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The Palace of Darkened Windows by Mary Hastings Bradley

M >> Mary Hastings Bradley >> The Palace of Darkened Windows



The PALACE of DARKENED WINDOWS

By
MARY HASTINGS BRADLEY

AUTHOR OF "THE FAVOR OF KINGS"


ILLUSTRATED BY EDMUND FREDERICK


NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1914


[Frontispiece illustration: "'It is no use,' he repeated.
'There is no way out for you.'" (Chapter IV)]



TO
MY HUSBAND



CONTENTS


CHAPTER
I. THE EAVESDROPPER
II. THE CAPTAIN CALLS
III. AT THE PALACE
IV. A SORRY QUEST
V. WITHIN THE WALLS
VI. A GIRL IN THE BAZAARS
VII. BILLY HAS HIS DOUBTS
VIII. THE MIDNIGHT VISITOR
IX. A DESPERATE GAME
X. A MAID AND A MESSAGE
XI. OVER THE GARDEN WALL
XII. THE GIRL FROM THE HAREM
XIII. TAKING CHANCES
XIV. IN THE ROSE ROOM
XV. ON THE TRAIL
XVI. THE HIDDEN GIRL
XVII. AT BAY
XVIII. DESERT MAGIC
XIX. THE PURSUIT
XX. A FRIEND IN NEED
XXI. CROSS PURPOSES
XXII. UPON THE PYLON
XXIII. THE BETTER MAN




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


"'It is no use,' he repeated. 'There is no way out for you'"
_Frontispiece_

"'I do not want to stay here'"

"He found himself staring down into the bright dark eyes of a girl
he had never seen"

"Billy went to the mouth, peering watchfully out"




THE PALACE OF DARKENED WINDOWS



CHAPTER I

THE EAVESDROPPER


A one-eyed man with a stuffed crocodile upon his head paused before
the steps of Cairo's gayest hotel and his expectant gaze ranged
hopefully over the thronged verandas. It was afternoon tea time; the
band was playing and the crowd was at its thickest and brightest.
The little tables were surrounded by travelers of all nations, some
in tourist tweeds and hats with the inevitable green veils; others,
those of more leisurely sojourns, in white serges and diaphanous
frocks and flighty hats fresh from the Rue de la Paix.

It was the tweed-clad groups that the crocodile vender scanned for a
purchaser of his wares and harshly and unintelligibly exhorted to
buy, but no answering gaze betokened the least desire to bring back
a crocodile to the loved ones at home. Only Billy B. Hill grinned
delightedly at him, as Billy grinned at every merry sight of the
spectacular East, and Billy shook his head with cheerful
convincingosity, so the crocodile merchant moved reluctantly on
before the importunities of the Oriental rug peddler at his heels.

Then he stopped. His turbaned head, topped by the grotesque,
glassy-eyed, glistening-toothed monster, revolved slowly as the
Arab's single eye steadily followed a couple who passed by him up
the hotel steps. Billy, struck by the man's intense interest, craned
forward and saw that one of the couple, now exchanging farewells at
the top of the steps, was a girl, a pretty girl, and an American,
and the other was an officer in a uniform of considerable green and
gold, and obviously a foreigner.

He might be any kind of a foreigner, according to Billy's lax
distinctions, that was olive of complexion and very black of hair
and eyes. Slender and of medium height, he carried himself with an
assurance that bordered upon effrontery, and as he bowed himself
down the steps he flashed upon his former companion a smile of
triumph that included and seemed to challenge the verandaful of
observers.

The girl turned and glanced casually about at the crowded groups
that were like little samples of all the nations of the earth, and
with no more than a faint awareness of the battery of eyes upon her
she passed toward the tables by the railing. She was a slim little
fairy of a girl, as fresh as a peach blossom, with a cloud of pale
gold hair fluttering round her pretty face, which lent her a most
alluring and deceptive appearance of ethereal mildness. She had a
soft, satiny, rose-leaf skin which was merely flushed by the heat of
the Egyptian day, and her eyes were big and very, very blue. There
were touches of that blue here and there upon her creamy linen suit,
and a knot of blue upon her parasol and a twist of blue about her
Panama hat, so that she could not be held unconscious of the
flagrantly bewitching effect. Altogether she was as upsettingly
pretty a young person as could be seen in a year's journey, and the
glances of the beholders brightened vividly at her approach.

There was one conspicuous exception. This exception was sitting
alone at the large table which backed Billy's tiny table into a
corner by the railing, and as the girl arrived at that large table
the exception arose and greeted her with an air of glacial chill.

"Oh! Am I so terribly late?" said the girl with great pleasantness,
and arched brows of surprise at the two other places at the table
before which used tea things were standing.

