Bella Donna Part 48

She took up the palm-leaf fan which he had laid upon the table.

"Let me see!"

How should she get at him? What method was the best? Somehow she did not feel inclined to be subtle with him. As she had powdered her face before him so she could calmly have applied the kohl to her eyelids, and so she could now be crude in speech with him. What a rest, what an almost sensuous joy that was! And she had only just realized it, suddenly, very thoroughly.

"What are you like?" she said. "I want to know."

She moved the fan gently, very languidly, to and fro.

"But you can tell me, because you can see me all the time, and I cannot see myself unless I take the gla.s.s," he said.

"Not outside, Baroudi, inside."

She spoke rather as if to a child.

"The man who shows all that is in him to a woman is not a clever man."

"But clever men often do that, without knowing they are doing it."

"You are thinking of your Englishmen," he said, but apparently without sarcasm.

She remembered their first conversation alone.

"The fine fellers--the rulers!" she said.

He did not answer her smile.

"Your Englishmen show what they are. They do not care to hide anything.

If any one does not like all they are, so much the worse for him. Let him have a kick and no piastre. And to the women they are the same--no!

that is not true."

He checked himself.

"No; to the men they are men who are ready to kick, but to the women they are boys. A woman takes a boy by the ear"--he put his left hand over his head and took hold of his right ear by the top--"so, and leads him where she pleases. So the woman leads the Englishman. But we are not like that."

She gazed at the brown hand that held the ear. How unnatural that action had seemed to her! Yet to him it was perfectly natural. Surely in everything he was the opposite of all that she was accustomed to. He took his hand away from his ear.

"How much have you been out of Egypt?" she asked him.

"Not very much. I have been three times to Naples in the hot weather. My father had a villa at Posilipo. I have been with my father to Vichy. I have been four times to Paris. I have been to Constantinople, and I have travelled in Syria."

"Did you go to Palestine?"

"Jerusalem--no. That is for Copts!"

He spoke with disdain. Then he added, with a sort of calm pride and a certain accession of dignity:

"I have been, of course, to Mecca."

"The real man--is he to be found in his religion?"

The thought came to her, and again she--she of all women! How strange that was!--felt the fascination of his faith.

"To Mecca!" she said.

Men pa.s.sed through deserts to reach the holy places. Nigel one evening had told her something of that journey, and she had felt rather bored.

Now she looked at a pilgrim who had gone with the Sacred Carpet, and she was bored no longer.

"Hamza--is he your servant?" she asked, with an apparent irrelevance, that was not really irrelevance.

"He is a donkey-boy at Luxor."

"Yes. He used not to be my donkey-boy. He has only been my donkey-boy since--since my husband has gone. They say in Luxor he is really a dervish."

"They say many things in Luxor."

"They call him the praying donkey-boy. Has he too been to Mecca?"

His face slightly changed. The eyes narrowed, the sloping brows came down. But after a short pause he answered:

"He went to Mecca with me. I paid for him to go."

She did not know much of Mohammedans, but she knew enough to be aware that Hamza was not likely to forget that benefit. And Baroudi had chosen Hamza to be her donkey-boy. She felt as if the hands of Islam were laid upon her.

"Hamza must be very grateful to you!" she said, slowly.

Baroudi made no reply. She looked away over the wild geraniums, down the alley between the trees to the hollow in the river-bank, and she saw a lateen sail glide by, and vanish behind the trees, going towards the south. In a moment another came, then a third, a fourth. The fourth was orange-coloured. For an instant she followed its course beyond the leaves of the orange-trees. How many boats were going southwards!

"All the boats are going southwards to-day," she said.

"The breeze is from the north," he answered, prosaically.

"I want to go further up the Nile."

"If you go, you should take a dahabeeyah."

"Like the _Loulia_. But I am sure there is not a second _Loulia_ on the Nile."

"Do you think you would like to live for a time upon my _Loulia_?"

She nodded, without speaking.

More lateen sails went by, like wings. The effect of them was bizarre, seen thus from a distance and without the bodies to which they were attached. They became mysterious, and Mrs. Armine was conscious of their mystery. With Baroudi she felt strangeness, mystery, romance, things she had either as a rule ignored or openly jeered at during many years of her life. Did she feel them because he did? The question could not be answered till she knew more of what he felt.

"Perhaps it will be so. Perhaps you will live upon the _Loulia_," he said.

"How could I? And when?"

"We do in our lives many things we have said to ourselves we never shall do. And we often do them just at the times when we have thought they will be impossible to do."