Thus he explained quite satisfactorily to himself his reason for entering and looking about him for Marguerite. But she was nowhere to be seen—no, not even amongst the Dagoes and the Levantines. She must be outside in the cool of the balcony beneath the roof of vines. But a glance there showed him that he was wrong. There was nothing for it but to approach the virago behind the Bar, who hotter and redder than ever on this night in early May, was polishing away at her counter and serving out the drinks.
Gerard ordered one and taking it from her hand, said carelessly:
“Mademoiselle Marguerite is not here to-night?”
Madame Delagrange made a vicious dab with her duster and cried in an exasperation:
“Look, Monsieur! When she is here I have nothing but complaints. That little Marguerite! She holds her nose in the air as if we smelled. She looks at us as if we were animals at a circus—and she has nothing to be conceited about with her thin shoulders and tired face. Now she is gone, it is all the time—‘What have you done with our little Marguerite?’ Well, I have done nothing.” She turned to another customer. “For you, Monsieur? A bottle of champagne? Abdullah shall bring it to you.”
Abdullah in his Turkish breeches was handed the dreadful decoction and Gerard de Montignac tried again:
“She has left the Villa Iris altogether?”
“Yes, yes, yes. She has gone, that Miss Ni’Touche!”
The harridan behind the Bar flung up her hands.
“Saperlipoppette, how should I know, I ask you? I beg you, Monsieur, to allow me to serve my clients who do not think that because they have bought a whiskey-soda, they have become proprietors for the night of the Villa Iris.”
With an indignant nod she turned to some other customers. Gerard wandered out into the verandah, where he sat down rather heavily. He was more troubled than he would have thought possible. After all the disappearance of a little dancing girl from a Bar in a coast town of Morocco!—what was there to make a fuss about in that? That is the way of little dancing girls. They dance and they disappear, a question or two from you and me and the next man are as it were the ripples upon the pond, and then the surface is still once more.
But Gerard de Montignac could not dismiss Marguerite Lambert with this easy philosophy. He remembered her too clearly, her slim grace, the promise of real beauty if only she had food enough, her anger with him two evenings ago, and above all the queer look of fatality set upon her like a seal. Marguerite Lambert gone! How and whither? One or two dreadful sentences spoken a fortnight ago in the mess by the Commandant Marnier were written in letters of flame upon his memory. Casablanca was the last halting place but one in the ghastly pilgrimage of these poor creatures. The last of all—he shuddered to think of it. To picture Marguerite Lambert amongst its squalors was a sacrilege. Yet she had gone—she had moved on! There was the appalling fact.