Chapter 9

He took up the _carte du jour_, studied it at length and with obvious care, then gave an order in excellent French, which the steward hastened away to carry out. This done, he twisted his moustaches and looked calmly at his companions, not curiously, but rather as if he regarded them with a polite indifference, and merely because they were near him. Mrs. Armine seemed quite unaware of his scrutiny, but Nigel spoke to him almost immediately, making some remark about the ship in English. The stranger answered in the same language, but with a strong foreign accent. He seemed quite willing to talk. He apologized for interrupting their tete-a-tete, but said he had no choice, as the saloon was completely full. They declared they were quite ready for company, Nigel with his usual sympathetic geniality, Mrs. Armine with a sort of graceful formality beneath which--or so her husband fancied--there was just a suspicion of reluctance. He guessed that she would have much preferred a private table, but when he said so to her, as they were taking their coffee on deck, she answered:

"No, what does it matter? We shall so soon be in our own house. Tell me about the villa, Nigel, and Luxor. You know I have never seen it."

With little more than a word she had deftly flicked the intruding stranger out of their lives, she had concentrated herself on Nigel. He felt that all her force, like a strong and ardent stream, was flowing into the new channel which he had cut for her. He obeyed her. He told her about Egypt. And as he talked, and watched her listening, he began to feel thoroughly for the first time the vital change in his life, and something within him rejoiced, that was surely his manhood singing.

The voyage passed swiftly by, attended by perfect weather, calm, radiant, blue--weather that releases humanity from any bonds of depression into a joyous world. Yet for the Armines it was not without an unpleasant incident. Among the passengers were a Lord and Lady Hayman, whom Nigel Armine knew, and whom Mrs. Armine had known in the days when London had loved her. It was impossible not to meet them, equally impossible not to perceive their cold confusion at each encounter, shown by a sudden interest in empty seas and unpopulated horizons. That they mistook the situation was so evident to Nigel that one day he managed to confront Lord Hayman in the smoke-room and to have it out with him.

"Congratulate you, I'm sure, congratulate you!" murmured that gentleman, whose practical brown eyes became suddenly wells full of ironical amazement. "Tell my wife at once. Knew nothing at all about it."

He got away, with a moribund cigar between his teeth, and no doubt informed Lady Hayman, who thereafter bowed to Nigel, but with a reluctant muscular movement that adequately expressed an inward moral surprise mingled with condemnation. Mrs. Armine seemed totally undisturbed by these demonstrations, her only comment upon the lady being that it was really strange that "in these days" any one could be found to wear magenta and red together, especially any one with a complexion like Lady Hayman's. And her astonishment at the triple combination of colours seemed so simple, so sincere, that it had to be believed in as merely an emanation from an artistic temperament. It was probable that the Haymans told other English on the _Hohenzollern_ the news of Nigel's marriage, for several of the faces that had stared from the luncheon-tables continued to stare on the deck, but with a slightly different expression; the sheer, dull curiosity being exchanged for that half-satirical interest with which the average person of British blood regards a newly-married couple.

This contemplation of them made Nigel secretly angry, and awoke in him a great and peculiar tenderness for his wife, founded on a suddenly more acute understanding of the brutality of the ostracism, combined with notoriety, which she had endured in recent years. Now at last she had some one to protect her. His heart enfolded her with ample wings. But he longed to be free from this crowd, from which on a ship they could not escape, and they spoke to no one during the voyage except to their companion at meals.

With him they were soon on the intimate terms of shipboard--terms that commit one to nothing in the future when land is reached. Although he was dressed like an Englishman, and on deck wore a straw hat with the word "Scott" inside it, he soon let them know that his name was Mahmoud Baroudi, that his native place was Alexandria, that he was of mixed Greek and Egyptian blood, and that he was a man of great energy and will, interested in many schemes, pulling the strings of many enterprises.

