Part 27 (1/2)

'Well, he's not impressive exactly--is he?--as a rule. That little stoop--and so on. But I saw his figure coming up the path before I recognised who it was, and I thought suddenly of an Egyptian, almost an old Pharaoh, walking.'

She broke off with that little significant laugh Tom knew so well.

But, comical though the picture might have been--Tony walking like a king,--Tom did not laugh. It was not ludicrous, for it was somewhere true. He remembered the singular inner mental picture he had seen above the desert fire, and the pain within him seemed the forerunner of some tragedy that watched too close upon his life. But, for another and more obvious reason, he could not laugh; for he heard the admiration in her voice, and it was upon that his mind fastened instantly. His observation was so mercilessly sharp. He hated it. Where was his usual slowness gone? Why was his blood so quickly apprehensive?

She kept her eyes fixed steadily on his, saying what followed gently, calmly, yet as though another woman spoke the words. She stabbed him, noting the effect upon him with a detached interest that seemed indifferent to his pain. Something remote and ancient stirred in her, something that was not of herself To-day, something half primitive, half barbaric.

'It may have been the blazing light,' she went on, 'the half-savage effect of these amazing sunsets--I cannot say,--but I saw him in a sheet of gold.

There was gold about him, I mean, as though he wore it--and when he came close there was that odd, faint perfume, half of the open desert and half of ambra, as we call it----' Again she broke off and hesitated, leaving the impression there was more to tell, but that she could not say it.

She kept back much. Into the distance now established between them Tom felt a creeping sense of cold, as of the chill desert wind that follows hard upon the sunset. Her eyes still held him steadily. He seemed more and more aware of something merciless in her.

He sat and gazed at her--at a woman he loved, a woman who loved him, but a woman who now caused him pain deliberately because something beyond herself compelled. Her tenderness lay inactive, though surely not forgotten. She, too, felt the pain. Yet with her it was in some odd way--impersonal. . . . Tom, hopelessly out of his depth, swept onward by this mighty wave behind all three of them, sat still and watched her-- fascinated, even terrified. Her eyelids were half closed again.

Another look stole up into her face, driving away the modern beauty, replacing its softness, tenderness with another expression he could not fathom. Yet this new expression was somehow, too, half recognisable.

It was difficult to describe--a little sterner, a little wilder, a faint emphasis of the barbaric peering through it. It was darker. She looked eastern. Almost, he saw her visibly change--here in the twilight of the little Luxor garden by his side. Distance increased remorselessly between them. She was far away, yet ever close at the same time. He could not tell whether she was going away from him or coming nearer. The shadow of tragedy fell on him from the empty sky. . . .

In his bewilderment he tried to hold steady and watch, but the soul in him rushed backwards. He felt, but could not think. The wave surged under him. Various impulses urged him into a pouring flood of words; yet he gave expression to none of them. He laughed a little dry, short laugh.

He heard himself saying lightly, though with apparent lack of interest: 'How curious, Lettice, how very odd! What made him look like that?'

But he knew her answer would mean pain. It came just as he expected:

'He _is_ wonderful--out here--quite different----' Another minute and she would have added 'I'm different, too.' But Tom interrupted hurriedly:

'Do you always see him--like that--now? In a sheet of gold--with beauty?'

His tongue was so hot and dry against his lips that he almost stammered.

She nodded, her eyelids still half closed. She lay very quiet, peering down at him. 'It lasts?' he insisted, turning the knife himself.

'You'll laugh when I tell you something more,' she went on, making a slight gesture of a.s.sent, 'but I felt such joy in myself--so wild and reckless--that when I got to my room that night I danced--danced alone with all my clothes off.'

'Lettice!'

'The spontaneous happiness was like a child's--a sort of freedom feeling.

I _had_ to shake my clothes off simply. I wanted to shake off the walls and ceiling too, and get out into the open desert. Tom--I felt out of myself in a way--as though I'd escaped--into--into quite different conditions----'

She gave details of the singular mood that had come upon her with the arrival of Tony, but Tom hardly heard her. Only too well he knew the explanation. The touch of ecstasy was no new thing, although its manifestation may have been peculiar. He had known it himself in his own lesser love affairs. But that she could calmly tell him about it, that she could deliberately describe this effect upon her of another man--!

It baffled him beyond all thoughts or words. . . . Was the self-revelation an unconscious one? Did she realise the meaning of what she told him?

The Lettice he had known could surely not say this thing. In her he felt again, more distinctly than before, another person--division, conflict.

Her hesitations, her face, her gestures, her very language proved it.

He shrank, as from some one who inflicted pain as a child, unwittingly, to see what the effect would be. . . . He remembered the incident of the insect in the sand. . . .

'And I feel--even now--I could do it again,' her voice pierced in across his moment of hidden anguish. The knife she had thrust again into his breast was twisted then.

It was time that he said something, and a sentence offered itself in time to save him. The desire to hide his pain from her was too strong to be disobeyed. He wanted to know, yet not, somehow, to prevent. He seized upon the sentence, keeping his voice steady with an effort that cut his very flesh: 'There's nothing impersonal exactly in _that_, Lettice!' he exclaimed with an exaggerated lightness.

'Oh no,' she agreed. 'But it's only in England, perhaps, that I'm impersonal, as you call it. I suppose, out here, I've changed.

The beauty, the mystery,--this fierce suns.h.i.+ne or something--stir----'