Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Logotheti had been first of all preoccupied about getting Baraka out of England without attracting attention, and then for her comfort and recovery from the strain and suffering of the last few days. As for that, she was like a healthy young animal, and as soon as she had a chance she had fallen so sound asleep that she had not waked for twelve hours. Logotheti’s intention was to take her to Paris by a roundabout way, and establish her under some proper sort of protection. Margaret was still in Germany, but would soon return to France, and he had almost made up his mind to ask her advice, not dreaming that in such a case she could really deem anything he did an unpardonable offence. He had always laughed at the conventionalities of European life, and had paid very little heed to them when they stood in his way.

  He had been on deck a long time that day, but Baraka had only been established in her chair a few minutes. As yet he had hardly talked with her of anything but the necessary preparations for the journey, and she had trusted him entirely, being so worn out with fatigue and bodily discomfort, that she was already half asleep when he had at last brought her on board, late on the previous night. Before the yacht had sailed he had received Van Torp’s telegram informing him that Kralinsky was at Bayreuth; for his secretary had sat up till two in the morning to telegraph him the latest news and forward any message that came, and Van Torp’s had been amongst the number.

  Baraka turned her head a little towards him and smiled.

  ‘Kafar the Persian said well that you are a great man,’ she said in her own language. ‘Perhaps you are one of the greatest in the world. I think so. He told me you were very rich, and so did the Greek merchants who came with me to France. When you would not buy the other ruby I thought they were mistaken, but now I see they were right. Where you are, there is gold, and men bow before you. You say: “Set Baraka free,” and I am free. Also, you say: “Give her the ruby that is hers,” and they give it, and her belongings, too, all clean and in good order and nothing stolen. You are a king. Like a king, you have a new fire-ship of your own and an army of young men to do your bidding. They are cleaner and better dressed than the sailors on the Sultan’s fire-ships that lie in the Golden Horn, for I have seen them. They are as clean as the young effendis in London, in Paris! It is wonderful! You have not many on your ship, but you could have ten ships, all with sailors like these, and they would be all well washed. I like clean people. Yes, you are a great man.’

  She turned her eyes away from him and gazed lazily at the still blue sea, having apparently said all she had to say. Logotheti was well used to Asiatics and understood that her speech was partly conventional and intended to convey that sort of flattery which is dear to the Oriental soul. Baraka knew perfectly well what a real king was, and the difference between a yacht and a man-of-war, and many other things which she had learned in Constantinople. Primitive people, when they come from Asia, are not at all simple people, though they are often very direct in pursuing what they want.

  ‘I have something of importance to tell you,’ Logotheti said after a pause.

  Baraka prepared herself against betraying surprise by letting her lids droop a little, but that was all.

  ‘Speak,’ she answered. ‘I desire knowledge more than gold.’

  ‘You are wise,’ said the Greek gravely. ‘No doubt you remember the rich man Van Torp, for whom I gave you a letter, and whom you had seen on the day you were arrested.’

  ‘Van Torp.’ Baraka pronounced the name distinctly, and nodded. ‘Yes, I remember him well. He knows where the man is whom I seek, and he wrote the address for me. I have it. You will take me there in your ship, and I shall find him.’

  ‘If you find him, what shall you say to him?’ Logotheti asked.

  ‘Few words. These perhaps: “You left me to die, but I am not dead, I am here. Through me you are a rich, great man. The rubies are my marriage portion, which you have taken. Now you must be my husband.” That is all. Few words.’

  ‘It is your right,’ Logotheti answered. ‘But he will not marry you.’

  ‘Then he shall die,’ replied Baraka, as quietly as if she were saying that he should go for a walk.

  ‘If you kill him, the laws of that country may take your life,’ objected the Greek.

  ‘That will be my portion,’ the girl answered, with profound indifference.

  ‘You only have one life,’ Logotheti observed. ‘It is yours to throw away. But the man you seek is not in that country. Van Torp has telegraphed me that he is much nearer. Nevertheless, if you mean to kill him, I will not take you to him, as I intended to do.’