He spoke always with a certain polite but bold indifference, as if he cared very little what impression he made on others; and all the information that he gave about himself was dropped out in a careless, casual way that seemed expressive of his character. The high rank, the great riches of his father he rather implied than definitely mentioned. Only when he talked of his occupations was he more definite, more strongly personal. Nigel gathered that he was essentially a man of affairs, had nothing in common with the typical lazy Eastern, who loves to sit in the sun, to suffer the will of Allah, and to fill the years with dreams; that he was cool, clear-headed, and full of the marked commercial ability characteristic of the modern Greek. Whether this aptitude was combined with the sinuous cunning that is essentially Oriental Nigel did not know. He certainly could not perceive it. All that Baroudi said was said with clearness, and a sort of acute precision, whether he discussed the land question, the irrigation works on the Nile, the great boom of 1906, in which such gigantic fortunes were made, or the cotton and sugar industries, in both of which he was interested. The impression he conveyed to Nigel was that he was born to "get on" in whatever he undertook, and that in almost any form of activity he could be a fine ally, or an equally fine opponent. That he was fond of sport was soon apparent. He spoke with an enthusiasm that was always mingled with a certain serene _insouciance_ of the horses he had bred and of the races he had won in Alexandria and Cairo, of yachting, of big-game shooting up the Nile beyond Khartum in the country of the Shillouks, and of duck, pigeon, and jackal shooting in the Fayyum and on the sacred Lake of Kurun.

Nigel found him an excellent fellow, the most sympathetic and energetic man of Eastern blood whom he had ever encountered. Mrs. Armine spoke of him more temperately; he did not seem to interest her, and Nigel was confirmed by her lack of appreciation in an idea that had already occurred to him. He believed that Baroudi was a man who did not care for women, except, no doubt, as the occasional and servile distractions of an unoccupied hour in the harem. He was always very polite to Mrs. Armine, but when he talked he soon, as if almost instinctively, addressed himself to Nigel; and once or twice, when Mrs. Armine left them alone together over their coffee and cigars, he seemed to Nigel to become another man, to expand almost into geniality, to be not merely self-possessed--that faculty never failed him--but to be more happily at his ease, more racy, more ready for intimacy. Probably he was governed by the Oriental's conception of woman as an inferior sex, and was unable to be quite at home in the complete equality and ease of the English relation with women.

When the _Hohenzollern_ sighted Alexandria, Baroudi went below for a moment. He reappeared wearing the fez. They bade each other good-bye in the harbour, with the usual vague hopes of a further meeting that do duty on such occasions, and that generally end in nothing.

Mrs. Armine seemed glad to be rid of him and to be alone with her husband.

"Don't let us stay in Cairo," she said. "I want to go up the river. I want to be in the Villa Androud."

After one night at Shepheard's they started for Luxor, or rather for Keneh, where they got out in the early morning to visit the temple of Denderah, taking a later train which brought them to Luxor towards evening, just as the gold of the sunset was beginning to steal into the sky and to cover the river with glory.

Mrs. Armine was fatigued by the journey, and by the long day at Denderah, which had secretly depressed her. She looked out of the window of their compartment at the green plains of doura, at the almost naked brown men bending rhythmically by the shadufs, at the children passing on donkeys, and the women standing at gaze with corners of their dingy garments held fast between their teeth; and she felt as if she still saw the dark courts of Hathor's dwelling, as if she still heard the cries of the enormous bats that inhabit them. When the train stopped, she got up slowly, and let Nigel help her down to the platform.

"Is the villa far away?" she said, looking round on the crowd of staring Egyptians.

"No, I want you to walk to it. Do you mind?"

His eyes demanded a "no," and she gave it him with a good grace that ought to have been written down to her credit by the pen of the recording angel. They set out to walk to the villa. As they went through the little town, Nigel pointed out the various "objects of interest": the antiquity shops, where may be purchased rings, necklaces, and amulets, blue and green "servants of the dead," scarabs, winged discs, and mummy-cases; the mosque, a Coptic church, cafes, the garden of the Hotel de Luxor. He greeted several friends of humble origin: the black barber who called himself "Mr. White"; Ahri Achmed, the Folly of Luxor, who danced and gibbered at Mrs. Armine and cried out a welcome in many languages; Hassan, the one-eyed pipe-player; and Hamza, the praying donkey-boy, who in winter stole all the millionaires from his protesting comrades and in summer sat with the dervishes in the deep shadows of the mosques.

