Bella Donna Part 45

How much more at her ease she was with Baroudi than she could ever be with Nigel! What Nigel desired she could never give him. She might seem to give it, but the bread would be really a stone, even if he were deceived. And he would be deceived. But what Baroudi desired she could give. It seemed to her to-night indeed that she was born to give just what he desired. She made no mistake about herself. And he could give to her exactly what she wanted. So she thought now. For, since the long day in the mountains, her old ambition seemed to have died, to have been slain, and, with its death, had suddenly grown more fierce within her the governing love, or governing greed, for material things-for money, jewels, lovely bibelots, for all that is summed up in the one word _luxe_. And Baroudi was immensely rich, and would grow continually richer. She knew how to weigh a man in the balance, and though, even for her, there was mystery in him, she could form a perfectly right judgment of his practical capacity, of his power of acquirement.

But he could give her more than _luxe_, much, more than _luxe_.

And as she acknowledged that to herself, there came into Mrs. Armine's heart a new inhabitant.

That inhabitant was fear.

She knew that in Baroudi she had found a man by whom she could be governed, by whom, perhaps, she could be destroyed, because in him she had found a man whom she could love, in no high, eternal way-she was not capable of loving any man like that--but with the dangerous force, the jealous physical pa.s.sion and desire, the almost bitter concentration, that seem to come to life in a certain type of woman only when youth is left behind.

She knew that, and she was afraid as she had never been afraid before.

That night she slept very little. Two or three times, as she lay awake in the dark, she heard distant voices singing somewhere on the Nile, and she turned upon the bed, and she longed to be out in the night, nearer to the voices. They seemed to be there for her, to be calling her, and they brought back to her memory the sound of Baroudi's voice, when he raised himself up, stared into her face, and sang the song about Allah, the song of the Nubian boatmen. And then she saw him before her in the darkness with a painful clearness, as if he were lit up by the burning rays of the sun. Why had she met this man immediately after she had taken the vital step into another marriage? For years she had been free, free as only the social outcast can be who is forcibly driven out into an almost terrible liberty, and through all those years of freedom she had used men without really loving any man. And then, at last, she had once more bound herself, she had taken what seemed to be a decisive step towards an ultimate respectability, perhaps an ultimate social position, and no sooner had she done this than chance threw in her way a man who could grip her, rouse her, appeal to all the chief wants in her nature.

Those words in the Koran, were they not true for her? Her fate had surely been bound about her neck. By whom? If she asked Baroudi she knew what he would tell her. Strangely, even his faith fascinated her, although at Nigel's faith she secretly laughed; for in Baroudi's faith there seemed to be a strength that was hard, that was fierce and cruel.

Even in his religion she felt him to be a brigand, trying to seize with greedy hands upon the promises and the joys of another world. He was determined not to be denied anything that he really desired.

She turned again on her pillows, and she put her arms outside the sheet, then she put her hands up to her face and felt that her cheeks were burning. And she remembered how, long ago, when she was a young married woman, one night she had lain awake and had felt her burning cheeks with her hands.

That was soon after she had met the man for whom she had been divorced, the man who had ruined her social life. Does life return upon its steps?

She remembered the violent joys of that secret love which had ultimately been thrown down in the dust for all the world to stare at. Was she to know such joys again? Was it possible that she could know them, had she the capacity to know them after all she had pa.s.sed through?

She knew she had that capacity, and with her fear was mingled a sense of triumph; for she felt that with the years the capacity within her for that which to her was joy had not diminished, but increased. And this sense of increase gave her a vital sense of youth. Even Nigel had said, "You are blossoming here!" Even he, whom she had so easily and so completely deceived, had seen that truth of her clearly.

And when he came back from the Fayyum to stay again with her, or, more probably, to fetch her away?

The voices that had come to her from far away on the Nile were hushed.

The night at last had imposed herself on the singers, and they had sunk down to sleep under the mantle of her silence. But Mrs. Armine still lay awake, felt as if the cessation of the singing had made her less capable of sleeping.

When Nigel came to fetch her away to the tent in the Fayyum, what then?

