He tried to sting Si Tayeb Reha into a rejoinder.
“Trenches, too! Fire-trenches on the latest plan—so that if by chance we should come and be fools enough to come without guns”—he broke off and beat upon the table with his closed fist—“you would fight France, would you, to keep your burrow secret! The insolence of it! The Zemmour indeed! Fire-trenches and traverses and the rest of it against the Zemmour.”
Si Tayeb Reha leapt upon a word familiar to his tongue.
“The Zemmour! Yes,” he cried, smiling his relief. Here was something which he could understand. “The Zemmour threatened us two, three, four weeks ago. We made ready to welcome them. But they did not come. They were very wise, the Zemmour!” and he chuckled and nodded.
Gerard found this man of smiles and cunning easier to talk with than the aloof masked figure of a minute ago.
“It was you who constructed those trenches and against us, who were once your comrades,” he said sternly.
“If your Excellency will not speak my tongue, how shall I answer you?” he asked, plaintively, and Gerard did not trouble to answer.
“I ought to send you down to Meknes, for a court-martial to deal with you,” he said, reflectively. “But all strange crimes have their lures. They breed. God knows what decent-living youngster might get his imagination unwholesomely stirred and do as you have done and bring his name to disgrace! Besides—do you know who guards the gate of Mulai Idris whilst I talk to you? Who but Laguessière? Captain Laguessière.” He searched the still face for a tremor, a twitch of recognition. Si Tayeb Reha had apparently given up the attempt to understand. He stood leaning against the wall at the side of the window and looking out across the ravine to the mountainside.
“Laguessière, at whose side you charged twisting your staff—do you remember?—back over the bridge by the lime-kilns in Fez two years ago.”
The light fell full upon the face of the man at the window. It seemed to Gerard de Montignac impossible that any man, even the _grand serieux_, who had so often carried his life in his hands through the solitary places, could have learnt so to school his features and keep all meaning from his eyes.
“Yes, that charge counts for you, and something else which shouldn’t count at all. You and I were at St. Cyr together.”