"My sister and Lady Claire had an appointment, so they were obliged
to have their tea and leave," stated the young man, with an air of
politely endeavoring to conceal his feelings, and failing
conspicuously in the endeavor. "They were most sorry."

"Oh, so am I!" declared the girl, in clear and contrite tones which
carried perfectly to Billy B. Hill's enchanted ears. "I never
dreamed they would have to hurry away."

"They did not hurry, as you call it," and the young man glanced at
his watch, "for nearly an hour. It was a disappointment to them."

"Pin-pate!" thought Billy, with intense disgust. "Is he kicking at a
two-some?"

"And have you had your tea, too?" inquired the girl, with an air of
tantalizing unconcern.

"I waited, naturally, for my guest."

"Oh, not _naturally_!" she laughed. "It must be very unnatural for
you to wait for anything. And you must be starving. So am I--do you
think there are enough cakes left for the two of us?"

Without directly replying, the young man gave the order to the
red-fezzed Arab in a red-girdled white robe who was removing the
soiled tea things, and he assisted the girl into a chair and sat
down facing her. Their profiles were given to the shameless Billy,
and he continued his rapt observations.

He had immediately recognized the girl as a vision he had seen
fluttering around the hotel with an incongruously dismal
couple of unyouthful ladies, and he had mentally affixed a
magnate's-only-daughter-globe-trotting-with-elderly-friends label to
her.

The young man he could not place so definitely. There were a good
many tall, aristocratic young Englishmen about, with slight stoops
and incipient moustaches. This particular Englishman had hair that
was pronouncedly sandy, and Billy suddenly recollected that in
lunching at the Savoy the other day he had noticed that young
Englishman in company with a sandy-haired lady, not so young, and a
decidedly pretty dark-haired girl--it was the girl, of course, who
had fixed the group in Billy's crowded impressions. He decided that
these ladies were the sister and Lady Claire--and Lady Claire, he
judiciously concluded, certainly had nothing on young America.

Young America was speaking. "Don't look so thunderous!" she
complained to her irate host. "How do you know I didn't plan to be
late so as to have you all to myself?"

This was too derisive for endurance. A dull red burned through the
tan on the young Englishman's cheeks and crept up to meet the
corresponding warmth of his hair. A leash within him snapped.

"It is simply inconceivable!" burst from him, and then he shut his
jaw hard, as if only one last remnant of will power kept a seething
volcano, from explosion.

"What is?"

"How any girl--in Cairo, of all places!" he continued to explode in
little snorts.

"You are speaking of--?" she suggested.

"Of your walking with that fellow--in broad daylight!"

"Would it have been better in the gloaming?"

The sweet restraint in the young thing's manner was supernatural. It
was uncanny. It should have warned the red-headed young man, but
oblivious of danger signals, he was plunging on, full steam ahead.

"It isn't as if you didn't know--hadn't been warned."

"You have been so kind," the girl murmured, and poured a cup of tea
the Arab had placed at her elbow.

The young man ignored his. The color burned hotter and hotter in his
face. Even his hair looked redder.

"The look he gave up here was simply outrageous--a grin of insolent
triumph. I'd like to have laid my cane across him!"

The girl's cup clicked against the saucer. "You are horrid!" she
declared. "When we were on shipboard Captain Kerissen was very
popular among the passengers and I talked with him whenever I cared
to. Everyone did. Now that I am in his native city I see no reason
to stalk past him when we happen to be going in the same direction.
He is a gentleman of rank, a relative of the Khedive who is ruling
this country--under your English advice--and he is----"

"A Turk!" gritted out the young man.

"A Turk and proud of it! His mother was French, however, and he was
educated at Oxford and he is as cosmopolitan as any man I ever met.
It's unusual to meet anyone so close to the reigning family, and it
gives one a wonderful insight into things off the beaten track----"

"The beaten--damn!" said the young man, and Billy's heart went out
to him. "Oh, I beg pardon, but you--he--I--" So many things occurred
to him to say at one and the same time that he emitted a snort of
warring and incoherent syllables. Finally, with supreme control, "Do
you know that your 'gentleman of rank' couldn't set foot in a
gentleman's club in this country?"

"I think it's _mean_!" retorted the girl, her blue eyes very bright
and indignant. "You English come here and look down on even the
highest members of the country you are pretending to assist. Why do
you? When he was at Oxford he went into your English homes."

"English madhouses--for admitting him."

A brief silence ensued.

The girl ate a cake. It was a nice cake, powdered with almonds, but
she ate it obliviously. The angry red shone rosily in her cheeks.