She would not think about that, but she would obey her temperament. She had two weeks of freedom before her, she who had had so many years of freedom. She had only two weeks. Then she would use them, enjoy them to the uttermost. She would think of nothing but the moment. She would squeeze, squeeze out the golden juices that these moments contained which lay immediately before her. The tent in the Fayyum--perhaps she would never see it, would never come out in the night with Nigel to hear the Egyptian Pan by the water. But--she would surely hear Baroudi sing again to-morrow, she would surely, to-morrow, watch him while he sang.

She put her arms inside the bed, and feverishly drew the sheet up underneath her chin. She must sleep, or to-morrow her face would show that she had not slept. And Baroudi stared at her while he sang.

Again she was seized by fear.

XVIII

Late the next morning there awoke with Mrs. Armine a woman who for a time had lain in a quiescence almost like that of death, a woman who years ago had risked ruin for a pa.s.sion more physical than ideal, who, when ruin actually overtook her, had let the ugly side of her nature run free with a loose rein, defiant of the world.

Only when she awoke to that new day did she fully realize the long effort she had been making, and how it had tired and irritated her nerves and her temperament. She had won her husband by playing a part, and ever since she had won him she had gone on playing a part. And this acting had not hitherto seemed to her very difficult, although there had been moments when she had longed fiercely to show herself as she was.

But now that she had spent some hours with a man who read her rightly, and who desired of her no moral beauty, no strivings after virtue, no bitter regret for any actions of the past, she realized the weight of the yoke she had been bearing, and she was filled with an almost angry desire for compensation.

She felt as if destiny were heavily in her debt, and she was resolved that the debt should be paid to the uttermost farthing.

Freed from the restraint of her husband's presence, and from the burden of his perpetual though very secret search for the moral rewards she could never give him, her whole nature seemed violently to rebound.

During the days that immediately followed she sometimes felt more completely, more crudely, herself than she had ever felt before, and she was often conscious of the curious, almost savage, relief that the West sometimes feels when brought into close touch with the warm and the subtle barbarity of the East, of the East that asks no questions, that has omitted "Why?" from its dictionary.

Baroudi was as totally devoid of ordinary scruples as the average well-bred Englishman is full of them. He had, no doubt, a code of his own to guide his conduct towards his co-religionists, but this code seemed wholly inoperative when he was brought into relation with those of another race and faith.

And Mrs. Armine was a woman, and therefore, in his eyes, on a lower plane than himself.

Among the attractions which he possessed for Mrs. Armine, certainly not the least was his lack of respect for women as women. It is usually accepted as true of all women that, however low one of them has fallen, she preserves for ever within her a secret longing to be respected by man. Whether Mrs. Armine shared this secret longing or not, one thing is certain: her husband had respect for her, and she wore his respect like a chain; Baroudi had not respect for her, and she wore his lack of respect like a flower.

When she had visited the _Loulia_, reading, as women often do, the character of a man in the things by which he has deliberately surrounded himself, Mrs. Armine had grasped at once certain realities of him which, in his intercourse with her, he was at no pains to conceal. Mingled with his penetration, his easy subtlety, his hard lack of scruple, his boldness that was smooth, and polished, and cool as bronze, there went a nave crudity, a simplicity like that of a school-boy, an uncivilized ingenuousness which was startling, and yet attractive, in its unexpectedness. The man who had bought the cuckoo-clocks and the cheap vases, who had set the gilded ball dancing upon the water of the faskeeyeh, who had broken the dim harmony of the colours in his resting-place by the introduction of that orange hue which seemed to reflect certain fierce lights within his nature, walked hand-in-hand with the shrewd money-maker, the determined pleasure-seeker, the sensual dreamer, the acute diplomatist. The combination was piquant, though not very unusual in the countries of the sun. It appealed to Mrs. Armine's wayward love of novelty, it made her feel that despite her wide experience of life in relation to men there still remained _terra incognita_ on which she might set her feet. And though she did not care particularly for children, and had never longed to have a child of her own, she knew she would love occasionally to play with the child enclosed in this man, to pet it, to laugh at it, to feel superior to it, to feel tender over it, as the hardest woman can feel tender over that which wakes in her woman's dual capacity for pa.s.sion and for motherliness. She both feared Baroudi and smiled, almost laughed, at him; she both wondered at and saw through him. At one moment he was transparent as gla.s.s to her view, at another he confronted her like rock surrounded by the blackness of an impenetrable night. And he never cared whether she was looking through the gla.s.s or whether she was staring, baffled, at the rock.

