Part 22

"Ill do better another time," he said, when he had finished, rather ruefully surveying his handiwork. "And now I'll call Hassan and get tea, and while we're having it I'll tell you about our camp in the Fayyum. To think of your giving up your maid!"

He kissed her again, with a lingering tenderness, and went out.

As soon as he was gone she got up. She had to search for a wrapper. She did not know where any of her things were. How maddening it was to be without a maid! More than once, now that Nigel was back and she could not go to Baroudi, she almost wished that she had kept Marie. Would it have been very unwise to keep her? She pulled out drawer after drawer. She was quite hot and tired before she had found what she wanted. What would life be like in a tent? She almost sickened at the thought of all that was before her. Ah! here was the wrapper at last. She tore it out from where it was lying with reckless violence, and put it on anyhow; then suddenly her real nature, the continuous part of her, asserted itself. She went to the mirror and adjusted it very carefully, very deftly. Then she twisted up her hair simply, and considered herself for a moment.

Had the new truth stamped itself yet upon her face, her body?

She saw before her a woman strongly, strikingly alive, thrilling with life. The eyes, released from sleep, were ardent, were full of the promises of passion; the lips were fresh, surely, and humid; the figure was alluring and splendid; the wonderful line of the neck had kept all its beauty. She had grown younger in Egypt, and she knew very well why. For her the new truth was clearly stamped, but not for Nigel. He would read it wrongly; he would take it for himself, as so many deceived men from the beginning of time have taken the truths of women, thinking "All this is for me." She looked long at herself, and she rejoiced in the vital change that had come over her, and, rejoicing, she came to the resolve of a vain woman. She must exert all her will to keep with her this Indian summer. She must school her nature, govern her passions, drill her mind to accept with serenity what was to come--dulness, delay, the long fatigues of playing a part, the ennui of tent life, of this _solitude a deux_ in the Fayyum. She must not permit this opulence of beauty to be tarnished by the ravages of jealousy; for jealousy often destroys the beauty of women, turns them into haggard witches. But she would not succumb; for, in her creed beauty was everything to a woman, and the woman who had lost her beauty had ceased to count, was scarcely any more to be numbered among the living. This sight and appreciation of herself suddenly seemed to arm her at all points. Her depression, which had peopled the night with horrors and the morning with apprehensions, departed from her. She was able to believe that the future held golden things, because she was able to believe in her own still immense attraction.

That day she contented Nigel, she fascinated him, she charmed him with her flow of animal spirits. He could deny her nothing. And when, laughingly, she begged him, as she had dispensed with a maid, to let her have her own special donkey-boy and donkey in the Fayyum, he was ready to acquiesce.

"We'll take Mohammed, of course, if you wish," he said, heartily, "though there are lots of donkey-boys to be got where we are going."

"I've given up Mohammed," she said.

He looked surprised.

"Have you? What's he done?"

"Nothing specially. But I prefer Hamza."

"The praying donkey-boy!"

"Yes."

She paused; then, looking away from him, she said slowly:

"There's something strange to me and interesting about him. I think it comes, perhaps, from his intense belief in his religion, his intense devotion to the Moslem's faith. I--I can't help admiring that, and I should like to take Hamza with us. He's so different from all the others."

Then, with a changed and lighter tone, she added:

"Besides, his donkey is the best on the river. It comes from Syria, and is a perfect marvel. Give me Hamza, his donkey, and Ibrahim as my suite, and you shall never hear a complaint from me, I promise you."

"Of course you shall have them," he said. "I like the man to whom his beliefs mean something, even if they're not mine and could never be mine."

So the fate of Hamza and Ibrahim was very easily settled.

But when Nigel called Ibrahim, and told him that he had decided on taking him and Hamza to the Fayyum, and that he was to tell Hamza at once, Ibrahim looked a little doubtful.

"All what my gentleman want I do," he said. "But Hamza do much business in Luxor; I dunno if him come to the Fayyum."

He glanced deprecatingly at Mrs. Armine.

"I very glad to come, but about Hamza I dunno."

He spoke with such apparent sincerity that she was almost deceived, and thought that perhaps some difficulty had really arisen.

"Offer him his own terms," exclaimed Nigel, "and I'll bet he'll be glad to come."

"I go to see, my gentleman."

"You shall have him, Ruby, whatever his price," said Nigel.

