THE GREAT SIR MARCUS

The appointment was at the Semiramis Hotel, where Sir Marcus Lark was staying. I went with my mind an aching void, and my heart a cold boiled potato. I can think of nothing more disagreeable! For not a word more would Fenton let drop as to the great man's business with us or the Mountain of the Golden Pyramid.

I sent up my card, and a few minutes later was shown into a private salon more appropriate to a beautiful young duchess than to a middle-aged, bumptious financier. It was pale green and white, full of lilies and fragrance, and an immense French window opened out upon a roofed loggia overlooking the Nile. This would have been the ideal environment for our Gilded Rose; and I felt more venomous than before, if possible, toward the rich bounder who posed against such an unsuitable background. I thought, as the door of the salon was opened for me by the smart Arab servant, that the room was untenanted, and that Sir Marcus Lark meant to keep me waiting; but there he was, on the balcony, gazing in rapture at the shining river. As if he were capable of raptures, he, an earth-bound worm! But there was no mistaking that back, those shoulders, or the face, as the big body turned. He advanced through the open window, holding out a hand as big as a steak. He was exactly like his photograph, except that there was even more of him than I had been led to expect. The pretty room was net small, but entering, he seemed to turn it into a doll's house parlour. "Six foot two, if he's an inch!" I said to myself, longing to play David to his Goliath. "Big, rich, common brute!" I thought. "You snatch our mountain out of our mouths, and then you send for us as if we were servants—men whose boots you ought to be blacking!" I was vindictive. I stared him straight between the eyes—where a stone from David's sling would have fitted in neatly.

The eyes were wide apart, and kinder than in the photographs. They were even curiously innocent, and boyish. His grin of greeting made the large, waxed black moustache point joyously up. He showed teeth white as a child's, and had dimples—actually dimples—in his big cheeks, to say nothing of the one in his chin, with which snapshots had familiarized me. He looked like a huge, overgrown schoolboy with a corked moustache. My glare faded in the light of his smile. No man with a gleam of humour could have kept a mask of grimness. I found my hand enveloped in the pound of steak, and warmly shaken up and down inside it.

"Lord Ernest Borrow, I'm delighted to see you. Very good of you to come, I'm sure!" to David quoth Goliath, in a big voice, mellow despite a slight Cockney accent. "Nice view I've treated myself to here, what? I'm in Egypt on business, but I like to have pretty things around me —pleasant colours and flowers and a view. That's a specialty of mine. I'm great on specializing. And that brings me to what we have in common; a scheme of yours; a scheme of mine."

I wanted to detest the man, but somehow couldn't. To hate him would be hating an overpowering force, like heat, or electricity.

With an old-fashioned politeness he made me sit down, picking out my chair, the most comfortable in the room, then taking the next best for himself. He fitted into it as tightly as a ripe plum into its skin, and talked with one leg crossed over the other and swinging, the points of his brown fingers joined. I was glad they were brown.

"I'm afraid you're sore with me," he began, having ordered coffee and liqueurs, and forced upon his guest a cigar as big as a sausage. "I've got what you and your friend wanted; and I'm going to be frank with you as I've been with him, and admit that I got it because you did want it. Simply and solely for that reason and nothing else. He told you this?"

"He left the telling to you," I said, wondering why I wasn't more furious than curious. But it was the other way round.

"Good egg! He promised he would, and he looks the sort of chap to keep his promise. Well, I see you want me to get down to business, and I will. I'm going to lay all my cards on the table. I came here to Egypt for the first time in my life, to see a scheme through, and I landed on the scene in time to find that I was likely to fail. I haven't told any one else that, but your friend Fenton; for I never have made a business failure yet, and I don't mean to now if I can help it. The scheme had to be saved in a hurry if it could be saved at all; and when I set my wits to work I saw that I must get hold of some such young men as you and Captain Fenton to help me. I don't know how the thought of you two popped into my head, but I suppose it was seeing a lot of stuff about Fenton in the papers, his Balkan adventure, and the announcement that he'd been recalled to his regiment. There were paragraphs about him as a linguist, and an Egyptologist, and anecdotes of him as a smart soldier. You know the sort of thing. And the stories about his parentage caught my fancy a bit. They're romantic. I've got enough romance in me to see that side of life, and to know how it goes down with the women. This scheme of mine depends on women. Most schemes do. At the same time the Egyptian papers were printing paragraphs about Lord Ernest Borrow. I don't know whether you're aware of that or not? No? Would you like to see 'em? I've had my secretary cut 'em out—and the Fenton stuff, too. The minute this idea began to wiggle in my mind like a tadpole in water, I kept everything."