Never, for one moment, did he seem to be self-conscious when he was with her, did he seem to be anxious about, or even attentive to, what she was thinking of him. And the completeness of his egoism called from her egoism respect, as she was forced to realize that he possessed certain of her own qualities, but exaggerated, made portentous, brilliant, mysterious, by something in his temperament which had been left out of hers, something perhaps racial which must be for ever denied to her.

Each day Hamza, the praying donkey-boy, awaited her at some point fixed beforehand on the western side of the river, and Ibrahim escorted her there in the felucca, smiling gently like an altruistic child, and holding a rose between his teeth.

Far up the river the _Loulia_ was moored, between Baroudi's orange-gardens and Armant, and each day he dropped down the Nile in his white boat to meet the European woman, bringing only one attendant with him, a huge Nubian called Ayoub. The tourists who come to Luxor seldom go far from certain fixed points. Their days are spent either floating upon the river within sight of the village and of Thebes, among the temples and tombs on the western bank, or at Karnak, the temple of Luxor, in the antiquity shops, or in the shade of the palm-groves immediately around the brown houses of Karnak and the minarets of Luxor. Go to the north beyond Kurna, to the south beyond Madinat-Habu, or to the east to the edge of the mountains that fringe the Arabian desert, and a man is beyond their ken and the clamour of their gossip.

Baroudi and Mrs. Armine met in the territory to the south, once again among the mountains, then in the plain, presently under the flickering shade of orange-trees neatly planted in serried rows and accurately es.p.a.ced.

When she started in the morning from the river-bank below the garden, Mrs. Armine did not ask where she was going of Ibrahim; when she got upon her donkey did not put any question to Hamza. She just gave herself without a word into the hands of these two, let them take her, as on that first day of her freedom, where they had been told, where they had been paid to take her. As on that first day of her freedom! Soon she was to ask herself whether part of the creed of Islam was not true for those beyond its borders, whether, till the sounding of the trumpet by the angel Asrafil, each living being was not confined in the prison of the fate predestined for it. But, able to be short-sighted sometimes, although already in the dark moments of the night far-sighted and afraid, she had now often the sensation of an untrammelled liberty, realizing the s.p.a.ces that lay between her and the Fayyum, seeing no longer the eyes that asked gifts of her, hearing no longer the voice that pleaded for graces in her, that she could never make, could never display, though she might pretend to display them.

And so she sometimes hugged to her breast the spectre of perfect liberty in the radiant, unclouded mornings when Ibrahim came to tell her it was time to start, and she heard the low chaunt of the boatmen in the felucca. If her fate were being bound about her neck, there were moments when she did not fully realize it, when she was informed by a light and a heady sensation of strength and of youth, when she thought of the woman who had sat one day in Meyer Isaacson's consulting-room as of a weary stranger with whom she had no more to do.

But though Mrs. Armine had moments of exultation in these days, which she often told herself were her days of liberty, she had also many moments of apprehension, of depression, of wonder about the future, moments that were more frequent as she began more fully to realize the truth of her nature now fiercely revealing itself.

She had never supposed that within her there still remained so strong a capacity for feeling. She had never supposed it possible that she could really care for a man again--care, that is, with ardour, with the force that brings in its train uneasiness and the cruel desire to monopolize, to a.s.sert oneself, to take possession, not because of feminine vanity or feminine greed, but because of something lodged far deeper among the very springs of the temperament. She had never imagined that, at this probably midmost epoch of her life, there could be within her such a resurrection as that which soon she began to be anxiously aware of. The weariness, the almost stagnant calm that had, not seldom, beset her--they sank down suddenly like things falling into a measureless gulf. Body and mind bristled with an alertness that was not free from fever.

She said to herself sometimes, trying to play false even with herself, that the blame, or at least the responsibility, for this change must be laid on the shoulders of Egypt.

