Part 30

"You have reproached me very justly. My only excuse is--that I did not understand!"

He went with her across the lawn, and ushered her through the loggia door into a passage, and up a wide staircase leading by one short flight of steps to the single floor above. She took the curious Eastern key he silently offered her, and put it in the lock of the door he had stopped at. The lock yielded easily....

"Won't--won't you come too?" she whispered, oppressed with an increasing sense of awe, and John Hazel's voice answered from behind her:

"We are the Guardians of the Shrine, and yet we may not enter. It would not be according to the Law!"

Thus Katharine went in alone, her heart-beats quickened by the startled whirr of wings, as the busy swallows quitted their nest-building in the upper corner of one of the three tall windows, filled in with lattices of carved and painted marble, and looking on the garden, now all golden in the rays of the westering sun.

The ceiling rose to a frescoed dome, with an opening at the apex. The spice of incense and the perfume of flowers yet sweetened the still air of this place of memories. It was a revelation of wonderful art, its dome and walls covered with ancient frescoes, representing in all the opulent symbolism of early Christianity, the anchor, the palm, the Dove with the olive-branch; the Vine, the heavy ear of Wheat, the Fish, the Chalice encircled with rays of glory,--the Good Shepherd carrying His lamb. The carved and inwrought and costly screens of cedar and ebony-wood were all inlaid in mother o' pearl, silver and ivory. Nothing had been spared in money or labour, to perfect this--the replica in miniature, of the interior of a Coptic Christian Church. Save that seemly, exquisite neatness, and scrupulous cleanliness reigned here instead of dust and dirt, spider-webs, and bird and bat-droppings; and the disquieting disorder which too often, in the East, prevails in such a sacred place....

Katharine passed over the mosaic floor of red and green porphyry and grey crystalline syenite, and through the central opening in the latticed outer screen. The gates stood open, showing an altar, wrought of black Egyptian basalt, standing under a baldaquin of inlaid ebony-wood borne on four carved and inlaid columns, the rich embroidered curtains of the baldaquin being drawn back. Four man-high candlesticks of silver, holding great unlighted tapers, were set one at each corner of the basalt altar. On the altar was an upper covering of rich silk, embroidered with gold. On this were a censer of silver open-work, a silver-gilt or golden incense-box, and two golden candlesticks of magnificent workmanship flanked the usual copy of the Four Gospels, sealed in a gold and jewelled case.

Three silver lamps hung before the altar. In the central lamp alone burned a tiny votive flame. The altar was not raised above the floor.... Its front was uncovered, and a small square opening in this resembled a doorway.

In the cavity revealed by the opening stood an alabaster urn of funerary type and evidently of great antiquity. Katharine, kneeling on the upper step of the little sanctuary, could, despite the tempering of the light by the screens and window-lattices, clearly distinguish below the Greek monogram of the Sacred Name, in irregular lines of incised Roman capitals,--still rusty-bright with antique gilding,--the epitaph in faulty Latin:

"MARTYR CHRISTI, AMICVSPAVPERVM.

EGO PHILOREMUS FLORENS FABIVS. CLARISSIMVS. PRÆTOR VECTIGALIVM ÆGVPTORVM. ALEXANDRIA. SEPTIMVS ANNO AVGVSTI MAXIMIANVS ÆGYPTI IMPERATORIS. QUE VIXIT. ANN. XL. MENS. V.D. VII. MENSIS OCTOBRIS IDIBUS. PORTA SPEI INTROGRESSVS SVM."

A rough translation of which might run:

"_The Martyr of Christ, the Friend of the Poor. I, Philoremus Florens Fabius, of Senatorial Rank, Receiver-General at Alexandria of the Taxes of Egypt. In the Seventh Year of the Reign of Cæsar Maximianus, Emperor of Africa. Aged Forty Years, Five months and Seven Days. On the Ides of October, Entered in at the Gate of Hope._"

X

Katharine Forbis came out of the chapel, noiselessly shutting the door behind her, and stood, looking silently down at a man who knelt there. He raised the head that had been bowed nearly to the floor, and rose to his feet at the sound of her footstep, removed his cap, and, standing aside made room for Miss Forbis to pass him before he re-locked the door. Then he followed her downstairs, through the passage and doorway leading to the loggia, and back into the garden they had left....

