Читать книгу The White Blackbird - Robert Aitken - Страница 10

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They passed together through the curtained porch of the pavilion, and Sallie looked about her with blinking eyes as the Emir's wife led her toward a long, low, cushioned divan, with a tall screen of black carved ebony behind it, which stood in one of the corners formed by the partitions within.

The entire interior of the tent was brilliantly lighted by many lamps of a dull yellow metal, swung from under the billowy silken ceiling. Underfoot were carpets and rugs of the most costly, chosen with taste. The inner divisions seemed almost solid behind their heavy hangings of embroidery and filigree work. About the couch in the corner were grouped a number of languorous women slaves, all very richly dressed. The whole effect was one of barbaric splendour and luxury.

Her women crossed their arms on their breasts and bowed before the Emir's wife, their golden bangles jingling. She drew Sallie down on the couch beside her and waved them away. They backed into another corner with heads still bent, but stealing furtive glances at the fair stranger. Sallie had let her veil fall; the heat was stifling.

The Emir's wife laid a hand on her heart and panted, as if she had been running. A hectic flush had coloured her sunken cheeks. Sallie saw that she must once have been a very good-looking girl.

"How did you come to our camp?" she asked, suppressing with a great effort the cough her labouring chest could scarcely contain. "Is there another caravan near, or—a ship?"

"A ship," Sallie answered gently, forgetting all her own urgent troubles in quick compassion for that poor soul. And the dying girl's feverish eyes grew suddenly eager.

"A ship!" she repeated breathlessly, and for a moment or two seemed to be searching Sallie's expressively pitiful features for some further information, which she found there. The anxiety in her eyes changed to appeal, and then certainty.

"You'll help—me," she whispered. "I know you will." And she began to cough.

Two or three of her women came running forward to offer her such first aid as lay in their power. Another had hurried off through a curtained doorway which led inward, and promptly returned, followed by two enormous negroes, vile-looking rascals, each wearing a scanty tunic of leopard-skins which hung from one shoulder and did not reach to his knees, with a broad waist-belt which also served to contain a short, heavy scimitar, in a metal scabbard. Between them walked a man, a white man to judge by his hands, since his head was completely masked in a hood of coarse scarlet cotton, with only a couple of careless eyelet-holes and a rough round mouth cut in it. He was dressed in a worn drill tunic and riding-breeches and pigskin puttees, and carried himself, a thin, limber, muscular figure, with careless ease.

Sallie took him to be that doctor of whom the Emir had spoken, and shuddered at thought of the dreadful death with which the Emir had threatened him. His guards' cruel faces grew still more watchful and grim as he hastened, limping a little, toward the couch, while they were still saluting its occupant.

Sallie had risen from it and was standing with one arm about the other girl's heaving shoulders, adjusting her veil. The cough had ceased again, but its victim had not yet recovered her voice. The man in the mask glanced most unhappily at her and then at Sallie. But it was not concern on his own account that his steady grey eyes expressed.

He was about to speak, when the Emir's wife held up a thin, transparent hand. "Wait," she begged weakly. "There is so little time—and my strength—"

He pulled a glass tube from one of his pockets and gave her a tabloid. She swallowed it down, with a mouthful of water, indifferently, but it soon did her good. She signed her women aside, and looked imploringly up at Sallie.

"I can't live through another night," she said, "and—neither will this man, unless you help me to help him. You will do that, won't you? He's an Englishman—a doctor—he has done all he possibly could for me—and I cannot die while I know that his life hangs on mine. It's too horrible—"

Sallie sat down again and clasped the wasted, writhing body closely to her in her strong, young arms.

"I'll do all I possibly can to help him," she promised in a quick whisper. The grey eyes behind the horrible scarlet hood had seemed to say that they would not hold her responsible for any promise given to lighten that poor creature's last hours. And the Emir's wife lay back against her shoulder with an exhausted sob of relief.

"I'm really an American," said a pleasant and very grateful voice from behind the mask which was gazing down at them so inscrutably now, "and no doctor at all." He was speaking to Sallie; the Emir's wife was still gasping for breath. "But—you can see for yourself how very harmful this nervous excitement must be to her."

"We must humour her—whatever may happen," his glance seemed to add, and Sallie nodded in quick understanding and sympathy.

She had been wondering what she, so helpless and uncertain herself, could possibly do to reassure the dying girl and help the man who was doomed.

