'We're very rarely alone now, are we, Lettice?' Tom began abruptly the instant they were together. At the back of his mind rose something he did not understand that forced more significance into his tone than he intended. He felt very full--an acc.u.mulation that must have expression.

He blurted it out without reflection. 'Hardly once since I arrived two weeks ago, now I come to think of it.' He looked at her half playfully, half reproachfully. 'We're always three,' he added with the frank pathos of a boy. And while one part of him felt ashamed, another part urged him onward and was glad.

But the way she answered startled him.

'Tom dear, don't scold me now. I _am_ so tired.' It was the tone that took his breath away. For the first time in their acquaintance he noticed something like exasperation. 'I've been doing too much,' she went on more gently, smiling up into his face: 'I feel it. And that dreadful thing-- that insect,'--she shuddered a little--'I never meant to hurt it.

It's upset me. All this daily excitement, and the sun, and the jolting of that rickety sand-cart--There, Tom, come and sit beside me a moment and let's talk before you go. I'm really too done up to drive you to the station to-night. You'll understand and forgive me, won't you?'

Her voice was very soft. She was excited, too, talking at random rather.

Her being seemed confused.

He took his place on a st.u.r.dy cushion at her feet, full of an exaggerated remorse. She looked pale, though her eyes were very sparkling. His heart condemned him. He said nothing about the 'dreadful incident.'

'Lettice, dearest girl, I didn't mean anything. You have been doing far too much, and it's my fault; you've done it all for me--to give me pleasure. It's been too wonderful.' He took her hand, while her other stroked his head. 'You must rest while I'm away.'

'Yes,' she murmured, 'so as to be quite fresh when you come back.

You won't be _very_ long, will you?' He said he would risk his whole career to get back within the week. 'But, you know, I have neglected things rather--up there.' He smiled fondly as he said 'up there.'

She looked down tenderly into his eyes. 'And I have neglected you--down here,' she said. 'That's what you mean, boy, isn't it?' And for the first time he did not like the old mode of address he once thought perfect. There seemed a flavour of pity in it. 'It _would_ be nice to be alone sometimes, wouldn't it, Lettice? Quite alone, I mean,' he said with meaning.

'We shall be, we will be--later, Tom,' she whispered; '_quite_ alone together.' She paused, then added louder: 'The truth is, Egypt--the air and climate--stimulates me too much; it makes me restless. It excites me in a way I can't quite understand. I can't sit still and talk and be idle as one does in sleepy, solemn England.'

He was explaining with laborious logic that it was the dryness of the air that exhausted the nerves a bit, when she straightened herself up and took her hand away. 'Oh yes, Tom, I know, I know. That's perfectly true, and everybody says that--I mean, everybody feels it, don't they?' She said it quickly, almost impatiently.

The old uneasiness flashed through him at that moment: it occurred to him, 'I'm dull, I'm boring her.' She was over-tired, he remembered then, her nerves on edge a trifle; it was natural enough; he would just kiss her and leave her to rest quietly. Yet a tiny sense of resentment, even of chill, crept over him. This impatience in her was new to him. He wondered an instant, then crushed back the words that tried to rise. He said goodbye, taking her in his arms for a moment with an overmastering impulse he could not check. Deep love and tenderness were in his heart and eyes.

He yearned to protect and guide her--keep her safe from harm. He felt his older years, his steadier strength; he was a man, she but a little gentle woman. And the elemental powers of life were very strong. With a sudden impulsive gesture, then, that surprised him, she returned the embrace with a kind of vehemence, pressing him closely to her heart and kissing him repeatedly on the cheeks and eyes.

Tom had expected her to resist and chide him. He was bewildered and delighted; he was also puzzled--for the first second only. 'You darling woman,' he cried, forgetting utterly the suspicion, the uneasiness, the pa.s.sing cold of a moment before. He marvelled that his heart could have let such fancies come to birth. Surely he had changed for such a thing to be possible at all! . . . Various impulses and emotions that clamoured in him he kept back with an effort. He was aware of clashing contradictions.

Confidence was less in him. He felt curiously unsure of himself--also, in a cruel, subtle way--of her. There was a new thing in her--rising.

Was it against himself somewhere? The tangle in his heart and mind seemed inextricable: he wanted to seize her and carry her away, struggling but captured, and at the same time--singular contradiction--to entreat her humbly, though pa.s.sionately, to love him more, and to _show_ more that she loved him. Surely there were two selves in him.

He moved over to the door. 'Cataract Hotel, remember, finds me.'

He stood still, looking back at her.

She smiled, repeating the words after him. 'And Lettice, you _will_ write?' She blew a kiss to him by way of answer. Then, charged to the brim with a thousand things he ached to say, yet would not, almost dared not say, he added playfully--a child must have noticed that his voice was too deep for banter and his breath came oddly:

'And mind you don't let Tony lose his head _too_ much. He's pretty far gone, you know, already.'

The same instant he could have bitten his tongue off to recall the words.

Somewhere he had been untrue to himself, almost betrayed himself.

