice did not wish it. There is another task for thee yet, my Sweet. Dost thou shrink from it, Little One?"

"Nay. For thou art Hazaël, and the Head of our House. Surely I will obey thee. Have thou no doubt of me! ..."

"Kind One! ... Brave One! Little Judith in Israel!— Surely thou wilt be rewarded for thy courage and thy faith. Listen now! ... When I who am the littlest and least of all the Hazaëls shall be gathered to our fathers—thou shalt seek out Katharine Forbis—wherever thou shalt hear of her—and carry word from me." The voice deepens and grows strong: "Say—there is no longer an Hazaël left of the male line, to guard the Ashes. The Oath is fulfilled—the Debt is paid! Katharine and her children—and theirs following them—must take upon them to be Guardians of the Shrine."

"What Oath was it?"

"The Oath made sixteen hundred years ago and more, by Hazaël Aben Hazaël. Remember!—she is to take the Urn back to Kerr's Arbour, and house it under the altar in the Chapel there.... And her children will reverence it—knowing its sacredness. Perhaps," the black eyes are shining now with a light that is soft and gentle, "perhaps there will be a little boy—with eyes like his mother's—who will ask for the story oftener and love it more than the others—because—because—his name will be John ..."

"Ah, dearest!—dearest! ..."

"Do not cry. All this when I have departed.... Till then I would be forgotten by all I used to know."

"Then thou wilt say I have done right when I tell thee that some two months back—when thou wert very feeble—diligent search was made for thee. Even under the eyes of the Turks and Germans—a man whom thou knowest ventured into this place."

"One whom I know! ..." The black eyes flash, the scarred head turns towards her on the pillow: "Is his name Yaill?"

"His name is Colonel Edward Yaill, though sometimes he calls himself the Emir Fadl Anga. He was garbed as a Moghrabi sugar-merchant—but I knew his eyes again. So I sought him out, and guessing at thy pleasure in the matter, I told him thou couldst not be moved—and he went away from here."

"It is well. Now I talk no more, sweetheart, for breath is hard to come by. Do one thing that I ask before the daylight goes. Take off thy veil, little Judith, and let me see thee plainly. For once! I will not ask again, if my asking hurt thee so!"

She falters a refusal, then yields at his entreaty.

"Shut thine eyes for a little moment, and open when I call...."

He shuts his eyes and opens them, to see Esther sitting at the bed-foot.... A figure girlish in its youth fulness, pathetic in its slender fragility, and veilless, save for the tresses of her rich black silken hair. She parts the hair with two little brown hands, then throws it back on either side, revealing the face it has covered—and a sob catches in the man's throat, and his eyes are wet with tears....

For that side of Esther's face that is never shown is beautiful, strangely beautiful. The great dark eye under the arched black eyebrow, the little aquiline nose, with proud curved nostrils, the delicate mouth, the rounded chin, are of purest Hebrew type. She bears his scrutiny awhile, then lifts the discarded covering, adjusts it with quick, slender hands—and is Ummshni once again.

"Will that do? Hast thou looked enough?" she asks with a touch of sharp regret for her lost heritage of Beauty.

"I have looked.... And I have seen—as I knew I should!" says John placidly, "that thy face, my little Esther—is lovely as thy soul. Now I will rest, for I am done. Perhaps I shall walk to-morrow...."

Comes the month of June, with ardent suns, and July with skies of fire. Esther reads to John in another Book—a copy of the Syriac Gospels picked up on a stall in the Bazâr—of One Whose teachings she has been reared to hold as rank blasphemy. But her Hazaël has commanded it, and she obeys Hazaël, and reads of Him Who raised the dead to life, and opened the eyes of those born blind, and made the lame to walk. Here in this land of Palestine nearly two thousand years ago. But time goes on and this lame man does not walk yet....

It is October, the month of Asphodel, and Shechem is swept clean of Germans and Turks, as the brown line moves up north. The great Commander-in-Chief of the E.E.F. has carried out his leopard-pounce on Nazareth,—whence Von Sanders and his Headquarters Staff have fled—Tiberias and Amman have been occupied by British Forces, and the stronghold of Turkish Power at Damascus has fallen, before the colossal, tottering bulk can balance on its feet.