  Baraka’s face had changed, though she had been determined not to betray surprise at anything he said; she turned to him, and fixed her eyes on his, and he saw her lashes quiver.

  ‘You will tell me where he is,’ she said anxiously. ‘If you will not take me I will go alone with Spiro. I have been in many countries with no other help. I can go there also, where he is. You will tell me.’

  ‘Not if you mean to murder him,’ said Logotheti, and she saw that he was in earnest.

  ‘But if he will not be my husband, what can I do, if I do not kill him?’ She asked the question in evident good faith.

  ‘If I were you, I should make him share the rubies and the money with you, and then I would leave him to himself.’

  ‘But you do not understand,’ Baraka protested. ‘He is young, he is beautiful, he is rich. He will take some other woman for his wife, if I leave him. You see, he must die, there is no other way. If he will not marry me, it is his portion. Why do you talk? Have I not come across the world from the Altai, by Samarkand and Tiflis, as far as England, to find him and marry him? Is it nothing that I have done, a Tartar girl alone, with no friend but a bag of precious stones that any strong thief might have taken from me? Is the danger nothing? The travel nothing? Is it nothing that I have gone about like a shameless one, with my face uncovered, dressed in a man’s clothes? That I have cut my hair, my beautiful black hair, is that as nothing too? That I have been in an English prison? That I have been called a thief? I have suffered all these things to find him, and if I come to him at last, and he will not be my husband, shall he live and take another woman? You are a great man, it is true. But you do not understand. You are only a Frank, after all! That little maid you have brought for me would understand me better, though she has been taught for six years by Christians. She is a good girl. She says that in all that time she has never once forgotten to say the Fatiheh three times a day, and to say “el hamdu illah” to herself after she has eaten! She would understand. I know she would. But you, never!’

  The exquisite little aquiline features wore a look of unutterable contempt.

  ‘If I were you,’ said Logotheti, smiling, ‘I would not tell her what you are going to do.’

  ‘You see!’ cried Baraka, almost angrily. ‘You do not understand. A servant! Shall I tell my heart to my handmaid, and my secret thoughts to a hired man? I tell you, because you are a friend, though you have no understanding of us. My father feeds many flocks, and has many bondmen and bondwomen, whom he beats when it pleases him, and can put to death if he likes. He also knows the mine of rubies, as his father did before him, and when he desires gold he takes one to Tashkent, or even to Samarkand, a long journey, and sells it to the Russians. He is a great man. If he would bring a camel bag full of precious stones to Europe he could be one of the greatest men in the world. And you think that my father’s daughter would open her heart’s treasure to one of her servants? I said well that you do not understand!’

  Logotheti looked quietly at the slim young thing in a ready-made blue serge frock, who said such things as a Lady Clara Vere de Vere would scarcely dare to say above her breath in these democratic days; and he watched the noble little features, and the small white hands, that had come down to her through generations of chieftains, since the days when the primeval shepherds of the world counted the stars in the plains of Káf.

  He himself, with his long Greek descent, was an ari
stocrat to the marrow, and smiled at the claims of men who traced their families back to Crusaders. With the help of a legend or two and half a myth, he could almost make himself a far descendant of the Tyndaridæ. But what was that compared with the pedigree of the little thing in a blue serge frock? Her race went back to a time before Hesiod, before Homer, to a date that might be found in the annals of Egypt, but nowhere else in all the dim traditions of human history.

  ‘No,’ he said, after a long pause. ‘I begin to understand. You had not told me that your father was a great man, and that his sires before him had joined hand to hand, from the hand of Adam himself.’

  This polite speech, delivered in his best Tartar, though with sundry Turkish terminations and accents, somewhat mollified Baraka, and she pushed her little head backwards and upwards against the top of the deck chair, as if she were drawing herself up with pride. Also, not being used to European skirts, she stuck out one tiny foot a little further across the other, as she stretched herself, and she indiscreetly showed a pale-yellow silk ankle, round which she could have easily made her thumb meet her second finger. Logotheti glanced at it.

