Chapter XIV

When Mrs. Armine came into the little drawing-room, it was empty, but she smelt cigars, and heard the murmur of voices outside near the terrace. The men were evidently walking up and down enjoying the soft air of the evening. She did not go out immediately, but stood and listened to the voices.

Ah, they were talking about the Fayyum--doubtless discussing some question of sowing, planting, of the cultivation of land!

This evening her face seemed to retain in its skin an effect of her outburst of passion, a sensation of dryness and harshness, as if it were unduly stretched over the flesh and had lost its normal elasticity. Just before she came out of her bedroom, Marie, with a sort of reluctant admiration, had exclaimed, "_Madame est exquise ce soir!_" She wondered if it were true, and as the voices without grew softer for a moment, more distant, she went to stand again before a mirror, and to ask herself that question.

She had chosen to put on a walking-dress instead of a tea-gown, because she believed that in it she would look younger, her splendid figure being still one of her greatest advantages. Yes, her figure was superb, and this gown showed it off superbly. The long quiet of her very dull life in London while she had known Nigel, followed by her comparative repose in the splendid climate of Egypt, had done wonders for her appearance. Certainly to-night, despite any ravages made by her injudicious yielding to anger, she looked years younger than she had looked in Isaacson's consulting-room. The wrinkles about her eyes showed scarcely at all, or--not at all. And she was marvellously fair.

Orientals delight in fairness, and always suppose Occidentals to be years younger than they really are, if they have succeeded in retaining any of the charms of youth.

Marie was not far wrong.

She turned to step out upon the terrace.

"Ah, Mahmoud Baroudi!" she said, with a sort of lazy but charming indifference, as the two men came to meet her. "So you have come up the river to look after--what is it? your something--your sugar?"

"My sugar; exactly, madame," he replied gravely, bowing over her hand. "I hope you will forgive my intrusion. Your husband kindly insisted on bringing me over--and in flannels."

His apology was extremely composed, but Nigel was looking a little excited, a little anxious, was begging forgiveness with his eyes for all the trouble of the morning. She was not going to seem to give it him yet; a man on the tenter-hooks was a man in the perfectly right place. So she was suave, and avoided his glance without seeming to avoid it. They strolled about a little, talking lightly of nothing particular; then she said, speaking for the first time directly to her husband,

"Nigel, don't you think you'd better just go and tell Hassan we shall be three at dinner, and have a little talk to the cook? Your Arabic will have more effect upon the servants than my English. Mahmoud Baroudi and I will sit on the terrace till you come back."

"Right you are!" he said.

And he went off at once, leaving them together.

As soon as he was gone, Mrs. Armine sat down on a basket chair. For a moment she said nothing. In the silence her face changed. The almost lazy naturalness and simplicity faded gradually out of it, revealing the alert and seductive woman of the world. Even her body seemed to change, to become more sensitive, more conscious, under the eyes of Baroudi; and all the woman in her, who till now, save for a few subtle and fleeting indications of life, had lain almost quiescent, rose suddenly and signalled boldly to attract the attention of this man, who sat down a little way from her, and gazed at her in silence with an Oriental directness and composure.

Although they had talked upon shipboard, this was the first time they had been _en tete-a-tete_.

To-night Mrs. Armine's eyes told Baroudi plainly that she admired him, told him more--that she wished him to know it; and he accepted her admiration, and now made a bold return. For soon the change in her was matched by the change in him. The open resolution of his face, which on the ship had often attracted Nigel, was now mingled with a something sharp, as of cunning, with a ruthlessness she could understand and appreciate. As she looked at him in the gathering darkness of the night, she realized that housed within him, no doubt with many companions, there was certainly a brigand, without any fear, without much pity. And she compared this brigand with Nigel.

"How do you find Egypt, madame? Do you like my country?"

He leaned a little forward as at last he broke their silence, and the movement, and his present attitude, drew her attention to the breadth of his mighty shoulders and to the arresting poise of his head, a poise that, had it been only a shade less bold, would have been almost touchingly gallant.

"Have you seen all the interesting things in Thebes and Karnak?"

"Yes. We've been quite good tourists. We've been to the Colossi, the tombs, the temples. We've dined by moonlight on the top of the Pylon at Karnak. We've seen sunset from Deir-al-Bahari."

"And sunrise?"

