Bella Donna Part 38

He stood for a moment considering, then he sat down once more, and began to speak with a resolution that seemed to be prompted by pa.s.sion.

"Ruby, to-day I think I was false to myself, because to-day I was false to my real, my deep-down belief in you. In London I did think you cared for me as a man, not perhaps specially because I'd attracted you by my personality, but because I felt how others misunderstood you. It seemed to me--it seems to me now--that I could answer to a desire in you to which no one else ever tried, ever wished to answer. The others seemed to think you only wanted the things that don't really count--lots of money, luxury, jewels, clothes--you know what I mean. I felt that your real desire was--well, I must put it plainly--to be loved and not l.u.s.ted after, to be asked for something, not only to be given things. I felt that, I seemed to know it. Wasn't I right?"

"To-night--I don't know," she said.

Her ears were full of the music that wailed and throbbed in the breast of the night.

"Can't you forgive that one going back on myself after all these days and--and nights together? Haven't I proved anything to you in them?"

"You have seemed to, perhaps. But men so often seem, and aren't. And I did think you knew why I had married you."

"Tell me why you married me."

"Not to-night."

"Long ago," he said, and now he spoke slowly, and with a deep earnestness which suddenly caught the whole of her attention, "Long ago I loved a girl, Ruby. She was very young, knew very little of the world, and nothing at all of its beastlinesses. I think I loved her partly because she knew so little, she was so very pure. One could see--see in her eyes that they had never looked, even from a distance, on mud, on anything black. She loved me. She died. And, after that, she became my ideal."

He looked at her, slowly lifting his head a little. There was a light in his eyes which for a moment half frightened, half fascinated her, so nakedly genuine was it--genuine as a flame which burns straight in an absolutely windless place.

"In my thoughts I always kept her apart from all other women--always--for years and years, until one night in London, after I knew you. That night--I don't know how it was, or why--I seemed to see her and you standing together, looking at each other; I seemed to know that in you both--I don't know how to tell it exactly"--he stopped, looked down, like one thinking deeply, like one absorbed in thought--"that in you both, mixed with quant.i.ties of different things, there was one thing--a beautiful thing--that was the same. She--she seemed that night to tell me that you had something I had loved in her, that it was covered up out of sight, that you were afraid to show it, that n.o.body believed you had it within you. She seemed to tell me that I might teach you to trust me and show it to me. That night I think I began to love you. I didn't know I should ever tell this to any one, even to you. Do you think I could tell it if I distrusted you as much as you seem to think?"

"Give me a gla.s.s of Apollinaris, will you, Nigel?" she said. "It's over there beside the bed."

"Apollinaris!"

He stared at her as if confused by this sudden diversion.

"Over there!"

She pointed. The long sleeve, like a wing, fell away from her soft, white arm.

"Oh--all right."

He went to get it. She sat still, looking out through the open window to the moonlight that lay on the white stone of the balcony floor. She heard the c.h.i.n.k of gla.s.s, the thin gurgle of liquid falling. Then he came back and stood beside her.

"Here it is, Ruby."

The enthusiasm had gone out of his voice, and the curious light had gone out of his eyes.

"Thank you."

She took it, put it to her lips, and drank. Then she set the gla.s.s down on the writing-table.

"We're at the beginning of things, Nigel," she said. "That's the truth.

We can't jump into a mutual perfection of relations.h.i.+p at once. I've got very few illusions, and I dare say I'm absurdly sensitive about certain matters, much more sensitive than even you can imagine. The fact is I've--I've been trodden on for a long while. A man can't know what a woman--a lady--who's been thoroughly 'in it' feels when she's put outside, and kept outside, and--trodden on. It sends her running to throw her arms round the neck of the Devil. That may be abominable, but it's the fact. And, when she tries to come back from the Devil--well, she's a ma.s.s of nerves, and ready to start at a shadow. I saw a shadow to-day in the garden--"

"I know, I know!"

"You remember the night we dined on the Pylon at Karnak? After dinner you tried to show me the ruins by moonlight, and wherever we went a black-robed watchman followed us, or a black-robed watchman glided from behind a pillar, or an obelisk, or a crumbling wall, and faced us, and at last we took to flight. Well, that's what life is like to certain women; that's what life has been for a long time to me. Whenever I've tried to look at anything beautiful quietly, I've been followed or faced by a black-robed watchman, staring at me suspiciously. And to-day you seemed to be one when you asked me that about Harwich."

She took up the gla.s.s and drank some more of the water. When she put it down he was kneeling beside her. He put his arms around her.

"I won't be that again."

A very faint perfume from her hair came to him, now that he was so close to her.

"I don't want to be that ever."

He held her, and, while he held her, he listened to the Nubian sailors and to the word that was nearly always upon their tireless lips.

"Al-lah--Al-lah--Al-lah!"

G.o.d was there in the night, by the great, mysterious Nile, that flows from such far-off sources in the wild places of the earth; G.o.d was attending to them--to him and Ruby. He had the simple faith almost of a child in a G.o.d who knew each thing that he thought, each thing that he did. Thousands of men have this faith, and thousands of men conceal it as they might conceal a sin. They fear their own simplicity.

The purpose of G.o.d, was it not very plain before him? He thought now that it was. What he had to do was to restore this woman's confidence in the goodness that exists by having a firm faith in the goodness existing in her, by not letting that faith be shaken, as he had let it be shaken that day.

He hated himself for having wounded her, and as he hated himself his strong arms closed more firmly round her, trying to communicate physically to her the resolution he was forming.

And the Nubian sailors went on singing.

To him that night they sang of G.o.d.

To her they sang of Mahmoud Baroudi.

XV

"What is the meaning of that Arabic writing, Mahmoud Baroudi?" said Mrs.

Armine on the following afternoon, as she stood with him and her husband upon the lower deck of the _Loulia_, at the foot of the two steps which led down to the big door dividing the lines of living-rooms from the quarters of the Nubian sailors. The door was white, with mouldings of gold, and the inscription above it was in golden characters.

"It looks so significant that I must know what it means," she added.

"It is taken from the Koran, madame."

"And it means?"

He fixed his great eyes upon her.

"'The fate of every man have we bound about his neck.'"

"'The fate of every man have we bound about his neck,'" she repeated, slowly. "So that is the motto for the _Loulia_!"

She was standing quite still, staring up at the cabalistic signs beneath which she was going to pa.s.s.

"Do you dislike it, madame?"