THE next morning, Martin enquiring for Miss Merriton learned that she had already started on a sketching excursion with Hassan, the old, one-eyed dragoman. Her destination was unknown; but the fact that Hassan had taken charge of a basket containing luncheon augured a late return. Martin spent a sorry forenoon at Karnak which, deprived of the vivifying influence of the only goddess that had ever graced its precincts, seemed dead, forlorn and vain. It was a day, too, of khamsin, when hot stones and sand are an abomination to the gasping and perspiring sense. And yet Lucilla had gone off into the desert. She would faint at her easel. She would get sunstroke. She would be brought back dead. And anxious Martin joined a languid luncheon table. There was talk of the absent one. If she had not been Lucilla they would have accounted her mad. He sat through the sweltering afternoon on the eastern terrace over a novel which he could not read. Last night he had held her passionately in his arms. Her surrender had been absolute and eloquent avowal. Already the masculine instinct of possession spoke. Why did she now elude him? He had counted on a morning of joy that would have eclipsed the night. Why had she gone? Deep thought brought comforting solution. To-morrow they were to migrate to Assouan. This was their last day in Luxor where, up to now, Lucilla had not made one single sketch. Now, had she not told him in Brant?me that her object in going to Egypt was to paint it? Generously she had put aside her art for his sake—until the last moment. Of this last moment she was taking advantage. Still—why not a little word to him? He turned to his book. But the thrill of the great kiss pulsated through his veins. He gave himself up to dreams.
Later in the afternoon, Watney-Holcombe, fly-whisk in one hand and handkerchief in the other, took him into the cool, darkened bar, and supplied him with icy drink and told him tales of his early days in San Francisco. A few other men lounged in and joined them. Desultory talk furnished an excuse for systematic imbibing of cold liquid. When Martin reached the upper air he found that Lucilla had already arrived and had gone to her room for rest. He only saw her when she came down late for dinner. She was dressed in a close-fitting charmeuse gown of a strange blue shade like an Egyptian evening. Her pleasant greeting differed no whit from that of twenty-four hours ago. Not by the flicker of a brown eyelash did she betray recollection of last night’s impassioned happenings.
She talked of her excursion to the eager and reproachful group. A sandstorm had ruined a masterpiece, her best brushes, her hair and old Hassan’s temper. She had swallowed half Sahara with her food. Her very donkey, cocking round an angry eye, had called her the most opprobrious term in his vocabulary—an ass. Altogether she had enjoyed herself immensely.
“You ought to have come, Martin,” she said coolly.
He made the obvious retort. “You did not give me the chance.”
“If only you had been up at dawn,” she laughed.
“I was,” he replied. “I lay awake most of the night and I saw the sunrise from my bedroom window.”
“Oh, dear!” she sighed. “You were looking the wrong way. You were adoring the East while I was going out to the West.”
“All that is very pretty, but I’m dying of hunger,” said Watney-Holcombe, carrying her off to the dining room.
The rest followed. At table, she sat between her captor and Dangerfield, so that Martin had no private speech with her. After dinner Watney-Holcombe and Dangerfield wandered off to the bar to play billiards. Martin declining an invitation to join them remained with the four ladies in the lounge. Lucilla had man?uvred herself into an unassailable position between the two married women. Martin and Maisie sat sketchily on the outskirts behind the coffee table. The band discoursed unexhilarating music. Talk languished. At last Maisie sprang to her feet and took Martin unceremoniously by the arm.
“If I sit here much longer I shall sob. Come on out and do something.”
Martin rose. “What can we do?”
“Anything. We can gaze at the stars and you can swear that you love me. Or we can go and look at Cook’s steamboat.”
“Will you come with us, Lucilla?” asked Martin.
She shook her head and smiled. “I’m far too tired and lazy.”
The girl, still holding his arm, swung him round. He had no choice but to obey. They walked along the quay as far as the northern end of the temple. By the time of their return Lucilla had gone to bed. She had become as elusive as a dream.
He did not capture her till the next morning on the railway station platform, before their train started. By a chance of which he took swift advantage, she stood some paces apart from the little group of friends. He carried her further away. Moments were precious; he went at once to the root of the matter.
“Lucilla, why are you avoiding me?”
She opened wide eyes. “Avoiding you, my dear Martin?”
“Yesterday you gave me no opportunity of speaking to you, and this morning it has been the same. And I’ve been in a fever of longing for a word with you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “And now you have me, what is the word?”
“I love you,” said Martin.
“Hush,” she whispered, with an involuntary glance round at the red-jerseyed porters and the stray passengers. “This is scarcely the place for a declaration.”
“The declaration was the night before last.”
“Hush!” she said again, and laid her gloved hand on his arm. But he insisted.
“You haven’t forgotten?”
“Not yet. How could I? You must give me time.”
“For what?” he asked.
“To forget.”
A horrible pain shot through him. “Do you want to forget all that has passed between us?”
She raised her eyes, frankly, and laughed. “My dear boy, how can we go into such intimate matters among this rabble?”
“Oh, my dear,” said Martin, “I am only asking a very simple question. Do you want to forget?”
“Perhaps not quite,” she replied softly, and the pain through his heart ceased and he held up his head and laughed, and then bent it towards her and asked forgiveness.
“If I didn’t forgive you, I suppose you’d be miserable?”
“Abjectly wretched,” he declared.
“That wouldn’t be a fit frame of mind for a six-hour stifling and dusty railway journey. So let us be happy while we can.”
At Assouan they went to the hotel on the little green island in the middle of the Nile. In the hope of her redeeming a half promise of early descent before dinner, he dressed betimes and waited in the long lounge, his eyes on the lift. She appeared at last, fresh, radiant, as though she had stepped out of the dawn. She sat beside him with an adorable suggestion of intimacy.