"From nowhere. I prefer to sleep in the morning."

"And do you care about all these things, tombs, temples, mummies--madame? Have you enjoyed your Egyptian life?"

She paused before answering the question. As a fact, she had often enjoyed her expeditions with Nigel in the bright and shimmering gaiety of the exquisite climate of Luxor; the picnic lunches out in the open, or within the walls of some mighty ruin; the smart canters on the straight brown paths between the waving green prairies or crops, above which the larks sang and the wild pigeons flew up to form the only cloud in the triumph of gold and of blue; the long climbs upward into the mountains along the tiger-coloured ways, where the sun had made his empire since the beginning of the world; the descents when day was declining, when the fellahin went homewards under the black velvet of the palm-trees, and the dust stirred by their brown and naked feet rose up in spirals towards the almost livid light of the afterglow. And she had enjoyed the dinner at Karnak in the pale beams of a baby moon. For she still had the power to enjoy, and much of the physical energy of the average Englishwoman, who is at home in the open air and quite at her ease in the saddle. And Egypt was for her a complete novelty, and a novelty bringing health, and a feeling almost of youth.

Nevertheless, she paused before replying.

Secretly, during all these days she was now considering, she had been as one who walks in a triumph. She had been exulting in the _coup_ she had made just when her life seemed turning to greyness, exulting in the blow she had struck against a society which had despised her and cast her out. Exultation had coloured her days. Now suddenly, unexpectedly, she knew she had been living in a fool's paradise, into which Nigel had led her. And this knowledge fell, like a great shadow, over all the days in Egypt behind her, blotting out their sunshine, their gaiety, their glow.

"Pretty well," she said, at last. "Do you care about such things?"

He shrugged his mighty shoulders.

"Madame, I am not a tourist. What should I do in the temples among the bats, and in the tombs where one can almost smell the dead people? You must not come to us Egyptians for all that. You must go to the old English maidens--is that it?--maidens who wear helmets on their grey hair done so"--he put up his brown hands, and pretended to twist up a tiny top-knot at the back of his head--"and who stroke the heads of the dragomans sitting there at their feet, what they call their 'tootsicums,' and telling them thousands of lies. Or you must go to the thin antiquaries, with the red noses and the heads without any hair, who dig for mummies while their wives--ah, well I must not say that! But we Egyptians, we have other things to do than to go and stare at the Sphinx. We have always seen it. We know it is there, that it is not going to run away. So we prefer to enjoy our lives while we can, and not to trouble about it. Do you blame us?"

"No," she said. "I never blame any one for enjoying life."

There was in his look and manner, even in his attitude, a something that was almost like a carelessly veiled insolence. In a European she would perhaps have resented it. In him not only did she not resent it, but she was attracted by it. For it seemed to belong as of right to his great strength, his bold and direct good looks, which sprang to the eyes, his youth, and his Eastern blood. Such a man must feel often insolent, however carefully he might hide it. Why should he not show some grains of his truth to her?

"Nor for any way of enjoying life, madame?" he said.

And he leaned still a little more forward, put up one big hand to his cheek, let it drop down to his splendid throat, and kept the fingers inside his soft turn-down collar while he looked into her eyes.

"I didn't say that."

"Would you care much what way it was if it gave the enjoyment?"

"Would you?"

"I! Certainly not. But--I am not like Mr. Armeen."

He slightly mispronounced the name.

"Mr. Armine?" she said. "What about him?"

"Would he not think that some things one might do and many things one must not do? All the Englishmen are like that. Oh, dear, if one does the thing they think wrong! Oh, dear! Oh, Law!"

He took away his hand from his throat, held it up, then slapped it down upon his knee.

"My word!" he added, smiling, and always searching her eyes with his. "It is worse than to eat pig by daylight in Ramadan would seem to an Egyptian."

"Do you dislike the English?"

"What must I say?"

"Say the truth."

"If it is the English ladies, I think them lovely."

"And the Englishmen?"

"Oh, they are all--good fellers."

He threw into the last two words an indescribable sound of half-laughing contempt.

"They are all--good fellers. Don't you think so?"

"But what does that mean?"

"Splendid chaps, madame!"

He sat up straight, and threw out his chest and thumped it.

"Beef, plum pudding, fine fellers, rulers!"

"You mustn't laugh at my countrymen."

