 CHAPTER XIV RIDER sprang forward trying to reach the bay, but he dodged skillfully, his holding Amy blocked Rider in his attack. He knew that high, peculiar whistle had been a signal, a call for aid, and he flung a lightning glance down that long room, tightening his hold on the revolver, but he did not see the small door that opened in the shadowy panelling behind him, nor the shadow that grew into the gorilla-like shape of the black as it launched itself through the air upon his back. He only heard Amy's scream, and then, before the crashing weight upon his shoulders, he staggered and went down. The bay flung Amy aside and rushed upon the prostrate figure, kicking the revolver from the outspread hand. The black knelt swiftly down, unfastening his silken sash. Giddily the room whirled about Amy. In the candlelight, leaping in the rush of conflict, she saw the bay and the black and their distorted shadows in a goblin blur, and beneath them she saw Rider, helpless, his hands and feet pinioned, but the madness of despair she rushed forward, but the general intercepted her. He is quite helpless. You need not be alarmed for my safety, madame." The cold, biting fury of his voice steadied her. She saw his face was distorted, livid with anger. His breathing was stratorious. She stood helplessly by the table. The general turned and looked down upon the face of the man who had dared to violate the sanctity of his harem and attempt to steal his bride. On the man's head, Yusuf, the black, was squatting with a grinning dog-like watchfulness. But Rider did not require watching. That sash had been tied strongly about his hands and feet. He was as helpless as a baby. But the peculiar flavor of his helplessness was not so much fear before the fanatic fury of this man he had outraged, although he had a clear notion that his position was not enviably secure, but a bitter black chagrin. To have had the game in his hands and have bungled it. To have been surprised by that simple strategy taken off his guard by a feigned collapse. The wily old Turk for all his champagne had the clearer, quicker brain. To have let him get to Amy and call on his black. To have been thrown, disarmed. It was crass stupidity. It was outrageous mismanagement, abominable, maddening. And Amy must pay for it. He tried to think very quickly what could best clear her. He fixed his eyes on those glittering eyes staring down upon him. I realize I owe you an explanation, he said grimly. If you will let me tell you. The bay turned to Amy with a smile that was the lifting of a lip and the distension of his nostrils. This fool thinks he has the time to talk, is English. Desperately Rider grasped for his vernacular. I want to tell you why I came. This young lady doesn't know me. Past the general he shot a look of warning at the girl. I was trying to get hold of her for her family in France. She is really a French girl. Tufik Pasha is not her father, but her. He could not find the word and dropped into English. Her stepfather, do you understand? And he had no business to marry her off. So I tried to steal her for the French family. It was a mad attempt which has failed. For which the young lady should not be blamed. She has never seen me before. She had no idea I was here. After a pause, a remarkable story, said the general distinctly. He turned about to the table and drank off the last of the glass of champagne, and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand that trembled. He turned back to stand over his prostrate invader. Now, you, you dog of Satan! He snarled and a sudden snapping of restraint. How did you get here? Who admitted you? And at that, for all his trust and helpless plight, Jack Ryder grinned. He moved his head slightly. That blackbird of yours here. Yousef, never. The very one. But he didn't know it. I was in that black mantle and veil. Oh, the mantle I had forgot! So you stole in, disguised, to violate my hospitality, to outrage my harem, to gaze upon the forbidden faces of women and to steal the bride. I tell you I was trying to rescue the girl for her French family. She is French, and Tufik Pasha is only—and what is that to me? Do I? The bay broke off, and then turned to the silent girl, who stood leaning towards them, a trembling ghost in white. And you, my little one, he murmured sardonically, with a savage irony of restraint, you, the little dove secluded from the world who trembled at a kiss, the crystal vase who had never reflected the blush of love, whose virginal praises I was chanting when I was so oddly assaulted. Do you support this idiot's story? Mechanically her head moved in ascent, her eyes, dilated with fear, were like the dark, fascinated eyes of some helpless bird. You never saw this young man, the bay pursued, and yet you were ready to run off with him, a pretty character you'll give yourself, my snow-drop, and you liked his eyes and hastened to obey? Amy was silent, from his ignomy upon the floor, rider hastened to interpose. It is true she had never seen me, but I had already written to her and acquainted her with the story. I tried to reach her first through her father, but that was useless, so I resorted to these desperate means. Oh, you wrote, and you told her you would be here and murdered her husband? I told her nothing of the kind. She didn't know that I was coming, until I spoke to her here, and then she had no idea that I was going to wait and carry her off. In the name of Allah, do you take me for adult and ass? You with your writing, and your masquerade, and your secrets, though any families try to recover their relatives with such means, daughter or step-daughter, it is nothing to me. But it is true, Amy insisted in a trembling voice. My father was Paul Delcasse. Yara kiddisek man rablak, curse the man who brought the up. Delcasse or devil, it is Tufik Pasha who is your step-father, your guardian, who gave you to me for a wife. What has your genealogy to do with this affront upon my honor? But he did not intend to affront your honor, only to aid the family in France. I ask you again, do I resemble an ass that you should put such a burden of lies upon me, as if I did not know why young men risked their lives in the dead of night in other men's rooms. If I did not know what turns their brains too much and their hearts too leading strings, and you, you little white rose of seclusion, his venom leaped out at her in his voice. It was a terrible voice, the cold, grating menace of a madman. You who had never seen this man, but who fluttered to him like a white moth to a fire. You who cowered from your husband's hand, but who turned to follow this strange dog into the streets. There will be care taken of you later. But now you complain to Fatigue. Surely this scene is overtaxing for your delicacy, if you will come to your rooms. She drew back from the hand he laid upon her. Do not injure him. By Allah's truth he is rash, mad, but a stranger. He did not know. He needs an election admit. He needs to learn that a nobleman's harem is not a café of dancing girls, where all may enter and stare and fondle. Bishmala! He shall earn. And now come. I shall not go, she said breathlessly. What? Struggle? But your father has been strangely remiss with his discipline. Permit me. His hand tightened in a grasp of iron. My train is caught, she said, in a tone of sudden petishness. She stooped to lift it with her hand that was free. My train! He mimicked her in a quivering falsetto. Have a care of my frock. Do not crush my chiffons. And these are the women for whom men break their heads and hearts. I tell you, sir, came urgently from Ryder, that the girl is innocent of all. Keep your tongue from her name, and your eyes from her face. Come, dumb! With his iron grasp on her elbow he thrust her towards the boudoir at the end of the drawing-room, behind whose curtains Ryder had so long been hiding. The chamber was in darkness, lighted only by a pale gleam from the other room. Amy stumbled across the rug and found herself upon a huge divan against a window-screen. Fatima is in the next room to come at a call, but perhaps you would prefer to wait for me alone. I shall not be long. Desperately she caught at his arm, imploring, I beg you, Mishur, he has done no real harm. Let him go. He is a stranger. He did not know. And he will never trouble you again. I will do anything, everything you desire, if only you will not injure him. You'll trouble yourself strangely for a stranger. He is a stranger in danger for my sake, for it was in his duty to my family. Her trembling lips stumbled over the ridiculous lies, that he has blundered into this. He has no idea how shocking a thing he has, and you had no idea either, I suppose. You had never heard of honor, or treachery, or— I was wrong. Oh, I was wrong. I did want to go to France. I own it. But I was not ready for marriage, and I had heard that you—I was afraid. But now, if you will let him go for my sake, if you will not visit my sins upon him, oh, I should be so grateful, so grateful that anything I can ever do. But you will be grateful anyway, my little blossom. I promise you that you will learn to be very grateful. It is easier to die than to learn to love a hated one. She reminded him softly, leaning towards him, I can die very willingly, monsieur, and you would not want a wife before him there was always an object of terror. Through the dusk her great eyes sought his. Be generous and harm him not, she breathed. I beg of you, I implore. And if I am lenient, you will always be grateful. Mutely she nodded, her eyes trying pitifully to read that shadowy mask of mockery he turned towards her. And how grateful could you be, little dove? Pitifully she smiled. Could you, he murmured, could you learn to kiss? He leaned nearer, and involuntarily she shrank back, and politely, at this moment I beg of you, monsieur. Oh, if it is to be in a fair of moments, we shall never find the right one, but you were so full of promises. I will do anything, said Amy convulsively, if you will promise me. Come then, a kiss. A peck from my little dove. She looked at him out of wretched eyes. And you promise to free him not to hurt him? I promise not to hurt a hair of his head. Come, that is generous, isn't it? As to freeing him, hmm, that is for later. Perhaps if you are very good, a kiss then, and later. He bent over her. She shut her eyes and heard the taunt of his laugh. She kissed him, and he laughed again. What is it that the Afghan poets say, kiss lips lose no sweetness, but renew their freshness with the moon? Certainly if you have ever been kissed, little bud, you have lost no due. Delicious! I shall hurry back. He cast a hard look down at her as she sat there, her arms strooping at her sides. He looked about the room as if consideringly, then nodded at an unseen door at the right. Fatima is there if you want lights or assistance. And El-Smit, Yusuf's brother, is at the other door beyond. Do not stir, little bird, I shall be back very soon. And he, you promised, I shall not hurt a hair of his head. But he was smiling evilly in the darkness as he drew shut the door and returned to the bound figure by the guarding black. For a moment he stood silent, considering, while Yusuf looked up with glistening eyed intentness like an eager dog ready for the word of attack. Then in hasty turkish the general gave his directions, and the black nodded and strode to a portier jerking it down, which he wrapped about Rider's helpless form. Then he hoisted his burden over his huge shoulder and bore it on after the general. Across the great room they went, and down the long stairs, up which that day a most complacent Hamdi Bey had escorted his just glimpsed bride. Now at the bottom of the stairs a shadowy figure of a sleeping eunuch was stretched. Hamdi Bey spoke sharply, giving a quick order. The black scramble to his feet yawned, nodded, and strode away into the main vestibule and out into the garden to investigate a shadow which the general had just reported, and when he was out of sight the general and Yusuf, with his unwieldy burden, came quietly down the stairs and turned back into a long dark hall. For a moment they paused outside a wide, many-columned banqueting room, and there Hamdi Bey stood listening, straining attentive ears for the faint sounds from the service quarters on the other side of the room. He caught the guttural of a half inaudible voice and the wash of water and clink of a dish, showing that the belated work of the reception was going draggingly on, but it was all far away and invisible. Satisfied he went on a few steps to a pointed door set in the heavy stone. From a nail he took down a lantern of heavy, fretted brass and lighted it, not without some difficulty, for his hands were still trembling. Then he took from the black a cumbersome key which he fitted into the lock and turned heavily. Drawing back the door he motioned Yusuf ahead and followed drawing the door shut. Down a steep stone spiral stair they went, and at the bottom, at the general's order, the black set Rider down from his shoulder and flung aside the portier. From its muffling folds Rider looked out bewilderedly into the darkness about him, illumined only by the yellow flare of the ancient lantern. The general cautioned him to silence while Yusuf knelt and untied the strip that bound his feet, then his arms still bound he was ordered to march on before them. This he said to himself as he silently obeyed that order, this really was the time to pinch himself and wake up. Of all the dark, eerie nightmares, this slow procession through these underground halls, the giant black on his heels, the