"Why, yes, he was curious. They say Arabs always are, if you let them be. Not that he is exactly an Arab. But I suppose Armenians are the same. He seemed to want to know things about me--what I'd done, where I'd lived, and--oh, lots of little questions he would ask. Monny and I made up our minds from the first, as I told you, that there mustn't be any fibs. I simply put him off. He never got anything out of me at all."

"I see," I said; and let myself drift away from her into thoughtfulness.

"Is that all, then?"

"Yes, that is all, thank you."

Her tone sounded as if she were relieved of a mental weight, and would like to go. I expected her to make some excuse: it would soon be time to dress for dinner: or she had a letter to write. But no, she lingered. She was trying to bring herself to say something. I waited, in silence, my eyes on the shining river, looking back at the golden trail of the sun that was like a rich mantle draping a gondola on a fete day in Venice.

"I suppose you think," she forced the words out at last, "that Willis Bailey wouldn't have--fallen in love--or proposed--if he hadn't thought like the rest, that I--I--" "I don't see why he shouldn't, Miss Guest."

"He--really does seem to care for me--as I _am_, you know. And I've never told him a single untruth. I've _nothing_ to blame myself for."

"I'm sure of that."

"Yet you don't approve of me--one bit. You think I'm a--kind of adventuress. So does Mrs. Jones. _Me_! Why, what would the people at home in Salem say if any one suggested such a thing? You don't know the life I've led, Lord Ernest."

"I can imagine. You don't want to go back to it again, do you?"

"It does seem as if I _couldn't_, now. It's seemed so, even before Willis--oh, I'm sure you think I _never_ meant to go back, once I'd broken free from the dull grind."

"No harm in that!"

"I'm glad you say so. I took all my legacy to see the world a little --well, nearly all, not quite, perhaps, to tell the truth. And being brave has brought me this reward: the love of a man who can give me everything worth having. I shan't be _outside_ life any more. And Willis won't have any reason to blame me when he--when he--"

"No reason, of course," I fitted into her long pause. "But men as well as women are unreasonable, sometimes, you know. And if he should be so --er--wrong-headed as to think you'd deceived him about yourself--"

"Then he ought to blame Monny, not me!"

"He ought, perhaps. But the question is, what he will do. And you can't like having a sword hanging over your head? Supposing he should be unjust, and refuse to carry out--"

"Oh, Lord Ernest, you don't think he will, after he's sworn that I'm the only woman in the world he could ever have loved? He thinks me _much_ better looking than Monny. He says she hasn't got a _soul_, yet.

He doubts if she ever will have one."

I didn't doubt it. I thought I had heard it stirring in the throes of birth, a soul such as would blind the eyes of a Rachel Guest, with its white shining. Monny had said that she would "find her soul in Egypt."

But the mention of this was not indicated just then.

"I haven't the courage to tell him, even if there were really anything definite enough to tell," Rachel went on. "It would be insulting a man like Willis to suggest that he'd been influenced--you know what I mean.

But--now we're talking of it--oh, do advise me! We're planning to be married in Egypt, at the end of this trip, and then settle down in Cairo, for Mr. Bailey's studies at the museum. He came up the Nile only for me, you see! And he says I shall be his first model for the new style--my eyes are _just_ right, as if they'd been made on purpose to help him. I lie awake nights wondering what if, before the wedding, when he finds out for certain that my name is really only Rachel Guest, and that I'm I--oh, I daren't _think_ of it!"

"Then, if you want me to advise, why don't you in some tactful, perhaps joking way, speak of the story Bedr started, and--"

"I can't--I simply can't."

"Yet you feel it would be better?"

"Yes--sometimes I feel it. _You_ help me, Lord Ernest. _You_ tell him.

And then, if you see any signs--you'll make him understand how dreadful it would be to throw me over because I'm poor and have been a n.o.body till now?"

"I'll do my best," I heard myself weakly promising.

No wonder I have earned the nickname of Duffer!

CHAPTER XXV

MAROONED

Had any human fly ever buzzed himself so fatally into the spider-webs of other people's love affairs? I asked myself sternly. As soon as Providence plucked me out of one web, back I would b.u.mble into another, though I had no time for a love affair of my own.

When the _Enchantress Isis_ had slipped past many miles of desert sh.o.r.e, black-striped and tawny as a leopard's skin, and other desert sh.o.r.es so fiercely yellow as to create an effect of sunshine under gray skies, we arrived at a.s.suan. I had not yet kept my promise to Rachel, though whether from lack of opportunity or courage I was not sure.