"You seem to be as much at home here as in London," said Mrs. Armine, in a voice that was rather vague.

"Ten times more, Ruby. And so will you be soon. I love a little place."

"Yes?"

After a pause she added:

"Are there many villas here?"

"Only two on the bank of the Nile. One belongs to a Dutchman. Our villa is the other."

"Only two--and one belongs to a Dutchman!" she thought.

And she wondered about their winter.

"When I've settled you in, I must run off to the Fayyum to see how the work is going, and rig up something for you. I want to take you there soon, but it's really in the wilds, and I didn't like to straight away. Besides I was afraid you might be dull and unhappy without any of your comforts. And I do want you to be happy."

There was an anxiety that was almost wistful in his voice.

"I do want you to like Egypt," he added, like an eager boy.

"I am sure I shall like it, Nigel. There's no Casino, I suppose!"

"Good heavens, no! What should one do with a Casino here!"

"Oh, they sometimes have one, even in places like this. A friend of mine who went to Biskra told me there was one there."

"Look at that, Ruby! That's better than any Casino--don't you think?"

They had turned to the left and come to the river bank.

All the Nile was flooded with gold, in which there were eddies of pale mauve and distant flushes of a red that resembled the red on the wing of a flamingo. The clear and radiant sky was drowned in a quivering radiance of gold, that was like a thing alive and sensitively palpitating. The far-off palms, the lofty river banks that framed the Nile's upper reaches, the birds that flew south, following the direction of the breeze, the bats that wheeled about the great columns of the temple, the boats that with wide-spread lateen sails went southward with the birds, were like motionless and moving jewels of black against the vibrant gold. And the crenellated mountains of Libya, beyond Thebes and the tombs of the Kings, stood like spectral sentinels at their posts till the pageant should be over.

"Isn't it wonderful, Ruby?"

"Yes," she said. "Quite wonderful."

She honestly thought it superb, but the dust in her hair and in her skirts, the lassitude that seemed to hang, almost like spiders' webs about wood, about the body which contained her tired spirit, restrained her enthusiasm from being a match for his. Perhaps she knew this and wished to come up with him, for she added, throwing a warm sound into her voice:

"It is exquisite. It is the most magical thing I have ever seen."

She touched her veil, as she spoke, and put up her hand to her hair behind. Two Frenchmen, talking with sonorous voices, were just then passing them on the road.

"I didn't know any sunset could be so marvellous."

She was still touching her hair, and now she felt clothed in dust; and, with the ardour of a fastidious woman who has not seen the inside of a dressing-room for twenty-four hours, she longed to be rid both of the sunset and of the man.

"Where is the villa, Nigel?"

"Not ten minutes away."

The spirit groaned within her, and she went resolutely forward, passing the Winter Palace Hotel.

"What a huge hotel--but it isn't open!" she said.

"It will be almost directly. We turn to the right down here."

Some large rats were playing on the uneven stones close to the river; from a little shed close by there came the dull puffing of an engine.

"Where on earth are we going, Nigel? This is only a donkey track."

"It's all right. Just wait a minute. There's the Dutchman's castle, and we are just beyond it. Am I walking too fast for you, Ruby?"

"No, no."

She hurried on. Her whole body was clamouring for warm water with a certain essence dissolved in it, for a change of stockings and shoes, for a tea-gown, for a sofa with a tea-table beside it, for a hundred and one things his manhood did not dream of.

"Here it is at last!" he said.

A tall and amiable-looking boy in a flowing gold-coloured robe suddenly appeared before them, holding open a wooden gate, through which they passed into a garden.

"Hulloh, Ibrahim!" cried Nigel.

"Hulloh, my gentleman!" returned the boy, inclining his body towards Mrs. Armine and touching his fez with his hand. "I am Ibrahim Ahmed, my lady, the special servant called a dragoman of my Lord Arminigel. I can read the hieroglyphs, and I am always young and cheerful."

He took Nigel's right hand, kissed it and placed it against his forehead rapidly three times in succession, smiled, and looked sideways on the ground.

