Part 27

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.