No available garments of European make can be adapted to John's hugeness. Esther and the jewel-dealer's wife are in despair, then hit upon a brilliant idea. A vast pair of Turkish drawers of yellow and white striped-cotton are tucked into the baggy tops of immense soft yellow boots. Over an Arab jubba of white cotton material goes a loose-sleeved Arab over-robe of brown camel-hair. They cover him with a black felt tarbûsh, and a white silk kuffiyeh bound with a scarlet head-rope, and swathe him in the voluminous folds of a primrose-coloured jerd. Now, with the beard that he has grown in captivity at Shechem, the mother at home in London would not know her son again.

The German Commander with his merry men departed in haste for Aleppo when the huge khaki torrent rolled upon Samaria from the South.... The Turks of the garrison escaped over Jordan, the batteries on the flank of Ebal were taken by the British, and the Patriarchs and other notables deported from the Holy City are chartering vehicles to take them back again.

Some of these are quaint enough. To witness, the ancient travelling-landau, piled with luggage of a heterogeneous description, packed with Armenian Fathers, and drawn by a tall camel and a small, rebellious mule. But the hooded bath-pony-chair of largest size, a venerable derelict of British make left by some wealthy traveller years ago to moulder in the courtyard of a Shechem hotel, to which a diminutive red-tasselled donkey has been harnessed, and in which is seated a prodigiously obese and bushy-bearded Arab, possibly takes the palm....

Three women run beside the chair, drawn by the small donkey driven by an Arab urchin with a sharpened palm-wood stick. As the chair rolls through the east gate, and moves in the rolling dust-cloud with a column of other vehicles, past the Wired Place and the Mohammedan Tombs, the little donkey stops.

"Shalôm, Sidi! Health and recovery be thine—and Happiness with the Blessing!" says the wife of the jewel-dealer, bidding John Hazel farewell.

"Farewell, O woman of gentle heart.... Remember me to thy husband. And farewell, kind Inaini.... Sometimes remember us! ..."

"Farewell, my lord.... My lord will not soon forget Shechem!" says Inaini, with a flash of brilliant eyes and teeth from between her flowered veils....

"Nor thee. May the Most High reward thee for all thy charity! ..."

"It was nothing!" says the woman, almost sullenly, but John can hear her sob....

"O my friend! O my sister! Farewell, good-bye! Little Mother of Ugliness, my heart is sore to part! ..."

The jewel-dealer's wife hugs the little white-robed figure. Esther embraces her, and then Inaini—and the honest woman and the courtesan go away together, both red-eyed with weeping behind their shrouding veils. And the big bath chair drawn by the little donkey—with the huge Arab in it and the little woman and the native boy running beside it—is lost in the stream of traffic on the Jerusalem-Shechem Road.

It is a day of dust and sun, and the big man in the bath chair drawn by the little donkey is as feeble as he is heavy, and unfitted to bear fatigue. It is night by the time they have left the plain, and the road climbs amongst the hills, that are ridged and furrowed with the traces of War, as the face that is shaded by the white jerd, and the body that the sick heart's throbbing shakes, and the man's misshapen hands and feet are scarred by the Turkish asayisi....

Sunset flames over the Western Sea and all the land is rosy-dyed when at last he looks on the ancient City, the bourne of his desires. Set between east and west upon three hills, of which the lesser, Ophel, has vanished—the limestone spurs of Sion and Moriah upholding her, she turns her back upon the ocean plain and the mild damp airs that blow from it, to fill her lungs with the burning winds and dust-storms of the Wilderness—where the Son of God and Saviour of mankind was tempted of Satan, and Jordan's yellow waters flow towards the abyss of the Dead Sea.

They go no farther that night, for the sick man cannot bear it, but hire two rooms, almost clean, and newly whitewashed, at the Khân of a little mud-built Mohammedan village that sits on a hill beside the road.

The left wing of the London Division were entrenched here before the Occupation, and the Advance that moved them north.... The whitewash of the Khân of Shafât has familiar names scribbled upon it, attached to caustic comments on the price of native eggs, dates, cheese, oranges and olives, as compared with their quality and their size.

