Part 30

"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? ..."