general's lantern throwing its flickering rays over the huge, seemed blocks of granite foundations. It made him think of the catacombs, it made him think of the Serapium, it made him think of those damp, torturous underground ways of the Villa Borgoni. They seemed to be in the wine cellars, he saw bins and barrels and barred vaults that would have done credit to an English squire, and he reflected fleetly that wine bibbing was forbidden to Mohammedans and that Hamdi Bey was a fanatic Moslem, then he saw open spaces of ancient stuffs, broken tables and dismantled castes and a broken oar. His earlier observation of the palace had told him that it had a water-gate and he thought now that they might be near some opening. He wondered if they were going to throw him, pinioned, into the river. He wouldn't put it past this livid, silent, shaking man, and yet the thing appeared so impossible, so theatric, so utterly unrelated to any of the ways that he, Jack Ryder, might be expected to end his days, that it couldn't possibly send more than a shiver of speculation down his spine. And yet men had been thrown into rivers, this very river, and men had disappeared from just such palaces as this. There was the story about young Monkton. He knew it perfectly. He had reminded himself of it the last evening, while he reflected upon this escapade, but he had never actually appreciated the peculiar poignancy of the thing until now. Monkton had met, so rumor reported, a Turkish lady of position, flirted with her, it was said, while on horseback outside her motor, when caught in the crush at Kazeer El Neil Bridge. There had been a meeting or two in the back of shops, and then he had boasted, lightheartedly, of a design to take tea in her harem. He had never boasted about the tea. No one had ever seen Monkton again, and he was generally reported, after a stifled inquiry, to have been thrown from his horse in the desert, or spilled out of his sailing canoe. The government, English or Egyptian, assumed no interest in the matter of gentlemen found in other gentlemen's harems. There were other stories, too. There was one of a little Viennese actress, who after a dramatic escape, reported a whole winter of captivity in one of these old palaces, and there was a vaguer rumor of a rash young American girl detained for days. Rider had always known these stories. They were part of the gossip and thrill of Cairo, but he had never till now realized how exquisitely possible was their occurrence. Anything, everything might happen in these hidden secret chambers. These Turks were as much masters here as their old predecessors who had reared these stones. This black upon his heels might have been the grinning, faithful executioner of some Kadeev or Caliph. He might have been the very massurer, the sorter of vengeance of Al-Rashid. He told himself that it was no time to think of the past. His business acutely was in the present. If only he could get his hands untied. If only he could get those untied hands upon that demonic Turk. But strained as he could upon the knots they held. It seemed to him that they had been walking for an interminable distance in odd roundabout ways. Once they had stopped and he had involuntarily glanced back over his shoulder, but at a word from the general he had kept his head forward again, while he heard the black behind him gathering something that clinked. Later a stolen glance had revealed the eunuch with some tools in one hand and a bag slung over his shoulder. The bag disquieted him. Bags filled a foreboding place in the eastern literature of vengeance. He wondered if he were to go into the river in that bag with the tools for weight. He decided, feeling now a very odd and definite disturbance in the region of his stomach, that he would tell that general that he was a cousin of the late Lord Crommer and a nephew of Lord Kitchener. Something insistent would have to be done about this. They were passing now through a strange open space between old arches that for an instant arrested his excavator's interest. He saw in the shadows about them a crumbled, crumbling dome and broken shafts, with half a wall of masonry pierced with arabests. Traces of old ruins, fragments of some old forgotten mosque over which the palace had spread its foundations in bygone days. Buried treasure looted some of it for the palace overhead, but still rare and lovely. That was a gleam of lapis lazuli that winked at him from the crumbling mortar under his feet. Then they were between other walls, not crumbling ones, but the solid, pillared walls of the palace masonry with here and there broad arches of old brick. They stopped. Between two arches the general held his lantern high, flashing it over the surface while Yusuf swung down his sack and knocked with the handle of his tool. Suddenly he stopped and looked at his master, nodding cheerfully. The general lowered his light and stepped back, and Yusuf reared the pickaxe in his powerful arms and sent it dexterously at the wall between two broken bits of brick. It caught and sent the mortar spraying. Another blow and another loosened a hole in which the black inserted a short iron and began nervously grinding and prying. Rider, watching with oppressed and helpless fury, saw the bricks at last break and tumble faster and faster in a cloud of dust, and saw a pocket in the wall become revealed, a long or bright niche, the size, perhaps, of a man's coffin on end. He tried very suddenly to talk. His tongue felt thick and swollen and there seemed no words in all the world to fit his need of overcoming this fanatic madman. And after all, he had no chance for them, for Yusuf, with a huge palm upon his mouth, urged him suddenly backwards towards that horrible niche. "'Gently, Yusuf, gently,' said the general, suavely, and with a slow distinctness that was for Rider's ears, I gave my word that I would not hurt a hair of his head. Grinning, the black lifted him over the remaining wall and set him down into the niche, leaving him standing in there like a helpless statue, tasting to the full fury of his heart, the bitterness of his helplessness, and the ludicrous impotence of all struggle. "'Good God, sir, you must be mad,' he said, in a strained, sharp voice that his ears would not have known as his own. "'Do you realize there will be an inquiry? There is such a thing as law?' It seemed to him that he talked in English and stammering Arabic for a long time. The black was kneeling out of sight, stooping over a basin of water and his abominable sack, and Rider was facing that silent, sardonic face with its fantastic mustache, its evil, gloating eyes. He stopped for very shame. The man was mad, mad and drunk, and there was no appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober. Mad or drunk he had devised his vengeance shrewdly. Upon Rider's helpless body a cold sweat of incredulous horror broke softly out. At his feet he heard the black begin to fit his bricks and smooth his mortar. "'You do well to save your breath,' said Hamdi Bey at last. As Rider still stood silent, you will need it in this chamber I am providing. "'But it may be,' he said thoughtfully, that your breath will last your need. Thirst may be the more impatient for her victim. They tell me Thirst is an obtrusive visitor. As you were this evening, still, why do you not cry out a little? It will amuse my black.' "'Yes, this was real,' Rider reminded himself, and these things could happen, had happened. He remembered suddenly the hideous scene outside the dungeons in Francesca da Ramini when that beast-jewel brother goes into the helpless prisoners. He remembered the sick horror of those groans. He remembered also various excursions of his in the terror of London and the scenery of Florence, and the sight of old rings and stakes and racks and the feeling of their total unrelatedness to every actuality. And yet they had happened, and this thing, for all its fantastic medieval horror, was happening. Brick by brick the imprisoning wall was rising. Brick by brick it intervened between him and sane, sensible, happy, normal life. Eye for eye he gave the general back his look. He had always wondered about the poor devils in underground torture chambers. Had wondered how they had the stuff to hold out against such odds, for some belief, some information. Now he knew the stiffening stuff of a personal hate, upholding to the very grave. That sardonic devil's face, that face which was going back upstairs to Amy, but he must not think of that, or he should give way and begin to babble, to plead. He must simply stand and meet that glance. And there came that incredible insane moment when Ryder looked out on that face through one last breathing space, and then saw the fitted brick settled into place, blot the world to darkness before his eyes. CHAPTER XV OF THE FORTYTH DOOR This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. THE FORTYTH DOOR by Mary Hastings Bradley CHAPTER XV UNDERGROUND Alone in the gloom of that strange room Amy sat rigid, listening, not a sound beyond the closed door from the long drawing-room, not a sound beyond the other door from the room where the slave Fatima waited to assist in her disrobing. Silence everywhere, for a low lapping of water against the masonry beneath her windows. The palace was on the river then, or on some old backwater. She remembered glimpses of dark canals on her drive that morning, had it only been that morning? The sound of that soft, hidden water added to her feeling of isolation and remoteness from everything that had been her life before. She thought fleetingly almost indifferently of her friends, Azima, who today had crowned her for happiness, and fawned foolish old Miriam and Madame de Coulivan, and Tufik Pasha, weakly cruel but amiable. She thought of them all as unreal figures from whom she had long taken leave. The old life was over. It had died for her when she passed through the dark doorway and met that arrogant, sardonic, fatuous man, the master of this palace, or more truly, that old life had died for her when she had flung a black mantle about her chiffon frock, and a street veil across her sparkling face, and had stolen, daring and breathless, into the lights and revelry of that hotel masquerade. There, when she had shrunk back from the Harlequin, and had looked up to meet the kindling glance of that mask and tartans, yes, there, the old life had died for her forever if only she had known it. And now, she would only like to die too, she thought miserably, after she had been assured of Rider's safety. She was tense with fear for him, distrusting in every fiber the assurance of that fanatic, outraged Turk. She was not utterly resourceless. When Rider's revolver had dropped to the floor, she had maneuvered, unseen by Hamdi Bey, to get her train over it, and when she had stooped for her train her one free hand had closed over the revolver handle beneath the satin and lace. Now the revolver lay on the divan, and very eagerly she drew it out, feeling it in the darkness, curling her finger about the trigger. Never in her life had she fired a shot, for her most formidable weapon had been the bows and arrows of the children's archery contest of the English club. But she felt in herself now that high strung density that at all cost would carry her on. Carefully she bestowed the small, steel thing in the bosom of her dress. Then she stared questioningly at the dress itself, hastily unpinning her veil, and tying the long train up to her girdle. Then with a wary glance for the closed door behind which waited that Fatima she dreaded, she stole to the door the general had shot and pressed it softly ajar, peering out into the deserted throne room. Like a great cave of darkness the room stretched before her, peopled with goblin shadows from the dying candles upon the disordered abandoned table. She saw the chair pushed back where she had risen to struggle with the bay, the long folds of white cloth sweeping the floor behind which Hamdi had rolled so agilely. A stain was still spreading about an upset glass, and from the overturned cooler the ice water was dripping, dripping, with a steady, sinister implication. She thought a flight. There was another black the general had warned her beyond the door, and there would be bars and bolts on any egress from the harem, but with the revolver in her possession some desperate escape might be achieved. But rider, no, the gun was for another purpose. She would not squander it yet upon herself. From the boudoir she moved slowly, carrying one of the gilt candelabra from the table to light the room. She would need light for her plan. For ages, long unending ages she sat there waiting. A hundred times it seemed to her that she could stand no more, that she must make her way out at all costs, must discover what fate they were dealing to rider, but still she forced herself to sit there, her pulses racing, her heart sick with suspense, but desperately waiting. She felt a sudden wave of weakness go through her at an advancing step from the next room. But her chin was up, her eyes fixed and desperate, as the figure of the general appeared in her opening door. Ah, light! This is more cheerful, little one. She had risen, half moved towards him. Is he safe? The stranger? Safeest treasure. Very treasure, little one. The bay laughed, and that laughter and the glittering satisfaction of his eyes filled her with foreboding, although his next words came with smiling reassurance. Not a hair of his head is hurt. I give you my word. But where is he? What have you done? Shut him up, to be sure. Kept him as hostage for your sweet