Part 19 (1/2)
And while she wept to herself in solitude, and her brother Denzil wandered about in the gardens of the hotel, encouraging within himself hopes of winning the bewitching Ziska for a wife, Armand Gervase, shut up in his room under plea of slight indisposition, reviewed the emotions of the past night and tired to a.n.a.lyze them. Some men are born self-a.n.a.lysts, and are able to dissect their feelings by some peculiar form of mental surgery which finally leads them to cut out tenderness as though it were a cancer, love as a disease, and romantic aspirations as mere uncomfortable growths injurious to self-interest, but Gervase was not one of these. Outwardly he a.s.sumed more or less the composed and careless demeanor of the modern French cynic, but inwardly the man was a raging fire of fierce pa.s.sions which were sometimes too strong to be held in check. At the present moment he was prepared to sacrifice everything, even life itself, to obtain possession of the woman he coveted, and he made no attempt whatever to resist the tempest of desire that was urging him on with an invincible force in a direction which, for some strange and altogether inexplicable reason, he dreaded.
Yes, there was a dim sense of terror lurking behind all the wild pa.s.sion that filled his soul--a haunting, vague idea that this sudden love, with its glowing ardor and intoxicating delirium, was like the brilliant red sunset which frequently prognosticates a night of storm, ruin and death. Yet, though he felt this presentiment like a creeping shudder of cold through his blood, it did not hold him back, or for a moment impress him with the idea that it might be better to yield no further to this desperate love-madness which enthralled him.
Once only, he thought, ”What if I left Egypt now--at once--and saw her no more?” And then he laughed scornfully at the impossibility proposed.
”Leave Egypt!” he muttered, ”I might as well leave the world altogether! She would draw me back with those sweet wild eyes of hers,--she would drag me from the uttermost parts of the earth to fall at her feet in a very agony of love. My G.o.d! She must have her way and do with me as she will, for I feel that she holds my life in her hands!”
As he spoke these last words half aloud, he sprang up from the chair in which he had been reclining, and stood for a moment lost in frowning meditation.
”My life in her hands!” he repeated musingly. ”Yes, it has come to that! My life!” A great sigh broke from him. ”My life--my art--my work--my name! In all these things I have taken pride, and she--she can trample them under her feet and make of me nothing more than man clamoring for woman's love! What a wild world it is! What a strange Force must that be which created it!--the Force that some men call G.o.d and others Devil! A strange, blind, brute Force!--for it makes us aspire only to fall; it gives a man dreams of ambition and splendid attainment only to fling him like a mad fool on a woman's breast, and bid him find there, and there only, the bewildering sweetness which makes everything else in existence poor and tame in comparison. Well, well--my life! What is it? A mere grain of sand dropped in the sea; let her do with it as she will. G.o.d! How I felt her power upon me last night,--last night when her lithe figure swaying in the dance reminded me ...”
He paused, startled at the turn his own thoughts were taking.
”Of what? Let me try and express to myself now what I could not express or realize last night. She--Ziska--I thought was mine,--mine from her dimpled feet to her dusky hair,--and she danced for me alone. It seemed that the jewels she wore upon her rounded arms and slender ankles were all love-gifts from me--every circlet of gold, every starry, s.h.i.+ning gem on her fair body was the symbol of some secret joy between us--joy so keen as to be almost pain. And as she danced, I thought I was in a vast hall of a majestic palace, where open colonnades revealed wide glimpses of a burning desert and deep blue sky. I heard the distant sound of rolling drums, and not far off I saw the Sphinx--a creature not old but new--resting upon a giant pedestal and guarding the sculptured gate of some great temple which contained, as I then thought, all the treasures of the world. I could paint the picture as I saw it then! It was a fleeting impression merely, conjured up by the dance that dizzied my brain. And that song of the Lotus-lily! That was strange--very strange, for I thought I had heard it often before,--and I saw myself in the vague dream, a prince, a warrior, almost a king, and far more famous in the world than I am now!”
He looked about him uneasily, with a kind of nervous terror, and his eyes rested for a moment on the easel where the picture he had painted of the Princess was placed, covered from view by a fold of dark cloth.
”Bah!” he exclaimed at last with a forced laugh, ”What stupid fancies fool me! It is all the vague talk of that would-be learned a.s.s, Dr.
Dean, with his ridiculous theories about life and death. I shall be imagining I am his fad, Araxes, next! This sort of thing will never do.