Copts with tied-back sleeves and tucked-up _gelabiyehs_ were moving among the flower-beds with wheeled tanks and syringes, setting water running in the channels bordering the paths of the rose-alleys and shrubberies. Already the perfume exhaled from wet rich soil and dampened petals freshened the air, and the sultry heat had abated. Coolness was coming with the short Eastern twilight, the sky above, and to the west, was streaked with pomegranate and amber; the elongated shadow of the house, with its dome and pediment and flat loggiaed roofs, stretched dusky-blue over the grass to the foot of the red granite seat under the moss-cup oak.

Katharine's heliotropes were lying on the seat, faded already but still exhaling sweetness.... As she lifted them from the hot red stone, the faint south breeze brought to her across the crowded buildings, and the traffic of Khedive street, the mellow voice of a muezzin from the minaret of the Mosque Sidi Amr, crying, as it cries thrice a day, from thousands of minarets in four world-continents:

"_Allah is most great! I witness that there is no God but Allah! And Mohammed is the apostle of Allah! Come to prayer! Prayer is better than work! Come to salvation! God is most great! There is no God but Allah!_"

When the voice from the mosque, and its myriad human echoes had vibrated into silence, and the distant noise of the crowded streets had rolled back into hearing again,--Katharine said to the man who stood silently beside her, his khaki cap dangling from his big right hand:

"Mr. Hazel, you have to forgive in me an indifference that may have wounded you. But until I found myself in that chapel, in the presence of the reliquary urn that speaks of his martyrdom, my ancestor was no more to me than a legendary old Roman, who lived and died in a remote Past, in a distant part of the world. But since I said a prayer for him before that altar, it was--as though he had only died a month or two ago! ... Now, it crushes me to realise that through more than sixteen centuries, you and yours have guarded those ashes in the urn! ..."

"It is true. Since the forefather of Ephraim--you have seen Ephraim--it was he who attended you here from Montana--brought back the ring to Alexandria, and the widow opened the sealed packet--the wishes of the Founder of the House of Hazaël have scrupulously been carried out. There has always been a Christian hand to clean the lamp and feed it with oil daily, and place fresh flowers in the vases on one day in the year.... Though I have heard that in the days of the Great Earthquake--when fifty thousand people perished in the fire or were buried beneath the ruins,--there was no oil for the famine that then prevailed...."

The deep monotonous voice that spoke in somewhat archaic English--was and was not the voice of John Hazel.... And suddenly, with a shudder and a crisping of the nerves as she looked at and listened to him,--Katharine doubted whether he realised that he was speaking at all....

"Chosroes the Persian King," the deep voice went on, "laid siege to the city,--and the Arab Amru, general of Omar's Saracen armies,--wrested it from the Persians and held it:--but before the urn,--hidden in a secret chamber of this dwelling, the votive lamp burned still! And as a weaker hawk by suddenness snatches a quail from a hawk that is by far the stronger--and as the stronger pursues and wrests it from the first, even so the Greeks took Alexandria by cunning from the Saracens--and the Saracens won her back again--yet the lamp went on burning, for the hands that tended it were faithful, and the children of Hazaël's children's children were sedulous to do his will. Then in the Fourteenth Century of your Christian Era came the Crusaders and sacked and spoiled the city. But the lamp was not quenched even then! ... Nor when the French seized Alexandria--nor when the British took and held it--nor when they ceded it to Mehmet Ali--did the lamp cease to burn.... Jewish oil is very good, and Jewish hearts remember! The Past is living as the Present in the mind of the Jew. The negress whom you saw to-day, and her husband Zaid, are Christians. It is they who are entrusted--like their forerunners, with the keeping of the place...."

His tone changed. He spoke now in his own clipped and slangy vernacular.

"By the way--I want to say--with reference to the apology you were--so--gracious as to offer me, that I think it was awfully ripping of you! But for a thing I said, a bit back, that rather rattled you.... _I_ don't apologise at all! ..."

