In grateful and undying memory of James Champernowne Tundering-West, Esquire, of Eversfield Manor, who, after an unassuming but exemplary life, marked by true christian piety and an unswerving devotion to duty, met an untimely death, in the flower of his manhood, at the hand of an assassin, near Pisa, Italy, this stone has been set up by his sorrowing widow, Dorothy Tundering-West.Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.—Rev. ii. 10.
In grateful and undying memory of James Champernowne Tundering-West, Esquire, of Eversfield Manor, who, after an unassuming but exemplary life, marked by true christian piety and an unswerving devotion to duty, met an untimely death, in the flower of his manhood, at the hand of an assassin, near Pisa, Italy, this stone has been set up by his sorrowing widow, Dorothy Tundering-West.
Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.—Rev. ii. 10.
“Good Lord!” Jim muttered, his sallow face for a moment red with shame. “And in face of this, I have got to come back to life, so that this ