Soon after half-past eight that evening, when darkness lay over the Nile
and over the small garden of the villa, a tall Nubian servant, dressed
in white with a scarlet girdle, spread two prayer rugs on the terrace
before the French windows of the drawing-room, and placed upon them a
coffee-table and two arm-chairs. At first he put the chairs a good way
apart, and looked at them very gravely. Then he set them quite close
together, and relaxed into a smile. And before he had finished smiling,
over the parquet floor behind him there came the light rustle of a
dress. The Nubian servant turned round and gazed at Mrs. Armine, who had
stopped beside a table and was looking about the room; a
white-and-yellow room, gaily but rather sparsely furnished, that
harmonized well with the fair beauty which moved the black man's soul.
He thought her very wonderful. The pallor of her face, the delicate
lustre of her hair, quite overcame his temperament, and when she caught
sight of him and smiled, and observed the contrast between the snowy
white of his turban, his scarlet girdle and babouches, and the black
lustre of his skin, with eyes that frankly admired, he compared her
secretly to the little moon that lights up the Eastern night. He went
softly to fetch the coffee, while she stepped out on to the terrace.
At first she stood quite still, and stared at the bit of garden which
revealed itself in the darkness; at the dry earth, the untrimmed,
wild-looking rose-bushes, and the little mimosa-trees, vague almost as
pretty shadows. A thin, dark-brown dog, with pale yellow eyes, slunk in
from the night and stood near her, trembling and furtively watching
her. She had not seen it yet, for now she was gazing up at the sky,
which was peopled with myriads of stars, those piercingly bright stars
which look down from African skies. The brown dog trembled and blinked,
keeping his yellow eyes upon her, looked self-consciously down sideways,
then looked at her again.
From the hidden river there came a distant song of boatmen, one of those
vehement and yet sad songs of the Nile that the Nubian waterman loves.
"Sh--sh--sh!"
Mrs. Armine had caught sight of the dog. She hissed at him angrily, and
made a threatening gesture with her hands, which sent him slinking back
to the darkness.
"What is it, Ruby?" called out a strong voice from above.
She started.
"Oh, are you there, Nigel?"
"Yes. What's the matter?"
"It was only a dreadful-looking dog. What are you doing up there?"
"I was looking at the stars. Aren't they wonderful to-night?"
There was in his voice a sound of warm yet almost childlike enthusiasm,
with which she was becoming very familiar.
"Yes, marvellous. Oh, there's the dog again! Sh--sh--sh!"
"I'll come down and drive it away."
In a moment he was with her.
"Where is the little beast?"
"It's gone again. I frightened it. Oh, you've brought me a cloak, you
thoughtful person."
She turned for him to put it round her, and as he began to do so, as he
touched her arms and shoulders, his eyes shone and his brown cheeks
slightly reddened. Then his expression changed; he seemed to repress, to
beat back something; he drew her down into a chair, and quietly sat
down by her. The Nubian came with coffee, and went softly away, smiling.
Mrs. Armine poured out the coffee, and Nigel lit his cigar.
"Turkish coffee for my lord and master!" she said, pushing a cup towards
him over the little table. "I think I must learn how to make it."
He was gazing at her as he stretched out his hand to take it.
"Do you feel at home here, Ruby?" he asked her.
"It's such a very short time, you dear enquirer," she answered.
"Remember I haven't closed an eye here yet. But I'm sure I shall feel at
home. And what about you?"
"I scarcely know what I feel."
He sipped the coffee slowly.
"It's such a tremendous change," he continued. "And I've been alone so
long. Of course, I've got lots of friends, but still I've often felt
very lonely, as you have, Ruby, haven't you?"
"I've seldom felt anything else," she replied.
"But to-night--?"
"Oh, to-night--everything's different to-night. I wonder--"
She paused. She was leaning back in her chair, with her head against a
cushion, looking at him with a slight, half-ironical smile in her eyes
and at the corners of her lips.
"I wonder," she continued, "what Meyer Isaacson will think."
"Of our marriage?"
"Yes. Do you suppose it will surprise him?"
"I--no, I hardly think it will."
"You didn't hint it to him, did you?"
"I said nothing about any marriage, but he knew something of my feeling
for you."
"All the same, I think he'll be surprised. When shall we get the first
post from England telling us the opinion of the dear, kind,
generous-hearted world?"
"Ruby, who cares what any one thinks or says?"
"Men often don't credit us with it, but we women, as a rule, are
horribly sensitive, more sensitive than you can imagine. I--how I wish
that some day your people would try to like me!"
He took one of her hands in his.
"Why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't they? But this winter we'll keep to
ourselves, learn to know each other, learn to trust each other, learn
to--to love each other in the very best and finest way. Ruby, I took
this villa because I thought you would like it, that it would not be so
bad as our first home. But presently I want you to come with me to
Sennoures. When we've had our fortnight's honeymoon here, I'll go off
for a few nights, and look into the work, and arrange something for you.
I'll get a first-rate tent from Cairo. I want you in camp with me. And
it's farther away there, wilder, less civilized; one gets right down to
Nature. When I was in London, before I asked you to marry me, I thought
of you at Sennoures. My camp used to be pitched near water, and at
night, when the men slept covered up in their rugs and bits of sacking,
and the camels lay in a line, with their faces towards the men's tent,
eating, I used to come out, alone and listen to the frogs singing. It's
like the note of a flute, and they keep it up all night, the beggars.
You shall come out beside that water, and you shall hear it with me.
It's odd how a little thing like that stirs up one's imagination. Why,
even just thinking of that flute of the Egyptian Pan in the night--" He
broke off with a sound that was not quite a laugh, but that held
laughter and something else. "We've got, please God, a grand winter
ahead of us, Ruby," he finished. "And far away from the world."
"Far--far away from the world!"
She repeated his words rather slowly.
"I must have some more coffee," she added, with a change of tone.
"Take care. You mayn't be able to sleep."
"Nigel--do you want me to sleep to-night?"
He looked at her, but he did not answer.
"Even if I don't sleep I must have it. Besides I always sit up late."
"But to-night you're tired."
"Never mind. I must have the coffee."
She poured it out and drank it.
"I believe you live very much in the present," he said.
"Well--you live very much in the future."
"Do I? What makes you think so?"
"My instinct informs me of the fact, and of other facts about you."
"You'll make me feel as if I were made of glass if you don't take care."
"Live a little more in the present. Live in the present to-night."
There was a sound of insistence in her voice, a look of insistence in
her bright blue eyes which shone out from their painted shadows, a
feeling of insistence in the thin and warm white hand which now she laid
upon his. "Don't worry about the future."
He smiled.
"I wasn't worrying. I was looking forward."
"Why? We are here to-night, Nigel, to live as if we had only to-night to
live. You talk of Sennoures. But who knows whether we shall ever see
Sennoures, ever hear the Egyptian Pan by the water? I don't. You don't.
But we do know we are here to-night by the Nile."
With all her force, but secretly, she was trying to destroy in him the
spiritual aspiration which was essential in his nature, through which
she had won him as her husband, but which now could only irritate and
confuse her, and stand in the way of her desires, keeping the path
against them.
"Yes," he said, drawing in his breath. "We are here to-night by the
Nile, and we hear the boatmen singing."
The distant singers had been silent for some minutes; now their voices
were heard again, and sounded nearer to the garden, as if they were on
some vessel that was drifting down the river under the brilliant stars.
So much nearer was the music that Mrs. Armine could hear a word cried
out by a solo voice, "Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!" The voice was accompanied
by a deep and monotonous murmur. The singer was beating a _daraboukkeh_
held loosely between his knees. The chorus of nasal voices joined in
with the rough and artless vehemence which had in it something that was
sad, and something that, though pitiless, seemed at moments to thrill
with yearning, like the cruelty of the world, which is mingled with the
eternal longing for the healing of its wounds.
"We hear the boatmen singing," he repeated, "about Allah, and always
Allah, Allah, the God of the Nile, and of us two on the Nile."
"Sh--sh! There's that dog again! I do wish--"
She had begun to speak with an abrupt and almost fierce nervous
irritation, but she recovered herself immediately.
"Couldn't the gardener keep him out?" she said, quietly.
"Perhaps he belongs to the gardener. I'll go and see. I won't be a
minute."
He sprang up and followed the dog, which crept away into the garden,
looking around with its desolate, yellow eyes to see if danger were near
it.
Allah--Allah--Allah in the night!
Mrs. Armine did not know that this song of the boatmen of Nubia was
presently, in later days she did not dream of, to become almost an
integral part of her existence on the Nile; but although she did not
know this, she listened to it with an attention that was strained and
almost painful.
"Al-lah--Al-lah--"
"And probably there is no God," she thought. "How can there be? I am
sure there is none."
Abruptly Meyer Isaacson seemed to come before her in the darkness,
looking into her eyes as he had looked in his consulting-room when she
had put up her veil and turned her face towards the light. She shut her
eyes. Why should she think about him now? Why should she call him up
before her?
She heard a slight rustle near her, and she started and opened her eyes.
By one of the French windows the dragoman Ibrahim was standing,
perfectly still now, and looking steadily at her. He held a flower
between his teeth, and when he saw that she had seen him, he came
gracefully forward, smiling and almost hanging his head, as if in
half-roguish deprecation.