“Martin,” she said, “I want you to make me a promise, will you?”
His eyes on hers, he promised blindly.
“Promise me to be good while we’re here.”
“Good?” he queried.
“Yes. Don’t you know what ‘good’ means? It means not to be tempestuous or foolish or inquisitive.”
“I see,” said Martin, with a frown between his brows. “I mustn’t”—he hesitated—“I mustn’t do what I did the other night, and I mustn’t say that all my universe, earth and sun and moon and stars are packed in this”—his fingers met the drapery of her bodice in a fugitive, delicate touch—“and I mustn’t ask you any questions about what you may be thinking.”
There was a new tone in his voice, a new expression in his eyes and about the corners of his lips, all of which she was quick to note. She cast him a swift glance of apprehension, and her smile faded.
“You set out the position with startling concreteness.”
“I do,” said he. “Up to a couple of days ago I worshipped you as a divine abstraction. The night before last, things, to use your words, became startlingly concrete. You are none the less wonderful and adorable, but you have become the concrete woman of flesh and blood I want and would sell my soul for.”
She glanced at him again, anxiously, furtively, half afraid. In such terms do none but masterful men speak to women; men who from experience of a deceitful sex know how to tear away ridiculous veils; or else men who, having no knowledge of woman whatever, suddenly awaken with primitive brutality to the sex instinct. Her subtle brain worked out the rapid solution. Her charming idea of making a man of Martin had succeeded beyond her most romantic expectations. She realised that facing him dry and cold, as she was doing now, would only develop a dramatic situation which would be cut uncomfortably short by the first careless friend who stepped out of the lift. She temporised, summoning the smile to her eyes.
“Anyway, you’ve promised.”
“I have,” said Martin.
“You see, you can’t stand with a pistol at my head whenever we meet alone. You must give me time.”
“To forget?”
“To make up my mind whether to forget or remember,” she declared radiantly. “Now what more do you want an embarrassed woman to say?”
Swiftly she had reassumed command. Martin yielded happily. “If it isn’t all I want,” said he, “it’s much more than I dared claim.”
She rose and he rose too. She passed her hand through his arm. “Come and see whether anybody has had the common sense to reserve a table for dinner.”
Thus during her royal pleasure, their semi-loverlike relations were established; rather perhaps were they nicely balanced on a knife-edge, the equilibrium dependent on her skill. As at Luxor, so at Assouan did they the things that those who go to Assouan do. They lounged about the hotel garden. They took the motor ferry to the little town on the mainland and wandered about the tiny bazaar. They sailed on the Nile. They went to the merriest race meetings in heathendom, where you can back your fancy in camel, donkey or buffalo for a shilling upwards at the state pari-mutuel. They made an expedition to the Dam. The main occupation, as it is that of most who go to Assouan, was not to pass the time, but to sit in the sun and let the time pass. A golden fortnight or so slipped by. Martin lived as freely in his goddess’s company as he had done at Cairo or Luxor. She had ordained a period of probation. All his delicacy of sentiment proclaimed her justified. She comported herself as the most gracious of divinities, and the most warmly sympathetic of human women, leading him by all the delicate devices known to Olympus and Clapham Common, to lay bare to her his inmost soul. He told her all that he had to tell: much that he had told already: his childhood in Switzerland, his broken Cambridge career, his life at Margett’s Universal College, his adventures with Corinna, his waiterdom at Brant?me, his relations with Fortinbras, Bigourdin, Félise. The only thing in his simple past that he hid was his knowledge of the tragedy in the life of Fortinbras. “And then you came,” said he, “and touched my dull earth, and turned it into a New Jerusalem of ‘pure gold like unto clear glass.’?” And he told her of his consultation with the Dealer in Happiness, and his journey to London and his meeting with Corinna in the flimsy flat. It seemed to him that she had the divine power of taking his heart in her blue-veined hands and making it speak like that of a child. For everything in the world for which that heart had longed she had the genius to create expression.
In spite of all the delicious intimacy of such revelation he observed his compact loyally. For the quivering moment it was enough that she knew and accepted his love; it was enough to realise that when she smiled on him, she must remember unresentfully the few holy seconds of his embrace. And yet, when alone with her, in the moonlit garden, so near that accidental touch of arm or swinging touch of skirt or other delicate physical sense of her, was an essential part of their intercourse, he wondered whether she had a notion of the madness that surged in his blood, of the tensity of the grip in which he held himself.
And so, lotus-eating, reckless of the future, happy only in the throbbing present, he remained with Lucilla and her friends at Assouan until the heat of spring drove them back to Cairo.
There, on the terrace of Shepheard’s, on the noon of his arrival, he found Fortinbras. The Dealer in Happiness, economically personally (though philosophically) conducted, had also visited Luxor and had brought away a rich harvest of observation. He bestowed it liberally on Martin, who, listening with perplexed brow, wondered whether he himself had brought away but chaff. After a while Fortinbras enquired:
“And the stock we wot of—is it still booming?”
Martin said: “I’ve been inconceivably happy. Don’t let us talk about it.”
Presently Lucilla and Mrs. Dangerfield joined them and Fortinbras was carried off to the Semiramis to lunch. It was a gay meal. The Watney-Holcombes had gathered in a few young soldiers, and youth asserted itself joyously. Fortinbras, urbane and debonair, laughed with the youngest. The subalterns thinking him a personage of high importance who was unbending for their benefit, paid him touching deference. He exerted himself to please, dealing out happiness lavishly; yet his bland eyes kept keen watch on Martin and Lucilla sitting together on the opposite side of the great round table. Once he caught and held ............