Part 12 (1/2)
It was the Khamasin, the hot wind bringing sand, that drove him in--with the feeling that these few days and nights had been immeasurable, and that he had been away a thousand years. He came back with the magic of the Desert in his blood, hotel-life tasteless and insipid by comparison.
To human impressions thus he was fresh and vividly sensitive. His being, cleaned and sensitized by pure grandeur, ”felt” people--for a time at any rate--with an uncommon sharpness of receptive judgment. He returned to a life somehow mean and meagre, resuming insignificance with his dinner jacket. Out with the sand he had been regal; now, like a slave, he strutted self-conscious and reduced.
But this imperial standard of the Desert stayed a little time beside him, its purity focussing judgment like a lens. The specks of smaller emotions left it clear at first, and as his eye wandered vaguely over the people a.s.sembled in the dining-room, it was arrested with a vivid shock upon two figures at the little table facing him.
He had forgotten Vance, the Birmingham man who sought the North at midnight with a pocket compa.s.s. He now saw him again, with an intuitive discernment entirely fresh. Before memory brought up her clouding a.s.sociations, some brilliance flashed a light upon him. ”That man,”
Henriot thought, ”might have come with me. He would have understood and loved it!” But the thought was really this--a moment's reflection spread it, rather: ”He belongs somewhere to the Desert; the Desert brought him out here.” And, again, hidden swiftly behind it like a movement running below water--”What does he want with it? What is the deeper motive he conceals? For there is a deeper motive; and it _is_ concealed.”
But it was the woman seated next him who absorbed his attention really, even while this thought flashed and went its way. The empty chair was occupied at last. Unlike his first encounter with the man, she looked straight at him. Their eyes met fully. For several seconds there was steady mutual inspection, while her penetrating stare, intent without being rude, pa.s.sed searchingly all over his face. It was disconcerting.
Crumbling his bread, he looked equally hard at her, unable to turn away, determined not to be the first to s.h.i.+ft his gaze. And when at length she lowered her eyes he felt that many things had happened, as in a long period of intimate conversation. Her mind had judged him through and through. Questions and answer flashed. They were no longer strangers.
For the rest of dinner, though he was careful to avoid direct inspection, he was aware that she felt his presence and was secretly speaking with him. She asked questions beneath her breath. The answers rose with the quickened pulses in his blood. Moreover, she explained Richard Vance. It was this woman's power that shone reflected in the man. She was the one who knew the big, unusual things. Vance merely echoed the rush of her vital personality.
This was the first impression that he got--from the most striking, curious face he had ever seen in a woman. It remained very near him all through the meal: she had moved to his table, it seemed she sat beside him. Their minds certainly knew contact from that moment.
It is never difficult to credit strangers with the qualities and knowledge that oneself craves for, and no doubt Henriot's active fancy went busily to work. But, none the less, this thing remained and grew: that this woman was aware of the hidden things of Egypt he had always longed to know. There was knowledge and guidance she could impart. Her soul was searching among ancient things. Her face brought the Desert back into his thoughts. And with it came--the sand.
Here was the flash. The sight of her restored the peace and splendour he had left behind him in his Desert camps. The rest, of course, was what his imagination constructed upon this slender basis. Only,--not all of it was imagination.
Now, Henriot knew little enough of women, and had no pose of ”understanding” them. His experience was of the slightest; the love and veneration felt for his own mother had set the entire s.e.x upon the heights. His affairs with women, if so they may be called, had been transient--all but those of early youth, which having never known the devastating test of fulfilment, still remained ideal and superb. There was unconscious humour in his att.i.tude--from a distance; for he regarded women with wonder and respect, as puzzles that sweetened but complicated life, might even endanger it. He certainly was not a marrying man! But now, as he felt the presence of this woman so deliberately possess him, there came over him two clear, strong messages, each vivid with certainty. One was that ba.n.a.l suggestion of familiarity claimed by lovers and the like--he had often heard of it--”I have known that woman before; I have met her ages ago somewhere; she is strangely familiar to me”; and the other, growing out of it almost: ”Have nothing to do with her; she will bring you trouble and confusion; avoid her, and be warned”;--in fact, a distinct presentiment.
Yet, although Henriot dismissed both impressions as having no shred of evidence to justify them, the original clear judgment, as he studied her extraordinary countenance, persisted through all denials The familiarity, and the presentiment, remained. There also remained this other--an enormous imaginative leap!--that she could teach him ”Egypt.”
He watched her carefully, in a sense fascinated. He could only describe the face as black, so dark it was with the darkness of great age.
Elderly was the obvious, natural word; but elderly described the features only. The expression of the face wore centuries. Nor was it merely the coal-black eyes that betrayed an ancient, age-travelled soul behind them. The entire presentment mysteriously conveyed it. This woman's heart knew long-forgotten things--the thought kept beating up against him. There were cheek-bones, oddly high, that made him think involuntarily of the well-advertised Pharaoh, Ramases; a square, deep jaw; and an aquiline nose that gave the final touch of power. For the power undeniably was there, and while the general effect had grimness in it, there was neither harshness nor any forbidding touch about it. There was an implacable sternness in the set of lips and jaw, and, most curious of all, the eyelids over the steady eyes of black were level as a ruler. This level framing made the woman's stare remarkable beyond description. Henriot thought of an idol carved in stone, stone hard and black, with eyes that stared across the sand into a world of things non-human, very far away, forgotten of men. The face was finely ugly.
