The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories (26 page)

Oft times Desmond had spent his evenings thus, imagining how, in some earlier incarnation, he, too, might have worn the double crown of Egypt.

Tonight he felt less godlike. Luxor was crowded, and money could not obtain a room at the Winter Palace Hotel. The German representative of one of Europe’s great Jewish families had secured twenty apartments for the accommodation of his dahabeah party. Mr Jacob Goldberger, of Johannesburg, occupied three suites. Others, still more newly rich than Diamond Jake, made Egypt glad with their presence. Only for sentimental reasons had the great M. Pagnon granted Desmond the use of a chamber apparently designed for a hat box, top floor back—at the nominal rate of ninety piastres per day.

What is a distinguished Egyptologist, an MC, a BA, a Bsc, a member of numerous learned societies and one of the oldest families in Ireland, compared with a millionaire banker who is a director of numberless companies and a member of one of the oldest clans in the world? Small fry, indeed—and a beer-drinker withal, whose wine bill for the week would not total as much as Jacob Goldberger paid for a single postprandial cigar. One should not expect impossibilities!

Fashionable women of Europe and America moved about him, with black-coated manhood hovering in attendance. Desmond felt uncomfortable—as every public school man, even though he be Irish, and strive how he may to defy the conventionalities, must ever feel when he is conscious of not being “correct”. Dress suits are unnecessary in the desert, and Desmond was arrayed in a serviceable outfit of washable linen. He concealed his discomfort, however, for in his secret heart he despised the sheeplike trooping of society equally with the gilded glory of Goldberger, and sought to crush that within him which was allied to the ways of the fold.

He turned to his companion, who sat beside him in the gayly lit lounge, and a slight smile disturbed the firm, straight line of his mouth.

Desmond’s smile had once been described by an American lady as “worthwhile”. He was one of those grim six-footers, prematurely grey, and straight as a mast. His short moustache was black, however. When he smiled, he revealed his lower teeth—small, even, strong-looking teeth—and his deep-set, rather sinister blue eyes lit up. The stern face became the face of a lovable schoolboy—and a bashful schoolboy, at that. With his fine appearance his romantic name, and his smile, he was fatal to women; but he didn’t seem to know it.

“It is good of you to consent to be with me,” he said, in his slow, hesitating fashion; “for, although I am neither distinguished nor wealthy, I dare to be shabby.”

Mme. de Medicis dropped the cigarette from her tapered fingers into the little bowl upon the table at her side. Women were there tonight whose reputation for smartness was well deserved, and who, covertly watching
madame
, knew her to be dressed with a daring yet exquisite tastefulness which they might copy but could never equal. Women were there whom society called beautiful, but their beauty became very ordinary prettiness beside the dazzling loveliness of Desmond’s companion.

She wore a gown of Delhi muslin with golden butterflies wrought upon its texture, and over it, as a cloud, floated that wondrous gauze which is known in the East as “the breath of Allah”. No newest tenet of Paris was violated in its fashioning; no line of the wearer’s exquisite shape was concealed by its softness.

Madame
smiled dreamily, protruding one tiny foot cased in a shoe of old gold. Under her curved black lashes her eyes turned momentarily, glancing at Desmond. Those eyes were such as have never been bestowed by the gods upon woman save as a scourge to man. They possessed the hue seen in the eyes of a tigress, yet they could be as voluptuously soft as the shadows of some dim lagoon. Her carmine lips were curved with a high disdain, and, though her hair was black as the ebony pillars of the Hall of the Afreets, her lovely cheeks glowed like the petals of a newborn rose and her velvet skin was as fair as the almond blossom.

“You lack the courage of the
soi-disant
grand duke,” she murmured.

Desmond turned languidly in his chair, fixing his queer, lingering regard upon the speaker.

“You refer to the eccentric royal personage who braves the wrath of Alexandria arrayed in a frock coat fastened by a piece of string? Poor fellow! His estates are confiscated, and he wears a pair of canvas shoes and a straw hat with a crown that permits the genial rays to caress his scalp.”

Mme. de Medicis laughed softly.

“But he is so clever an artist!” she said.

Desmond shrugged cynically.

“There you are!” he protested. “An artist and a grand duke—all is forgiven!”

Madame
laughed again, adjusting the filmy scarf that caressed her white shoulders as lightly as the amorous cloud which of old enveloped Io, the beauteous.