Ibrahim, with great difficulty, he said, made a bargain with Hamza, and on the following day the Villa Androud was left in Hassan's charge, and the Armines went north by the evening express to Cairo, where they were to stay two days and nights, in order that Mrs. Armine might see the Pyramids and the Sphinx. Nigel had already taken rooms at the Mena House, with a terrace exactly opposite to the Great Pyramid, and giving on to the sand of the desert.

They breakfasted at Shepheard's, then hired a victoria to drive up Ismail's road under the meeting lebbek-trees. Nigel was in glorious spirits. It seemed to him that morning as if his life were culminating, as if he were destined to a joy of which he was scarcely worthy. An unworldly man, and never specially fond of society or anxious about its edicts and its opinions, he did not suffer, as many men might have done, under his knowledge of its surprised pity for him, or even contempt. But in his secret heart he was glad that he was cut out of the succession to his family's title and the estates. Had he succeeded to them, his position would at once have become more difficult, his situation with Ruby far more complicated. As things were, they two were free as the wind. His soul leaped up to their freedom.

"I feel like a nomad to-day!" he exclaimed. "By Jove, though! isn't the wind cold? It always blows in the winter over these flats. Wrap yourself well up, darling."

He put up his hand to draw the furs more closely round her. When with her now he so easily felt protective that he was perpetually doing little things for her, and he did them with a gentleness of touch that, coming from a man of his healthy strength and vigour, revealed the progress made by the inner man in absence.

"I must be your maid," he added.

"But you'll be working and shooting," she said, speaking out of the depths of her furs in a low voice.

Her face was shrouded in a veil which seemed to muffle her words, and he only just heard them.

"You come first. I am going to look after you before anything else," he said.

She pulled up her veil till her lips were free of it.

"But I want your work to come first," she said, speaking with more energy. "I hate the woman who marries a man because she admires his character, and who then seeks by every means to change it, to reduce him from a real man to--well, to a sort of male lady's maid. No, Nigel; stick to your work, and I'll manage all right."

She felt just then that she could not endure it if he were always intent on her in the Fayyum. And yet she wished him to be her slave, and she always wished to be adored by men. But now there was something within her which might, perhaps, in the fulness of time even get the upper hand of her vanity.

"We'll see," he answered. "It'll be all right about the work, Ruby. You see the Pyramids well now."

She looked across the flats to those great tombs which draw the world to their feet.

"I wish it wasn't so horribly cold," she said.

And Baroudi was away in the gold of the south, and perhaps with the "Full Moon."

"It won't be half so bad when we get to Mena House. There's always a wind on this road in winter."

"And in the Fayyum? Will it be cold there?"

"No, not like this. Only at nights it gets cold sometimes, and there's often a thick mist."

"A thick mist!"

"But we shall be warm and cosy in our tent, and we shall know nothing about it."

And the _Loulia_ was floating up the Nile into the heart of the gold! Her heart sank. But then she remembered her resolution in the villa. And her vanity, and that which a moment ago had seemed to be fighting against it, clasped hands in resistant friendship.

The victoria rolled smoothly; the horses trotted fast in the brisk air; the line of the desert, pale and vague in the windy morning, grew more distinct, more full of summons; the orifice that was the end of the avenue gaped like a mouth that opens more widely. A line of donkeys appeared, with here and there a white camel with tasselled trappings, surrounded by groups of shouting Egyptians, who stared at the carriage with avaricious eyes. "Ah--ah!" shouted the coachman. The horses broke into a gallop, turned into a garden on the right, and drew up before the Mena House.

A minute later Mrs. Armine was standing on a terrace that ended in a sea of pale yellow sand. Nigel followed her, but only after some minutes.

"You seem to know everybody here," she said to him, in a slightly constrained voice, as he came to stand beside her.

"Well, there are several fellows from Cairo come here to spend Sunday."

"With their wives apparently."

"Yes, some of them. Of course last winter I got to know a good many people. It's much warmer here. We get all the sun, and there's much less wind. And isn't the Great Pyramid grand?"

He took her gently by the arm.

"The Sphinx is beyond. I want you to see that for the first time just before nightfall, Ruby."

"Whatever you like," she said.