This strange dark beauty flashed flame about it.
And, as the way ever was with him, Henriot next fell to constructing the possible lives of herself and her companion, though without much success. Imagination soon stopped dead. She was not old enough to be Vance's mother, and a.s.suredly she was not his wife. His interest was more than merely piqued--it was puzzled uncommonly. What was the contrast that made the man seem beside her--vile? Whence came, too, the impression that she exercised some strong authority, though never directly exercised, that held him at her mercy? How did he guess that the man resented it, yet did not dare oppose, and that, apparently acquiescing good-humouredly, his will was deliberately held in abeyance, and that he waited sulkily, biding his time? There was furtiveness in every gesture and expression. A hidden motive lurked in him; unworthiness somewhere; he was determined yet ashamed. He watched her ceaselessly and with such uncanny closeness.
Henriot imagined he divined all this. He leaped to the guess that his expenses were being paid. A good deal more was being paid besides. She was a rich relation, from whom he had expectations; he was serving his seven years, ashamed of his servitude, ever calculating escape--but, perhaps, no ordinary escape. A faint shudder ran over him. He drew in the reins of imagination.
Of course, the probabilities were that he was hopelessly astray--one usually is on such occasions--but this time, it so happened, he was singularly right. Before one thing only his ready invention stopped every time. This vileness, this notion of unworthiness in Vance, could not be negative merely. A man with that face was no inactive weakling.
The motive he was at such pains to conceal, betraying its existence by that very fact, moved, surely, towards aggressive action. Disguised, it never slept. Vance was sharply on the alert. He had a plan deep out of sight. And Henriot remembered how the man's soft approach along the carpeted corridor had made him start. He recalled the quasi shock it gave him. He thought again of the feeling of discomfort he had experienced.
Next, his eager fancy sought to plumb the business these two had together in Egypt--in the Desert. For the Desert, he felt convinced, had brought them out. But here, though he constructed numerous explanations, another barrier stopped him. Because he _knew_. This woman was in touch with that aspect of ancient Egypt he himself had ever sought in vain; and not merely with stones the sand had buried so deep, but with the meanings they once represented, buried so utterly by the sands of later thought.
And here, being ignorant, he found no clue that could lead to any satisfactory result, for he possessed no knowledge that might guide him.
He floundered--until Fate helped him. And the instant Fate helped him, the warning and presentiment he had dismissed as fanciful, became real again. He hesitated. Caution acted. He would think twice before taking steps to form acquaintance. ”Better not,” thought whispered. ”Better leave them alone, this queer couple. They're after things that won't do you any good.” This idea of mischief, almost of danger, in their purposes was oddly insistent; for what could possibly convey it? But, while he hesitated, Fate, who sent the warning, pushed him at the same time into the circle of their lives: at first tentatively--he might still have escaped; but soon urgently--curiosity led him inexorably towards the end.
IV
It was so simple a manoeuvre by which Fate began the innocent game. The woman left a couple of books behind her on the table one night, and Henriot, after a moment's hesitation, took them out after her. He knew the t.i.tles--_The House of the Master_, and _The House of the Hidden Places_, both singular interpretations of the Pyramids that once had held his own mind spellbound. Their ideas had been since disproved, if he remembered rightly, yet the t.i.tles were a clue--a clue to that imaginative part of his mind that was so busy constructing theories and had found its stride. Loose sheets of paper, covered with notes in a minute handwriting, lay between the pages; but these, of course, he did not read, noticing only that they were written round designs of various kinds--intricate designs.
He discovered Vance in a corner of the smoking-lounge. The woman had disappeared.
Vance thanked him politely. ”My aunt is so forgetful sometimes,” he said, and took them with a covert eagerness that did not escape the other's observation. He folded up the sheets and put them carefully in his pocket. On one there was an ink-sketched map, crammed with detail, that might well have referred to some portion of the Desert. The points of the compa.s.s stood out boldly at the bottom. There were involved geometrical designs again. Henriot saw them. They exchanged, then, the commonplaces of conversation, but these led to nothing further. Vance was nervous and betrayed impatience. He presently excused himself and left the lounge. Ten minutes later he pa.s.sed through the outer hall, the woman beside him, and the pair of them, wrapped up in cloak and ulster, went out into the night. At the door, Vance turned and threw a quick, investigating glance in his direction. There seemed a hint of questioning in that glance; it might almost have been a tentative invitation. But, also, he wanted to see if their exit had been particularly noticed--and by whom.
This, briefly told, was the first manoeuvre by which Fate introduced them. There was nothing in it. The details were so insignificant, so slight the conversation, so meagre the pieces thus added to Henriot's imaginative structure. Yet they somehow built it up and made it solid; the outline in his mind began to stand foursquare. That writing, those designs, the manner of the man, their going out together, the final curious look--each and all betrayed points of a hidden thing.
Subconsciously he was excavating their buried purposes. The sand was s.h.i.+fting. The concentration of his mind incessantly upon them removed it grain by grain and speck by speck. Tips of the smothered thing emerged.