The Shadow of the East

Craven turned away with an abrupt movement and bent over the lamp to light his pipe. “They told you the truth,” he said, with a certain reluctance, his face hidden by a cloud of smoke. “Pourtant, I ride with you to-night.” There was a note of brusque finality in his voice that Saïd recognised, and he shrugged acquiescence as he lit another cigarette. “It is almost certain death,” he said, with nonchalant oriental calm. But Craven did not answer and Saïd relapsed into a silence that was protracted. From the midst of the blue haze surrounding him, his earnest scrutiny hidden by the thick lashes that curved downwards to his swarthy cheek, he gazed intently through half-closed eyes at the friend whose presence he found for the first time embarrassing. Fatalist though he was in all things that concerned himself, western influence had bitten deep enough to make him realise that the same doctrine did not extend to Craven. He recognised that self-determination came more largely into the Englishman’s creed than into his own. Whether he himself lived or died was a matter of no great moment. But with Craven it was otherwise and he had no liking for the thought that should the morrow’s venture go against them his friend’s blood would, virtually, be upon his hands! So far had his Francophile tendencies taken him. And the more he dwelt upon the uncomfortable fact the less he liked it. He turned his attention more directly upon the man himself and he noted changes that surprised and disturbed him. The stern weary looking face was not the careless smiling one he remembered. The man he had known had been vividly alive, care-free and animated; one who had jested alike at life and death with an indifferent laugh, but one who though careless of danger even to the extent of foolhardiness had never given any indication of a desire to quit a life that was obviously easy and attractive. But this man was different, grave and abrupt of speech, with an air of tired suffering, and a grim purposefulness in his determination to ignore his friend’s warning that conveyed an impression of underlying sinister intent that set the Arab wondering what sting had poisoned his life even to the desire to sacrifice it. For the look on Craven’s face was not new to him, he had seen it before—on the face of a French officer in Algiers who had subsequently taken his own life, and again this very evening on the face of his brother Omar. The personalities of the three men were widely different, but the expression of each was identical. The deduction was simple and yet to him wholly inexplicable. A woman—without doubt a woman! In the first two cases it was certainly so, he seemed to know instinctively that here, too, he was not mistaken in his supposition. A puzzled look crept into his fine dark eyes and a cynical smile hovered round his mouth as he viewed these three dissimilar men from the height of his own contemptuous indifference towards any and every woman. It was a weakness he did not understand, a phase of life that held no meaning for him at all. He had never bestowed a second glance on any woman of his own race, the attentions of European women in Paris and Algiers had been met with cold scorn that he masked with racial gravity of demeanour or frank insolence according to circumstances. For him women did not exist; he lived for his horses, for his regiment and for sport. To his strangely cold nature the influence that women exercised over other men was a thing inconceivable—the houris of the paradise of his fathers’ creed were to him no incentive to enter the realms of the blessed. A character apart, incomprehensible alike to the warm-blooded Frenchmen with whom he associated and to his own passionate countrymen, he maintained his peculiarity tranquilly, undisturbed by the banter of his friends and the admonitions of his father, who in view of his heir’s childlessness regarded his younger son’s temperament with growing uneasiness as the years advanced.