"Dear John Hazel, I haven't even asked you!" In her frank, womanly, impulsive way, she stretched out a hand and lightly pressed his. "I have learned from you the priceless worth of Jewish loyalty and Jewish honour;--and a devotion for which I don't know even how to begin to express my gratitude and esteem! Unless in some way like this--"

He started, and his dark hand clenched; for carried away by an irresistible impulse, Miss Forbis had bent aside and brushed it lightly with her lips. The instant the impulse had had its way she realised her mistake.... For the man's great frame quivered from head to foot as though the ague fit of fever were upon him.... He mastered the trembling with an effort that left him rigid; and said,--his face yet stiffly averted and his black eyes bent upon the ground:

"You asked me a good many months ago,--I don't mistake--for I remember everything you've ever said to me!--if I thought that you and I had ever lived on earth before now?" He went on as she bent her head, sensing the movement rather than seeing it. "What I said then, I say again! ... I don't believe either of us is by way of making a second visit to this little old planet.... But somehow we are influenced by those who have passed on! Not by the hanky-panky, table-rapping, automatic pencil-scribbling Spooklets you summon up as with your thumbs crossed,--points downwards--and your little fingers jammed against those of your right-and-left hand neighbours,--you sit round a rubber-covered table in a stuffy, darkened room.... Spirits of dead poets who've forgotten how to turn a rhyme!--dead historians who mix up Alexander the Great with Napoleon the Little--and perpetrate howlers that would disgrace a Fourth Standard Board School kid.... Dead Editors who can't spell for peanuts.... And dead chemists who're knocked out by the formula of H2O!"

He moved behind the seat and sat on the other end of it, crossing his long legs, slipping his left arm from the sling, and nursing a big-boned knee in both powerful hands as he went on:

"Put it that those who carried in their blood the germs that you and I have sprung from--living on the Other Side as conscious Intelligences,--are permitted by the Divine Power Who rules things visible and invisible,--to sway us, help us, prompt our actions, check our impulses and desires--and you have what I believe, concentrated down to tabloid form! On the whole, your Catholic faith in Guardian Angels isn't much unlike it. Only, instead of a bright-winged spirit hovering somewhere near me, I've felt as though a big old man, dark and strong, like my father,--was keeping his eye on me.... And the bias of the lead he gave,--quite definite when you shut your eyes--and felt back in the dark of your mind along the spider-thread that led to him,--was definitely for Right and clearly opposed to Wrong! ..."

Hugging his knee, he looked for the first time directly at Katharine, since that swift incautious touch of her lips had levelled the last barrier, and turned his blood to flame. There was no shamed consciousness in the pure eyes that met his.... She listened, and his thoughts were mirrored in the swift changes of her face....

"I didn't shape out this theory of mine, till I was getting close on thirty. I'd lived all my life amongst Christians and Jews who faithfully believed in Nothing!--and what one saw, and touched and tasted was quite enough for them and for me! That I ran anything but straight, there's not the least earthly use denying...." His memory went back to Birdie Bright, and others of her liberal sisterhood, and a dusky flush burned under his tawny, sun-baked skin. "But when the War broke out, and I joined the London Terriers--and saw men dying in the mud of France and Flanders, as up to date I'm seeing 'em die in the dirt of Palestine!--the advantage of living clean and being ready to answer to one's number came home to me as it never had before.... And Life was sweet, because it was so damnably uncertain! ... Men dealt Death every hour to the son of some mother, and no one could have guessed when it mightn't be his turn! Fellows used to tell me I killed men as if I liked doing it!--and I'm bound to admit I did! ... They said I sang as I fought,--in Hebrew one learned bloke swore it was! Though, as I hardly knew a word,--it couldn't have been the truth. But this is true, that in the blinding thick of the scrap I'd feel that big man near me.... I've seen him--or as good as!--signing and waving me on.... And when I came back to Hospital, and got that letter from Jaffa, and took over the Title Deeds, and the Guardianship of the Ashes; and put on the onyx signet-ring--"

"Then?" Her clear eyes were intent upon him....

"Then, instead of one old man, big and dark and brawny, strangely dressed--standing somewhere back of me, grimly willing me on; I seemed to be--I seem now!--to be looking back through Time down an interminable line of such men.... And the biggest of all the big old men is right away at the end! ... That's all! ..." He put down the knee he had nursed.

