Miranda of the Balcony Part 14

Instead, he hitched and worked his white waistcoat upwards from the bottom, leaning forward the while, until his watch fell from the pocket and dangled on the end of the chain; after his watch a metal pencil-case rolled out and dropped between his knees. One of the two things he meant to do was done. Ha.s.san had bound his hands not palm to palm, but wrist across wrist; and raising his hands he was able with the tips of his right-hand fingers to feel in the left-hand breast-pocket of his dress-coat. His fingers touched a small pocket-book, opened it, and plucked out a leaf of paper. This leaf and the pencil-case he secreted in the palm of his hand.

Ha.s.san crawled back into the tent and closed the flap. Bentham, with his knees drawn up to his chin, crouched back against the wall of the tent. Now that the flap was closed, it was pitch-dark; that, however, made no difference to Ha.s.san Akbar, who lived in darkness, and out of the darkness his voice spoke.

"The ways of G.o.d are very wonderful. You gave me this tent. With the dollar you dropped on my knees at the gate of the cemetery, I bought this tent and set it up here apart, to keep you safe for the little time before you start upon your journey."

Bentham took no comfort from the pa.s.sionless voice, though his heart leaped at the words. He was not then to be killed. He did not answer Ha.s.san, but remained crouched in his corner.

"Now the dog of a Christian will speak," said Ha.s.san, quietly. Bentham made no movement. Ha.s.san crawled towards him, felt his feet, his up-drawn knees, and reaching his face untied the cloak from his mouth.

"Now the dog of a Christian will speak," he repeated softly, in a low gentle voice, "so that I may know it is indeed Bentham, who took shelter with me at Tangier, and ate of my _kouss-kouss_, and thereafter betrayed me."

Bentham did not reply. If Ha.s.san had a doubt, then it was his part to make the most of it to prolong the solution of the doubt, to defer it, if it might be, till the morning came. This was summer--July--the morning comes early in July, not so early as in June, but still early.

Would that this had happened one month back!

Ha.s.san kneeled upon his hams by Bentham's side. "Will not the dog of a Christian speak?" he asked in a wheedling voice, which daunted and chilled the man he spoke to. "Let us see!" And again his sinuous hands lingered and stole over Bentham's face. The thumbs lingered about Bentham's eyes.

Bentham s.h.i.+vered; but still, though the desire to shout, to curse, to relieve by some violence, if only of speech, the tension he was suffering, was strong, he mastered himself, he held his tongue, for if once he did speak he betrayed himself. His only chance lay in Ha.s.san's doubt, which lived upon his silence. Again Ha.s.san's fingers returned to his face. Bentham closed his eyes; the thumbs touched and retouched them, now pressing gently upon the eyeb.a.l.l.s, now working about the corners of the sockets. Finally Ha.s.san s.n.a.t.c.hed his hands away. "If I did that," he murmured, "they would not take him, for he would fetch no price;" and Bentham understood the fate which was in store for him--if he spoke.

Ha.s.san left his side, and was busy in a corner of the tent, at what Bentham could not for the moment discover. He heard a cracking of twigs; what was to follow? One instant he dreaded, the next he burned to know, and all the while he s.h.i.+vered with terror. Ha.s.san struck a match and lit the twigs, and breathed upon the little blue flames, until they warmed to yellow, and spirted up into a fire.

Bentham watched Ha.s.san's gaunt, disfigured, inexpressive face, as he crouched over the twigs, and his terror increased. He saw that he held something in each hand, something that flashed bright, like a disk of iron. Ha.s.san laid the disks upon the twigs; they were the hobbles which Bentham had placed upon his mule early that evening.

Bentham began to count the seconds; at any moment the morning might begin to break, surely, surely. As he watched the hobbles growing hot and the sparks dance upon the iron, he continued to count the seconds, not knowing what he did, and at an incredible speed.

Ha.s.san picked up the hobbles, each with a cleft stick, and brought them over to Bentham. "Now the dog of a Christian will speak," said he.

Bentham summoned all his courage, all his strength, and was silent.

