Part 34 (1/2)

He felt suddenly she was masquerading, playing with him again, playing with his very heart and soul. The devil tempted him. All the things he had decided he would not say rose to the tip of his tongue. The worst of them--those that hurt him most--he managed to force down. But even the one he did suffer to escape gave him atrocious pain:

'Well, Lettice, to tell the truth, I do think Tony has a bad--a curious influence on you. I do feel he has come between us rather. And I do think that if you would only share with me----'

The sudden way she turned upon him, rising from her chair and standing over him, was so startling that he got up too. They faced each other, he in the blazing suns.h.i.+ne, she in the shade. She looked so different that he was utterly taken aback. She wore that singular Eastern appearance he now knew so well. Expression, att.i.tude, gesture, all betrayed it.

That inflexible, cruel thing shone in her eyes.

'Tom, dear,' she said, but with a touch of frigid exasperation that for a moment paralysed thought and utterance in him, 'whatever happens, you must realise this--that I am myself and that I can never allow my freedom to be taken from me. If you're determined to misjudge, the fault is yours, and if our love, our friends.h.i.+p, cannot understand _that_, there's something wrong with it.'

The word 'friends.h.i.+p' was like a sword thrust. It went right through him.

'I trust you,' he faltered, 'I trust you wholly. I know you're true.'

But the words, it seemed, gave expression to an intense desire, a fading hope. He did not say it with conviction. She gazed at him for a moment through half-closed eyelids.

'_Do_ you, Tom?' she whispered.

'Lettice . . .!'

'Then believe at least--' her voice wavered suddenly, there came a little break in it--'that I am true to you, Tom, as I am to myself. Believe in that . . . and--Oh! for the love of heaven--help me!'

Before he could respond, before he could act upon the hope and pa.s.sion her last unexpected words set loose in him--she turned away to go into the house. Voices were audible behind them, and Miss de Lorne was coming up the sandy drive with Mrs. Haughstone. Tom watched her go. She moved with a certain gliding, swaying walk as she pa.s.sed along the verandah and disappeared behind the curtains of dried gra.s.s. It almost seemed--though this must certainly have been a trick of light and shadow--that she was swathed from head to foot in a clinging garment not of modern kind, and that he caught the gleam of gold upon the flesh of dusky arms that were bare above the elbow. Two persons were visible in her very physical appearance, as two persons had just been audible in her words. Thence came the conflict and the contradictions.

CHAPTER XXV

A few minutes later Lettice was presiding over her luncheon table as though life were simple as the sunlight in the street outside, and no clouds could ever fleck the procession of the years. She was quiet and yet betrayed excitement. Tom, at the opposite end of the table, watched her girlish figure, her graceful gestures. Her eyes were very bright, no shadows in their depths; she returned his gaze with untroubled frankness.

Yet the set of her little mouth had self-mastery in it somewhere; there was no wavering or uncertainty; her self-possession was complete.

But above his head the sword of Damocles hung. He saw the thread, taut and gleaming in the glare of the Egyptian sunlight. . . . He waited upon his cousin's return as men once waited for the sign thumbs up, thumbs down. . . .

'Molly has sent me her alb.u.m,' mentioned Mrs. Haughstone when the four of them were lounging in the garden chairs; 'she wonders if you would write your name in it. It's her pa.s.sion--to fill it with distinguished names.'

And when the page was found, she pointed to the quotation against his birthday date with the remark, in a lowered voice: 'It's quite appropriate, isn't it? For a man, I mean,' she added, 'because when a man's unhappy he's more easily tempted to suspicion than a woman is.'

'What is the quotation?' asked Lettice, glancing up from her deck chair.

Tom was carefully inscribing his 'distinguished' name in the child's alb.u.m, as Mrs. Haughstone read the words aloud over his shoulder:

'”Whatever the circ.u.mstances, there is no man so miserable that he need not be true.” It's anonymous,' she added, 'but it's by some one very wise.'

'A woman, probably,' Miss de Lorne put in with a laugh.

They discussed it, while Tom laboriously wrote his name against it with a fountain pen. His writing was a little shaky, for his sight was blurred and ice was in his veins.

'There's no need for you to hurry, is there?' said Lettice presently.

'Won't you stay and read to me a bit? Or would you rather look in--after dinner--and smoke?' The two selves spoke in that. It was as if the earlier, loving Lettice tried to a.s.sert itself, but was instantly driven back again. How differently she would have said it a few months ago. . . . He made excuses, saying he would drop in after dinner if he might. She did not press him further.

'I _am_ tired a little,' she said gently. 'I'll sleep and rest and write letters too, then.'

She was invariably tired now, Tom soon discovered--until Tony returned from Cairo. . . .

And that evening he escaped the invitations to play bridge, and made his way back, as in a dream, to the little house upon the Nile. He found her bending over the table so that the lamp shone on her abundant coils of hair, and as he entered softly he saw the address on the envelope beside her writing pad, several pages of which were already covered with her small, fine writing. He read the name before he could turn his eyes away.

'I was writing to Tony,' she said, looking up with an untroubled smile, 'but I can finish later. And you've come just in time to take my part.