And here the little party stay. For the big man in the bath chair can travel no farther. Many days pass and he can move again; and the little donkey is harnessed to the chair by its tasselled traces, and the Arab boy with the palm-stick, and the little veiled woman run by it—and the queer cortége halts by and by where the broad dusty track that leads south and a shade west to the Damascus Gate, forks off on the left to the less broad, better-kept carriage way that—following the line of the mountain-ridge, leads—south and a trifle east—to the Mount of Olives, passing the Tombs of the Kings.

In the shadow of the south wall of the royal enclosure, the sick man signifies his wish to halt. All day he lingers there, content, and for the greater part in silence; shares with his meek nurse and the Arab boy such food as they have with them—and when the short dusk heralds Dark, is loth to leave the spot. Next day they are there again—and the next day and the next. It is here, he signifies to his patient nurse, that the Message he waits will reach him—and content that Hazaël should be content, she knows no other will.

XXI

Meanwhile, the period of stagnation past, the current of life begins to flow within and around Jerusalem. In the house of an English Protestant Missionary Society without the walls, a Division has its Headquarters. At the Sign of the Red Triangle, guides may be obtained for the reverent conduct of soldier-visitors to the Holy Places. Here also photographs for the folks at home, with lightning hair-cuts and shaves, can be supplied with light refreshments. Signboards along the Jaffa Road invite Crusaders from the Land of the Ifrangi to partake at their own peril of sweets, ices and cakes.... And a Divisional Theatre flourishes in a tin-roofed shed, outside the Gate of Jaffa, and a Cinema established in a ramshackle booth is nightly packed to the walls.

Though the trenches and gun-emplacements on the Mount of Olives and Mount Scopas yet speak of War, there are local tennis-parties on badly neglected lawns, and even small dances to the accompaniment of the gramophone. The donkey-boys and Cook's tourists are no more.... But there are Military Races and Military Sports; and divers favourites, human and equine, are duly backed by the men of the Expeditionary Army....

Within the City English soldiers guard the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Mohammedans the Haram. The depot of the A.S.C. is lodged in the courtyard of a Jewish School.

English Military Nursing Sisters are housed in the Abyssinian Patriarch's palace—the French Convent where the Turkish Army Officers were, now shelters French soldiers—though the Turkish Crescent and Star have not yet been obliterated from the Jaffa Gate; and the Arab police, in black sheepskin caps and dark blue drill uniforms, keep order as they used to under the Turkish régime....

Though the solemn boom of heavy guns still wakens all the echoes of the Hills of Judæa, though Turkish batteries and Turkish troops move in the neighbourhood of Jericho, and British motor-launches churn the waters of the Dead Sea, the Holy City is wakening from her torpor of years.... Kinder-gartens and boys' and girls' schools, Christian and Jewish, Homes and Orphanages—the Teacher's University, the Missionary Colleges, and the seminaries supervised by Catholic Religious—revive like the withered blossoms of the so-called Jericho Rose....

The Clothes-Market near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,—where skin affections and fleas could be purchased at exorbitant prices—re-opens. In the labyrinth of bâzârs under the shadowy arcades, the Jew and Arab pedlars set up their stalls of rosaries and medals, gaudy religious pictures, and common household wares. Sleek-haired Levantines and Syrians behind counters of modern shops, offer antiques and souvenirs in mother o' pearl and olive-wood; ostrich feathers, roses of Jericho, Syriac Gospels and Rolls of the Law. German stores miraculously become Dutch, offer for sale liqueurs, cigars, sauer-kraut in barrels, tinned sausage, pickles and chocolates.

And the People who Wait for Signs have come out of their various hiding-places. The haggard man who carries a heavy wooden Cross and wears a plaited Crown of Thorns, pants under his heavy burden from station to station along the Sorrowful Way.... And the other, long haired and wearing robes of white, waits again near the Jaffa Gate, carrying his brightly-polished lamp, well trimmed and filled with oil. He says he is one of the Virgins waiting for the Coming of the Bridegroom.... And again, there is another, a handsome, martial figure, in the panoply of a Knight of Malta, folded in a cross-embroidered mantle, girt with a Crusader's sword....

