Part 6 (1/2)

”Ah, good morning, Muriel dear,” he exclaimed, giving her cheek a friendly but quite unaffectionate kiss. ”You've had a lazy morning, eh?

Feel the heat, no doubt. Yes? No? Ah, that's good, that's capital! Good morning Mr. Lane, or Daniel, I should say, since you permit it. I hope Muriel has been amusing you.”

”She has,” said Daniel, and Muriel blushed.

Rupert Helsingham entered the room; and, when he had made his salutations, Muriel turned to him with relief, strolling with him across to the windows through which the warm scented air of the garden drifted, bringing with it the drone of the flies and the incessant rustle of the palms.

”Please see that I don't sit next to that horrible man at lunch,” she whispered.

”There's no choice,” he answered. ”The four of us are alone today.”

”Shall we go in?” said Lord Blair, nodding vigorously to Muriel; and the three men followed her into the dining-room.

The meal proved to be less of an ordeal than she had expected. Their visitor talked at first almost exclusively to his host, who showed him, and discussed, the draft of his reply to the Minister of War; and Muriel made herself quite entrancing to Rupert Helsingham. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances she was, in spite of occasional lapses into bored silence, a quick and witty talker; one who speedily established a sympathetic connection with the person with whom she was conversing; and her laughter was frequent and infectious. It was only this Daniel Lane who had such a disturbing effect upon her equanimity; but here, at the opposite side of a large table, she seemed to be out of range of his influence, and she rejoiced in her unimpaired power to captivate the little Diplomatic secretary.

”I am going to call you Rupert at once,” she said to him; and, breaking in on the opposite conversation, ”Father,” she demanded, ”d'you mind if I call this man by his Christian name? Everybody seems to.”

Lord Blair laughed, holding out his hands in a gesture which indicated that he took no responsibility, and turned to Daniel. ”Do you think I ought to let her?” he asked.

To Muriel his remark could hardly have been more unfortunate, and a momentary frown gathered upon her face.

”I think it's a good idea,” replied Daniel, looking quietly at her.

”Then if you quarrel you can revert to 'Mr. Helsingham' with telling effect.”

Muriel made a slight movement, not far removed from a toss of her head, and, without giving any reply, continued her conversation to Rupert.

The meal was nearly finished when she became aware that her friend was not paying full attention to her remarks, but was listening to Daniel Lane, whose tongue a gla.s.s of wine had loosened, and who was speaking in a low vibrating voice, describing some phases of his life in the desert.

At this she, too, began to listen, at first with some irritation, but soon with genuine interest. She had supposed him to be more or less monosyllabic, and she was astonished at his command of languages.

As she fixed her eyes upon him he glanced at her for a moment, and there was a pause in his words. For the first time he was conscious of a look of friends.h.i.+p in her face; and his heart responded to the expression.

The pause was hardly noticeable, but to him it was as though something of importance had happened; and when he turned again to continue to address himself to his host, there was a warm impulse behind his words.

Muriel thereafter made no further remark to Rupert; but leaning her elbow upon the table, and fingering some grapes, gave her undivided attention to the speaker.

”It's always a matter of surprise to me,” he was saying, ”that people don't come out more often into the desert. You all sit here in this garden of Egypt, this little strip of fertile land on the banks of the Nile, and you look up at the great wall of the hills to east and west; but you don't ever seem to think of climbing over and running away into the wonderful country beyond.”

Was it, he asked, that they were afraid of the roads that led nowhere-in-particular, and the tracks that wandered like meandering dreams? Why, those were the best kind of roads, because they merely took your feet wherever your heart suggested-to shady places where you could sprawl on the cool sand; or up to rocks where the sun beat on you and the invigorating wind blew on your face; or down to wells of good water where you could drink your fill and take your rest in the shade of the tamarisks; or along echoing valleys where there was always an interesting turning just ahead; or into the flat plains where the mirage receded before you.

”You soon grow desert-wise,” he said: ”you can't get lost; and at last the tracks will always bring you to some Abraham's tent, and he'll lift up his eyes and see you, and come running to you to bid you welcome. And there's bread for you, and honey, and curds, and camel's milk, and maybe venison; and tobacco; and quiet, courteous talk far into the night, under the stars; and perhaps a boy's full-throated song.... I can't think how you can live your crabbed life here in Cairo, when there's all that vast liberty so near at hand.”

Muriel sipped her coffee, and listened, with a kind of excitement. His voice had some quality in it which seemed to arouse a response deep in the unfrequented places of her mind. It was as though she saw with her own eyes the scenes which he was describing. With him she ascended the bridlepath over the wall of the hills, and ran laughing down into the valleys beyond, the wind in her face and the sun at her back; with him she went sliding down the golden drifts of sand, or sprang from rock to rock along the course of forgotten torrents; and with him she sat at the camp fire and listened to the far-off cry of the little jackals.

He told of warm moonlight nights spent in the open, when the drowsy eye looks up at the Milky Way, and the mind drifts into sleep, rocked, as it were, in a cradle slung between the planets. He spoke of the first sweet vision of the opalescent dawn, when sleep ends in quiet wakefulness, without a middle period of stupor; and of the rising sun over the low horizon, when every pebble casts a liquid blue shadow and the shallowest footprints in the sand look like little pools of water.

He told of blazing days; of long journeys across hills and plains; of the drumming of the pads of the camels upon the hard tracks; of deep, shadowed gorges, and precipices touched only at the summit by the glare of the sun; of the endless waves of the sand drifts, their sharp ridges seen against the sky, like gold against blue enamel; of flaming sunsets, and mysterious dusks, when, by creeping over the top of a hillock, one might look down at ghostly gazelle drinking from a pool, and might listen to the sucking in of the water.

And more especially he spoke of the freedom of the desert. ”Ah, there's liberty for you!” he exclaimed, and his eyes seemed to be alight with his enthusiasm. ”That's the life for a man! There are no clocks out there, no miserable appointments to keep, no laying of foolish foundation stones, or inspecting of sweating troops, no diplomatic speeches, no wordy doc.u.ments signifying nothing. Out there the men that you meet speak the truth openly, and do all that they have to do without cunning, and without fuss or frills. If you are wandering and hungry they give you shelter and feed you; if they like you they treat you as a brother; and when they wish to kill you they tell you so, and give you four-and-twenty hours in which to quit. They are free men, and to them all men have the status of the free; all partake, so to speak, of the liberty of the desert.”

He stopped rather abruptly: it was as though suddenly he had become conscious that he had engaged the attention of the company, and was abashed.