Burning Sands Part 22

"Spying on you," she answered, coming out into the open, her arms full of roses which she had been picking.

"That's very wrong of you," he said.

"Well, you've taken possession of my particular corner," she laughed, "and I always get my roses from here."

"I'm sorry," he replied as they seated themselves upon the marble bench.

"I though you slacked about upstairs until midday."

She looked at him squarely. "You've got a wrong idea about me altogether," she declared. "It's true I don't spend my mornings in smashing up Government property.... By the way, why did you break that wooden stake across your knee?"

He laughed quietly. "It was a parable: it represented a certain province of the Soudan, and its possible fate at England's hands."

She thought it out. "I wonder what would have happened," she mused, "if you'd found that you couldn't break it. I suppose in that case you would have said it represented England."

"No," he answered, "I should have been in a bad fix, and it would have served me right for showing off. But I don't often attempt what I don't think I can do. It's a bad thing to fumble about with anything that's beyond one, like a dog with an uncrackable bone."

"Somebody ought to have invented a proverb," she said, "like 'Don't worry what you can't bite.' But, you know, you're fumbling about with me very badly."

"Would you rather I bit clean through you right away?" he asked.

"Supposing I said I thought I had smashed you open already...?"

"I'd pity your strange delusion," she answered, and they both laughed, though Muriel did not feel hilarious.

"Well, supposing I just said I thought I _could_ do so, and was going to try?"

"I'd reply: 'Any thing, so long as you don't worry me.'"

Again they laughed, and this time Muriel did so with more sincerity, for she felt that she had answered him well.

He took a rose from the bunch in her hands, and smelt it thoughtfully.

"Yes, I'm going to try," he said at length. "I'm going to understand you, and then make you understand yourself. I'm going to show you yourself."

"You're a busy man," she answered, at once estranged; "you'd better not take on any new job."

"It's worth while, I think," he replied.

There was something in his voice which changed the tone of their conversation, and arrested the development of her hostile feelings. The flippancy of their words died away, and a new seriousness, a salient eventfulness, took its place. Suddenly Muriel was filled with longing to be understood, to be laid bare mentally both to him and to herself. She felt solitary and her heart cried out for the enlightenment of friendship; yet she did not dare to make an intimate of this man, whose treatment of her s.e.x did not seem to be conspicuously delicate.

Nevertheless the inadequacy, the inutility of her method of life was very forcibly presented to her, and she seemed to be beating at the bars of her cage. There was something so flat and unprofitable in all that she had done, and the desire was urgent in her to realize herself and expand.

"O, I want to be taught," she exclaimed, "I want to be taught...." She checked herself, and was silent.

He looked at her in surprise, for she uttered the words with intensity, and it was clear that she meant them; but it was not clear that they were prompted by more than a pa.s.sing emotion, for presently she began to talk about the lighter things of her life, and she spoke of the various events in prospect which would keep her from brooding. The greater part of each day for the next week or so was already filled; and Muriel spoke of these coming events as though they were dispensations granted to her by a benevolent Fortune for her heart's comfort.

"I've come to the conclusion," she said, "that the only way to be happy is to be surrounded by amusing people, so that there is no opportunity for thinking about oneself."

He shook his head. "No, you're wrong. Your happiness must come from within, from the contentment and fullness of your own mind. The Buddha once said 'Let us dwell free from yearning, among men who are anxious'; and there is an anonymous Oriental poem which says something about the lost paradise being hidden, really, in the human breast. My good girl,"

he exclaimed, warming to his subject, "don't you realize that what you can get from this restless world of 'society' you live in is only pleasure, not happiness, and even at that it doesn't last. You are like a punctured wheel: so long as people are pumping you up, you seem to be all right, but when they leave you alone you go flat, because your inner tube isn't sound. You ought to be alone in the desert for a bit: it would do you all the good in the world."

Muriel looked at him questioningly. "Were you alone in the desert?" she asked. There had come into her mind a vision of that harim of which she had heard tell.

"Well, I wasn't exactly alone ...," he replied; for he had many friends among the natives.

His answer gave fresh colour to her thoughts, and a sense of annoyance crept over her.

"It seems to me," she remarked, "that I ought to remind you of the Biblical saying, 'Physician, heal thyself.'"

