Part 9

The feast of performance was now going briskly. A conjurer trod upon the heels of the dervish, and performed a few palpable feats which deceived no one but himself; and after that we had the expected dancing girls, and the Ouled-Naïls. Nor were the latter the central piece, as it were, of our host's program; for presently the Moors about me ceased their babbling; there was a restless chatter in the gallery above, the old host whispered something to his attendant, and new musicians, who had relieved the others, struck up a hideous banging of tom-toms, flageolets, and guitars. At that very moment, when I had come to the conclusion that Sidi ben Ahmed had made a fool of me, and that my errand was to end idly, one of my guides spoke for the first time, putting his mouth close to my ear, and using very passable English. "Now," said he, "be ready;" but whether he meant me to prepare for some saltatory display, or for action, he did not condescend to say; and before I could ask him a great applause greeted the advent of a dancing girl, who bounded into the arena with a conventional run, and at once began her amazing gyrations.

She was a beautiful girl, not more than eighteen years of age, I should think, and probably a Circassian. She had clear-cut features, a complexion bright with the freshness of youth, a figure of fine balance and maturity; but the most striking thing about her was her hair. More abundant or glossier tresses I have never seen. In color, a deep golden-red, this magnificent silky gift was bunched upon her head in a great coil at the back, and fell thence almost to her feet. It covered her when she chose as the burnouses covered the Moors who watched her; and she used it in her dancing with a _chic_ and skill unimaginable. In one moment coiling it about her body so that she seemed wrapped in a sheen of gold; in the next cast like an outspread fan behind her, she presented a picture ravishing beyond description, and one which drew shouts of "Zorah, Zorah!" even from the women in the galleries above. I sat under the spell, enraptured like the rest; and as the girl floated with a dreamy lightness, or pirouetted with amazing agility, or swept past me with a motion that was the very essence of grace, I was ready to declare that the dance was unrivaled by anything I had seen in any of the capitals.

Now, the girl must have been dancing for a couple of minutes, and the audience was thoroughly held by her prodigious cleverness, when I, engrossed as the others, was suddenly interrupted in my contemplation of her by the action of the Moors, my guides. To my utter surprise they all of a sudden stood up on either side of me, and one of them crying to me in English as before to be ready, the other seemed to wait for the girl Zorah, who, with streaming hair and body thrown well back, was dancing down towards us.

A few of the company near to us turned their heads, and cried out at the interruption; but the girl came on with quick steps, and when she was just upon us, the Moor who waited seized her by her hair, and putting his hands in the great coil upon her head, he unrolled it with a strong grasp, and the missing scimitar, to my unutterable surprise, rolled out upon the pavement.

I am willing to confess that for one moment the whole action dazed me so completely that I stood like a fool gaping at the jewel, and at the girl, who had begun to cling to the Moor and to scream. The thing was so unlooked for, so strange, so incredible, that I could do nothing but ask myself if it were really my bauble that lay upon the floor, or was I the victim of an incomprehensible trick? Yet there was the jewel, and there at my elbow were the two Moors, now all ready for the action aftermath. Scarce, in fact, had one of them picked up my property and crammed it into my hand before the uproar began, the whole roomful of erstwhile sedate-looking men springing to their feet and turning upon us. For an instant, the Moor who had snatched the jewel for me kept them back with an harangue in Arabic of which I did not understand one word; but his best and only card failed him at the first playing, and it remained to face the danger and to fight it.

Of the extraordinary scene that followed I remember but little. It seemed to me that I was surrounded in an instant by hungry, gleaming hawk-like eyes which glowed with mischief; that women screamed, that lamps were overturned; that I saw knives flashing on every side of me. Had Sidi's men then failed him or displayed any craven cunning, I take it that my body might have been hurled from the Kasbah within a minute of the recovery of the jewel; but they showed quite an uncommon fidelity and courage. Standing on either side of me so that my body was almost wedged between theirs, they suddenly flashed long knives in the air, and cut and parried with wondrous dexterity. For myself, I had only my fists, and these I used with a generous freedom, thinking even in the danger that a Moor's face is a substantial one to hit; and that a little boxing goes a long way with him. Yet I could not help but realize that the minute was a supreme one, and as the crowd of demoniacal and shouting figures pressed nearer and nearer, threatening to bear us down in the _mêlée_, I heard my heart thumping, and began to grow giddy.