"I am always young and cheerful," he repeated, softly and dreamily. He picked a red rose from a bush, placed it between his white teeth, and turned to conduct them to the white house that stood in the midst of the garden perhaps a hundred yards away.

"What a nice boy!" said Mrs. Armine.

"He's been my dragoman before. This is our little domain."

Mrs. Armine saw a flat expanse of brown and sun-dried earth, completely devoid of grass, and divided roughly into sunken beds containing small orange-trees, mimosas, rose-bushes, poinsettias, and geraniums. It was bounded on three sides by earthen walls and on the fourth side by the Nile.

"Is it not beautiful, mees?" said Ibrahim.

Mrs. Armine began to laugh.

"He takes me for a _vieille fille_!" she said. "Is it a compliment, Nigel? Ibrahim,"--she touched the boy's robe--"won't you give me that rose?"

"My lady, I will give you all what you want."

Already she had fascinated him. As she took the rose, which he offered with a salaam, she began to look quite gay.

"All what you want you must have," continued Ibrahim, gravely.

"Ibrahim reads my thoughts like a true Eastern!" said Nigel.

"What I want now is a bath," remarked Mrs. Armine, smelling the rose.

"Directly we have had one more look at the Nile from our own garden," exclaimed Nigel.

But she had stopped before the house.

"I can't take my bath in the Nile. Good-bye, Nigel!"

Before he could say a word she had crossed a little terrace, disappeared through a French window, and vanished into the villa.

Ibrahim smiled, hung his head, and then murmured in a deep contralto voice:

"The wife of my Lord Arminigel, she does not want Ibrahim any more, she does not want the Nile, she wants to be all alone."

He shook his head, which drooped on his long and gentle brown neck, sighed, and repeated dreamily:

"She wants to be all alone."

"We'll leave her alone for a little and go and look at the gold."

Meanwhile within the house Mrs. Armine was calling impatiently for her maid.

"For mercy's sake, undress me. I am a mass of dust, and looking perfectly dreadful. Is the bath ready?" she asked, as the girl, who had come running, showed her into a good-sized bedroom.

The maid, who was not the red-eyed maid Nigel had met at the Savoy, shrugged up her small shoulders, and extended her little, greedy hands.

"It is ready, madame; but the water--oh, _la, la!_"

"What's the matter. What do you mean?"

"The water is the colour of madame's morning chocolate."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Armine, almost with a sound of despair.

She sank into a chair, taking in with a glance every detail of the chamber, which had been furnished and arranged by a rich and consumptive Frenchman who had lived there with his mistress and had recently died at Cairo.

"Bring me the mirror from my dressing-case, and get me out of this gown."

Marie hastened to fetch the mirror, into which, after unpinning and removing her hat and veil, Mrs. Armine looked long and earnestly.

"There are no women servants, madame."

* * * * *

"All the servants here are men, madame, and all are as black as boots."

"Shut the door into monsieur's room, and don't chatter so much. My head is simply splitting."

* * * * *

"What are you doing? One would think you had never seen a corset before. Don't fumble! If you fumble, I shall pack you off to Paris by the first train to-morrow morning. Now where's the bath?"

Marie, wrinkling up her nose, which looked like a note of interrogation, led the way into the bathroom, and pointed to the water with a grimace.

"_Voila_, madame!"

"_Mon Dieu!_" said Mrs. Armine.

She stared at the water, and repeated her exclamation.

"That makes pity to think that madame--"

"Have you put in the _eau de paradis_?"

"But certainly, madame."

"Very well then--ugh!"

She shuddered with disgust as the rich brown water of the Nile came up to her breast, to her chin.

"And to think that it looked golden," she murmured, "when we were standing on the bank!"

XII

Soon after half-past eight that evening, when darkness lay over the Nile and over the small garden of the villa, a tall Nubian servant, dressed in white with a scarlet girdle, spread two prayer rugs on the terrace before the French windows of the drawing-room, and placed upon them a coffee-table and two arm-chairs. At first he put the chairs a good way apart, and looked at them very gravely. Then he set them quite close together, and relaxed into a smile. And before he had finished smiling, over the parquet floor behind him there came the light rustle of a dress. The Nubian servant turned round and gazed at Mrs. Armine, who had stopped beside a table and was looking about the room; a white-and-yellow room, gaily but rather sparsely furnished, that harmonized well with the fair beauty which moved the black man's soul.