  ‘You will never understand,’ she said, but her tone had relented, and she made a concession. ‘If you will take me to him, and if he will not be my husband, I will let Spiro kill him.’

  ‘That might be better,’ Logotheti answered with extreme gravity, for he was quite sure that Spiro would never kill anybody. ‘If you will take an oath which I shall dictate, and swear to let Spiro do it, I will take you to the man you seek.’

  ‘What must be, must be,’ Baraka said in a tone of resignation. ‘When he is dead, Spiro can also kill me and take the rubies and the money.’

  ‘That would be a pity,’ observed the Greek, thoughtfully.

  ‘Why a pity? It will be my portion. I will not kill myself because then I should go to hell-fire, but Spiro can do it very well. Why should I still live, then?’

  ‘Because you are young and beautiful and rich enough to be very happy. Do you never look at your face in the mirror? The eyes of Baraka are like the pools of paradise, when the moon rose upon them the first time, her waist is as slender as a young willow sapling that bends to the breath of a spring breeze, her mouth is a dark rose from Gulistán — —’

  But Baraka interrupted him with a faint smile.

  ‘You speak emptiness,’ she said quietly. ‘What is the oath, that I may swear it? Shall I take Allah, and the Prophet, and the Angel Israfil to witness that I will keep my word? Shall I prick my hand and let the drops fall into your two hands that you may drink them? What shall I do and say? I am ready.’

  ‘You must swear an oath that my fathers swore before there were Christians or Musulmans in the world, when the old gods were still great.’

  ‘Speak. I will repeat any words you like. Is it a very solemn oath?’

  ‘It is the most solemn that ever was sworn, for it is the oath of the gods themselves. I shall give it to you slowly, and you must try to pronounce it right, word by word, holding out your hands, like this, with the palms downwards.’

  ‘I am ready,’ said Baraka, doing as he bade her.

  He quoted in Greek the oath that Hypnos dictates to Hera in the Iliad, and Baraka repeated each word, pronouncing as well as she could.

  ‘I swear by the inviolable water of the Styx, and I lay one hand upon the all-nourishing earth, the other on the sparkling sea, that all the gods below may be our witnesses, even they that stand round about Kronos. Thus I swear!’

  As he had anticipated, Baraka was much more impressed by the importance of the words she did not understand than if she had bound herself by any oath familiar to her.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said, ‘but what is done is done, and you would have it so.’

  She pressed her hand gently to her left side and felt the long steel bodkin, and sighed regretfully.

  ‘You have sworn an oath that no man would dare to break,’ said Logotheti solemnly. ‘A man would rather kill pigs on the graves of his father and his mother than break it.’

  ‘I shall keep my word. Only take me quickly where I would be.’

  Logotheti produced a whistle from his pocket and blew on it, and a quartermaster answered the call, and was sent for the captain, who came in a few moments.

  ‘Head her about for Jersey and Carterets, Captain,’ said the owner. ‘The sea is as flat as a board, and we will land there. You can go on to the Mediterranean without coaling, can you not?’

  The captain said he could coal at Gibraltar, if necessary.

  ‘Then take her to Naples, please, and wait for instructions.’

  Baraka understood nothing, but within two minutes she saw that the yacht was changing her course, for the afternoon sun was all at once pouring in on the deck, just beyond the end of her chair. She was satisfied, and nodded her approval.

  But she did not speak for a long time, paying no more attention to Logotheti’s gaze than if he had not existed. No people in the world can remain perfectly motionless so long as Asiatics, perfectly absorbed in their own thoughts.

  To the Greek’s art-loving nature it was pure delight to watch her. Never, since he had first met Margaret Donne, had he seen any woman or young girl who appealed to his sense of beauty as Baraka did, though the impression she made on him was wholly different from that he received when Margaret was near.

