That lustrous land of weary music and wild dancing, of reverend tombs
and pert Arabs, that Egypt of plagues and tourists, to whose sandy bosom
Society flocks, affects her visitors in many different ways. Bellairs
went to her under the fixed impression that he was a cynic, and found
that he was a romanticist. Very acute in mind, he had long flattered
himself on being unimpressionable; and he was much inclined to think
that to be insensitive was to be strong with the best kind of strength.
He loved to lay stress on all that was devil-may-care in his character,
and to put aside all that was prone to cling, or weep, or wonder, or
pray, and he fancied that if he cultivated one side of his mind
assiduously he could eliminate the other sides. In England, in London,
the process had seemed to be successful. But Egypt gave to him illusions
with both hands, and, against his will, he had to accept them. Protests
were unavailing, and soon he ceased to protest, and told himself the
horrid fact that he was a sentimentalist, perhaps even a poet. Good
heavens! a Bellairs--a poet! His soldier ancestors seemed forming a
square and fixing bayonets to resist the charging notion. And yet--and
yet--
Instead of playing pool after dinner at night, Bellairs found himself
wandering, like Haroun Al Raschid, through the narrow ways of Cairo,
mixing with the natives, studying their loves, and drinking their
coffee. There were moments, retrograde moments, when he even wished to
wear their dress, to drape his long-limbed British form in a flowing
blue robe, and wrap his dark head in a bulging white turban. He resisted
this devil of an idea; but the fact that it had ever come to him
troubled him. And, partly to regain his manhood, his hard scepticism,
his contempt of outside, delicate influences, he went up the Nile--and
succumbed utterly to fantasy and to old romance. "I am no longer Jack
Bellairs," he told himself one day, as the steamer on which he travelled
neared Luxor on its way down the river from the First Cataract--"I am
somebody else; some one who is touched by a sunset, and responsive to a
gleam of rose on the Libyan Mountains, some one who dreams at night when
the pipes wail under the palm-trees, some one who feels that the great
river has life, and that the desert owns a wistful soul, and has a sweet
armour with silence. Good-bye, Jack Bellairs! Go home to England--I stay
here."
And that evening he left the steamer, and took a room for a month at the
Luxor Hotel. And that evening he cast the skin of his former self, and
emerged, with fluttering wings, from the chrysalis of his identity. He
was a bachelor, aged twenty-eight, and he was travelling alone; so
there was no critical eye to mark the change in him, no chattering
tongue to express surprise at his pleasant abandonment to the follies
which make up the lives of sensitive artists and refined sensualists who
can differentiate between the promenade of the "Empire," and the garden
of love. As he stepped out into the Arab-haunted village that night,
after dinner, Bellairs breathed a sigh of relief. For a month he would
let himself go. Where to? He bent his steps towards the river, the Nile
that is the pulsing blood in the veins of Egypt. Moored in the shadow of
its brown banks lay a string of bright-eyed dahabeeyahs. From more than
one of them came music. Bellairs, his cigarette his only companion,
strolled slowly along listening idly in a pleasant dream. A woman's
voice sang, asking "Ninon" what was her scheme of life. A man beat out
his soul at the feet of "Medje." And, upon the deck of the last
dahabeeyah, a woman played a fantastic mazurka. Bellairs was fond of
music, and her performance was so clever, so full of nuances,
understanding, wild passion, that he stood still to remark it more
closely.
"She has known many things, good and evil," he thought, as his mind
noted the intellect that spoke in the changes of time, the regret and
the gaiety that the touch demonstrated so surely and easily, as the mood
of the composition changed. The music ceased.
"Betty," a woman's voice said, in English, but with a slight French
accent, "I want to see the stars. This awning hides them. Come for a
little walk."
"Yes; I want to see the stars too, and the awning does hide them," a
girl's voice answered. "Do let us take a little walk."
Bellairs smiled, as he said to himself, "The first voice is the voice of
the musician, and the second voice seems to be its echo." He was still
standing on the bank when the two women stepped upon the gangway to the
shore and climbed to the narrow path.
