Bye-Ways Part 15

And that evening he left the steamer, and took a room for a month at the Luxor Hotel. And that evening he cast the skin of his former self, and emerged, with fluttering wings, from the chrysalis of his ident.i.ty. He was a bachelor, aged twenty-eight, and he was travelling alone; so there was no critical eye to mark the change in him, no chattering tongue to express surprise at his pleasant abandonment to the follies which make up the lives of sensitive artists and refined sensualists who can differentiate between the promenade of the "Empire," and the garden of love. As he stepped out into the Arab-haunted village that night, after dinner, Bellairs breathed a sigh of relief. For a month he would let himself go. Where to? He bent his steps towards the river, the Nile that is the pulsing blood in the veins of Egypt. Moored in the shadow of its brown banks lay a string of bright-eyed dahabeeyahs. From more than one of them came music. Bellairs, his cigarette his only companion, strolled slowly along listening idly in a pleasant dream. A woman's voice sang, asking "Ninon" what was her scheme of life. A man beat out his soul at the feet of "Medje." And, upon the deck of the last dahabeeyah, a woman played a fantastic mazurka. Bellairs was fond of music, and her performance was so clever, so full of nuances, understanding, wild pa.s.sion, that he stood still to remark it more closely.

"She has known many things, good and evil," he thought, as his mind noted the intellect that spoke in the changes of time, the regret and the gaiety that the touch demonstrated so surely and easily, as the mood of the composition changed. The music ceased.

"Betty," a woman's voice said, in English, but with a slight French accent, "I want to see the stars. This awning hides them. Come for a little walk."

"Yes; I want to see the stars too, and the awning does hide them," a girl's voice answered. "Do let us take a little walk."

Bellairs smiled, as he said to himself, "The first voice is the voice of the musician, and the second voice seems to be its echo." He was still standing on the bank when the two women stepped upon the gangway to the sh.o.r.e and climbed to the narrow path.

As they pa.s.sed him by they glanced at him rather curiously. One was a woman of about thirty, dark, with a pale, strong-featured face. The other was a fair, aristocratic-looking girl, not more than seventeen.

"She is the echo," Bellairs thought. "Rather a sweet one." Then, at a distance, he followed them, and presently found them sitting together in the garden of the Hotel. He sat down not far off. A man, whom he knew slightly, spoke to them, and afterwards crossed to him.

"That lady plays very cleverly," Bellairs said.

"Mademoiselle Leroux, you mean--yes. You know her?"

"Not at all. I only heard her from the river bank."

"She is travelling with Lord Braydon. She is a great friend of Lady Betty Lambe, his daughter."

"That pretty girl?"

"Yes. Shall I introduce you?"

"I should be delighted."

A moment later Bellairs was sitting with the two ladies and talking of Egypt. It seemed to him that they were the first nurses to dandle his new baby-nature, this nature which Egypt had given to him, and which only to-night he had definitely accepted. Perhaps this fact quickly cemented their acquaintance. At any rate, a distinct friendship began to walk in their conversation, and Bellairs found himself listening to Mdlle. Leroux, and looking at Lady Betty, with a great deal of interest and of admiration. Presently the former said:--

"I knew you would be introduced to us to-night."

Bellairs was surprised.

"When?" he asked.

"When we pa.s.sed you just now on the bank of the Nile."

"I knew we should too," said Lady Betty.

"You must be very intuitive," said Bellairs.

"Women generally are," remarked Mdlle. Leroux.

"Yes. Do your intuitions tell you whether our acquaintance will be long and agreeable?"

"Perhaps--but I never prophesy."

"Why?"

"Because I am always right."

"Is that a valid reason for abstention?"

"I think so. For in this world those who look forward generally see darkness."

"I cannot achieve a proper pessimism in Upper Egypt," Bellairs replied.