Let me reason out the matter calmly. I love this woman,--love her to absolute madness. It is not the best kind of love, maybe, but it is the only kind I am capable of, and such as it is, she possesses it all.
What then? Well! We go to-morrow to the Pyramids, and we join her at the Mena House, I and the poor boy Denzil. He will try his chance--I mine. If he wins, I shall kill him as surely as I myself live,--yes, even though he is Helen's brother. No man shall s.n.a.t.c.h Ziska from my arms and continue to breathe. If I win, it is possible he may kill me, and I shall respect him for trying to do it. But I shall satisfy my love first; Ziska will be mine--mine in every sense of possession,--before I die. Yes, that must be--that will have to be. And afterwards,--why let Denzil do his worst; a man can but die once.”
He drew the cloth off his easel and stared at the strange picture of the Princess, which seemed almost sentient in its half-watchful, half-mocking expression.
”There is a dead face and a living one on this canvas,” he said, ”and the dead face seems to enthral me as much as the living. Both have the same cruel smile,--both the same compelling magnetism of eye. Only it is a singular thing that I should know the dead face even more intimately than the living--that the tortured look upon it should be a kind of haunting memory--horrible--ghastly. ...”
He flung the cloth over the easel again impatiently, and tried to laugh at his own morbid imagination.
”I know who is responsible for all this nonsense,” he said. ”It is that ridiculous little half-mad faddist, Dr. Dean. He is going to the Mena House, too. Well!--he will be the witness of a comedy or a tragedy there,--and Heaven alone knows which it will be!”
And to distract his thoughts from dwelling any longer on the haunting ideas that perplexed him, he took up one of the latest and frothiest of French novels and began to read. Some one in a room not far off was singing a French song,--a man with a rich baritone voice,--and unconsciously to himself Gervase caught the words as they rang out full and clearly on the quiet, heated air--
O toi que j'ai tant aimee Songes-tu que je t'aime encor?
Et dans ton ame alarmee, Ne sens-tu pas quelque remord?
Viens avec moi, si tu m'aimes, Habiter dans ces deserts; Nous y vivrons pour nous memes, Oublies de tout l'univers!
And something like a mist of tears clouded his aching eyes as he repeated, half mechanically and dreamily--
O toi que j'ai tant aimee, Songes-tu que je t'aime encor?
CHAPTER XIII.
For the benefit of those among the untravelled English who have not yet broken a soda-water bottle against the Sphinx, or eaten sandwiches to the immortal memory of Cheops, it may be as well to explain that the Mena House Hotel is a long, rambling, roomy building, situated within five minutes' walk of the Great Pyramid, and happily possessed of a golfing-ground and a marble swimming-bath. That ubiquitous nuisance, the ”amateur photographer,” can there have his ”dark room” for the development of his more or less imperfect ”plates”; and there is a resident chaplain for the piously inclined. With a chaplain and a ”dark room,” what more can the aspiring soul of the modern tourist desire?
Some of the rooms at the Mena House are small and stuffy; others large and furnished with sufficient elegance: and the Princess Ziska had secured a ”suite” of the best that could be obtained, and was soon installed there with befitting luxury. She left Cairo quite suddenly, and without any visible preparation, the morning after the reception in which she had astonished her guests by her dancing: and she did not call at the Gezireh Palace Hotel to say good-bye to any of her acquaintances there. She was perhaps conscious that her somewhat ”free”
behavior had startled several worthy and sanctimonious persons; and possibly she also thought that to take rooms in an hotel which was only an hour's distance from Cairo, could scarcely be considered as absenting herself from Cairene society. She was followed to her desert retreat by Dr. Dean, Armand Gervase, and Denzil Murray, who drove to the Mena House together in one carriage, and were more or less all three in a sober and meditative frame of mind. They arrived in time to see the Sphinx bathed in the fierce glow of an ardent sunset, which turned the golden sands to crimson, and made the granite monster look like a cruel idol surrounded by a sea of blood. The brilliant red of the heavens flamed in its stony eyes, and gave them a sentient look as of contemplated murder,--and the same radiance fitfully playing on the half-scornful, half-sensual lips caused them to smile with a seeming voluptuous mockery. Dr. Dean stood transfixed for a while at the strange splendor of the spectacle, and turning to his two silent companions, said suddenly:
”There is something, after all, in the unguessed riddle of the Sphinx.