Who knows what compact these and many more have made with One Whom they acknowledge Master. They are content, for their belief in Him, to be despised as fools. Calm, reasonable Christians shudder at, or ignore, while the Children of Islam respect them. To their number another is added with the passage of the days....

December draws to its end again. Tea-parties and concerts are given, and the Representatives of the Three Great Faiths may be said to fraternise. The Red Cross and the Society of St. John of Jerusalem unite in splendid efforts for the good of War-ridden Humanity. The olives are grey-green, and the palms are yellowing, and the first pale mist of almond-bloom pinkens on the hillsides, above the hedges of tamarisk—and Christmas Eve is here....

The portly Arab in the bath-chair drawn by the tiny donkey sits in his accustomed place, from which fierce gales and heavy Winter rains alone may drive him, in the shelter of the south wall of the Enclosure of the Tombs of the Kings....

Two chaplains of the E.E.F. go by in their cross-badged khaki; accompanied by an elderly Armenian in flowing black kaftan and high square head-dress.

"There's the New Crank," says an Oxford voice. "And the little Syrian woman, and the bath chair and the donkey-boy—and the donkey possibly—all waiting as usual for the Sign that doesn't come!"

"'The Sign.' What Sign? ..."

The second khaki chaplain looks with interest at the Arab. The strong south wind has blown back the folds of his ample head-covering, and it is plainly seen what kind of man the drapery has concealed. His huge ears, swollen beyond all shape, hang down on the bulgy, turgid flesh of the neck-folds, his huge hooked nose, and long but shapeless upper-lip dominate an extraordinary acreage of countenance that is ridged and knobbed and crumpled like a new-dug potato-field. And his great hands and gigantic arms, wherever these are visible, present the same appearance, to the chaplain's curious eye.

"Would that be some obscure form of elephantiasis, do you think, now?" he asks the Armenian ecclesiastic who walks by his side.

"It is not disease of any kind," the Armenian answers in English. "The man has been beaten—nearly to death, and has lived—that is all! ... Many of my friends, condemned to the severest punishment of the Turkish asâyisi, have died under the infliction—as this man was meant to do...."

"Speak lower!" It is the second chaplain in khaki who is speaking. "That Arab understands you.... I saw it in his eyes...."

"Not he!" the first speaker returns. "He's an Arab pure and simple—and some of the Tommies have dubbed him 'The Father of Buffaloes.' The little woman with him has a nickname—somebody told me.... "Sabâh-el-kheir, Daddy Buffalo.... Khud!—and good luck to you! ..."

And a couple of Turkish beshliks clink into the Arab's lap.

"Thy day be happy and blessed!" says a deep bass voice in answer. The three pedestrians pass on, and the beshliks fall amongst the straw in the bottom of the bath-chair. Unseen save by the sharp glance of the Arab donkey-boy, who squats in the shadow of the wall of the Enclosure, playing, with lines scratched upon the smooth limestone, a game that is scored upon the walls and flags of old Pompeii, as upon the recently excavated guard-room of the Herodian Mercenaries, eighteen feet under the level of the Sorrowful Way. A brace of coppers thrown to a sick man sitting by the wayside are surely given in charity. Yet when the sick one dies, the Fund amassed to build and endow the Hebrew University (the foundations of which are being even now blasted in the rock of Mount Scopas) will be enriched by a legacy of three hundred and eighty thousand pounds....

"What does it matter, Essie? Sweet One, why dost thou tremble? Surely the gift was kindly meant!"

The speaker thinks that his companion has been hurt by the bestowal of the coins. But she has not even seen the gift made, or heard the giver's words....

A moment since, a grey Staff car, driven by a soldier-chauffeur with the Great Headquarters' brassard—coming from the direction of the station beyond the Montefiore Hospice, by the road that skirts the City wall, to debouch upon the Road of the Damascus Gate—has passed by the Tombs of the Kings. Driven at speed, it has flashed by, carrying strangers with it. But one face was not strange.... One voice; borne on the wind that blows from Samaria, has echoed in the ears of Esther-Ummshni, bringing memories that brim the heart....

"I did not hear.... I thought I saw.... What is it, what is it, Mabruk?"