As they passed him by they glanced at him rather curiously. One was a
woman of about thirty, dark, with a pale, strong-featured face. The
other was a fair, aristocratic-looking girl, not more than seventeen.
"She is the echo," Bellairs thought. "Rather a sweet one." Then, at a
distance, he followed them, and presently found them sitting together in
the garden of the Hotel. He sat down not far off. A man, whom he knew
slightly, spoke to them, and afterwards crossed to him.
"That lady plays very cleverly," Bellairs said.
"Mademoiselle Leroux, you mean--yes. You know her?"
"Not at all. I only heard her from the river bank."
"She is travelling with Lord Braydon. She is a great friend of Lady
Betty Lambe, his daughter."
"That pretty girl?"
"Yes. Shall I introduce you?"
"I should be delighted."
A moment later Bellairs was sitting with the two ladies and talking of
Egypt. It seemed to him that they were the first nurses to dandle his
new baby-nature, this nature which Egypt had given to him, and which
only to-night he had definitely accepted. Perhaps this fact quickly
cemented their acquaintance. At any rate, a distinct friendship began to
walk in their conversation, and Bellairs found himself listening to
Mdlle. Leroux, and looking at Lady Betty, with a great deal of interest
and of admiration. Presently the former said:--
"I knew you would be introduced to us to-night."
Bellairs was surprised.
"When?" he asked.
"When we passed you just now on the bank of the Nile."
"I knew we should too," said Lady Betty.
"You must be very intuitive," said Bellairs.
"Women generally are," remarked Mdlle. Leroux.
"Yes. Do your intuitions tell you whether our acquaintance will be long
and agreeable?"
"Perhaps--but I never prophesy."
"Why?"
"Because I am always right."
"Is that a valid reason for abstention?"
"I think so. For in this world those who look forward generally see
darkness."
"I cannot achieve a proper pessimism in Upper Egypt," Bellairs replied.
* * * * *
A week later, Bellairs felt quite certain that there had never been a
period in his life when he had not known and talked with Mdlle. Leroux
and Lady Betty Lambe. Lord and Lady Braydon asked him to lunch on the
dahabeeyah almost every day, and he often strolled down to tea without
invitation. Then, in the afternoon, there were donkey expeditions to
Karnak, or across the river to the tombs of the kings, to the desert
villa of Monsieur Naville, to ancient Thebes, to the two Colossi. Lord
Braydon was consumptive and was spending the winter and spring in Egypt.
Lady Braydon seldom left his side, and so it happened that Bellairs and
his two acquaintances of the garden were often alone together. Bellairs
became deeply interested in them, and for a rather peculiar reason. He
was fascinated by the extraordinary sympathy that existed between the
two women--if Lady Betty could be called a woman yet. Mdlle. Leroux had
obtained so strong an influence over the girl that she seemed to have
grafted not only her mind, but her heart, her apparatus of emotions and
of affections, on to Lady Betty's. What the former silently thought,
the latter silently thought too, and when the silence died in
expression, they frequently spoke almost the same sentence
simultaneously. Sometimes Mdlle. Leroux would express some feeling with
vehemence to Bellairs when Lady Betty was out of hearing, and an hour or
two afterwards, with only a slightly fainter vehemence, Lady Betty would
express the same feeling. Indeed, these two women seemed to have only
one heart, one soul, between them, the heart and soul that had
originally been the sole property of the elder one.
"You are very generous," said Bellairs one day to Mdlle. Leroux.
"Why?" she asked in surprise.
"You give away things that most of us have only the power to keep."
"What do you mean?"
"Some day, perhaps, I will tell you."
