Chapter Seventeen. Mr Muirhead and Hilda Discover Raife’s Identity.

When Raife had returned to his room after the pleasantest evening of his life, he meditated, as is the wont of impulsive young men after an event. The night was very hot and, in spite of the clear starlit sky overhead, it was sultry. He donned a light cashmere dressing-gown and walked out to the balcony which overlooked the old town. Seating himself in a wicker chair, he lit a cigar and talked to himself, a practice of elderly people and those who are mentally perturbed. He talked to himself softly, in short, disjointed sentences. He muttered, with a curl of his lips: “Gilda! Ha! ha! That was a passing fancy. I was a fool. I’m glad I got out of it as well as I did. It was good of that fellow, Herrion, to steer me out of the mess I was landing myself into. Fancy marrying a ‘lady’ burglar.”

He yawned and relit his cigar which had gone out. Cigars make no allowance for meditative monologues. Continuing, he raised his voice slightly: “Woman-hater! Of course, I’m a woman-hater. Two women have landed me in a hole.” Starting from his reverie, he thought he heard a cough. Yes, it was a woman’s cough. He stood up and leant over the balcony. As he looked down, he saw a woman with a light shawl over her head. She was on the balcony immediately under his. He only caught a glance as the figure entered the window below, which corresponded with the one that led to his own room. He whispered now, lest he should be overheard: “I wonder who that woman was. Was it Miss Muirhead?—Hilda! I rather like the name. It rhymes with Gilda. But what a different type of girl. And, after all, I must have companionship of some sort.”

Next morning the trio met again in the foyer. The ice was broken now. Hotel friendships are very warm whilst they last. Would this one last?

When Raife left, after his story of the wound he got on behalf of a strange woman in Khartoum, Mr Muirhead and Hilda, each holding the card in their hands, the card that Raife had given them, looked at one another with puzzled expressions. Then Mr Muirhead read aloud: “Sir Raife Remington, Bart., Aldborough Park, Tunbridge Wells.”

Hilda asked: “Why didn’t he tell us he was a baronet?”

Her father answered, reflectively: “Yes, these Englishmen certainly are curious. Now, if he’d been an American judge, or colonel, we should have known all about it in five minutes, and more than we wanted to know before the day was out, and before the dinner was over, we should have hated him for it.”

Hilda, too, gazed reflectively, and said, “Yes, that’s only too true. Then again, how strange that he should be ashamed of helping that poor woman in Khartoum, and after being stabbed, too.”

It has been said of Americans and others that they dearly love a lord. Why shouldn’t they? Especially if he is a nice lord. Raife was not a lord, but he was a baronet, and a very handsome and agreeable baronet. Mr Muirhead was an American business man, and it is the habit of such men to go to the “rock-bottom” of things, so he said to Hilda: “I wonder whether he’s a new-fledged political baronet, or one of the old families. I expect they’ve got a Debrett or Burke’s Peerage downstairs. I’ll look it up in the morning.”

When Mr Muirhead looked up Raife’s ancestry in the morning, he was not sorry to learn that Raife was descended from the Tudor and Elizabethan Reymingtounes. He had just completed this operation when they met Raife in the foyer. They greeted one another with cordiality, and Mr Muirhead induced Raife, without much difficulty, to join them in an expedition. Hilda was divinely beautiful at the dinner of the previous night. On this morning, riding in the bright sunlight, she was radiant. The reserve of the previous evening was absent and she talked intellectually. At times, her conversation was brilliant, and interspersed with those quaint witticisms that seem only possible to Americans, and are doubly entertaining when they flow from the lips of a pretty American girl. As Raife sat opposite to her, listening to the pleasing flow of her talk, he wrestled with his inclinations, and his mind determined for him that he need not be altogether a woman-hater. There was no harm in enjoying the society of a pretty girl as long as he did not allow himself to become entangled. At the same time, he could not help contrasting this sunny, vivacious young girl, with the handsome, white-haired, courtly father, against the mysterious Gilda, admittedly a “lady” burglar, and her sinister uncle with the unpleasing eyes.

During a lull in the talk, which had been mostly between Hilda and Raife, Mr Muirhead said: “I notice from your card that you are Sir Raife Remington, a baronet. I’ve been wondering why you didn’t mention that fact before.”

Raife laughed, and replied: “Oh, I don’t know. It didn’t occur to me.”

Mr Muirhead was characteristically American, a seeker after information or truth, so he added: “I am a very plain American and I am not familiar with the observances or etiquette of English society. I hazard the suggestion that we should address you as ‘Sir Raife,’ Is that correct?”

