CHAPTER XXVI – THE STOLEN HOUR
She had come to him! Impelled by her love she had come to him! That was the jubilant thought in Daniel’s rejoicing heart. At last she had turned her back upon the amusements and pleasures of the old life, finding them altogether unsatisfying now, and she had come to him! She loved him, and she had given up all to come to him! No longer was romance to be sandwiched in between race-meetings and dances, between “At Homes” and opera-parties: she had renounced the whole thing, and had come to him!
“How did you manage it?” he said, looking at her with admiration in his eyes.
“Oh, it was quite simple,” she laughed. “There was nothing extraordinary in my joining the Bindanes on their trip; and then …”
She told him how she had waited until Mr. Bindane was out of the way, and had then made a bolt for it.
“But what is the next step?” he asked. “What about the future?”
“Oh, man,” she cried, “don’t talk about the future – that can wait till you have time to think.”
The words may have had no particular significance, but to Daniel they seemed to be the most wonderful he had ever heard. They meant to him that she trusted him, that she placed her future in his hands, that she gave herself unreservedly to him. She left it to him to think out what he was going to do with her…
He looked at her with deep gratitude in his face; for she had, as it were, crowned him as lord of their destinies and enthroned him upon the very pinnacle of eventuality.
He could not take his eyes from her as she stood at the window, the reflected light of the sunset in her face, her well-proportioned figure seeming to be more vigorous, more athletic, than he had known it before. Her smile, always brilliant, was now intoxicating to him; and her eyes were filled with such tenderness that he could find no adequate response to their appeal. It was as though his kisses and his words of love were all insufficient to this great hour; and, with inward, joyous laughter, he found himself baffled in his search for means of expression.
He lifted her up in his arms, and kissed her throat and her shoulders and her knees. He lowered her to her feet again, and, with his arm about her, walked half-way across the room and back. He buried his face in her hair; held her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers one by one; he sat her in a deck-chair, and, kneeling before her, laid his head for a moment upon her lap.
She was his, she belonged to him! – the thought went coursing through his brain in headlong career, breaking down his reserve, overthrowing the walls of the citadel of his being.
At last, forcing himself down from the heights to the practicalities, he went to the door and shouted for tea; but Hussein, who, like most loyal Egyptian servants, regarded himself, with due deference, as ibn el bêt, “son of the house,” or “one of the family” as we should say, had thrown himself whole-heartedly into his master’s excitement, and had already prepared the tea and had opened the choicest tin of biscuits in the store-cupboard.
Muriel was hungry after her long ride; but she had so much to say, and the interruptions induced by their love were so frequent, that the meal occupied a great deal of time. She told him of the journey from Egypt, and of the wonders of the desert which had been revealed to her; she spoke of the bath that day in the pool at the roadside; she described her sensations of increasing happiness and well-being as day by day the old routine of her life had slipped further from her; and she talked with enthusiasm of the beauties of El Hamrân as she had approached it just now from the high ground.
“I spotted this old ruin of yours from miles away,” she said, “and we skirted along the high ground on this side of the Oasis until we came without a single wrong turning to your door.”
She went to the window, and, standing there with her arm linked in his, gazed in silence over the shimmering sea of the tree-tops. Upon the near side the shadow of the cliffs was spread, and the foliage seemed here to be tinged with cobalt and purple; but on the far side the mellow light of the vanishing sun still bathed the green of the leaves with a tincture of gold and copper.
The chirping of thousands of sparrows, as they gathered themselves in the branches to roost, filled the air with clamorous sound; and at the foot of the cliff, just below the window, a string of camels went by, the foremost being ridden by a small boy, dressed in a single garment of blue cotton, who was exultantly carolling a native song in a full-throated voice which, with its chucks and gurgles, seemed to be an imitation of the nightingale.
“What is he singing about?” Muriel asked. “He’s nearly bursting with it.”
“It is a part of the story of Leila and her lover Majnûn,” Daniel explained, after listening for a few moments; “the part where the Sultan sees Leila, and tells Majnûn that he doesn’t think she is anything to write home about; and Majnûn says: ‘O King, if you could only see her from the window of Majnûn’s eyes, the miracle of her beauty would be made known to you.’”
The boy’s voice passed into the distance; and Muriel stood gazing in front of her in silence, while the golden light faded from the palms as the sun went down.
At length she turned to Daniel, asking him to show her over his house; and, arm in arm, therefore, they went out of the airy, whitewashed living-room, coming presently to the old monks’ refectory, with its roofing of dried cornstalks, and so to the servants’ quarters and the kitchen, and thence to the ruined tower at the top of which Daniel was wont to sleep. They ascended this tower together, and from its summit Muriel could see the whole extent of the building; and, in a rapid passage of thought, she realized with inward satisfaction that the story of his harîm was a fabrication.
