THE SECRET AND THE GIRL

The exciting part began in Cairo; but perhaps I ought to go back to what happened on the Laconia, between Naples and Alexandria. Luckily no one can expect a man who actually rejoices in his nickname of "Duffer" to know how or where a true story should begin.

The huge ship was passing swiftly out of the Bay of Naples, and already we were in the strait between Capri and the mainland. I had come on deck from the smoking-room for a last look at poor Vesuvius, who lost her lovely head in the last eruption. I paced up and down, acutely conscious of my great secret, the secret inspiring my voyage to Egypt. For months it had been the hidden romance of life; now it began to seem real. This is not the moment to tell how I got the papers that revealed the secret, before I passed them on to Anthony Fenton at Khartum, for him to say whether or not the notes were of real importance. But the papers had been left in Rome by Ferlini, the Italian Egyptologist, seventy years ago, when he gave to the museum at Berlin the treasures he had unearthed. It was Ferlini who ransacked the pyramids all about MeroË, that so-called island in the desert, where in its days of splendour reigned the queens Candace. Fenton, stationed at Khartum, an eager dabbler in the old lore of Egypt, sent me an enthusiastic telegram the moment he read the documents. They confirmed legends of the Sudan in which he had been interested. Putting two and two together—the legends and Ferlini's notes—Anthony was convinced that we had the clue to fortune. At once he applied for permission to excavate under the little outlying mountain named by the desert folk "the Mountain of the Golden Pyramid." At first the spot was thought to fall within the province given up to Garstang, digging for Liverpool University. Later, however, the Service des AntiquitÉs pronounced the place to be outside Garstang's borders, and it seemed that luck was coming our way. No one but we two—Fenton and I—had any inkling of what might lie hidden in the Mountain of the Golden Pyramid. That was the great secret! Then Fenton had gone to the Balkans, on a flying trip in every sense of the word. It was only a fortnight ago—I being then in Rome—that I had had a wire from him in Salonica saying, "Friends at work to promote our scheme. Meet me on my return to Egypt." After that, several telegrams had been exchanged; and here I was on the Laconia bound for the land of my birth, full of hope and dreams.

For some moments distant Vesuvius had beguiled my thoughts from the still more distant mountain of the secret, when suddenly a white girl in a white hood and a long white cloak passed me on the white deck: whereupon I forgot mountains of reality and dreams. She was one of those tall, slim, long-limbed, dryad-sort of girls they are running up nowadays in England and America with much success; and besides all that, she was an amazing symphony in white and gold against an azure Italian sea and sky, the two last being breezily jumbled together at the moment for us on shipboard. She walked well in spite of the blue turmoil; and if a fair girl with golden-brown hair gets herself up in satiny white fur from head to foot she is evidently meant to be looked at. Others were looking: also they were whispering after she went by: and her serene air of being alone in a world made entirely for her caused me to wonder if she were not Some One in Particular.

Just then a sweet, soft voice said, close to my ear:

"Why, Duffer, dear, it can't possibly be you!"

I gave a jump, for I hadn't heard that voice for many a year, and between the ages of four and fourteen I had been in love with it.

"Brigit O'Brien!" said I. Then I grabbed her two hands and shook them as if her arms had been branches of a young cherry tree, dropping fruit.

"Why not Biddy?" she asked. "Or are ye wanting me to call ye Lord Ernest?"

"Good heavens, no! Once a Duffer, always a Duffer," I assured her. "And I've been thinking of you as Biddy from then till now. Only—"

"'Twas as clever a thing as a boy ever did," she broke in, with one of her smiles that no man ever forgets, "to begin duffing at an early age, in order to escape all the professions and businesses your pastors and masters proposed, and go your own way. Are ye at it still?"

"Rather! But you? I want to talk to you."

"Then don't do it in a loud voice, if you please, because, as you must have realized, if you've taken time to think, I'm Mrs. Jones at present."

"Why Jones?"

"Because Smith is engaged beforehand by too many people. Honestly, without joking, I'm in danger here and everywhere, and it's a wicked, selfish thing for me to come the way I have; but Rosamond Gilder is the hardest girl to resist you ever saw, so I'm with her; and it's a long history."

"Rosamond Gilder? What—the Cannon Princess, the Bertha Krupp of America?"

