THE AGHA'S ROSE

Sanda did not know, and would not know for many days, the news of Sidi-bel-AbbÉs, for she had started on a long journey, to the "wonderful place" of which she would have spoken to Max had she not been warned by her father's word and look that the story was "irrelevant."

If Sanda had tried to tell the tale of that "romance" at which she had hinted in the Salle d'Honneur, she would have had to begin far back in time when, after his wife's death, Georges DeLisle had by his own request been transferred to the Legion. His first big fight had been in helping the Agha of Djazerta against a raid of Touaregs, the veiled men of the South, brigands then and always. Since those days, DeLisle and Ben RÂana, the great desert chief, had been friends. More than once they had given each other aid and counsel. When Ben RÂana came north with other Caids, bidden to the Governor's ball in Algiers, he paid DeLisle a visit. Each year at the season of date-gathering he sent the colonel of the Legion a present of the honey-sweet, amber-clear fruit for which the oasis of Djazerta was famous; and the officer sent to the Agha a parcel of French books, or some new invention in the shape of a clock, such as Arabs love. Now he was sending his daughter.

The way of it was this: just before Sanda's surprise arrival, the Agha of Djazerta, chief of the Ouled-Mendil, had written a confidential letter to Colonel DeLisle. He had a young daughter whom he adored. Foolishly (he began to think) he had let her learn French, and allowed her to read French novels. These books had made the girl discontented with her cloistered life. Being the only child, and always rather delicate, perhaps she had been too much spoiled. Greater freedom than she had could not be granted; but seeing her sad Ben RÂana had asked himself what he could do for her happiness. Before long she would marry, of course; but it had occurred to him that meanwhile it might be well if a companion could be found who would be a safe friend for a girl of OurÏeda's position and religion. Did Colonel DeLisle know of any young gentlewoman, English or French, who would be willing to come to Djazerta? She must be educated and accomplished, but above all trustworthy; one who would not try to make OurÏeda wish for a life that could never be hers: one who would not attempt to unsettle the child's religious beliefs. In writing this letter Ben RÂana had shown a naÏf sort of conceit in his own broad-mindedness, which would have been rather comic if it had not been pathetic. But to DeLisle it was only pathetic, because, European though he was, he knew the hidden romance of the Agha's life: his worship of a beautiful Spanish wife who had died years ago, and for love of whom he had vowed never to take into his harem any other woman, although he had no son. His nearest male relative was a nephew, to whom DeLisle imagined that some day OurÏeda would be married, though the young man was at least a dozen years older than she.

When the letter came, Colonel DeLisle knew of no such person as Ben RÂana asked for; but he had not answered yet when Sanda unexpectedly appeared. Hardly had he recovered from the first shock of his surprise when he remembered the great march soon to be undertaken—a march ostensibly for maneuvers, but in reality to punish a band of desert raiders, and later, men of the Legion were to begin the laying of a new road in the far south, even beyond Djazerta. There would be no long rest for the colonel of the First Regiment for many months, consequently he would be unable to keep Sanda with him. She did not want to go back to France or Ireland, so she was told about the Agha of Djazerta and the sixteen-year-old girl, OurÏeda, whose Arab name meant "Little Rose."

Next to staying at the headquarters of the Foreign Legion with its colonel, Sanda liked the idea of going into the desert and living for a while the life of an Arab woman with the daughter of a great chief of the south. The more she thought of it, the more it appealed to her. Besides, when her father pointed out Djazerta on the map, and not more than twenty kilometres away the douar, or tribal encampment under the rule of Ben RÂana, she noticed that they seemed to be scarcely a hundred kilometres distant from Touggourt. Probably Richard Stanton would be spending many days or even weeks at Touggourt before he set off across vast desert spaces searching for the Lost Oasis. So the girl said to Colonel DeLisle that, since she could not at present stay with him, she would like beyond everything else such a romantic adventure as a visit to the Agha's house.

