Part 33 (1/2)

She answered him with a touch of impatience again, almost of exasperation.

He noticed the emphasis she used so needlessly.

'Tom, I'm _not_ tired--not in the way _you_ mean. It's just that I feel like being quiet for a bit. _Really_ it's not so remarkable! Can't you understand?'

'Perfectly,' he rejoined calmly, lighting another cigarette. 'We'll have a programme ready for later--when Tony gets back.' The blood rushed from his heart as he said it.

Her face brightened instantly, as he had expected--dreaded; there was no attempt at concealment anywhere; she showed interest as frankly as a child. 'It was stupid of him to go, just when we were enjoying everything so,' she said again. 'I wonder how long he'll stay----'

'I'll write and tell him to hurry up,' suggested Tom. He twirled his fly-whisk energetically.

'Tell him we can't get on without our _dragoman_,' she added eagerly with her first attempt at gaiety; and then went on to mention other things he was to say, till her pleasure in talking about Tony was so obvious that Tom yielded to temptation suddenly. It was more than he could bear.

'I strongly suspect a pretty girl in the party somewhere,' he observed carelessly.

'There is,' came the puzzling reply, 'but he doesn't care for her a bit.

He told me all about her. It's curious, isn't it, how he fascinates them all? There's something very remarkable about Tony--I can't quite make it out.'

Tom leaned forward, bringing his face in front of her own, and closer to it. He looked hard into her eyes a moment. In the depths of her steady gaze he saw shadows, far away, behind the open expression. There was trouble in her, but it was deep, deep down and out of sight. The eyes of some one else, it seemed, looked through her into his. An older world came whispering across the sunlight and the sand.

'Lettice,' he said quietly, 'there's something new come into your life these last few weeks--isn't there?' His voice grated--like machinery started with violent effort against resistance. 'Some new, big force, I mean? You seem so changed, so different.' He had not meant to speak like this. It was forced out. He expressed himself badly too. He raged inwardly.

She smiled, but only with her lips. The shadows from behind her eyes drew nearer to the surface. But the eyes themselves held steady. That other look peered out of them. He was aware of power, of something strangely bewitching, yet at the same time fierce, inflexible in her . . . and a kind of helplessness came over him, as though he was suddenly out of his depth, without sure footing. The Wave roared in his ears and blood.

'Egypt probably--old Egypt,' she said gently, making a slow gesture with one hand towards the river and the sky. 'It must be that.' The gesture, it seemed to him, had royalty in it somewhere. There was stateliness and dignity--an air of authority about her. It was magnificent. He felt wors.h.i.+p in him. The slave that lies in wors.h.i.+p stirred. He could yield his life, suffer torture for days to give her a moment's happiness.

'I meant something personal, rather,' he prevaricated.

'You meant Tony. I know it. Didn't you, Tom?'

His breath caught inwardly. In spite of himself, and in spite of his decision, she drew his secret out. Enchantment touched him deliciously, an actual torture in it.

'Yes,' he said honestly, 'perhaps I did.' He said it shamefacedly rather, to his keen vexation. 'For it _has_ to do with Tony somehow.'

He got up abruptly, tossed his cigarette over the wall into the river, then sat down again. 'There's something about it--strange and big.

I can't make it out a bit.' He faltered, stammered over the words.

'It's a long way off--then all at once it's close.' He had the feeling that he had put a match to something. 'I've done it now,' he said to himself like a boy, as though he expected that something dramatic must happen instantly.

But nothing happened. The river flowed on silently, the heat blazed down, the leaves hung motionless as before, and far away the lime-stone hills lay sweltering in the glare. But those hills had glided nearer. He was aware of them,--the Valley of the Kings,--the desolate Theban Hills with their myriad secrets and their deathless tombs.

Lettice gave her low, significant little laugh. 'It's odd you should say that, Tom--very odd. Because I've felt it too. It's awfully remote and quite near at the same time----'

'And Tony's brought it,' he interrupted eagerly, half pa.s.sionately.

'It's got to do with him, I mean.'

It seemed to him that the barrier between them had lowered a little.

The Lettice he knew first peered over it at him.

'No,' she corrected, 'I don't feel that he's brought it. He's _in_ it somehow, I admit, but he has not brought it exactly.' She hesitated a moment. 'I think the truth is he can't help himself--any more than we-- you or I--can.'

There was a caressing tenderness in her voice as she said it, but whether for himself or for another he could not tell. In his heart rose a frantic impulse just then to ask--to blurt it out: 'Do you love Tony? Has he taken you from me? Tell me the truth and I can bear it. Only, for heaven's sake, don't hide it!' But, instead of saying this absurd, theatrical thing, he looked at her through the drifting cigarette smoke a moment without speaking, trying to read the expression in her face.

'Last night, for instance,' he exclaimed abruptly; 'in the music room, I mean. Did you feel _that_?--the intensity--a kind of ominous feeling?'