"What did you say your name was?" Mrs. Armine asked him.
He took the flower from his teeth, handed it to her, then took her hand,
kissed it, bent his forehead quite low, and pressed her hand against it.
"Ibrahim Ahmed, my lady."
She looked at his gold-coloured robe, at his European jacket, at the
green and gold fringed handkerchief which he had wound about his
tarbush, and which covered his throat and fell down upon his breast.
"Very pretty," she said, approvingly. "But I don't like the jacket. It
looks too English."
"It is a present from London, my lady."
"Al-lah--"
Always the sailors' song seemed growing louder, more vehement, more
insistent, like a strange fanaticism ever increasing in the bosom of the
night.
"Where are those people singing, Ibrahim?" said Mrs. Armine.
She put his flower in the front of her gown, opening her cloak to do so.
"They seem to get nearer and nearer. Are they coming down the river?"
"I s'pose they are in a felucca, my lady. They are Noobian peoples. They
always make that song. It is a pretty song."
He gently moved his head, following the rhythm of the music. Between
the green and gold folds of his silken handkerchief his gentle brown
eyes always regarded her.
"Nubian people!" she said. "But Luxor isn't in Nubia."
"Noobia is up by Aswan. The obelisks come from there. I will show you
the obelisks to-morrow, my lady. There is no dragoman who understands
all 'bout obelisks like Ibrahim."
"I am sure there isn't. But"--those voices of the singing sailors were
beginning almost to obsess her--"are all the boatmen Nubians then?"
"Nao!" he replied, with a sudden cockney accent.
"But these that are singing?"
"I say they are Noobian peoples, my lady. They are Mahmoud Baroudi's
Noobian peoples."
"Baroudi's sailors!" said Mrs. Armine.
She sat up straight in her chair.
"But Mahmoud Baroudi isn't here, at Luxor?"
Ibrahim's soft eyes had become suddenly sharp and bright.
"Do you know Mahmoud Baroudi, my lady?"
"We met him on the ship coming from Naples."
"Very big--big as Rameses the Second, the statue of the King hisself
what you see before you at the Ramesseum--eyes large as mine, and hair
over them what goes like that!"
He put up his brown hands and suddenly sketched Baroudi's curiously
shaped eyebrows.
Mrs. Armine nodded. Ibrahim stretched out his arm towards the Nile.
"Those are his Noobian peoples. They come from his dahabeeyah. It is at
Luxor, waiting for him. They have nuthin' to do, and so they make the
fantasia to-night."
"He is coming here to Luxor?"
Ibrahim nodded his head calmly.
"He is comin' here to Luxor, my lady, very nice man, very good man. He
is as big as Rameses the Second, and he is as rich as the Khedive. He
has money--as much as that."
He threw out his arms, as if trying to indicate the proportions of a
great world or of an enormous ocean.
"Here comes my gentleman!" he added, suddenly dropping his arms.
Nigel returned from the darkness of the garden.
"Hulloh, Ibrahim!"
"Hulloh, my gentleman!"
"Keeping your mistress company while I was gone? That is right."
Ibrahim smiled, and sauntered away, going towards the bank of the Nile.
His golden robe faded among the little trunks of the orange-trees.
"It was the gardener's dog," said Nigel, letting himself down into his
chair with a sigh of satisfaction. "I've made him feed the poor brute.
It was nearly starving. That's why it came to us."
"I see."
"Al-lah!" he murmured, saying the word like an Eastern man.
He looked into her eyes.
"The first word you hear in the night from Egypt, Ruby, Egypt's night
greeting to you. I have heard that song up the river in Nubia often,
but--oh, it's so different now!"
During her long experience in a life that had been complex and full of
changes, Mrs. Armine had heard the sound of love many times in the
voices of men. But she had never heard till this moment Nigel's full
sound of love. There was something in it that she did not know how to
reply to, though she had the instinct of the great courtesan to make the
full and perfect reply to the desires of the man with whom she had
schemed to ally herself. She owed this reply to him, but she owed it how
much more to something within herself! But there existed within him a
hunger for which she had no food. Why did he show this hunger to her?
Already its demonstration had tried her temper, but to-night, for the
first time, she felt her whole being set on edge by it. Nevertheless,
she was determined he should not see this, and she answered very
quietly:
"I am hearing this song for the first time with you, so I shall always
associate it with you."
He drew a little nearer to her. And she understood and could reply to
the demand which prompted that movement.
"We must drink Nile water together, Ruby, Nile water--in all the
different ways. I'll take you to the tombs of the Kings, and to the
Colossi when the sun is setting. And when the moon comes, we'll go to
Karnak. I believe you'll love it all as I do. One can never tell, of
course, for another. But--but do you think you'll love it all with me?"