The view from here was magnificent. In the west, above the rugged line of the dark hills, the sunset was revealed to her in sudden, overpowering splendour. To the east the Oasis lay in cool shadow; and here and there a thin wisp of smoke rose into the air. Beyond lay the silent desert, and the far-off ranges of pink and mauve hills; and above them the sky was turquoise, fading into grey-blue. The wind had dropped, and now the chattering of the sparrows was ceasing, so that there seemed to be an increasing hush upon all things.
The foliage of the palms screened from sight any movement of human life in the Oasis; and Muriel had the feeling that she and Daniel stood quite alone in this vast setting, like two little sparks of vibrant energy dropped down from the hand of Fate in an empty, motionless world.
She looked up at him as he stood before her, his rough grey shirt thrown open at the neck, his sleeves rolled back from his bronzed arms, and his white trousers held up by an old sash of faded red and yellow silk knotted about his waist. He looked down at her, dressed in her silk sweater, and the same white serge skirt with the little stripe of grey in it which she had been wearing that afternoon at Sakkâra. And as their eyes met they both laughed, like two playmates of childhood who had quarrelled, and whose quarrel was now forgotten.
Presently he led her down the stairs again and across the outer kitchen yard. Here her dragoman, Mustafa, was waiting to take his orders; and he now asked permission to ride over to the house of his brother-in-law, which was situated at the far end of the Oasis, and there to spend the night; and this Muriel at once gave him.
“Where are the camels?” she asked; and in reply he pointed to a shed built against the outer wall of the monastery near the entrance. Here, also, were the three yellow dogs, who, knowing her well, came now to her with the fawning attitudes and uncertainly wagging tails of the real pariah breed.
Hussein was lighting the lamps in the living-room when they returned; and he paused to ask whether the evening meal should be served at the usual hour. Daniel referred him to Muriel. “Any time you like,” she answered, smiling happily at Daniel, as though even the arranging of such trivial details were a matter of delight. “I want a bath first, if I can have one.”
At this Daniel suddenly laughed. “Gee!” he exclaimed, “I’d forgotten to fix up a bedroom for you.” He scratched his head. “Now where on earth am I to put you?”
There was a small whitewashed chamber – originally a monk’s cell – opening off the refectory. This, Daniel used as his dressing-room, and in it stood his large tin foot-bath. He now told his servant, therefore, to set up the spare camp-bed in that room, to prepare the bath, and to remove his own belongings to the chamber at the base of the tower below the stairs.
“You won’t be nervous alone there, will you?” he asked her, and she shook her head. “If you feel lonely or frightened, you’ve only got to slip round to my tower and shout to me, or come up the stairs and wake me up.”
To Muriel there seemed to be a wonderful intimacy in his words, and she pictured herself creeping up the dark staircase in the night, and standing by her lover’s bedside under the stars, whispering to him that she could not sleep.
Hussein was not long in carrying out his instructions, and soon he came back to announce that the bath was ready. Therewith, Daniel took Muriel to this room, which looked exceedingly clean and comfortable in the lamplight. Towels and jugs of hot and cold water stood upon the grass-matted floor beside the bath-tub; the camp-bed had been made up in one corner; and Muriel’s dressing-case stood upon a chair near a table above which a looking-glass was hung. In place of a door a grass mat was suspended across the entrance; and the unglazed window, looking westwards on to the open desert, was fitted with rough wooden shutters now standing open to the warm night.
Daniel was loathe to leave her even for this little while, and he stood with his arm about her while she unfastened her dressing-case. He helped her to lay out her brushes and toilet utensils; and there was a peculiar and very tender sense of intimate companionship as she handed him her slippers to place beside the bed and her nightdress to lay upon the pillow. He made no attempt to go when she began to take the hairpins from her hair; and, when it fell about her shoulders, he took her in his arms once more, calling her by so many loving names that her brain seemed to be singing with them, and she could feel her riotous heart beating as it were in her throat.
At last he left her, and went to his own improvised dressing-room, to put on more presentable clothes; but when he was ready, and she had not yet made her reappearance, he went back to her doorway and spoke to her through the screen of the grass-matting.
She told him he might enter, and he found her sitting before the mirror fastening up her hair. She was dressed now in a kind of kimono; and he seized her bare white arms, which were raised above her head, kissing them fervently.
When at length her toilet was finished, he led her back to the living-room, where soon the evening meal was served at a small table upon which two candles burned at either side of a bowl of wild flowers hastily picked in the fields, where, at this time of the year, they grow in great abundance; and never in all their lives had either of them felt so completely happy. Through the open window the stars glinted in the wonderful sky, like amazing jewels sprinkled upon velvet; and the dimly lit room, with its series of shadowy domes, seemed to be a magical banquet-hall, its walls of alabaster and its flooring of marble. It was somewhat bare of furniture, for many things had been left behind at the Pyramids; but its very bareness enhanced its Oriental effect and added to its enchantment.
