The Palace of Darkened Windows Part 1

The Palace of Darkened Windows.

by Mary Hastings Bradley.

CHAPTER I

THE EAVESDROPPER

A one-eyed man with a stuffed crocodile upon his head paused before the steps of Cairo's gayest hotel and his expectant gaze ranged hopefully over the thronged verandas. It was afternoon tea time; the band was playing and the crowd was at its thickest and brightest.

The little tables were surrounded by travelers of all nations, some in tourist tweeds and hats with the inevitable green veils; others, those of more leisurely sojourns, in white serges and diaphanous frocks and flighty hats fresh from the Rue de la Paix.

It was the tweed-clad groups that the crocodile vender scanned for a purchaser of his wares and harshly and unintelligibly exhorted to buy, but no answering gaze betokened the least desire to bring back a crocodile to the loved ones at home. Only Billy B. Hill grinned delightedly at him, as Billy grinned at every merry sight of the spectacular East, and Billy shook his head with cheerful convincingosity, so the crocodile merchant moved reluctantly on before the importunities of the Oriental rug peddler at his heels.

Then he stopped. His turbaned head, topped by the grotesque, gla.s.sy-eyed, glistening-toothed monster, revolved slowly as the Arab's single eye steadily followed a couple who pa.s.sed by him up the hotel steps. Billy, struck by the man's intense interest, craned forward and saw that one of the couple, now exchanging farewells at the top of the steps, was a girl, a pretty girl, and an American, and the other was an officer in a uniform of considerable green and gold, and obviously a foreigner.

He might be any kind of a foreigner, according to Billy's lax distinctions, that was olive of complexion and very black of hair and eyes. Slender and of medium height, he carried himself with an a.s.surance that bordered upon effrontery, and as he bowed himself down the steps he flashed upon his former companion a smile of triumph that included and seemed to challenge the verandaful of observers.

The girl turned and glanced casually about at the crowded groups that were like little samples of all the nations of the earth, and with no more than a faint awareness of the battery of eyes upon her she pa.s.sed toward the tables by the railing. She was a slim little fairy of a girl, as fresh as a peach blossom, with a cloud of pale gold hair fluttering round her pretty face, which lent her a most alluring and deceptive appearance of ethereal mildness. She had a soft, satiny, rose-leaf skin which was merely flushed by the heat of the Egyptian day, and her eyes were big and very, very blue. There were touches of that blue here and there upon her creamy linen suit, and a knot of blue upon her parasol and a twist of blue about her Panama hat, so that she could not be held unconscious of the flagrantly bewitching effect. Altogether she was as upsettingly pretty a young person as could be seen in a year's journey, and the glances of the beholders brightened vividly at her approach.

There was one conspicuous exception. This exception was sitting alone at the large table which backed Billy's tiny table into a corner by the railing, and as the girl arrived at that large table the exception arose and greeted her with an air of glacial chill.

"Oh! Am I so terribly late?" said the girl with great pleasantness, and arched brows of surprise at the two other places at the table before which used tea things were standing.

"My sister and Lady Claire had an appointment, so they were obliged to have their tea and leave," stated the young man, with an air of politely endeavoring to conceal his feelings, and failing conspicuously in the endeavor. "They were most sorry."

"Oh, so am I!" declared the girl, in clear and contrite tones which carried perfectly to Billy B. Hill's enchanted ears. "I never dreamed they would have to hurry away."

"They did not hurry, as you call it," and the young man glanced at his watch, "for nearly an hour. It was a disappointment to them."

"Pin-pate!" thought Billy, with intense disgust. "Is he kicking at a two-some?"

"And have you had your tea, too?" inquired the girl, with an air of tantalizing unconcern.

"I waited, naturally, for my guest."

"Oh, not _naturally_!" she laughed. "It must be very unnatural for you to wait for anything. And you must be starving. So am I--do you think there are enough cakes left for the two of us?"

Without directly replying, the young man gave the order to the red-fezzed Arab in a red-girdled white robe who was removing the soiled tea things, and he a.s.sisted the girl into a chair and sat down facing her. Their profiles were given to the shameless Billy, and he continued his rapt observations.

