A month later, to a day, Barry from the boat deck of the Berengaria pointed out Ambrose Light to Zalithea. She clutched his arm to steady herself in the high wind, nestling, furry, very close to him. As he looked down at her he found himself thinking not of the camp in the wâdi, nor even of the tomb; not of the ancient wonders of Egypt; nor even of those few delightful days in Paris and the later joy of taking Zalithea around London.
He found himself thinking of Hassan es-Sugra.
Hassan had seen the party off at Luxor, bringing a great bundle of flowers for Zalithea. Where everyone else was hurrying and bustling, Hassan had walked calmly up and down the platform with Barry. His eyes, which were so like the eyes of a gazelle, had been sad. But his words, softly intoned yet laden with some deep significance, had remained with Barry like the haunting memory of a song:
“One day, sir, you will come again to Egypt. Some of your friends, now, will not be your friends then. You will learn to forgive me if I have failed you in anything and come and tell me so. For in the end understanding will be. There is one thing, sir, I have to say to you: they tell me the lady is of El-Kasr. It is not so. I cannot say where she is of. But this I know--she is not of Egypt. She is very sad at heart. If, one day, she tells you why, be not angry with her.”
Then the train had moved out. Barry’s last impression of Luxor was that of the graceful, black-robed figure of Hassan es-Sugra, his hand raised to his forehead in a parting salute.
“Be not angry with her.…”
He looked down at the bewitching face half hidden in fur. Sea breezes had whipped a delicious colour into the soft cheeks--down which big tears were falling!
“Zalithea!” he cried. “My dear! what is it?”
She looked up at him quickly, blinking tears away; then:
“Sorree,” she whispered.
This word, “sorry,” she had acquired in London, but he knew that she employed it in the sense of “sad.” He squeezed her arm reassuringly. He had long since decided that her courage was miraculous--unfaltering. Now, he tried to imagine what supreme dread--what rankling doubt--what sorrow for some long lost one had broken it.
It was always so with him. In the most perfect moments of understanding it would come--that inscrutable curtain; the veil of an unimaginable past.
Once, and once only, he had tried to ask her what he longed so ardently to know: if she remembered ever having met him before. By some unsuspected law of preordination alone could he hope to explain those visions. Had he not seen her as he was destined later to see her--in the dress of Ancient Egypt? Had he not seen her as she looked during the early days in Luxor--veiled like the women of Islam?
He thought he had made her understand. But instead of answering she had turned her back and walked away!
Did the question transgress some strange law, known to her but unknown to him?
There were times when his brain reeled. And now, with the American coast in sight, she was weeping; she was “sorree.” He wondered hopelessly what her thoughts were at this hour. “She is very sad at heart,” Hassan had said. How clearly he recalled the words of that extraordinary man.…
And then, before Barry realized the passage of time, they were in sight of the familiar skyscrapers.
Zalithea’s mood had changed. The child had come uppermost again. She clapped her hands gleefully, grasping Barry’s arm and pointing to the skyline of New York.
“Fo-ah me?” she asked.
Barry nodded, laughing.
“I trust,” murmured Professor Blackwell, “she is not labouring under the delusion that you are the king of this country!”
They speedily had evidence of Mrs. Uffington’s activity. She was not prepared to lose the credit of discovering a beautiful Oriental princess who had been adopted by an American millionaire! Every ship reporter in the city was primed; camera men were there in flocks.
And Zalithea imperiously declined to see any of them!
She retired to her cabin, with old Safîyeh on guard in the alleyway; and all remonstrances were in vain.
For a considerable time she banned Aunt Micky, as well, until Danbazzar made it clear to her that Aunt Micky was John Cumberland’s sister. She received her, then, very graciously. Aunt Micky was stupefied.
“She’s a beauty, young Cumberland,” she confided to Barry. “But who the devil is she?”
“The daughter of one of the minor rulers out there, Micky!”
“But she’s not black! She’s whiter than I am!”
“It isn’t my fault,” said Barry humbly. “Cleopatra wasn’t black, according to all accounts.”
“But this girl isn’t an Egyptian.”
“Neither was Cleopatra!”
“Young Cumberland--you have a secret eye! It’s the right. I’ll get the truth out of John!”
Out on the deck, Jim Sakers and pretty Jack Lorrimer were consoling each other. When, presently, Barry reappeared:
“This is the blackest hour of my life!” Jim declared plaintively. “I am despised--cast out--rejected. I feel like a falling stock. As though it isn’t bad enough to be told that the coveted bottle of unchanging desert has been forgotten! No man with a heart could have overlooked my quart of eternal sand. Now, with my eyes bulging out of my head and my temperature at a hundred and four in the shade, I’m told, ‘No fairy princess. Pass along, please. Stand clear of the gangway!’”
“Be patient, Jim,” said Barry. “She feels very strange.”
“She feels very strange!” cried Jim. “I feel completely extraordinary! Here are we--poor little sleepy Jack, who didn’t go to bed until three o’clock, and tired-eyed Jim who had to get home after seeing her home--here are we, lured from our slumbers at an unearthly hour by false promises!… Sand and sorrow!”
When Zalithea finally went ashore she was so heavily veiled that not a glimpse of her features could be obtained.
As a result, the most conflicting accounts were published. For a ship reporter whose imagination cannot penetrate a few yards of drapery is not worthy of his hire. “Veiled Princess for Cumberland Collection,” was one good headline. “Daughter of Persian Pasha Says New York Like Paradise,” another declared. “Harem Beauty Brought by Berengaria,” was the line which appealed to Jim. But Barry’s indignation was aroused by “Cumberland Cleopatra Here!”