"We Catholics believe that the souls of our dead love us and pray for us; and by Our Lord's permission--may sometimes help us in need. Do you think--do not answer unless you wish!--that he--your Big Old Man--ever suggests answers to you? ... Or prompts you with knowledge having reference to bygone matters? ... Forgotten, old, long-buried things, of which you could not otherwise know? ..."

"I think--" He turned his face to Katherine, and it was no longer stern and grim, but wore the toothy, cheerful grin of Private Abrahams--"that sometimes that Biggest Old Man of All is quite close to me. Towering up over my head, and sticking out all around me! And the thing he wants I've got to do, and the line he points I follow. And have to until Kingdom Come, and All the Rest, Amen! ..."

"Is he huge and tawny-brown with coarse curls of jet-black hair--and a great beard--and a fillet of white leather, set with green stones--round his forehead? ... Has he a face much like yours, but stern as Destiny? ... Is he wrapped in a great black mantle with a hood like a Dominican's? Does he wear immense thigh-boots and carry an iron-shod staff? ..."

The memory of her dream, months back at Kerr's Arbour, had prompted Katharine's question. John Hazel turned and looked at her in utter amaze.

"That's how _I_ see him, but how do _you_ come to know? ..."

"I don't know,--but I saw a man like that in a dream, once.... I seemed to be in danger, threatened by evil beings, and he came to the rescue. That's absolutely all! But, let me out of the depth of my own ignorance, give you a word of warning. This strange gift of yours ought to be held reverently. Kept a profound secret, and never under any circumstance? whatever submitted to a stranger's control. You understand?"

"All right! I'll be wide--O!" His black eyes snapped as he answered, and she went on:

"Now to come back to usual things, look at this flower, and tell me whether you know it?" She was holding out to him a withered spike of multifold white blossoms, exhaling a faint and delicate smell:

"That lily-thing...." He took it carefully in his big fingers. "All through October it was blooming in Palestine. Acres and acres of it--all white and yellow--when I left the Front to come down here. Smells nice!" He sniffed at it cautiously. "Something between a West End church got up for a Society wedding,--and the hall of a house blocked up with florist's boxes--where there's going to be a first-class funeral.... Presently, when the Spring comes along, there'll be scarlet tulips, and rose and purple anemones, and pink-and-white turncap lilies, and flowers I couldn't as much as name to you--miles and miles of 'em swarming over the plains, and covering the knees of those old Judæan Hills. The name of this is asphodel. I forget who told me! Where did you get it? ... I haven't seen it here! ..."

"It came in the letter you brought me from Palestine...." She took back the withered flower and slipped it back within her blouse. His eyes followed it, and she went on: "It is of the letter I wanted particularly to speak to you. For it tells me that Julian--my brother--is alive! ..."

"And a prisoner! ..." He spoke with certainty....

"And a prisoner at a Turkish labour-camp!"

"What are you going to do? ..."

Her bosom heaved in a perplexed sigh. Her broad brows knitted, and her clear eyes were clouded as she turned them upon John:

"Move Heaven and earth in any way possible to get my poor boy out of that earthly hell! Meanwhile one must wait, I suppose--"

"Does it strike you as a case likely to benefit by waiting?"

"No!--and in spite of that there is nothing to do but wait. Unless--unless you, who were so prompt to help in those troubled days at Kerr's Arbour, could suggest any--definite plan of action to me now? ..."

"I'll do my best, you may be sure!"

"I know you will," she responded gratefully. "But first I must put you in possession of the facts. Julian--"

"Is at Shechem.... I know it already.... No!" For her eyes had cried out to him "Edward! ..." "From another informant than Colonel Yaill. The airman who brought me here,--an Egyptian reconnaissance-officer I met at Salonika--happens to be on special duty at the Palestine Front just now.... Wing-Major Essenian Pasha.... Perhaps you've heard the name? ..."

She thought, and answered:

"Yes, I have often seen it mentioned in Despatches, in association with feats of aviation; bombing-raids carried out single-handed for the most part; dazzling reconnaissances over strongholds held by the enemy...."

