Part 41 (2/2)

He could see her starlit face. He remembered how he had turned it up to the heavens and said, ”You beautiful Meg, the stars adore you!” His own words rang in his ears.

She had come to help him to make his love for her still more complete.

She was with him still. He enfolded her in his arms and wept out his pa.s.sion on her breast.

CHAPTER V

”Let's begin where we left off yesterday, Mike,” Millicent said.

They had finished their lunch and were sitting in the desert watching the ”common or garden” day's idleness of the inhabitants of a Bedouin camp. The tents were huddled together under the shade of some feathery-leaved palm-trees, a typical desert homestead.

They had made a short excursion from the site of their own camp, for the sick man's condition had necessitated their halting for at least one whole day.

Subtly conscious of the fact that Satan finds some mischief even in the desert for idle hands to do, Michael had suggested a picnic to a small oasis which lay to the west of their route. Millicent and her dragoman and her servants still formed a part of his camp; her splendid supply of food and medicines was so valuable for the saint that Michael's silent consent to her presence had been given. Again he was drifting.

”Let us return to where we left off yesterday,” referred to her suggestion of the evening before that they should tell each other of the most English thing they could imagine, things seen in England as in comparison to things seen in Egypt.

It was a typically Eastern scene which lay before them--the yellow sands of the Arabian desert, the dark palm-trees and the picturesque Bedouins idling under the shelter of the palms. Not one of the group was occupied. Some goats and a great number of naked children were lying about on the sand. The purple shadows of the palm-trees intensified the bareness of the sunny desert.

One little figure, with a very protruding stomach, and a very large white metal disc on her dark chest for her only article of attire, suddenly appeared in front of them. Silently she had risen up out of the hot sand at their feet. Her big eyes stared at the two strange beings whom she had been brave enough to approach. When Millicent spoke to her she screamed and flew back to her mother's side. The woman looked like a man, clean-limbed and as tanned as leather. Her tent was supported by two sticks; to enter it she had to bend almost double.

The naked child had appeared so suddenly and it had run away so swiftly, that Millicent laughed like a child. It really was a delicious bit of nature. The metal disc shone like a small sun.

”What a 'tummy'!” she said. Her laughter was contagious. ”Just like a baby blackbird's before it has got its feathers. And that big silver disc!--like the family plate on the family chest.”

”It's protection from all evil, poor wee mite.”

”What a filthy-looking hovel,” Millicent said. ”Worse than a gipsy-tent in England.”

”And yet it's a home,” Michael said. ”And there are no more pa.s.sionate lovers of home than these tent-women, or more hospitable people.”

”Do these date-trees bear fruit?” Millicent asked the practical question irrelevantly. Her mind was charged with new interests, while her eyes looked at the soaring trees. The tent-dwellers interested her. She would like to have questioned them about all sorts of intimate subjects.

”Rather! These people pay taxes, too.”

”Really? Isn't there any spot on the globe where people can just live as they like, where they can get away from income-tax and authorities?”

”I don't know if the Bedouins pay any tent-taxes, but I suppose that if they didn't aspire to owning date-palms, they could live in the arid desert without paying anybody anything. It's the old, old, unchanging subject--water.”

Millicent lapsed into silence. Her chin was resting on her hands; she was lying face downwards on the sand. Michael was resting beside her.

Ha.s.san and the few servants they had taken with them to attend to their picnic-lunch were fast asleep. The camels and mules made a picturesque note in the distance. On Millicent's camel a pale blue sheepskin rug covered the fine saddle; it looked like a patch of the heavens dropped down to earth.

”I know what is the most English thing I can think of,” she said, ”the most English thing compared to all this Easternness--how I adore it, Mike!”

”The English thing you've thought of, or the Easternness?”

”Oh, the Easternness. England's placid and fat and bountiful, but all this throbbing emptiness----!”

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