"Yes, the 'Gilded Babe' that used to be wheeled about in a caged perambulator guarded by detectives: the 'Gilded Bud' whose coming out in society was called the Million Dollar DÉbut: now she's just had her twenty-first birthday, and the Sunday Supplements have promoted her to be the Golden Girl, alternating with the Gilded Rose, although she's the simplest creature, really, with a tremendous sense of the responsibility of her riches. Poor child! There she is, walking toward us now, with those two young men. Of course, young men! Droves of young men! She can't get away from them any more than she can from her money. No, she's stopped to talk to Cleopatra."

"That tall, white girl Rosamond Gilder! Just before you came, I was wondering who she was; and when you smiled at each other across the deck it sprang into my mind that—that—"

"That what?"

"Oh, it seems stupid now."

"Give me a chance to judge, dear Duffer."

"Well, seeing you, and knowing—that is, it occurred to me you might be travelling with—the daughter of—your late—"

"Good heavens, don't say any more! I've been frightened to death somebody would get that brilliant notion in his head, especially as Monny and her aunt came on board the Laconia only at Monaco. EsmÉ O'Brien is in a convent school not thirty miles from there. But that's the deepest secret. Poor Peter Gilder's fears for his millionaire girl would be child's play to what might happen, before such a mistake was found out if once it was made. That's just one of the hundred reasons why it would be as safe for Monny Gilder to travel with a bomb in her dressing-bag as to have me in her train of dependants. She telegraphed to New York for me, because of a stupid thing I said in a letter, about being lonely: though she pretends it would be too dull journeying to such a romantic country alone with a mere aunt. And she thinks I 'attract adventures.' It's only too true. But I couldn't resist her. Nobody can. Why, the first time I ever saw Monny she'd cast herself down in a mud-puddle, and was screaming and kicking because she wanted to walk while one adoring father, one sycophantic governess and two trained nurses wanted her to get into an automobile. That was on my honeymoon—heaven save the mark—! and Monny was nine. She has other ways now of getting what she wants, but they're even more effective. I laughed at her that first time, and she was so surprised at my impudence she took a violent fancy to me. But I don't always laugh at her now. Oh, she's a perfect terror, I assure you—and a still more perfect darling! Such an angel of charity to the poor, such a demon of obstinacy with the rich! I worship her. So does Cleopatra. So does everybody who doesn't hate her. So will you the minute you've been introduced. And by the way, why not? Why shouldn't I make myself useful for once by arranging a match between Rosamond Gilder, the prettiest heiress in America, and Lord Ernest Borrow, of the oldest family in Ireland?"

"And the poorest."

"All the more reason why. Don't you see?"

"She mightn't."

"Well, what's the good of her having all that money if she doesn't get hold of a really grand title to hang it on? I shall tell her that Borrow comes down from Boru, Brian Boru the rightful King of Ireland: and when your brother dies you'll be Marquis of Killeena."

"He'll not die for thirty or forty years, let's hope."

"Why hope it, when he likes nobody and nobody likes him, and everybody likes you? He can't be happy. And anyhow, isn't it worth a few millions to be Lady Ernest Borrow, and have the privilege of restoring the most beautiful old castle in Ireland? I'm sure Killeena would let her."

"He would, out of sheer, weak kindness of heart! But she's far too thickly gilded an heiress for me to aspire to. A few thousands a year is my most ambitious figure for a wife. Look at the men collecting around her and the wonderful lady you call Cleopatra. Why Cleopatra? Did sponsors in baptism—"

"No, they didn't. Why she's Cleopatra is as weird a history as why I'm Mrs. Jones. But she's Monny's aunt—at least, she's a half-sister of Peter Gilder, and as his only living relative his will makes her Monny's guardian till the girl marries or reaches twenty-five. A strange guardian! But he didn't know she was going to turn into Cleopatra. She wisely waited to do that until he was dead; so it came on only a year ago. It was a Bond Street crystal-gazer transplanted to Fifth Avenue told her who she really was: you know Sayda Sabri, the woman who has the illuminated mummy? It's Cleopatra's idea that Monny's second mourning for Peter should be white, nothing but white."

