The Carpet from Bagdad. MacGrath Harold

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      She had never seen her father, but she had often heard him referred to as "that brute" or "that fool" or "that drunken imbecile." If a portrait of him existed, Fortune had not yet seen it. She visited his lonely grave once a year, in the Protestant cemetery, and dreamily tried to conjure up what manner of man he had been. One day she plied her old Italian nurse with questions.

      "Handsome? Yes, but it was all so long ago, cara mia, that I can not describe him to you."

      "Did he drink?" Behind this question there was no sense of moral obloquy as applying to the dead.

      "Sainted Mary! didn't all men drink their very souls into purgatory those unreligious days?"

      "Had he any relatives?"

      "I never heard of any."

      "Was he rich?"

      "No; but when the signora, your mother, married him she thought he was."

      It was not till later years that Fortune grasped the true significance of this statement. It illumined many pages. She dropped all investigations, concluding wisely that her mother, if she were minded to speak at all, could supply only the incidents, the details.

      It was warm, balmy, like May in the northern latitudes. Women wore white dresses and carried sunshades over their shoulders. A good band played airs from the new light-operas, and at one side of the grand-stand were tea-tables under dazzling linen. Fashion was out. Not all her votaries enjoyed polo, but it was absolutely necessary to pretend that they did. When they talked they discussed the Spanish dancer who paraded back and forth across the tea-lawn. They discussed her jewels, her clothes, her escort, and quite frankly her morals, which of the four was by all odds the most popular theme. All agreed that she was handsome in a bold way. This modification invariably distinguishes the right sort of women from the wrong sort, from which there is no appeal to a higher court. They could well afford to admit of her beauty, since the dancer was outside what is called the social pale, for all that her newest escort was a prince incognito. They also discussed the play at bridge, the dullness of this particular season, the possibility of war between England and Germany. And some one asked others who were the two well-gowned women down in front, sitting on either side of the young chap in pearl-grey. No one knew. Mother and daughter, probably. Anyhow, they knew something about good clothes. Certainly they weren't ordinary tourists. They had seen What's-his-name tip his hat; and this simple act would pass any one into the inner shrine, for the general was not promiscuous. There, the first-half was over. All down for tea! Thank goodness!

      George was happy. He was proud, too. He saw the glances, the nods of approval. He basked in a kind of sunshine that was new. What an ass he had been all his life! To have been afraid of women just because he was Percival Algernon! What he should have done was to have gone forth boldly, taken what pleasures he found, and laughed with the rest of them.

      There weren't two other women in all Cairo to compare with these two. The mother, shapely, elegant, with the dark beauty of a high-class Spaniard, possessing humor, trenchant comment, keen deduction and application; worldly, cynical, high-bred. The student of nations might have tried in vain to place her. She spoke the French of the Parisians, the Italian of the Florentines, the German of the Hanoverians, and her English was the envy of Americans and the wonder of the Londoners. The daughter fell behind her but little, but she was more reserved. The worldly critic called this good form: no daughter should try to outshine her widowed mother.

      As Fortune sat beside the young collector that afternoon, she marveled why they had given him Percival Algernon. Jones was all right, solid and substantial, but the other two turned it into ridicule. Still, what was the matter with Percival Algernon? History had given men of these names mighty fine things to accomplish. Then why ridicule? Was it due to the perverted angle of vision created by wits and humorists in the comic weeklies, who were eternally pillorying these unhappy prefixes to ordinary cognomens? And why this pillorying? She hadn't studied the subject sufficiently to realize that the business of the humorist is not so much to amuse as to warn persons against becoming ridiculous. And Percival Algernon Jones was all of that. It resolved itself into a matter of values, then. Had his surname been Montmorency, Percival Algernon would have fitted as a key to its lock. She smiled. No one but a fond mother would be guilty of such a crime. And if she ever grew to know him well enough, she was going to ask him all about this mother.

      What interest had her own mother in this harmless young man? Oh, some day she would burst through this web, this jungle; some day she would see beyond the second act! What then? she never troubled to ask herself; time enough when the moment arrived.

      "I had an interesting adventure last night, a most interesting one," began George, who was no longer the shy, blundering recluse. They were on the way back to town.

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