The young man took a hasty drink of his tea, which had grown cold
in its cup, and pushed it away. Obstinately he rushed on in his mad
career.

"I simply cannot understand you!" he declared.

"Does it matter?" said she, and bit an almond's head off.

"It would be bad enough, in any city, but in Cairo--! To permit him
to insult you with his company, alone, upon the streets!"

"When you have said insult you have said a little too much," she
returned in a small, cold voice of war. "Is there anything against
Captain Kerissen personally?"

"Who knows anything about any of those fellows? They are all
alike--with half a dozen wives locked up behind their barred
windows."

"He isn't married."

"How do you know?"

"I--inferred it."

The Englishman snorted: "According to his custom, you know, it isn't
the proper thing to mention his ladies in public."

"You are frightfully unjust. Captain Kerissen's customs are the
customs of the civilized world, and he is very anxious to have his
country become modernized."

"Then let him send his sisters out walking with fellow officers....
For _him_ to walk beside _you_----"

"He was following the custom of my country," said the girl, with
maddening superiority. "Since I am an _American_ girl----"

The young Englishman said a horrible thing. He said it with immense
feeling.

"American goose!" he uttered, then stopped short. Precipitately he
floundered into explanation:

"I beg your pardon, but, you know, when you say such bally nonsense
as that--! An American girl has no more business to be imprudent
than a Patagonian girl. You have no idea how these people
regard----"

"Oh, don't apologize," murmured the girl, with charming sweetness.
"I don't mind what you say--not in the least."

The outraged man was not so befuddled but what he saw those danger
signals now. They glimmered scarlet upon his vision, but his blood
was up and he plunged on to destruction with the extraordinary
remark, "But isn't there a reason why you should?"

She gazed at him in mock reflection, as if mulling this striking
thought presented for her consideration, but her eyes were too
sparkly and her cheeks too poppy-pink to substantiate the reflective
pose.

"N-no," she said at last, with an impertinent little drawl. "I can't
seem to think of any."

He did not pause for innuendo. "You mean you don't give a _piastre_
what I think?"

"Not half a _piastre_," she confirmed, in flat defiance.

The young man looked at her. He was over the brink of ruin now;
nothing remained of the interesting little affair of the past three
weeks but a mangled and lamentable wreck at the bottom of a deep
abyss.

Perhaps a shaft of compunction touched her flinty soul at the sight
of his aghast and speechless face, for she had the grace to look
away. Her gaze encountered the absorbed and excited countenance of
Billy B. Hill, and the poppy-pink of her cheeks became poppy-red
and she turned her head sharply away. She rose, catching up her
gloves and parasol.

"Thank you so much for your tea," she said in a lowered tone to her
unfortunate host. "I've had a delicious time.... I'm sorry if I
disappointed you by not cowering before your disapproval. Oh, don't
bother to come in with me--I know my way to the lift and the band is
going to play God Save the King and they need you to stand up and
make a showing."

Billy B. Hill stared across at the abandoned young man with supreme
sympathy and intimate understanding. He was a nice and right-minded
young man and she was an utter minx. She was the daughter of
unreason and the granddaughter of folly. She needed, emphatically
needed, to be shown. But this Englishman, with his harsh and
violently antagonizing way of putting things, was clearly not the
man for the need. It took a lighter touch--the hand of iron in the
velvet glove, as it were. It took a keener spirit, a softer humor.

Billy threw out his chest and drew himself up to his full five feet
eleven and one-half inches, as he passed indoors and sought the
hotel register, for he felt within himself the true equipment for
that delicate mission. He fairly panted to be at it.

Fate was amiable. The hotel clerk, coerced with a couple of
gold-banded ones with the real fragrance, permitted Billy to learn
that the blue-eyed one's name was Beecher, Arlee Beecher, and that
she was in the company of two ladies entitled Mrs. and Miss
Eversham. The Miss Eversham was quite old enough to be entitled
otherwise. They were occupied, the clerk reported, with nerves and
dissatisfaction. Miss Beecher appeared occupied in part--with a
correspondence that would swamp a foreign office.

* * * * *

Now it is always a question whether being at the same hotel does or
does not constitute an introduction. Sometimes it does; sometimes it
does not. When the hotel is a small and inexpensive arrangement in
Switzerland, where the advertised view of the Alpengluehen is
obtained by placing the chairs in a sociable circle on the sidewalk,
then usually it does. When the hotel is a large and expensive affair
in gayest Cairo, where the sunny and shady side rub elbows, and
gamesters and debutantes and touts and school teachers and vivid
ladies of conspicuous pasts and stout gentlemen of exhilarated
presents abound, in fact where innocent sightseers and initiated
traffickers in human frailties are often indistinguishable, then
decidedly it does not.