As the press became more furious, the two men who had done so well were gradually carried away from me. I found myself at last in the lower corner of the room, surrounded by four burly fellows (the main body of the company swarming round the Moors, my guides); and of these but one had a knife in his hand. With this, taking the aggressive, he made a prodigious cut at me, which slit my left arm from the shoulder almost to the elbow; but I had no pain from the wound in the excitement of the moment; and I sent him howling like a dervish with a heavy blow low down upon the chest. Of the others, one I hit on the chin, whereupon he cried like a woman; but the remaining two sprang upon me with altogether an unlooked-for activity; and bore me down with a heavy crash upon the pavement. I thought then that the end had come; for not only was I half stunned with the blow, but the man who knelt upon my chest gripped my throat with grim ferocity and threatened to squeeze the life out of me as I lay. In that supreme moment I recollect that the lights of the room danced before my eyes in surprising shapes; that I saw a vision of dark-eyed but screaming women in the gallery above; that the jewel in my vest cut my skin under the pressure of the Moor's knee; and that I fell to wondering if I would live one minute or five. Then, as a new and violent shouting reached me, even above the singing in my ears, the Moor suddenly let go his hold, the light of the scene gave way to utter impenetrable darkness, and I fainted.

* * * * *

Next day I took _déjeuner_ at the Café Apollon with my arm in a sling, and Chassaigne's talk to whet my appetite. He had occupied himself during the morning in cross-examining Sidi, from whom he had wormed the whole secret of the robbery.

"It is as clear as the sun," said he, "the porter Mohammed was advised to steal the jewel by the man I unfortunately recommended to you. Mohammed, knowing that the police would search his house and watch him, hid the jewel in his wife's hair."

"His wife!" said I. "Was this dancing girl married to a scamp like that?"

"Certainly; these Circassians don't make great matches, if they make a good many of them. Their husbands are generally loafers about the cafés; and this girl was no more fortunate in that way than most of her sisters. You see, the fun of the business is that Sidi got two thousand francs from this man for telling him how to steal your jewels, and another two thousand from you for stealing them back again. That's why he did not go with you himself last night. Luckily, I went into your hotel at ten o'clock, and learning from the man where you had gone, I followed you with a dozen of my fellows."

"You came at a happy time, my dear fellow," said I, "in another five minutes I should have needed only an executor."

"That's true; you were nearly dead when I had the pleasure of kicking the man who sat on your head. But it was your own fault, you must admit."

"Any way," said I, "I got the stones, and that's something."

He agreed to this, and when I had thanked him for the great service he had done me, we parted. That night I left Algiers, carrying with me the pacific benediction of the admirable Moor, Sidi, who, despite the fact that I had kicked him down the steps of the hotel in the morning, came with me to the steamer, and patronized me to the end of it. I can hear to this day his last and final salutation:--

"Blessed be Allah, the jewel is found!"

THE SEVEN EMERALDS.

THE SEVEN EMERALDS.

