Part 20

"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--"