She rose suddenly from her sofa and came quickly towards him across the floor; he felt his heart sink a moment, then start hammering irregularly against his ribs. Something frightened him. For he caught in her face an expression he could not understand--the struggle of many strong emotions--anxiety and pa.s.sion, fear and love; the eyes were shining, though the lids remained half closed; she made a curious gesture: she moved swiftly. He braced himself as against attack. He shrank.

Her power over him was greater than he knew.

For he saw her in that instant as another person, another woman, foreign-- almost Eastern; the barbaric primitive thing flamed out of her, but with something regal, queenly, added to it; she looked Egyptian; the Princess, as he called her sometimes, had come to life. And the same moment in himself this curious sense of helplessness appeared--he raged against it inwardly--as though he were in her power somehow, as though her little foot could crush him--too--into the yellow sand. . . .

A spasm of acute and aching pain shot through him; he winced; he wanted to turn and fly, yet was held rooted to the floor. He could not escape. It had to be. For oddly, mysteriously, he felt pain in her quick approach: she was coming to do him injury and hurt. The incident of the afternoon flashed again upon his mind--with the idea of cruelty in it somewhere, but a deep surge of strange emotion that flung wild sentences into his mind at the same instant. He tightly shut his lips, lest a hundred thoughts that had lain in him of late might burst into words he would later regret intensely. He must not avoid, delay, an inevitable thing.

To resist was somehow to be untrue to the deepest in him--to something painful he deserved, and, paradoxically, desired too. What could it all mean? . . . He shivered as he waited--watching her come nearer.

She reached his side and her arms were stretched towards him. To his amazement she folded him in closely against her breast and held him as though she never could let him go again. He stood there helpless; the revulsion of feeling took his strength away. He heard her breathless, yearning whisper as she kissed him: 'My Tom, my precious boy, I couldn't see a hair of your dear head injured--I couldn't see you hurt! Take care of yourself and come back quickly--do, _do_ take care of yourself.

I shall count the days----' she broke off, held his face between her hands, gazed into his astonished eyes, and kissed him with the utmost tenderness again, the tenderness of a mother who is forced to be separated from the boy she loves better than herself.

Tom stood there trembling before her, and no speech came to help him.

The thing pa.s.sed like a dream; the dread, the emotion left him; the nightmare touch was gone. Her self-betrayal his simple nature did not at once discern. He felt only her divine tenderness pour over him. A spring of joy rose bubbling in him that no words could tell. Also he felt afraid. But the fear was no longer for himself. In some perplexing, singular way, he felt afraid for her.

Then, as a sentence came struggling to his lips, a step was heard upon the landing. There was time to resume conventional att.i.tudes of good-bye when Mrs. Haughstone appeared on the staircase leading to the hall. Tom said his farewells hurriedly to both of them, making his escape as naturally as possible. 'I've just time to pack and catch the train,' he shouted, and was gone.

And what remained with him afterwards of the curious little scene was the absolute joy and confidence those last tender embraces had restored to him, side by side with another thing that he was equally sure about, yet refused to dwell upon because he dared not--yet. For, as she came across the floor of the sunny room towards him, he realised two things in her, two persons almost. Another influence, he was convinced, worked in her strangely--some older, long-buried presentment of her interpenetrating, even piercing through, the modern self. She was divided against herself in some extraordinary fashion, one half struggling fiercely, yet struggling bravely, honestly, against the other. And the relationship between himself and her, though the evidence was so negligibly slight as yet, he knew had definitely changed. . . .

It came to him as the Mother and the Woman in her. The Mother belonged unchangeably to him: the Woman, he felt, was troubled, tempted, and afraid.

CHAPTER XVIII

Afterwards, months, years afterwards, looking back upon these strange weeks of his brief Egyptian winter, Tom marvelled at himself; he looked back, as it were, upon the thoughts and emotions of another man he could not recognise. This illusion involved his two companions also, Madame Jaretzka supremely, Tony slightly less, all three, however, together affected, all three changed.

As regards himself, however, there was always a part, it seemed, that remained unaffected. It looked on, it compared, it judged. He called it the Onlooker. . . .

Explanation lay beyond his reach; he termed it enchantment: and there he left it. Insight seemed only to operate with regard to himself: of _their_ feelings, thoughts, or point of view he was uninformed.

They offered no explanations, and he sought none. . . . The man honest with himself is more rare than a January swallow. He alone is honest who can state a case without that bias of exaggeration favourable to himself which is almost lying. Try as he may, his statement leans one way or the other. The spirit-level of absolute honesty is hard to find, and, of course, Tom was no exception. . . . Occasionally he recalled the 'spiral theory,' which once, at least, had been in the minds of all three--the notion that their three souls lived over a former episode together, but from a higher point, and with the bird's-eye view which brought in understanding. But if this offered a hint of that winter's inner spiritual structure, Tom certainly did not claim it as a true solution. The whole thing began so stealthily, and progressed so slowly yet so surely. . . .

He could only marvel at himself: he was so singularly changed--imagination so active, judgment alternately so positive and so faltering, every emotion so amazingly intensified. All the weakest and least admirable in him, the very dregs, seemed dragged up side by side with what was n.o.blest, highest, and flung together in the rush and smother of the breaking Wave.