"Don't trouble about the paragraphs, thanks," I said.

"All right. It will save our time not to. But your wish to go in with your friend, for the rights of excavating in the Sudan, was mentioned, and the delay on account of alleged interference with Garstang's pitch."

"By Jove, I wonder how the reporters got onto that?" I couldn't help exclaiming.

"It's their livelihood to get onto everything. 'Well then,' I said to myself, 'Here's my chance, my only one. I want those two young men. They're the right combination nation for me, to give real distinction to my undertaking. I have money, but they ain't the sort you can buy with money. There must be an incentive. If I get what they want, perhaps I can get them.' So I went into the job tooth and nail. Neither you nor Fenton was on the spot. I was—very much on it. Nothing was definitely fixed up between the Government and Fenton for the right to excavate at the Mountain of the Golden Pyramid, as they call the little old molehill, and I scored. Now, if you two will do what I want, you can have your mountain, and whatever you find you can keep. You're worth more to me than any beads and broken-nosed statues under the sand of Egypt. I think I've made some impression on your friend. He may be inclined to go in with me, if you will. He's explained that in any case he can't use his own name, on account of his position in the army and so on. That's a disappointment to me, but I'll put up with it for the sake of his accomplishments and his looks. Your name alone will carry the necessary weight as a leader."

"You're very flattering," said I. "But I'm in the dark."

"I'm going to put you wise, as Americans say. My scheme was—and is—to be a rival de luxe of Cook on the Nile. Not only that, but all over the near East. You've heard, of course, about my buying the Marquis of Redruth's yacht Candace, on his bankruptcy—the second biggest, and the most up-to-date yacht in the world—and turning her into a pleasure cruiser for the Mediterranean?"

"If I've heard, I'm afraid my memory's treacherous," said I, glad to show how unimportant to me were the schemes of financiers, but interested in the yacht's name, which carried my thoughts away to MerÖe.

"Great Scout! And I've spent two thousand in advertising! I've taken whole pages of London and Continental papers!"

"I never read advertisements if I can help it, except of new patents in razors. They're a fad of mine."

"Thank goodness you've got fads. Then we've something in common. I make money out of my fads. I call 'em inspirations. I thought the Candace business was one of my inspirations, and that I'd have some fun out of it. I advertised her to start on her first pleasure cruise from Marseilles to Gib, Algiers, Tangier, Tunis, Greece, Alexandria, and Jaffa. 'That'll be a smack in the eye for the big liners,' I said to myself. 'I'll skim the top layer of clotted cream off their passenger lists!' I was going to do the thing de luxe straight through—bid for the swell set, exclusiveness my motto. Of course I didn't expect to hit the dukes and dollar kings first shot, but I thought if everything went right the passengers would tell their friends at home how much better we did them on board than any one else had ever done, and we'd get a 'snowball' ad, that nothing could stop. All would have worked out first rate, if I hadn't made one mistake. I engaged a retired army colonel for a conductor on board my yacht. I got the man cheap. But I was a fool to economize on him. I ought to have launched out on a belted earl. Folks, especially Americans, don't like retired colonels. The woods are full of 'em over there, crawling with 'em. Most Americans are colonels and not retired. Besides, this chap of mine's no good anyhow —fancies himself as a politician, and is a first-class snob; has no tact; rubs up the passengers the wrong way, and outrages their feelings. We got a lot of people from the north of England, rich and a bit crude, like me. Will you believe it, Colonel Corkran began his job by sneering audibly at 'provincials' to some beastly friend of his, come to see him off at Marseilles? Instead of making his dinner-table lectures a kind of travellogue as he was hired to do, he turns 'em into political tirades, and calls the Liberals scoundrels, half of our folks being red-hot Rads. Not only that, if the girls and boys talk while the band's playin' any of his favourite airs, he hisses out 'Silence,' through a hole in his mouth where one tooth's missin'. That tooth bein' gone, has got on the girls' nerves worse than anything else, it would seem, except his being down on Suffragettes. And the crisis was reached when he insulted Miss Hassett Bean, the richest and most important woman in the bunch, when she expressed her political opinions. Said to her, 'My dear lady, why do you bother to have opinions? They give you a lot of trouble to collect, and nobody else will trouble to listen. Why not collect insects or stamps instead?' Of course she did think Germany had already invaded England with a large army of soldiers disguised as hotel waiters, which was calculated to rile an old officer; but that's no excuse for a man who's paid to please. And now the fellow's wondering why he's not popular with the passengers!"

I laughed, but Sir Walter had worked himself into a state past smiling point. "It's no laughing matter," he said, "This snob Corkran's killing my scheme. There's a plot on foot for the party to walk off the yacht at Alexandria, and demand half their passage money. Some old grampus on board has started the story that the Candace has been down three times———"

"A lie, of course," I soothed him.

