The Ghost Feeler (27 page)

‘If Allah would vouchsafe to let us know!'

‘But you suppose he's safe enough, don't you? You don't think it's necessary yet for a party to go out in search of him?'

The Arab appeared to ponder this deeply. The question must have taken him by surprise. He flung a brown arm about the horse's neck and continued to scrutinize the stones of the court.

‘When the master is away Mr Gosling is our master.'

‘And he doesn't think it necessary?'

The Arab sighed: ‘Not yet.'

‘But if Mr Almodham were away much longer –'

The man was again silent, and Medford continued: ‘You're the head groom, I suppose?'

‘Yes, Excellency.'

There was another pause. Medford half turned away; then, over his shoulder: ‘I suppose you know the direction Mr Almodham took? The place he's gone to?'

‘Oh, assuredly, Excellency.'

‘Then you and I are going to ride after him. Be ready an hour before daylight. Say nothing to anyone – Mr Gosling or anybody else. We two ought to be able to find him without other help.'

The Arab's face was all a responsive flash of eyes and teeth. ‘Oh, sir, I undertake that you and my master shall meet before tomorrow night. And none shall know of it.'

‘He's as anxious about Almodham as I am,' Medford thought; a faint shiver ran down his back.

‘All right. Be ready,' he repeated.

He strolled back and found the court empty of life, but fantastically peopled by palms of beaten silver and a white marble fig tree.

‘After all,' he thought irrelevantly, ‘I'm glad I didn't tell Gosling that I speak Arabic.'

He sat down and waited till Gosling, approaching from the living-room, ceremoniously announced for the fifth time that dinner was served.

Medford sat up in bed with the jerk which resembles no other. Someone was in his room. The fact reached him not by sight or sound – for the moon had set, and the silence of the night was complete – but by a peculiar faint disturbance of the invisible currents that enclose us.

He was awake in an instant, caught up his electric hand-lamp and flashed it into two astonished eyes. Gosling stood above the bed.

‘Mr Almodham – he's back?' Medford exclaimed.

‘No, sir; he's not back.' Gosling spoke in low controlled tones. His extreme self-possession gave Medford a sense of danger – he couldn't say why, or of what nature. He sat upright, looking hard at the man.

‘Then what's the matter?'

‘Well, sir, you might have told me you talk Arabic' – Gosling's tone was now wistfully reproachful – ‘before you got 'obnobbing with that Selim. Making randyvoos with 'im by night in the desert.'

Medford reached for his matches and lit the candle by the bed. He did not know whether to kick Gosling out of the room or to listen to what the man had to say; but a quick movement of curiosity made him determine on the latter course.

‘Such folly! First I thought I'd lock you in. I might 'ave.' Gosling drew a key from his pocket and held it up. ‘Or again I might 'ave let you go. Easier than not. But there was Wembley.'

‘Wembley?' Medford echoed. He began to think the man was going mad. One might, so conceivably, in that place of postponements and enchantments! He wondered whether Almodham himself were not a little mad.

‘Wembley. You promised to get Mr Almodham to give me an 'oliday – to let me go back to England in time for a look at Wembley. Every man 'as 'is fancies, 'asn't 'e, sir? And that's mine. I've told Mr Almodham so, agine and agine. He'd never listen, or only make believe to; say: “We'll see, now, Gosling, we'll see”; and no more 'eard of it. But you was different, sir. You said it, and I knew you meant it – about my 'oliday. So I'm going to lock you in.'

Gosling spoke composedly, but with an underthrill of emotion in his queer Mediterranean-Cockney voice.

‘Lock me in?'

‘Prevent you somehow from going off with that murderer. You don't suppose you'd ever 'ave come back alive from that ride, do you?'

A shiver ran over Medford, as it had the evening before when he had said to himself that the Arab was as anxious as he was about Almodham. He gave a slight laugh.

‘I don't know what you're talking about. But you're not going to lock me in.'