humility. A novel way to win a bride, O essence of shyness. Malevolently he smiled down at her, and in the back of her frightened mind she realized that this man did well to be angry, that the affront to him had been immeasurable, and that many a Turk would have simply driven his dagger through the intruder's heart and her own, too. But though she tried to tell herself that there was forbearance in him, she felt instinctively that there was deeper kindness in direct thrusting fury than in this man's sinister mockery. She had sunk back upon the divan upon the bay's approach. Now as he stood before her with that mask of a smile upon his face, drawing a silk handkerchief across the forehead she saw glistening in the candlelight, she leaned towards him again, her hands involuntarily clasping. Miss Yure, I seem to have done you a great wrong, she said tremblingly, but it is not so great as you suppose. Will you listen to me? I— Useless. Useless. He waved the handkerchief negligently at her. I have had words enough. You are not the daughter of Tufik Pasha, you are his stepdaughter. Your French family desires to capture you. I know that rigor marole by heart you observe. And, of course, when a French family desires to obtain possession of a charming stepdaughter on the eve of her marriage, that family always employs a handsome young man to break into the bride's chamber and point a gun at the husband. His mustache lifted in a grimacing sneer. But it is true, I am French, she interposed swiftly. Excellent, I do not object in the least. He shot his handkerchief up his cuff, and turned to her with eyes that lightly mocked the agonized appeal of the young face. French blood is delightful, quick silver and champagne. You will enliven me, I promise you. But the marriage it is not legal-mature, she said desperately, summoning all her courage. Tufik Pasha has no right to give me to you. Indulgently he smiled down at her, and his narrowed eyes travelled slowly about the room. But this is a strange time and place to talk of legalities. Do not distress yourself. Your stepfather is your guardian, and your marriage will be as binding as the Oce of the Prophet. Have no qualms. And now, if your French blood will smile a little, he started to seat himself beside her. But in that instant she was on her feet. With all the courage in her beating heart she whipped out that revolver and pointed it at him. If you call, I shoot, she said breathlessly. The round mouth of the gun shook ever so slightly in the excited hand gripping it. But in the blazing look she turned on him was the unshaken, imperious passion of a woman swept absolutely beyond all fear. Meeting that look Hamdi Bey stood extremely still and made no sound. There are plenty of shots for you at the first noise and for the servants if they come. She went on in that fierce undertone, and then, passionately, what did you do to him? Take me to him at once. Irresolutely the man stood and looked up at her under his half lowered lids. He was near enough for a spring, and yet if that excited finger should press, the girl was capable of anything. She was possessed, and men had died of such accidents before that. May I speak? He murmured in a tone scarcely audible, yet preserving somehow its flavor of sardonic amusement. Under your breath, one sound, remember, and I am a very good shot. But what a wife! he sighed, all the talons. I tell you that I will see him for myself. Take me to him this moment. Shall I give orders, and have him brought here? He is quite safe, I assure you. Orders? If you summon a servant I will shoot. No, lead the way, and I will follow you, and if you make one sound, one false move. Decidedly the girl was possessed. She stood there like a white image of war, her hand on that infernal automatic. He hesitated, nod his mustache, then swung sullenly upon his heel. Like some fantastic sculpture from an Amazonian triumph, they crossed the long drawing-room, the erect, guilt-braided general proceeding very slowly, the white-clad feminine creature who held one hand extended, with something boring almost into his shoulder blades. He did not lead her down the long stairs past the guarding eunuch. He took instead an inner way through the late supper-room, which led down into the Pillard Hall of Banquets. That way was safe of servants now, crossing the Pillard Hall. There were no more sounds of late work from the service-quarters beyond. Oblivious of the wild developments of that wedding reception, the tired servants, stuffed with the last pasty, warmed with the last surpicious drop of wine, or asleep at last. Outside the door in the stone wall, the bay took down the lantern, which showed short a time before he had replaced upon its nail and lighted its still smoking wick. He had not restored the key to Yusuf, and he drew it now from his pocket, and fitted it into the lock, drawing back the door. These stairs are steep, he murmured. I hardly like you to descend them, unaided. But if you insist, go on, she said imperiously. Down he went, and after him she came, following the way he led her down the long stone underground ways. We have, of course, very pleasant stairs down to our Watergate, he murmured apologetically. But since you prefer this way, really not the way that I would have chosen to have you first explore your palace, madame. These you perceive are the cellars and old storerooms. I do not want you to talk, she said urgently. But you would not shoot me for it, only for raising an alarm. And surely you cannot be unreasonable about a few words. You must be very careful here, this doorway is low. It was not past the old ruined mosque included in the palace's underground world that he was leading her, but down a narrow branching way, between walls so low that the general's head was bowed in caution. This part of the palace is very old, he murmured over his shoulder. An ancestor of mine, Chayar the Wazir, raised these walls during the wars for the dispensing of that sacred duty of hospitality which Allah enjoins upon the faithful. It is reported that he was host here to fifty of the enemy during their remaining lifetime, although they had the delicacy not to cumber him with overlong living. It is not, as I said, a pleasant place, but the walls are strong, and so I selected a spot here. Here, somewhere, then in these grim ruins, rider was penned, helpless and questioning the to-morrow. The girl trembled with excitement when she thought of his joy, his deliverance, and at her hands. For their escape she had no plans, only the decision to thrust the gun into his hands and follow him unquestioningly. Perhaps they could leave the general in his place and he would wear the general's uniform for disguise. Everything was possible now that she was nearing him and his safety was at hand. She thrilled with a reanimating excitement that flew its scarlet banners in her cheeks. Only a few steps now. Go on, she said breathlessly. The bay had stopped and now flashed his lantern over a low timber door, studded with ancient nail heads in a design whose artistry did not arrest her. From a peg inside it he took down a key of brass, fitted it to the lock, and turned it with a deliberation maddening to her tense nerves. Her heart was beating as if it would burst its bounds, only a moment or two. He had trouble with that door. It took his shoulder. At last he set it swinging inward slowly on its creaking hinges. Then he stepped back and with a wave of his hand invited her to enter. Not a chamber of luxury you understand but substantial as you will see. Go first. She ordered. He laughed. Ever distrustful little thorn of the rose. Follow then. And he stepped within into the darkness which his failing lantern but little illumined. Calling out in a latter tone in his halting English, a visitor, my friend, a tourist of the Subterranean. She had followed him to the threshold, seeing nothing in the blackness but the seemed blocks of stone within the lantern's rays, afraid always to turn her eyes from him or her hand from its outstretched pointing. He said very quickly to her in Turkish, if you will wait by the door the floor is bad and there is another lantern here on the wall. At her left he fumbled along the stone wall. She heard him mutter and then reach and then she did not know what was happening for the very ground on which she stood, the solid block of stone began to slip swiftly beneath her feet. She staggered and felt herself falling, falling, into some precipitately opened abyss. She gave a wild scream, flinging out her arms in terror and then cold waters closed above her and the scream ended in a gurgling cry. It was no great distance that she fell what the drop stone had revealed answering the signal of the old lever in the wall that the general had pressed was a stone well, narrow, deep, implanted there by some ingenious lord of the palace in bygone days for the subtle elimination of friend or foe or rival. But it was not part of Hamdi's plan to leave the young girl there and close the obliterating stone. Scarcely had the waters met above her head, then he was flinging down a rope ladder whose upper ends were fastened to rings in the floor and ascending this with swift agility until the waters reached his waist. Then he leaned out and clutched the floating satin bubbling and ballooning get unsubmerged above the stagnant depths and drew it towards him. As the struggling girl came gasping within his reach he carried her panting up the ladder again and later down in the darkness while he drew up the ladder and closed the stone by pressing that hidden lever. But the stone which had dropped so swiftly was slow and heavy in slipping back in place and when he turned again to Amy she had ceased her choking cough and was sitting up, thrusting back the dripping hair from her black eyes, staring bewilderly about the gloom as murky as any genie's cave. The lantern light was almost out. In its expiring gleam she saw no more inky water but only the damp morse-grown stones on which a pool was widening from her wet garments and the half-defined figure of the general stooping over to squeeze the streams from his own wet clothes. The nightmarish horror of it overwhelmed her. For a moment she could have screamed with horror and then she felt a cold and terrible despair lay its paralyzing hand upon her heart. Somewhere she felt beneath those secret stones lay Ryder drowned and she was living in her helplessness. No revolver now that was gone in the water perhaps. There was no resource now, no refuge. Strength went out of her and passive in a dream of evil darkness she felt herself being harried stumblingly back through the secret corridors and the dark halls. End of Chapter 15 Chapter 16 of the 40th Door This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. The 40th Door by Mary Hastings Bradley. Chapter 16 Out of the Darkness There was no measure of time for Ryder in that walled coffin of death. The seconds seemed hours, the minutes ages. He drew quick short breaths as if economizing the air that was so soon to fail him. He tugged at his bonds till the veins rose on his forehead but the silk held and the confines of the prison permitted him no room for struggle. Then he leaned forward to press with all his might upon the bricks before him. He grunted. He sweated with the agony of his exertions but not a brick was stirred, not a crack was made in the mortar that gripped them tighter every instant. He died a thousand deaths in the horror that invaded him then. Already he felt strangling and the painful pumping of his heart seemed the beginning of the end. Cold sweat stood out all over him. It ran down his face in trickling streams and his body was drenched with that clammy dew of fear. He tried to count the minutes, the hours, to estimate how long he would hold out. And then he heard his own voice sang very distinctly and clearly and dispassionately. This thing is absurd. It was absurd. It was idiotic. It was utterly irrational. It was an impossible end for an able-bodied young American, an excavator of no mean attainments, a young scholar and explorer of 20th century science, a sane, modern, harmless young man, to die immured in the ancient walls of a Turkish palace because he had invaded a marriage reception and intervened between man and wife. Violent death in any form must always appear absurd to the young and energetic, but the fantastic horror of his death removed it definitely from any realm of possibility. The thing simply could not happen. He thought of the amazement and the incredulity of his friends. Dangers and plenty they had warned him against, to his youthful amusement, sandstorms and chills and raw fruit and unboiled waters, but they had not warned him against veiled women and the resentments of outraged lords and masters. He thought of his mother's consternation and dismay. He thought of his father's stern amazement, but an awful jolt it would give them, he reflected, with an irrational tickling of young humor. But no, it would not. They would never know. Not a word of this fate would percolate into the world without. Not a comment upon his true end would enliven the daily columns of the East Middleton Monitor. Never would it regret the tragic and romantic internment of a young native son of talent buried alive by a revengeful general of the sultan. He amused himself by writing the paragraph that would never be written. Then he told himself that he was lightheaded and hysterical, and that he had better wonder what would actually be written, what explanation would be found. A desert storm, perhaps, or some accident, McLean would poke about, but