"A dastardly lie. She's been down only twice. The first time was a collision, the second a coincidence."

"But I thought she was the most up-to-date yacht in the world!"

"So she is, as the Candace. That was the Marquis's name for her: gave it after a trip to Egypt. He bought her second hand, and rechristened her while she was being redecorated. He spared no expense, which he could well afford, seeing that he never paid a penny. I got her at cost price, as you may say. But these plotters are going to claim that they were inveigled on board under false pretences, by my advertising the Candace as the newest thing in yachts. I've had a letter and several cypher telegrams from the assistant conductor, a useful chap, telling me the whole story of the plot, which he's nosed out; and I'm faced with humiliating failure unless I can save the situation by a grand coup at the eleventh hour. Now, you can guess why on the spur of the moment I bought up your rights to dig in the Sudan, can't you?"

"I confess I can't," I said.

"Why, I want you to take Colonel Corkran's place on the Candace as conductor. And I want you and your friend Fenton to go up Nile in charge of the splendid steam dahabeah I've bought to supplement the Mediterranean trip. There you have my motives in a nutshell!"

I burst out laughing. "A cracked nutshell," I remarked. Sir Marcus' rosy face turned royal purple. "What—you won't undertake it?"

"I couldn't," I assured him. "For one thing, I'd be a fish out of water. My dear sir, perhaps you don't know that my nickname since the age of five has been 'Duffer?' I'm proud of it. I take pains to live up to it——"

"I bet you do. I bet it opens doors and lays down velvet carpets for you. Why, a duffer with a title is exactly what I want! Duffers are the rage nowadays. You and your friend will make a brilliant pair, a fine contrast, especially with your friend's present get up. If you'd both been born for me you couldn't suit me better."

I laughed again. "You said you ought to have launched out on belted earls. We're humble——"

"There's no earls handy, and if there were any, they wouldn't be what you two are in looks and talents, to say nothing of your brother being a marquis. I'm offering you both the softest kind of job. All you have to do is to be agreeable young gentlemen, with a knowledge of society, and history; that means, you can be yourselves. You get a fine trip on high salaries if you don't scorn to accept my money; and as a reward for a good holiday you receive the right to explore your golden mountain. I suppose you must think it is a golden mountain, or you wouldn't be such nuts on it. You'd better consult your friend before you refuse my offer, anyhow."

"Haven't you heard that Fenton's left Cairo?" I took the precaution to ask. "That doesn't look as if he were entertaining the idea of going up the Nile on your steam dahabeah." "I have heard that he's left. But I happen to know—it isn't so. I saw him standing in front of Shepheard's Hotel this morning, waiting for you. I got on to what was in that green turban before the pretty girl in white—Miss Gilder, I've found out since—called him on to the terrace. Don't look as if you wanted to eat me, Lord Ernest. I've won my way up from the bottom rung of the ladder by keeping my eyes open, and by putting two and two together. I specialize on that. I don't suppose there's another man in Cairo except me and you, would have recognized Fenton, so you needn't worry. I twigged that he'd dressed up for serious business, not for fun, because I read about some smart coups he'd brought off by going among the natives like one of themselves. I'm not a sneak, and I shan't revenge myself by giving him away, even if you two do show me the frozen face. Captain Fenton encouraged me to think he might consider my proposition if you would, though he refused to influence your decision one way or the other. Naturally I conclude that he could be on my Nile boat if he wanted to, even if not in his own capacity as an officer. I'll take him in his green turban. He makes the best looking Egyptian I ever saw, and he'd go down with the ladies like hot cakes."

"Sir Marcus," I smiled, "you're one of the most amusing as well as the sharpest men, if you'll allow me to say so, that I ever met. Whatever happens I shall not forget this conversation."

"I don't want you to forget it," he grinned, beginning to hope. "Think it over. We're the chance of a lifetime for each other. And remember the Mountain of the Golden Pyramid." I rose, and he got up heavily. "When will you let me know?" he asked.

I was tempted to reply that he must have taken Fenton's seeming encouragement too seriously, that, mountain or no mountain, it was practically impossible for us to accept his amazing proposition. But suddenly I seemed to hear "Antoun Effendi" telling Miss Gilder that she must wait for his decision until evening. He had said afterward, also, that it depended on me. It was evident that he had a scheme of his own, worked by wheels within wheels. He had consoled me after the first blow by saying that all was not lost. And I had four months' leave from duty. A lot could be done in four months. "I will let you know before night," I said to Sir Marcus Lark.