"If I could get back on board the ship," she said somewhat uncertainly, in answer to the appealing look with which the Emir's wife was once more regarding her, "I would bring or send a boat ashore—"

The other girl's wan face displayed renewed life and animation.

"Soon after midnight," she whispered eagerly. "You must give me till then to do my part. But soon after midnight he will be waiting beyond the outermost of the guards at the shore-end of the ravine which leads from our camp. He'll be wearing that woman's cloak and veil, and carrying a bucket—I sometimes send her to the beach for sea-water to bathe my feet." She pointed to one of her slaves, but at that the man in the mask intervened.

"I couldn't do that. Your husband would—"

She held up a hand again, and he said no more, only shaking his head. He seemed to have forgotten that she was not to be contradicted.

"The woman is mine," said the Emir's wife, "and my husband will not hurt a hair of her head while she obeys me. He has sworn that on the Cross. He will keep his oath—and you have my word as well that she shall come to no harm. You need have no scruples, then!"

She looked impatiently up at the scarlet mask bending over her, not to be satisfied until it bowed in submission to her authority there. But Sallie could read in the steadfast grey eyes behind it a dumb determination that the slave girl should run no such risk, and she did not think it needful at that moment to say anything about the other difficulties to be overcome. She had promised that she would do all she possibly could to help the man in the mask, and believed she could help him best in the meantime by keeping her own troubles to herself.

She did not even know as yet what Captain Dove's immediate intentions toward her were, or whether she herself would ever see the Olive Branch again. But—she would know before very long, and it would be time enough then to explain her own plight.

"Feel my pulse now, before you go," the pseudo-doctor's patient commanded, and he did so, drawing out his watch, while she continued to plan for his flight.

"I'll send for you again before midnight," she said rapidly, for his guards had begun to show signs of unrest as his visit grew more prolonged, "and you must bring your—your—" She tapped her chest, very tenderly, with her free hand.

"Stethoscope?" he suggested, and she nodded quickly.

"You'll come in your cloak—it will be cold then. My women will draw a screen about us. As soon as you are safely behind it, slip off your shoes and gaiters while they are changing your cloak and hood. There will not be a moment to spare. And now—you must go."

He released her wrist and stood upright again.

"I shall come whenever you send for me, of course," he assured her soothingly, although his eyes, meeting Sallie's for an instant, betrayed the stubborn will behind them. "And I'm far more grateful than I can express for your good-will toward me. So now you'll rest quietly, won't you? And try not to worry needlessly about—anything at all. You're not afraid, I know. And neither am I."

He bowed to them both in his hideous hood, and went back to his scowling guards.

The Emir's dying wife lay very quietly in Sallie's arms for some time after he had gone. She was quite exhausted again. Her women, in a group at a little distance, were watching with jealous eyes the fair stranger who had supplanted them with such ease. The only sounds that broke the silence were the sick girl's laboured breathing, the occasional hoarse, angry rumble of Captain Dove's voice outside. Sallie was listening anxiously for that. She could hear no word of what he said, but—she wanted to be quite sure that he was still there. It was not her own fate alone that now depended on what these strangely dragging minutes should bring to pass.

"Lay me back on the cushions now," begged the girl in her arms. "I feel better—in every way. And—tell me how you came here, in the nick of time. I'm so thankful—but you know that, and I mustn't talk too much, I have so little strength left, and—

"Who is that shouting?"

"It's Captain Dove," Sallie answered in haste. "He brought me here. I must go to him now, but I'll come back before—" She had no time to say more, for Captain Dove had called her again, in a very angry voice.

He was shaking his only available fist impotently at the high heavens when she stepped timidly out from under the curtained porch of the tent.

She hesitated, but for no more than a moment, and then, drawing her veil closer, went on across the sand, with beating heart.

"You called me, Captain Dove?" she said, as she stopped at the old man's shoulder. And he ceased blaspheming to glare round at her as though she had been some intrusive stranger, his face very puffed and repulsive in the red firelight.

He did not answer at once, but reached again for the earthenware flagon. It was lying on its side empty, for she had tipped it over with a stealthy foot.

His angry glance grew darker with suspicion, but her eyes were downcast.

"Come round in front," he ordered harshly, and she had once more to submit herself to the Emir's appraising glance.