Ha.s.san reached out his hands, and drew his legs from under him, and fitted the hobbles over his slippers, and fixed them round his ankles like a pair of fetters.

Bentham uttered a cry--it was almost a scream--as the iron burnt into his flesh. He kicked, he struggled to free his legs, to free his hands; but Ha.s.san Akbar dragged him forward, thrust him down upon his back, and pinned his shoulders to the ground. Bentham could do no more than vainly writhe in convulsive movements of his limbs. The hot iron rings clung to his ankles; the smoke from the wood fire choked him; the smell of burning flesh was acrid in his nostrils. Agony redoubled his strength, but even so, he was too crippled, and Ha.s.san's grasp upon his shoulders did not relax.

In the end Ha.s.san had his heart's desire, and Bentham spoke. He spoke too in the low voice which Ha.s.san enjoined, though he used it without thought to obey,--low, voluble, earnest prayers for mercy, and then again voluble curses, and again voluble appeals for pity, and at the end of it a broken whimpering, as though his strength was gone, and the convulsive jerks which a fish makes in a basket.

All the while Ha.s.san held him down, listening to the appeals, the prayers, the curses, with an untouched gravity of face. "It is indeed you; I have made no mistake," and he freed him from the burning fetters, and opened the flap of the tent. Bentham rolled over on his side with his face to the opening, and lay there shaking, moaning.

"Now I will tell you what I have planned for you," continued Ha.s.san.

"I thought at first to kill you, but it is so small a thing. Then I remembered words you once told me, that you had trouble with your own people, and could not ask them for protection. So friends of mine from Beni Ha.s.san, who go upon their way to-night, will take you with them, and sell you when they are far away. And for the rest of your days you will carry loads upon your back up and down the inlands of Morocco, and your masters will beat you, and if you faint and are tired, they will do strange things to make you suffer, even as I did with the hobbles. Lo, here my friends come!"

The sound of steps came to their ears. A few moments later a hand fumbled at the flap of the tent, opened it, and a head was thrust in.

"Is it you, Ha.s.san Akbar?"

"Yes," replied Ha.s.san; "and here is the Room whom you promised to take out of my path. He will fetch a price, and besides I give to you his mule, which you will find tethered to the tent."

"And the saddle too, Ha.s.san, is it not so?"

"It is."

Meanwhile Ha.s.san cut Bentham's clothes from him as he lay upon the ground, and taking off his own sack, cast it for a garment over Bentham's shoulders, and wrapped himself in the dark cloak. In the place of that cloak he tied over Bentham's mouth a thick rag. Then he thrust him out of the tent, and jerked him on to his feet. Bentham made no longer any resistance; he let them do with him as they were pleased; and he stood tottering and swaying.

Five Arabs waited outside the tent. "He cannot walk, he shall ride the mule this night," said the chief of them. "To-morrow he shall learn to walk."

They hoisted Bentham on to the back of the mule, and tied him there with leathern thongs. Then they started on their long journey.

The cool night air after the stifling tent revived the man who perforce rode the mule. It did not give him strength to resist, or as yet even the impulse to cry out; but it restored to him the power to hear and to understand. What he heard was a distant clock below him in Tangier striking an hour; what he understood was that the hour it struck was only one o'clock.

CHAPTER X

M. FOURNIER EXPOUNDS THE ADVANTAGES WHICH EACH s.e.x HAS OVER THE OTHER

The long interview with Wilbraham in the Alameda of Ronda had consequences for Miranda which she felt but did not trace to their source. It was not merely that she sickened at the vulgar, futile story of his ruin; that she saw in imagination the wretched victim he had run to earth across two continents, closing the door and slipping the pistol-barrel between his teeth; that she loathed the knowledge that this man was henceforward her gaoler; but she took him and the bitter years of her marriage together in her thoughts, and using them as premisses began doubtfully to draw universal conclusions.

These conclusions Miranda hazarded at times in the form of questions to her companion Jane Holt, and sought answers from her as from one who had great experience of the tortuous conduct of men. Were men trustworthy at all? If so, were there any means by which a woman could test their trustworthiness? These two questions were the most constant upon Miranda's tongue, and Jane Holt answered them with a.s.surance, and in her own way.