Clarice Leroux was tremendously impulsive, and she had taken an
immediate and strong liking to Bellairs. In this Lady Betty, as usual,
coincided. But when Clarice's liking passed through self-revelations,
confidences, towards a stronger feeling, it was rather strange to find
Lady Betty still treading in her footsteps, still ever succeeding her in
her attitudes of mind and of heart. Yet the inevitable double
flirtation, apparently expected and desired by the two women, was
strangely gilded by novelty; and, at first, Bellairs played as happily
with these two dual natures as a child plays with two doll
representatives of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. For, at first, he
possessed the child's power of detachment, and felt that he could at any
moment discard dolls for soldiers, or a Noah's Ark, and still keep
happiness in his lap. But most things have an inherent tendency to
become complicated if they are let alone and allowed to develop free
from definite guidance, and presently Bellairs became conscious of
advancing complications. His intellectual appreciation of a new
situation began to degenerate into a more emotional condition, which
disturbed and irritated him. It seemed that he was peering through the
bars of the gate that guards the garden of passion. Which of the two
women did he see in the garden?
He told himself that, having regard to the circumstances of the case, he
ought to see both of them. Unfortunately, a vision of that kind never
has been, and never will be, seen by a man. The temple in which the idol
sits always makes a difference in the nature of our worship of the idol.
Bellairs was forced to recognise this fact. And the temple in which sat
the idol of Lady Betty's nature attracted him more than the temple in
which sat the idol of Mdlle. Leroux's nature. He came to this conclusion
one afternoon at Karnak. They three were hidden away in a stone nook of
this great stone forest, enshrined from the gaze of tourists by mighty
rugged pillars, walled in by huge blocks of antique masonry that threw
cold shadows whence the lizards stole to seek the sun. The blue sky was
broken to their gaze by a narrow section of what had been, doubtless,
once a wide-spread roof. A silence of endless ages hung around them in
this haven fashioned by dead men and living Time.
Mdlle. Leroux had been boiling a kettle; and they sipped tea, and, at
first, did not talk. But tea unlooses the bonds of speech. After their
second cups they felt communicative.
"One week gone out of my four," Bellairs said, "and each will seem
shorter-lived than its forerunner."
"You go in three weeks from now?" said Mdlle. Leroux, with an uneven
intonation that betokened a sudden awakening to the finality of things.
"Yes; at the end of January."
"And we are here until nearly the end of March."
"Yes," said Lady Betty; "it will seem a very long time. February will be
eternal."
"It is the shortest month in the year," Bellairs remarked.
Mdlle. Leroux looked at him sarcastically.
"You English are so prosaic," she exclaimed. "Any Frenchman would have
understood."
"What?"
"That we were paying you a compliment."
"Perhaps I did understand it, and preferred not to show my
comprehension; there is such a thing as modesty!"
"There is--such a thing as false modesty!"
"Exactly," remarked Lady Betty.
"I will accept your compliment gladly," said Bellairs, looking at Lady
Betty.
"Mine?" asked Clarice Leroux.
"Yes," Bellairs replied.
The consciousness that he cared very much more for such a pretty meaning
in Lady Betty than in Clarice Leroux led him then, for the first time,
to that Garden Gate. He looked at Lady Betty again with a new feeling.
She returned his gaze quietly. Then he turned his eyes to those of
Clarice. Hers were fixed upon him with a curious violence. He had a
momentary sensation, literally for the first time, that these two women
after all, had not one soul, one heart, between them. They did not feel
quite simultaneously. Lady Betty was always a step behind Clarice. Yes,
that was the difference between them. However quickly the echo follows
the voice that summons it, yet it must always follow. Would Lady Betty
never cease to follow? Bellairs found himself wondering eagerly, for
that afternoon a strange certainty came to him. He knew, in a flash,
that Clarice, if she did not already love him, was on the verge of
loving him. He knew now that he loved Lady Betty. But she didn't love
him yet, was not even quite close to loving him. Had she been in Egypt
alone, divorced from Clarice, Bellairs believed that he would not have
attracted her. He attracted her through Clarice, because he attracted
Clarice. Could he make her love him in the same way? It would be a
curious, subtle experiment to try to win one woman's heart by winning
another's: Bellairs silently decided to make it. All the rest of that
afternoon he talked to Clarice, showing to her the new self that Egypt
had given him, the poetry which had ousted the prose inherited from a
long line of ancestors, the sentiment of which he was no longer ashamed
now he felt it to be a weapon with which he might win two hearts, the
heart that contained another heart, as one conjurer's box contains a
hundred others.