"Laugh--never! But--may I smile, just at one corner?"

He showed his rows of little, straight, white teeth, which looked strong enough to bite through a bar of iron.

"The Englishman rules us in Egypt. He keeps saying we are ruling, and he keeps on ruling us. And all the time he rules us, he despises us, madame. He thinks us silly children. But sometimes we smile at him, though of course he never smiles at us, for fear a smile from him should make us think we are not so far below him. It is very wrong of us, but somehow Allah permits us to smile. And then"--again he leaned forward, and his chair creaked in the darkness--"there are some Englishwomen who like to see us smile, some who even smile with us behind the Englishman's back."

He spoke calmly, with a certain subtle irony, but quite without any hint of bitterness, and in speaking the last words he slightly lowered his voice.

"Is it very wrong of them, madame? What do you say? Do you condemn them?"

She did not answer, but her mobile, painted lips quivered, as if she were trying to repress a smile and were not quite succeeding.

"If they smile, if they smile--isn't that a shame, madame?"

He was smiling into her eyes.

"It is a great shame," she said. "I despise deceitful women."

"And yet who does not deceive? Everybody--except the splendid fellers!"

He threw back his head and laughed, while she looked at his magnificent throat.

"You never talked like this on the _Hohenzollern_," she said.

"Madame, I was never alone with you. How could I talk like this? I should not have been properly understood."

Not only in his eyes, but also in this assumption of a certain comradeship and sympathy from which Nigel and Nigel's kind were necessarily excluded, there was a definite insolence that seemed to strike upon and challenge Mrs. Armine, like a glove flung in her face. Would she perhaps have resented it even yesterday? She could not tell. To-night she was ready to welcome it, for to-night she almost hated Nigel. But, apart from her personal anger, Baroudi made an impression upon her that was definite and strong. She felt, she ever seemed to perceive with her eyes, the love of brigandage in him--and had she not been a brigand? There were some ruined men who could have answered that question. And in this man there was a great fund of force and of energy. He threw out an extraordinary atmosphere of physical strength, in which seemed involved a strength that was mental, like dancing motes in a beam of light. Mrs. Armine was a resolute woman, as Meyer Isaacson had at once divined. She felt that here was a human being who could be even more resolute than herself, more persistent, more unyielding, and quite as subtle, quite as cool. Though he was an Eastern man and she was a Western woman, how should each not understand much of the other's character? And as to him--Orientals are readers of brains, if not of souls.

She felt a great sense of relief, as if a balm were laid at evening upon the morning's wound.

"Ruby!"

Baroudi leaned back quietly, looking calm and strong and practical. And this time Mrs. Armine noticed that the basket chair did not creak beneath his movement.

"Is it all right about the dinner, Nigel?"

"I hope so," he said. "But Baroudi mustn't suppose we've got a _chef_ like his."

"I'll leave you for a little while," she said, getting up. "Dinner at a quarter past eight."

"Thank you, madame."

He was standing up.

"You pardon my flannels?"

"I like men in flannels, don't I, Nigel?"

She spoke carelessly, almost absently, and went slowly into the house. Again she had subtly cast around her a gentle atmosphere of rebuke.

On the table in the drawing-room were lying, still in their wrappers, the papers which had come by the morning's post. She took one up, as she passed, and carried it upstairs with her; and when she was in her bedroom she opened it, and glanced quickly through the social news. Ah! there was a paragraph about Lady Harwich!

"The birth of twin sons to the Countess of Harwich has given much satisfaction in social circles, as both Lord and Lady Harwich are universally popular and esteemed. It is said that the baptism of the infants will take place, in the Chapel Royal of St. James's Palace, and that His Majesty the King will be one of the sponsors. Until this happy event, the next heir to the title and the immense estates that go with it was the Honourable Nigel Armine, who recently married the well-known Mrs. Chepstow, and who is ten years younger than Lord Harwich."

Somehow, now that she saw the fact stated in print, Mrs. Armine felt suddenly more conscious both of the triumph of Lady Harwich and of the Harwich, which was the social, faction generally, and of what seemed her own defeat. What a comfortable smile there must be just now upon the lips of the smart world, upon the lips of numbers of women not a bit better than she was! And Nigel had "let her in" for it all. Her lips tightened ominously as she remembered the cool American eyes of Lady Harwich, which had often glanced at her with the knowing contempt of the lively but innocent woman, which stirs the devil in women who are not innocent, and who are known not to be innocent.

