The Traitors. E. Phillips Oppenheim
will perhaps continue your—game,” Reist suggested, with another glance towards the net. “My time is yours.”
Erlito hesitated.
“You are very good, Nicholas,” he said. “We are, as you see, playing Badminton, and as a matter of fact we are very much in earnest about this game. Miss Van Decht and I are playing the deciding match with my friends there, Hassen and Brand. Let me find you a chair, and present you to these good people. Afterwards—it will not be long—I shall be wholly at your service; and, Nicholas, if you please, I am Erlito only here. You understand?”
Reist assented gravely, and Erlito turned round. The two players were talking to the girl across the net. An elderly man with grey imperial and smoking a long cigar was leaning back in a deck-chair.
“Miss Van Decht,” Erlito said, turning to her, “will you permit me to present to you my very old friend, the Duke Nicholas of Reist—Miss Van Decht, Mr. Van Decht, Mr. Hassen, Mr. Brand.”
Reist bowed low before the girl, who looked straight into his eyes with a frank and pleasant curiosity. She was largely made, but the long flowing lines of her figure were perfectly and symmetrically graceful. Her features were delicate, but her mouth was delightful—large, shapely and sensitive. Her light brown hair, which showed a disposition to wave, had escaped bounds a little during the violent exercise and had fallen into picturesque disorder. She smiled charmingly at Reist, but said nothing beyond the conventional words of greeting. Then she looked up at Erlito with twinkling eyes.
“Mr. Brand is getting insupportable,” she declared. “He is like all you obstinate Englishmen. He does not know when he is beaten.”
“We will endeavour,” Erlito said, taking up his racquet, “to impress it upon him. There are cigarettes by your side, Reist.”
The girl went to her place at the end of the court.
“This must be the deciding game,” she declared, “for the light is going, and dad is smoking his last cigar. Ready! Serve!”
The game recommenced. Reist sat upon an overturned box by the side of Mr. Van Decht smoking a cigarette and watching gravely the flying figures. It was the girl who absorbed most of his attention. To him she was an utterly new type. She was as beautiful in her way as his own sister, but her frank energy and the easy terms of intimacy which obviously existed between her male companions and herself was wholly inexplicable to him. He watched her with fascinated gaze. All the beautiful women whom he had ever known had numbered amongst their characteristics a certain restraint, almost an aloofness, which he had come to look upon as their inevitable attribute. Their smiles were rare and precious marks of favour, an undisturbed serenity of deportment was almost an inherent part of their education. Here was a woman of the new world, no less to be respected, he was sure, than her sisters of Theos, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, yet viewing life from a wholly different standpoint. From the first there was something curiously fascinating to Reist in the perfect naturalness and self-assurance of the girl whose every thought and energy seemed centred just then upon that flying cork. Her lips were slightly parted, her eyes were bright, her face was full of colour and vivacity. She sprang backwards and forwards, jumped and stooped with the delightful freedom of perfect health and strength. She even joined in the chaff which flashed backwards and forwards across the net, good-humoured always, and gay, but always personal and indicating a more than common intimacy between the little party. Reist would have been quite content to have sat and watched her until the game was over, but for a sudden, and to him amazing, incident. At a critical moment Erlito missed a difficult stroke—the younger and slighter of his two opponents threw his racquet into the air with a curious little cry of triumph.
“Ho-e-la! Ho-e-la!”
Reist started almost to his feet, and the blood surged hotly in his veins. Where had he heard that cry before? He looked the man over with a swift and eager scrutiny. Olive-cheeked, with black eyes and moustache, slightly-hooked nose and light, graceful bearing, he might have belonged to any of the southern nations. He was certainly no Englishman. “Ho-e-la! Ho-e-la!” How the fever of hate was kindled in Reist’s heart as the echoes of that cry rang through the room. His memory, too, was swift and vivid. No longer he sat in that bare attic watching the flying figures of the Badminton players and listening to their cheerful badinage. Walls enclosed him no more. He saw out over the sea and land, he saw things the memory of which still thrilled his pulses, tugged at his heart-strings. Over the snow-capped hills he rode, wrapped in military furs, his sabre clanking by his side and a storm of stinging sleet driven into his face. Below were lights flashing in a white wilderness—amongst the hills flared the red fire of the guns, the music of their thunders was even then upon his ears. Down the steep defile he rode at the head of his troop, the sound of their approach muffled by the deep snow—afterwards the roar of meeting, the breathless excitement of the charge, the deep battle-cry of the men of Theos and from those others—ah, he had it now.
“Ho-e-la! Ho-e-la! Allah! Allah!”
A cry of triumph. The game was over. Sara Van Decht threw herself into a chair between her father and him and fanned herself vigorously with a pocket-handkerchief. The others were laughing and talking amongst themselves. Erlito came over at once to her side.
“Miss Van Decht,” he cried, gaily, “we are invincible. You played magnificently. Reist, we are going to have some tea, and then I shall be at your service. Why, our tussle seems to have interested you.”
Reist withdrew his eyes reluctantly from watching Hassen. He smiled faintly.
“Yes,” he said. “New things are always interesting! New things—and old friends!”
CHAPTER IV
Afternoon tea was brought in by an elderly man-servant in plain livery, and was probably the most unconventional meal which Reist had ever shared. They sat about promiscuously upon chairs and overturned boxes, and there was a good deal of lively conversation. Brand was a newspaper man, who had served as war correspondent with Erlito in the Egyptian campaign, Mr. Van Decht and his daughter were rich Americans, loitering about Europe. Hassen remained silent, and of him Reist learned nothing further. The little which he knew sufficed.
Brand came over and sat by Reist’s side. He was a tall, fair man, with keen eyes and weather-beaten skin—by no means unlike Erlito, save that his shoulders were not so broad, and he lacked the military carriage.
“I am interested in your country, Duke,” he said. “You are making history there. It seems to me that it may become European history.”
“Theos has fallen upon evil times,” Reist answered. “All that we pray of Europe is that we may be left alone. If that be granted us we shall right ourselves.”
Sara Van Decht looked across at him with frank interest.
“Do you come from Theos, Duke?” she asked.
Reist bowed.
“I have lived there all my life,” he said, “and I know it better than any other place.
“It is a very beautiful country,” he continued, “and very dear to its people. To strangers, though, and specially you who have been brought up in America, I must confess that we should probably seem outside the pale of civilization.”
“Tell me why,” she asked. “What are you so backward in?”
“Luxuries,” he answered. “We have no electric light.”
“It is detestable,” she exclaimed.
“No street cars.”
“They are abominable!”
Reist smiled quietly.
“We have scarcely any railways,” he said, “and the telephone