The man stood upon the weir-bridge watching me, a conspicuous man with strange clothes for river-work upon him, and a haunting activity which drove him from the lock to the inn, and again from the inn to the lock with a crazy restlessness which was maddening. I had been for some hours whipping the mill-stream, which lies over against the lockhouse at Pangbourne; but meeting with no success amongst the chub, which on this particular July evening were aggravatingly indifferent even to the succulent frog, I had punted to the bushes in the open river; and there lit my pipe and fell to speculation upon him who favored me with so close an attention. I have said that he was a conspicuous man, and to this I owed it that I had seen him. He wore the straw hat of Jesus College, Cambridge, and a velvet coat which shone brown and greasy in the falling sunlight; but his legs were encased in salmon-pink riding breeches, and he had brown boots reaching to his knees. Beyond this, he was singularly handsome, so far as I could judge with the river's breadth between us; and his hair was fair with a ridiculous golden strain quite unlooked for in one who has grown to manhood. Why he watched me so closely I could not even conjecture, but the fact was not to be disputed. I had lain by the mill since the forenoon, and since the forenoon he had hugged to the weir-bridge or to the lockhouse, giving no attention to the score of small boats and launches which passed up or down to Goring or Mapledurham; or even to the many pretty women who basked upon the cushions of punts or pair-oars. I alone was the object of his gaze, and for me he seemed to wait through the afternoon and until the twilight.

Now, had the man hailed me, I should have gone shorewards at once, for my curiosity had been petted by his attentions until it waxed warm and harassing, but this he did not do; keeping his eyes upon me even when I had rested from casting and sat idling in the punt. It would have been easy, I concede, to have gone up river toward Goring and so to have avoided him; but this would have cut short the chance of explanation, and have left ungratified my desire to know who he was, and wherefrom came his embarrassing interest in my failure to ensnare the exasperating chub. So I sat there, in turn wondering if he were honest or a rogue, an adventurer or an idler, a river-man or a fop from Piccadilly. And as the problem was beyond me, I left it at last; and taking up my punt-pole I gave three or four vigorous thrusts which sent me immediately to the landing-stage of the Swan Inn, and thence to my room.

It may be urged that this was an indifferent way of dealing with the man in the velvet coat if I wished to know more of him; but I had taken that little parlor of the inn which juts out upon the hard of the boathouse; and I could see from my open windows both the panorama of the lock and that of the open reach away towards the islands. It was now close upon the hour of seven, and the most part of the river lay in cooling shadow. I could hear by no means inharmonious music floating out over the water from a girl's guitar; there were several launches waiting for the lock-gates; and I recall well the face of a very remarkable woman, who presently came to the landing-stage in a gig, the cushions of which were of an aggressive yellow, but one which was a striking contrast to her black hair and ivory-white skin. Quite apart, however, from her indisputable beauty, I had reason to watch this conspicuous oarswoman, for no sooner had she come to the landing-stage than the man in the velvet coat went to her assistance, and taking a number of bags and baskets from the boat, accompanied her up the village high street, and so carried her from my view.

Here then, thought I, is the end of my mystery. The man had been waiting for the return of his wife, when I, with preposterous conceit, plumed myself that he had been looking to speak with me. What creatures of ideas we are! And when I reflected upon it, certainly it was monstrous absurd to think that one man should wish to watch another failing to catch fish through a long summer's afternoon. Indeed, I laughed heartily at myself as the maid set my dinner, and I put my creel and rod upon the piano (one puts everything upon the piano in a Thames village) before daring the very substantial, if rural, repast served to me.

One dines up river, as most people know, in semi-public state. Loafers, loiterers, fruit-sellers, boatmen--all these congregate near the open window, and discuss verbally the dishes which the diner discusses more substantially. Custom so stales us that this publicity in no way interferes with our pleasure. I have so long learned to tolerate the presence before my casement of oarsman, pedlar, and even the less welcome bargee, that these now are almost as salt to my appetite. And for the matter of that, on the evening of which I am writing, the crowd was less than usual, being composed of one vendor of fruit, three men in obviously Cheapside blazers, and an old woman who sold boot-laces and discussed the weather with me through the casement at one and the same time. She was such a merry old soul, and gave me so much of her history and of that of her son, who was "fightin' for his quane and counthry" in a place which she could not mind herself of, that I forgot the ridiculous romance of the velvet-coated man, and even his existence, until of a sudden he presented himself, no longer watching me upon the bridge, but standing at the casement, and asking to be admitted.