But fate, still smiling, dropped a silver shawl in Billy's path as
he was trailing his prey through the lounge after dinner. The shawl
belonged, most palpably, to a German lady three feet ahead of him,
but gripping it triumphantly, he bounded over the six feet which
separated him from the Eversham-Beecher triangle and with marvelous
self-restraint he touched Miss Eversham on the arm.

"You dropped this?" he inquired.

Miss Eversham looked surprisedly at Billy and uncertainly at the
shawl, which she mechanically accepted. "Why I--I didn't remember
having it with me," she hesitated.

"I noticed you were wearing one other evenings," said Billy, the
Artful, "so I thought----"

"You know whether this is yours or not, don't you, Clara?"
interposed the mother.

"They all look alike," murmured Clara Eversham, eying helplessly the
silver border.

Billy permitted himself to look at Miss Beecher. That young person
was looking at him and there was a disconcerting gaiety in her
expression, but at sight of him she turned her head, faintly
coloring. He judged she recalled his unmannerly eavesdropping that
afternoon.

"Pardon--excuse me--but that is to me belonging," panted an agitated
but firm voice behind them, and two stout and beringed hands seized
upon the glittering shawl in Miss Eversham's lax grasp. "It but just
now off me falls," and the German lady looked belligerent accusation
upon the defrauding Billy.

There was a round of apologetic murmurs, unacknowledged by the
recipient, who plunged away with her shawl, as if fearing further
designs upon it. Billy laughed down at the Evershams.

"I feel like a porch climber making off with her belongings. But I
had seen you with----"

"I do think I had mine this evening, after all," murmured Clara,
with a questioning glance after the departing one.

"An uncultured person!" stated Mrs. Eversham.

Miss Beecher said nothing at all. Her faint smile was mockingly
derisive.

"Anyway you must let me get you some coffee," Billy most
inconsequentially suggested, beckoning to the red-girdled Mohammed
with his laden tray, and because he was young and nice looking and
evidently a gentleman from their part of the world and his evening
clothes fitted perfectly and had just the right amount of braid,
Mrs. Eversham made no objection to the circle of chairs he hastily
collected about a taborette, and let him hand them their coffee and
send Mohammed for the cream which Miss Eversham declared was
indispensable for her health.

"If I take it clear I find it keeps me awake," she confided, and
Billy deplored that startling and lamentable circumstance, and
passed Mrs. Eversham the sugar and wondered if they could be the
Philadelphia Evershams of whom he had heard his mother speak, and
regretted that they were not, for then they would know who he
was--William B. Hill of Alatoona, New York. He found it rather
stupid traveling alone. Of course one met many Americans, but----

Mrs. Eversham took up that "but" most eagerly, and recounted
multiple and deplorable instances of nasal countrywomen doing the
East and monopolizing the window seats in compartments, and Miss
Eversham supplied details and corrections.

Still Miss Beecher said nothing. She had a dreamy air of not
belonging to the conversationalists. But from an inscrutable
something in her appearance, Billy judged she was not unentertained
by his sufferings.

At the first pause he addressed her directly. "And how do you like
Cairo?" was his simple question. That ought, he reflected, to be an
entering wedge.

The young lady did not trouble to raise her eyes. "Oh, very much,"
said she negligently, sipping her coffee.

"Oh, very well!" said Billy haughtily to himself. If being her
fellow countryman in a strange land, and obviously a young and
cultivated countryman whom it would be a profit and pleasure for any
girl to know, wasn't enough for her--what was the use? He ought to
get up and go away. He intended to get up and go away--immediately.

But he didn't. Perhaps it was the shimmery gold hair, perhaps it was
the flickering mischief of the downcast lashes, perhaps it was the
loveliness of the soft, white throat and slenderly rounded arms.
Anyway he stayed. And when the strain of waltz music sounded through
the chatter of voices about them and young couples began to stroll
to the long parlors, Billy jumped to his feet with a devastating
desire that totally ignored the interminable wanderings of Clara
Eversham's complaints.

"Will you dance this with me?" he besought of Miss Arlee Beecher,
with a direct gaze more boyishly eager than he knew.

For an agonizing moment she hesitated. Then, "I think I will," she
concluded, with sudden roguery in her smile.

Stammering a farewell to the Evershams, he bore her off.

It would be useless to describe that waltz. It was one of the
ecstatic moments which Young Joy sometimes tosses from her garlanded
arms. It was one of the sudden, vivid, unforgettable delights which
makes youth a fever and a desire. For Billy it was the wildest stab
the sex had ever dealt him. For though this was perhaps the nine
thousand nine hundred and ninety-ninth girl with whom he had danced,
it was as if he had discovered music and motion and girls for the
first time.