She got up, and, with a little nod to him, strolled back to the rose-bushes. He watched her as she added fresh blooms to the bunch she was carrying; and he noticed how the sunlight caught her hair and made it beautiful. He would have liked to have gone after her and taken her in his arms.

Presently he returned to the house, and, finding that there were no more native visitors, went to talk over serious matters of policy with the regular Secretaries.

He remained to luncheon at the Residency, and at the table Lord Blair enquired eagerly as to whether he had found his first morning's work interesting, and appeared to be relieved to hear that such was the case.

Muriel joined in the conversation. "I was eavesdropping behind the bushes," she said, "and I can say with confidence that Mr. Lane enjoyed it all thoroughly, especially the part where he smashed up the gardener's work of weeks." Therewith she related the incident of the wooden stake, but in her narrative the f.a.ggot became an immense tree-trunk.

Lord Blair rubbed his hands. "That's the sort of thing!" he exclaimed.

"Dear me, dear me!-what strength you have, Daniel!"

"Yes," said Muriel, "his mere presence would make the dullest party piquant. One has only to recollect that if he were suddenly to get out of control, every person in the vicinity would run the risk of being banged into a boneless emulsion...."

She broke off with a laugh, and Daniel smiled affably. Somehow, in spite of his Herculean proportions, he was not a man one would a.s.sociate with violence.

After luncheon, Daniel spent some time in talking to Lord Blair in regard to native affairs; and it was already half past three when he left the Great Man's study, and walked across the hall to the main entrance. Here he encountered Lady Muriel, who was just going off upon her visit to the bazaars. She was about to step into a very new and luxurious automobile, which Mrs. de Courcy Cavilland, wife of the Colonel of the Dragoons, had recently purchased to the honour of the regiment and to the dismay of her husband. This lady, a small fluffy woman, with innocent blue eyes and sharp little teeth, was making gushing remarks to Muriel as Daniel appeared at the head of the steps; and three young Dragoon officers were standing behind her, like nice little dogs awaiting their turn to go through their tricks. Actually they were excellent fellows, but in the presence of their colonel's wife, they bore little resemblance to the fire-eating cavalrymen of tradition; and Daniel, as he looked down upon them from the top of the steps, wondered which was the more disastrous influence in a regiment-that of the colonel's wife upon the younger officers, or that of the younger officers upon the colonel's wife.

He felt a sort of gloomy interest in the group before him; and, as his presence seemed to be unnoticed, he leaned against the jamb of the door, hat in hand, watching the scene through a recurrent haze of tobacco-smoke.

"I suggest," Mrs. Cavilland was saying to Muriel whose back was turned to him, "that we drive up the Mousky, and go first to the scent bazaar.

Willie Purdett, here, wants to buy some scent for his mother-Lady Mary, you know. And then I must go to the bra.s.s bazaar: I promised dear Lady Agatha Lawer I'd get her one of those tea-tray things. She so hates going to the bazaars herself: she says they're so smelly. Personally, I simply love the East...."

Muriel took her seat in the car, and as she did so she caught sight of Daniel.

"Hullo!" she exclaimed, "I thought you'd gone."

He took his pipe out of his mouth, and told her he was just going.

Muriel introduced him to Mrs. Cavilland, who stared at him with disdain, casting a withering glance upon the disreputable hat he was holding in one hand, and upon the pipe in the other. She then turned away as though the sight were unbearable.

"Mr. Lane is a cousin of your friend Charles Barthampton," Muriel told her; and thereat her manner changed with surprising suddenness, for the British peerage was as meat and drink to her.

"Why, of course," she answered, "I can see the likeness now;" and she glanced with surprise at the mischievous smile-almost a wink-which Muriel directed at him. "You're new to Cairo?" she added. "You must come and see me: I'm always at home on Tuesdays."

"Yes," said Muriel, "that will be very nice for him: he loves tea-parties, don't you, Daniel dear?"

Daniel looked at her curiously. His Christian name sounded strange from her lips, and he wondered why she had used it now for the first time.

Her expression suggested that there was a private joke between them, and the intimacy pleased him.

"Yes, Muriel dear," he replied, gravely, and Muriel gasped; "but you needn't blurt out my secret." He turned to Mrs. Cavilland as though to explain. "I'm rather addicted to tea-drinking and quiet gossip," he said.

Mrs. Cavilland thought him somewhat forward, but she excused it in one who was so well-connected. "We tear each other to pieces on Tuesdays,"