The one objection was that, if she went at all, she must start at once, because there was at the moment a great chance for her to travel well chaperoned. A captain of the Chasseurs d'Afrique had just been ordered from Sidi-bel-AbbÉs to Touggourt, and was leaving at once with his wife. They could take Sanda with them: and at Touggourt Ben RÂana would have his friend's daughter met by an escort and several women servants. It was an opportunity not to miss; though otherwise Colonel DeLisle might have kept the girl with him for a fortnight longer.

Sanda would have liked to bid Max good-bye, or if that were not possible, to write him a letter. But DeLisle said it "would not do." Not that the newly enlisted soldier would misunderstand: but—he would realize why he heard nothing more from his colonel's daughter. She need not fear that he would be hurt. So Sanda could send only a thought message to her friend, and perhaps it reached him in a dream, for the night of her departure—knowing nothing of it—he was back again in the dim cabin of the General Morel gazing through the dusk at a long, swinging plait of gold-brown hair.

Sanda, with Captain Amaranthe and his wife, travelled to Oran, thence to Biskra, and from Biskra on the newly finished railway line to Touggourt. It was there that, twenty-two years ago, the beautiful Irish girl who had run away from home to her soldier lover, joined Georges DeLisle and married him. Sanda thought of that, and thought again also that in a few months more Richard Stanton would come to Touggourt for the getting together of his caravan. These two thoughts transformed the wild desert town with its palms, and tombs of murdered sultans, and its frame of golden dunes into a magical city of romance. She felt that some great thing ought to happen to her there. It was not enough that Touggourt should give her a first glimpse of the true Sahara. She wanted it to give her more. Nor was it enough that she should be met there by an escort of Bedouins with a chief's nephew at their head, and negro women to be her servants, and a white camel of purest breed for her to ride, she being hidden like an Arab princess in a red-curtained bassourah. All this was wonderful, and thrilling as an Eastern story of the Middle Ages; but it meant nothing to her heart. And something deep down in her expected more of Touggourt even than this. She told herself that a place with such associations owed more to a child of Georges DeLisle and Sanda De Lisle; and even when she and her cavalcade started away from the great oasis city, winding southward among the dunes, she still had the conviction that some day, before very long, Touggourt would pay its debt.

Ben RÂana had done what he could to honour Colonel DeLisle through his daughter. He had sent a fine caravan to fetch the girl to Djazerta, and according to the ideas of desert travellers, no luxury was lacking for her comfort. His half-sister's son, Sidi Tahar Ben Hadj, had under him some of the best men of the Agha's goum, and there were a pair of giant, ink-black eunuchs to guard the guest and her two negresses. Silky-soft rugs from Persia lined her bassourah on the side where she would sit, the balance being kept on the other by her luggage wrapped in bundles; and the whole was curtained with sumptuous djerbi, striped in rainbow tints. Over the djerbi, to protect her from the sun, or wind and blowing sand, were hung heavy rugs made by the women of the Djebel Amour mountains, the red and blue folds ornamented by long strands and woollen tassels of kaleidoscopic colours. Sanda's camel (like that of Ben Hadj and the one which carried the two negresses) was a mehari, an animal of race, as superior to ordinary beasts of burden as an eagle is nobler than a domestic fowl. There was a musician among the camel-drivers, chosen especially—so said Ben Hadj—because he knew and could sing a hundred famous songs of love and war. Also he was master of the Arab flute, and the rÄita, "Muezzin of Satan," strange instrument of the wicked voice that can cry down all other voices.

Lest the men should misunderstand and think lightly of the Agha's guest, his nephew did not look upon Sanda's face after the hour of meeting her at Touggourt, in the presence of her friends, until he had brought the girl to his uncle's house, three days later. She was waited upon only by the women and the two black giants who rode behind the white camels: and altogether Sidi Tahar Ben Hadj was in his actions an example of that Arab chivalry about which Sanda had read. Nevertheless she was not able to like him.