  The Primadonna was on a large scale, robust, magnificently vital, a Niké, even a young Hera; and sometimes, especially on the stage, she was almost insolently handsome, rather than beautiful like Lady Maud. Baraka was an Artemis, virginal, high-bred; delicately modelled for grace and speed rather than for reposeful beauty, for motion rather than for rest. It was true that the singer’s walk was something to dream of and write verses about, but Baraka’s swift-gliding step was that of the Maiden Huntress in the chase, her attitude in rest was the pose of a watchful Diana, ready to spring up at a sound or a breath, a figure almost boyish in its elastic vigour, and yet deeply feminine in meaning.

  Baraka once more turned her head without lifting it from the back of the deck-chair.

  ‘I am hungry and thirsty again,’ she said gravely. ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘What will you eat, and what will you drink?’ Logotheti asked.

  She smiled and shook her head.

  ‘Anything that is good,’ she said; ‘but what I desire you have not in your ship. I long for fat quails with Italian rice, and for fig-paste, and I desire a sherbet made with rose leaves, such as the merchant’s wife and I used to drink at the Kaffedji’s by the Galata Bridge, and sometimes when we went up the Sweet Waters in a caïque on Friday. But you have not such things on your ship.’

  Logotheti smiled.

  ‘You forget that I am myself from Constantinople,’ he said. ‘It is now the season for fat quails in Italy, and they are sent alive to London and Paris, and there are many in my ship, waiting to be eaten. There is also fig-paste from the Stamboul confectioner near the end of the Galata Bridge, and preserved rose leaves with which to make a sherbet, and much ice; and you shall eat and drink the things you like best. Moreover, if there is anything else you long for, speak.’

  ‘You are scoffing at Baraka!’ answered the slim thing in blue serge, with the air of a displeased fairy princess.

  ‘Not I. You shall see. We will have a table set here between us, with all the things you desire.’

  ‘Truly? And coffee too? Real coffee? Not the thin mud-broth of the Franks?’

  ‘Real coffee, in a real fildjan.’

  Baraka clapped her small white hands for pleasure.

  ‘You are indeed a very great man!’ she cried. ‘You are one of the kings!’

  At the sound of the clapping she had made, Logotheti’s Greek steward appeared in a silver-laced blue jacket and a fez.

  ‘He comes because you clapped your hands,’ Logotheti said, with a smile.

  Baraka laughed softly.

  ‘We are not in your ship,’ she said. ‘We are in Con
stantinople! I am happy.’ The smile faded quickly and her dark lashes drooped. ‘It is a pity,’ she added, very low, and her left hand felt the long steel bodkin through her dress.

  The steward knew Turkish, but did not understand all she said in her own tongue; and besides, his master was already ordering an unusual luncheon, in Greek, which disturbed even his Eastern faculty of hearing separately with each ear things said in different languages.

  Baraka was busy with her own thoughts again, and paid no more attention to her companion, until the steward came back after a few minutes bringing a low round table which he placed between the two chairs. He disappeared again and returned immediately with a salver on which there were two small cups of steaming Turkish coffee, each in its silver filigree stand, and two tall glasses of sherbet, of a beautiful pale rose colour.

  Baraka turned on her chair with a look of pleasure, tasted the light hot foam of the coffee, and then began to drink slowly with enjoyment that increased visibly with every sip.

  ‘It is real coffee,’ she said, looking up at Logotheti. ‘It is made with the beans of Arabia that are picked out one by one for the Sheikhs themselves before the coffee is sold to the Indian princes. The unripe and broken beans that are left are sold to the great Pashas in Constantinople! And that is all there is of it, for the Persian merchant explained all to me, and I know. But how you have got the coffee of the Sheikhs, I know not. You are a very great man.’

  ‘The gates of the pleasant places of this world are all locked, and the keys are of gold,’ observed Logotheti, who could quote Asiatic proverbs by the dozen, when he liked. ‘But the doors of Hades stand always open,’ he added, suddenly following a Greek thought, ‘and from wheresoever men are, the way that leads to them is but one.’

  Baraka had tasted the sherbet, which interested her more than his philosophical reflexions.