Here we were at historic a.s.suan; and nothing had happened, nothing which could be written down in black and white, since the excitements at Luxor. Nevertheless, some of us were different within, and the differences were due, directly or indirectly, to those excitements.

Now we were nearing Ethiopia, alias the Land of Cush, though Monny said she could not bear to have it called by that name, except, of course, in the Bible, where it couldn't be helped. How would any of us like to "register" at an hotel as Mr. or Miss So-and-So, of Cush? Oshkosh sounded more romantic.

No land, however, could look more romantic than a.s.suan, City of the Cataracts, Greek Syene, that granite quarry whose red syenite made obelisks and sarcophagi for kings of countless dynasties. "Suan," as the Copts renamed it (a frontier town of Egypt since the days of Ezekiel the prophet), now appeared a gay place, made for pleasure-pilgrims.

Sky and river were dazzling blue, and the sea of sand was a sea of gold, the dark rocks lying like tamed monsters at the feet of Khnum, G.o.d of the Cataract, glittered bright as jet, over which a libation of red wine had gushed. The river-front of the town, with its hotels and shops, was brightly coloured as a row of shining sh.e.l.ls from a southern sea; tints of pink and blue and amber, translucently clear in contrast with the dark green of lebbek trees and palms, in whose shadow flowers burned, like rainbow-tinted flames of driftwood. Between our eyes and the brilliant picture, a network of thin dark lines was tangled, as if an artist had defaced his canvas with scratches of a drying brush.

These scratches were in reality the masts of moored feluccas, bristling close to the sh.o.r.e like a high hedge of flower stems, stripped of blossoms and bent by driving wind.

On the opposite side of the river, the desert crouched like a lion who flings back his head with a shake of yellow mane, before he stoops to drink. And in the midst of the stream rose Elephantine Island, with its crown of feathery palms, its breastwork of Roman ruins (a medal of fame for the kings it gave to Egypt) and its undying lullaby sung by the cataract, among surrounding rocks.

Very strange rocks they were, black as wet onyx, though for thousands of years they had been painted rose by sunrise and sunset; shapes of animal G.o.ds, shapes of negro slaves, shapes of broken obelisks and fallen temples; shapes of elephants like those seen first by Egyptians on this island; shapes which one felt could never have taken form except in Egypt.

Over our heads armies of migrating birds made a network like a great floating scarf of beads, each bead a bird: and the blue water round the slow-gliding _Enchantress_ was crowded with boats of so many hitherto unknown sorts, that they might have been visiting craft from another world: feluccas with sails red or white, or painted in strange patterns, or awninged; some with rails like open trellis work of many colours, over which dark faces shone like copper in the sunshine; rowing boats, "galleys" with fluttering flags, and old soap-boxes roughly lined with tin, in which naked imps of boys perilously paddled.

Out from the boats rushed music in clouds like incense; wild, African music of chanting voices, beating tom-toms, or clapping hands that clacked together like castanets. Very old men and very young youths thumped furiously on earthen drums shaped like the jars of Elephantine, once so famous that they travelled the length of Egypt filled with wine. The breeze that fanned to us from beyond the palms and lebbeks, the roses and azaleas, was soft and flower-laden. There was a scent in it, too, as of ripe grapes, as if a fragrance lingered from vanished days when wine for the G.o.ds was made from Elephantine vineyards, and fig-trees never lost their leaves. We ourselves, and our big three-decked boat were alone in our modernity, if one forgot the line of gay buildings on the sh.o.r.e. Everything else might have been of the time when the world supposed Elephantine to be placed directly on the Tropic of Cancer, and believed in the magic lamp which lit the unfathomable well; the time when quarries of red and yellow clay gave riches to the island, and all Egypt thanked its G.o.ds when Elephantine's Nilemeter showed that the Two Lands would be plentifully watered.

Most of us were going to live on board the _Enchantress_ for our three days at a.s.suan; but, hearing that lords and ladies of high degrees swarmed at the Cataract Hotel with its wild, watery view of tumbled rocks, and at the Savoy in its flowery gardens, some went where they might hope to cross the path of dukes and d.u.c.h.esses.