Mingled with the ardour and the desire there was a hint in his voice of
anxiety, of the self-doubt which, in certain types of natures, is the
accompaniment of love.
"I know I shall love it all--with you," she said.
She let her hand fall into his, and as his hand closed upon it she was
physically moved. There was in Nigel something that attracted her
physically, that attracted her at certain moments very strongly. In the
life that was to come she must sweep away all interference with that.
"And some day," he said, "some day I shall take you to see night fall
over the Sphinx, the most wonderful thing in Egypt and perhaps in the
whole world. We can do that on our way to or from the Fayyum when we
have to pass through Cairo, as soon as I've arranged something for you."
"You think of everything, Nigel."
"Do you like to be thought for?"
"No woman ever lived that did not."
She softly pressed his hand. Then she lifted it and held it on her knee.
Presently she saw him look up at the stars, and she felt sure that he
was connecting her with them, was thinking of her as something almost
ideal, or, if not that, as something that might in time become almost
ideal.
"I am not a star," she said.
He did not make any answer.
"Nigel, never be so absurd as to think of me as a star!"
He suddenly looked around at her.
"What do you say, Ruby?"
"Nothing."
"But I heard you speak."
"It must have been the sailors singing. I was looking up at the stars.
How wonderful they are!"
As she spoke, she moved very slightly, letting her cloak fall open so
that her long throat was exposed.
"And how beautifully warm it is!"
He looked at her throat, and sighed, seemed to hesitate, and then bent
suddenly down as if he were going to kiss it.
"Al-lah!"
Almost fiercely the nasal voice of the singing boatman who gave out the
solo part of the song of the Nile came over the garden from the river,
and the throbbing of the _daraboukkeh_ sounded loudly in their ears.
Nigel lifted his head without kissing her.
"Those boatmen are close to the garden!" he said.
Mrs. Armine wrapped her cloak suddenly round her.
"Would you like to go down to the river and see them?" he added.
"Yes, let us go. I must see them," she said.
She got up from her chair with a quick but graceful movement that was
full of fiery impetus, and her eyes were shining almost fiercely, as if
they gave a reply to the fierce voices of the boatmen.
Nigel drew her arm through his, and they went down the little sandy path
past the motionless orange-trees till they came to the bank of the Nile.
Ibrahim was standing there, peeping out whimsically from his fringed and
tasselled wrappings, and smoking a cigarette.
"Where are the boatmen, Ibrahim?" said Nigel.
"Here they come, my gentleman!"
Upon the wide and moving darkness of the river, a great highway of the
night leading to far-off African lands, hugging the shore by a tufted
darkness of trees, there came a felucca that gleamed with lanterns. The
oars sounded in the water, mingling with the voices of the men, whose
vague, uncertain forms, some crouched, some standing up, some leaning
over the river, that was dyed with streaks of light into which the
shining drops fell back from the lifted blades, were half revealed to
the watchers above them in the garden.
"Here come the Noobian peoples!"
"I wonder what they are doing here," said Nigel, "and why they come up
the river to-night. Whose people can they be?"
Ibrahim opened his lips to explain, but Mrs. Armine looked at him, and
he shut them without a word.
"Hush!" she whispered. "I want to listen."
This was like a serenade of the East designed to give her a welcome to
Egypt, like the voice of this great, black Africa speaking to her alone
out of the night, speaking with a fierce insistence, daring her not to
listen to it, not to accept its barbaric summons. A sort of animal
romance was stirred within her, and she began to feel strongly excited.
She heard no longer the name of Allah, or, if she heard it, she
connected it no longer with the Christian's conception of a God, with
Nigel's conception of a God, but perhaps with strange idols in dusky
temples where are mingled crimes and worship. Her imagination suddenly
rose up, gathered its energies, and ran wild.
The boat stayed opposite the garden.
"It must be meant for me, it is meant for me!" she thought.
At that moment she knew quite certainly that this boat had come to the
garden because she lived in the garden, that it paused so that she might
be sure that the music was directed to her, was meant for no one but
her. It was not for her and Nigel. Nigel had nothing to do with it. He
did not understand its meaning.
At last the boat moved on, the flickering spears of light on the water
travelled on and turned away, the voices floated away under the stars
till the night enfolded them, the light and the music were taken and
kept by the sleepless mystery of Egypt.
"Shall we go into the villa, Ruby?" said Nigel, almost diffidently, yet
with a thrill in his voice.
She did not answer for a moment, then she said,
"Yes, I suppose it is time to go to bed."
Nigel drew her arm again through his, and they went away towards the
house, while Ibrahim looked after them, smiling.