For the Arab boy has run down the road to meet a messenger from the Khân.

"What says he? ..." asks the deep, slow voice.

"He says—Mabruk says—" Esther commences, shaking like a wind-blown reed of the Jordan behind her shrouding veils: "that strangers are at Shafât. He says—"

"O Shaykh!—" Mabruk, a lanky crow-necked youngster, son of the Mohammedan landlord of the Shafât Khân, importantly steps forwards: "Great ones have arrived at my father's Khân. Two lords of the Inglizi, and a lady, tall and beautiful. They have sent me in the horseless carriage to bring back thee and the Sitti. This letter also they have sent thee by thy servant's hands.—Behold! ..."

Mabrûk lifts the note to his eyes and forehead, and hands it over. A folded sheet of paper, sealed with an impression of a well-known onyx signet, and scrawled with some hastily pencilled lines in a beloved hand:

"I am here, at the Khân at Shafât, with my brother and husband. Do not be angry that we have come! Your aunt is with us. Tell your Cousin Esther, whom I long to see and thank for my dear Julian, but not as I'm longing to see and thank you! Alone, dear, dear John!—because I'm jealous of the others. Your first word—your first look have got to be for me. Come back in the car or send it back to fetch—

Your loving, grateful
KATHARINE YAILL."

XXII

Married. For a long time John has felt that she was married. Well, well, it was to be. His sovereign lady, his dear Princess, a wife, and soon, perhaps, a mother. God bless her and her husband. He is glad, glad, because of their happiness.... Holding the pencilled scrawl with the seal of the Hercules, his shapeless hand drops heavily back upon his knees.

"O John, my Cousin, answer me!"—Esther is eagerly speaking—"The Sign that thou hast waited for so long, was it not this? ..."

"Nay, Sweet!" He shakes his head. "This is a token from a friend beloved, but not the Sign I look for.... Now undo the Ring of Hazaël from the cord about my neck. Carry it to her at the Khân where she waits with her brother. Render it back to them both from me. Giving with the Ring, the Message I have taught thee!—I need not to repeat the words, they are written in thy heart...."

"But, dearest one—it was a message from the Dead, and thou art yet living...."

She looks anxiously in the speaker's face. Save that the black eyes have a strange glaze, and the puffed lips are lead-colour—and the beating of his damaged heart shakes the flowing draperies that cover him—there is nothing to rouse her fears.

"Take Katharine," there is a clang of masterful authority in the deep voice, "take Katharine the Message—from the departing Guardian of the Ashes. Return in an hour. Leave the child here to sit by me. One thing remains!—" He calls her back as she is turning meekly to obey him: "Kiss me, my Little Cousin, before thou dost depart."

She goes, and presently the hoot of a car testifies to her departure.... It nears the hour of sunset on this Vigil of the Nativity. There was a tang of frost early in the morning. But the rosy air is warm and still, the sky serenely splendid, the orange-breasted blackbirds pipe and trill, and clouds of little ash-coloured, grasshopper-like insects rise at the brush of footsteps through the short dun-coloured grass....

He sits there for a long time or a short time, he is not certain. To the soul upon the edge of Timelessness, many hours are as one.... The tiny donkey, hobbled, grazes at a little distance. The Arab child who drives the beast, plays the game that the soldiers of the Roman Guard played in the days of Herod, and then, grown weary, steals off to play elsewhere....

The sick man dozes heavily now, with jaw a little fallen, and black eyes that show glazed and dim between their parted lids.... The breaths that shake the puffed lips come slower and fainter. The Arab jerd that swathes him ceases to tremble with the irregular beating of his heart....

Suddenly, his eyes stare wide and a strange cold thrill goes through him. He has been touched.... By whose hand? ... No messenger stands near.... Can it be that so strange a shock heralds the Sign that he has waited? ...

Midnight!—yet when he closed his eyes it was not yet sunset, the blind muezzin of the Mosque of the Throne of Solomon had not given the Call to Prayer.... And now, the Hosts of Heaven blaze from zenith to horizon. The full Moon stands over Bethlehem and the flood of radiant pale light makes Jerusalem a silver city, inlaid with jet and ebony....

