From that hour forward my husband was a changed man. His manner to me,
so brusque before, became courteous, kind, almost affectionate. Every
morning he would knock at the door of my state-room to ask if I had
slept well, or if the movement of the steamer had disturbed me.
His manner to Alma was charming. He was up before breakfast every day,
promenading the deck with her in the fresh salt air. I would slide back
my window and hear their laughter as they passed, above the throb of the
engines and the wash of the sea. Sometimes they would look in upon me
and joke, and Alma would say:
"And how's Margaret Mary this morning?"
Our seats in the saloon had been changed. Now we sat with Alma at the
Captain's table, and though I sorely missed the doctor's racy talk about
Martin Conrad I was charmed by Alma's bright wit and the fund of her
personal anecdotes. She seemed to know nearly everybody. My husband knew
everybody also, and their conversation never flagged.
Something of the wonderful and worshipful feeling I had had for Alma at
the Sacred Heart came back to me, and as for my husband it seemed to me
that I was seeing him for the first time.
He persuaded the Captain to give a dance on our last night at sea, so
the awnings were spread, the electric lights were turned on, and the
deck of the ship became a scene of enchantment.
My husband and Alma led off. He danced beautifully and she was dressed
to perfection. Not being a dancer myself I stood with the Captain in the
darkness outside, looking in on them in the bright and dazzling circle,
while the moon-rays were sweeping the waters like a silver fan and the
little waves were beating the ship's side with friendly pats.
I was almost happy. In my simplicity I was feeling grateful to Alma for
having wrought this extraordinary change, so that when, on our arrival
at Port Said, my husband said,
"Your friend Madame Lier has made no arrangements for her rooms at
Cairo--hadn't I better telegraph to our hotel, dear?" I answered, "Yes,"
and wondered why he had asked me.
Our hotel was an oriental building, situated on an island at the further
side of the Nile. Formerly the palace of a dead Khedive, who had built
it in honour of the visit of an Empress, it had a vast reception hall
with a great staircase.
There, with separated rooms, as in London, we remained for three months.
I was enthralled. Too young and inexperienced to be conscious of the
darker side of the picture before me, I found everything beautiful. I
was seeing fashionable life for the first time, and it was entrancing.
Lovely and richly-dressed ladies in silk, velvet, lace, and no limit of
jewellery--the dark French women, the blonde German women, the stately
English women, and the American women with their flexuous grace. And
then the British soldiers in their various uniforms, the semi-Turks in
their red tarbooshes, and the diplomats of all nationalities, Italian,
Austrian, French, German--what a cosmopolitan world it was, what a
meeting-place of all nations!
Every hour had its interest, but I liked best the hour of tea on the
terrace, for that was the glorious hour of woman, when every condition
invested her dress with added beauty and her smile with greater charm.
Such a blaze of colour in the sunshine! Such a sea of muslin, flowers,
and feathers! Such lovely female figures in diaphanous clouds of
toilettes, delicate as gossamer and varied as the colours in the
rainbow! They were like a living bouquet, as they sat under the shade of
the verandah, with the green lawns and the palm trees in front, the
red-coated orchestra behind, and the noiseless forms of swarthy
Bednouins and Nubians moving to and fro.
Although I had been brought up in such a different world altogether I
could not help being carried away by all this beauty. My senses
burgeoned out and my heart seemed to expand.
As for Alma and my husband, they seemed to belong to the scene of
themselves. She would sit at one of the tea-tables, swishing away the
buzzing flies with a little whip of cord and cowries, and making
comments on the crowd in soft undertones which he alone seemed to catch.
Her vivid and searching eyes, with their constant suggestion of
laughter, seemed to be picking out absurdities on every side and finding
nearly everybody funny.
She found me funny also. My innocence and my convent-bred ideas were a
constant subject of jest with her.
"What does our dear little Margaret Mary think of that?" she would say
with a significant smile, at sights that seemed to me quite harmless.
After a while I began to have a feeling of indefinable uneasiness about
Alma. She was daily redoubling her cordiality, always calling me her
"dearest sweetest girl," and "the oldest friend she had in the world."
But little by little I became conscious of a certain commerce between
her and my husband in which I had no part. Sometimes I saw her eyes
seeking his, and occasionally I heard them exchange a few words about me
in French, which (because I did not speak it, being uncertain of my
accent) they thought I did not understand.
Perhaps this helped to sharpen my wits, for I began to see that I had
gone the wrong way to work with my husband. Instead of trying to make
myself fall in love with my husband, I should have tried to make my
husband fall in love with me.
When I asked myself how this was to be done I found one obvious
answer--I must become the sort of woman my husband admired and liked; in
short I must imitate Alma.
I resolved to do this, and after all that has happened since I feel a
little ashamed to tell of the efforts I made to play a part for which I
was so ill-fitted by nature and education.
Some of them were silly enough perhaps, but some were almost pathetic,
and I am not afraid that any good woman will laugh at the futile shifts
I was put to, in my girlish ignorance, to make my husband love me.
"I must do it," I thought. "I must, I must!"