"I'm most horribly sorry," said he, "to intrude upon you at your dinner, but my train leaves for town in ten minutes, and I particularly want your opinion upon something which they tell me you know more about than any man in England."

"By all means," said I. "But your estimate of my opinion is hopelessly flattering; it concerns jewels, I suppose?"

"Exactly," said he; "and I shall be under very large obligations to you if you will tell me whether two emeralds I have in my pocket are of any value, and if so, where would be the best place to dispose of them?"

He took a little paper box from his coat, and laid it near to my plate. I saw that it was a box which had contained tabloids of nitro-glycerine (a drug prescribed for diseases of the heart); and that it had been sold by a chemist of the name of Benjamin Wain, whose shop was in the High Street at Reading. These things I observed with my intuitive habit of grasping detail, learnt in long contention with rogues; and then forgot them as the man opened a screw of tissue paper, and I beheld two of the finest emeralds I have seen during my career. The stones were perfectly matched, of a rich velvety, but brilliant color, and came, I did not doubt after my first sight of them, from the Upper Orinoco or from Columbia. Their weight I judged to be about five carats each, and I knew that if they were without a flaw, which very few emeralds are, they would be worth fifteen hundred pounds at a very low estimate. All this passed through my mind like a flash; but with admiration of the gems, which brought covetousness in its path, there came at once the other thought--what is this man doing here with these stones, and how comes it that he can carry them and yet be unconscious of their value? But this I endeavored to conceal, and waited for him to speak.

"Well," said he, after a pause, "do you find much the matter with them?"

"I should want my glass to see," said I with caution; "the light is failing, and my eyes are not as good as they were."

"You mean a magnifying glass, I suppose?" said he, producing a lens from his pocket. "Well, I happen to have one."

Why it was I cannot tell you, but this trifling circumstance I marked down in my mind as my first sound cause of suspicion against him. Perhaps I coupled it with that spontaneous distrust which I felt when first he spoke, for the very softness of his voice was obviously assumed; and now that I saw him near to me, I did not fail to notice that the velvet coat was much worn, and the rowing club tie he wore frayed beyond respectability. But I took his lens, and, having examined the stones long and critically under it, I found them to be without flaw or blemish. Then I gave him my opinion.

"They are fine stuff," said I; "do you happen to know where they come from?"

I looked him full in the face when I spoke, and observed a slight drawing of the lines above his mouth. When he answered me I was sure that he had thought out a lie--and with effort.

"I believe they come from Salzburg," he stammered; "at least I have heard so."

"That could not possibly be," said I; "the worst emeralds we have are the best product of that mine. I fancy they are from Venezuela."

"Ah, that's the place," said he, "I remember it now; but I've a wretched head for geography."

While he said this the train to London steamed out of the railway station, which is not a stone's throw from the inn, and he, forgetful of his tale to me, sat watching it unconcernedly. I had discovered him in a second lie, and I waited to entrap him to a third with the practised pleasure of a cross-examiner.

"Do you sell these stones for yourself or as an agent?" I asked, assuming some authority as I felt surer of him. His hesitation in answering was merely momentary, but it was enough for my purpose.

"For myself," said he; and then with clumsy maladroitness he added, "They were left to me by my father, and I have never had the heart to offer them to any one. I'll tell you what, though; if you'll give me a thousand pounds for the pair, you shall keep them."

"That's a long price," said I; "and if you don't mind the suggestion, my dinner's getting cold."

I had spoken thus with the design of putting him off; but he was undisguisedly an ill-bred man, and I saw that I could have bought the emeralds from him for five hundred pounds. My hint--if such you could call it--fell upon deaf ears; and he, seeming not to hear it, continued to argle-bargle, but betraying himself in every word he said.

"Come, now," he cried, "you don't want to be hard upon me; give me a check for five hundred, and send the balance to Brighton in a week if you find them as good as you think. That's a fair offer, isn't it?"