for all McLean knew he might be on his way back to camp that very moment, and sometimes he went by sailing canoe and a rented horse, and sometimes by the accredited steamer and a camel, and sometimes by tram or train to the nearest station. Even McLean's mind and McLean's cops wouldn't make much of all the alternatives that his unsettled habits had afforded. Was there any possibility of his being traced, of any rescue reaching him? He thought hard and long upon his last free moments. Ginny Jeffries knew that he was in the palace, and Ginny had been reiteratedly warned about the danger of portraying that knowledge. It would take some little time for alarm before Ginny said anything, and it would take a little time for Ginny to begin to worry. He had not been so instant in attendance upon Ginny of late, for all their residents in the same hotel, that she would suspect that his absence of 24 hours was due to actual incarceration. His cursed passion for freedom in which to ramble up and down that deserted lane without Tufik Pasha's garden, his inane love of solitary mooning. No, Ginny would not soon wonder about him. She had not expected to see him that evening anyway. He had muttered something to her about a man and an engagement. She would rather look to see him the next day and talk about their adventure. But still she would feel no more than peak at his absence. Positive worry would not develop until later. Besides all the revelations that Ginny could make would do no good. Ginny could only report that he had maintained a disguise at a wedding reception, and talked a few moments apparently undetected to a bride. Hamdi Bey and Hamdi's eunuchs would be blandly ignorant of such a scandal. What his disappearance would indicate would be some further frolic on his part, some tempting of a later providence before he had abandoned his disguise, if he were discovered, for instance, in some of those native quarters behind a woman's veil. Decidedly the only effect of Ginny's revelations would be an unsavory cloud upon his character. There was no hope to be looked for. And yet he could not believe it. There were moments when the Black Terror mastered him, but involuntarily his young strength shook it off. He could not believe in its reality. He could not believe that he was actually here, bricked and bound in this infernal coffin. But indisputably the evidence was in favor of belief. Only to believe was to feel again that horror. He tried to tell himself that it didn't matter. One had to die some time. Everybody did. One might as well go out young and strong and still interested in life. But that was remarkably cold comfort. He didn't want to go out at all. He didn't want to die, not for fifty or sixty years yet. And of all the ways of dying he wanted least to smother and choke and stifle like a rat walled in its hull in the wall. He recalled with peculiar pain a woodchuck that he had penned up as a boy, and he hoped with extraordinary passion that the poor beast had made another hull. Never again he resolved would he pen up a living creature, never again, if only again he could see the light of day and breathe the free air. He thought of Amie, and when he thought of her his heart seemed to turn to water, useless to repeat to himself now those old reminders that he had seen her so little, known her so slightly, useless to measure that strange feeling that drew him by any artifice of time and acquaintance. She was Amie, she was enchantment and delight, she was appeal and tenderness, she was blind longing and mystery, she was beauty and desire. Even to think of her now, in the infernal horror of this cramping grave, was to feel his heart quicken and his blood grow hot in a helpless passion of dread and fear. She was alone there, helpless with that madman. He tried to tell himself that she was not wholly helpless, that she had wit and spirit and courage, and that somehow she would manage to quell the storm. She might persuade Hamdi to their story, make him remember that this was the twentieth century, wherein one does not go about emuring inconvenient trespassers as in the earlier days of the mad-cadieve, years which had probably formed the general's impulses, but in telling himself this there was no comfort for the thought of the price that Amie would have to pay. It was pleasanter to pretend that Hamdi was really only joking in a shockingly exaggerated, practical way, and that presently, when the suitable time had elapsed, he would present himself, smiling, to end the ghastly, antiquated jest. For some time he continued to tell himself that. And then suddenly he told himself that the time for intervention had surely come. It was very hard to breathe. The next minute he was assuring himself that this was merely some devil's trick of his apprehensive imagination. There must be a great deal of air left. But he was distressingly ignorant of the contents of air, and his calculations were lamentably unsupported by any sound basis of fact. Mistake not to have gone in for chemistry and physics. A chap who'd done time in those subjects wouldn't now be rocking with suspense. He'd comfortably and satisfactorily know just how many hours, minutes, and seconds were allotted before his finish, and he could think his thoughts accordingly. Undoubtedly so he insisted to himself, there was air enough here to last him till morning. This gasping stuff was all imagination. He wanted to keep cool and quiet. But for all his reassurance there was something a little queer with his lungs, and his heart was lurching sickeningly in his side like a runaway ship's engine. And then he heard his own voice repeating very tonguelessly. Oh God! Oh God! And the horror of it all came blackly over him, and a feeling of profound and awful sickness. It was a sound. The faintest scraping and knocking without that wall. It went through him like an electric current, and then a roar burst from him that fairly split his ears, the reaction of his quivered nerves and racking fears of his uncertainties, his tightening terrors. But now nothing. He could not hear a thing. A delusion? A torture of his final hours? No, it came again. More definitely now. A little grinding and scraping. Faster and faster. A muffled, driving thud. A jubilant reassurance sang gaily through him. He had expected this. This was what he had predicted. Hamdi was no foul friend. He was a devilish, uncomfortable customer with antiquated notions of revenge. But now he had shot his sword and was going to undo his tricks. Brighter braced himself to present a carefree jauntiness, an air somewhat difficult to assume when one is thrust like a spitted bird in a hot coffin space, with hair full and dankly over a steaming brow, with a collar like a string, and an indescribable pallor beneath the bronze of one's face. Something stirred. One end of a brick was driven in against his chest. Then he felt the blind working of some tool that caught it and worried it free. It seemed to him that through the dark aperture a current of cold, delicious air came rushing in about him. The blows sounded against the adjoining bricks, and he thought of the glorious joy of seeing out again, feeling that he would welcome even the sight of Hamdi's blonde mustache and the eunuch's hideous grin. Now the aperture emitted a pale gleam upon his chest. Staring steadily down, he caught a glimpse of the fingers curving about a brick and his heart that had steadied began to race again wildly, for they were not the fingers of the black nor yet the wiry joints of the general. They were soft white fingers with a gleam of rings. Amie! Somehow, somewhere, she had managed to come to him to achieve this rescue. Amie! he breathed the name. Shhh! came a warning little whisper, and impatiently he waited until that opening should be greater and permit of sight and speech. His helplessness was maddening. If only he could raise his hands could get those bonds off. He twisted, he writhed. He tried to lift his elbows and get his wrists in reach of the opening, but the coffin was too diabolically cramped for movement until the hole was very much larger. Then with a convulsive pressure he swung his wrists within reach, and after a moment's wait he felt a thin blade drawn across the silk. The relief was glorious. He swung his hands free, rubbing the chafed wrists, then thrust an open hand out into the opening, and with an instant comprehension a short pointed bit of iron was put within it. Now he could do something. With furious strength he attacked the bricks edging the hole, and as he pried free each brick he could again get a glimpse of those white delicate fingers lifting it carefully away. And now the hole was large enough. He twisted about and thrust out a leg, and then with a feeling of ecstasy which made the official literary raptures of saints and conquerors but pale dim moods he wormed his way out of that jagged hole and turned, erect and free to the shrouded figure of his rescuer. She had drawn back a little against the wall, a gauzy veil across her face. Beside her upon the stone floor a solitary candle sent its flickering rays into the shadows, edging with light her slender outlines. Rider took one quick step to her, his heart and his throat, and put out eager arms. But in the very moment that he was gathering her to him, even when he felt her pliant body, at first resistant, then softly yielding, swept against his own, he felt to, a little palm suddenly upon his mouth. Hush! said the soft whispering voice, cutting into his low murmur of Aimee. And then in slow emphatic caution, be careful. He had need of that caution, for under the saffron veil was not the face of Aimee. He was clasping a young creature that he had never seen before. A girl with flaming henna hair and cold darkened brows. A vivid, blazing face that smiled enigmatically with a certain mockery of delight at the amazement he reflected so unguardedly. CHAPTER 17 Aziza From the slackening grip of his astounded arms she stepped backward, still smiling faintly, and holding up in admonishment the palm she had pressed against his mouth. But what, what the dev, muttered Rider. She nodded mysteriously and beckoned. Come, she whispered, catching a percandle, and after holding it high for a moment, staring at him, she extinguished it suddenly and turned to lead the cautious way across the stone spaces while Rider closely followed. Not Aimee then, but some messenger he could only suppose. Some confidant at need. A handmaid? The whisper of her silks, the remembered gleam of jewels in the henna hair, flouted that thought, and not troubling his ingenuity with alternatives he was content to follow her swift steps. They were now in those open, rubbishy spaces where he remembered the crumbling masonry and broken arches of old disregarded mosques. Now they were again enclosed in narrow stone walls, winding past cellars and storerooms. The girl's advance grew more cautious. Often she stopped and listened, peering ahead into the darkness, and now, as she took another turning, her care redoubled and Rider needed no exhortation to imitate it. Obeying a gesture of her arm he followed at a greater distance, prepared at the warning of a sound to flatten himself against the wall or dart into some cranny of retreat. They were now in the cellars. The corridor was widening out before them, the pallid showing of light, crossed with many bars at some far end. They stole towards it. It was a window or barred gate he saw, and he heard again that lapping of restless water against stone. He could see too in the dimness the curve of a stair near the gate. Abruptly his guide checked him. Wary and noiseless he waited while she stole forward to those stairs, peering up into the gloom, attentive for any sound from above. Apparently satisfied, she went on towards the barred gate and bent down over a spot of darkness which Rider had taken for a shadow. He saw now that it had some semblance to a human outline. Closely the girl bent and he caught the pallor of her hands, searching swiftly. And then a muffled clink. Next moment a wraith with soundless steps, she was back at his side again, urging him on with her. They passed the stairs. He felt the soft yield of carpet beneath his feet. They passed that recumbent figure, and now he heard the rhythm of a sleeper's heavy breath escaping muffledly from the folds of a thick mantle which the sleeper's habits had wrapped about his head. For all the mantle he was aware of the fumes of wine. I saw that Jafar had his drink, said the girl suddenly, and soft whispered Turkish, her head close to his. He is my friend. I do not neglect him. And under her breath she laughed, as she exhibited the great bunch of keys she had taken from the imbibre. Stooping now before the gate, she fitted the key into the lock. Then over her shoulder she looked up at the young man, and asked him a quick question. He did not understand. That was the trouble with his vernacular. It would go on very well for a time, when he had a clue to the sense, or when it was a question of everyday expression. But a sudden divergence, an unexpected word, was apt to prove a hopeless obstacle. Now she repeated her question again more slowly, and again he shook his head. Now she stood up frowning a little and began again in English. You know, I not know. This way, you do it? A sudden smile broke over her face, as she made a swift pushing gesture with her hands, that with her pointing to the water outside, sent Ryder a sudden enlightenment. Swim? You mean do I swim? She nodded. Not go, she made a swift downward movement of her hands, and then pointed again to that water just