Bella Donna Part 46

But he had also within him a secret fanaticism that was very old, a fatalism, obscure, and cruel, and strange, a lack of scruple that would have revolted almost any Englishman who could have understood it, an occasional childishness, rather Egyptian than Turco-Egyptian, and a quick and instinctive subtlety that came from no sunless land.

He prayed, and was a sensualist. He fasted, and loved luxury. He could control his appet.i.tes, and fling self-control to the winds. But in all that he did and left undone there was the diligent spirit at work of the man who can persevere, in renunciation even as in pursuit. And that presence of the diligent spirit made him a strong man.

That he was a strong man, with a strength not merely physical, Mrs.

Armine swiftly realized. He told her of his father and mother, but he did not tell her of the atmosphere in which he had been brought up. He told her of his father's large fortune and wide lands, of his own schemes, what they had brought him, what they would probably bring him in the future; of certain marvellous _coups_ which he had made by selling bits of land he had possessed in the environs of Cairo when the building craze was at its height during the "boom" of 1906. But he did not tell her of a governing factor in his life--his secret hatred of the English, originally implanted in him by his father, and nourished by certain incidents that had occurred in his own experience. He did not tell her, in more ample detail, what he had already hinted at on the evening when Nigel had brought him to the villa, how certain Egyptians love to gratify not merely their vanity and their sensuality, but also their secret loathing of their masters, by betraying those masters in the most cruel way when the opportunity is offered to them. He did not tell her that since he had been almost a boy--quite a boy according to English ideas--he, like a good many of his smart, semi-cultured, self-possessed, and physically attractive young contemporaries, had gloried in his triumphs among the Occidental women who come in crowds to spend the winters in Cairo and upon the Nile, had gloried still more in the thought that with every triumph he struck a blow at the Western man who thought him a child, unfit to rule, who ruled him for his own benefit, and who very quietly despised him.

Perhaps he feared lest Mrs. Armine might guess at a bitter truth of his nature, and shrink from him, despite the powerful attraction he possessed for her, despite her own freedom from scruple, her own ironic and even cruel outlook upon the average man.

In any case he was silent, and she almost forgot the shadow of his truth, which had risen out of the depths and stood before her on the terraces of the Villa Androud. Had she remembered it now, it might have rendered her uneasy, but it could not have recalled her from the path down which she was just beginning to go. For her life had blunted her, had coa.r.s.ened her nature. She had followed too many ign.o.ble impulses, has succ.u.mbed too often to whim, to be the happy slave of delicacy, or to allow any sense of patriotism to keep her hand in virtue's.

She told herself that when Baroudi's eyes had spoken to her on the _Hohenzollern_ they had spoken in reply to the summons of her beauty, and for no other reason. What else could such a woman think? And yet there were moments when feminine intuition sought for another reason, and, not finding it, went hungry.

Baroudi had no need to seek for more reasons in her than jumped to his eyes. Ever since he had been sixteen he had been accustomed to the effect that his a.s.surance, combined with his remarkable physique, had upon Western women.

And so each day Ibrahim and Hamza brought this Western woman to the place he had appointed, and always he was there before her.

Baroudi loved secrecy, and Mrs. Armine had nothing to fear at present from indiscretion of his. And she had no fear of that kind in connection with him.

But there were envious eyes in the villa--eyes which watched her go each morning, which greeted her on her return at sundown with a searching light of curiosity. For years she had not been obliged to care what her maid thought about her. But now she had to care. Obligations swarm in the wake of marriage. Marie knew nothing, had really no special reason to suspect anything, but, because of her mistress's personality, suspected all that a sharp French girl with a knowledge of Paris can suspect. And while Mrs. Armine trusted in the wickedness of Ibrahim and Hamza, she did not trust in the wickedness of Marie.

The _Loulia_ had vanished from Luxor with its master. Mrs. Armine, left alone for a little while, naturally spent her time, like all other travellers upon the Nile, in sightseeing. She lunched out, as almost every one else did. There was no cause for Marie to be suspicious.

Yes, there was a cause--what Mrs. Armine was, and was actually doing.

Truth often manifests itself, how no one can say, not even she who sees it. Mrs. Armine knew this at evening when she saw her maid's eyes, and she wished she had brought with her an unintelligent English maid.

And then, from the Fayyum, a shadow fell over her--the shadow of her husband.

Eight days after her meeting with Baroudi among the flame-coloured rocks she was taken by Ibrahim and Hamza to the orange-gardens up the river which Baroudi had mentioned to Nigel. They lay on the western bank of the Nile, between Luxor and Armant, and at a considerable distance from Luxor. But it chanced that the wind was fair, and blew with an unusual briskness from the north. The sailors set the great lateen sails of the felucca, which bellied out like things leaping into life. The greenish-brown water curled and whispered about the prow, and the minarets of Luxor seemed to retreat swiftly from Mrs. Armine's eyes, as if hastening from her with the desire to be lost among the palm-trees.

As the boat drew on and on, and reach after reach of the river was left behind, she began to wonder about this expedition.

"Where are we going?" she asked of Ibrahim.

"To a noo place," he answered, composedly. "To a very pretty place, a very nice place."

"We must not go too far," she said, rather doubtfully. "I must not be very late in getting back."

