Chapter 17

He prayed, and was a sensualist. He fasted, and loved luxury. He could control his appetites, 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 coarsened her nature. She had followed too many ignoble impulses, has succumbed 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 assurance, 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, shining 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 shining in the gold of the sunshine. And as she gazed the boat went about, and presently drew in towards the shore. 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, passed 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, shining leaves, among which the round balls, some green, some in the way of becoming gold, a few already gold, hung in masses 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?"

"It is the Villa Nuit d'Or. I use the word 'villa' in the Italian sense."

"Oh, of course. Night of gold. Why night?"

"The trees make a sort of darkness round the house."

"The gold I understand."

"Yes, you understand gold."

He stared at her and smiled.

"You understand it as well as I do, but perhaps in a different way," he said.

"I suppose we understand most things in different ways."

They spoke in French. They always spoke French together now. And Mrs. Armine preferred this. Somehow she did not care so much for this man translated into English. She wished she could communicate with him in Arabic, but she was too lazy to try to learn.

"Don't you think so?" she added.

"I think my way of understanding you is better than Mr. Armeen's way," he answered, calmly.

He lit a cigarette.

"What is your way of understanding me, I do not know," he added.

"Do I understand you at all?" she said. "Do you wish me to understand you?"

Suddenly she seemed to be confronted by the rock, and a sharp irritation invaded her. It was followed by a feeling colder and very determined. The long day was before her. She was in a very perfect isolation with this man. She was a woman who had for years made it her business to understand men. By understanding them--for what is beauty without any handmaid of brains?--she had gained fortunes, and squandered them. By understanding them, when a critical moment had come in her life, she had secured for herself a husband. It was absurd that a man, who was at least half child--she thought of the cuckoo-clocks, the gilded dancing-ball--should baffle her. If only she called upon her powers, she must be able to turn him inside out like one of her long gloves. She would do it to-day. And before he had replied to her question she had left it.

"Who cares for such things on the Nile?" she said.

She laughed.

"At least, what Western woman can care? I do not. I am too drunk with your sun."

She sent him a look.

"Is it to be in--or out?" she asked. "The house or the orange-gardens?"

"Which you wish."

But his movement was outwards, and she seconded it with hers.

As they went down the steps the loud voice of a shaduf man came to them from some distant place by the Nile, reminding her of the great river which seemed ever to be flowing through her Egyptian life, reminding her of the narrowness of Upper Egypt, a corridor between the mountains of Libya and of the Arabian desert. She stood still at the bottom of the steps to listen. There was a pause. Then the fierce voice was lifted again, came to them violently through the ordered alleys of lovely little trees. The first time she had ever seen the man with whom she had been divorced was at the opera in London. She remembered now that the opera on that night of fate had been "Aida," with its cries of the East, with its scenes beside the Nile. And for a moment it seemed to her that the hidden Egyptian who was working the shaduf was calling to them from a stage, that this garden of oranges was only a wonderful _decor_. But the illusion was too perfect for the stage. Reality broke in with its rough, tremendous touch that cannot be gainsaid, and she walked on in something that had a strangeness of truth--that naked wonder, and sometimes terror--more strange than that to be found in the most compelling art.

And yet she was walking in the Villa Nuit d'Or, a name evidently given to his property by the child of the gilded ball, a name that might be in place, surely, on the most stagey stage. She knew that, felt it, smiled at it--and yet mentally caressed the name, caressed the thing in Baroudi which had sought and found it appropriate.

"What hundreds and hundreds of orange-trees! We are losing ourselves in them," she said.

The little house was lost to sight in the trees.

"Where are we going?" she added.

"Wait a moment and you will see."

He walked on slowly, with his easy, determined gait, which, in its lightness, denoted a strength that had been trained.

"Now to the right."

He was walking on her left. She obeyed his direction, and, turning towards the Nile, saw before her a high arbour made of bamboo and encircled by a hedge of wild geranium. Its opening was towards the Nile, and when she entered it she perceived, far off, at the end of a long alley of orange-trees, the uneven line of the bank. Just where she saw it the ground had crumbled, the line wavered, and was depressed, and though the water was not visible the high lateen sails of the native boats, going southward in the sun, showed themselves to her strangely behind the fretwork of the leaves. At her approach a hoopoo rose and flew away above the trees. Somewhere a lark was singing.

In the arbour was spread an exquisite prayer-rug, and for her there was a low chair, with a cushion before it for her feet. On a table was Turkish coffee. In silver boxes were cigarettes, matches, soft sweetmeats shrouded in powdered sugar, through which they showed rose-colour, amber, and emerald green. At the edge of the table, close to the place where the chair was set, there was a pretty case of gilded silver, the top of which was made of looking-glass. She took it up at once.

"What is in this?" she said.

He opened the case, and showed her gravely a powder-puff, powder, kohl, with a tiny blunt instrument of ivory used in Egypt for its appliance, a glass bottle of rose-water, paste of henna, of smoke-black with oil and quick-lime, and other preparations commonly used in the East for the decoration of women. She examined them curiously and minutely, then looked up at him and smiled, thinking of Nigel's gentle but ardent protest. Yes, she could be strangely at home with Baroudi. But--now to turn inside out that long glove.