outside the gate. Not go down, not sink, interpreted Ryder? No, indeed, I can swim, he assured her. And revisited with smiling satisfaction, she knelt again before the barred gate. Opened its swung was so sharp a crack that both glanced at the figure behind them, and then at the shadowy gloom of the stairs. But no alarm sounded. Outside the gate Ryder saw the darkness of fairly wide rippling waters, visited with floating stars, and beyond a low-lying, done bank. Escape was there. Freedom. Safety. He felt an exultant longing to plunge in and strike out, but he turned, questioningly, to the mysterious rescuer. Amie, he said under his breath, where is she? He repeated it in the vernacular, distrusting her English, and in the vernacular she answered, you want her? You want to take her away with you? She laughed softly at the quick flash in his eyes, and hardly waited for his speech. Good, what a lover, you are not afraid. Mandaciously he assured her that he was not. Good, she said again, with a showing of white teeth between her car-mind lips. You take her. You take her away from him. That is what I want, you understand? Very suddenly he understood. The fortieth door, by Mary Hastings Bradley, Chapter 18, Aziza, is offended. This was no emissary from Amie. This was no philanthropic bystander. This was some girl of the palace, jealous and daring, conspiring shrewdly for the removal of her rival. Take her away, she was saying urgently, out of this palace. We want no brides here. Lowering and sullen, she turned bitter on the word. Tonight I was watching, she went on swiftly. I heard the noise, and then the whispering. The darkness has ears and eyes and a tongue, and so I waited out there. He could not distinguish all the quick flow of her speech, but he caught enough to understand how she had lurked in the halls jealously spying, defying the eunuch's authority, and how she had caught with passionate delight that stifled alarm of scandal. Later, hanging over some banister, she had seen the Ethiopian pass with his burden, and had stolen down afterwards, stalking like a cat, and had discovered the lantern gone, the door unlocked, and then she had watched until the pair emerged without the burden. She had not been able to get hold of the key to the door. But she had resolved to explore, and so she had furnished the watermen with his wine, drugged, Ryder gathered, and so stolen passed him on the other route to those underground foundations to which her suspicions had been directed by the mortar and dust upon Yusuf. Evidently she knew the possibilities of the place, and the mind of its master, and when she found the old niche freshly bricked and mortar at hand, she had not needed more to assure her that here was the burial place of her rival's lover. Now for the boon of his life he was to relieve her of that rival, or try to. For once he might not kill her, she whispered, but if again. Her eyes glowed like a cat's in the dark. Take her away. Make her name a spitting and a disgrace. Her memory a shame and a sting. Is she beautiful? She broke off to demand. They say, but slaves lie. Can you believe a lover? he said whimsically for all his impatience. She is a pearl, a rose, a crescent moon. They say she is very pale and thin. She is a hurly from paradise, he said distinctly. And now, in the name of Allah, let me get to her. Tell me the way. Will she go gladly with you? The low insistent voice went on, and at his quick nod. Holy Prophet! What a bride! She clapped her two ring-tans to smother the impish joy of her laugh. A warning to those who can be warned. He will not be so eager for another stripe from that same stick. It was his cousin, Saniha Hanam, Satan devour her, who made this marriage. Always she hated me. But now I will tell you how to get her. Look out with me. Kneeling at the gate over the dark flow of the water, she drew him down beside her, and thrusting out her veiled head, she pointed upward and to the right to a jutting balcony of Meshrubye, where a pale light shows through the fretwork. There, you see, that is my room, and if you climb up I can let you in. There, up! She repeated in English, resolved to make certain. I see I can get there, he assured her, measuring with his eye the dim distance. At once, she said, I will be there. I cannot take you with me through the upper hall. It is dangerous even for me to be caught. But no eunuch wants my displeasure. He could believe it, watching the subtle malicious daring of her face. Even in the gloom he caught the steady-lidded arrogance of her cold, darkened eyes, and the bold insolence of a high cheekbone. She had a hint of gypsy. And you can get me in? You're a wonder, he whispered. I can't thank you enough. Rid me of her, said the girl swiftly. But not, not him. You must swear. What is it that Christian swore by? She broke off to demand. By the grave of your father? Yes. You will swear not to hurt him, to hurt Hamdi. By the grave of your father, yes? Ryder nodded quickly. His father, to be sure, was in no grave at all. He was, allowing hastily for the difference in time, in his treasurer's cage at the bank in East Middleton. But he did not wait to explain this to the girl. I swear it, he repeated. I won't hurt your Hamdi, since that's your condition, but we're wasting time. Up, then, and if you fall down, do like this. Smiling mischievishly, she made the gesture of swimming. I'll go with thee. And with me also. He heard her murmur. As he stepped out to the ledge of the entrance, twisted himself agilely about, and climbing up the open gate, swung himself up to the stone carving overhead. Below him he heard the gate swing shut. He did not hear her locket. Fervently he hoped she had not, since it was a possible exit for anyone in a hurry, but at any rate he need not worry about a way out of the place until he had got into it again. And the getting-in was not any too simple. It was work for a mountain goat, he reflected, after a short interval devoted to tentative reaches and balancing and digging in of hands and feet. The distances were far greater than the first glimpse, for short and perspective had allowed him to guess, and there was only the starlight to illumine the gray face of the palace. He had no idea of the time. Somewhere about the middle of the night or early morning he judged vaguely by the stars, although it seemed impossible that so few hours had passed. The river was all silence and darkness. No nougars with their sleeping crews were moored below. He seemed the only living breathing thing clamoring across the face of time and space. Gingerly he kicked off the nondescript black shoes he had worn with his disguise that afternoon, and assayed a perilous toe hold while he reached for the interstices of a mesh ruby-a window just overhead. Once gripping the rounds he pulled himself up, reflecting that it was well it was night, and that no lady was sitting within her shelter to be affrighted at this intrusion of fingers and toes. From the jutting top of this projection he surveyed his further field of operation. The window with a light was two stories higher yet and to the right. There were two other windows with lights on the second story very much farther along, and he wondered painfully if these were the rooms of Amy. That boudoir in which he had hidden through the end of the long reception had been upon the water, and there had been a door into an adjoining room where he had seen a sallow-faced attendant passing in and out. A wild longing seized him to crawl on and over into those windows. But it was a difficult, almost an impossible distance, and even when there he would be like a fly on the outside of a pane with no way of getting in. The unknown girl had promised him a way through her window, and he had confidence in her ingenuity and daring. So he went on, worming cautiously along old gutters and ledges and jutting balconies, until at last he was clasping the lower grille of that mesh ruby-a from which her light gleamed. Instantly the light went out. Wait! he heard her voice say sharply over his head. She was standing by the window, fumbling with the woodwork, and in a moment he heard the click of a knob, and then, just opposite his head, the screening grille slipped aside and an aperture appeared. Quick! admonished the voice, and quickly indeed he drew himself up and in, reflecting whimsically as he did so, that this girl had first helped him out of a hole, and then into one. The next moment she had moved the grille into place and lifted the cover she had placed over her triplet of candles on a stand. Triumphant, her eyes dancing, her teeth a gleam of light between those scarlet lips of hers, she looked at him for the admiration she saw twinkling back at her in his eyes. But not me, no, she protested, her supple hands gesturing towards the magic casement. I found it here. It is very old, you'll understand. Some other, long ago, found time dull, and so. Delightedly she shared the flavor of that secret of the vagabond lady of long ago who had devised this cunning entrance for her lover. On some dark night like this, with the gatekeeper drowsy with old wine, some other stripling had climbed that worn façade before him, and slipped through the secret space and stood triumphantly before some daring, laughing girl who had cast aside for him her veil and her fear of death. What ingenuity, writer wondered flutely, had smuggled in the carpenter for the contrivance, what jewels had gone to the bribing, what lies had been told, what had been the end of it all? Evidently not the discovery of the opening. He hoped, with singular intensity for the safety of the daring young lovers, that unknown youth whose feet had forewarned the path for his feet, and that dead and gone young girl who had dared anything rather than endure the mortal ennui of those hours behind the veil. These thoughts all went through him like one thought as he stood there, his eyes roving about the dim, shadowy room of old devans and eastern hangings, and then turning back to the glimmering figure of its mistress. She was staring frankly at him, her eyes boldly curious and examining. They were not dark eyes, he saw now, that had been the impression given by the coal around them, and the black line of the brows penciled into one line. They were yellow eyes, golden and glowing, scornful and lazy-litted. As she looked at him, these eyes smiled slowly. She was seeing in this lover of her rival a singularly delightful-looking young man, for all his dust and disarray, a slender, bronzed, hearty-looking young man, with dark, disordered hair straying across a white brow, and audacious, eager eyes, in which the fear of death, so lately glimpsed, had left no daunting reflection. Slowly she lifted her hand, and with deliberate softness put back that straying hair of his, poor boy, she said slowly in English, and then smiling roofily, she held out her hands for his inspection. The grime of the bricks had discolored their scented delicacy, and he saw bruised fingertips in a torn nail. I'm infernally sorry, he said quickly. Her smile deepened at his look of concern, as he held a little helplessly the witnesses of her work of rescue which seemed somehow to stray into his keeping. It is nothing, but you, poor boy, she said again, in that English of which she seemed naively proud. If you could give me some water, he suggested, and drank deep with delight the last drop she brought him from an earthen jar, it seemed to wash from his throat the taste of that dust and fear. I can't begin to thank you, he murmured. I only wish that I could do something for you. She looked up at him. They were standing close together, their voices cautiously low. Perhaps, yes, you can. It's not doing anything for you to save Amy, he told her. That's what you are doing for her and for me, but if ever you want me for anything after this, my name is Ryder, Jack Ryder, and you can reach me at the agricultural bank. He had a vague vision of someday repaying his enormous debt by assisting this girl, grown tired of her humdy, out of this aperture and into a waiting boat. He would do it like a shot, he told himself gladly. He would do anything on God's green earth if only she helped him get Amy away from that infernal villain. Jack, she repeated under her breath, and then in her slow English, I like Jack. Don't forget it. I'll always come and do anything for you, and if you'll tell me your name, Aziza. Aziza, I'll never forget that. And now, if you'll tell me how I can get to her and then the best way out, why you so hurry? Why? He looked a little blank. I can't lose a minute, he may be with her. She came a little nearer to him, her head tilting back with a slow, indolent challenge. Gone was the silken mantle that had been about her below stairs, and he saw now that she was a vivid, exotic shimmer of gauzy green against the saffron veil that fell from her henna hair. There was barbaric beauty in her, in the bold, painted face, the bare, gold-banded arms, the slender, sinuous lines, and there was barbaric splendor in the heavy jewels that winked and flashed. It struck writer that she was gotten up, regardless, in pride, perhaps, on her rival's wedding night, or had there been some defiant, desperate design upon Hamdi? She did not miss that sudden prolonging of his look upon her. You like me, yes? she murmured, and then slipping back into the vernacular, I—I am not the stupid veiled girl of the seclusion, not forever. I come from the west, the deserts. I have seen the world, men, men I know. I dance before them, not the dances of the carine cafés, she uttered with swift scorn, but the dance of the