Raife was very charmed with these ingenuous people, and this time he laughed heartily until his shoulder reminded them all of the dagger wound. Recovering from the spasm of pain, which had caused Hilda to regard him with the real sympathy which brought the perfect beauty into her lustrous eyes, he said: “I hope, sir, you will call me Remington, just Remington. The intricacies of etiquette are far too tiresome for such pleasant occasions as these. If Miss Muirhead insists on calling me ‘Sir Raife’ I must submit, but the sooner she will forget the prefix the greater will be my happiness.”

Hilda, with eyes that had changed from sympathy to merriment, and with fun that was not intended for flirtation, exclaimed: “Really, Sir Raife, do you mean that? If so, how soon may I call you just ‘Raife’ only?”

Mr Muirhead raised his eyebrows with a quizzical smile.

Raife replied: “I am not very familiar with your language as you always charmingly and frequently quaintly express it, but I dare to suggest ‘right now!’”

Hilda had not imagined that an Englishman, especially an English aristocrat, could be so quick and graceful in repartee, and in spite of her natural self-possession she blushed.

Raife was playing his part as a woman-hater rather badly; but he, at the time, was very confident of himself. Raife was brave enough when they had returned to the hotel, and he felt that the day’s pleasure had, in no sense, altered his determination in the matter. His bravery came to his rescue in so far that he managed to avoid the incident of a dinner together. He pleaded the excuse of his wounded shoulder and retired to his rooms.

Alone, after dinner, he renewed his moralising. He sat again on the balcony, and tried to chase away the fever of love which was more to him than a mere stab of a dagger in the shoulder. He flattered himself that he was still a woman-hater, and that he had only played a game. This was a divertissement which should last until his shoulder was healed, and then he would rejoin Colonel Langton and renew his intention of big-game shooting. It did not occur to him that he was “big game,” and that he stood to be shot at. It was yet another of those divine nights which are so frequent in Cairo, and Raife’s mood was quite contented as he sat on the balcony and surveyed this fascinating city.

Among the cities of the East, Cairo is counted one of the most enchanting. All that Europe has done to spoil the primitive grandeur of the older civilisation, which has existed centuries before us of the West, leaves Cairo a monument of the gorgeous and inscrutable past. Aladdin with the wonderful lamp and all the stories of the Arabian Nights seem to have emanated from such a place as Cairo.

Raife sat and contemplated the mysterious view which confronted him. It was dark, but it was early, and the lights of the crowded cafés flickered below in a serried row of all that counted for speculation. There, in every garb, every conceivable costume, was a mixture of nationalities from every corner of the globe Americans, Europeans, Egyptians, Turks, Arabs, Negroes, and the unfathomable Indians of the remote East. Raife thought of his first experience of the Americans, and it was a pleasing one. Hilda Muirhead was a novel type to him; for, in spite of the fact that fortune had been kind to him in the matter of wealth and family and inheritance, his experience was limited. A strange vein of adventure was his. He was descended from the Reymingtounes, who, in the days of Elizabeth, helped to found the British Empire, and saved our diminutive islands from invasion and conquest by the all-powerful Spaniard of the period. His mind did not travel in this direction. He was an English aristocrat, and possessed all the endowments of a lavish fortune. At the moment, he was a very ordinary, human young man. He thought he was a woman-hater. Hilda Muirhead was to him an interesting specimen. At least, he flattered himself that was his view of the matter.

Hilda’s opinion of Raife is rather hard to determine. She was bred, or, as they still sometimes say in the United States, “reared” in Cincinnati, which is on the border-line of south, and hers was an aristocratic lineage, dating, as far as that country is concerned, to the old colonial days when the present United States were peopled almost entirely by British. The British who fought against British before the Declaration of Independence, were, in a large number of instances, aristocrats. Hilda Muirhead was descended from such “stock.”

Raife now gazed at the wonderful grouping of minarets and mosques which were silhouetted against the sparkling sky of deepest transparent blue. Cairo is not a noisy city at night-time, and from his wickered chair everything was seductively calm. This calm was suddenly made more pleasing by the strains of music. It was soft, restrained music, and a human voice predominated. “The Rosary” should, preferably, be sung by a subdued contralto voice to a low-pitched accompaniment. This was the song that completed the breaking of a responsive string in Raife’s heart. Hilda Muirhead was singing to her father, but the song floated upwards and through the still, pure night air, reached him. Could it be an accident or was it design? No one shall ever know. It happened. The conquest, for a time, was complete, and Raife felt and knew that only one woman could have sung that song, that night, in that way.

The song was finished. No ragtime melody followed—nothing. The exquisite completeness of the situation and the incident left Raife very doubtful as to whether he really was a woman-hater.