The Fortieth Door | Page 7

had conspired to hide and he wrenched it open.
He found himself on a little balcony overlooking the hotel garden. He knew the place in daytime--palms and shrubs and a graveled walk and painted chairs where he had drunk tea with Jinny and watched a Russian tourist beautifully smoking cigarettes.
Now the place was strange. Night and a crescent moon had wrought their magic, and the garden was a mystery of velvet dusks and ivory pallors. The graveled path ran glimmering beneath the magnolias. Over the wall's blankness the eucalyptus defined its crooked lines against the blue Egyptian sky.
No living thing was there ... nothing ... or did that shadow stir? There, just at the path's end.
Ryder's lithe strength was swift. There was one breathless moment of pursuit, then his hand fell with gripping fierceness upon the huddled dark figure that had sped so frantically to the tiny door in the garden's end.... A moment more and she would have been through.
His hand on her shoulder turned her towards him. Her eyes met his with a dash of desperation.... He was unconscious how his own were blazing ... how queerly white his face had gone under its desert brown.
She was actually running away. She had meant never to see him again. He had frustrated her, but the blow she had meant to deal him was still felt.
His voice, when it came, sounded shaken.
"You were going to leave me?"
Strangely her eyes changed. The defiance, the panic fear, faded. A cloud of slow despair welled up in them.
"What else?" she said very softly.
He did not lose his hold on her. He drew her back into the shadows with involuntary caution, and he felt her slender body trembling in his grasp. The tremors seemed to pass into his own.
A sense of urgency was pressing upon him. He was not himself, not any self that he had known. He stood there, in the Egyptian night, in the motley of a Scotch chieftain, grasping this mysterious creature of the masquerade, and he heard a voice that he did not know ask of her again and again, "But why? Why? Why were you going?"
It was not, he was telling himself, and her eyes were telling him, as if she wanted to go. He knew what he knew.... Those had been enchanted hours.... Yet she had deceived and fled from him.
Her eyes looked darkly back at him through the dusk.
"Because I must return to my own life." Her voice was a whisper. "And I did not want you to know--"
"To know what? Who are you? Where were you going?" A confusion of conjecture, fantastic, horrible, impossible, was surging in him. Dim, vague, terrible things....
"Who are you, anyway?"
She looked away from him, to the door which she had tried to gain.
"No masker, monsieur.... For me, there is no unveiling."
Ryder's hand stiffened. He felt his blood stop a moment, as if his heart stood still.
And then it beat on again in a furious turmoil of contradiction of this impossible thing that she was telling him.
"That door, monsieur, is to the lane, and in the lane another door leads to another garden--the garden of a girl you can never know."
He was no novice to Egypt. Even while his credulity was still battling with belief, his mind had realized this thing that had happened ... the astounding, unbelievable thing.... He had heard something of those Turkish girls, daughters of rich officials, whose lives were such strange opposition of modernity and tradition.
Indulgence and luxury. French governesses and French frocks ... freedom, travel, often,--Paris, London, perhaps--and then, as the girl eclipses the child--the veil. Still indulgence and luxury, still books and governesses and frocks and motors and society--but a feminine society.
Not a man in it. Not a caller. Not a friend. Not a lover.... Not an interview, even, with the man who is to be the husband--until the bride is safe in the husband's home. Hidden women. Secret, secluded lives.... Extinguished by tradition--a tradition against which their earlier years only had won modern emancipation.
And she--this slim creature in the black domino--one of those invisibles?
Stark amazement looked out of his eyes into hers.
"You--a Turk?" he blurted.
"I--a Turk!" Her head went suddenly high; she stiffened with defensive pride. "I am ashamed--but for the thing I have done. That is a shameful thing. To steal out at night--to a hotel--to a ball--And to dance with a man! To tell him who I am--Oh, yes, I am much ashamed. I am as bold as a Christian!" she tossed at him suddenly, between mockery and malice.
Still his wonder and his trouble found no words and the shadow on his face was reflected swiftly in her own.
"I beg you to believe, monsieur, that never before--never have I done such a thing. My greatest fault was to be out in the garden