Part 5 (1/2)

He was now having an example of her capacity for learning which she did at a pace which rather unnerved him. Margaret learnt a language as she learned the geography of a city. She would quietly and composedly study a map until the ”sense” of the city was in her brain. In beginning her study of Arabic she explained to her brother that she must first of all try to grasp the ”sense” of the language.

”I want a map of it, Freddy--you know what I mean.”

And Freddy did know. The Lampton type of brain was familiar to him, and his own method of absorbing languages, or any of the subjects which he had had to study for his examinations, was exactly similar to Margaret's, so he set Michael and their Arabic master on the right track.

As a rule, the Arabic alphabet takes a student about three weeks to learn. Margaret, with apparently very little trouble, mastered it in one; it took Michael almost a month. Yet Margaret knew that she was not grasping things with any ease or quickness; she felt too unsettled and impatient. She was ”dying,” as she expressed it, to push on with Arabic so as to be able to talk to the natives and understand things Mohammedan, but the very fact that Arabic was not going to help her to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, or understand anything at all about ancient Egypt, acted as an irritant to her brain, and r.e.t.a.r.ded her working powers.

”And when my brain is annoyed, or it feels impatient,” she said, ”bang goes my poor intelligence--it simply won't be hurried; it will only work in its own deliberate way.”

Michael declared that the way it was working was good enough for him--rather too good, in fact.

Under such circ.u.mstances, the intimacy between Margaret and her brother's best friend naturally ripened very quickly. Margaret felt as though she had known him for months instead of weeks, and more than once she had wondered what life would be like without him. He was much more imaginative than Freddy and more intellectually excitable and curious. He theorized and perhaps romanced where Freddy was apt to accept only proven facts. Michael's temperament was the exact stimulant which Margaret's brain required.

That Michael did his share of hard work Margaret had realized when she accompanied him one day to the scene of his labours. She had had to bend almost double and crawl down a steep shaft, of slippery, sliding debris, to what she thought must be halfway through the world, and pick her way over the rubbish in a semi-excavated chamber in the vast tomb.

Some of the chambers were full of huge stones, which had fallen in with the roof. It was in a smaller chamber, where the heat was so great that she could scarcely breathe, that Michael spent his mornings and the greater part of his afternoons.

The heat of Egypt, concentrated for centuries and centuries, seemed to scorch Margaret's face when she entered it. The building was like a temple with side chapels. In one side chapel Michael sat himself down to copy a wide band of gaily-painted decorations, which formed a dado round its three walls.

On this particular night Margaret had returned from a long walk with Michael. They had left the low level of the valley and its winding white road and had climbed up on to the heights of the Sahara. It had pleased Margaret to feel that her feet were pressing the sands of the great African desert. She had never dreamed that their valley was actually a rift in the rocks of the Sahara, that ocean of sand which travels on and on to infinity.

They had stood side by side on its high ridge, with their eyes looking towards the plain below, the historic plain which once held the capital of the world. The plain of Thebes reached to the river, and across the river lay gay Luxor, with its lights and the luxuries of modern civilization.

Their walk was finished. It had drawn them still closer together. The solitude of the Sahara, with its sense of Divinity, had established a new link in their sympathies; it had created a feeling between them similar to that which is the outcome of two people having been together through strenuous and trying circ.u.mstances. They had, as usual, spoken very little; yet they were conscious of having enjoyed each other's society intensely and in the best possible manner, the enjoyment of complete understanding.

Earlier in the evening, when Michael asked her to go for a walk, because Freddy was absorbed in some business letters, he had made the proposal in his habitual way.

”May I come and keep silence with you to-night in the great Sahara?”

And Meg had said, ”Yes, do. You know, we really talk to each other all the time--my mind has so much more the gift of speech than my tongue.”

And so their silence had been as golden as the sand at their feet, which under Egypt's moon never pales.

Freddy was only too glad that Michael had ”cottoned on to Meg,” as he expressed it--in fact, he was extremely pleased, for Meg would drive ”the other woman” out of his thoughts, and if anything should come of it--well, Mike was one of the very best; Meg could not have a better husband.

But so far no such thought had entered Mike's head, nor yet Margaret's.

She was too interested and busy in her new life to think of love; she was only conscious of living as she had never lived before, and as she would have asked to live if she had possessed a wis.h.i.+ng-ring. Every hour and minute of her days were a delight. To be with her best ”pal”

Freddy in Egypt seemed too good to be true, and added to that, there was this unexpected pleasure, the friends.h.i.+p and companions.h.i.+p of the nicest man she had ever met. His rather ”drifting” temperament and nature appealed to her as it appealed to Freddy, for the very reason, perhaps, that keenly sensitive as she was and susceptible to her surroundings, her nature and brains were of a practical order. She was not imaginative or moody.

She loved to listen to Michael's vivid, unpractical, Utopian theories and to follow him to where his flashes of brilliance carried him. His dream cities and dream people delighted Margaret. He told her stories as she had never been told stories before, invented as he went along, stories which kept her one minute fighting against tears and the next in delicious laughter.

Margaret never could tell stories, not even to little children; she was not gifted with a creative brain or ingenuity.

On the heights of the Sahara they, had not broken the silence; it was only on their return journey, under a canopy of southern stars, that Margaret had said:

”A short story, please.”

And Michael had told her a story about a certain king of Egypt who had a beautiful slave, who had such power over him that she could make him do anything she liked. The things she liked were more fantastic than anything Margaret had ever read in _The Arabian Nights_.