Mordaunt had seldom seen anything more desolate. Once, no doubt, it had been built upon. For it had certainly never been laid out as a garden or a place of ornament and rest. Here, for instance, a wall began for no reason, continued for a few yards, and for no reason ceased. Here a mound of bricks with a floor of bricks spread like an open fan about it showed where a house had slipped to the ground. Everywhere the earth was uneven and in colour of a dull yellow and was withdrawing, it seemed, from sight under a yellow pall made of its own dust. Were there a flint upon that ground, it had no facet from which the sun could strike a spark. The whole place was melancholy and more silent than the desert, as all places will be where dwellings are relapsing slowly into the shapeless earth from which they sprang.
As Mordaunt leaned forward he saw on his left hand two trees of tamarisk which stood within a wall at the path’s side. He had begun to hope that he had missed his way. But his courage sank now. The house of the tamarisks!
He went forward to it. It was a large house with a gate and, within the gate, three brick steps led up to the door. Again the hope that he had been misled encouraged him; so little sign was there that anyone for many years had made a home of it. But he had instructions nowadays. He opened the gate, mounted the three steps, and smartly knocked upon the door with the crook of his stick.
To his surprise, it was opened so quickly that he seemed to have been awaited. A young woman, indeed she was little more than a girl, stood in the doorway with a look of eagerness upon her white face. Never had anyone in Mordaunt’s experience appeared so out of place as this girl in this dusty area of ruin. She was slender, dressed in a coat and skirt of dark grey, shabby, no doubt, but as trim and tidy as when it came first from its George Street tailor in London, and with nothing of Egypt in her dark blue eyes. Mordaunt had not a doubt that here his walk ended. But there was obviously no such conviction in the woman in the doorway. There had been a welcome for someone, but it had faded into bewilderment at the sight of him; and even that bewilderment had not been able to master her disappointment. She was very white. The youth of her face was spoilt by her fatigue and under the broad forehead her eyes brooded upon him incuriously.
“You have come to the wrong house, I think,” she said.
To Mordaunt, this gracious English voice was lovely as music, however commonplace the words. “I am sure not,” he answered. “In a way, no doubt, I am sorry, but in a way perhaps I am glad.” If Mordaunt had been at pains to replace her distress with a return of her bewilderment, he could hardly have done better. “You are Mrs. Leete.”
Now, indeed, she was surprised. The white brows drew together under the swathe of fair hair which crowned her head. “Yes.”
In the admission there was a question.
“When I left London, your father, Mr. Septimus Crottle, asked me to bring you a message.”
For a moment her face softened. A smile almost flickered across her lips, as though she saw Septimus suddenly in his frock coat with the points of his high white collar cupping his cheeks. All that she said, however, was again “Yes?” but now in a voice less hostile.
“Mr. Crottle wished you to know that your place was always kept for you in Portman Square.”
Once more the smile almost curved her lips and the ghost of a smile glimmered in the dark pools of her eyes.
“Next to Agatha’s, was it? Do Sunday nights still go on?”
“Rather,” Mordaunt exclaimed, commending them.
“Yes, riotous, weren’t they?” she answered dryly, and added thoughtfully: “I ran out—that was the phrase—but I may come back—to 1870—if I wish.” She remained silent, and then threw up her head “Wouldn’t it have been better for all of them—Anne Audrey and Agatha—if they had run out, too!”—and recovering from her outburst, “I should, of course, very much like to hear all you have to tell me. But to-day—” and again distress took her by the throat so that her voice broke. “If you will give me your address, I’ll write to you.”
Mordaunt pulled out of his pocket a small diary with loose leaves. He was saved one awkward moment; it was all the more welcome since there were many others ahead. He wrote his name and title on one leaf and handed it to her.
“Yobosci,” she began as she read. “That’s captain, I think. Captain Philip Mordaunt—” and as her eyes ran along the written words, she stopped abruptly and began again. “The Coastguard Directorate. I see.”
There was no resentment in her voice and no suggestion that Mordaunt had set a trap for her. “I see,” merely meant, “It was expected.” Mordaunt, however, took the words to himself.
“No doubt I should have put my duty first,” he stammered.
“We are all recommended to do that,” she answered gravely.
“What I said was true,” he exclaimed.
Rosalind Leete looked puzzled.
“No doubt,” she replied.
“I mean—your father’s message. He did send it.”
She looked—and again with a trifle of amusement—at his face, so troubled lest he should be thought guilty of a despicable subterfuge. “I never thought for a moment that you had made the message up.”
“Thank you,” said Mordaunt fervently, and so began to stammer again. “As for the other matter”—no other matter had been mentioned but neither pretended that it didn’t exist—“as for this other matter—it’s—well—it’s different.”
“It would be,” said Rosalind Leete. Clearly she had to help him out. “As you pointed out, it’s a matter of your duty and it should have come first.”
Mordaunt caught at the word. “Yes.”
Rosalind stepped aside in the hall and he crossed the threshold. She shut the front door and threw open the door of the room which looked out upon the empty space. Mordaunt walked into a room, meagrely equipped but clean as soap and a scrubbing brush could make it. One or two cotton mats were spread upon the bare floor. The furniture was of painted deal and upholstered in brown plush, a sofa, an arm-chair and hall a dozen straight-backed chairs—a suite in fact from a Cairene Bon Marché. But more pitiable than any sign of poverty was the absence of any of those trifles which, through their private associations, will make a home out of the barest lodgings. Septimus had declared that the marriage had failed. Mordaunt had thought, “There spoke the architect of his family, angry because a brick had fallen from its place.” But clearly the marriage had failed. There was not a photograph in the style of ten or fifteen years ago, not some little toy or book which linked the grievous to-day with a pleasant schoolroom, not some small picture or statue on which one hangs a dream. Mordaunt’s face was compassionate as he stood in that inhospitable room. He had a queer vision of the girl setting those small memorials out when she and her husband came first to live there and removing them one by one as the shadows darkened upon their lives until the room became the cold waiting-room of a railway station.