Her voice still sounded constrained. On the veranda and in the hall of the hotel she had had to run the gauntlet, and now that she was married again, and had abandoned the defiant life which she had led for so many years, somehow she had become less careless of opinion, of the hostility of women, than she had formerly been. She wished to be accepted again. As Lady Harwich she could have forced people to accept her.

As she looked at the Great Pyramid, she was saying that to herself, and Nigel's words about the Sphinx fell upon inattentive ears. Although he did not know it, in bringing her to Mena House just at this moment he had taken a step that was unwise. But he was walking in the dark.

At lunch in the great Arabic hall officers from the garrisons of Cairo and Abbassieh, and their womenkind, were in great force. Acquaintances of Nigel's sat at little tables to the right and left of them. In other parts of the room were scattered various well-known English people, who stared at Mrs. Armine when they chose to imagine she did not see them. Not far off Lord and Lady Hayman and the Murchisons reappeared.

A more effective irritant to Mrs. Armine's temper and nerves at this moment than this collection of people afforded could scarcely have been devised by her most subtle enemy. But not by a glance or movement did she betray the fact. She had had time to recover herself, to regain perfect outward self-control. But within her a storm was raging. Into the chamber of her soul, borne upon the wings of the wind, were flocking the ginnees out of the dense darkness of night. And when the twilight came, throwing its pale mystery over the desert, and the wonders the desert kept, they had taken possession of her spirit.

The travellers who, during the day, had peopled the waste about the Pyramids had gone back to Cairo by tram and carriage, or were at tea in the hotel, when the Armines, mounted on donkeys, rode through the twilight towards the Sphinx. They approached it from behind. The wind had quite gone down, and though the evening was not warm, the sharpness of the morning had given place to a more gentle briskness that was in place among the sands. Far off, across the plains and the Nile, the lights of Cairo gleamed against the ridges of the Mokattam. Through the empty silence of this now deserted desert they rode in silence, till before them, above the grey waste of the sand, a protuberance arose.

"Do you see that, Ruby?" Nigel said, pulling at his donkey's rein.

"That thing like a gigantic mushroom? Yes. What is it?"

"The Sphinx."

"That!" she exclaimed.

"Yes, but only the back of its head. All the body is concealed. Wait till you've ridden round it and seen it from the front."

She said nothing, and they rode on till they came to the edge of the deep basin in which the sacred monster lies with the sand and its ceaseless fame about it, till they had skirted the basin's rim, and faced it full on the farther bank. There they dismounted, and Nigel ordered their donkey-boys to lead the beasts away till they were out of earshot. The dry sound of their tripping feet, over the stones and hard earth which edged the sand near by, soon died down into the twilight, and the Armines were left alone.

Although the light of day was rapidly failing, it had not entirely gone; day and night joined hands in a twilight mystery which seemed not only to fall from the sky, so soon to be peopled with stars, but also to rise from the pallor of the sands, and to float about the Sphinx. In the distance the Great Pyramid was black against the void.

Mrs. Armine at first stood perfectly still looking at the monster. Then she made Nigel a sign to spread her dust-cloak upon the ridge of the sand, and she sat down on it, and looked again. She did not speak. The pallor of the twilight began to grow dusky, as if into its yellow grey and grey white, from some invisible source a shadowy black was filtering. A cool air stirred, coming from far away where the sands stretch out towards the Gold Coast. It failed, then came again, with a slightly greater force, a more definite intention.

Nigel was standing, but presently, as Ruby did not move, he sat down beside her, and clasped his brown hands round his knees so tightly that they went white at the knuckles. He stole a glance at her, and thought that her face looked strangely fixed and stern, almost cruel in its repose, and he turned his eyes once more towards the Sphinx.

And then he forgot Ruby, he forgot Egypt, he forgot everything except that greatest creation which man has ever accomplished; that creation which by its inexorable calm and prodigious power rouses in some hearts terror and sets peace in some, stirs some natures to aspiration, and crushes others to the ground with an overwhelming sense of their impotence, their smallness, their fugitive existence, and their dark and mysterious fate.