She put down the paper; she went to the window and looked out. From the garden there rose to her nostrils the delicate scent of some hidden flower that gave its best gift to the darkness. In the distance, to her right, there was a pattern of coloured fire relieved against the dimness, that was not blackness, of the world. That was Baroudi's dahabeeyah.

Women were smiling in London, were rejoicing in her misfortune. As she looked at the lines of lamps, they seemed to her lines of satirical eyes, then, presently, lines of eyes that were watching her and were reading the truth of her nature.

She called Marie, and again she changed her gown.

While she was doing so, Nigel came up once more, taking Baroudi to a bedroom, and presently tried the door between her bedroom and his.

"Can't come in!" she called out, lightly.

"You're not changing your dress?"

"I couldn't dine in linen."

"But we are both--"

"Men--and I'm a woman, and I can't dine in linen. I should feel like a sheet or a pillow-case. Run away, Nigel!"

She heard him washing his hands, and presently she heard him go away. She knew very well that the lightness in her voice had whipped him, and that he was "feeling badly."

When the small gong sounded for dinner, she went downstairs, dressed in a pale yellow gown with a high bodice in which a bunch of purple flowers was fastened. She wore no jewels and no ornament in her hair.

As she came into the room, for a moment Nigel had the impression that she was a stranger coming in. Why was that? His mind repeated the question, and he gazed at her with intensity, seeking the reason of his impression. She was looking strangely, abnormally fair. Had she again, despite the conversation of the morning, "done something" to her face? Was its whiteness whiter than usual? Or were her lips a little redder? Or--he did not know what she had done, whether, indeed, she had done anything--but he felt troubled, ill at ease. He felt a longing to be alone with Ruby, to make her forgive him for having hurt her in the morning. He hated the barrier between them, and he felt that he had created it by his disbelief in her. Women are always more sensitive than men, and who is more sensitive than the emerging Magdalen, encompassed by disbelief, by irony, by wonder? He felt that in the morning he had been radically false to himself, that by his lapse from a high ideal of conduct he had struck a heavy blow upon a trembling virtue which had been gathering its courage to venture forth into the light.

During the dinner, almost everything, every look, tone, gesture, attitude, that was expressive of Ruby, confirmed him in self-rebuke. She was certainly changed. The rather weary and wistful woman who had stayed alone in the garden when he went to the dahabeeyah had given place to a woman more resolute, brilliant, animated--a woman who could hold her own, who could be daring, almost defiant, and a woman who could pain him in return, perhaps, for the pain he had inflicted on her. The dinner was quite good. Their Nubian cook had been trained in a big hotel, and Mrs. Armine had nothing to apologize for. Baroudi politely praised the cooking. Yet she felt that behind his praise there lurked immeasurable reservations, and she remembered the time when her _chef_ was the most famous in London, a marvel who had been bribed by a millionaire lover of hers to leave the service of a royalty to bring his gift to her. She mentioned this fact to Baroudi. It was a vulgar thing to do, and at heart she was not vulgar; but she was prompted by two desires. She felt in her guest the Oriental's curious and almost romantic admiration of riches, and wished to draw this admiration towards herself; and she wanted to inflict some more punishment on Nigel.

"You seem to be something of an epicure, Mahmoud Baroudi," she said. "I suppose you have heard of Armand Carrier?"

"The best _chef_ in Europe, madame? How should I not have heard of him among my friends of Paris?"

"He was in my service for five years."

There was a pause. Nigel suddenly turned red. Baroudi moved his large eyes slowly from Mrs. Armine to him, and at length observed calmly:

"I felicitate you both. You must have had a treasure. But why did you let him go?"

He addressed the question to Nigel.

"He was not in my service," said Nigel, with a sudden, very English stiffness that was almost like haughtiness. "It was long before we were married."

"Oh--I see. But what a pity! Then you did not have the benefit of eating his marvellous _plats_."

"No. I don't care about that sort of thing."

"Really!"

They talked of other matters, but Nigel had lost all his _bonhomie_, and seemed unable to recover it.

Baroudi, like a good Mohammedan, declined to drink any wine, but when the fruit was brought, Mrs. Armine got up.