“You are so English!” she declared. “Oh, no—please forgive me! You are Irish—but so absurdly sensitive! You fly to the Winter Palace because you are weary of the Theban solitude, and here you find yourself more lonely than when you camp in wilderness!”

“But you have taken pity upon me,” said Desmond, leaning toward her; “and now wild horses could not drag me back to my camp.”

“Ah!” sighed
madame
, archly lowering fringes of black lashes. “So you are not so English that you cannot make love!”

“On the contrary,” he replied, “I am so Irish that I cannot help it!”

She rose slowly to her feet. Her moving robe diffused a faint perfume. For a moment Desmond feared that he had offended her. Naïvely, he revealed his concern.

“Come, my desert man!” she said. “Walk with me beside holy Nile, and tell me that I am beautiful, in that deep, deceptive voice which has such tender notes! With what sweet English maids have you rehearsed the ballad of love, my friend! You strike its chords with rare proficiency!”

* * *

Many regarded Desmond’s naïveté as a pose. It was not a conscious pose; yet he knew a certain sense of pagan triumph as he came out from the Winter Palace, past the bench upon which were seated the picturesque dragomans, and so on into the shadowed part of the street between the hotel entrance and the arcade of shops.

Beside him walked the most beautiful and elegant woman of all that gay gathering. An old
roué
whose name may be found in Debrett bowed to
madame in
mid-Victorian fashion, and eyed her cavalier unkindly. Lord Abbeyrock, said to be the handsomest man in Europe, who had been haunting the foyer for an hour past, bit savagely at his moustache and turned brusquely to re-enter the hotel. Quite a company of young cosmopolitan bloods followed with longing eyes the exquisite figure in the amazing cloak of flamingo red. With manifest reluctance, a stolid New York business magnate—whose wife was in Cairo—quitted his strategic post near the dragomans’ bench, hitherto held against all comers.

Mystery is woman’s supreme charm. It is the mystery of dark eyes peeping from a
mushrabiyeh
lattice that constitutes the love lure of the East. Mme. de Medicis was utterly mysterious—tempting, taunting, unfathomable—at once a Sibyl and a Cleopatra.

Who was she, and from whence did she come? She was steeped in mysticism, spoke intimately of the strange writings of Eliphas Levi, and quoted Pythagoras and Zarathustra with the same facility where with Desmond, of catholic literary sympathies, quoted Kipling and Yeats. She had tremendous intellectual fascination. At one moment she made him feel like a child; in the next, her wondrous eyes would look into his own, and they were the luresome eyes of a
ghaziyeh
, setting his blood more quickly coursing.

Groups of tourists lingered around the native shops, volubly chattering of their travels. Boatmen and donkey boys sat upon the low parapet, watching the idle throng and smiling their inscrutable Egyptian smiles. In the river lay the lighted dahabeahs. From one of them—that of Diamond Jake—came the softened tones of a sweet violin.

“Art lays its treasures at the feet of Mammon,” murmured
madame
.

For a moment she paused, resting her slender hand upon Desmond’s arm. The strains of a Spanish caprice of Sarasate’s, played by one of Europe’s greatest violinists, floated across the waters of the Nile.

It was Luxor reborn—Luxor, that has known so much of peace and war, of fashion and art; Luxor, that once was Thebes, beloved of Amen, the city of temples and palaces. And near them, beside them, cloaked in velvet night, swooned the deathless mystery of that historic land.

Desmond looked long and ardently at his companion, as she moved onward again. Only
she
had a true place in a picture of the greater city which now was rising up before him. The modern, empty Luxor was fading, and upon rich banks of the ancient river; looming shadowly, were the stately walls of the city of a hundred gates.

He seemed to be pacing beside the Nile with a Pharaoh’s queen on a night of long, long ago.

“Tell me about your work in the temple,” she said, breaking an eloquent silence. “You are looking for the sacred ornaments of the Princess Taia, are you not?”

“Yes,” Desmond answered dreamily, “under the floor of what is sometimes called the Treasure Room.”

“You know that the Egyptian government expedition, under. Van Kuyper, is similarly engaged at Biban el Muluk?”