He and Captain Dove had still much to say to each other, too, while she stood patiently there, like a slave for sale. They fell to arguing with much heat some point in dispute between them, an argument she could not follow since they were speaking some jargon of Arabic strange to her. But she knew very well that it was about her they were wrangling, and a cold fear clutched cruelly at her heart.

At last, however, the Emir appeared to give in to his visitor, and Captain Dove, after a final ineffectual snatch at the flagon, got on to his feet, since even that hint seemed to be thrown away on his host.

"We'll get off to the ship again," he said in English, and Sallie could almost have cried aloud in relief from such sore suspense.

"May I go back to the tent—just for a minute—to say good-bye?" she begged in a breathless whisper, and turned and ran.

The Emir's wife glanced eagerly up at her as she reappeared.

"I'm going back on board now," Sallie told her with shining eyes, which suddenly grew dim as she thought of the other girl's loneliness there. She sank on her knees beside the couch, and the Emir's wife, leaning forward, slipped a frail arm about her neck; and so they two, sisters in trouble, kissed each other good-bye for all time.

"You'll be sure to send the boat—soon after midnight?" the other asked, but with no shadow of doubt in her low, weak tones.

"I'll come myself, if I possibly can," Sallie promised, "and, if not, I'll send a safe friend—soon after midnight."

As she was rising, she saw on her bosom a little locket which hung from a thin gold chain. She lifted a hand to it, and hesitated uncertainly.

"It's all I have in the world that's my own," said the Emir's wife in a pleading whisper, "all I can offer you but my empty thanks. I'd like to think to-night that you will sometimes remember me. Will you not keep it, for my sake?"

"I'll wear it always—I'll never forget you—and oh! I'm so sorry that I must go," cried Sallie, sorely distressed, and had to hurry away without more words. Captain Dove had twice called her. There were tears in her eyes as she ran back across the sand to where, under the green flag, he was wrathfully waiting for her, and she scarcely heard his harsh order to hurry up.

Some of the Emir's men had come forward with a couple of litters. She seated herself in one, although she would much rather have walked, and, as soon as Captain Dove was ready, they were carried off, the Emir shouting a valedictory message to the old man.

"You keep your bargain and I'll keep mine," Captain Dove called back, and snorted contemptuously.

"That damned fellow talks to me as if I had been his second mate!" he commented, and snorted again.

From the mouth of the dark defile which led toward the shore, Sallie looked back over one shoulder, almost as an escaped prisoner might, at the bizarre, fantastic scene the still camp made in that strange crimson light. And the big, red-haired Emir standing motionless under his great green flag, whose fluttering folds seen from that distance seemed of the colour of blood, waved a hand to her ere she disappeared.

She shivered, instinctively. She had been dumbly afraid of the man, and that although she was possessed of a courage such as could look grim death itself in the empty eye-holes and smile. She was correspondingly thankful when, the gorge and its sentinels safely behind her, she found herself once more facing the open sea.

Captain Dove's carriers set him down alongside the boat, lying high and dry on the sands where they had left it. Having set it afloat, they lifted him carefully into it, and her also. A few shallow yards from the shore, she slipped off her white cloak and head-covering at an order from the old man, and so set to rowing again.

Once, one of her oars touched some invisible body swimming parallel with the boat, and a lightning-like flash of phosphorus showed a curved black fin that darted to a little distance and then turned back toward them. It was risky work crossing the bar, but both she and Captain Dove knew just what they were about, and presently they shot free of the surf into comparative safety.

"Starboard a little," he told her then, and ten or twelve minutes' pulling took them back to the Olive Branch, which he must have found by sheer instinct, since the ship was showing no lights.

They approached it almost soundlessly from astern, so that the sleepy look-out on the fo'c'sle-head neither heard nor saw them. For even the stars were invisible then through the curtain of vapour overhanging the coast.

Reuben Yoxall, the mate, was awaiting them at the poop-rail. He threw Sallie a line, and running to the companion-hatch, called Jasper Slyne up from the little saloon below. The two of them hoisted Captain Dove up the side, and after him Sallie, as light and agile as any boy. The canvas boat was easily got to the rail, folded flat and returned to its hiding-place.

Sallie stayed on deck, and Yoxall was not long in rejoining her there. Slyne and Captain Dove had sat down to a leisurely supper below. The plup! of a cork popping in the saloon broke the silence just before seven bells struck. They had half an hour yet till midnight.