A week later, Bellairs felt quite certain that there had never been a period in his life when he had not known and talked with Mdlle. Leroux and Lady Betty Lambe. Lord and Lady Braydon asked him to lunch on the dahabeeyah almost every day, and he often strolled down to tea without invitation. Then, in the afternoon, there were donkey expeditions to Karnak, or across the river to the tombs of the kings, to the desert villa of Monsieur Naville, to ancient Thebes, to the two Colossi. Lord Braydon was consumptive and was spending the winter and spring in Egypt.

Lady Braydon seldom left his side, and so it happened that Bellairs and his two acquaintances of the garden were often alone together. Bellairs became deeply interested in them, and for a rather peculiar reason. He was fascinated by the extraordinary sympathy that existed between the two women--if Lady Betty could be called a woman yet. Mdlle. Leroux had obtained so strong an influence over the girl that she seemed to have grafted not only her mind, but her heart, her apparatus of emotions and of affections, on to Lady Betty's. What the former silently thought, the latter silently thought too, and when the silence died in expression, they frequently spoke almost the same sentence simultaneously. Sometimes Mdlle. Leroux would express some feeling with vehemence to Bellairs when Lady Betty was out of hearing, and an hour or two afterwards, with only a slightly fainter vehemence, Lady Betty would express the same feeling. Indeed, these two women seemed to have only one heart, one soul, between them, the heart and soul that had originally been the sole property of the elder one.

"You are very generous," said Bellairs one day to Mdlle. Leroux.

"Why?" she asked in surprise.

"You give away things that most of us have only the power to keep."

"What do you mean?"

"Some day, perhaps, I will tell you."

Clarice Leroux was tremendously impulsive, and she had taken an immediate and strong liking to Bellairs. In this Lady Betty, as usual, coincided. But when Clarice's liking pa.s.sed through self-revelations, confidences, towards a stronger feeling, it was rather strange to find Lady Betty still treading in her footsteps, still ever succeeding her in her att.i.tudes of mind and of heart. Yet the inevitable double flirtation, apparently expected and desired by the two women, was strangely gilded by novelty; and, at first, Bellairs played as happily with these two dual natures as a child plays with two doll representatives of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. For, at first, he possessed the child's power of detachment, and felt that he could at any moment discard dolls for soldiers, or a Noah's Ark, and still keep happiness in his lap. But most things have an inherent tendency to become complicated if they are let alone and allowed to develop free from definite guidance, and presently Bellairs became conscious of advancing complications. His intellectual appreciation of a new situation began to degenerate into a more emotional condition, which disturbed and irritated him. It seemed that he was peering through the bars of the gate that guards the garden of pa.s.sion. Which of the two women did he see in the garden?

He told himself that, having regard to the circ.u.mstances of the case, he ought to see both of them. Unfortunately, a vision of that kind never has been, and never will be, seen by a man. The temple in which the idol sits always makes a difference in the nature of our worship of the idol.

Bellairs was forced to recognise this fact. And the temple in which sat the idol of Lady Betty's nature attracted him more than the temple in which sat the idol of Mdlle. Leroux's nature. He came to this conclusion one afternoon at Karnak. They three were hidden away in a stone nook of this great stone forest, enshrined from the gaze of tourists by mighty rugged pillars, walled in by huge blocks of antique masonry that threw cold shadows whence the lizards stole to seek the sun. The blue sky was broken to their gaze by a narrow section of what had been, doubtless, once a wide-spread roof. A silence of endless ages hung around them in this haven fashioned by dead men and living Time.

Mdlle. Leroux had been boiling a kettle; and they sipped tea, and, at first, did not talk. But tea unlooses the bonds of speech. After their second cups they felt communicative.

"One week gone out of my four," Bellairs said, "and each will seem shorter-lived than its forerunner."

"You go in three weeks from now?" said Mdlle. Leroux, with an uneven intonation that betokened a sudden awakening to the finality of things.

"Yes; at the end of January."

"And we are here until nearly the end of March."

"Yes," said Lady Betty; "it will seem a very long time. February will be eternal."

"It is the shortest month in the year," Bellairs remarked.

Mdlle. Leroux looked at him sarcastically.

"You English are so prosaic," she exclaimed. "Any Frenchman would have understood."

"What?"

"That we were paying you a compliment."