"Well, he"s not impressive exactly--is he?--as a rule. That little stoop--and so on. But I saw his figure coming up the path before I recognised who it was, and I thought suddenly of an Egyptian, almost an old Pharaoh, walking."
She broke off with that little significant laugh Tom knew so well.
But, comical though the picture might have been--Tony walking like a king,--Tom did not laugh. It was not ludicrous, for it was somewhere true. He remembered the singular inner mental picture he had seen above the desert fire, and the pain within him seemed the forerunner of some tragedy that watched too close upon his life. But, for another and more obvious reason, he could not laugh; for he heard the admiration in her voice, and it was upon that his mind fastened instantly. His observation was so mercilessly sharp. He hated it. Where was his usual slowness gone? Why was his blood so quickly apprehensive?
She kept her eyes fixed steadily on his, saying what followed gently, calmly, yet as though another woman spoke the words. She stabbed him, noting the effect upon him with a detached interest that seemed indifferent to his pain. Something remote and ancient stirred in her, something that was not of herself To-day, something half primitive, half barbaric.
"It may have been the blazing light," she went on, "the half-savage effect of these amazing sunsets--I cannot say,--but I saw him in a sheet of gold.
There was gold about him, I mean, as though he wore it--and when he came close there was that odd, faint perfume, half of the open desert and half of ambra, as we call it----" Again she broke off and hesitated, leaving the impression there was more to tell, but that she could not say it.
She kept back much. Into the distance now established between them Tom felt a creeping sense of cold, as of the chill desert wind that follows hard upon the sunset. Her eyes still held him steadily. He seemed more and more aware of something merciless in her.
He sat and gazed at her--at a woman he loved, a woman who loved him, but a woman who now caused him pain deliberately because something beyond herself compelled. Her tenderness lay inactive, though surely not forgotten. She, too, felt the pain. Yet with her it was in some odd way--impersonal. . . . Tom, hopelessly out of his depth, swept onward by this mighty wave behind all three of them, sat still and watched her-- fascinated, even terrified. Her eyelids were half closed again.
Another look stole up into her face, driving away the modern beauty, replacing its softness, tenderness with another expression he could not fathom. Yet this new expression was somehow, too, half recognisable.
It was difficult to describe--a little sterner, a little wilder, a faint emphasis of the barbaric peering through it. It was darker. She looked eastern. Almost, he saw her visibly change--here in the twilight of the little Luxor garden by his side. Distance increased remorselessly between them. She was far away, yet ever close at the same time. He could not tell whether she was going away from him or coming nearer. The shadow of tragedy fell on him from the empty sky. . . .
In his bewilderment he tried to hold steady and watch, but the soul in him rushed backwards. He felt, but could not think. The wave surged under him. Various impulses urged him into a pouring flood of words; yet he gave expression to none of them. He laughed a little dry, short laugh.
He heard himself saying lightly, though with apparent lack of interest: "How curious, Lettice, how very odd! What made him look like that?"
But he knew her answer would mean pain. It came just as he expected:
"He _is_ wonderful--out here--quite different----" Another minute and she would have added "I"m different, too." But Tom interrupted hurriedly:
"Do you always see him--like that--now? In a sheet of gold--with beauty?"
His tongue was so hot and dry against his lips that he almost stammered.
She nodded, her eyelids still half closed. She lay very quiet, peering down at him. "It lasts?" he insisted, turning the knife himself.
"You"ll laugh when I tell you something more," she went on, making a slight gesture of a.s.sent, "but I felt such joy in myself--so wild and reckless--that when I got to my room that night I danced--danced alone with all my clothes off."
"Lettice!"
"The spontaneous happiness was like a child"s--a sort of freedom feeling.
I _had_ to shake my clothes off simply. I wanted to shake off the walls and ceiling too, and get out into the open desert. Tom--I felt out of myself in a way--as though I"d escaped--into--into quite different conditions----"
She gave details of the singular mood that had come upon her with the arrival of Tony, but Tom hardly heard her. Only too well he knew the explanation. The touch of ecstasy was no new thing, although its manifestation may have been peculiar. He had known it himself in his own lesser love affairs. But that she could calmly tell him about it, that she could deliberately describe this effect upon her of another man--!
It baffled him beyond all thoughts or words. . . . Was the self-revelation an unconscious one? Did she realise the meaning of what she told him?
The Lettice he had known could surely not say this thing. In her he felt again, more distinctly than before, another person--division, conflict.
Her hesitations, her face, her gestures, her very language proved it.
He shrank, as from some one who inflicted pain as a child, unwittingly, to see what the effect would be. . . . He remembered the incident of the insect in the sand. . . .
"And I feel--even now--I could do it again," her voice pierced in across his moment of hidden anguish. The knife she had thrust again into his breast was twisted then.
It was time that he said something, and a sentence offered itself in time to save him. The desire to hide his pain from her was too strong to be disobeyed. He wanted to know, yet not, somehow, to prevent. He seized upon the sentence, keeping his voice steady with an effort that cut his very flesh: "There"s nothing impersonal exactly in _that_, Lettice!" he exclaimed with an exaggerated lightness.
"Oh no," she agreed. "But it"s only in England, perhaps, that I"m impersonal, as you call it. I suppose, out here, I"ve changed.
The beauty, the mystery,--this fierce sunshine or something--stir----"
She hesitated for a fraction of a second.
