CHAPTER IX

A DESPERATE GAME

Very slowly the black night grayed down into a wan, spectral morning, and slowly the gray morning paled into a dim mother-of-pearl dawn. And then suddenly the mother-of-pearliness brightened into a shimmering opal, and the ray of pale gold light slanted through the barred window and the bright face of new day peeped over the sill, staring out of countenance the lurking shadows of the night.

And then Arlee's eyes closed, and the heart which had been beating like a frightened rabbit's at every sound and shadow steadied into a rhythm as regular as a clock. She slept like a tired baby; while the light grew brighter and higher, and reached in over the shining dressing table, over the white piano, to rest upon the oblivious face upon the couch and to play with the bright, tangled hair.

The first knocking upon the door did not disturb that sleep, and it was a long time before the knock was again sounded. Then Arlee heard and sprang to her feet in a lightning rush of consciousness. It was Mariayah again, and the water jars which already looked familiar to her, and after the water jars appeared more roses and with the roses a letter.

Those roses came, the letter explained, to droop their heads before her loveliness, which put theirs to shame. They would greet her as humbler sisters greet a fairer. For they were roses of a day, but she was the Rose of Life. The capitals were Kerissen's own. And then abruptly the letter demanded:

Did I frighten you last night? Is it so strange to you that you have magic to make a man forget all the barriers of your convention? Do you not know you have an enchantment which distills in the blood and changes it to wine? You are the Rose of Life, the Rose of Desire, and no man can look upon you without longing. But you must not be angry at me for that, for I am your slave, and would strew roses always to soften the world for your little feet.... Fortune has made you my guest. Will you not smile upon me while Fortune smiles? Luncheon will be in the garden, for it is cool and fresh today.

The mask was slipping. Only a flimsy veil of sentiment now over his rash will. Only a light pretense of her freedom, of his courtesy. He was beginning to declare himself....

But she must not let him suspect that she knew. She must _not_.

Her spirit responded fiercely to this tense demand upon it. The dread, the panic of the night was gone. The fear that had shaken her was beaten down like a cowardly dog. Excitement burned in her blood.

Everything depended upon her coolness and her wit, upon a look, perhaps, the turn of a phrase, the droop of an eye, and she was pa.s.sionately resolved that neither coolness nor wit should fail her, nor words nor looks nor eyes betray the heart of her. She would play her role with every breath she drew.

She crossed the room at the luncheon summons in the nervous tensity of mood that an actress might go to play a part in which her career would live or die. Every half hour with Kerissen was now a duel, every minute was a stroke to be parried, and she flung herself into that duel with the desperate exhilaration of such daring. Her hands were icy, and her cheeks were flaming with the excitement which consumed her, but she revealed no other trace of it, and she wondered to herself at the inscrutable fairness of the face which, looked back at her from the gla.s.s.

None of the record of those frightened, sleepless hours was written there, none of her furious pride, her fixed intensity. Only the soft shadows under the blue eyes gave her face a look of added delicacy for all the unnatural flare of brilliant color, and a faint wistfulness in those eyes seemed to overlay the smiles she practiced, like a cloud shadow on a brook. And never, never, in all her glad, care-free days, had she been as distractingly pretty as she was that moment. With an angry little pang she recognized it, pinning on the lace hat with its enchanting rose, and then desperately she resolved to employ it and added two of Kerissen's pink roses to the costume.

She thought the scene was very like a stage, when she came out through the narrow door which the old woman unlocked from a key she carried on a girdle, and slowly descended the stone steps. Beneath the wide-spreading lebbek a low table was laid for luncheon with two wicker chairs beside it. The green of the fresh turf was as vivid as stage gra.s.s; the lilies loomed unreally large and white; the poinsettias flaunted like red paper flowers behind the vivid picture that the Captain made in a dazzling buff and green uniform picked out with gold. His bow was theatric, so was the deep look of exaggerated admiration he bent upon her--it was strange to remember that her danger was not theatric also. But that was deadly real, and real, too, was the sudden surge of color into the young man's sallow face.

"You are kind to my roses--if not to me," he said quickly, and held out his hand for the brief little clasp she accorded.

"Your roses are dumb and have said nothing to make me cross," she laughed lightly, and looked swiftly about her. "How lovely this is,"

she ran on, "and how charming to feel a breeze. That room is rather warm and close.... Is you sister still too ill to come?"

And scarcely waiting for the a.s.sent which he began to frame with his searching eyes upon her, she added, "I am afraid I made her angry last night by intruding upon her. But I heard her voice and ran back to her room to ask after her. She wouldn't let me stay at all."

It was droll how natural her voice sounded, she thought. His eyes held their fixed scrutiny in an instant, then dropped carelessly away, as he drew forward the wicker chairs. "She is a _nerveuse_, you understand," he said with an air of indolent resignation, "and one can do nothing for that sort of thing. A crisis comes--one must wait for it to pa.s.s.... She regrets that condition.... And she wished me to present her regrets to you," he added suavely, "for that reception of you last night. She was ill and did not expect you--and she did not wish you to see her in that condition."