"The offer is fair enough," said I; "but you forget that I did not come here to buy emeralds. I am in Pangbourne to catch chub, as you saw this afternoon."

"I'm afraid I can't agree to that," he replied with a laugh; "I did not see you catch chub this afternoon--I saw you miss three."

"The bait was poor," I said meaningly; "fish are as canny as men, and don't take pretty things if they think there's a hook in them."

This I gave him with such a stare that he rose up suddenly from his chair, and, having made a bungling parcel of his jewels, went off by himself. He had to pass my window as he left the inn, and as he crossed the road I called after him, saying--

"You'll be losing your train to London."

"Be d----d to that!" said he; and with such a salute he turned the angle of the road, and I lost sight of him.

But I thought much of his emeralds through the night, both in my walk across the old wooden bridge to Whitchurch, when the river lay dark and gloomy with the sough of the breeze in the reeds and sedge-grass; and again as I lay in the old wooden "best-bed" of the inn, and contemplated the "sampler" which bore witness to the energy of one Jane Atkins, whose work it was. By what chance had the man found me out? Whence came his seedy clothes and his jewels? Who was the pretty woman who had gone up from the hard with him? He had come by the stones fraudulently, of course; had the case been different he would have sent them to London to a house of substance, and there got his price for them. At one time I felt that it lay upon me to advise the police in Reading of the offer I had received; at another, there came some regret for the stones, and at the manner of his departure. The season had been one of emeralds. I could have sold the pair he had for some profit, and, as my greed told me, I could have bought them cheap. At the end of it I fell asleep to dream that I rowed to Mapledurham in an emerald boat, and that a man with emerald eyes steered me abominably.

On the next day, quite early in the morning, I set out in a dog-cart for Reading, having a _rendezvous_ with Barisbroke at the Kennet's mouth, whence we were to start for a day's sport upon that fish-breeding river. My drive took me by the old Bath-road, turning to the left midway up the village street; but I had not gone very far upon the Reading-road before I saw the handsome woman--the wife, as I assumed, of the velvet-coated man--now dressed with exceeding poorness, and carrying a heavy bag towards the biscuit town. At this point the sun beat early upon the sandy way with a shimmer of white and misty light, which promised great heat of the forenoon; there was scarce a quiver of wind in the woods to the left of me, and I did not doubt that walking was a great labor. Yet, when I reined in the cob, and asked the woman, if at least I might not carry her bag to Reading and leave it for her, she thanked me somewhat curtly, I thought, and evidently resented any notice of her difficulty. It occurred to me, as I drove on, that the man, who had been with her on the previous day, had really left by the last train for London; but when I came into Reading, and was about to cross the High Street, to reach Earleigh, I saw the name Benjamin Wain superscribed above a little chemist's shop, and I stopped at once. I know that a country tradesman will gossip like a fishwife; and I asked the man for some preparation which he could not possibly find in the pharmacopoeia, and so began to feel my ground.

"You're well ahead of the times here," said I, looking at his show-case, which was wofully destitute of drugs. "I shouldn't have thought that you'd be asked for tabloids in a place like Reading."

"Oh, but we are," said he, readily; "it's a wonderfully advanced town is Reading--you won't get much in Regent Street which is not here. I've lived in Reading all my life--and seen changes, sir, indeed I have!"

"You know most of the people then?" said I, with a purpose.

"Ay," said he, "I've born and buried a many, so to speak; seen children grow to men and women, and men and women grow to children--you wouldn't think it perhaps!"

"No," said I, "you don't show it; but your reputation, if I may say so, goes beyond this place. I was in Pangbourne yesterday, where a tall, yellow-haired man was speaking of you; who is he, I wonder?"

"A tall, yellow-haired man!" he exclaimed, putting his finger in the center of his forehead as if in aid of memory; "I didn't know there were such in Reading. A tall, yellow--let me see, now----"

"You sold him some tabloids of nitro-glycerine; perhaps that will help to his identification?" said I.