Solemn black clouds heap over Moab. The Valley of the Kedron and the Vale of Our Lady Mary are swallowed in a gulf of shade. But Olivet is glorious in the brilliance that pours down on her, making a prone black giant under every lonely cypress, and a black cat crouching under every bush and stone.

Bells ring from all the convents, and churches in Jerusalem. All over Palestine bells ring for Christmas Day. From Bethlehem where He was born, comes the sound of joyful chiming. On the north wind the sound of bells is brought from Nazareth....

"Peace on earth!" ... John Hazel stands and listens, as from north, east, west and south the bells of Christmas ring.... A great cry breaks from him, of wild despair and anguish:

"O Christ, there is no peace for me while yet Thou art withholden. O Shepherd of all broken hearts! send me Thy promised Sign! Speak to me at least, you Big Old Men," he cries, "for I am lonely! ... Say to this John, the littlest and least of all the Hazaëls—that I have done my duty, and ye are content with me!"

The shuddering cry dies on the breeze. And a terrible voice answers:

"Not the least, but the greatest of all art thou.... For thou art our leader. Hear, now! The choice has fallen to thee. Worthy art thou to rule us, who canst so well obey! ..."

Wonderful sight.... On his left hand, on his right and before him. From the skirts of the Mount of Olives, to the Mohammedan Cemetery, and across the road of the Damascus Gate, to the site of the Unknown Tombs.... Rank upon rank of Big Old Men—stately as Kings, in flowing robes and high jewelled tiaras, and others in less ancient garb, and others in more modern garments—even down to the style of the present day. He sees his grandfather, Eli, and his own father, and his brother Maurice, and stretches his hands to them, crying, as they smile and wave to him:

"Tell me, is this the Sign that I was promised when I was chained to the bed in the Turkish hut and the Voice spoke to me? ..."

And all the Hazaëls answer in deep, tremendous voices, and then the turmoil quietens down, and the Biggest of all the Big Old Men stands forth and gives reply:

"We know not of any Sign, O John! Thou calledst, and we answered. Now hear Hazaël Aben Hazaël, who made the Oath of old.... Lead and we follow.... Command, and we obey thee. Speak, and deliver counsels—thou greatest of us all!"

John hesitates a moment, and then words come to him:

"O all ye Big Old Men, listen to me, the littlest! This is the lore I have gathered in the thirty-five years of my life. Human Love is a passing Breath—a rosy, flying Shadow. Happiness, Wealth, Honour, Fame—are cobwebs on the wind. Rank and Power are gilded stools, worm-eaten and rotten. Nothing is Real—nothing is true—but the Truths ye would not see! There is no gain save Sacrifice—no good save Renunciation!—no Way except the Way of the Cross—no Hope but in the Blood of CHRIST! He is our King! ... Now follow me, and we will do Him homage. Or cast me out from among you, and let me be forgotten. I, John, the littlest of all the Hazaëls, have said my say! ..."

"We hear!" The deep chorus of answering voices rose and rolled down on him.... "We hear. Lead on—we follow thee!"

"It is well. Wheel and face southwards, O ye Hazaëls! and form four men abreast in columns of companies."

He gives the order loud and clear, and the extended ranks of towering figures shift and change, and close in—and all the faces are turned from him, except the face of the very Biggest of all the Big Old Men. He says to John, in a voice that is very like John's own:

"I am the Captain of thy host. Give me the route of march."

"First to Bethlehem, the Place of His Birth, and then to His Death Place on Calvary," John answers, though his knees seem melting under him, and he has hardly any breath.

"And then? ... Whither go we? ... For the Gate of the Place where we abode is now shut behind us.... Is there not entrance for thee and me and these, by the Gate of Hope? ... The Gate that opened for Philoremus Fabius—that I saw when the Blemmyes gave me death! ..."

"But I do not know the Gate of Hope! ..." John falters, rather weakly, and the Biggest of all his Big Old Men answers him sternly now:

"The Crucified promised thee a Sign—and He deceives not. Ask now His Father in His Name—to open His Gate of Hope!"