"I'll leave you for a little while," she said. "You'll find me on the terrace. Although Mahmoud Baroudi drinks nothing, I am sure he likes men's talk better than woman's chatter."

Baroudi politely but rather perfunctorily denied this.

"But what do you say," he added, "to coming as my guest to take a cup of coffee and a liqueur at the Winter Palace Hotel? To-night there is the first performance of a Hungarian band which I introduced last winter to Egypt, and which--I am told; I am not, perhaps, a judge of your Western music--plays remarkably. What do you say? Would it please you, madame?"

"Yes, do let us go. Shan't we go?"

She turned to Nigel.

"Of course," he said, "if you like. But can you walk in that dress?"

She nodded.

"It's perfectly dry outside. I'll come down in a moment."

She was away for nearly ten; then she returned, wrapped up in a marvellous ermine coat, and wearing on her head a yellow toque with a high aigrette at one side.

"I'm ready now," she said.

"What a beautiful coat!" Nigel said.

He had not seen it before. He gently smoothed it with his brown fingers. Then he looked at her, took them away, and stepped back rather abruptly.

When they arrived at the great hotel the band was already playing in the hall, and a number of people, scattered about in little detached groups, were listening to it and drinking Turkish coffee. It was very early in the season. The rush up the Nile had not begun, and travellers had not yet cemented their travelling acquaintanceships. People looked at each other rather vaguely, or definitely ignored each other, with profiles and backs which said quite plainly: "We won't have anything to do with you until we know more about you." The entrance of the party from the Villa Androud created a strong diversion. As soon as Baroudi was perceived by the attendants, there was a soft and gliding movement to serve him. The tall Nubians in white and scarlet smiled, salaamed, and showed their pleasure and their desire for his notice. The German hall porter hastened forward, with a pink smile upon his countenance; the _chef d'orchestre_, a real Hungarian, began to play at him with fervour; and a black gentleman in gold and scarlet, who looked like a Prince of the East, but who was really earning his living in connection with the lift to the first floor, bounded to show them to a table.

Baroudi accepted all these attentions with a magnificent indifference that had in it nothing of assumption. They sat down, he ordered coffee and liqueurs, and they listened to the music, which was genuinely good, and had the peculiar fervent and yet melancholy flavour which music receives from the bows of Hungarian fiddlers. Nigel was smoking. He seemed profoundly attentive, did not attempt any conversation, and kept his eyes on the ground. Mrs. Armine seemed listening attentively, too, but she had not been sitting for five minutes before she had seen and summed up every group in her neighborhood; had defined the nationalities, criticized the gowns and faces of the women, and made up her mind as to the characters of the men who accompanied them, and as to the family or amorous ties uniting them to each other and the men.

And she had done more than this: she had measured the amount of interest, of curiosity, of admiration, of envy, of condemnation which she herself excited with the almost unerring scales of the clever woman who has lived for years both in the great and the half worlds.

Quite near them, not level with their table, but a little behind it on the right, within easy range of her eyes, Lord and Lady Hayman were sitting, with another English couple, a Sir John and Lady Murchison, smart, gambling, racing, pleasure-loving people, who seemed to be everywhere at the same time, and never to miss any function of importance where their "set" put in an appearance. Lady Murchison was a pretty and vindictive blonde--the sort of woman who looks as if she would bite you if you did not let her have her way. She was smiling cruelly now, and murmuring to Lady Hayman, a naturally large, but powerfully compressed personage, with a too-sanguine complexion insufficiently corrected by powder, and a too-autocratic temperament insufficiently corrected by Lord Hayman.

All these people--Mrs. Armine knew it "in her bones"--had just been reading the _Morning Post_. Here in Egypt they stood for "London." She saw London's verdict, "Serve her right," in their cool smiles, their moments of direct attention to herself--an attention hard, insolent, frigid as steel--in the curious glances of pity combined with a sort of animal, almost school-boy, amusement, which the two men sent towards Nigel.

She looked from "London" to "Egypt," represented by Baroudi. In marrying Nigel she had longed to set her heel upon the London which had despised her; she had hoped some day to set the heel of Lady Harwich upon more than one woman whom she had known before she was cast out. Secretly she had reckoned upon that, as upon something that was certain, something for which she had only to wait. Lord Harwich was worn out, and he was a wildly reckless man, always having accidents, always breaking his bones. She would only have to wait.