two swords, the dance of the serpents. Men threw the gold from their turbans about my feet when I danced to them, and others, English, French. She broke off, but her eyes told many things. Then Hamdi, she said slowly, him I ruled, and his palace. But I have known other things. Closer yet she came to him. Her eyes, golden fires of eyes, were smiling up into his. Her scarlet lips gathered in soft, central curves. Her whole, silken, scented body seemed to slip into his embrace. A bare arm touched his neck, resting heavily. Sweet heart, she said slowly in her difficult English. It was the deuce of a position. No man can rudely snatch from his neck the arm of the lady who has just saved him from a harrowing death, and a lady who is risking more than her life in sheltering him. Decidedly the situation was delicate. It was not the lady's fault that her impetuosity, the impetuosity which had been his salvation, now plunged her into amorous caprice. There were obvious handicaps, moral, social, and ethical, in her upbringing. She was a child of nature, a nature undisciplined, unruly, tempestuous. An even queening over Hamdi and his palace must have offered little diversion to a wild dancing girl, familiar with the excitement of more varied conquest. Ryder was horribly embarrassed. He was visited with a fearful constraint, a chivalrous wish not to hurt her feelings, and a sharp provision of the danger of offending her. He took the first turn of least resistance. He did not need to bend his head, their eyes were on a level, he simply kissed her, and she kissed him back. He hated himself for the leap of his blood, and for the puritanical discomfort of his nature. Her arm about his neck was pressing closer. It was the moment for action, and Ryder acted. Very firmly he put his hand upon her hand, withdrew it from its clasp about him, and raised it to his lips. His kiss was respectful gratitude and an abdication of the delights of dalliance. Goodbye, my dear, he murmured. Now, if you will show me the way out. Her eyes agleamed between half-closed lids she studied him. It occurred to Ryder that probably never before had her hands been detached, and kissed, and put away. He must be a phenomenon, an enigma. Then her eyes parted in a faintly scornful smile. You afraid? You? You want to run? I'm horribly afraid, he said earnestly. I want to get out of here as quick as I can. That was pudding, he considered, the very wisest construction upon it. Negligently her gesture reminded him of the opening in the window. Here you are safe, she murmured in the vernacular, and the doors are locked. Yes, but Amy isn't safe, you know, and I must get her out of here. Amy? In those yellow eyes he caught the flash of capricious resentment at the reminder. Then indifferently she brushed the distraction away. There is time enough for Amy. She is not lonely now. Not lonely? He shivered at the cold carelessness of her tone. I must get to her quickly then. But it is not safe. A little later. Uncomfortably he tried to infuse his glance with innate innocence and utter lack of understanding. I shan't hurt him if I have the chance, he told her, I've given you my word. And I trust you much. Her gaze sought his in a trifle of impatience at such simplicity. But it is not safe for you now, later. Bye and bye. You don't want him to have a chance to make love to her, do you? said Rider sharply. I thought that was the very thing you didn't. Her smile was a subtle confessing caress. I shall have my revenge, she murmured, and pressed closer to him again. Every sensuous, sumptuous line of her, a challenge and an enticement. I give you life, she whispered very low in her throat. You give me, perhaps, an hour? I haven't an hour, said Rider very desperately and unhappily. Not when Amy is with that devil. It took every thought of Amy to get the words out. He felt abrut about it. A low ungrateful dog. She had given him life and every fiber in him clamor to save her pride and champion her caprice. It seems so dastardly to wrench away from her now, like some self-centered Joseph, leaving that beastly stab in her vanity. And she was a stunning creature, lawless, elemental, hot and cold like the seventh wind of the inferno. But it was Amy who was in his blood like a fever. Amy, that frail white rose of a girl in her bonds of terror. He saw the flame in Aziza's eyes. He saw the stiffening of her defiance, of half incredulous affront. Then her form drawn up, her bared arms outflung, her vivid painted, furious face challenging him. I am not beautiful like Amy, she said in the voice of Venom, and in the English for double measure. You not like me? No? You are beautiful, and I do like you, Rider combatted, feeling a bungling fool, and then went on to thrust into that half second of suspended fury a faint breath of appeasing. But don't you see it's my duty? You go, she said clearly. Even in that moment he had a sharp prescience of the unwisdom of his rejection. A cold calculator of chance and probabilities would have reckoned that a half hour of assuagement here would have been a wiser investment of his mortal moments than any virtuous plunge into single-hearted duty. But Rider did not calculate. He could not, with Amy under that beast's hand. His heart and soul were possessed with her danger, and his heart and soul carried his body instinctively back from the Dancing Girl's advance, and he whispered, I must go, there is no time. She flung back her fiery-hued head with a gesture of intolerable rage. Her eyes were lightnings, dog of a Christian, she said chokingly, and flew to the doors. Backed she thrust the heavy hangings, turning a quick key in the lock and wrenching the door wide, and before Rider could understand, before he could bring himself to realize that she was not simply violently expelling him from her room, she gave a shriek that rang wildly down the long unseen corridors. At the top of her lungs, with one hand out to thrust him back or cling to him if he attempted to pass, she shrieked again and again. Instantly there came a running of feet. CHAPTER XIX. An interruption. When Hamdi Bey had taken Amy back to her apartments, he pulled sharply upon a bell-court. In a few moments the slave-woman Fatima made her appearance. No kindly eyed old crone like Miriam, but a sallow, furtive-faced creature was an old disfiguring scar across the cheek. The general pointed to the wet and fainting girl huddling weakly upon the devan. Your new mistress has met with an accident out boating. A curse upon me for gratifying forbidden caprice, he said crisply. Be silent of this, and array her quickly in garments of rest. I will return. Very hurriedly he took himself and his own wet condition away. He was furious through and through. What a night! What a wedding night! Scandal and frustration! A bride with a desperate lover, a bride who, herself, drew revolvers and threatened. It was beyond any old tale of the palace. For less girls had had his father's dagger driven through their hearts. His grandfather, at a mere whisper from a eunuch, had given his favorite to the lion. The whisper was found incorrect at a later, too late date, and the eunuch had furnished the lion another meal. His modern leniency in this case would have outraged his ancestors. But it was not in the bae's nature to deal the finishing stroke to anything so soft and lovely as a me. He had no intention of depriving himself of her. If she were read with guilt he would feign belief in her, to save his face until his infatuation was gratified. But actually he did not believe in any great guilt of hers. Tufik Pasha, for all his indulgent modernity, would keep too strict a harem for that. What he rather believed had happened was that the young American, now so happily immured in his masonry, had become aware of the girl through the story of her French father, and in that connection had struck up the clandestine and romantic correspondence which had led to their mutual infatuation and his desperate venture there that afternoon. The young man had been dealt with, and the thought of the very summary and competent way he had been dealt with drew the fangs from the bite of that night's invasion. His fury felt soothingly glutted. He had been a match for them both. He recalled his own subtlety and agility with a genuine smile as he exchanged his dripping uniform for more informal trousers and a house coat. He had taught that young man a lesson, a final and ultimate lesson, and he was beginning to teach one to that girl before he was done with her. He felt for her a mingled passion for her beauty and a lust for conquest of her resistant spirit that fed every base and cruel instinct of his nature. A find, a rare find, even with her circumvented lover, he would have his sport with her. But though he promised this to himself with feline relish, apprehension and chagrin were still working. The fond fatuity which which he had welcomed that starry-eyed little creature had been rudely overthrown, and his pride smarted at the idea of the whispers that might echo and re-echo through his palace. He was too wise an old hand to flatter himself that it would preserve its bland and silent unawareness of this night. So far he believed he had been unobserved. In use of silence he had absolute confidence, but of course there were a hundred other chances, some spying back-stairs eye, some curious straining ear. And for this matter of the boating mishap he cursed himself now as he combed up his fair mustaches and settled a scarlet fez upon his thin thatch of graying hair, cursed himself roundly for his malicious resort to that old oubliet. Anything else would have done to frighten and overwhelm her, and yet he had gratified his dramatic itch, and now had paid for it with that idiotic story of the boating expedition. He had reason to trust Fatima. There was history behind the old sword scar upon her cheek, and he had a hold over her through her ambition for a son. But Fatima was a woman, and she, or some other, who would see that drenched satin would be curious of that boating story. And, of course, they could find out from the boatman. It occurred to him to go and see the boatman and order him away so that afterward the man could say he had been sent off duty, and the story of a nocturnal river trip would not appear too incredible. It was a small concession to stop Gossip's mouth. So, drawing on a swinging military cloak, the general stole down through the stair of the water entrance into the lower hall, where the pale light gleamed through the cross-part iron of the gate, and the gatekeepers slept like a log in his muffling cloak. The soundness of that slumber, loudly attested by the fumes of wine, afforded the general a profound pleasure. He took the man's keys softly, and went to the gate. It afforded him less pleasure to observe that the gate was unlocked, but he put this down to the keeper's muddle-headedness. Carefully he turned the lock and pocketed the keys, for a lesson to the man's over-deep sleep in the morning, and to attest his own presence there that night. Then he went back and brought out an oar which he placed conspicuously beside the smallest boat, drawn up just within the gates. He was afraid to alter the boat's position, lest the noise should prove too wakening, but he considered he had laid an artistic foundation for his story, and with a gratifying sense of triumph he mounted the stairs. He was not conscious of fatigue. He had always been a wiry, indefaggable person, and the alarms and emotions of this night had cleared his head of its wines and drowsiness. He felt the sense of tense, high-strung power which came to him in war, in fighting, in any element of danger. Youth, he snapped his fingers at it. Youth was buried in his masonry, and helpless in its shuttered room. Power was master. Power, craft, subtlety. But his elation ebbed as he crossed again that long drawing-room with its faded flowers about the marriage-throne, and its abandoned table with its cloth askew, its crystal disarrayed, its candles gutted and spent. The memory of that insolent moment when a man's hand had gripped him had whirled him from Amy, when a man's voice and gun had threatened him. That memory was too overpowering for even his triumph over the invader to lay wholly its smart of outrage. He felt again the tightening of his nerves, like quivering wires, as he crossed the violated reception-room and entered the boudoir. It was empty, but on the devan the flickering candle-light revealed the damp, spreading stain where Amy's drenched satins had been. He thrust aside a hanging and pushed open the door into the room beyond. It was a small bedroom evidently very recently furnished in new and white shining lacquer of French design, labyrinthly inlaid with painted porcelains and draped with a perfusion of rosy taffeta. Among this elegance, surprisingly unrelated to the ancient panelled walls, stood the hastily open trunk and bags of the bride, their raised lids and disarranged trays heaped with the confusion of unaccustomed, swiftly searching hands. Amy herself, in a gay little French boudoir robe of jade and citron, sat huddled in a chair like a mute, terrified child in the hand of her dresser who was shaking out the long damp hair and fanning it with a peacock fan. At the base entrance Fatima suspended the fanning, but with easy familiarity exhibited the long ringlets. Kurtly the bae nodded and gestured in dismissal. The woman laid down her fan and with a last slant-eyed look at the strangely still, new mistress she went noiselessly out a small service door. With an air of negligent assurance, Hamdi bae gazed