When the gong sounded for dinner, Jim protested to Monimé that he was ill and did not wish to change his clothes and come down. For a while he had hoped, in his madness, that when Mrs. Darling saw him again he would be able to look straight at her and deny that he was her son-in-law. “I evidently have a double,” he would say. “My name is Easton, madam; the proprietor of the hotel will tell you that he has known me as such for the last five years.” A fact, indeed, which was beyond dispute, for he had stayed here before he went to the gold mines. But now that the time had come he realized that this was fantastic, and his one idea was to get away, so that he might make an end of himself in decent privacy. He was not a coward: he was not afraid of death or physical suffering. But with all his soul he dreaded captivity or enforcement of any kind. The possibility of being chased into a corner, of being handcuffed and put behind bolts and bars, of being compelled and constrained, and finally led, pinioned, to the gallows, filled him with horrible terror.
One of the most common forms in which a breakdown of the nervous system shows itself is that known as claustrophobia, a fear of being shut up or surrounded and fettered. It is a primitive and primeval dread to which the disordered consciousness[290] leaps back; it is a survival of the days, ?ons ago, when man was both hunter and prey of man; it is, in essence, the fear of the trap.
Monimé, from whom his mental torture could not be altogether concealed, looked at him with troubled, anxious eyes. “Oh, Jim,” she said, “what is the matter with you? There’s something dreadful on your mind; there’s something worrying you, and you won’t tell me about it.”
“No, there’s nothing, I assure you,” he answered, in quick denial. She must never know, for knowledge of the whole miserable business might bring contempt, and her love for him might be killed. Of all his terrors the terror of losing her love was the most unbearable.
“Come down to dinner, dear,” she persuaded. “It will do you good.” She bent down and looked intently at him as he sat on the edge of the bed, scraping the carpet with his feet and staring at the floor, his eyes wild with alarm. “It isn’t that you are afraid of meeting somebody you don’t want to see, is it?”
His heart seemed to stop beating for a moment as he denied the suggestion. She was beginning to guess, she was beginning to suspect.
“Oh, very well, then,” he said, unable to meet her gaze. “I’ll come down. Perhaps, as you say, it’ll do me good.”
There was the black murk of damnation now in his soul, lit only by the glow of his fighting instinct. The crisis of terror was passing, and now he was determined not to be caught. “Go on down, darling,” he said. “I’ll follow you in a moment.”
[291]
She put her arms about him and kissed him, smoothing his forehead with her cool hand. “Whatever it is that is troubling you,” she whispered, “remember always that I love you, and shall go to my grave loving you and you only.”
He closed his eyes, and for a while his head lay upon her breast, like that of an exhausted child. All the brawn of life had been knocked out of him. Every hope, every dream, every vestige of content had gone from him; and in these pitiable straits he desired only to shut out the world, and to obtain, if but for a moment, a respite from the horror of actuality.
As soon as he was alone he went to his portmanteau, and took from it his revolver, which he loaded and placed in his pocket. His intention had been to appear to meet with an accidental death, but if he had left it now till too late, he would have to blow his brains out. A Bedouin wanderer such as he, he muttered to himself, must, at any rate, never be taken alive: a son of the open road must never be led captive.
For a moment he stood irresolute at the open door of his room, and the sweat gleamed upon his forehead. Then he braced himself, and walked down the stairs. Monimé was not far ahead of him, and, as he turned the corner to descend the last flight which led down into the front hall, she paused at the foot of the steps to wait for him.
He saw her standing there in the light of a large electric globe, her black hair as vivid as a strong colour, her skin white like marble, her eyes occult in their serenity, her lips smiling encouragement to[292] him; but in the same glance he saw also a group of persons standing before the cashier’s office in the otherwise empty hall, and instantly he knew that the crisis of his life was upon him.
There, fat but alert, stood Mrs. Darling, still wearing day-dress and hat; beside her was a quiet-looking Englishman who was the British Consul, and with whom Jim had had dealings in his gold-mining days; on her other hand was an Egyptian police-officer; and next to him was the proprietor of the hotel, whose face was turned in contemplation of the native policeman standing at the main entrance. It was evident on the instant that as soon as Mrs. Darling had caught sight of him on his arrival she had communicated with the police, who, in their turn, had fetched the Consul.
As Jim appeared at the head of the stairs Mrs. Darling clutched at the Consul’s arm. “There he is!” she exclaimed excitedly, pointing an accusing finger at him. “That’s the man!”
He saw Monimé swing round and face them; he saw the policeman put his hand to his hip-pocket, and turn to the Consul for instructions; and, as though a flame had been set to straw, his anger blazed up into unreasoning, passionate hate of all that these people stood for.