Wilbraham had not erred when he described her as a sentimentalist with grievances. Sentimentalism was the shallows of her nature, and she had no depths. Her conversation ran continually upon the "big things," as she termed them, such as devotion, endurance, self-sacrifice, and the rest, in which qualities men were singularly deficient. She meant, however, only devotion to her, endurance of her, self-sacrifice for her, of which it was not unnatural that men should tire, seeing who it was that demanded them. Yet she had enjoyed her share, and more than her share. For though incapable of pa.s.sion herself, she had in her youth possessed the trick of inspiring it, but without the power, perhaps through her own incapacity, of keeping it alive, and no doubt too because upon a moderate acquaintance she conveyed an impression of inherent falsity. For, being a sentimentalist, she lived in a false world, on the borders of a lie, never quite telling it perhaps, and certainly never quite not telling it. She was by nature exigent, for she was in her own eyes the pivot of her little world, and for the wider world beyond, she had no eyes whatever. And her exigence took amusing or irritating shapes according to the point of view of those who suffered it. For instance, you must never praise her costumes, of which she had many, and those worthy of praise, but the high qualities of her mind, which were few and often of no taste whatever. It should be added that she had always favoured an inferior before an equal. For it pleased her above all things to condescend, since she secured thus a double flattery, in the knowledge of her own condescension, and in the grateful humility of those to whom she condescended.

It can be foreseen, then, what answers this woman,--who was tall, and still retained the elegance of her figure, and would have still retained the good looks of her face, but that it was written upon by many grievances--would give to Miranda's questions.

"You can trust no men. You must bribe them with cajoleries; you must play the coquette; you must enlist their vanity. They are all trivial, and the big things do not appeal to them."

Miranda listened. She was accustomed to Jane Holt, and had no longer a reasoned conception of her character. Habit had dulled her impressions. She remembered only that Jane Holt had had much experience of men wherein she herself was wofully deficient. Jane Holt embroidered her theme; a pretty display of petulance, the seemingly accidental disclosure of an ankle, a voluntary involuntary pressure of the arm, these things had power to persuade the male mind, such as it is, and to enmesh that worthless thing the male heart.

"One might have a man for a friend, perhaps," suggested Miranda, hopefully.

"My poor Miranda!" exclaimed Miss Holt. "No wonder your marriage was a failure. Men pretend friends.h.i.+p for a woman at times, but they mean something else."

The moral was always that they were not to be trusted, and Miranda, vividly recollecting Ralph Warriner and Wilbraham, listened and wondered, listened and wondered, until she would rise of a sudden and take refuge in her own parlour, of which the window looked out across the valley to the hills, where she would sit with a throbbing forehead pressed upon her palms, certain, certain, that the homily was not true, and yet half distracted lest it should be true.

On the morrow of one such conversation, and one such flight, Miss Holt came into the little parlour--a cool, dark-panelled, low-roofed room of which the door gave on to the patio--and found Miranda searching the room.

"Do you know what month this is?" Miss Holt asked severely.

"October."

"Quite so," and great emphasis was laid upon the words.

"I know," replied Miranda, penitently, as she crossed over to a table and lifted the books. "We have been here all the summer; it has been very hot. I am sorry, but I was compelled to stay. I did not know what might occur, and," she anxiously turned over the letters and papers on her writing-table in the window, "it was some comfort, I admit, to feel that one was near--" She stopped suddenly and resumed in confusion, "I mean I did not know what might happen."

Jane Holt looked at her with great displeasure, but said nothing until Miranda began hurriedly to open and shut the drawers of her writing-table. Then she said irritably: "What in the world are you looking for?"

Miranda stood up and looked round the room. "There was a glove," she said absently.

"Yes, I threw it away."

"Threw it away!" Miranda stared at Jane Holt with a look of complete dismay. "You don't mean that. Oh, you can't mean it!"

"Indeed I do; it was torn across the palm."