For on the morning when probate of Horbury’s will was granted to his widow—that is a few weeks after Horbury’s death—Philip Mordaunt was walking along the street of’ Nubar Pasha, in Cairo. It was half-past eleven. The wide platform of Shepheard’s Hotel was as yet sparsely occupied and he passed it with a distinct pleasure. He had the time but no longer the wish to explore it. He passed the Esbekiyeh Gardens and crossed the head of the road leading to the great Bazaar. Later, when the platform outside Shepheard’s was filled and the alleys of the Mouski empty, he would walk that way, but for the moment he had a happier task. He continued along the straight broad avenue of Abdul Azziz. Upon his left hand the great sand cliffs of the Nile Valley were closing in. Just behind this street the houses were thinning out on the rising ground. Spaces of brown earth, broken walls, an Arab cemetery replaced them; and then it came into view—the village of Elaoui.
It hung like a cage under the high edge of the cliff, tiny, yet, in that clear air, distinct—three sides of a square rather like Lézardrieux, except in one particular, and an awkward particular. At Lézardrieux the road from the square down to the river ran backwards and forwards across the slope in reasonable gradients, some times invisible under a cliff, sometimes in full view on a plateau. From Elaoui one road, straight as the blade of a sword, dropped like a precipice from the outcrop of rock on which centuries ago the village was built. It dropped for a mile in length till it joined the desolation of broken walls without which no eastern city is complete; and throughout that mile not a building nor a tree cast a shadow across it. Moreover, it was lighted at night at the top, where it passed between old brick walls into the village square, and half-way down, and, most usefully for a keen-eyed watchman in the square, at the bottom where at last it swerved amongst the ruins and was lost. Mordaunt could see it, plain as a panel painted white in a wall of pale red. Not a car, however swift, could ascend that road without advertising its approach. And it was the only road, as the village about the square was one house with a hundred tunnels and passages; for the inhabitants of the village were one close-knit, remote family. A formidable village under the eaves of the high Mokattam Hills—an island with a single causeway, always watched, and time to spare!
Mordaunt took his first look at the Elaoui village, as he walked along the street of Abdul Azziz, with as much indifference as he could counterfeit, and suddenly came to a halt. Straight ahead of him, the owner of a little bar had set out a few iron tables and iron chairs on the pavement; and at one of these, facing him, sat a man he knew. A man whom be had last seen on his yacht in Dartmouth Harbour, wearing a suit of his clothes and with fifteen pounds of his money in his pocket. Devisher! Yes, Devisher, but now a Devisher whose face had begun to fill out, who wore white flannel trousers and white buckskin shoes and a grey coat and waistcoat suitable to the season and the place. It perplexed Mordaunt for a moment that, although they were face to face and the distance with each step that he took narrowing between them, Devisher did not see him. Mordaunt laughed, and the laugh brought no look of recognition to Devisher’s face.
“Well,” Mordaunt reflected, laughing again at the image of the dead-and-gone Mordaunt which rose in his mind, “that would have annoyed me a few months ago. I couldn’t have believed that anyone who had once seen the Mordaunt who was shortly to electrify the world wouldn’t have known him again.”
There was a vanity, too, even in that reflection, Mordaunt began to recognise. But he was too beset by curiosity to continue his analysis. Devisher did not see him because all the senses that he had were gathered and blended into one. He was listening as the blind listen, to hear something far away beyond the hearing of the men with vision. His eyes, a little down-turned, were empty.
Mordaunt was already abreast of the table, but instead of passing on he dropped his hand sharply on Devisher’s shoulder and slid into the iron chair opposite. Devisher’ reaction to that clap of the hand was astonishing. With a yelp which was sharp with terror, Devisher sprang to his feet. He looked around wildly and brought his eyes down at last Mordaunt’s face.
“You?” he gasped, and then cried sharply: “What are you doing here?”
Philip Mordaunt answered meekly: “Cairo—early October—mayn’t I? Or do you already own the town?”
Devisher laughed a little uneasily, but he was bringing his nerves under control and made a shift to excuse his cry of fear.
“You might have realised, Captain Mordaunt, that for the residents of the Castillo del Libertador, the laying on of hands was a rite seldom associated with pleasure.”
“I am sorry,” Mordaunt answered. “What are you drinking?”
“Beer. Not so bad.”
Mordaunt rapped upon the table and two long glasses topped with snow were set before them.
“Here’s luck!” said Devisher as he drank.
“The skin off your nose!” replied Mordaunt.
“I, too, take in the Sunday newspapers,” said Devisher, and Mordaunt produced a cigar case. “Will you?” he asked, holding out the case.
“No, thank you.”
Mordaunt pinched the end of one of the cigars and put it between his lips and felt in his pocket for a box of matches. But the box was hardly out before he heard a tiny click and a spirit-fed lighter was burning under his nose.
“Why waste a match? Try this!” cried Devisher with a curious urgency.
Mordaunt had it on the tip of his tongue to answer that he preferred a wooden match, but a startling conjecture suddenly struck him dumb. It wasn’t probable; it was hardly tenable at all. But if it were true? It explained the expectancy and concentration of Devisher, the eager offer of his cigar lighter, his presence at this hour, at this bar, in this broad street under the hanging village of Elaoui. Did it explain, too, Devisher’s presence in Cairo? Mordaunt must discover the answer to that question. It was not busybody’s work. It was his appointed work. But he must approach it cunningly and he was a novice in the art.
