Ziska | Page 5

was to be a costume ball at the Gezireh
Palace Hotel,--a superb affair, organized by the proprietors for the
amusement of their paying guests, who certainly paid well,--even
stiffly. Owing to the preparations that were going on for this festivity,
the lounge, with its sumptuous Egyptian decorations and luxurious
modern fittings, was well-nigh deserted save for Sir Chetwynd and his
particular group of friends, to whom he was holding forth, between
slow cigar-puffs, on the squalor of the Arabs, the frightful thievery of
the Sheiks, the incompetency of his own special dragoman, and the
mistake people made in thinking the Egyptians themselves a fine race.
"They are tall, certainly," said Sir Chetwynd, surveying his paunch,
which lolled comfortably, and as it were by itself, in front of him, like a
kind of waistcoated air-balloon. "I grant you they are tall. That is, the
majority of them are. But I have seen short men among them. The
Khedive is not taller than I am. And the Egyptian face is very deceptive.
The features are often fine,-- occasionally classic,--but intelligent
expression is totally lacking."
Here Sir Chetwynd waved his cigar descriptively, as though he would
fain suggest that a heavy jaw, a fat nose with a pimple at the end, and a
gross mouth with black teeth inside it, which were special points in his
own physiognomy, went further to make up "intelligent expression"
than any well-moulded, straight, Eastern type of sun-browned
countenance ever seen or imagined.
"Well, I don't quite agree with you there," said a man who was lying
full length on one of the divans close by and smoking. "These brown
chaps have deuced fine eyes. There doesn't seem to be any lack of
expression in them. And that reminds me, there is at fellow arrived here
to-day who looks for all the world like an Egyptian, of the best form.
He is a Frenchman, though; a Provencal,--every one knows him,--he is
the famous painter, Armand Gervase."
"Indeed!"--and Sir Chetwynd roused himself at the name--"Armand

Gervase! THE Armand Gervase?"
"The only one original," laughed the other. "He's come here to make
studies of Eastern women. A rare old time he'll have among them, I
daresay! He's not famous for character. He ought to paint the Princess
Ziska."
"Ah, by-the-bye, I wanted to ask you about that lady. Does anyone
know who she is? My wife is very anxious to find out whether she
is--well--er--quite the proper person, you know! When one has young
girls, one cannot be too careful."
Ross Courtney, the man on the divan, got up slowly and stretched his
long athletic limbs with a lazy enjoyment in the action. He was a
sporting person with unhampered means and large estates in Scotland
and Ireland; he lived a joyous, "don't-care" life of wandering about the
world in search of adventures, and he had a scorn of civilized
conventionalities--newspapers and their editors among them. And
whenever Sir Chetwynd spoke of his "young girls" he was moved to
irreverent smiling, as he knew the youngest of the twain was at least
thirty. He also recognized and avoided the wily traps and pitfalls set for
him by Lady Chetwynd Lyle in the hope that he would yield himself up
a captive to the charms of Muriel or Dolly; and as he thought of these
two fair ones now and involuntarily compared them in his mind with
the other woman just spoken of, the smile that had begun to hover on
his lips deepened unconsciously till his handsome face was quite
illumined with its mirth.
"Upon my word, I don't think it matters who anybody is in Cairo!" he
said with a fine carelessness. "The people whose families are all
guaranteed respectable are more lax in their behavior than the people
one knows nothing about. As for the Princess Ziska, her extraordinary
beauty and intelligence would give her the entree anywhere--even if
she hadn't money to back those qualities up."
"She's enormously wealthy, I hear," said young Lord Fulkeward,
another of the languid smokers, caressing his scarcely perceptible
moustache. "My mother thinks she is a divorcee."

Sir Chetwynd looked very serious, and shook his fat head solemnly.
"Well, there is nothing remarkable in being divorced, you know,"
laughed Ross Courtney. "Nowadays it seems the natural and fitting end
of marriage."
Sir Chetwynd looked graver still. He refused to be drawn into this kind
of flippant conversation. He, at any rate, was respectably married; he
had no sympathy whatever with the larger majority of people whose
marriages were a failure.
"There is no Prince Ziska then?" he inquired. "The name sounds to me
of Russian origin, and I imagined--my wife also imagined,--that the
husband of the lady might very easily be in Russia while his wife's
health might necessitate her wintering in Egypt. The