For one thing, though he had a fine bearing and a good enough figure (so far as she could tell in his flowing robes and burnous), in looks he was no hero of romance, but a disappointingly ugly man. OurÏeda, the Agha's daughter, was only sixteen, and Tahar was supposed to be no more than a dozen years her elder, but he appeared nearer forty than twenty-eight. He had suffered from smallpox, which had marred his large features and destroyed the sight of one eye. It had turned white and looked, thought Sanda, like the eye of a boiled fish. He wore a short black beard that, although thick, showed the shape of a heavy jaw; and his wide-open, quivering nostrils gave him the look of a bad-tempered horse. Although he could speak French, he seemed to the girl singularly alien and remote. Sanda wondered if he had a wife, or wives, and pitied any Arab woman unfortunate enough to be shut up in his harem.

On the third morning the great dunes were left behind, and the bassourahs no longer swayed like towers in a rotary earthquake with the movements of the camels. Far away across a flat expanse of golden sand, silvered by saltpetre, a long, low cloud—blue-green as a peacock's tail—trailed on the horizon. It was the oasis of Djazerta, with its thousands of date palms.

At first the vision seemed to float behind a veil of sparkling gauze, unreal as a mirage; but toward noon it brightened and sharpened in outline, until at last the tall trees took individual form, bunches of unripe dates beneath their spread fan of plumes hanging down like immense yellow fists at the end of limp, thin arms cased in orange-coloured gloves.

There was a chott, or dried desert lake, glistening white and livid blue, full of ghostly reflections, to cross; but once on the other side all the poetic romance of fairy gardens and magic mirrors vanished. The vast oasis rose out of earthy sand and cracked mud; and the houses piled together beyond it were no longer cubes of molten gold, but squalid, primitive buildings of sun-dried brick crowding each other for shade and protection, their only beauty in general effect and bizarre outline.

"Am I to live in one of those mud hovels?" Sanda wondered. She was not disheartened even by this thought, for the novelty of the whole experience had keyed her up to enjoy any adventure; still it was a relief to go swaying past the huddled town, and to stop before a high, white-washed wall with a small tower on each side of a great gate. Over the top of the wall Sanda could see the flat roof of a large, low house, not yellow like the others, but pearly white as the two or three minarets that gleamed above the fringe of palms.

Somebody must have been watching from one of the squat towers by the gate—each of which had a loophole-window looking out over the caravan way—for even before the head man of the cavalcade could reach the shut portals of faded gray palm-wood, both gates were thrown open, and a dozen men in white rushed out. They uttered shouts of joy at sight of Sidi Tahar Ben Hadj, as though he had been absent for months instead of a few days, and some of the oldest brown faces bent to kiss his shoulders or elbows.

Sanda saw a bare courtyard paved only with hard-packed, yellow sand; and the long front of the house with its few small windows looked unsympathetic and unattractive. The girl felt disappointed. She had imagined a picturesque house, a sort of "Kubla Khan" palace in the desert; and she had expected that perhaps OurÏeda and her father, the Agha, would come ceremoniously out through a vast arched doorway to welcome her. But here there was not even the arched entrance of her fancy, only two small doors set as far as possible from one another in the blank faÇade. Sanda's mehari was led in front of the eastern door, which was pulled ajar in a secretive way. One of the big negroes helped her out of the bassourah as usual, when he had forced the white camel to its knees; and to her surprise the other black man made of his long white burnous a kind of screen behind which she might pass without being seen. The women servants—already out of their bassourah—came hurrying along to join her, silver bracelets a-jingle, chattering encouragement in Arab, scarcely a word of which could Sanda understand.

Inside the house was a queer kind of vestibule, evidently intended for defence, with a jutting screen of wall behind the door, and then a passage with a sharp turn in it, and seats along the sides. A very old, withered negro let them in; and still it seemed to the girl an unfriendly greeting for her father's daughter, one who had come so far. But in a minute more she gave a little cry of pleasure, and suddenly understood the mystery. This part of the house was the harem, secret and sacred to the women, since the very meaning of the word "harem" is "hidden."