about the room and yawned. Truly a fatiguing evening, he remarked in his dry, sardonic voice, but you look so untouched. What a thing is radiant youth. He sauntered over to her, who drew a little closer together at his approach and lifted one of the long dark curls that the serving woman had exhibited. The ringlets of loveliness, he murmured. You know the old saying of the Saadi? The ringlets of the lovely are a chain on the feet of reason and a snare for the bird of wisdom. How long ago he said it, and how true to-day. Yet such a charming chain. Suppose then I forgive you, little one, since sages have forgiven beauty before. She was silent. Her eyes fixed on him with the silent terror with which a trapped bird sees its captor in their bright darkness the same mute apprehension, the same filming of helpless despair. Rider was dead, she thought. This cruel and sensed old madman had killed him for all his oaths. Somewhere beneath those ancient stones he was lying drowned and dead a strange, pitiable addition to the dark secrets of those grim walls. He had died for her sake, and all that she asked now of life, she thought, in the utter agony of her youth was death, and very quickly. I am so soft-hearted, he sighed, still with that ringlet in his lifted hand, his hand which wanted palpably to settle upon her, and yet was withheld by some strange inhibition of those fixed, helpless eyes. Who knows? Perhaps I may forgive you yet. You might persuade me. He is dead, she said shiveringly. Dead? He? Ah, the invader, the intruder, the young man who wanted you for a family and friends. The bay laughed gratingly. No, I assure you he is not dead. I have not harmed a hair of his head. He is alive, only not with quite the widest range of liberty. He broke off to laugh again. Ah, you disbelieve, he said politely. Shall I send then, for some proof, an ear, perhaps, or a little finger, still very warm and bleeding, to convince you? In five minutes it would be here. Then terror stirred again in her frozen heart. If writer were alive and still in this man's power. You are horrible, she said to him, in a voice that was suddenly clear and unshaken. What is it you want of me, fear and hate and utter loathing? Her unexpected spirit was briefly disconcerting. The Turk looked down upon her in a rested irony, and then he smiled beneath his mustaches and bent nearer with kindling gaze. Not at all. Not at all like that, little dove with talons. I want sweetness and repentance and submission, and— You have a strange way to win them, she said desperately. You have taken a strange way with me, my love. Little did I foresee, when I escorted you up the stairs this morning. He broke off. There are men, he reminded her, who would not consider a cold bath, as a complete recompense for your bridal plans. She was silent. But I, he murmured, I am soft-hearted. He dropped on one knee before her, and tried to smile into her averted face. I can never resist a charming penitent. I assure you, I imply ability itself in delicate fingers, although iron and steel to a threatening hand. If you should will me, very sweetly, little one. She could not overcome, and she could not hide from his mocking eyes the sick shrinking that drew her back from his least touch, but she did fight down the wild hysteria of her repugnance, so that her voice was not the trembling gasp it wanted to be. How can I know what you are? she told him. You mock me. You threaten to torture that man. It would be folly not to think that you are deceiving me, if you would only prove to me so that I could believe. If you would but prove to me so that I could believe. Prove that you are mine, and not that infidels. Prove that you bring me a wife's devotion, not a wanton's indifference. He caught her cold hands, trying to draw her forward to him. Prove that you only pity him, he whispered, but that your love will be mine. She felt as if a serpent clasped her, and yet, if that were the only way to win rider's safety, if it were possible for her sicken senses to allay this bad man's suspicions and undermine his revenge. Quiveringly she thought that to save rider she would go through fire, but the hideous mocking uncertainties, her utter helplessness, her lost deference. It was not a sudden sound that broke in upon them, but rather the perception of many sounds muffled, half heard, but gaining upon their consciousness, running feet a stifled voice, something faint and shrill. Amy sprang to her feet, the general rose with her, and turned his head inquiringly in the direction. Then he jerked open the door through which Fatima had disappeared. It led to a dark service corridor and a small enter room, from whose bed the attendant was absent, and outer door was a jar. No need to question the sounds now, faint, but piercingly shrill shrieks were sounding from above, while the footsteps were racing, some down, some up. The bay flung shut the door behind him and hurried towards the confusion. End of Chapter 19 Chapter 20 of the 40th Door This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The 40th Door by Mary Hastings Bradley Chapter 20 Beyond the Door Rider had stood stock still with amazement when the girl began to scream. She had gone mad, he thought for an instant, in masculine bewilderment, and then her madness revealed as treacherous cunning, for she began crying wildly for help against an invader, an infidel, a dog of a Christian who had stolen into her rooms. She had chucked him to the lions, Rider perceived. One furious flash of lightning jealousy and oriental anger had overthrown in that wild and lawless head every other design for him for which she had risked so much. He had scorned her, he had floutered her caprice, he had dared to refuse the langurs of those dangerous eyes. The hurrying footsteps appeared to him the tread of a legion in action, and he had no desire to rush out upon the oncomers. He had indeed distinct doubts of his ruthless ability to pass that supple, clawing, incense creature at the door. He whirled and made a bolt for the window, striking at the fastened grill. He heard the snapping of wooden bolts and the splintering of wood, and out through the hole he climbed to a precipitous headlong flight that fairly felt the clutching hands upon his ankle. He had meant to make a jump for it. A three-story plunge into the Nile appeared a gentle exercise compared to the alternative within the palace, but in the very act of releasing his hold he changed his mind. Quicker than he had ever moved before, in any visitude of his lithe and agile youth, he clamored up, not down, and crouching back from sight upon the jutting top of the window, he sent his coat, sailing violently through space. He dared not look over for its descent upon the water, for other heads were peering from below, and he could hear an excited outburst of speech that broke sharply off. Evidently they were hurrying down to the water gate. Swiftly he utilized this misdirection for his own ends. The roofs, that was the refuge to make for, flat, long-reaching roofs, from which one could climb off onto a wall or a palm or a side street. He had only a story to ascend, and he made it in record time. Fearful that the searchers whom he heard now launching a boat below would turn their eyes skywards. But he gained the top without an outcry being raised, and found himself upon the roof, where the ladies of the harem took their air, unseen of any, saved the blind eyes of the musin in the salt and mosque upon the hill. There were the devans and a little tabaret or two, and a framework where an awning could be raised against the sun. There was also a trap door. And here, tempestuously he changed his mind again. He abandoned the goal of outer walls and chances of escape. He wrenched violently at that trap door. It was bolted, but the bolt was an ancient one, and gave at his furious exertions, letting him down into a narrow spiral staircase between walls. Down he plunged in haste, before some confused searcher should dash up. It was no place to meet an opposing force. Nor was the corridor in which he found himself much better. It was black and baffling as a labyrinth, with unexpected turnings, and he kept gingerly close to the wall, with one hand clutching a bit of iron, which he had taken into his possession and his pocket, when Aziza had led him out of the underground walls. The very bit of pointed iron it was, with which the volatile creature had affected his rescue. He considered it an invaluable souvenir, and twice in his nervous apprehension, he almost brought it down upon shadows. Direction he judged vaguely by the screaming, which was still going on at a tremendous rate. Evidently the girl had gone off into genuine hysterics, or else she had determined not to leave her agitation at the intrusion in any manner of question. No doubt the outcries were a relief to her mingled emotions. Remorse at her impetuosity, and chagrin at her thwarted plans, might conceivably be now among those emotions, and since the vicinity of those shrieks must be a gathering place to be avoided by him, he stole on, down the upper hall, and finding a stair he went down for two continuous flights. Amy's rooms, he knew, had been upon the water, and recalling the general direction of those two lighted windows that he had seen so recently from without, his excavator's instinct led him on. Once he saw the flitting figure of a turban woman in time to draw back into a heaven-sent niche, and again he flattened into a soundless shadow against the wall, as two young serving-girls ran by on slippered feet, their ankles tinkling, chattering to each other in delighted excitement. And then the stealthy opening of a door, it was the very door by which Yusuf had precipitated himself upon the struggle at the separate table some age-long hours ago, gave him a glimpse into the far glooms of the reception room, where its long side of meshrubie windows revealed now between its fretwork tiny chinks of a paling sky. He could make out the dark-draped marriage throne and the pallor of the disordered cloth upon the abandoned table below. And behind the table the dark draperies of the remaining portiers before the doorway into the boudoir where he had hidden himself, and into which he had last seen Amy thrust. At the other end of the great room were the entrance stairs to the harem, and there he imagined a watchman was stationed, or else stout bolts and bars regarding the situation. There remained an arched doorway into other formal rooms through which he had seen Amy and the guest disappear for the wedding supper, and that way led, he surmised, down into the service-quarters. A sorry choice of exits. He could form no plan in advance, but trust blindly to the amazing chances of adventure, and first, before he rushed for escape, there was Amy to find. Yet for all the mad hazard of the situation he was elated with life. He felt as if he had never fully lived until now, when every breath was informed with the sharp prescience of danger. He was at once cool and exultant, wary yet reckless, with the joyous recklessness of utter desperation. With cat-like hair he surveyed the drawing-room. It appeared deserted, but as he watched his tense nerves could see the shadows forming, taking furtive, crouching shape, and then dissolving harmlessly into a rug, a chair, or a stirring drapery. His eyes grown used to the dimness, he identified the mantle upon the floor in which he had come, and which he had extended to Amy in that brief moment of fatuous triumph, and beyond it, across the chair, was the portiere which the black had torn down from the doorway to wrap about writer's helpless form as he had carried him down to living death. That mantle, he thought, might yet be useful, and he stole forward and recovered it, but as he straightened, another shadow darted out from the boudoir door, and silhouetteed for an instant against the lighted room, he saw a figure in a long, swinging, military cloak. Discovery was inevitable, and writer made a swift plunge to take the cloaked figure by surprise, but even as one hand shot out and gripped the throat, while the other held his threatening iron aloft, his clutch relaxed, his arm fell nervously at his side. For from the figure had come the broken gasp of a soft voice, and the face upturned to his was a pale oval under dark, disordered hair. Amy, he breathed, an exultant, still half incredulous joy. Amy, did I hurt you? Oh no, no! came Amy's shaken voice. Oh, you are safe! He felt her trembling in his clasp, and he swept her close to him. For one breathless instant they clung together in a sharp, passionate gladness, which blurred every sense of dread or danger. They were safe, they were together, and for the moment it was enough. Every obstacle was surmounted, every terror conquered. They clung obliviously like children, her pale face against his shoulder, her hair brushing his lips, her wild heartbeats throbbing against his own. Then the girl, remembering, lifted her head. Quick, we must go, she whispered. For there I made a fire. He followed her frightened backward glance at the Boudoir door, and suddenly saw its cracks and keyhole, strangely radiant with light. He left me to go to those screams, she was saying rapidly. I tried to run that way, and found that woman coming back, and I told her to wait in her own room, and I slipped back in there. And suddenly it came to me to thrust the candle about. I thought I would run out, and if I met anyone I would call fire, and say the general was burning, and perhaps in the confusion, the terrible desperation of her both stirred and rung him. She was so little, so