He had immediately recognized the girl as a vision he had seen fluttering around the hotel with an incongruously dismal couple of unyouthful ladies, and he had mentally affixed a magnate's-only-daughter-globe-trotting-with-elderly-friends label to her.

The young man he could not place so definitely. There were a good many tall, aristocratic young Englishmen about, with slight stoops and incipient moustaches. This particular Englishman had hair that was p.r.o.nouncedly sandy, and Billy suddenly recollected that in lunching at the Savoy the other day he had noticed that young Englishman in company with a sandy-haired lady, not so young, and a decidedly pretty dark-haired girl--it was the girl, of course, who had fixed the group in Billy's crowded impressions. He decided that these ladies were the sister and Lady Claire--and Lady Claire, he judiciously concluded, certainly had nothing on young America.

Young America was speaking. "Don't look so thunderous!" she complained to her irate host. "How do you know I didn't plan to be late so as to have you all to myself?"

This was too derisive for endurance. A dull red burned through the tan on the young Englishman's cheeks and crept up to meet the corresponding warmth of his hair. A leash within him snapped.

"It is simply inconceivable!" burst from him, and then he shut his jaw hard, as if only one last remnant of will power kept a seething volcano, from explosion.

"What is?"

"How any girl--in Cairo, of all places!" he continued to explode in little snorts.

"You are speaking of--?" she suggested.

"Of your walking with that fellow--in broad daylight!"

"Would it have been better in the gloaming?"

The sweet restraint in the young thing's manner was supernatural. It was uncanny. It should have warned the red-headed young man, but oblivious of danger signals, he was plunging on, full steam ahead.

"It isn't as if you didn't know--hadn't been warned."

"You have been so kind," the girl murmured, and poured a cup of tea the Arab had placed at her elbow.

The young man ignored his. The color burned hotter and hotter in his face. Even his hair looked redder.

"The look he gave up here was simply outrageous--a grin of insolent triumph. I'd like to have laid my cane across him!"

The girl's cup clicked against the saucer. "You are horrid!" she declared. "When we were on s.h.i.+pboard Captain Kerissen was very popular among the pa.s.sengers and I talked with him whenever I cared to. Everyone did. Now that I am in his native city I see no reason to stalk past him when we happen to be going in the same direction.

He is a gentleman of rank, a relative of the Khedive who is ruling this country--under your English advice--and he is----"

"A Turk!" gritted out the young man.

"A Turk and proud of it! His mother was French, however, and he was educated at Oxford and he is as cosmopolitan as any man I ever met.

It's unusual to meet anyone so close to the reigning family, and it gives one a wonderful insight into things off the beaten track----"

"The beaten--d.a.m.n!" said the young man, and Billy's heart went out to him. "Oh, I beg pardon, but you--he--I--" So many things occurred to him to say at one and the same time that he emitted a snort of warring and incoherent syllables. Finally, with supreme control, "Do you know that your 'gentleman of rank' couldn't set foot in a gentleman's club in this country?"

"I think it's _mean_!" retorted the girl, her blue eyes very bright and indignant. "You English come here and look down on even the highest members of the country you are pretending to a.s.sist. Why do you? When he was at Oxford he went into your English homes."

"English madhouses--for admitting him."

A brief silence ensued.

The girl ate a cake. It was a nice cake, powdered with almonds, but she ate it obliviously. The angry red shone rosily in her cheeks.

The young man took a hasty drink of his tea, which had grown cold in its cup, and pushed it away. Obstinately he rushed on in his mad career.

"I simply cannot understand you!" he declared.

"Does it matter?" said she, and bit an almond's head off.

"It would be bad enough, in any city, but in Cairo--! To permit him to insult you with his company, alone, upon the streets!"

"When you have said insult you have said a little too much," she returned in a small, cold voice of war. "Is there anything against Captain Kerissen personally?"

"Who knows anything about any of those fellows? They are all alike--with half a dozen wives locked up behind their barred windows."