Bella Donna Part 44

"Why do women so often ask questions to which they know the answers?

Here is Ibrahim with our coffee."

At this moment, indeed, Ibrahim came slowly from behind the rocky barrier, carrying coffee-cups, sugar, and a steaming bra.s.s coffee-pot on a tray. Without speaking a word, he placed the tray gently upon the ground, filled the cups, handed them to Mrs. Armine and Baroudi, and went quietly away. He had not looked at Mrs. Armine.

And she had thought of Ibrahim as just a gentle and amiable boy!

Could all these people read her mind and follow the track of her distastes and desires, even the dragomans and the donkey-boys? For an instant she felt as if the stalwart Englishmen, the governing race, whom she knew so well, were only children--short-sighted and frigid children--that these really submissive Egyptians, Baroudi, Ibrahim, and the praying Hamza, were crafty and hot-blooded men with a divinatory power.

"Your coffee," said Baroudi, handing to her a cup.

She drank a little, put down the cup, and said:

"The first night we were at the Villa Androud your Nubian sailors came up the Nile and sang just underneath the garden. Why did they do that?"

"Because they are my men, and had my orders to sing to you."

"And Ibrahim--and Hamza?" she asked.

"They had my orders to bring you here."

"Yes," she said.

She was silent for an instant.

"Yes; of course they had your orders."

As she spoke a hot wave of intimate satisfaction seemed to run all over her. From Alexandria this man had greeted her on the first evening of her new life beside the Nile. He had greeted her then, and now he had surely insulted her. He acknowledged calmly that he had treated her as a chattel.

She loved that.

He had greeted her on that first evening with a song about Allah. Her mind, moving quickly from thought to thought, now alighted upon that remembrance, and immediately she recollected Hamza and his prayer, and she wondered how strong was the belief in Allah of the ruthless being beside her.

"They sang a song about Allah," she said, slowly. "Allah was the only word I could understand."

Baroudi raised himself up a little more, and, staring into her face, he opened his lips, and, in a loud and melancholy voice, sang the violent, syncopated tune the Nubian boatmen love. The hot yellow rocks around them seemed to act as a sounding-board to his voice. Its power was surely unnatural, and, combined with his now expressionless face, made upon her an effect that was painful. Nevertheless, it allured her. When he was silent, she murmured:

"Yes, it was that."

He said nothing, and his absolute silence following upon his violent singing strengthened the grip of his strangeness upon her. Only a little while ago she had felt, had even known, that she and Baroudi understood one another as Nigel and she could never understand one another. Now suddenly she felt a mystery in Baroudi far deeper, far more impenetrable, than any mystery that dwelt in Nigel. This mystery seemed to her to be connected with his belief in an all-powerful G.o.d, in some Being outside of the world, presiding over its destinies, ordering all the fates which it contained. And whereas the belief of her husband, which she divined and was often sharply conscious of, moved her to a feeling of irony such as may be felt by a naturally sardonic person when hearing the nave revelations of a child, the faith of Baroudi fascinated her, and moved her almost to a sensation of awe. It was like a fire which burnt her, and like an iron door which shut against her.

Yet he had never spoken of it; he did not speak of it now. But he had sung the song of Nubia.

"Did you tell Ibrahim that he was to choose Hamza as my donkey-boy to-day?" she said.

She was still preoccupied, still she seemed to see Hamza running beside her towards the mountains, praying among the rocks.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Hamza is a very good donkey-boy."

In that moment Mrs. Armine began to feel afraid of Hamza, even afraid of his prayers. That was strangely absurd, she knew, because she believed in nothing. Baroudi now let himself sink down a little, and rested his cheek upon his hand. Somewhere he had learnt the secret of European postures. There had been depths of strangeness in his singing. There was a depth of strangeness in his demeanour. He had greeted her from the Nile by night when he was far away in Alexandria; he had ordered Ibrahim and Hamza to bring her into this solitary place, and now he lay beside her with his strong body at rest, and his mind, apparently, lost in some vagrant reverie, not heeding her, not making any effort to please her, not even--so it seemed to her now--thinking about her. Why was she not piqued, indignant? Why was she even actually charmed by his indifference?