Instantly he whipped out his revolver and shouted to them: “Put up your hands, or I shoot!” at the same time running downstairs and straight at them across the hall—a wild, grey-flannelled figure, his dark hair tumbling over his pallid face, and his eyes burning like coals of fire. All the hands in the[293] group went up together, and he saw Mrs. Darling’s face grow livid with alarm.
Monimé ran forward. “Jim! Oh, Jim!” she cried, trying to seize his arm.
“I’m innocent!” he gasped. “But I won’t be taken alive by a damned set of bungling parasites.”
Still covering them with his revolver he backed towards the garden entrance, and the next moment was out in the chill night air and running like a madman down the path between the palms and shrubs. The darkness was intense, and more than once he fell into the flower-beds, kicking the soft earth in all directions. He heard shouts and cries behind, but the thunder of his own brain rendered these meaningless as he dashed onwards under the stars.
Soon he came to the back wall of the garden, and this he scaled like a cat, dropping into the narrow lane on the other side and continuing his flight between the walls of the silent native huts and enclosures. At length he emerged, breathless, into the open space not far from the railway-station, where, under a flickering street-lamp, a two-horsed carriage was standing awaiting hire.
He hailed the red-fezzed driver with as much composure as he could command, and told him to drive “like the wind” to the temple of Karnak. This, at any rate, would take him clear of the town, and near the open fields; and to the driver he would seem to be but a somewhat impatient Cook’s tourist, anxious to see the ruins by night. Perhaps there was no need to kill himself: he might go into hiding and ultimately fly to the uttermost ends of the earth.
[294]
As the carriage lurched and swayed along the embanked road, he turned in his seat to watch for his pursuers; but there was no sign of them. Yet this fact now brought no comfort to him. With returning sanity he realized clearly enough that escape was impossible. Were he to hide in the desert, the Ababdeh trackers, always employed by the police in these districts, would soon hunt him down. Were he to take refuge amongst the natives, his hiding-place would be revealed in a few hours in response to the official offer of a reward. And, anyway, to abandon Monimé, and to have no likely means of communicating with her, would make the smart of life unbearable.
There was no way out, and his present flight resolved itself into a wild attempt to obtain breathing space in which to prepare himself for the end, and, if possible, to see Monimé once again to bid her farewell. The jury at home would be bound to find him guilty: the evidence was too damning. Some tramp had murdered Dolly, and was now lost forever; or else, and more probably, Merrivall’s housekeeper had actually done it, but was now unalterably acquitted. It was certain that he would be hanged in the end, and it would therefore be far better to finish it this very night.
In these moments he drank the cup of bitterness to the dregs; and the comparative calmness which now succeeded his frenzy was the calmness of utter despair. Thus, when the driver pulled up his horses in the darkness before the towering pylons of the main gateway of the temple of Karnak, Jim paid him off and approached the ancient courts of Ammon,[295] determined only to keep his pursuers at bay until he could make his confession to Monimé and die in the peace of her forgiveness.
The watchman at the gateway, being used to the eccentric ways of the foreigner, admitted him without comment, and left him to wander alone amongst the vast black ruins, which were massed around him in a silence broken only by the distant yelping of the jackals and the nearer hooting of the owls. Through the roofless Hypostyle Hall he went, a desolate little figure, dwarfed into insignificance by the stupendous pillars which mounted up about him into the stars; and here, presently, he stood for a while with arms outstretched and face upturned, in an agony of supplication.
“O Almighty You,” he prayed, “Who, under this name or under that, have ever been the God of the wretched, and the Father of the broken-hearted, look down upon this miserable little grub whom You have created, and whose brain You had filled with all those splendid dreams which now You have shattered and swept aside. Before I come to You, grant me this last request: give me a little time with the woman I love, so that I may make my peace with her and hear her words of forgiveness.”
He walked onwards, past the huge obelisk of Hatshepsut, and in amongst the mass of fallen blocks of stone which lie heaped before the Sanctuary; but now frenzy seized him again, and, furiously resolving to meet his fate, he swung round and retraced his steps back to the first court, breathing imprecations as he went. Somehow, by some means, he must see Monimé before the final production[296] of the handcuffs gave him the signal for his suicide, which it was now too late to disguise as an accident.
“Blast them!” he muttered. “Blast them! Blast them! I’ll show them that they can’t go chasing innocent men across the world. I’ll shoot the lot of them, and then I’ll shoot myself.” He stumbled over a fallen column. “Damnation!” he cried. “Who the devil left that thing lying about?—the silly idiots!”
Suddenly voices at the gateway came to his ears, and, with hammering heart, he realized that he had been tracked and that his hour was come. Thereupon he ran headlong through the dark forecourt of the small temple of Rameses the Third which stands at the south side of the main courtyard, and concealed himself, panting, in the sanctuary at its far end, a place to which there was but the one entrance.
Here he stood in the darkness,............