A suite of rooms had been prepared, by John Cumberland’s orders, in the furnishing of which, while a definite Egyptian note had been struck, the total leaned to modernity. For Zalithea he had conceived an affection which, when he tried to analyze it, seemed to be compounded of the paternal, the scientific, and--he could not otherwise define it--the maternal! She was his child in a sense not hitherto comprehended in human relations; and she was the embodiment of that second great passion of his life--Egyptology.
Lovingly he had studied her. He had noted her early acceptance of those mechanical things which at first had appalled her; her easy, youthful adaptability to wildly strange environment. A certain shrinking from her--involuntary, superstitious--of which for a time he had been conscious, left him utterly in the sunshine of her warm humanity.
Barry’s attitude occasioned him many anxious hours. That the boy should lose his heart to this beautiful mystery was no matter for wonder. He had eyes, ears, imagination. And Zalithea would have inflamed any man of his age not made of wood or stone with whom she was thrown into contact.
Furthermore, that the meeting of these two was preordained, John Cumberland found it hard to doubt. He knew that Barry thought so; and he did not blame him. For what other explanation could there be of those strange pre-glimpses which he had had of her? He had never doubted his son’s word. But he had found something phenomenal in the story which had led him to look upon it as the product of an excited imagination. How little he had known, in those days, of the wonderful! How sceptical he had been!
From the big armchair in which he was seated in the library, he looked up at a wall painting from Medinet Habu. Quite clearly he recalled that he had been seated here, looking at this very painting, on the night that Danbazzar arrived, on the night that he had first set eyes upon the papyrus!
Somehow, the values of his possessions seemed to have changed, subtly, during his absence. That wall painting, for instance, no longer struck him as a priceless treasure, although he had often thought of it as such. The enamelled casket of Nitocris; the exquisite painted wooden figure of the priestess, Thent-Kheta; even the great inlaid throne of Osorkon from Bubastis--in some queer fashion they had lost colour in his eyes.
Almost as the fact dawned upon him, its explanation came, too. As those ancient priests had foreseen, a living testimony to the grandeur of the Pharaohs would outshine all others!
The library door opened, although there had been no knock; and Zalithea stole in.
John Cumberland jumped up and placed an armchair for her. Jim and Jack were coming on after a theatre, Danbazzar and Aunt Micky having joined them there.
Zalithea was wearing a frock which had been bought for her in Paris. She wore it exquisitely. It was a semi-Oriental creation, simple enough; but it set off her dark, lithe beauty to perfection. She rested one slender hand on the chair back for a moment, smiling inscrutably at John Cumberland.
Then she crossed to the Bubastite throne and seated herself.
“Yes?” she asked naïvely, her head tilted aside.
And John Cumberland knew that it would be quite useless to say No, therefore:
“Yes, Zalithea,” he agreed, “if you’re comfortable.”
She listened in her intent fashion, then:
“Zal’ith-eeah you-ah-addorahble!” she corrected.
John Cumberland sat down. Apparently Zalithea thought that this was the name by which she was known nowadays. He strongly suspected the identity of the tutor who had led her into this error.
“You’re learning the wrong things too quickly, young lady!” said John Cumberland. “Do you know where you are, yet?”
“Ah-addorahble!”
“I mean where you live. I tried to teach you yesterday. Your home?”
Zalithea wrinkled her smooth forehead.
“Darling,” she replied.
“I know you’re a darling,” John Cumberland admitted; “but I think I shall have to take your education in hand myself. I’m afraid I have been neglecting you.”
Zalithea, from the throne of the Bubastite king, smiled regally.
A considerable disturbance in the lobby now proclaimed the return of the theatre party. Barry opened the library door, and:
“Hullo!” he cried. “You’re in there! I’ve been hunting all over for you. Here’s the gang.”
Headed by the Countess Colonna, the party entered. Jack Lorrimer was frankly nervous--an unusual condition--but highly curious. She had not yet met the mysterious Cumberland guest. Jim followed in with Danbazzar, an imposing figure distinguished from the rest alike by his great height and by the slight eccentricity of dress which he affected. His Egyptian tan suited his oddly Moorish type.
“Zalithea,” said John Cumberland, beckoning to Jack, “I want you to know Jack Lorrimer, my niece, and”--he drew Jim forward--“Mr. Sakers. Princess Zalithea has very little English, so excuse her.”
Zalithea, beyond a slight smile, offered no sort of acknowledgment. Barry, covertly watching his friend and his cousin, noted that the girl’s queer aloofness had created its usual effect. He noted something else. Jack Lorrimer was very pretty (what Jim termed “A 1 at Cupid’s”), and Barry, like many another, had often wondered where the dividing line lay between prettiness and beauty. To-night he knew that Zalithea was beautiful.
Jim’s reaction to the lovely, cold vision on the throne was good to study.
“Delighted!” he said. “Been counting the hours until---- No, of course, you don’t know what I’m talking about!… Cooler this evening, I fancy.… Wrong again! How’s Egypt looking these days?… Let me out, somebody!…”
Danbazzar stood at his elbow. He spoke to Zalithea in that monotonous language which no one else understood. Under half-lowered lids she watched him, and then replied briefly. He turned to Jim.
“She says you talk too much!” he translated.
Jim turned fiery red.
Barry laughed delightedly, and Professor Blackwell, who had just come in, endeavoured to console poor Jim.
“She is a young lady of very definite ideas,” he said, groping with one large, bony hand for a dress tie which, having become unknotted, had evidently dropped off somewhere. “For instance, she has a settled belief that I’m funny!”
“Please, Mr. Danbazzar!” whispered Jack. “Ask her if she likes me!”
Danbazzar, whom nothing annoyed more than to be addressed as “mister,” conversed briefly, and unintelligibly, with Zalithea; then:
“She is a little undecided,” he announced. “She has got hold of the idea that you’re a dancing girl and wants to know when you are going to begin!”