Hussein had prepared a very excellent meal, not sparing the store-cupboard; and he had opened a particularly large fiasco of Italian red-wine to grace the occasion. He had donned a clean white garment, held in at the waist by a crimson sash; and as he noiselessly entered or left the room he seemed to Muriel to have taken to himself the nature of a geni out of a tale of the Arabian Nights.
When at last the meal was finished, and cleared away, and she and Daniel were seated in the deck chairs at the open window to drink their coffee, Muriel felt that the whole world of actuality had slid from her, leaving her enthroned with her lover in a palace of glorious dream; and when, out of the darkness of the palm-groves below, there came to their ears the distant and wandering sound of a flute, played by some unseen goatherd passing homewards with his flock, the magic of the desert was almost overpowering in the measure of its enchantment. She was bewildered and intoxicated by it; and in Daniel’s eyes she found, too, a light of love such as she had never seen there before.
The hours passed unnoticed, for time had ceased to be; and it was already late when at last Daniel arose, and stood looking down at her with a smile upon his face. “Well,” he said, with a sigh, “I didn’t think anything would induce me to return to Cairo so soon; but now… When shall we start?”
Muriel looked at him in surprise. “O Daniel,” she whispered, “there’s no hurry, is there? The Bindanes won’t be going back for a fortnight.”
Her low voice set his heart beating for a moment, but he did not take the real significance of her words.
“Well,” he said. “I suppose it will be all right for you to be here for a day or two; and then we can ride straight to Cairo and be married by special licence or whatever they call it.” He lifted her fingers to his lips. “Oh, darling, in less than a week you’ll be my wife!”
Muriel stared at him, wide-eyed. It was as though she had suddenly awakened from a dream. “Oh, but the family will be horrified,” she said. “Everybody will expect a proper wedding in London: after we get home – in May or June. You’ll have to make that concession to the world, my darling.”
Daniel laughed. “Yes, but what about our compromising situation, here?” he asked. “Don’t you see, my sweet, what I mean? Your bolting from the Bindanes is to me a sort of sacred and wonderful thing that you have done, because you’ve put your fate irrevocably in my hands. To my way of thinking we are already married, because you have openly abandoned everything and come to me; but I’m not going to give anybody the chance to question our acts. We belong to each other, and the quicker the position is regularized, so to speak, the better.”
“But who is to find out?” she said. “If I stay with you till the Bindanes come, nobody will hear of it in Cairo.”
He looked quickly at her, his brows drawn together. “What d’you mean?” he asked, as though he could not follow the workings of her mind.
She laughed. “I mean, I’ve arranged it all,” she answered. “Kate is to say I was ill, and that I came to you so as not to be a nuisance to them. She can prevent her husband ever giving me away, and I should think you could manage the others, or at any rate keep them from talking until we’re married.”
He did not answer, but his eyes were fixed upon her. She got up from their chair, and put her hands about his neck. “This is to be our wonderful fortnight, darling,” she whispered. “It is to be our secret.”
He lifted her arms from his shoulders, holding her wrists. “I don’t understand,” he said, and his voice was hard.
She looked at him with wonder. She could not comprehend what was troubling him. “Darling, what’s the matter?” she asked, in dismay. “What I mean is that I’ve done what you always wanted me to do: I’ve broken loose; only I’ve chosen my opportunity, and arranged it so that people won’t talk.”
Still he did not take his eyes from her; but he removed his hand from her wrist. “You mean,” he said very slowly, “that you will return with the Bindanes, and finish up the Cairo season?”
“Well,” she answered, “I’ve got all sorts of more or less official engagements, you know.”
“This is to be just a stolen fortnight?” he asked, and she was frightened by the stern tones of his voice.
She nodded, and again her arms sought his shoulders. But he stepped back quickly from her, and his hand passed across has forehead.
“You are going to cover up your tracks with a pack of lies,” he said, his breath sounding like that of one in pain. “And then you are going back to your dances and your parties, pretending nothing has happened.”
“Oh, you don’t understand,” she cried. “I’ve given myself to you, body and soul.”
“Yes,” he scoffed, his voice rising. “You’ve given yourself to me for a fortnight. A sneaking fortnight that you think nobody will ever hear about. A fortnight sandwiched in between the middle and the end of the Cairo season, to fill up the blank time while your father is away.”
“But I never want to go back,” she answered, her voice trembling.
“If that is true,” he said, “why have you arranged everything for your return? You’ve given yourself to me, you say! Yes, for a stolen fortnight, as you call it yourself: it is to be just an underhand little intrigue. Good God! – and I believed you had given up everything for your love’s sake; and now I find you’ve given up nothing. You’ve taken all the necessary steps to prevent your action being decisive, to make your return to society perfectly easy. And I thought you had burnt your boats!”
