The Fortieth Door | Page 7

or centuries
before. "You can believe anything that I say."
"A young man of character! Perhaps that goes with the Scotch costume.
I have read the Scots are a noble people."
"They haven't a thing on the Americans. You must know me better and
discover--"
But again her eyes had gone, almost guiltily, to that watch. And when
she raised them again they were not smiling but very strangely
resolved.
"Monsieur, it is so hot--if you would get me a glass of sherbet?"

"Certainly." Convention brought out the assent; convention turned him
about and marched him dutifully toward the crowded table she
indicated.
But something deeper than convention, some warning born of that
too-often consulted watch and that strange look in her eyes, that uneasy
fear and swift resolve, turned him quickly about again.
Other couples had strolled between them. He hurried through and
stepped back among the palms.
The place was empty. The black domino was gone.
* * * * *
He wasted one minute in assuring himself that she was not hidden in
some corner, not mingled with the crowd. But the niche was deserted as
a rifled nest. Then his eyes spied the door that the green decorations
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.