A few minutes later Lettice was presiding over her luncheon table as
though life were simple as the sunlight in the street outside, and no
clouds could ever fleck the procession of the years. She was quiet and
yet betrayed excitement. Tom, at the opposite end of the table, watched
her girlish figure, her graceful gestures. Her eyes were very bright, no
shadows in their depths; she returned his gaze with untroubled frankness.
Yet the set of her little mouth had self-mastery in it somewhere;
there was no wavering or uncertainty; her self-possession was complete.
But above his head the sword of Damocles hung. He saw the thread, taut
and gleaming in the glare of the Egyptian sunlight. . . . He waited upon
his cousin's return as men once waited for the sign thumbs up, thumbs
down. . . .
'Molly has sent me her album,' mentioned Mrs. Haughstone when the four of
them were lounging in the garden chairs; 'she wonders if you would write
your name in it. It's her passion--to fill it with distinguished names.'
And when the page was found, she pointed to the quotation against his
birthday date with the remark, in a lowered voice: 'It's quite
appropriate, isn't it? For a man, I mean,' she added, 'because when a
man's unhappy he's more easily tempted to suspicion than a woman is.'
'What is the quotation?' asked Lettice, glancing up from her deck chair.
Tom was carefully inscribing his 'distinguished' name in the child's
album, as Mrs. Haughstone read the words aloud over his shoulder:
'"Whatever the circumstances, there is no man so miserable that he need
not be true." It's anonymous,' she added, 'but it's by some one very
wise.'
'A woman, probably,' Miss de Lorne put in with a laugh.
They discussed it, while Tom laboriously wrote his name against it with a
fountain pen. His writing was a little shaky, for his sight was blurred
and ice was in his veins.
'There's no need for you to hurry, is there?' said Lettice presently.
'Won't you stay and read to me a bit? Or would you rather look in--after
dinner--and smoke?' The two selves spoke in that. It was as if the
earlier, loving Lettice tried to assert itself, but was instantly driven
back again. How differently she would have said it a few months
ago. . . . He made excuses, saying he would drop in after dinner if he
might. She did not press him further.
'I _am_ tired a little,' she said gently. 'I'll sleep and rest and write
letters too, then.'
She was invariably tired now, Tom soon discovered--until Tony returned
from Cairo. . . .
And that evening he escaped the invitations to play bridge, and made his
way back, as in a dream, to the little house upon the Nile. He found her
bending over the table so that the lamp shone on her abundant coils of
hair, and as he entered softly he saw the address on the envelope beside
her writing pad, several pages of which were already covered with her
small, fine writing. He read the name before he could turn his eyes away.
'I was writing to Tony,' she said, looking up with an untroubled smile,
'but I can finish later. And you've come just in time to take my part.
Ettie's been scolding me severely again.'
She blotted the lines and put the paper on one side, then turned with a
challenging expression at her cousin who was knitting by the open window.
The little name sounded so incongruous; it did not suit the big gaunt
woman who had almost a touch of the monstrous in her. Tom stared a moment
without speaking. The playful challenge had reality in it. Lettice
intended to define her position openly. She meant that Tom should support
her too.
He smiled as he watched them. But no words came to him. Then,
remembering all at once that he had not kept his promise, he said quietly:
'I must send a line as well. I quite forgot.'
'You can write it now,' suggested Lettice, 'and I'll enclose it in mine.'
And she pointed to the envelopes and paper before him on the table.
There was a moment of acute and painful struggle in him; pride and love
fought the old pitched battle, but on a field of her own bold choosing!
Tom knew murder in his heart, but he knew also that strange rich pain of
sacrifice. It was theatrical: he stood upon the stage, an audience
watching him with intent expectancy, wondering upon his decision.
Mrs. Haughstone, Lettice and another part of himself that was Onlooker
were the audience; Mrs. Haughstone had ceased knitting, Lettice leaned
back in her chair, a smile in the eyes, but the lips set very firmly
together. The man in him, with scorn and anger, seemed to clench his
fists, while that other self--as with a spirit's voice from very far
away--whispered behind his pain: 'Obey. You must. It has to be, so why
not help it forward!'
To play the game, but to play it better than before, flashed through
him. . . . Half amazed at himself, yet half contented, he sat down
mechanically and scribbled a few lines of urgent entreaty to his cousin to
come back soon. . . . 'We want you here, it's dull, we can't get on
without you . . .' knowing that he traced the sentences of his own
death-warrant. He folded it and passed it across to Lettice, who slipped
it unread into her envelope. 'That ought to bring him, you think?' she
observed, a happy light in her eyes, yet with a faint sigh half
suppressed, as though she did a thing which hurt her too.
'I hope so,' replied Tom. 'I think so.'
He knew not what she had written to Tony; but whatever it was, his own
note would appear to endorse it. He had perhaps placed in her hand the
weapon that should hasten his own defeat, stretch him bleeding on the
sand. And yet he trusted her; she was loyal and true throughout.
The quicker the climax came, the sooner would he know the marvellous joy
that lay beyond the pain. In some way, moreover, she knew this too.
Actually they were working together, hand in hand, to hasten its
inevitable arrival. They merely used such instruments as fate offered,
however trivial, however clumsy. They were _being_ driven. They could
neither choose nor resist. He found a germ of subtle comfort in the
thought. The Wave was under them. Upon its tumultuous volume they swept
forward, side by side . . . striking out wildly.