“Now,” she said.
“I want to see Professor Leete.”
That the title was no longer Leete’s by right, Mordaunt knew, but still to attach it to his name might give her a momentary comfort. It seemed, however, that she would have no pretences.
“Then you didn’t know?” she cried.
But the cry was so wild, the look so amazed, that more must have happened than the loss of Leete’s professorship. Rosalind clapped her hand suddenly to her mouth to stop the hysteria in which her voice was rising. But she succeeded. She drew away her hand and let it fall by her side.
“What else should I know?” he asked.
“What you shall know,” she answered.
The words were not clipped. There was nothing whatever dramatic in her gesture. She walked to a door at the side of the room and opened it.
“He is here,” she said.
Mordaunt followed her into a bedroom as mean in its equipment as the parlour. But it had a dignity which the other room had not. For in the bed a dead man lay swathed already for the grave. He had the likeness of a man of middle age, with black hair growing thin and a face so discoloured and emaciated that it was shocking to see. Moreover, there was no peace in it.
Mordaunt bent his head towards Rosalind.
“I was abrupt. I am sorry. This—you were right—I didn’t know,”, and he looked at her full in the face. “Can I help you?”
“I don’t think so,” she answered quietly.
“It happened—?”
“This morning at five o’clock.”
“You had a doctor?”
“An Egyptian. Dr. Achmed Agami. He has been attending my husband. He is very kind. You know that here there must be no delays. He is arranging everything.”
There were possibilities of delay, a simple form of embalming, but no doubt the doctor had explained that. If there were no friends to escort Leete to his grave, and Mordaunt thought that he had shaken off all of them except this girl, delay was little to be desired.
“The actual cause was, I suppose, malaria?”
Rosalind Leete looked at him with surprise.
“Yes. How could you tell that?”
For one might have thought that he had starved to death, even with those wrappings about his throat and neck.
“It ends that way so often,” said Mordaunt gently.
And it begins so easily, so pleasantly. Perhaps a reward for a day’s overwork, perhaps idly as an experiment, perhaps, as with the fellaheen, to gratify a lust. There were a thousand entrances into that fatal Enchanted Cavern.
“It began in Luxor?” he asked.
“In the Valley of the Kings,” she answered. “He was sent out with an American Mission. Why it began, I don’t know,” and for the second time her voice broke. “I hope that it wasn’t my fault.”
Mordaunt wondered how much of truth there was in that self-reproach. It might have been that she had run out to escape from the sea-discipline of the house in Portman Square rather than from any love of her professor. Somehow disappointment had come.
“You went to him straight from your father’s house?” Even as he spoke, he realised the question’s impertinence, but she answered at once.
“We had arranged everything on tiptoes. We were married in St. Bride’s, at the back of Fleet Street, on a Friday morning and left by the boat-train for Brindisi.”
Had he looked for so much more from her than she, with all the promise of her youth, had to give him? For she must have been glorious three years ago before poverty and shame had reclothed her in distress. I was certainly distress rather than grief, distress and a gnawing sense of guilt, which numbed her now.
Mordaunt could read the history of their marriage easily enough, once the lure of the drug had caught him. The man’s loss of interest in his most fascinating work, his long absences, the growing slovenliness of his dress and his looks, the whispers which became open talk, the loss of discipline amongst the men employed, the dismissal, the flight to a native quarter in Cairo, the growing urgency for the drug, the diminishing means to gratify it, more boracic to less heroin—until in the end it came to an Arab in a back room of the Mouski using an hypodermic needle which was never disinfected. Hence malaria and this polluted skeleton of an outcast who had once ruled men and held his head high.
Mordaunt turned towards Rosalind Leete.
“You are alone here?” he asked.
“There is a woman. She is buying food now. She has been very helpful.”
“But she doesn’t sleep here? “
Rosalind Leete looked about the room.
“We have nothing worth anybody’s while to steal.”
Nevertheless this grim morning had been foreseen. It was properly humbling to Philip Mordaunt to realise that all the high services which he had begun to watch himself rendering to the hapless daughter of Septimus Crottle had already been discounted. Rosalind had sufficient money to pay all that was due, she had taken, a room in an English boarding-house in the Sharià Abdin. She had been working in the Museum for Henry Scobell, one of the greatest of English Egyptologists, owing to a certain skill which she had acquired in photography and typewriting.
“So you have been the breadwinner in Cairo?” he Maid.
“He was too ill,” she answered, and the noise of wheels broke in upon her voice.
She looked out of the window as a van stopped before the house and a sharp movement warned him that here, after all, were friendly offices which a deputy might take over.
Mordaunt was the only mourner besides herself at the burial in the English cemetery that afternoon.
“I am grateful,” she said as they walked away, “and in a day or two I should like to talk to you. I shouldn’t wonder if I could help you,” she added with a ghost of a smile.
“Did you ever hear of the village of Elaoui?” he asked.
She repeated the name. “No.”
“Nor of a match struck at a certain hour in a certain place?”
‘’No.”
“Yet I think we might help one another, nonetheless,” he said as he left her at her door.