"The woman in you," he put in, turning the knife this time with his own fingers deliberately. The words seemed driven out by their own impetus; he did not choose them. A faint ghastly hope was in him--that she would shake her head and contradict him.
She waited a moment, then turned her eyes aside. "Perhaps, Tom.
I wonder. . . .!"
And as she said it, Tom knew suddenly another thing as well. It stood out clearly, as with big printed letters that violent advertis.e.m.e.nts use upon the h.o.a.rdings. Her new joy and excitement, her gaiety and zest for life-- all had been caused, not by himself, but by another. Heavens! how blind he had been! He understood at last, and a flood of freezing water drenched him. His heart stopped beating for a moment. He gasped.
He could not get his breath. His acc.u.mulating doubts. .h.i.therto unexpressed, almost unacknowledged even, were now confirmed.
He got up stiffly, awkwardly, from his cushions, and moved a few steps towards the house, for there stole upon her altered face just then the very expression of excitement, of radiant and spontaneous joy, he had believed until this moment were caused by himself. Tony was coming up the darkened drive. He was exactly in her line of sight. And a severe, embittered struggle then took place in a heart that seemed strangely divided against itself. He felt as though a second Tom, yet still himself, battled against the first, exchanging thrusts of indescribable torture. The complexity of emotions in his heart was devastating beyond anything he had ever known in his thirty-five years of satisfied, self-centred life. Two voices spoke in clear, sharp sentences, one against the other:
"Your suspicions are unworthy, shameful. Trust her. She"s as loyal and true and faithful as yourself!" cried the first.
And the second:
"Blind! Can"t you see what"s going on between them? It has happened to other men, why not to you? She is playing with you; she has outgrown your love." It was the older voice that used the words.
"Impossible, ridiculous!" the first voice cried. "There"s something wrong with me that I can have such wretched thoughts. It"s merely innocence and joy of life. No one can take _my_ place."
To which, again, the second Tom made bitter answer. "You are too old for her, too dull, too ordinary! You hold the loving mother still, but a younger man has waked the woman in her. And you must let it come.
You dare not blame. Nor have you the right to interfere."
So acute, so violent was the perplexity in him that he knew not what to say or do at first. Unable to come to a decision, he stood there, waving his hand to Tony with a cry of welcome. His first vehement desire to be alone, to make an excuse, to get to his room and think, had pa.s.sed: a second, a maturer att.i.tude, conquered it: to take whatever came, to face it, in a word to know the worst. . . . And the extraordinary pain he hid by an exuberance of high spirits that surprised himself. It was, of course, the suppressed emotional energy finding another outlet. A similar state had occurred that "Karnak night" of a long ten days ago, though he had not understood it then. Behind it lay the misery of loneliness that he knew in his very bones was coming.
"Tony! So it is. I was afraid he"d change his mind and leave us in the lurch."
Tom heard the laugh of happiness as she said it; he heard the voice distinctly--the change of tone in it, the softness, the half-caressing tenderness that crept unconsciously in, the faint thrill of womanly pa.s.sion. Unconsciously, yes! he was sure, at least, of that. She did not know quite yet, she did not realise what had happened. Honest to the core, he felt her. His love surged up tumultuously. He could face pain, loss, death--or, as he put it, "almost anything," if it meant happiness to her. The thought, at any rate, came to him thus. . . . And Tom believed it.
At the same moment he heard her voice, close behind him this time.
She had left her chair, meaning to go indoors and prepare for supper before Tony actually arrived. "Tom, dear boy," her hand upon his shoulder a moment as she pa.s.sed, "you"re tired or something. I can see it.
I believe you"re worrying. There"s something you haven"t told me--isn"t there now?" She gave him a loving glance that was of purest gold.
"You shall tell me all about it when we"re alone. You must tell me everything."
The pain and joy in him were equal then. He was a boy of eighteen, aching over his first love affair; and she was divinely mothering him. It was extraordinary; it was past belief; another minute, had they been alone, he could almost have laid his head upon her breast, complaining in anguish to the mother in her that the woman he loved was gone: "I feel you"re slipping from me! I"m losing you . . .!"
Instead he stammered some commonplace unreality about his work at a.s.souan and heard her agree with him that he certainly must not neglect it--and she was gone into the house. The swinging curtains of dried gra.s.ses hid her a few feet beyond, but between them, he felt, stretched five thousand years and half a dozen continents as well.
"Tom, old chap, did you get my letter? You promised to read it. Is it all right, I mean? I wouldn"t for all the world let anything----"
Tom stopped him abruptly. He wished to read the letter for himself without foreknowledge of its contents.
"Eh? No--that is, I got it," he said confusedly, "but I haven"t read it yet. I slept all the afternoon."
An expression of anxiety in Tony"s face came and vanished. "You can tell me to-morrow--frank as you like, mind," he replied, to which Tom said quite eagerly, "Rather, Tony: of course. I"ll read your old letter the moment I get back to-night." And Tony, merry as a sandboy, changed the subject, declaring that he had only one desire in life just then, and that was--food.
CHAPTER XXI
The conflict in Tom"s puzzled heart sharpened that evening into dreadful edges that cut him mercilessly whichever way he turned. One minute he felt sure of Lettice, the next the opposite was clear. Between these two certainties he balanced in secret torture, one factor alone constant--that his sense of security was shaken to the foundations.