* * * * * * *

And John hears his own voice blundering in the petition:

"O Christ, Who art the Very Truth, show now the Sign Thou promised! Lead us into the Land of Peace by Thine Own Gate of Hope! O look! ... Look, ye Hazaëls!—in the sky, over the Holy City! ..."

Obedient to the voice and the arm that is uplifted, the faces of the mighty host, are upturned to the sky. Faces that are dark and fierce, noble and mild, harsh and stern or gentle.... Faces of Kings and prophets and sages, leaders of hosts and seers of visions; men of the sceptre, men of the sword, men of the crucible, men of the scalpel; men of the pen, men of the spade and pickaxe—men of all ages and all climes—but Hebrew every one....

Over the ancient City that stoned her prophets, and cast out her Saints, having slain the Son of God—is another City, shining-walled, with radiant domes and towers. Figures more radiant walk upon her walls and crowd her housetops. John knows the City. Of it he spoke to Esther a little while ago.

A Gate is opened in Her walls between two shining towers. A Man stands on the threshold more glorious than the Sun. Majesty and meekness radiate from Him, with Love and Compassion and Mercy.... His Hands are stretched in welcome. They are Wounded, like His Feet. He speaks, touching His naked Side, where the gash of the Roman spear is:

"Come unto Me, My people! Here is the Gate of Hope! ..."

* * * * * * *

An earthly voice John Hazel used to think the loveliest of women's voices, calls him with eager breathlessness. Now a tall figure in a felt hat, with the Red Cross badge and ribbon, and a flowing cape of red-lined blue, comes swiftly down the road. A gallant, womanly creature with beautiful and tender eyes that John has often dreamed of.... They lighten as they fall on the great shapeless bulk of the man, who—dressed like an Arab—is sitting in an old bath-chair....

The little donkey grazes near, the Arab boy is not visible. It is just upon the flush of sunset, and the voice of the blind muezzin at the Mosque of the Throne of Solomon comes faintly out of the distance, giving the Call to Prayer. Other voices take it up and die out in distance; and Katharine would speak now, but pauses as the Angelus rings its mellow triples from the Dominican Monastery behind the Tombs of the Kings, and the Chapel in the garden of the Syrian Patriarch....

She ends the little Latin prayer with the Sign of the Cross, and comes forward. Clouds of little dun insects like grasshoppers rise under her footsteps as she comes.... A tiny bird no bigger than a tit that is perched on the sick man's shoulder takes wing with a fluttering, silken sound. And a creature like a biggish mouse, with kangaroo-like hind legs, leaps away as Katharine comes to the side of the rickety bath-chair....

She calls the man who sits in it, and he does not answer, but leans back against his pillow, staring fixedly before him with his hands upon his knees. The Arab kuffiyeh partly hides his face, so changed since she last saw it. But she catches the jut of the great hooked nose, and the glitter of the stern black eyes....

A cocksure woman is Katharine, who always thinks she is wanted. He does not speak, but she is quite sure he is glad that she has come....

"John Hazel! Are you vexed with me for thrusting myself upon you? I had to come! ... I simply couldn't stay away! ... You do know why, truest of friends! ... To thank you—to bless you! For Edward and for me, and Julian!" The eager words come pouring out as she kneels beside the chair. "Dearest, best, bravest one—come back with us to England! ... I will nurse you,—you will,—you shall get well! There MUST be happiness and health for you—it couldn't be otherwise! ... Say you'll come, or I shall kiss you. My husband told me to! ..."

She rises to her feet now and leans over him smiling, with a womanly-tender impulse to hug him to her breast. Her warm, sweet arm goes round the man's great neck, her pure breath fans his forehead. Her lips touch the scarred cheek—and the truth comes home to her.

That longed-for kiss has come too late for the last of the Hazaëls. He leaves it as his legacy to a new Keeper of the Shrine. The little boy who is to be, with eyes like his mother's.... The son of Yaill and Katharine—whose Christian name is John.

THE END

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Table of Contents

- THE JUST STEWARD

- Book the First: THE SEEKING

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- Book the Second: THE SENDING

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- Book the Third: THE FINDING

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- Book the Fourth: THE PASSING

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- IX
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- XIV
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- XX
- XXI
- XXII

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE