There was a King in Egypt Part 53

"You are pretty good at hating, Meg."

"Well, Mohammed Ali has since told me where he found her eye of Horus.

Guess where it was."

Freddy laughed. "I'm sure I couldn't."

"She read my diary all the time she was here alone. He says she asked if she might rest and tidy up in my room. He found the eye of Horus just beside the table where she had been reading it. He thinks that it must have caught in the key of the drawer in the table. Probably she thought we were coming and moved quickly away--the ring was easily wrenched open."

"The little cad!" Freddy said slowly. "The venomous little toad!"

"In my diary, Freddy, I referred to Michael's strange journey, his journey to King Solomon's Mines, as we always called it."

Freddy freed himself from his sister's arms and lit a cigarette.

"What a mean little brute! Mohammed Ali was probably in her pay; he told her he had found the eye at the spot where she dismounted."

"He said he told that lie because Madam made a face at him. He confesses to that."

Freddy thought for a moment while he smoked, then he said slowly and deliberately: "If she got that information from your diary, she could easily get more. _Baksheesh_ will make the dead give up their secrets.

That is why Bismarck said to his generals, never tell your own shirt what you want kept a secret. Diaries are dangerous things, Meg."

"I wrote it in French," Meg said. "I thought only the servants would stoop to reading it and they can't read French."

"Next time, try invisible ink. In Egypt, once a thing is written or told, it is public property."

"I scarcely write anything now," she said. "I feel as if some spy will see it, and the dry bones of a diary never interest me."

As Freddy was leaving the sitting-room--he was going to bed for a couple of hours before he began work again--Margaret said to him:

"Just tell me before you go, where you first heard the report about Michael, and from whom you heard it."

"One or two days ago," he said. "I heard a smouldering gossip about it going on amongst the workmen. They'd got wind of it somehow. No one ever knows how these things begin. Then I met young King from Professor L----'s camp, and he told me the whole story. He knew Millicent very well. He said she's not what you could call an immoral woman so much as a woman without morals. He confesses he never met anyone in the least like her before, and he rather prides himself on his knowledge of the world--he would have us believe that he has seen a devil of a lot. He wondered at a man of Michael's refined temperament taking her into the desert in the way he has done."

"He never took her," Meg said. "Isn't it hateful, Freddy, hearing people make these a.s.sertions about our Mike?"

"That's what I meant," Freddy said, "when I told you that I hated your name being mixed up with his."

"Oh, that's not what troubles me. No one knows me out here, or my affairs. I meant that it's such a wicked libel on Michael, who's not here to defend himself."

"But if she's there with him, what can you expect the world to say, to believe?"

"If she followed him and joined him, it wouldn't be very easy to shake her off, would it?"

Freddy smiled. "You're right there--the fair Millicent wouldn't go because she wasn't wanted!"

"I often ask myself why and how we tolerated her."

"Did we?" Freddy laughed.

"Well, yes, we did. Even I found myself liking her that day after lunch. I began to wonder if I had always been too hard on her, if I had had my judgment perverted by my jealousy."

"Surely you're not really jealous of Millicent?" Freddy paused. "That is, if you are confident that Michael is not with her at the present moment?"

"I am confident, Freddy. All the same, I have lots to be jealous of.

Her beauty amazes me every time I look at her and, after all, beauty is a rare and wonderful thing. Lots of women are good to look at and attractive, but Millicent is beautiful. You have often said how rare real beauty is and how carelessly we use the expression. Millicent deserves it."

"You needn't be jealous of mere beauty, Meg. Even when she's on her best behaviour, she never could impress a stranger as being anything but what she is, a soulless little minx."

"Yet you thoroughly enjoyed her company, Freddy."

"I know I did. She's amusing, her personality is stimulating. But I shouldn't like to have too much of it."

"Yet you'd have kissed her if you'd been alone with her--you said you'd try!"

Freddy did not deny the accusation.

"Men are queer things," Meg said; "but you must get off to bed, you look awfully tired."

She hated to have to send him away, for it was only on very rare occasions, and quite unexpectedly, that Freddy expressed his opinions.