He thought her very wonderful. The pallor of her face, the delicate lustre of her hair, quite overcame his temperament, and when she caught sight of him and smiled, and observed the contrast between the snowy white of his turban, his scarlet girdle and babouches, and the black lustre of his skin, with eyes that frankly admired, he compared her secretly to the little moon that lights up the Eastern night. He went softly to fetch the coffee, while she stepped out on to the terrace.

At first she stood quite still, and stared at the bit of garden which revealed itself in the darkness; at the dry earth, the untrimmed, wild-looking rose-bushes, and the little mimosa-trees, vague almost as pretty shadows. A thin, dark-brown dog, with pale yellow eyes, slunk in from the night and stood near her, trembling and furtively watching her. She had not seen it yet, for now she was gazing up at the sky, which was peopled with myriads of stars, those piercingly bright stars which look down from African skies. The brown dog trembled and blinked, keeping his yellow eyes upon her, looked self-consciously down sideways, then looked at her again.

From the hidden river there came a distant song of boatmen, one of those vehement and yet sad songs of the Nile that the Nubian waterman loves.

"Sh--sh--sh!"

Mrs. Armine had caught sight of the dog. She hissed at him angrily, and made a threatening gesture with her hands, which sent him slinking back to the darkness.

"What is it, Ruby?" called out a strong voice from above.

She started.

"Oh, are you there, Nigel?"

"Yes. What's the matter?"

"It was only a dreadful-looking dog. What are you doing up there?"

"I was looking at the stars. Aren't they wonderful to-night?"

There was in his voice a sound of warm yet almost childlike enthusiasm, with which she was becoming very familiar.

"Yes, marvellous. Oh, there's the dog again! Sh--sh--sh!"

"I'll come down and drive it away."

In a moment he was with her.

"Where is the little beast?"

"It's gone again. I frightened it. Oh, you've brought me a cloak, you thoughtful person."

She turned for him to put it round her, and as he began to do so, as he touched her arms and shoulders, his eyes shone and his brown cheeks slightly reddened. Then his expression changed; he seemed to repress, to beat back something; he drew her down into a chair, and quietly sat down by her. The Nubian came with coffee, and went softly away, smiling.

Mrs. Armine poured out the coffee, and Nigel lit his cigar.

"Turkish coffee for my lord and master!" she said, pushing a cup towards him over the little table. "I think I must learn how to make it."

He was gazing at her as he stretched out his hand to take it.

"Do you feel at home here, Ruby?" he asked her.

"It's such a very short time, you dear enquirer," she answered. "Remember I haven't closed an eye here yet. But I'm sure I shall feel at home. And what about you?"

"I scarcely know what I feel."

He sipped the coffee slowly.

"It's such a tremendous change," he continued. "And I've been alone so long. Of course, I've got lots of friends, but still I've often felt very lonely, as you have, Ruby, haven't you?"

"I've seldom felt anything else," she replied.

"But to-night--?"

"Oh, to-night--everything's different to-night. I wonder--"

She paused. She was leaning back in her chair, with her head against a cushion, looking at him with a slight, half-ironical smile in her eyes and at the corners of her lips.

"I wonder," she continued, "what Meyer Isaacson will think."

"Of our marriage?"

"Yes. Do you suppose it will surprise him?"

"I--no, I hardly think it will."

"You didn't hint it to him, did you?"

"I said nothing about any marriage, but he knew something of my feeling for you."

"All the same, I think he'll be surprised. When shall we get the first post from England telling us the opinion of the dear, kind, generous-hearted world?"

"Ruby, who cares what any one thinks or says?"

"Men often don't credit us with it, but we women, as a rule, are horribly sensitive, more sensitive than you can imagine. I--how I wish that some day your people would try to like me!"

He took one of her hands in his.