* * * * *
"I knew it when I first saw you," Clarice said. "Directly I looked at
you that evening on the bank I knew it."
"How strange," Bellairs answered.
"And you--did you know it when you heard me playing?"
"That mazurka! Remember I am a man."
They were sitting in the garden. It was night. Very few people were out,
for a great Austrian pianist was playing in the public drawing-room, and
the little world of Luxor sat at his feet relentlessly. They two could
hear, mingling with a Polonaise of Chopin, the throbbing of tom-toms in
the dusty village, the faint and suggestive cry of the pipes, which fill
the soul at the same time with desire, and regret for past desire killed
by gratification. Bellairs had been making love to Clarice, and she had
told him that she loved him. And he had kissed her and his kiss had been
returned.
"Will this kiss, too, have its echo?" he thought; and his eyes travelled
towards the lighted windows of the drawing-room behind which Lady Betty
sat. He turned again to Clarice.
"Do you believe in echoes?" he asked.
"Echoes!"
"That each thing we do in life, each word, each cry, each act, calls
into being, perhaps very soon, perhaps very late, a repetition?"
"From the same person?"
"Or from some other person."
"What a curious idea. You think we cannot ever do anything without
finding an imitator! I don't like to imagine it. I don't fancy that
there can ever, in the history of the world, be an exact repetition of
our feeling, our doing, to-night."
"Yet, there may be. Who knows?"
"I do. Instinct tells me there never can. There has never been, never
will be, any woman with a heart just like mine, given to a man just in
the same way as mine is given to you. Why should you think such a
hateful thing?"
"I don't know. It was only an idea that occurred to me."
And again he glanced towards the lighted windows.
"The world is very full of echoes," he went on; "our troubles are
repeated."
"But not our joys, our deepest joys. No, no, never!"
"There have always been lovers, and they all act in much the same way!"
"Hateful! Ah! why can't we invent some new mode of expression for
ourselves--you and I?"
"Because we are human beings, and one network of tangled limitations."
"You make me cry with anger," she said.
And when he looked, he saw that there were tears shining in her eyes.
At that moment a ghastly sensation of compunction swept over him. What
had he done? A deep wrong, the deepest wrong man can do. He had made an
experiment, as a scientist may make an experiment. He had vivisected a
soul, but the soul was yet ignorant of the fact. When it knew, would it
die? But then he told himself he had to do it. For he loved
passionately, and was certain that he could only gain the heart he had
not yet completely won by gaining this heart that he had completely won.
He had made an experiment. If it failed! But it could not fail. All that
Clarice said, all that she thought, all that she desired, Betty said,
thought, desired. After the necessary interval the echo must follow the
voice. And he smiled to himself.
"Why do you smile like that?" Clarice asked.
"Because--because I thought I heard an echo," he replied. And then they
kissed again. He, with his eyes shut, forced his imagination to tell him
that the lips he pressed were the lips of Betty. She thought only of the
lips of love, that burn up all the recollections of the lonely years,
all the phantoms which dwell in the deserts through which women pass to
joy--or to despair.
The Austrian pianist was exhausted. Even his long hair could no longer
sustain his failing energies. He expired magnificently, the seventh
rhapsody of Liszt serving as his bier. Lady Betty came out into the
garden.
"How unmusical you two are," she said; "his playing was exquisite."
"We heard finer music here," Clarice answered, as she got up to go back
to the dahabeeyah--"did we not?"
She turned to Bellairs. He was looking at Lady Betty and did not hear.
Clarice's cheek flushed angrily.
"Come, Betty," she exclaimed. "Good-night, Mr Bellairs."
"Good-night, Mr Bellairs," echoed Lady Betty.
The two women moved away, and vanished down the narrow and dusty avenue
that leads to the bank of the Nile. Bellairs stood looking after them.