The effect of this was unexpected. Gosling's face was drawn up into a convulsive grimace and two tears rose to his pale eyelashes and ran down his cheeks.

‘You don't trust me, after all,' he said plaintively.

Medford leaned on his pillow and considered. Nothing as queer had ever before happened to him. The fellow looked almost ridiculous enough to laugh at; yet his tears were certainly not simulated. Was he weeping for Almodham, already dead, or for Medford, about to be committed to the same grave?

‘I should trust you at once,' said Medford, ‘if you'd tell me where your master is.'

Gosling's face resumed its usual guarded expression, though the trace of the tears still glittered on it.

‘I can't do that, sir.'

‘Ah, I thought so!'

‘Because – 'ow do I know?'

Medford thrust a leg out of bed. One hand, under the blanket, lay on his revolver.

‘Well, you may go now. Put that key down on the table first. And don't try to do anything to interfere with my plans. If you do I'll shoot you,' he added concisely.

‘Oh, no, you wouldn't shoot a British subject; it makes such a fuss. Not that I'd care – I've often thought of doing it myself. Sometimes in the sirocco season. That don't scare me. And you shan't go.'

Medford was on his feet now, the revolver visible. Gosling eyed it with indifference.

‘Then you do know where Mr Almodham is? And you're determined that I shan't find out?' Medford challenged him.

‘Selim's determined,' said Gosling, ‘and all the others are. They all want you out of the way. That's why I've kept 'em to their quarters – done all the waiting on you myself. Now will you stay here? For God's sake, sir! The return caravan is going through to the coast the day after tomorrow. Join it, sir – it's the only safe way! I darsn't let you go with one of our men, not even if you was to swear you'd ride straight for the coast and let this business be.'

‘This business? What business?'

‘This worrying about where Mr Almodham is, sir. Not that there's anything to worry about. The men all know that. But the plain fact is they've stolen some money from his box, since he's been gone, and if I hadn't winked at it they'd 'ave killed me; and all they want is to get you to ride out after 'im, and put you safe away under a 'eap of sand somewhere off the caravan trails. Easy job. There; that's all, sir. My word it is.'

There was a long silence. In the weak candle-light the two men stood considering each other.

Medford's wits began to clear as the sense of peril closed in on him. His mind reached out on all sides into the enfolding mystery, but it was everywhere impenetrable. The odd thing was that, though he did not believe half of what Gosling had told him, the man yet inspired him with a queer sense of confidence as far as their mutual relation was concerned.

Medford laid his revolver on the table. ‘Very well,' he said. ‘I won't ride out to look for Mr Almodham, since you advise me not to. But I won't leave by the caravan; I'll wait here till he comes back.'

He saw Gosling whiten under his sallowness. ‘Oh, don't do that, sir; I couldn't answer for them if you was to wait. The caravan'll take you to the coast the day after tomorrow as easy as if you was riding in Rotten Row.'

‘Ah, then you know that Mr Almodham won't be back by the day after tomorrow?' Medford caught him up.

‘I don't know anything, sir.'

‘Not even where he is now?'

Gosling reflected. ‘He's been gone too long, sir, for me to know that.'

The door closed on him.

Medford found sleep unrecoverable. He leaned in his window and watched the stars fade and the dawn break in all its holiness. As the stir of life rose among the ancient walls he marvelled at the contrast between that fountain of purity welling up into the heavens and the evil secrets clinging bat-like to the nest of masonry below.

He no longer knew what to believe or whom. Had some enemy of Almodham's lured him into the desert and bought the connivance of his people? Or had the servants had some reason of their own for spiriting him away, and was Gosling possibly telling the truth when he said that the same fate would befall Medford?

Medford, as the light brightened, felt his energy return. The very impenetrableness of the mystery stimulated him. He would stay, and he would find out the truth.