"That's my man. 'A vivid personality,' my mother'd have ticketed him.... He was an officer of the Khedive's Artillery in prehistoric ages--at the time of the Egyptian Army Revolt under Arabi Pasha. That was about 1881. And he was with Hicks Pasha's Expedition in 1883--against the Mahdi--which got wiped out by the Baggara near El Obeyd.... He had a command under Baker Pasha in 1884, and was with the Dongola Relief Advance,--and with the Khartoum Column in 1897 ... Emin Pasha was a pal of his--and Gordon thought no end of him.... When the South African War of 1900 broke out he'd retired--was living at Ismailia--as a wealthy Egyptian ex-officer of Engineers.... Took up aviation and started a Flying Club here in Alexandria about 1911.... Gave the Club an aërodrome--with hangars and everything!--the big place you've seen near the Water Works,--and another at Ismailia where he lives--and another on the Upper Nile! ... And as he flies like Satan, the Government snapped at him, when he volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps in 1914...."

"He must be a brave man! ..."

"Got nerve enough for anything! ... And to look at him you'd guess him to be thirty-five as the limit.... Yet there are old men here in Alexandria who've known him since they were gay young Johnnies,--and they're ready to bet their wigs and false teeth that he's always been the same! ..."

"Could Essenian Pasha be of use in this particular emergency? ..."

"You mean your brother's case? ... He had the facts from me at Salonika.... I said the brother of a friend of mine--a Chaplain serving with the Expeditionary--was missing since the storming of Scimitar Hill and supposed to have been killed.... And I mentioned his being a Catholic priest, and added his name, and a few particulars. For instance, I'd heard from the landlady at the _Cross Keys_, Cauldstanes, months ago, that Father Forbis was very handsome. 'As like oor Miss Forbis as gin they were twins'--I can't do her Scotch for peanuts, 'but blue-eyed and wi' fair hair.'"

"It is true. Except about us being so much alike," she said, her eyes now openly brimming over. "For Julian has almost the beauty of an angel, and when he sings, the voice of one. My father worshipped him.... So did Mark--and I for that matter! ... So did the priests and the students at the Seminary, the Prior and the Fathers at the Monastery, and the officers and men of the Brigade with which he served.... You should see the letters they wrote me when his death was reported. And now!--Don't be scared!--I'm not going to cry."

She brought out a little filmy handkerchief and dried the tears bravely, and put it away again....

"Crying isn't of any use. Forget that I was stupid enough to shed tears!--they are over and done with now. Tell me how your friend of the R.F.C. could help us in this strait?"

John Hazel hugged his knee again, and said, with knitted eyebrows:

"You mean, how I think, and he believes, he could help us,--since he dropped down in our lines the day after Sheria. He'd been doing a lot of reconnaissance over Hebron and Shechem, and a shell from a Turkish A.A. had burst near them--and Captain Usborn of the Engineers, his observer--was lying over, stone-dead--behind his Lewis gun.... Shot through the head. See--this is the bullet that did it!" He slipped two fingers inside a front-pocket of his tunic, drew out and showed her the dented cone of lead....

"Isn't that," her fine brows frowned, "rather a gruesome relic to carry? ..."

"Well, you know!--that's as you happen to look at it. I wasn't out for mascots--the thing came my way, and so I just froze on.... And"--he dropped the bullet back again, "then Major Essenian Pasha sent for me, and asked me--I'd flown with him several times near Salonika--"

John Hazel spoke in a low voice calculated just to reach her ear:

"He asked me whether I'd replace Usborn on the flight back to Ismailia,--if permission could be wrested from the Powers that Be? ... Then he went on to tell me of something he'd got from an Arab, with reference to a British prisoner in the labour-camp at Shechem. A Catholic priest, a tall fair man, astonishingly handsome,--who was suffering brutal ill-usage at the hands of Hamid Bey...."

"'Hamid Bey!'" She caught at the name. "Colonel Yaill speaks of that man in my letter.... He is the Turkish Commandant of the prison-camp at Shechem." ...

"He ought to be Commandant of a Division in Hell, going by what I've heard of him! By the way, may I ask you not to mention his name in the hearing of my aunt.... For we Hazaëls," said John with a bitter sneer--"have a little family score of our own to settle with His Excellency, Hamid Bey, Miralai of the Shechem Prison Camp...."

"I shall not forget. I will make a point of being careful! ... But forgive me if I ask you again, how you think this officer--Major Essenian Pasha--could help my brother now? ..."