He was wondering why he loved Betty and did not love Clarice. It seemed
feeble to love an echo. Yet, the intonation of an echo is sometimes
exquisite in its trilling vagueness, its far-off, thrilling beauty. And
Bellairs fancied that if he once wakened Betty to passion he would free
her, in a moment, from her curious bondage, would give to her the soul
that Clarice must surely have crushed down and expelled, replacing it
with a replica of her own soul. And then he asked himself, being
analytically inclined that night, what he adored in Betty. Was it merely
her fresh young beauty? It could not be her nature; for that, at
present, was merely Clarice's, and he did not love the nature of
Clarice. Yet he felt it was something more than her beauty. When he had
made her love him he would know; for, when he had made her love him, he
would force her to be herself.
He watched the bats circling among the shadowy palms. How gentle the air
was. How sweet the stars looked. Bellairs thought of England that was so
far away. It seemed impossible that he could ever be in London again,
ever again assume a Piccadilly nature, and laugh at the folly of having
a romance. Yes, it seemed impossible. Nevertheless, in a fortnight he
must go. But he would take Betty's promise with him. He was resolved on
that. And then he left the silent garden to the bats, and was soon
between the mosquito curtains, dreaming.
* * * * *
Three days afterwards Clarice was prostrated with a nervous headache.
She could not bear to have any one in her cabin, and Lady Betty sat on
the deck of the _Queen Hatasoo_ quite inconsolable. Bellairs, arriving
to pay his usual afternoon call, found her there. Lord Braydon was out,
sailing in a flat-bottomed boat far up the river with Lady Braydon, so
Lady Betty was quite desolate. She told Bellairs so mournfully.
"And Clarice won't let me come near her," she exclaimed. "A step on the
floor, the creak of the cabin door as I come in, tortures her. She is
all nerves. I hope I shan't have her headache presently."
"Is it likely?"
"I often do. She seems to pass it on to me. I never had a headache until
I knew her. But, indeed, I never seemed to live, I never seemed to know
anything, be anything, until she came into my life."
"I wish I had known you before you knew her," Bellairs said.
"Why?"
"I don't know--perhaps to see if you were really so very different from
what you are now."
"I was--utterly."
"What were you like?"
"I can't remember--but I was utterly different."
As she ceased speaking, Bellairs glanced over the rail to the river
bank. Two blue-robed donkey boys stood there trying to attract his
attention, and pointing significantly to their gaily-bedizened donkeys.
"Shall we go for a ride?" he said to Lady Betty. "Just along the river
bank? Then we shall see Lord Braydon as he sails back. Mdlle. Leroux
won't miss you. Shall we go?"
Betty hesitated. But she could do the invalid no good by staying. So she
assented. Bellairs helped her to the bank and placed her in the smart
red saddle. He motioned the boys to keep well in the rear, and they
started at a quick, tripping walk. As they went, a white face appeared
at a cabin window, staring after them, the face of Clarice, who had with
difficulty lifted her throbbing head from the pillow. She watched the
donkeys diminishing till they were black shadows moving along against
the sky, then she began to cry weakly, but only because she was too ill
to be with them. Her gift of prophecy failed her at this critical
juncture of her life, and she had no sense of a coming disaster, as she
lay back on her berth, and gave herself up once more to pain.
That evening Lord Braydon asked Bellairs to dine on the dahabeeyah, and
he accepted the invitation. Clarice was still in durance, having
entirely failed to pass her headache on to Lady Betty. After dinner Lord
Braydon went into the saloon to write a letter to England, and Lady
Betty and Bellairs had the deck to themselves. He was resolved to put
his fate to the touch; for, during the donkey ride, he had discovered
the change in Betty which he had so eagerly desired, the change from
warm friendship to a different feeling. The girl had not acknowledged
it. Bellairs had not asked her to do so; but he meant to. Only the
thought of his treachery to the woman lying in the cabin below held him
back, just for a moment, and prompted him to talk lightly of indifferent
things. But that treachery had been a necessary manoeuvre in his
campaign of happiness. He strove to dismiss it from his mind as he leant
forward in his chair, and led Lady Betty to the subject that lay so near
to his heart.
"You love me?" she said presently.
"Yes--deeply. You are angry?"
"How can I be? No, no--and yet--"
"Yes?"
"And yet, when you told me, I felt sad."