She sat down and put her feet on the cushion. Baroudi was instantly cross-legged on the rug. Dressed as he was, in European clothes, he ought to have looked awkward, even ridiculous. She said so to herself as she gazed down on him; and she knew that he was in the perfectly right posture, comfortable, at his ease, even--somehow--graceful. And, as she knew it, she felt the mystery of his body of the East as sometimes she had felt the mystery of his mind.

"Will you take coffee after your ride?" he said.

"Yes. Don't get up. I will pour it out, and give you yours."

She did so, with the smiling grace that had affected Nigel, had even affected Meyer Isaacson. She put up her veil, lifted the gilded case, looked at herself in the mirror steadily, critically, took the powder-puff and deftly used it. She knew instinctively that Baroudi liked to see her do this. When she was satisfied with her appearance she put the case down.

"It is charming," she said, touching it as it lay near her cup.

"It is for you."

"I will take it away this evening."

She wished there was a big diamond, or a big emerald, set in it somewhere. She had had to sell most of her finest jewels when the bad time had come in England.

"I must have a cigarette."

The coffee, the cigarette--they were both delicious. The warmth of the atmosphere was like satin about her body. She heard a little soft sound. An orange had dropped from a branch into the scarlet tangle of the geraniums.

"Why don't you talk to me?" she said to Baroudi.

But she said it with a lazy indifference. Was her purpose beginning to weaken in this morning made for dreaming, in this luxury of isolation with the silent man who always watched her?

"Why should I talk to you? I am not like those who make a noise always whether they have words within them that need to be spoken or not. What do you wish me to say to you?" he answered.

"Well--"

She took up the palm-leaf fan which he had laid upon the table.

"Let me see!"

How should she get at him? What method was the best? Somehow she did not feel inclined to be subtle with him. As she had powdered her face before him so she could calmly have applied the kohl to her eyelids, and so she could now be crude in speech with him. What a rest, what an almost sensuous joy that was! And she had only just realized it, suddenly, very thoroughly.

"What are you like?" she said. "I want to know."

She moved the fan gently, very languidly, to and fro.

"But you can tell me, because you can see me all the time, and I cannot see myself unless I take the glass," he said.

"Not outside, Baroudi, inside."

She spoke rather as if to a child.

"The man who shows all that is in him to a woman is not a clever man."

"But clever men often do that, without knowing they are doing it."

"You are thinking of your Englishmen," he said, but apparently without sarcasm.

She remembered their first conversation alone.

"The fine fellers--the rulers!" she said.

He did not answer her smile.

"Your Englishmen show what they are. They do not care to hide anything. If any one does not like all they are, so much the worse for him. Let him have a kick and no piastre. And to the women they are the same--no! that is not true."

He checked himself.

"No; to the men they are men who are ready to kick, but to the women they are boys. A woman takes a boy by the ear"--he put his left hand over his head and took hold of his right ear by the top--"so, and leads him where she pleases. So the woman leads the Englishman. But we are not like that."

She gazed at the brown hand that held the ear. How unnatural that action had seemed to her! Yet to him it was perfectly natural. Surely in everything he was the opposite of all that she was accustomed to. He took his hand away from his ear.

"How much have you been out of Egypt?" she asked him.

"Not very much. I have been three times to Naples in the hot weather. My father had a villa at Posilipo. I have been with my father to Vichy. I have been four times to Paris. I have been to Constantinople, and I have travelled in Syria."

"Did you go to Palestine?"

"Jerusalem--no. That is for Copts!"

He spoke with disdain. Then he added, with a sort of calm pride and a certain accession of dignity:

"I have been, of course, to Mecca."

"The real man--is he to be found in his religion?"

The thought came to her, and again she--she of all women! How strange that was!--felt the fascination of his faith.

"To Mecca!" she said.

Men passed through deserts to reach the holy places. Nigel one evening had told her something of that journey, and she had felt rather bored. Now she looked at a pilgrim who had gone with the Sacred Carpet, and she was bored no longer.

"Hamza--is he your servant?" she asked, with an apparent irrelevance, that was not really irrelevance.

"He is a donkey-boy at Luxor."

"Yes. He used not to be my donkey-boy. He has only been my donkey-boy since--since my husband has gone. They say in Luxor he is really a dervish."

"They say many things in Luxor."

"They call him the praying donkey-boy. Has he too been to Mecca?"

His face slightly changed. The eyes narrowed, the sloping brows came down. But after a short pause he answered:

"He went to Mecca with me. I paid for him to go."

She did not know much of Mohammedans, but she knew enough to be aware that Hamza was not likely to forget that benefit. And Baroudi had chosen Hamza to be her donkey-boy. She felt as if the hands of Islam were laid upon her.

"Hamza must be very grateful to you!" she said, slowly.