She did not ask herself why. Perhaps she was catching from him a mood that had never before been hers.

For a long time they remained thus side by side, quite motionless, quite silent. And that period of stillness was to Mrs. Armine the most strange period she had ever pa.s.sed through in a life that had been full of events. In that stillness she was being subdued, in that stillness moulded, in that stillness drawn away. What was active, and how was it active? What spoke in the stillness? No echoes replied with their charmed voices among the gleaming rocks of the Libyan mountains.

Nevertheless, something had lifted up a voice and had cried aloud. And an answer had come that had been no echo.

In repose there is renewal. When they spoke again the almost avid desire to make the most of the years that remained to her had grown much stronger in Mrs. Armine, and there had been born within her one of those curious beliefs which, it seems, come only to women--the belief that there was reserved for her a revenge upon a fate, the fate that had taken from her the possibility of having all that she had married Nigel to obtain, and the belief that she would achieve that revenge by means of the man who lay beside her.

XVII

That evening, when Mrs. Armine stepped out of the felucca at the foot of the garden of the Villa Androud, she did not wait for Ibrahim to help her up the bank, but hurried away alone, crossed the garden and the terrace, went to her bedroom, shut and locked the door, lit the candles on either side of the long mirror that stood in the dressing-room, pushed up her veil, and anxiously looked at her "undone" face in the gla.s.s.

Had her action been very unwise? Several times that day, while with Baroudi, she had felt something that was almost like panic invade her at the thought of what she had done. Now, quite alone and safe, she asked herself whether she had been a fool to obey Nigel's injunction and to trust her own beauty.

She gazed; she took off her hat and she gazed again, hard, critically, almost cruelly.

There came a sharp knock against the door.

"Who is it?"

"_C'est moi, madame!_"

Mrs. Armine went to the door and opened it.

"Come here, Marie!" she said, almost roughly, "and tell me the truth. I don't want any flattering or any palavering from you. Do you think I look younger, better looking, with something on my face, or like this?"

She put her face close to the light of the candles and stood quite still. Marie examined her with sharp attention.

"Madame has got to look much younger here," she said, at length. "Madame has changed very much since we have been in Egypt. I do not know, but I think, perhaps, here madame can go without anything, unless, of course, she is going to be with Frenchmen. But if madame is much in the sun, at night she should be careful to put--"

And the maid ran on, happy in a subject that appealed to her whole nature.

Mrs. Armine dined alone and quickly. It was past nine o'clock when she finished, and went out to sit on the terrace and to smoke her cigarette and drink her coffee. In returning from the mountains she had scarcely spoken to Ibrahim, and had not spoken to Hamza except to wish him good-night upon the bank of the Nile. She remembered now the expression in his almond-shaped eyes when he had returned her salutation--an unfathomable expression of ruthless understanding that stripped her nature bare of all disguises, and seemed to leave it as it was for all the men of this land to see.

Ibrahim's eyes never could look like Hamza's. And yet between Ibrahim and Hamza what essential difference was there!

Suddenly she said to herself: "Why should I bother my head about these people, a servant and a donkey-boy?"

In England she would never have cared in the least what the people in her service thought about her. But out here things seemed to be different. And Ibrahim and Hamza had brought her to the place where Baroudi had been waiting to meet her. They were in Baroudi's pay. That was the crude fact. She considered it now as she sat alone, sipping the Turkish coffee that Ha.s.san had carried out to her, and smoking her cigarette. She said to herself that she ought to be angry, but she knew that she was not angry. She knew that she was pleased that Ibrahim and Hamza had been bought by Baroudi. Easterns are born with an appet.i.te for intrigue, with a love of walking in hidden ways and creeping along devious paths. Why should those by whom she happened to be surrounded discard their natures?

And then she thought of Nigel.