"I should not have gone," acknowledged Arlee, "but, as I said, I heard voices from the ante-room and thought I would like to see her.... That pretty little maid she gave me does not speak any English, so I cannot send any messages."

"But you can write them."

"My French spelling is worse than my p.r.o.nunciation!" She laughed amusedly. "I wish you would find me an interpreter to put my polite remarks into polite sounding phrases. I know I put things like a First Reader!"

He smiled. "You do not put them like a First Reader to me. _We_ do not need an interpreter.... Unless I need one to speak to you?"

"Oh, no, your English is wonderful!" She waited an instant, then took a breathless plunge. "Have you any more news for me?" she demanded, forcing the note of expectancy. It would be suspicious, indeed, if she did not ask that. But what if he had decided to throw the pretense aside----

"Not one word of news more," he said slowly.

She felt him watching her as she looked down on her plate. The pretty little girl was pa.s.sing a platter of pigeon: Arlee did not speak until she had helped herself, then she said in a voice touched faintly with chagrin, "Well, the English are not very gallant toward ladies in misfortune, are they? I feel furiously snubbed.... Of course Mrs. Eversham never was much of a writer, but they might send over my letters from the hotel. The last mail ought to have brought a lot from that big brother of mine."

"Ah, yes, that big, grown-up, married brother who is so satisfied with all you do!"

She felt she had been unfortunate in her rash confidences.

"He won't be so pleased when he learns how I wasted a perfectly good Nile ticket," she remarked. "And Big Brother is rather fierce when he isn't pleased."

His eyes smiled, as if he understood and despised her suggestion.

"Cairo and your America are not so near," he observed negligently, "that an incident here is a matter of immediate knowledge there."

She felt the danger of seeming to threaten him. "Oh, I'd 'fess up,"

she said lightly, playing with her food. "There--shoo--go away!" she cried suddenly, with a militant gesture about her plate. "That's one thing I hate about Egypt--the flies!"

"I hope that is the only thing you hate," said the young man blandly.

"Isn't that enough? There are so many of them!"

He laughed with real amus.e.m.e.nt at her petulance. "Is there netting enough in your room?" he inquired. "Would you like more for your bed?"

"Oh, no, I'm all right, thank you. The flies are chiefly bothersome at meals. This is certainly their paradise."

"But is there anything you would like--to make you happy here? I will get it for you. Would you not like some books, some music, some new clothes----"

"I don't wonder you ask! But really this white gown will last a little longer--Cairo is so clean. No, thank you, there is nothing I need bother you about--Oh, yes, there really is one book that I would like--a Turkish or an Arabic dictionary. I have always meant to learn a little of the language and this would seem the opportunity."

In the pause in which he appeared to be consuming pigeon she could feel him weighing her request, foreseeing its results.

"I shall be most happy to teach you," was what he said, but she knew she would never have that dictionary. And so one plan of the morning went flying to the winds. But she s.n.a.t.c.hed at the next opening she saw and plunged into interested questions about the Turkish language, asking the words for such things as seemed spontaneously to occur to her--wall, palace, table--numbers--days of the week--repeating the p.r.o.nunciation with the earnestness of a diligent young pupil, until she felt that her memory had all it could hold.

And distrust, always ready now like a prompter in the box, suggested most upsettingly that perhaps he was not giving the right words. She resolved to experiment upon Mariayah.

He reverted, with increasing emphasis, upon his desire to make her happy in the palace, to surround her with whatever she desired, and swiftly she availed herself of this second opening.

"Yes, indeed, there is something that would make me happier, if you don't mind, please," she added with a droll a.s.sumption of meekness.

"You don't know how horrid it is for me to be caged in one room and not be out of doors, and I would love to come down into the garden when I want to. Won't you give me a key to that door? That is, if it is always locked."

"Generally it is not," he said readily, "but now with the soldiers about it is safer. You see, the soldiers can approach the garden through the open banquet hall"--and he nodded to the colonnade behind them--"and though it is forbidden, one cannot foretell their obedience."

To one who knew those soldiers were chimerical acquiescence was maddening.

"But, dear me, can't you have some one in the banquet hall to shoo the soldiers away?" Arlee argued persuasively. "Since the rest of the household has the court, it seems awfully selfish not to let the ladies have the garden for their airing."

"It may be managed," he a.s.sented. "It has always been done, for the garden is for the ladies. Whenever you wish to be in the garden you have but to send word, and the household will remain in the court, as is, indeed, the custom."

"It would not be so terrible, you know, if a gardener or a donkey-boy did see my face!" laughed Arlee. "Plenty of them have had that pleasure before this."