The Fortieth Door | Page 9

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
had died when I was very young and so happy when my father took me
traveling in Europe.... I played games on the decks of the ships ... I had
my tea with the English children.... I went down into the hold to play
with their dogs..."
She broke off, between a laugh and a sigh, "Dogs are forbidden to
Moslems--but of course you know, if you have been here two years....
And emancipated as we may be, there is no changing the customs. We
must live as our grandmothers lived ... though we are not as our
grandmothers are..."
"With a French mother, you must be very far from what some of your
grandmothers were!"
"My poor French mother!" Whimsically the girl sighed. "Must I blame
it on her--the spirit that took me to the ball?... To-morrow this will be a
dream to me.... I shall not believe in my shamelessness.... And you, too,
must forget--"
"Forget?" said Ryder under his breath.
"Forget--and go. Positively you must go now, monsieur. It is very
dangerous here--"
"It is." There was a light dancing in his hazel eyes. "It is more
dangerous every moment--"
"But I mean--" Her confusion betrayed itself.
"But I mean--that you are magic--black magic," he murmured bending

over the black domino.
The crescent moon had found its way through a filigree of boughs.
Faintly its exploring ray lighted the contour of that shrouded head,
touched the lovely curves of her arched brows and the tender pallor of
the skin about those great wells of dark eyes.... From his own eyes a
flame seemed to pass into hers.... Breathlessly they gazed at each
other ... like dim shadows in a garden of still enchantment.
And then, as from a palpable clasp, she tried to slip away. "Truly, I
must go! It is so late--"
Ryder's heart was pounding within him. He did not recognize this state
of affairs; it was utterly unrelated to anything that had gone before in
his merry, humorous, rather clear-sighted and wary young life.... He
felt dazed and wondering at himself ... and irresponsible ... and
appalled ... but deeper than all else, he felt eager and exultant and
strangely, furtively determined about something that he was not owning
to himself ... something that leaped off his lips in the low murmur to
her, "But to-morrow night--I shall see you again--"
She caught her breath. "Oh, never again! To-night has no to-morrow--"
"Outside this gate," he persisted. "I shall wait--and other nights after
that. For I must know--if you are safe--"
"See, I am very safe now. For if I were missed there would be running
and confusion--"
He only drew a little closer to her. "To-morrow night--or another--I
shall come to this door--"
"It must not open to you.... It is a forbidden door--forbidden as that
fortieth door in the old story.... There are thirty and nine doors in your
life, monsieur, that you may open, but this is the forbidden--"
"I shall be waiting," he insisted. "To-morrow night--or another--"

She moved her head in denial.
"Neither to-morrow nor another night--"
Again their eyes met. He bent over her. He knew a gleam of sharpest
wonder at himself as his arms went swiftly round that shrouding