helpless, so trembling in his clasp, so made for love and tenderness, and to think of her in such fear and horror that she went thrusting reckless candles into her hangings, setting a palace on fire in the blind fury for escape. To such work had this night brought her, this night, and three men, for he and the craven Tufik and the fanatic Bay were all linked in this night's work. Yes, and another man, and he thought swiftly in a lightning flash of wonder how little that Paul Delcasse had known when he set his eager face toward the old world, with his wife and baby with him, that he was setting his feet into such a web, that his wife would die languishing in a Pasha's harem, and his little daughter would one night be flying in mad terror from the cruel beast the weak Pasha had sold her to. And how little, for that matter, he had known when he had set his own face toward those same sands what secrets he would discover there and what forbidden ways his heart would know. These thoughts all went through him like one thought in some clear, remote background of his mind while he was swiftly drawing on the military cloak she gave him and wrapping her in the black mantle. There was a veil on the mantle's hood that she could fling across her face when she wished, but Ryder had no fez to complete the deceptive outline of his masquerade. He must trust the dark and to the concealment of the high military collar of the cloak. Do you know a way, he whispered, and at her shaken head. The water-gate, he said, thinking swiftly. There would be a crowd now about the gate, but if they could only manage to gain those cellars and hide somewhere they could steal out later upon that water-man. It seemed the most feasible of all the desperate plans. The roofs might be a trap. The harem entrance led into a garden and the garden was guarded by an impassable wall. But if he could only get to the river, he knew that he was a strong enough swimmer to save Amy, or he might even terrorize the watchman into furnishing a boat. She did not question but guided him swiftly through the arch that led down into the banqueting hall. Twice that day she had gone down those stairs. Once in her bridal state, her eyes shining, her cheeks glowing, with the wild joy of rider's arrival and dreams of escape. And again, scarcely an hour gone by she had descended them, tense and desperate, her revolver at the general's head, seeking vainly rider's rescue. And now a third time, a guilty, reckless fugitive in the night, she stole down those stairs into the many-columned hall where she had been fettered in state among her guests. Here her only knowledge was of the stone corridor and the lock door through which the bay had led her. But rider knew the way that Aziza had brought him, and he turned cautiously towards those wide, curving stairs. Keeping Amy a few steps behind him, he went down the soft carpet and peered out at the bottom towards the water gate. He saw no bars, the gate was open and against the pale square of the water were the black silhouettes of the general and the gatemen, both leaning out at some splashing in the river. He knew a boy's reckless impulse to shove them both in. It was an unholy thought his better judgment rejected, unless driven to it, yet some prankish element in his roused recklessness would not have deplored the necessity, if they looked about. But they did not stir, as with Amy's cold hand in his, he made the tiptoe descent and slipped softly about the corner of the steps. Then instead of going on down the hall to some hiding place in the ruins, he took a suddenly revealed, sharper turn into a narrow passage just beyond the stairs. It might lead to another gate, some service entrance perhaps, it ran so straight and direct between its walls. Intuitively that excavator's sense of his defined the direction. They were going parallel with the river, although a little way back from the water wall, and in the direction of the men's part of the palace, the selum lick. He recalled the selum lick vaguely as an irregular mass of buildings, and though the formal entrance was of course through the garden from the avenue, there was a narrow side street or lane leading back to the water's edge between this part of the palace and the nest building, and very likely there was some entrance on that lane. Bitterly he blamed himself for his lack of complete inspection that morning. To be sure, he had told himself then, as he strolled about the high garden walls and peered down the narrow lane on one side of the Nile backwaters, that he didn't need a map of the place for his arrival at an afternoon reception, he was simply going in and out, and close and speech were his only real concern. He had even said to himself that he might not reveal himself to Amy, if she did not discover him. He wanted merely to see her again, and be sure that she understood her own history. He had no notion of attempting any further relations with her, any resumption of their forbidden and dangerous acquaintance. And it was true that that had been the defiant and protesting surface of his thoughts, but deep within himself there had always been that hot hidden spark ready to kindle to a flame at her word, and with it the unowned secret longing that she would speak the word. And when she had called on him for help, when the trembling appeal had sprung past her stricken pride, and he had seen the terror in her soft child's eyes, then the spark had struck its conflagration. He had become nothing but a hot, headstrong fury of devotion. And he said to himself now that he might have known it was going to happen. And that if he had not been so concerned that morning about saving his face and preserving this fiction of indifference, he would know a little more about the labyrinth they were poking about in, the little more that tips the scale between safety and destruction. But he did not know, and blind chance was his only goddess. The passage had brought into a wall and in narrow stairs, while another passage led off to the right, apparently to the forward regions of the place. He took the stairs. He had had enough of the underground regions when they did not lean to water gates, and the stairs promised novelty at least. He wished he knew more about Turkish palaces. He supposed they had a fairly consistent ground plan, but beyond a few main features of inner courts and halls, he was culpably ignorant of their intentions. If it were an early Egyptian tomb or temple now, but then perhaps the Turks were more indefinite in their building and rebuilding. At the head of the stairs a door stood half ajar. Through the crack he strained his eyes, but his anxious glance met only the darkness of utter night, not a gleam of light and not a sound, except the far hollow stamping of some stabled horse. Slowly he pushed the door open, and he and a me slipped within. The place, whatever it was, appeared deserted, a dark, bare, back stairs region, for he stumbled over a bucket, from which to the right he could just discern a hall leading into the forward part of the palace, wainly lighted some distance on with the pale flicker of an old ceiling lamp. They seemed to be at the end of the hall, and the darker shadows in the walls about them appeared to be a number of doors closed so his groping hands informed him. Oh, for his excavator's steady light or a pocket flash! Oh, for a light of any kind, even a temporary match! But he dared not risk the scratch, for now he caught the thud of footfalls overhead, heavy footfalls, and there might be stairs unexpectedly close at hand. He turned to Amy, but the girl shook her head helplessly, and hesitant and dashed, for all their young confidence, they wavered a moment, hand in hand in the dark, fearful of what a rash move might bring upon them. And in the beating stillness, Rider became conscious that the muffled monotonous stamping of a horse is a gloomy, disheartening thing in the night, and that footsteps overhead are of all noises the most nervous and unsettling. What was behind those doors, not a spark of light came from them? That was one comfort. The rooms, kitchen, service, store rooms, or whatever they were, appeared in the same blackness and oblivion, but any door might open on a room full of sleeping gardeners and grooms. Life and more than life hung on the blind goddess. It was only an instant that they hesitated there, yet it appeared an eternity of indecision. Then nearer footsteps sounded, coming down that hall, no more wavering of the scales. Rider turned to the door at his left, at the very end of the wall, beyond which came that far stamping, and wrenched it open, closing it swiftly behind him. He saw a light now, a mild yellow ray through an open door ahead, that vaguely illumined the strange old vehicles of the palace, and the stables were beyond. Someone else was beyond, too, in the stables, for that very instant he saw a black horse backed restively into sight, its tossing head evading the hands that were trying to bridle it. The fortieth door said Rider to himself with an involuntary thrust of humor. The door of the horse, the door of forbidden daring. He knew now the vague associations that had stirred in him as he had stared blindly about that place of doors, but he had opened so many forbidden doors of late, that this last was welcome as the supreme test. And nothing in the world could have been more welcome than a horse. A horse with a way out behind it. Stay back, he said under his breath to Amy, and clasping his bit of iron he moved toward the door. He could see the attendant now, who was finishing his bridling, and it was Yusuf, the eunuch, so busy gentling and soothing the horse, that he cast only one glance in the direction of the sounds he heard, and that one glance misled him in its glimpse of the general's cloak. By your favour, but an instant, he called out, and he is ready. Stand aside, said Rider very clearly, emerging from the shadows at the horse's heels, out of the way with you, the horse is for me. A moment Yusuf gaped, then he dropped the bridle, and his hand went swiftly to the knife-hilt in his belt. Fool, said Rider contemptuously, would you tempt fate? Do you think I am such that your knife could harm me? Must I prove to you again that walls are nothings, that I but let myself be taken to prove my powers? Ethiopians are superstitious, and Yusuf knew that his brick and mortar had been strong. Yet they have great trust in a crooked short-bladed knife, and Yusuf did not relax his hold upon his, and for all that Rider could see, there was no hesitation in the grinning ferocity of his black face. Yet his spring was an instant delayed, and in that instant Rider spoke again. Look now at the wall behind you, he said quickly. Yusuf looked, and as he turned his bullet head, Rider jumped close and brought his iron down upon it, with a sickening force he thought scarcely short of murder. To his amazement the black did not fall, but staggered only, and Rider had need to send the knife spinning from his grasp, and strike again before the eunuch's knees sagged, and his huge bulk sank at Rider's feet. This time Rider took no chance with a shamed unconsciousness. He snatched down bits of leather from the wall, and bound the man's hands and feet in tight security, and seeing that he was breathing, although heavily, he thrust a gagging handkerchief into his mouth. Then he dragged the heavy body towards a pile of hay he saw in a vacant stall, and concealed it effectively, but not too smotheringly, although Yusuf, he felt, would be no grievous loss to society. Vegley in the back of his consciousness he had been aware of the excited plunge of the horse, and then of a low, soothing murmur of speech, and now he turned to find Aimee holding the bridle and stroking the quivering creature with gentle fearless hands. Is he dead? She asked quietly of the eunuch. Stunned, said Rider, meaning reassurement, and was startled by the passion of her cry. Oh, I could kill them all, all! I will if they try to stop us, he promised grimly, forgetful of that oath to Aziza. Hastily he glanced about the stalls. There was no other horse there, only a pair of mild-eyed donkeys, and though there might conceivably be other horses behind other doors, there was no instant to spare in search. This luck was too prodigious to risk. The door to the street had already been unbolted, and now he threw it back, with a quick look into the dark emptiness of the narrow side street, and then, with a tight hold of the reins, he swung himself into the saddle, and Aimee up into his arms, her head on his shoulder, her arms clasping him. It was a huge Bedouin saddle with high archback and curved pommel, and the slender player no more than filled it, making apparently no weight at all for the spirited beast which tore out of the stalls at the charging gallop beloved of eastern horsemen. For a moment, Rider felt wildly that he might meet the fate of the rash youth in his patron's story. He had never ridden a horse like this, which, like all high-meddled Arabs, resented the authority of any but his master, and though a good horseman, Rider had all he could do to keep his seat and Aimee in his arms. Around the corner of the lane the horse went racing, and down the dark, lebic-lined avenue, his flying feet struck back their sparks of fire. Across an open square he plunged, while irate camel screamed at him, and a harsh voice shouted back loud curses. It seemed to Rider that other voices joined in, that there was a pursuit, an outcry, and then they were out upon an open road, wildly galloping like a mad highwayman under a pale morning sky.