"Her idea! But I thought Miss Monny, as you call her, adopted only her own ideas. How can a mere half-aunt, labouring under the name of Cleopatra, force her—"

"Well, you see, white's very becoming; and as for the Cleopatra part, it pleases our princess to tolerate that. It's part of the queer history that's mixing me up with the family. We've come to spend the season in Egypt because Cleopatra thinks she's Cleopatra; also because Monny (that's what she's chosen to call herself since she tried to lisp 'Resamond' and couldn't) because Monny has read 'The Garden of Allah,' and wants the 'desert to take her.' That book had nothing to do with Egyptian deserts; but any desert will do for Monny. What she expects it to do with her exactly when it has taken her, on the strength of a Cook ticket, I don't quite know; but I may later, because she vows she'll keep me at her side with hooks of steel all through the tour—unless something worse happens to me, or to some of us because of me." "Biddy, dear, don't be morbid. Nothing bad will happen," I tried to reassure her.

"Thank you for saying so. It cheers me up. We women folk are so in the habit of believing anything you men folk tell us. It's really quaint!"

"Stop rotting, and tell me about yourself; and a truce to heiresses and Cleopatras. You know I'm dying to hear."

"Not a syllable, until you've told me about yourself. Where you're going, and what the dickens for!"

We laughed into each other's eyes. To do so, I had to look a long way down, and she a long way up. This in itself is a pleasantly Victorian thing for a man to do in these days of Jerrybuilt girls, on the same level or a story or two higher than himself. I'm not a tall man: just the dull average five foot ten or eleven that appears taller, while it keeps lean—so naturally I have a hopeless yearning for nymph-like creatures who pretend to be engaged when I ask them to dance. Still, there's consolation and homely comfort in talking with a little woman who makes you feel the next best thing to a giant. Biddy is an old-fashioned five foot four in her highest heels; and as she smiled up at me I saw that she hadn't changed a jot in the last ten years, despite the tragedy that had involved her. Not a silver thread in the black hair, not a line on the creamy round face.

"You're just yourself," I said.

"I oughtn't to be. I know that very well. I ought to be a Dido and Niobe and Cassandra rolled into one. I'm a brute not to be dead or look a hag. I've gone through horrors, and the secrets I know could put dozens of people in prison, if not electrocute them. But you see I'm not the right type of person for the kind of life I've had, as I should be if I were in a story book, and the author had created me to suit my background. I can't help flapping up out of my own ashes before they're cold. I can't help laughing in the face of fate."

"And looking a girl of twenty-three, at most, while you do it!"

"If I look a girl, I must be a phenomenon as well as a phoenix, for nobody knows better than you that my Bible age is thirty-one if it's a day. And I think Burke and Debrett have got the same tale to tell about you, eh?"

"They have. I was always delighted to share something with you."

"You can have the whole share of my age over twenty-six. There's one advantage 'Mrs. Jones' has. She can, if her looking-glass doesn't forbid, go back to that classic age dear to all sensible adventuresses. I'm afraid I come under the head of adventuress, with my alias, and travelling as companion to the rich Miss Gilder."

"You're the last person on earth for the part! Your fate was thrust on you. You've thrust yourself on no one. Miss Gilder 'achieved' you."

"Collected me, rather, as one of her 'specimens.' She has a noble weakness for lame ducks, and though she fails sometimes in trying to strengthen their game legs, she tries gloriously. She and her aunt have been travelling in France and Italy, guided by instinct and French maids, and already Monny has picked up two weird protÉgÉes, sure to bring her to grief. The most exciting and deadly specimen is a perfectly beautiful American girl just married to a Turkish Bey who met her in Paris, and is taking her home to Egypt. I haven't even seen the unfortunate houri, because the Turk has shut her up in their cabin and pretends she's seasick. Monny doesn't believe in the seasickness, and sends secret notes in presents of flowers and boxes of chocolate. But I have seen the Turk. He's pink and white and looks angelic, except for a gleam deep down in his eyes, if Monny inquires after his wife when any of her best young men are hanging about. Especially when there's Neill Sheridan, a young Egyptologist from Harvard, Monny met in Paris, or Willis Bailey, a fascinating sculptor who wants to study the crystal eyes of wooden statues in the Museum at Cairo. He is going to make them the fashion in America, next year. Yes, Madame Rechid Bey is a most explosive protÉgÉe for a girl to have, on her way to Egypt. I'm not sure even I am not innocuous by comparison; though I do wish you hadn't reminded me of my poor little step-daughter EsmÉ, in her convent-school. If any one should get the idea that Monny—but I won't put it in words! Besides me, and the brand-new bride of Rechid Bey ('Wretched Bey' is our name for him), there's one more protÉgÉe, a Miss Rachel Guest from Salem, Massachusetts, a school-teacher taking her first holiday. That sounds harmless, and it looks harmless to an amateur; but wait till you meet her and see what instinct tells you about her eyes. Oh, we shall have ructions! But that reminds me. You haven't told me where you're bound—or anything."