The Monny-ites were not "wild" about the aristocracy, nor would royalty (of later date than the Ptolemies) have lured Cleopatra from her suite on the boat. But the whole party was eager for sh.o.r.e, and no sooner had the _Enchantress_ put her foot on the yellow sands than she was deserted by her pa.s.sengers. The bazaars were the first attractions, for "everybody said" that they were as fine in their way as the bazaars of Cairo; so very soon we were all buying silver, ivory, stuffed crocodiles and ostrich feathers from the Sudan, which now opened its gates not far ahead: the Sudan, mysterious, unknown, and vast.

Cleopatra clung to me, with a certain wistfulness, as if in this incarnation she were not so intimately at home in Upper Egypt as she had hoped to be. Perhaps this loneliness of her soul was due to the fact that instead of seeking her society, "Anthony with an H" seldom came near her now. Something had warned him off. He would never tell me or any one on earth: but, unused to the ways of women as he was, I felt sure that he had been uncomfortably enlightened as to Cleopatra's feelings. The cure, according to his prescription, was evidently to be "absent treatment." But there was another which I fancied might be efficacious; the sudden arrival on the scene of Marcus Antonius Lark.

I happened to know that he proposed a dash from Cairo to a.s.suan by train, for I had received two telegrams at the moment of walking off the boat. The first message announced his almost immediate advent; the second regretted unavoidable delay, but expressed an intention not to let us steam away for Wady Halfa without seeing him. The excuse alleged was business, but I thought I saw through it, and sympathized; for he whom I had once cursed as a brutal tyrant of money-bags now loomed large as a pathetic figure.

Despite the lesson of the lotuses, I believed that his motive was to try his chance with Mrs. East; that life had become intolerable, unless "Lark's Luck" might hold again; and that he could not wait till the cruel lady returned to Cairo. It was a toss-up, as we walked side by side to the incense-laden bazaar, whether I told her the news or left her to be surprised by the unexpected visitor. Eventually I decided that silence would help the cause; and in thus making up my mind I was far from guessing that my own fate and Monny's and Anthony's and Brigit's hung also on that insignificant decision. I was thankful that Mrs. East said no more of bringing her niece and me together, and that, on the contrary, she dropped dark hints about "everything in life which she had wanted" being now "too late, and useless to hope for" in this incarnation. Why she had changed her plans for Monny I could not be sure; enough for me that she apparently had changed them.

Sir Marcus did not appear the next day or the next, and I heard no more. Indeed, between dread of breaking the truth to Bill Bailey, and self-reproach at letting time pa.s.s without breaking it, I almost forgot Lark's love affair. I salved my conscience by working unnecessarily hard, and even helping Kruger with his accounts, when Anthony too generously relieved me of other duties.

How I envied Fenton at this time, because no girls asked him what men they ought to marry; or implored him to prevent men from jilting them; or urged him to enlighten handsome sculptors with wavy, soft hair, and hard eyes resembling the crystal orbs which were to become fashionable in Society! Anthony loved a.s.suan, and apparently enjoyed displaying its beauties. Not knowing that I hid a fox under my mantle, he meant to be kind in "taking people off my hands," giving them tea on the Cataract Hotel veranda; escorting them to the ruined Saracen Castle which, with Elephantine opposite, barred the river and made a n.o.ble gateway; leading them at sunset to the Arab cemetery in the desert, and to the Bisharin village where wild, dark creatures (whose hair was pinned with arrows and whose ancestors were mentioned in the Bible) sold baskets and bracelets and what not. There were really, as Sir John Biddell remarked, a "plethora of sights," not counting the magnificent Rock Tombs, since the Set had definitely "struck" against tombs of all descriptions. But even with an excursion to the ancient quarries, for a look at half-finished obelisks, for once I had not enough to do. And Fenton had s.n.a.t.c.hed Biddy from me as well as Monny. Mercilessly he had them sightseeing every moment. And I could no longer scold Rachel for "letting things slide." To blame her would be for the pot to call the kettle black.

It was on the day of the Great Dam that I screwed my courage to the sticking-place, and made Bailey understand that his fiancee was n.o.body but Rachel Guest; that she would be Rachel Guest all her life until she became Mrs. Some One-or-Other: preferably Mrs. Willis Bailey. Somehow it seemed appropriate to do the deed at the Dam. And always in future, when people ask what impression the eighth wonder of the world made upon me, I shall doubt for an instant whether they refer to the American sculptor, or to the Barrage.

The way in which we went was so impressive that it was comparatively easy to be keyed up to anything.