And now--twin boys, and all London smiling!

Again she looked at Baroudi. The fervent and melancholy music was rising towards a climax. It caught hold of her now, had her in a grip, swept her onwards. When it ceased, she felt as if she had been carried away from "London," and from those old ambitions and hopes for ever.

Baroudi's great eyes were upon her, and seemed to read her thoughts; and now for the first time she felt uneasy under their resolute gaze, felt the desire, almost the necessity to escape from it and to be unwatched.

"Have you had enough of the music, Nigel?" she said to her husband, as the musicians lifted their chins from their instruments, and let their arms drop down.

He started.

"What, Ruby? By Jove, they do play well!"

There was a look in his eyes almost as of one coming back from a long and dark journey underground into the light of day. That music had taken him back to the side of the girl whom he had loved, and who had died so long ago. Now he looked at the woman who was living, and to whom the great power to love which was within him was being directed, on whom it was being concentrated.

"Do you mind if we go home?" she said.

"You have had enough of it already?"

"No, not that; but--I'm tired," she said.

As she spoke, skilfully, without appearing to do so, she led him to look towards the little group of the Murchisons and the Haymans; led him to pity her for their observation, and to take that as the cause of her wish to go. Perhaps it was partly the cause, but not wholly, and not as she made him believe it.

"Ill take you home at once," Nigel said, tenderly.

When they were outside Baroudi bade them good-bye, and invited them to tea on the _Loulia_--so his dahabeeyah was called--on the following day.

"In the evening I may start for Armant," he said. "Will it bore you to come, madame?"

He spoke politely, but rather perfunctorily, and she answered with much the same tone.

"Thanks, I shall be delighted. Good-night. The music was delicious."

His tall figure went away in the dark.

When he had left them there was a silence. Nigel made a movement as if he were going to take her hand, and draw her arm within the circle of his; but he did not do it, and they walked on side by side by the river, not touching each other, not speaking. And so, presently, they came to the villa, and to the terrace before the drawing-room. Then Nigel spoke at last.

"Are--you are going in at once, Ruby?" he said.

"Yes."

"I--will you call from your window presently?"

"Why?"

"When I may come up. After this morning I must talk to you before we sleep."

She looked at him, then looked down, resting her white chin on the warm white fur of the ermine.

"I'll call," she said.

As she went away he looked after her, and thought how almost strangely tall she looked in the long white coat. He paced up and down as he waited, listening for the sound of her voice. After what seemed to him a very long time he heard it at last.

"Nigel! You can come up now--if you like."

He went upstairs at once to her room, and found her sitting in an arm-chair near the window, which led on to the balcony, and which was wide open to the night. She was in a loose and, to him, a mysterious white and flowing garment, with sleeves that fell away from her arms like wings. Her hair was coiled low at the back of her neck.

The room was lit by two candles, which burned upon a small writing-table, and by the wan and delicate moonlight that seemed to creep in stealthily, yet obstinately, from the silently-breathing Egypt in whose warm breast they were. He stood for a moment; then he sat down on a little sofa, not close to her, but near her.

"Ruby," he said.

"Well, Nigel?"

"This has been the first unhappy day for me since we've been married."

"Unhappy!"

"Yes, because of the cloud between us."

She said nothing, and he resumed:

"It's made me know something, though, Ruby; it's made me know how much I care--for you."

He leaned forward, and, as he did so, her mind went to Baroudi, and she remembered exactly the look of his shoulders and of his throat when he was leaning towards her.

"I don't think I really knew it before. I'm sure I didn't know it. What made me understand it was the way I felt when I found I had hurt you, had done you a wrong for a moment. Ruby, my own feeling has punished me so much that I don't think you can want to punish me any more."

"I punish you!" she said. "But what wrong have you done me? And how could I punish you?"

"I did you a wrong this morning by thinking for a moment--" He stopped; he found he could not put it quite clearly into words. "Over Harwich and the boys," he concluded.

"Oh, that! That didn't matter!" she said.

She spoke coldly, but she was feeling more excited, more emotional, than she had felt for a very long time, than she had known that she could feel.

"It mattered very much. But I don't think I really thought it."

"Yes, you did!" she said, sharply.

He sat straight up, like a man very much startled.

"You did think it. Don't try to get out of it, Nigel."

"Ruby, I'm not trying. Why, haven't I said--"

But she interrupted him.