"Thanks for putting me among the 'specimens.' But this sample hasn't yet been collected by Miss Gilder."

"You might be her salvation, and keep her out of mischief. She's quite wild now with sheer joy because she's going to Egypt. But do be serious, and tell me all I pine to know, if you want me to do the same by you."

"Well—though it's unimportant compared to what you have to tell! I'm an insignificant second secretary to Sir Raymond Ronalds, the British Ambassador at Rome. I've got four months' leave——"

"Ah, that's what comes of duffing so skilfully, and avoiding all the things you didn't want to do, till you got exactly what you did want! I remember when we were small boy and girl, and you used to walk down to the vicarage every day, to talk Greek or Latin or something with father——"

"No, to see you!"

"Well, you used to tell me, if you couldn't be the greatest prize-fighter or the greatest opera-singer in the world, you thought you'd like to be a diplomat.

"I haven't become a diplomat yet, in spite of Foreign Office grubbing. But I've been enjoying life pretty well, fagging up Arabic and modern Greek, and playing about with pleasant people, while pretending to do my duty. Now I've got leave on account of a mild fever which turned out a blessing in disguise. I could have found no other excuse for Egypt this winter."

"You speak as if you had some special reason for going to Egypt."

"I've been wishing to go, more or less, for years, because you know—if you haven't forgotten—I was accidentally born in Cairo while my father was fighting in Alexandria. My earliest recollections are of Egypt, for we lived there till I was four—about the time I met and fell in love with you. I've always thought I'd like to polish up old memories. But my special hurry is because I'm anxious to meet a friend, a chap I admire and love beyond all others. I want to see him for his own sake, and for the sake of a plan we have, which may make a lot of difference for our future."

"How exciting! Did I ever know him?"

"I think not."

"Well? Don't you mean to tell me who he is?"

I hesitated, sorry I had let myself go: because Anthony had written that he didn't want his movements discussed at present.

"I'll tell you another time," I said. "I want to talk about you. Anybody else is irrelevant."

"Clever Duffer! Your friend is a secret."

"Not he! But if there's a secret anywhere, it's only a dull, dusty sort of secret. You wouldn't be interested."

"Women never are, in secrets. Well, I'm glad somebody else besides myself has a mystery to hide."

"You're very quick."

"I'm Irish! But I'm merciful. No more questions—till you're off your guard. You're free to ask me all you like, if there's anything you care to know which horrid newspapers haven't told you these last few years."

"There are a thousand things. You didn't answer anybody's letters, after—after——"

"After Richard died. Oh, I can talk about it, now. It was the best thing that could happen for him, poor fellow. Life in hiding was purgatory. No, I couldn't answer letters, though my old friends (you among them) wanted to be kind. There wasn't anything I could let anybody do for me. Monny Gilder's different. You'll soon see why."

I smiled indulgently. But, though I was to be introduced to Miss Gilder for the purpose of being eventually gilded by her, at the instant my thoughts were for my childhood's sweetheart.

Brigit Burne made a terrible mess of things in marrying, when she was eighteen or so, Richard O'Brien, in the height of his celebrity as a socialist leader. People still believed in him then, at the time of his famous lecturing tour and visit to his birthplace on our green island; and though he was more than twice her age, the fascination he had for Biddy surprised few who knew him.

He was eloquent, in a fiery way. He had extraordinary eyes, and it was his pride to resemble portraits of Lord Byron. After an acquaintance of a month, Biddy married O'Brien (I had just gone up to Oxford at the time, or I should have tried not to let it happen), went to America with him, and voluntarily ceased to exist for her friends.