The music left them by the windows.

"Thank you," said Billy under his breath.

"You didn't deserve it," said the girl, with a faint smile playing
about the corners of her lips. "You know you stared--scandalously."

Grateful that she mentioned only the lesser sin, "Could I help it?"
he stammered, by way of a finished retort.

The smile deepened, "And I'm afraid you listened!"

He stared down at her anxiously. "Will you like me better if I
didn't?" he inquired.

"I shan't like you at all if you did."

"Then I didn't hear a word.... Besides," he basely uttered, "you
were entirely in the right!"

"I should think I was!" said Arlee Beecher very indignantly. "The
very notion--! Captain Kerissen is a very nice young man. He is
going to get me an invitation to the Khedive's ball."

"Is that a very crumby affair?"

"Crumby? It's simply gorgeous! Everyone is mad over it. Most
tourists simply read about it, and it is too perfect luck to be
invited! Only the English who have been presented at court are
invited and there's a girl at the Savoy Hotel I've met--Lady Claire
Montfort--who wasn't presented because she was in mourning for her
grandmother last year, and she is simply furious about it. An old
dowager here said that there ought to be similar distinctions among
the Americans--that only those who had been presented at the White
House ought to be recognized. Fancy making the White House a social
distinction!" laughed the daughter of the Great Republic.

"I wonder," said Billy, "if I met a nice Turkish lady, whether she
would get me an invitation? Then we could have another waltz----"

"There aren't any Turkish ladies there," uttered Miss Beecher
rebukingly. "Don't you know that? When they are on the
Continent--those that are ever taken there--they may go to dances
and things, but here they can't, although some of them are just as
modern as you or I, I've heard, and lots more educated."

"You speak," he protested, "from a superficial acquaintance with my
academic accomplishments."

"Are you so very--proficient?"

"I was--I am Phi Beta Kappa," he sadly confessed.

Her laugh rippled out. "You don't look it," she cheered.

"Oh, no, I don't look it," he complacently agreed. "That's the lamp
in the gloom. But I am. I couldn't help it. I was curious about
things and I studied about them and faculties pressed honors upon
me. I am even here upon a semi-learned errand. I wanted to have a
look at the diggings a friend of mine is making at Thebes and
several looks at the dam at Assouan, for I am by way of being an
engineer myself--a beginning engineer."

"You have been up the Nile, then?"

"Yes, I'm just back. Now I'm going to see something of Cairo before
I leave."

"We start up the Nile day after to-morrow," said she.

"The day after--" he stopped.

'Twas ever thus. Fate never did one good turn but she sneaked back
and jabbed him unawares. She was a tricksy jade.

"That's--that's gloomy luck," said Billy, and felt outraged. "Why,
how about that Khedive ball thing?"

"Oh, that's when we come back."

She was coming back, then. Hope lifted her head.

"When will that be?"

"In three weeks. It takes about three weeks to go up to the first
cataract and back, doesn't it?"

"Yes, by boat," he said, adding hopefully, "but lots of people like
the express trains better. They--they don't keep you so long on the
way."

"Oh, I hate trains," said she cheerfully.

Three weeks ... Ruefully he surveyed the desolation. "I ought to be
gone by then," he muttered.

A trifle startled, the girl looked up at him. As he was not looking
at her, but staring moodily into what was then black vacancy, her
look lingered and deepened. She saw a most bronzed and hardy looking
young man, tall and broad-shouldered, with gray eyes, wide apart
under straight black brows, and black hair brushed straight back
from a wide forehead. She saw a rugged nose, a likeable mouth, and
an abrupt and aggressive chin, saved somehow from grimness by a deep
cleft in the blunt end of it.... She thought he was a very
_stirring_ looking young man. Undoubtedly he was a very sudden
young man--if he meant one bit of what he intimated.

Feminine-wise, she mocked.

"What a calamity!"

"Yes, for me," said Billy squarely. "You know it's--it's awfully
jolly to meet a girl from home out here!"

"A girl from _home_----!"

"Well, all America seems home from this place. And I shouldn't be
surprised if we knew a lot of the same people ... You can get a good
line on me that way, you know," he laughed. "Now I went to Williams
and then to Boston Tech., and there must be acquaintances----"

"Don't!" said Arlee, with a laughing gesture of prohibition. "We
probably have thousands of the same acquaintances, and you would
turn out to be some one I knew everything about--perhaps the first
fiance of my roommate whose letters I used to help her answer."

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