He belonged to the silent order of mankind; to strangers he never revealed himself; he rarely said anything in their presence which suggested that he had opinions at all, or that he was really an exceedingly thoughtful person. Meg knew that he had ideas and thoughts--very sound, clear ideas, too. She knew that Freddy thought while other men talked. All the same, his opinions and thoughts, apart from his profession, were apt to be strangled and suffocated by tradition. Tradition was a mighty force in the Lampton family. It almost, as Meg said, amounted to ancestor-worship. Freddy's choice of a profession had been his one act of emanc.i.p.ation. He had, according to family tradition, been destined for either the navy or the army, and it had taken no little strength of character to cut the first link in the chain.

When Freddy had gone to lie down and the little hut was left to its midday silence--the tropical breathless silence of Upper Egypt, when the sun is so hot that even a lizard would not venture from its shelter--Meg sat down on a chair close to the table, and laid her head on her arms.

She was tired, tired, tired. She must forget things for a little time, before she even tried to review the situation, or think out what was best to be done. If only she could will herself into absolute unconsciousness for a little time, how sweet it would be! If she let herself sleep--even though sleep seemed very far from her--she might dream of Millicent, and that would be worse than wakefulness and remembrance. To trust herself to the lordship of dreams was to seek refuge in the unknown, and that was dangerous. It was total unconsciousness which she desired, the restful unconsciousness of a blank mind. She remained perfectly still for a little time, asking for rest, asking for the power not to think. She concentrated her thoughts on this one desire; she opened her being for the reception of peace.

Suddenly the voice which heals spoke. It suggested a respite for her troubles. "No mind can remain a blank," it said. "Try instead to think of your vision, fill your whole being with its beauty, repeat to yourself all that happened during that wonderful revelation."

Unconsciously and swiftly Meg's painful thoughts drifted away. The picture of Millicent amusing and tempting her lover, which had danced before her eyes, was no longer there--or, at all events, it was not dominating her mind, and Freddy's words no longer rang in her ears.

Her misery, made by her own thoughts, left her, as a headache leaves a sufferer when a sedative has been administered. The gentle voice, the divine attendant, achieved its work. Meg had asked for rest and for forgetfulness. Her prayer was being answered. It repeated to her the tender words of Akhnaton; it told her in Michael's own dear way the true explanation of her vision. With tightly-closed eyes and her head bowed, she saw again the whole scene. It was unnaturally vivid--the luminous figure, with the pitying, sorrowful eyes. As she gazed at it, to her spirit came the same quiet comfort as had come to her on that night when the vision had visited her. So clearly could she see the rays of Aton behind the high crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, that she lifted up her head. Perhaps He was there, in the sitting-room, standing just in front of her? Had the luminous body penetrated the darkness of her tightly-closed eyes?

Meg blinked her eyes to rid them of their confusion; her fingers had been tightly pressed against them. She looked fixedly into the s.p.a.ce in front of her. Nothing was there; the room was just as it had been when she closed her eyes. The disordered table, the cigarette-ash in the two saucers, the crumbs from a Huntley and Palmer's cake on the table-cloth--these homely things struck her as incongruous. She had expected a vision of Akhnaton; she had hoped for it.

She put her head down on her arms again; her thoughts had been very sweet; with closed eyes they might come back again. How absurd it was to think of such material things as the silver paper round the imported cake, and to remember that Freddy had said he was sick of tinned apricot jam!

These domestic thoughts had taken but a second. She was going back to her vision and to the happiness it had given her.

And so it came to pa.s.s that just as Michael had found solace for heart and mind in the dancing of the daffodils which he had visualized in the eastern desert, so Meg's bruised heart lost its sense of fear in her visualizing of the world's first reformer.

When Freddy returned to the sitting-room, refreshed and invigorated, he woke his sister by his noisy entrance. He was extremely angry with himself, and showed his sorrow very tenderly.

Meg looked at him with half-awakened senses. Where was she? What was she doing? What hour of the day was it?

"Never mind, Freddy, I've slept long enough." She smiled, and looked as though the thoughts from which she drew her happiness were far away.

Freddy put his two hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes.

"Were your dreams very nice, old girl? You look as if you'd been playing on the Elysian plain, or had been re-born!"