Poor girl, she must have had an awakening! He had posed as a bachelor; but after her marriage she found out (and the world with her) that he was a widower with one child, a little girl he had practically abandoned. Biddy adopted her, though the mother had been a rather undesirable Frenchwoman; and now when I saw her smiling at the tall white girl on the Laconia, I had thought for an instant that Biddy and her stepdaughter might be in flight together. O'Brien was a drunkard, as well as a demagogue; and not long after Brigit's flitting with him there was a scandal about the accepting of bribes from politicians on the opposing side, apparently his greatest enemies; but a minor scandal compared to what came some years afterward. O'Brien's name was implicated in the blowing up of the World-Republican Building in Washington, and the wrecking of Senator Marlowe's special train after his speech against socialist interests, but the coward turned informer against his friends and associates in the secret society of which he had been a leader, and saved himself by sending them to prison. From that day until his death he lived the life of a hunted animal flying from the hounds of vengeance. Brigit stood by him in spite of threats against her life as well as his, and the life of the child. Since then, though she answered none of our letters, we had heard rumours. The girl EsmÉ, whom the avengers had threatened to kidnap, was supposed to be hidden in some convent-school in Europe. As for Brigit, she was said to be training for a hospital nurse: reported to have become a missionary in India, China, and one or two other countries; seen on the music-hall stage, and traced to Johannesburg, where she had married a diamond-merchant; yet here she was on board the Laconia, unchanged in looks, or nature, and the guest of a much paragraphed, much proposed to American heiress en route to Egypt.

While Brigit was telling me the real story of her last two years, as governess, companion, teacher of music, and journalist, Miss Gilder regarded us sidewise from amid her bodyguard of young men. Evidently she was dying to know who was the acquaintance her darling Biddy had picked up in mid-Mediterranean the moment her back was turned; and at last, unable to restrain herself longer, she made use of some magic trick to attach the band of youths to her aunt. Then, separating herself with almost indecent haste from the group, she marched up to us, gazing—I might say, staring—with large unfriendly eyes at the intruder.

Brigit promptly accounted for me, however, rolling her "r's" patriotically because I reminded her of Ireland. "Do let me introduce Lord Ernest Borrow," she said. "I must have told you about him in my stories, when you were a child, for he was me first love."

"It was the other way round," I objected. "She wouldn't look at me. I adored her."

Biddy glared a warning. Her eyes said, "Silly fellow, don't you know every girl wants to be the one and only love of a man's life?"

I had supposed that this old craze had gone out of fashion. But perhaps there are a few primitive things which will never go out of fashion with women.

Now that I had Miss Gilder's proud young face opposite mine, I saw that it wasn't quite so perfect as I'd fancied when she flashed by in her tall whiteness. Her nose, pure Greek in profile, seen in full was —well, just neat American: a straight, determined little twentieth-century nose. The full red mouth, not small, struck me as being determined also, rather than classic, despite the daintily drawn cupid's bow of the short upper lip. I realized too that the long-lashed, wide-open, and wide-apart eyes were of the usual bluish-gray possessed by half the girls one knows. And as for the thick wavy hair pushed crisply forward by the white hood, now it was out of the sun's glamour, there was more brown than gold in it. I said to myself, that the face with the firm cleft chin was only just pretty enough to give a great heiress or a youthful princess the reputation of a beauty; a combination desired and generally produced by journalists. Then, as I was thinking this, while Brigit explained me, Miss Gilder suddenly smiled. I was dazzled. No wonder Biddy loved her. It would be a wonder if I didn't love her myself before I knew what was happening.

And so I should instantly have done, perhaps, if it hadn't been for Biddy's eyes seeming to come between mine and Miss Gilder's: and the fact that at the moment I was in quest of another treasure than a woman's heart. My thoughts were running ahead of the ship to Alexandria, to find out from Anthony Fenton ("Antoun Effendi" the biggest boys used to nickname him at school) more about the true history of that treasure than he dared trust to paper and ink and the post office.

So I put off falling in love with Rosamond Gilder till I should have seen Anthony, and tidied up my distracted mind. A little later would do, I told myself, because (owing to the fact that my ancestral castle had figured in Biddy's tales of long ago) I was annexed as one of the protÉgÉs; allowed to make a fifth at the small, flowery table under a desirable porthole in the green and white restaurant; also I was invited to go about with the ladies and show them Cairo. Just how much "going about," and falling in love, I should be able to do there, depended on "Antoun Effendi." But when Biddy congratulated me on my luck, and chance of success in the "scheme," I said nothing of Anthony.