Luckily for Mordaunt, Devisher was not at his ease. He had a question or two which clamoured for answers.
“You know,” he began as he lit a cigarette and put his lighter back into his pocket, “when I saw you in the cabin of your yacht—whether it was something you said or just an impression that I got—I thought you had evolved out of your experiences a sort of complete new pattern to which you were going to fit your life.”
“I had?” asked Philip, apparently as much at sea now as he had been on his yacht.
“Yes,” Devisher added, with just a hint of disdain for the man who made a plan but couldn’t act on it. “And then, a month or so later, I find you strolling along a street of Cairo, the complete tourist, a walking poster for Mr. Cook.”
Mordaunt’s face flushed. The contemptuous good-humour stung him and he leaned forward sharply to show Mr. Bryan Devisher how wrong he was. But he showed nothing. A warning bell was beginning to ring rather urgently in his brain. Devisher’s scorn was meant to sting, and to sting him into admissions, if admissions there were. Mordaunt lowered his head. He drank his beer silently, shamefacedly. The rush of blood into his face might as truly have expressed his shame as his anger.
“You are quite right,” he confessed. “I had made a plan. I was going to do wonders. But you know what I did do?”—and he uttered a harsh little laugh—. “I fell asleep in my bath. That’s me, I am afraid.”
He leaned back in his chair, with now and then a jerk of amusement, and now and then a pull at his beer, and now and then a puff at his cigar.
“The complete tourist. Not so bad for you, Mr. Devisher, but too hard a stroke to be pleasant to me. After I had had the nerve too, one night on the Helford river, to give old Septimus Crottle a full history—” Mordaunt broke off suddenly. He had been tilting his chair on to its back legs. He brought the forelegs down with a bang upon the stones. “Of course,” he cried. “I gave you a letter to old Septimus, didn’t I?”
Devisher was not prepared for that question being flung at him. He was distracted, too, by the crash of the chair legs upon the stones. He could listen and talk, but he couldn’t listen as he wished to listen if the talk was to be punctuated by these exclamation marks.
“Yes, you did.”
“And you used it, I hope.”
Devisher jumped at the suggestion. It explained at once his presence in Cairo, his means of livelihood. He would have been compelled to offer some explanation to the man who had seen him last in such distressful circum stances. Here was a providential explanation provided by this simpleton. Devisher smiled and spread out his hands. “Well, you see. I am here.”
“Permanently?”
“To be sure.”
“The Dagger Line?”
“Thanks to you.”
And Philip Mordaunt began to doubt. Septimus? Was there anything in the world so dear to that old man’s heart as the Dagger Line? Its prestige, the beauty of its ships, their efficiency and speed? Mordaunt had written a fair letter to Septimus, concealing nothing which he knew, not even the deep black ring round Devisher’s ankle. To try such an applicant out in an office under his eye—yes, that the old tyrant might do. But to send him at once abroad to a place so important in the shipping world as the Canal—that didn’t sound like Septimus at all.
“You’re stationed at Port Said, I suppose?”
“No, here. The Line has an office in Cairo.”
Well, that might be so. Mordaunt leaned back in his chair, and Devisher said with a smile. “It looks as if the old man has taken a risk. But that isn’t the case really. I have merely routine work. As you saw, probably, I didn’t want responsibility. Checking up on passages, passing the time of day with Cook’s and the travel agents. And I’m not alone in the office. It just suits me, and if it doesn’t run to cocktails at Shepheard’s, it does to a decent glass of beer in the street of Abdul Azziz.”
He had hardly finished when a match was struck upon the other side of the street. Devisher did not turn his head, but he heard—Mordaunt was sure of it. There was a quick flicker in his eye—Mordaunt classed it with the scratch of the match upon the emery paper—and a relaxation of his face. A signal had been given and taken. Mordaunt, for his part, could look across the road. He saw a tall youth in an Arab gown standing outside a cheap provision shop with a cigarette in his mouth which he had just lighted, and a big box of Bryant & May’s matches in his hand. The young Arab drew at his cigarette to make sure that it was alight and then, putting the match-box into his pocket, strolled away.
High up above their heads the village of Elaoui clung under the rim of the hill. Mordaunt was tempted to draw Devisher’s attention to it and watch confusion trouble his face. But he bethought him of a better way, which would not betray himself.
Devisher was looking at his watch.
“Twelve o’clock!” he said, and he finished his glass, of beer. “That will give me just the hour I want before lunch.” He looked around for waiter and summoned him. “I had a glass before you came,” and as he paid for it, Mordaunt said blandly:
“I’m very glad that we met, and I’m very glad, too, that things have smoothed themselves out for you. I’ll write to old Septimus to-day and tell him that I’ve met you and thank him.”
Now he saw more than confusion rise in Devisher’s f ace. He saw fear. He heard a quick gasp.
“I’ve already done that,” exclaimed Devisher.
“But not for me,” Mordaunt returned with a laugh. “I wish you could. I hate letter-writing. But this one I must write myself.”
He watched Devisher hurry away. Septimus and the Dagger Line could not blend with Elaoui and a young Arab striking a match in the street of Abdul Azziz. The sooner he wrote to Crottle to thank him for giving Devisher a chance, the better. That was all that he need do; and, indeed, he wrote the letter and posted it that evening.
But it was already too late.