She faced him angrily. “Oh, you’re incomprehensible,” she exclaimed. “You let me see in every possible way that you want me to give myself to you and to follow you into the desert; you let me understand that this is what you expect of a woman; you knew that I had heard about your affairs with the Bedouin women here; you didn’t seem to mind my having heard about Lizette: and then, when I accept your point of view and come to you, you tell me I’ve done wrong.”
“What on earth are you saying?” he cried. “What do you mean about Bedouin women? I have never had any relations whatsoever with native women in my life – never. And as for Lizette, I didn’t tell at the time, because I wanted you to trust me of your own accord; but I will tell you now. I’ve only spoken to her twice in my life. Once we had supper together, and once we had coffee together in a restaurant. That is the beginning and the end of my relationship with her. Do you mean to say that thinking me a sort of libertine, you have come out to live with me here as my mistress for a fortnight? Is that what you mean?”
She did not reply. She sat down on a cane chair near the table, and twisted her handkerchief to and fro with her fingers. The expression on her pale face revealed the black despair of her heart.
“Answer me!” he said, sharply.
“I have no answer,” she replied. “I thought you wanted me, I thought you loved me.”
He turned from her, sick at heart. It seemed now to him that his worst fears were realized: he could almost have called her “Harlot.” In no wise had she abandoned the world and run to him, defying the conventions because she desired to be his mate. She had merely planned a secret love-affair: she had just slipped out of the ballroom, so to speak, to enjoy an amorous interlude, and she would be back amongst the dancers once more before anybody had missed her. This sort of clandestine, cunningly arranged affair was an insult to the whole idea of union: it was an intrigue out of a French novel.
He looked at her once more as she sat at the table, and, in his revulsion of feeling, he thought her kimono gaudy. The expression on her face was angry, almost sullen.
“I think you must be mad,” she said. “In Cairo you wouldn’t be publicly engaged to me, and you made me understand quite clearly that it wasn’t our actual marriage you were thinking about: you wanted me to run away with you. You always jibbed at the thought of marriage, and were silent about it; but you talked freely enough about our life together. You made it quite clear that you regarded morals with contempt; and now, you suddenly have scruples, and pretend that you are shocked at my having taken steps to prevent a scandal which would hurt my father’s reputation.”
“If you were afraid of a scandal,” he answered, quickly, “why did you come at all? When you arrived this afternoon I thought you had left that question to me, and were ready to get married at once, which was the only way to avoid hurting your father – unless I had sent you back this very night to Kate Bindane. No, you weren’t afraid of a scandal: you arranged it all too cleverly for there to be much risk.”
“I was prepared to marry you,” she said, “if you really wanted marriage.”
“And if I didn’t,” he replied, “you were prepared to live with me for a fortnight. Oh, you make me ashamed!”
“I wanted to save you from these other women,” she protested.
“I tell you there never were any other women,” he answered. “I’m not a man out of one of your horrible novels.”
“I don’t know what you are driving at,” she exclaimed. “Anyway I won’t be played fast and loose with like this. I shall go back to my friends tomorrow, and I hope I shall never see you again.”
Suddenly her voice broke, and throwing her arms out across the table, she laid her head upon them, and cried bitterly.
Daniel did not move. His heart was hardened against her, and he told himself that her tears were but one of the wiles of her sex.
“No,” he said at length, coming suddenly to a decision, “you shall not go back tomorrow. You have come here for a fortnight, and have made arrangements for your visit to be secret. You say there is no fear of a scandal such as would hurt your father. Very well then, you shall stay here a fortnight whether you want to or not. I propose that we get to know each other: we’ve had enough misunderstandings. You have misunderstood everything I have ever said to you: it has all been warped and twisted by your miserable society attitude of mind.”
“I shall never understand you,” she answered, raising her head, and drying her eyes with the back of her hand. “This is quite final. You’ve insulted me and humiliated me. I might have known that that was what you’d do.”
“Very well,” he said, “I think you had better go to your room now. Remember, you are going to stay here for the full fortnight.”
“I shall do no such thing,” she declared, facing him defiantly.
He gripped hold of her wrist. “Do you want me to have to lock you up?” he asked; and she quailed before the authority of his voice.
He went across to the door and opened it. Outside, upon the floor, a hurricane lamp was burning; and this he picked up.
“Here’s a lamp,” he said, “and here are matches. Now go to bed.”
She took them from him in silence, and slowly walked out of the room.
He watched her as she passed across the refectory, the light from her lantern casting her swaying shadow in huge size upon the ruinous walls. Then he shut the door, and sitting down at the table, buried his face in his hands.