And then she looked, perhaps, at the mighty shoulders of Baroudi. And he saw the look, and understood her better than she just then chose to say to herself that she understood herself.

And yet for many years she had not been a woman who had tried to play tricks with her own soul. This man was to have an effect not only upon the physical part of her, but also upon that in her which would not respond to tender attempts at influencing it towards goodness or any lofty morality, but which existed, a vital spark, incorporeal, the strange and wonderful thing in the cage of her ardent flesh.

And Mahmoud Baroudi? Was there any drama being acted behind the strong, but enigmatic, exterior which he offered to the examination of the world and of this woman?

Mrs. Armine sometimes wondered, and could not determine. She knew really little of him, for though he seemed often to be very carelessly displaying himself exactly as he was, at the close of each interview she went back to the villa with a mind not yet emptied of questions. She was often strangely at ease with him because he did not ask from her that which she could not give, and therefore she could be herself when with him. But the Eastern man does not pour confidences into the ear of the Western woman, nor are the workings of his mind like the workings of the mind of a Western man. Never till now had Mrs. Armine known a secret intimacy, or any intimacy, like this, procured by bribery, and surely hastening to a swift and decisive ending.

Upon the _Hohenzollern_ Baroudi must have laid his plans to see her as he was seeing her now. He did not tell her so, but she knew it. Had she not known it upon ship-board? In their exchange of glances how much had been said and answered?

Despite her life of knowledge, she said to herself now that she did not know. And there was much in Baroudi's mind, even in connection with herself, that she could not possibly know.

Something about him, nevertheless, she was able to find out.

Baroudi's father was a rich Turco-Egyptian. His mother had been a beautiful Greek girl, who had embraced Islam when his father fell in love with her and proposed to marry her. She a.s.sumed the burko, and vanished from the world into the harim. And in the harim she had eventually died, leaving this only son behind her.

The Turco-Egyptians are as a rule more virile, more active, more dominant, and perhaps more greedy than are the pure-bred Egyptians. In the days before the English protectorate they held many important positions among the ruling cla.s.ses of Egypt. They lined their pockets well, plundering those in their power with the ruthlessness characteristic of the Oriental character. The English came and put a stop to their nefarious money-making. And even to-day love of the Englishman is far less common than hatred in the heart of a Turco-Egyptian. In the Turco-Egyptian nature there is, nevertheless, not seldom something that is more nearly akin to the typical Englishman's nature than could be found in the pure-bred Egyptian. And possibly because he sometimes sees in the Englishman what--but for certain Oriental characteristics that hold him back--he might almost become himself, the Turco-Egyptian often nourishes a peculiar venom against him. Men may hate because of ignorance, but they may hate also because of understanding.

Baroudi had been brought up in an atmosphere of Anglophobia. His father, though very rich, had lost place and power through the English. He had once had the upper hand with many of his countrymen. He had the upper hand no longer, would never have it again. The opportunity to plunder had been quietly taken from him by the men who wore the helmet instead of the tarbush, and who, while acknowledging that there is no G.o.d but G.o.d, deny that Mohammed was the Prophet of G.o.d. He hated the English, and he taught his half-Greek son to hate them, but never noisily or ostentatiously. And Baroudi learnt the lesson of his father quickly and very thoroughly. He grew up hating the English, and yet, paradoxically, developing a nature in which were certain characteristics, certain apt.i.tudes, certain affections shared by the English.

He was no lethargic Eastern, unpractical, though deviously subtle, taking no thought for the morrow, uselessly imaginative, submissive, ready to cringe genuinely to authority, then turn and kick the man below him. He was no stagnant pool with only the iridescent lights of corruption upon it. Almost in the English sense he was thoroughly manly.

He had the true instinct for sport, the true ability of the thorough sportsman. He was active. He had within him the faculty to command, to administrate, to organize. He had, like the Englishman, the a.s.siduity that brings a work undertaken to a successful close. He had will as well as cunning, persistence as well as penetration. From his father he had inherited instincts of a conquering race--therefore akin to English instincts; from his mother, who had sprung from the lower cla.s.ses, that extraordinary acquisitive faculty, that almost limitless energy, regardless of hardship, in the pursuit of gain which is characteristic of the modern Greek in Egypt.