Events, in the dramatic meaning of the word, and outwardly, there were few perhaps, and those few meagre and unsensational. No one was shot or drowned, no one was hanged and quartered; the police were not called in; to outsiders there seemed no air or att.i.tude of drama anywhere; but in three human hearts, thrown together as by chance currents of normal life, there came to pa.s.s changes of a spiritual kind, conflict between essential, primitive forces of the soul, battlings, temptings, aspirations, sacrifice, that are the truest drama always, because the inmost being, whether glorified or degraded, is thereby--changed.

In this fierce intensification of his own being, and in the events experienced, Tom recognised the rising of his childhood Wave towards the breaking point. The early premonition that had seemed causeless to his learned father, that stirred in his mother the deep instinct to protect, and that ever, more or less, hung poised above the horizon of his pa.s.sing years, had its origin in the bed-rock of his nature. It was a.s.sociated with memory and instinct; the native tendencies and forces of his being had dramatised their inevitable fulfilment in a dream. He recognised intuitively what was coming--and he welcomed it. The body shrank from pain; the soul held out her hands to it. . . .

Thus, looking back, he saw it mapped below him from a higher curve in life's ascending spiral. In the glare of a drenching sunshine that seemed hauntingly familiar, in the stupendous blaze of Egypt that knew and favoured it, the action lay spread out: but in darkness, too, an oppressive, suffocating darkness as of the grave, as of the bottom of the sea. The map was streaked with this alternate light and gloom of elemental kind. It pa.s.sed swiftly, he went swiftly with it. A few short crowded weeks of the intensest pain and happiness he had ever known,--and the Wave, its crest reflected in its origin, fell with a drowning crash.

He merged into his background, yet he did not drown: in due course he again--emerged.

The sense of rushing that accompanied it all was in himself apparently: heightened by the contrast of the divine stillness which is Egypt--the golden, hanging days, the nights of cool, soft moonlight, the sighing winds with perfume in their breath, the mournful palms that fringed the peaceful river, the calm of mult.i.tudinous stars. The grim Theban hills looked on; the ruined Temples watched and knew; there were listening ears within a thousand tombs. . . . And there was the Desert--the endless emptiness where everything had already happened, the place where, therefore, everything could happen again without affronting time and s.p.a.ce--the Desert seemed the infinite background whence the Wave tossed up three little specks of pa.s.sionate human action and reaction. It was the 'sea,' a sea of dust. Yet out of the dust wild roses blossomed eventually with a sweetness of beauty unknown to any cultivated gardens. . . .

And while he and his two companions made their moves upon this ancient chessboard of half-forgotten, half-remembered life, all natural things as well seemed raised to their most significant expression, sharing the joy and sadness, the beauty and the terror of his own experience. For the very scenery borrowed of his intensity, the familiar details urged a fraction beyond the normal, as though any moment they must break down into their elemental and essential nakedness. The pungent odour of the universal sand, the dust, the minute golden particles suspended in the flaming air, the marvellous dawns and sunsets, the mighty, awful pylons, and the heat--all these contributed their quota of wonder and mystery to what happened. Egypt inspired it, and was satisfied.

The sediment of his nature was drawn up, the rubbish floated before his eyes, he saw himself through the curtains of suspended dust--until the flood, retiring, left him high upon the sh.o.r.e, no longer shuffling with his earthly, physical feet.

In the train to a.s.souan, Tom still felt the clinging arms about his neck, still heard the loving voice, eager with tenderness for his welfare and his quick return. She needed him: he was everything to her. He knew it, oh he was sure of it. He thought of his work, and knew some slight anxiety that he had neglected it. He would devote all his energies to the interests of his firm: there should be no shirking anywhere; his ten days' holiday was over. His mind fixed itself deliberately, though not too easily, on this alone.

He knew his own capacity, however, and that by concentration he could accomplish in a short time what other men might ask weeks to complete.

Provided all was going well, he saw no reason why he could not be free again in a week at most. He knew quite well his value to the firm, but he knew also that he must continue to justify it. He was complacent, but, he hoped, not carelessly complacent. Tom felt very sure of himself again.

To his great relief he found things running smoothly. He examined every detail, interviewed all and sundry, supervised, decided, gave instructions. There was a letter from the London office conveying the formal satisfaction of the Board with results so far, praising especially certain reductions in cost he had judiciously effected; another private letter from the older partner referred confidently to greater profits than they had dared to antic.i.p.ate; also there was a brief note from Sir William, the Chairman, now at Salonica, saying he might run over a little later and see for himself how the work was getting along.

Tom was supremely happy with it all. There was really very little for him to do; his engineers were highly competent; they could summon him at a day's notice from Luxor if anything went wrong. 'But there's no sign of difficulty, sir,' was their verdict; 'everything's going like clockwork; the men working splendidly; it's only a matter of time.'

It was the evening of the second day that Tom decided to go back to Luxor.

He was eager for the promised bivouac they had arranged together.