The Fortieth Door | Page 8

after sunset--when all Moslem women should be within. But my nurse was indulgent."
Almost pleadingly she looked up at the young man. "Believe this of me, monsieur. I would not have you think of me lightly. But to-night something possessed me. I had heard of the masque, and I remembered the balls of the Embassy where I danced when I was so young and so I slipped away--there was a garden key that I had stolen, long ago, and kept for another thing.... I did not mean to dance. Only to look on at the world again."
"Oh, my good Lord," said Jack Ryder.
And then suddenly he asked, "Are you--do you--whom do you live with?"
And when she answered in surprise, "But with whom but my father--he is Tewfick Pasha," he drew a long breath.
"I thought you'd tell me next you were married," he said limply.
The next moment they were laughing the sudden, incredibly absorbed laughter of youth.
"No husband. I am one of the young revoltées--the moderns--and I am the only daughter of a most indulgent father."
"Well, that's something to the good," was Ryder's comment upon that. He added, "But if that most indulgent father caught you--"
He looked down at her. The secret trouble of her answering look told him more than its assumption of courage.
This was no boarding school girl lingering beyond hours.... This was a high-born Moslem, risking more than he could well know.
The escapade was suddenly serious, tremendously menacing.
She answered faintly, "I have no idea--the thing is so impossible! But of course," she rallied her spirit to protest, "I do not think they would sew me in a sack with a stone and drop me in the river, like the odalisques of yesterday!"
She added, her voice uncertain in spite of her, "I meant only to stay a moment."
"Which is the way?" said Jack briefly.
With caution he opened the gate into the black canyon of the lane. Silence and darkness. Not a loiterer, only one of the furtive starved dogs, slinking back from some rubbish....
The girl moved forward and keeping closely at her side he followed; they crossed to the other wall, and turned towards the right, stopping before the deeper shadow of a small, pointed door set into the heavy brick of the high wall. From her draperies the girl drew out a huge key.
She fitted it into the ancient lock and turned it; carefully she pressed open the gate and stared anxiously into the gloom of the shadowy garden that it disclosed.
Relief colored her voice as she turned to him.
"All is quiet.... I am safe, now.... And so--good-bye, monsieur."
"And this is where you live?" Ryder whispered.
"There--in that wing," she murmured, slipping within the gate, and he stole after her, and looked across the garden, through a fringe of date palms, to the outlines of the buildings.
Dim and dark showed the high walls, black as a prison, only here and there the pale orange oblong of a lighted window.
"Did you climb out the window?" he murmured.
From beneath the veil came a little sound of soft derision.
"But there are always bars, even in the garden windows of the haremlik!... No, I stole down by an old stair.... That wing, there, on the right."
Barred on the garden, and on the street the impregnable wooden screens of the mashrubiyeh, those were the rooms where this girl beside him was to spend her life--until that most indulgent father wearied of her modernity and transferred her to other rooms, as barred and screened, in the palace of some husband!... That thought was brushing Ryder ... with other thoughts of her present risk ... of her lovely eyes, visible again, above the veil, thoughts of the strangeness and unreality of it all ... there in the shrubbery of a pasha's garden, the pasha's daughter whispering at his side.
"What about your mother--?" he asked her. "Is she--?"
"She is dead," the girl told him, with a drop in her voice.
And after a long moment of silence, "When I was so little--but I remember her, oh, indeed I do ... She was French, monsieur."
"Oh! And so you--"
"I am French-Turk," she whispered back. "That is very often so--in the harems of Cairo.... She was so lovely," said the girl wistfully. "My father must have loved her very much ... he never brought another wife here. Always I lived alone with my old nurse and the governesses--"
"You had--lessons?"
"Oh, nothing but lessons--all of that world which was shut away so soon.... French and English and music and the philosophy--Oh, we Turks are what you call blue stockings, monsieur, shut away with our books and our dreams ... and our memories ... We are so young and already the real world is a memory.... Sometimes," she said, with a tremor of suppressed passion in her still little tones, "I could wish that I