Upon Mrs. Armine the effect of the Sphinx, whatever it might have been at a less critical moment in her life, at this moment was cruel. The storm had broken upon her and she faced the uttermost calm. She was the prey of conflicting forces, wild beasts of which herself was the cage. And she was confronted by the beast of the living rock which, in its almost ironic composure, its power purged of passion, did it deign to be aware of her she felt could only, with a strange stillness, mock her. She was a believer only in the little life, and here lay the conception of Eternity, struck out of the stone of the waste by man, to say to her with its motionless lips, "Thou fool!" And as she had within her resolution, will, and an unsleeping vanity, this power which confronted her not only dimly distressed, but angered her. She felt angry with Nigel. She forgot, or chose not to remember, that the Sphinx was the wonder of the world, and she said to herself that she knew very well why Nigel had brought her by night to see it. He had brought her to be chastened, he had brought her to be rebuked. In the heat of her nervous fancy it almost seemed to her for a moment as if he had divined something of the truth that was in her, truth that struck hard at him, and his hopes of happiness, and all his moral designs, and as if he had brought her to be punished by the Sphinx. In the grasp of the monster she writhed, and she hated herself for writhing. Once in her presence Baroudi had sneered at the Sphinx. Now she remembered his very words: "We Egyptians, we have other things to do than to go and stare at the Sphinx. We prefer to enjoy our lives while we can, and not to trouble about it." She remembered the shrug of his mighty shoulders that had accompanied the words. Almost she could see them and their disdainful movement before her. Yes, the Sphinx was fading away in the night, and Baroudi was there in front of her. His strong outline blotted out from her the outline of the Sphinx. The evening star came out, and the breeze arose again from its distant place in the sands, and whispered round the Sphinx.

She shivered, and got up.

"Let us go; I want to go," she said.

"Isn't it wonderful, Ruby?"

"Yes. Where are the Arabs?"

She could no longer quite conceal her secret agitation, but Nigel attributed it to a wrong cause, and respected it. The Sphinx always stirred powerfully the spiritual part of him, made him feel in every fibre of his being that man is created not for time, but for Eternity. He believed that it had produced a similar effect in Ruby. That this effect should distress her did not surprise him, but roused in his heart a great tenderness towards her, not unlike the tenderness of a parent who sees the tears of a child flow after a punishment the justice of which is realized. The Sphinx had made her understand intensely the hatefulness of certain things.

When he had helped her on to her donkey he kept his arm about her.

"Do you realize what it has been to me to see the Sphinx with you?" he whispered.

The night had fallen. In the darkness they went away across the desert.

And the Sphinx lay looking towards the East, where the lights of Cairo shone across the flats under the ridges of the Mokattam.

XXII

The Fayyum is a great and superb oasis situated upon a plateau of the desert of Libya, wonderfully fertile, rich, and bland, with a splendid climate, and springs of sweet waters which, carefully directed into a network of channels, spreading like wrinkles over the face of the land, carry life and a smiling of joy through the crowding palms, the olive and fruit trees, the corn and the brakes of the sugar-cane. The Egyptians often call it "the country of the roses," and they say that everything grows there. The fellah thinks of it as of a Paradise where man can only be happy. Every Egyptian who has ever set the butt end of a gun against his shoulder sighs to be among its multitudinous game. The fisherman longs to let down his net into the depths of its sacred lake. The land-owner would rather have a few acres between Sennoures and Beni Suwef than many in the other parts of Egypt. The man who is amorous yearns after the legendary beauty of its unveiled women, with their delicately tattooed chins, their huge eyes, and their slim and sinuous bodies. And scarcely is there upon the Nile a brown boy whose face will not gleam and grow expressive with desire at the sound of the words "El-Fayyum."

It is a land of Goshen, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of the heart's desire, this green tract of sweet and gracious fertility to which the Bahr-Yusuf is kind.

But to Mrs. Armine it was from the very first a hateful land.

Their camp was pitched on a piece of brown waste ground, close to a runlet of water, near a palm-grove that shut out from them the native houses of the great village or country town of Sennoures. The land which Nigel's fellahin were reclaiming and had reclaimed--for much of it was already green with luxuriant crops--was farther away, where the oasis runs flush with the pale yellow, or honey-coloured, or sometimes spectral grey sands of the desert of Libya. But Nigel, when he first came to the Fayyum, had first gone into camp among the palms of Sennoures, and there had heard the Egyptian Pan in the night; and he wanted to renew certain impressions, to feel them decked out, as it were, with novel graces now that he was no longer lonely; so he had ordered the camp to be pitched by the little stream that he knew, in order to savour fully the great change in his life.