“Van Kuyper is wrong,” snapped Desmond, with sudden animation; for the enthusiast within him was awakened by the challenge in her words. “He confuses the princess with the queen, whereas they belonged to different families. I am glad he is wrong. He deserves to fail.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because,” said Desmond grimly, “Van Kuyper is no true Egyptologist. He is an impostor and the so-called government expedition is no more than a marauding expedition. It is subsidised by a millionaire collector, and if the jewels were found by Van Kuyper they would mysteriously disappear and reappear in New York. It’s a scandal! Such things belong neither to the Egyptian government nor to any purse-proud collector rich enough to pay to have them stolen. They belong to the world.”

His enthusiasm was infectious. Covertly, Mme. De Medicis watched him; and in the dusk the man’s strong, rugged profile resembled that of the great Rameses who holds eternal court amid the ruins of his great temple-palace.

“You, then, seek for love of seeking?” she asked softly.

“I revere the grandeur that was Egypt,” he replied. “To commercialise such majesty is intolerable!”

“May it not also be dangerous?”

“Well!” Desmond laughed. “Princess Taia certainly had an odd reputation!”

“You refer to the fact that she was a sorceress?”

Desmond started, glancing aside at his lovely companion. Then he laughed again. “You seem to know everything!” he declared. “At times, when you question me on some point of Egyptology, I feel that you are amusing yourself. Yes—the princess was famous for her beauty and notorious for her witchcraft.”

“Beware, then, that you are not playing with fire,” said Mme. de Medicis softly. “Others have suffered—is it not so?”

Desmond pulled up suddenly. They had passed the shops, and passed the imitation temple gateway which marks the boundary of a hotel garden. They were alone with the night mystery of the Nile, upon a footpath leading to an old shadoof.

Something sombre, a new fascination, had come into the woman’s silver voice. The moon poured its radiance quenchingly upon the flaming figure of this strange woman who warned him to beware of a sorceress dead twelve hundred years before the dawn of Christianity. Her tigress eyes looked fully into his own; and now-their glance chilled him coldly, as but a moment ago it had warmed him like wine.

“You speak in riddles,” he said awkwardly, again become the boy who questions the Sibyl.

“Have you then heard and seen nothing strange in the temple?” she whispered, and looked about her fearfully.

“I have seen nothing,” he replied, “but I have heard much. Some of the Arabs in these parts regard the ruins of Medinet Habu as haunted, I am aware; but if one listened to natives, one could not avoid the conclusion that the whole of Egypt is haunted. My headman and several others come from Suefee, in the Fayum, and are of different mettle.”

“And so they camp in the temple?”

“Well,” Desmond admitted, “not exactly. They sleep in the village, as a matter of fact—or have been doing so for some little time past.”

“And you sleep in Luxor?”

He stared fully into the lovely, sombre face.

“You don’t seriously believe that I am
afraid
to sleep in the temple?” he inquired slowly.

“Not at all; but I think you are wise to avoid doing so.”

Awhile longer he watched her, betwixt anger and perplexity, until her carmine lips softened, parted, and hinted the gleam of pearly teeth. She dropped her heavy lashes, then raised them again; and her wonderful eyes were changed. They chilled no longer. Mme. de Medicis raised one slender, round ivory arm and laid her jewelled fingers caressingly upon Desmond’s breast. The flaming cloak fell back, revealing a peeping shoulder wooed by the daring moon.

“How I love the English character!” she whispered, lending the words a bewitching little foreign intonation. “Ah, my Irish friend, forgive me—but you are so perfectly English! Look!” She moved her hand and pointed out across the silvery Nile. “There is my dahabeah!”

Desmond stared across the water toward where a vessel showing but few lights lay moored in the stream.

“Your dahabeah?”
he said in surprise. “But I thought—”

“That I was one of the Goldberger party?” she suggested. “Oh no! I have my own dahabeah; but because I was lonely, too, I came, as you came, to the Winter Palace.”

“I am grateful to the gods of Egypt!” said Desmond in a low voice.

She turned and laid her hand upon his breast again. He clasped his own tightly over the little jewelled fingers, crushing them against his heart, which was beating wildly, tumultuously.

Across the waters of the river of romance there came, faintly, magically, the sound of a throbbing
darabukkeh
and the wail of a reed pipe—that ancient music which the ages have not changed, and which accompanied the gliding of Cleopatra’s golden barge down the mystic Nile to meet the great Roman soldier.