She had been ushered through a long, dim corridor, with a sheen of pink and purple tiles halfway up the white wall to the dark wood of a roughly carved ceiling, and instead of coming into a room at the end, she walked unexpectedly into a large fountain court, bright with the crystal brightness of spraying water and the colour of flowers, shaded with orange trees whose blossoms poured out perfume.

Perhaps it was not such a wonderful place really, for the house walls were only of sun-dried sand-brick, white-washed till they gleamed like snow in sunlight; and the wooden balustrades of the narrow balcony that jutted out from the upper story were but roughly carved in stars and crescents, and painted brown to represent cedarwood. Yet it was a picture. The stem of the octagonal tiled fountain was of time-worn, creamy marble; the white house was draped with cascades of wistaria, and pale pink bougainvillea; underneath the shadow of the overhanging balcony ran wall-seats covered and backed with charming old tiles of blue and white "ribbon" design; on them were spread white woollen, black-striped rugs delicately woven by Kabyle women; Tuareg cushions of stamped leather, and pillows of brilliant purple and gold brocade silk. Though no grass carpeted the earthy sand, there were beds of gorgeous flowers under the orange and magnolia trees that patterned the yellow sand with lacy shadow, and a girl like an Arabian Nights' princess stopped feeding a tame gazelle and a troop of doves, to come forward shyly at sight of Sanda. She was the soul of the picture for the moment. Sanda did not even see that there were other women in it. Nothing counted except the girl. Everything else was a mere background or a frame.

There was but a second of silence before words came to either, yet that instant impressed upon Sanda so sharply, so clearly, every detail of OurÏeda's fantastic beauty, that if she had never seen the girl again, she could by closing her eyes have called up the vision.

The oval face was so fair and purely chiselled that it seemed Greek rather than Arab. The golden-brown eyes were large and full of dazzling light as the sun streamed into them under the curve of their heavy black lashes. But though they were bright they were very sad, keeping their infinite melancholy while the red lips smiled—the sad, far-off gaze of a desert creature caged. So long were the lashes that they curled up almost to the low-drawn brows which drooped toward the temples; and that droop of the eyebrows, with the peculiar fineness of the aquiline nose and the downward curve of the very short upper lip, gave a fatal and tragic look to the ivory face framed in dark hair. On either side its delicate oval fell a thick brown braid, not black, but with a glint of red where the light struck; and though OurÏeda's hair was not so long as Sanda's, the two plaits lying over the shoulders and following the line of the young bust fell below the waist. The girl wore a loose robe of coral-red silk, low in the neck, and belted in with a soft, violet-coloured sash. Over this dress was a gandourah of golden gauze with rose and purple glints in its woof; and a stiff, gold scarf was wound loosely round the dark head. The colours blazed like flaming jewels in the African sunshine. As the Agha's daughter moved forward smiling her sad little smile, there came with her a waft of perfume like the fragrance of lilies; and the tinkling of bracelets on slender wrists, the clash of anklets on silk-clad ankles, was like a musical accompaniment, a faintly played leit motif. Perhaps OurÏeda had dressed herself in all she had that was most beautiful in honour of her guest.

As usual, Sanda forgot herself with the first thrill of excitement. In her admiration she did not realize that the other girl was self-conscious, a little frightened, a little anxious, and even distrustful. It would have seemed incredible to Sanda DeLisle that any one on earth, even an inmate of a harem, could possibly be afraid of her.

She held out both hands impulsively, exclaiming in French: "Oh, are you OurÏeda? But you are beautiful as a princess in a fairy story. You are worth coming all this long way to see!"

Then the Arab girl's smile changed, and for an instant was radiant, unclouded by any thought of sadness. She took Sanda's little gloved hands, and, pressing them affectionately, bent forward to kiss her guest on both cheeks. Her lips were soft and cool as flower petals, though the day was hot, and the scent of lilies swept over Sanda in a fragrant wave. As she kissed the stranger, OurÏeda made little birdlike sucking sounds, in the fashion of Arab women when they would show honour to a favoured friend. First she kissed Sanda's right cheek, the right side of the body being nobler because the White Angel walks always on the right, jotting down in his book every good deed done; then she kissed the left cheek, since it is at the left side of man or woman that the wicked Black Angel stalks, tempting to evil acts, and hastily recording them before they can be repented.