"You did think, what every one thinks, that I'm a greedy, soulless woman, and that I even married you"--she laid a fierce emphasis on the pronoun--"out of the wretched, pettifogging ambition some day to be Lady Harwich. You did think it, Nigel. You did think it!"

"For one moment," he said.

He got up from the sofa, and stood by the window. He felt like a man in a moral crisis, and that what he said at this moment, and how he said it, with how much deep sincerity and how much warmth of heart, might, even must, determine the trend of the future.

"For one moment I did just wonder whether perhaps when you married me you had thought I might some day be Lord Harwich."

"Of course."

"Al-lah--"

Through the open window came faintly the nasal cry of the Nubian sailor beginning the song of the Nile upon the lower deck of the _Loulia_. With it there entered the very dim throbbing of the beaten _daraboukkeh_, sounding almost like some strange and perpetual ground-swell of the night, that flood of shadowy mystery and beauty in which they and the world were drowned. The distant music added to her sense of excitement and to his.

"Ruby--try to see--I think it was partly a humble feeling that made me wonder--a difficulty in believing you had cared very much for me."

"Why should you, or any one, think I have it in me to care?"

"I thought so in London, I think so here, I have always thought so--always. If others have--have disbelieved in you ever, I haven't been like them. You doubt it?"

He moved a step forward, and stood looking down on her.

"But I could prove it."

"Oh--how?"

"Meyer Isaacson knows it."

He did not refer to his marrying her as a proof already given, for that might have meant something else than belief in the hidden unworldliness of her, and in her hidden desire for that which was good and beautiful.

"And don't you--don't you know it, even after this morning?"

"After this morning--I don't want to hurt you--but after this morning you will have to prove it to me, thoroughly prove it, or else I shall not believe it."

The solo voice of the Nubian sailor was lost in the chorus of voices which came floating over the Nile.

"I don't want to be cold," she continued, "and I don't want to be unkind, but one can't help certain things. I have been driven, forced, into scepticism about men. I don't want to go back into my life, I don't want to trot out the old 'more sinned against than sinning' _cliche_. I don't mean to play the winey-piney woman. I never have done that, and I believe I've got a little grit in me to prevent me ever doing it. But such a thing as happened this morning must breed doubts and suspicions in a woman who has had the experience I have had. I might very easily tell you a lie, Nigel. I might very easily fall into your arms and say I've forgotten all about it, and I'll never think of it again, and all that sort of thing. It would be the simplest thing in the world for me to act a part to you. But you've been good to me when I was lonely, and you've cared for me enough to marry me, and--well, I won't. I'll tell you the truth. It's this: I can't help knowing you did doubt me, and I'm not really a bit surprised, and I don't know that I'd any right to be hurt; but whether I had any right or not, I was hurt, and it will take a little time to make me feel quite safe with you--quite safe--as one can only feel when the little bit of sincerity in one is believed in and trusted."

She spoke quietly, but he felt excitement behind her apparent calm. In her voice there was an inflexible sound, that seemed to tell him very clearly it meant what it was saying.

Always across the Nile came the song of the Nubian sailors.

"I'm not surprised that you feel like that," he said.

He stood for a moment considering, then he sat down once more, and began to speak with a resolution that seemed to be prompted by passion.

"Ruby, to-day I think I was false to myself, because to-day I was false to my real, my deep-down belief in you. In London I did think you cared for me as a man, not perhaps specially because I'd attracted you by my personality, but because I felt how others misunderstood you. It seemed to me--it seems to me now--that I could answer to a desire in you to which no one else ever tried, ever wished to answer. The others seemed to think you only wanted the things that don't really count--lots of money, luxury, jewels, clothes--you know what I mean. I felt that your real desire was--well, I must put it plainly--to be loved and not lusted after, to be asked for something, not only to be given things. I felt that, I seemed to know it. Wasn't I right?"

"To-night--I don't know," she said.

Her ears were full of the music that wailed and throbbed in the breast of the night.

"Can't you forgive that one going back on myself after all these days and--and nights together? Haven't I proved anything to you in them?"

"You have seemed to, perhaps. But men so often seem, and aren't. And I did think you knew why I had married you."

"Tell me why you married me."

"Not to-night."

