The Fortieth Door | Page 8

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 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