It was always Gosling himself who brought up the water for Medford's bath; but this morning he failed to appear with it, and when he came it was to bring the breakfast tray. Medford noticed that his face was of a pasty pallor, and that his lids were reddened as if with weeping. The contrast was unpleasant, and a dislike for Gosling began to shape itself in the young man's breast.

‘My bath?' he queried.

‘Well, sir, you complained yesterday of the water –'

‘Can't you boil it?'

‘I 'ave, sir.'

‘Well, then –'

Gosling went out sullenly and presently returned with a brass jug. ‘It's the time of year – we're dying for rain,' he grumbled, pouring a scant measure of water into the tub.

Yes, the well must be pretty low, Medford thought. Even boiled, the water had the disagreeable smell that he had noticed the day before, though of course in a slighter degree. But a bath was a necessity in that climate.

He spent the day in rather fruitlessly considering his situation. He had hoped the morning would bring counsel, but it brought only courage and resolution, and these were of small use without enlightenment. Suddenly he remembered that the caravan going south from the coast would pass near the castle that afternoon. Gosling had dwelt on the date often enough, for it was the caravan which was to bring the box of Perrier water.

‘Well, I'm not sorry for that,' Medford reflected, with a slight shrinking of the flesh. Something sick and viscous, half smell, half substance, seemed to have clung to his skin since his morning bath, and the idea of having to drink that water again was nauseating.

But his chief reason for welcoming the caravan was the hope of finding in it some European, or at any rate some native official from the coast, to whom he might confide his anxiety. He hung about, listening and waiting, and then mounted to the roof to gaze northward along the trail. But in the afternoon glow he saw only three Bedouins guiding laden packmules towards the castle.

As they mounted the steep path he recognized some of Almodham's men, and guessed at once that the southward caravan trail did not actually pass under the walls and that the men had been out to meet it, probably at a small oasis behind some fold of the sandhills. Vexed at his own thoughtlessness in not foreseeing such a possibility, Medford dashed down to the court, hoping the men might have brought back some news of Almodham.

As Medford reached the court, angry vociferations, and retorts as vehement, rose from the stableyard. He leaned over the wall and listened.

Gosling, master of all the desert dialects, was cursing his subordinates in a half-dozen.

‘And you didn't bring it – and you tell me it wasn't there, and I tell you it was, and that you know it, and that you either left it on a sand-heap while you were jawing with some of those slimy fellows from the coast, or else fastened it on to the horse so carelessly that it fell off on the way – and all of you too sleepy to notice. Oh, you sons of females I wouldn't soil my lips by naming! Well, back you go to hunt it up, that's all!'

‘By Allah and the tomb of his Prophet, you wrong us unpar-donably. There was nothing left at the oasis, nor yet dropped off on the way back. It was not there, and that is the truth in its purity.'

‘Truth! Purity! You miserable lot of shirks and liars, you – and the gentleman here not touching a drop of anything but water – as you profess to do, you liquor-swilling humbugs!'

Medford drew back from the parapet with a smile of relief. It was nothing but a case of Perrier – the missing case – which had raised the passions of these grown men to the pitch of frenzy! The anticlimax lifted a load from his breast. If Gosling, the calm and self-controlled, could waste his wrath on so slight a hitch in the working of the commissariat, he at least must have a free mind. How absurd this homely incident made Medford's speculations seem!

He was at once touched by Gosling's solicitude, and annoyed that he should have been so duped by the hallucinating fancies of the East.

Almodham was off on his own business; very likely the men knew where and what the business was; and even if they had robbed him in his absence, and quarreled over the spoils, Medford did not see what he could do. It might even be that his eccentric host – with whom, after all, he had had but one evening's acquaintance – repenting of an invitation too rashly given, had ridden away to escape the boredom of entertaining him. As this alternative occurred to Medford it seemed so plausible that he began to wonder if Almodham had not simply withdrawn to some secret suite of that intricate dwelling, and were waiting there for his guest's departure.