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Page 76
Hurt him she must, if only as a balm to her own physical and mental
agony; and in what better way than by destroying his faith in the white
girl he loved?
Hence the letter, written hastily in the hovel and consigned to the
care of the Ethiopian, who, in return for his assistance, had demanded
backshisch in the shape of a pink leaf covered with strange black marks.
The woman's presence in the great city in her deplorable state was the
last thing he wanted to be known; so he lied--clumsily.
"Nay; she is in Alexandria," he blurted out.
The commissionaire slowly winked an eye.
"Perhaps," he said; "perhaps not," and chuckled as the negro turned
hastily and strode away in the direction of the bank.
And thus came it to be known in the bazaar that Zulannah the courtesan
had returned to the great city.
And a little later, Ben Kelham felt no tweak at the string with which
Fate had hobbled him to his destiny, when, on hearing his number
called, he took the letter from the page-boy, turned it over, and
looked at it on each side, as we do when curious, but not
over-interested; then he opened it idly, read it and crushed it in both
hands.
It was written in the execrable English Zulannah had picked up in her
few years of cosmopolitan intercourse with different nationalities; it
was in vile hand-writing and was as despicable a method of revenge as
an anonymous letter usually is.
It ran after this fashion:
"If you want to find your white woman go and look for her in the ruins
of Karnak, at night, in the arms of her half-caste lover, Hugh Carden
Ali."
And the woman who had limped back to the street, sniggered behind her
veil as she watched the man tear the letter into shreds, while he sat
and thought out an answer to this second problem.
"It's a damnable lie. My Damaris and good old Carden! I expect
they've met, but who------" He sniffed at his hands suddenly. "Pah!
Now, where have I smelt that scent before?--filth!" He sat with his
hands to his nose, then frowned as, under the suggestion of the
perfume, the picture of a lovely woman clad in silks and satins and
wearing rich jewels rose before him.
"My God!" he said slowly, as the full significance of it all dawned
slowly upon him. "Of course! She--she invited me to--to visit
her--and I refused. By all that's clean and decent, if I don't make
her pay for this! And it's Carden, too, who can tell me the best way
to set about it. The harlot! I wonder if I shall have to wait until
evening for a train." He clenched his hands until the knuckles showed
white, as he unseeingly watched a woman limp down the street. "I'll
make her sorry she was ever born."
He need not have worried on that point. Fate was dogging those
unsteady feet back to the hovel.
The spreading of a prairie fire is slow compared to the speed with
which news runs through the bazaar. The servants in the big house in
the big garden went sullenly about their various tasks of tidying and
clearing up the courtesan's home, whilst little knots of people,
composed principally of women, stood about in the vicinity of the gate.
It was the first time the tyrannical woman had been absent upon a long
journey, and the relatives and friends even unto a most distant
generation of her servants had taken advantage of it to visit the house
and examine its, to them, surpassing luxury.
The Ethiopian, with his mind fixed only upon the bank, had taken but
little interest in the house itself, and had visited it but rarely, and
then only for the sake of appearances; so that the visitors had become
more and more brazen, as the days passed, fingering the satins, sitting
upon the cushions, feasting on the floor.
Bes, the monstrous keeper of the lions, had become prime favourite with
the men, and the neighbourhood had resounded with the roars of the
brutes at night as they fought for their food.
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