"Why, you are as young as I am, and white and gold as the little young moon, and very, very sweet, like honey!" cried the girl, in French as good as Sanda's, though with the throaty, thrushlike notes that Spaniards and Arabs put into every language. "I am glad, oh, really glad, that you have come to be with me! Now I see you I know I was foolish to be afraid."

Sanda laughed as they stood holding each other's hands and looking into each other's eyes. "Afraid of me?" she echoed. "Oh, you couldn't have been afraid of me!"

"But I was," said OurÏeda. "I was afraid until this minute."

"Why?" asked Sanda. "Did you fancy I might be big and old and cross, perhaps with stick-out teeth and spectacles, like Englishwomen in French caricatures?"

OurÏeda shook her head, still gazing at her guest as if she would read the soul whose experiences had been so different from her own. "No, I have never seen any French caricatures," she answered. "I hardly know what they are. And I did not think you would be old, because the Agha, my father, told me you were but a baby when he first knew your father, the Colonel DeLisle. Still, I did not understand that you would look as young as I do, or that you would have a face like a white flower, and eyes with truth shining in them, as our wise women say it shines up like a star out of darkness from the bottom of a well."

"In my country they say the very same thing about truth and a well," returned Sanda, blushing faintly under the oddly compelling gaze of the sad young eyes. "But do tell me why you felt afraid, if you didn't think I should be old and disagreeable?"

Suddenly the other's face changed. A queer look of extraordinary eagerness, almost of slyness, transformed it, chasing away something of its soft beauty. "Hush!" she said, "we can't talk of such things now. Some time soon, perhaps! I forgot we were not alone. I must introduce you to my Aunt Mabrouka, my father's widowed half-sister, who"—and her voice hardened—"is like a second mother to me."

She stepped back, and an elderly woman, who had stood in the background awaiting her turn (though far from humbly, to judge by the flashing of her eyes), moved forward to welcome the Roumia—the foreigner.

Then for the first time Sanda realized that OurÏeda, the soul of the picture, was not the only human figure in it besides herself. Lella[1] Mabrouka was a personality, too, and if she had been a woman of some progressive country, marching with the times, most probably she would have been among the Suffragists. She would have made a handsome man, and indeed looked rather like a stout, short man of middle age, disguised as an inmate of his own harem. She was dressed in white, Arab mourning, considered unlucky for women who have not lost some relative by death, and her square, wrinkled face, the colour of bronze, was dark and harsh in contrast. If she had not been partly screened by a great flowering pomegranate bush as she sat in her white dress against the white house wall, Sanda would have seen her on entering the court; but it was hopeless to try and appease the lady's scarcely stifled vexation with apologies or explanations. Lella Mabrouka, being of an older generation, had not troubled to learn French, and could understand only a few words which her naturally quick mind had assorted in hearing the Agha talk with his daughter. OurÏeda acted as interpreter for the politeness of her aunt and guest, but Sanda could not help realizing that all was not well between the two. A tall old negress (introduced by the girl as a beloved nurse), a woman of haggard yet noble face, stood dutifully behind Lella Mabrouka, but stabbed the broad white back with keen, suspicious glances that softened into love as her great eyes turned to the "Little Rose."

Honey could be no sweeter than the words of welcome translated by OurÏeda, and when Sanda's answers had been put into Arabic, Lella Mabrouka received them graciously. Soon aunt and niece and servant were all chattering and smiling, offering coffee and fruit, and assuring the Roumia that her host was eagerly awaiting permission to meet her. Yet Sanda could not rid herself of the impression that some hidden drama was being secretly played in this fountain court of sunshine and flowers.