'And will you also post it for me when you go?' he heard. 'I'll just add
a line to finish up with.' Tom watched her open the writing-block again
and trace a hurried sentence or two; she did it openly; he saw the neat,
small words flow from the nib; he saw the signature: 'Lettice.'
'Fasten it down for me, Tom, will you? It's such an ugly thing for a
woman to do. It's absurd that science can't invent a better way of
closing an envelope, isn't it?' He was oddly helpless; she forced him to
obey out of some greater knowledge. And while he did the ungraceful act,
their eyes met across the table. It was the other person in her--the
remote, barbaric, eastern woman, set somehow in power over him--who
watched him seal his own discomfiture, and smiled to know his obedience
had to be. It was, indeed, as though she tortured him deliberately, yet
for some reason undivined.
For a passing second Tom felt this--then the strange exaggeration
vanished. They played a game together. All this had been before.
They looked back upon it, looked down from a point above it. . . . Tom
could not read her heart, but he could read his own.
In a few minutes at most all this happened. He put the letter in his
pocket, and Lettice turned to her cousin, challenge in her manner, an air
of victory as well. And Tom felt he shared that victory somehow too.
It was a curious moment, charged with a subtle perplexity of emotions none
of them quite understood. It held such singular contradictions.
'There, Ettie!' she exclaimed, as much as to say 'Now you can't scold me
any more. You see how little Mr. Kelverdon minds!'
While she flitted into the next room to fetch a stamp, Mrs. Haughstone,
her needles arrested in mid-air, looked steadily at Tom. Her face was
white. She had watched the little scene intently.
'The only thing I cannot understand, Mr. Kelverdon,' she said in a low
tone, her voice both indignant and sympathetic, 'is how my cousin can give
pain to a man like _you_. It's the most heartless thing I've ever seen.'
'Me!' gasped Tom. 'But I don't understand you!'
'And for a creature like that!' she went on quickly, as Lettice was heard
in the passage; 'a libertine,'--she almost hissed the word out--'who thinks
every pretty woman is made for his amusement--and false into the
bargain----'
Tom put the stamp on. A few minutes later he was again walking along the
narrow little Luxor street, the sentences just heard still filling the
silent air about him, emotions charging wildly, each detail of the
familiar little journey associated already with present pain and with
prophecies of pain to come. The bewilderment and confusion in him were
beyond all quieting. One moment he saw the picture of a slender foot that
deliberately crushed life into the dust, the next he gazed into gentle,
loving eyes that would brim with tears if a single hair of his head were
injured.
A cold and mournful wind blew down the street, ruffling the darkened
river. The black line of hills he could not see. Mystery, enchantment
hung in the very air. The long dry fingers of the palm trees rattled
overhead, and looking up, he saw the divine light of the starry
heavens. . . . Surely among those comforting stars he saw her radiant
eyes as well. . . .
A voice, asking in ridiculous English the direction to a certain house,
broke his reverie, and, turning round, he saw the sheeted figure of an
Arab boy, the bright eyes gleaming in the mischievous little face of
bronze. He pointed out the gateway, and the boy slipped off into the
darkness, his bare feet soundless and mysterious on the sand.
He disappeared up the driveway to the house--her house. Tom knew quite
well from whom the telegram came. Tony had telegraphed to let her know of
his safe arrival. So even that was necessary! 'And to-morrow morning,'
he thought, 'he'll get my letter too. He'll come posting back again the
very next day.' He clenched his teeth a moment; he shuddered. Then he
added: 'So much the better!' and walked on quickly up the street.
He posted _her_ letter at the corner.
He went up to his bedroom. His sleepless nights had begun now. . . .
What was the use of thinking, he asked himself as the hours passed?
What good did it do to put the same questions over and over again, to pass
from doubt to certainty, only to be flung back again from certainty to
doubt? Was there no discoverable centre where the pendulum ceased from
swinging? How could she be at the same time both cruel and tender, both
true and false, frank and secretive, spiritual and sensual? Each of these
pairs, he realised, was really a single state of which the adjectives
represented the extremes at either end. They were ripples. The central
personality travelled in one or other direction according to
circumstances, according to the pull or push of forces--the main momentum
of the parent wave. But there was a point where the heart felt neither
one nor other, neither cruel nor tender, false nor true. Where, on the
thermometer, did heat begin and cold come to an end? Love and hate,
similarly, were extremes of one and the same emotion. Love, he well knew,
could turn to virulent hatred--if something checked and forced it back
upon the line of natural advance. Could, then, _her_ tenderness be thus
reversed, turning into cruelty. . . . Or was this cruelty but the
awakening in her of another thing? . . .
Possibly. Yet at the centre, that undiscovered centre at present beyond
his reach, Lettice, he knew, remained unalterably steadfast. There he
felt the absolute assurance she was his exclusively. His centre,
moreover, coincided with her own. They were in the 'sea' together.
But to get back into the sea, the Wave now rolling under them must first
break and fall. . . .
The sooner, then, the better! They would swing back with it together
eventually.
He chose, that is--without knowing it--a higher way of moulding destiny.
It was the spiritual way, whose method and secret lie in that subtle
paradox: Yield to conquer.