The Veiled Lady | Page 3

whispered an order in the left ear of the almost prostrate man. This done, the Pasha rose from his seat, straightened his shoulders (no handsomer men the world over than these high-class Turks), shook my hand warmly, gave me the Turkish salute--heart, mouth, and forehead touched with the tips of flying fingers--and bowed me out.
Once through the flat leather curtain that hid the exit door of the Pasha's office, and into the bare corridor, I led Joe to a corner out of the hearing of the ever-present spy, and, nailing him to the wall, propounded this query:
"What did the High-Pan-Jam say, Joe?"
Hornstog raised his shoulders level with his ears, fanned out his fingers, crooked his elbows, and in his best conglomerate answered:
"He say, effendi, that a guard of ein men, Yusuf, his name--I know him--he is in the Secret Service-- oh, we will have no trouble with him--" Here Joe chafed his thumb and forefinger with the movement of a paying teller counting a roll. "He come every morning to Galata Bridge for you me. He say, too, if any trouble while you paint I go him-- ah, effendi, it is only Joe Hornstog can do these things. The Pasha, he know me--all good Turk-men know me. Where we paint now, subito? In the plaza, or in the patio of the Valedee, like last year?"
"Neither. We go first to the Mosque of Suleiman. I want the view through the gate of the court-yard, with the mosque in the background. Best place is below the cafe. Pick up those traps and come along."
Thus it was that on this particular summer afternoon Joe and I found ourselves on the shadow side of a wall up a crooked, break-neck street paved with rocks, each as big as a dress-suit case, from which I got a full view of the wonderful mosque tossing its splendors into the still air, its cresting of minarets so much frozen spray against the blue.
The little comedy--or shall I say tragedy?--began a few minutes after I had opened my easel--I sitting crouched in the shadow, my elbow touching the plastered wall. Only Joe and I were present. Yusuf, the guard, a skinny, half-fed Turk in fez and European dress, had as usual betaken himself to the cafe fronting the same sidewalk on which I sat, but half a block away; far enough to be out of hearing, but near enough to miss my presence should I decamp suddenly without notifying him. There he drank some fifty cups of coffee, each one the size of a thimble, and smoked as many cigarettes, their burned stubs locating his seat under the cafe awning as clearly as peanut-shells mark a boy's at the circus. I, of course, paid for both.
So absorbed was I in my work--the mosque never was so beautiful as on that day--I gave no thought to the fact that in my eagerness to hide my canvas from the prying sun I had really backed myself into a small wooden gate, its lintel level with the sidewalk --a dry, dusty, sun-blistered gate, without lock or hasp on the outside, and evidently long closed. Even then I would not have noticed it, had not my ears caught the sound of a voice--two voices, in fact--low, gurgling voices--as if a fountain had just been turned on, spattering the leaves about it. Then my eye lighted, not only on the gate, but upon a seam or split in the wood, half-way up its height, showing where a panel was sometimes pushed back, perhaps for surer identification, before the inside wooden beam would be loosened.
So potent was the spell of the mosque's witchery that the next instant I should have forgotten both door and panel had not Joe touched the toe of my boot with his own--he was sitting close to me--and in explanation lifted his eyebrow a hair's breadth, his eyes fixed on the slowly sliding panel--sliding noiselessly, an inch at a time. Only then did my mind act.
What I saw was first a glow of yellow green, then a mass of blossoms, then a throat, chin and face, one after another, all veiled in a gossamer thin as a spider's web, and last--and these I shall never forget --a pair of eyes shining clear below and above the veil, and which gazed into mine with the same steady, full, unfrightened look one sometimes sees on the face of a summer moon when it bursts through a rift in the clouds.
"Don't move and don't look," whispered Joe in my ear, a tone in his voice of one who had just seen a ghost. "Allah! Ekber! Yuleima!"
"Who is she?" I answered, craning my neck to see the closer.
"No speak now--keep still," he mumbled under his breath.
It may have been the gossamer veil shading a