She was thinking at the moment angrily of Marie. If only Marie were not in the Villa Androud! She had no fear of the Nubian servants. They were all devoted to her. Already she had begun to consider them as her--not Nigel's--black slaves. But that horrid little intelligent, untrustworthy French girl--

"I have tell the French mees we are goin' to see a temple in the mountains--a temple that is wonderful indeed, all full of Rameses. I have tell her we may be late."

Mrs. Armine looked sharply into the boy's gentle, s.h.i.+ning eyes.

"Yes; but we must be back in good time," she said.

And her whole nature, accustomed to the liberty that lies outside the pale, chafed against this small obligation. Suddenly she came to a resolve. She would get rid of Marie--send her back to Europe. How was she to manage without a maid? She could not imagine, and at this moment she did not care. She would get rid of Marie and--Suddenly a smile came to her lips.

"Why do you larf?" asked Ibrahim.

"Because it is so fine, because I'm happy," she said.

Really she had smiled at the thought of her explanation to Nigel: "I don't want a maid here. I want to learn to be simple, to do things for myself. And how could I take her to the Fayyum?"

Nigel would be delighted.

And the Fayyum without a maid? But she turned her mind resolutely away from that thought. She would live for the day--this day on the Nile. She leaned over the gunwale of the boat, and she gazed towards the south across the great flood that was s.h.i.+ning in the gold of the suns.h.i.+ne. And as she gazed the boat went about, and presently drew in towards the sh.o.r.e. And upon the top of a high brown bank, where naked brown men were bending and singing by a shaduf, she saw the long ears of a waiting donkey, and then a straight white robe, and a silhouette like a silhouette of bronze, and a wand pointing towards the sun.

Hamza was waiting for her, was waiting--like a Fate.

XIX

Mrs. Armine rode slowly along the river-bank. Hamza did not turn the head of the donkey towards the Libyan mountains. The tombs and the temples of Thebes were far away. She wondered where she was being taken, but she did not ask again. She enjoyed this new sensation of being governed from a distance, and she remembered her effort of the imagination when she was shut up in the scented darkness of the _Loulia_. She had imagined herself a slave, as Eastern wives are slaves.

Now she glanced at Ibrahim and Hamza, and she thought of the eunuchs who often accompany Eastern women of the highest rank when they go out veiled into the world. And she touched her floating veil and smiled, as she played with her vagrant thoughts.

This Egyptian life was sharp with the spice of novelty.

Before her, at a short distance, she saw a great green dusk of trees spreading from the river-bank inland, sharply defined, with no ragged edges--a dusk that had been planned by man, not left to Nature's dealings. This was not a feathery dusk of palm-trees. She looked steadily, and knew.

"Mahmoud Baroudi's orange-gardens!" she said to Ibrahim.

"Suttinly!" he replied.

He looked towards them, and added, after a pause:

"They are most beautiful, indeed."

Then he spoke quickly in Arabic to Hamza. Hamza replied with volubility.

When he talked with his own people he seemed to become another being.

His almost cruel calm of a bronze vanished. His face lit up with expression. A various life broke from him, like a stream suddenly released. But if Mrs. Armine spoke to him, instantly his rigid calm returned. He answered "Yes," and his almond-shaped eyes became impenetrable.

"What are they really?" she thought now, as she heard them talking.

She could not tell, but at least there was in this air a scent of spices, a sharp and aromatic savour. And she had been--perhaps would be again--a reckless woman. She loved the aromatic savour. It made her feel as if, despite her many experiences, she had lived till now perpetually in a groove; as if she had known far less of life than she had hitherto supposed.

They gained the edge of the orange-grove, pa.s.sed between it and the Nile, and came presently to a broad earth-track, which led to the right.

Along this they went, and reached a house that stood in the very midst of the grove, in a delicious solitude, a very delicate calm. From about it on every hand stretched away the precisely ordered rows of small, umbrageous, already fruit-bearing trees, not tall, with narrow stems, forked branches, s.h.i.+ning leaves, among which the round b.a.l.l.s, some green, some in the way of becoming gold, a few already gold, hung in ma.s.ses that looked artificial because so curiously decorative. The breeze that had filled the sails of the felucca had either died down or was the possession of the river. For here stillness reigned. In a warm silence the fruit was ripening to bring gold to the pockets of Baroudi.

The wrinkled earth beneath the trees was a dark grey in the shade, a warmer hue, in which pale brown and an earthy yellow were mingled, where the sunlight lay upon it.

Mrs. Armine got down before the house, which was painted a very faint pink, through which white seemed trying to break. It had only one storey. A door of palm-wood in the facade was approached by two short flights of steps, descending on the right and left of a small terrace.

At this door Baroudi now appeared, dressed in a suit of flannel, wearing the tarbush, and holding in his hand a great palm-leaf fan. Hamza led away the donkey, going round to the back of the house. Ibrahim followed him. Mrs. Armine went slowly up the steps and joined Baroudi on the terrace.

He did not speak, and she stood by his side in silence for a moment, looking into the orange-grove. The world seemed planted with the beautiful little trees, the almost meretricious, carefully nurtured, and pampered belles of their tribe. And their aspect of artificiality, completely--indeed, quite wonderfully--effective, gave a thrill of pleasure to something within her. They were like trees that were perfectly dressed. Since the day when she first met Baroudi in the mountains she had resumed her practice of making up her face. Marie might be wrong, although Baroudi was not a Frenchman. Today Mrs. Armine was very glad that she had not trusted completely to Nature. In the midst of these orange trees she felt in place, and now she lifted her veil and she spoke to Baroudi.

"What do you call this? Has it a name?"