"Long ago," he said, and now he spoke slowly, and with a deep earnestness which suddenly caught the whole of her attention, "Long ago I loved a girl, Ruby. She was very young, knew very little of the world, and nothing at all of its beastlinesses. I think I loved her partly because she knew so little, she was so very pure. One could see--see in her eyes that they had never looked, even from a distance, on mud, on anything black. She loved me. She died. And, after that, she became my ideal."

He looked at her, slowly lifting his head a little. There was a light in his eyes which for a moment half frightened, half fascinated her, so nakedly genuine was it--genuine as a flame which burns straight in an absolutely windless place.

"In my thoughts I always kept her apart from all other women--always--for years and years, until one night in London, after I knew you. That night--I don't know how it was, or why--I seemed to see her and you standing together, looking at each other; I seemed to know that in you both--I don't know how to tell it exactly"--he stopped, looked down, like one thinking deeply, like one absorbed in thought--"that in you both, mixed with quantities of different things, there was one thing--a beautiful thing--that was the same. She--she seemed that night to tell me that you had something I had loved in her, that it was covered up out of sight, that you were afraid to show it, that nobody believed you had it within you. She seemed to tell me that I might teach you to trust me and show it to me. That night I think I began to love you. I didn't know I should ever tell this to any one, even to you. Do you think I could tell it if I distrusted you as much as you seem to think?"

"Give me a glass of Apollinaris, will you, Nigel?" she said. "It's over there beside the bed."

"Apollinaris!"

He stared at her as if confused by this sudden diversion.

"Over there!"

She pointed. The long sleeve, like a wing, fell away from her soft, white arm.

"Oh--all right."

He went to get it. She sat still, looking out through the open window to the moonlight that lay on the white stone of the balcony floor. She heard the chink of glass, the thin gurgle of liquid falling. Then he came back and stood beside her.

"Here it is, Ruby."

The enthusiasm had gone out of his voice, and the curious light had gone out of his eyes.

"Thank you."

She took it, put it to her lips, and drank. Then she set the glass down on the writing-table.

"We're at the beginning of things, Nigel," she said. "That's the truth. We can't jump into a mutual perfection of relationship at once. I've got very few illusions, and I dare say I'm absurdly sensitive about certain matters, much more sensitive than even you can imagine. The fact is I've--I've been trodden on for a long while. A man can't know what a woman--a lady--who's been thoroughly 'in it' feels when she's put outside, and kept outside, and--trodden on. It sends her running to throw her arms round the neck of the Devil. That may be abominable, but it's the fact. And, when she tries to come back from the Devil--well, she's a mass of nerves, and ready to start at a shadow. I saw a shadow to-day in the garden--"

"I know, I know!"

"You remember the night we dined on the Pylon at Karnak? After dinner you tried to show me the ruins by moonlight, and wherever we went a black-robed watchman followed us, or a black-robed watchman glided from behind a pillar, or an obelisk, or a crumbling wall, and faced us, and at last we took to flight. Well, that's what life is like to certain women; that's what life has been for a long time to me. Whenever I've tried to look at anything beautiful quietly, I've been followed or faced by a black-robed watchman, staring at me suspiciously. And to-day you seemed to be one when you asked me that about Harwich."

She took up the glass and drank some more of the water. When she put it down he was kneeling beside her. He put his arms around her.

"I won't be that again."

A very faint perfume from her hair came to him, now that he was so close to her.

"I don't want to be that ever."

He held her, and, while he held her, he listened to the Nubian sailors and to the word that was nearly always upon their tireless lips.

"Al-lah--Al-lah--Al-lah!"

God was there in the night, by the great, mysterious Nile, that flows from such far-off sources in the wild places of the earth; God was attending to them--to him and Ruby. He had the simple faith almost of a child in a God who knew each thing that he thought, each thing that he did. Thousands of men have this faith, and thousands of men conceal it as they might conceal a sin. They fear their own simplicity.

The purpose of God, was it not very plain before him? He thought now that it was. What he had to do was to restore this woman's confidence in the goodness that exists by having a firm faith in the goodness existing in her, by not letting that faith be shaken, as he had let it be shaken that day.

He hated himself for having wounded her, and as he hated himself his strong arms closed more firmly round her, trying to communicate physically to her the resolution he was forming.

And the Nubian sailors went on singing.

To him that night they sang of God.

To her they sang of Mahmoud Baroudi.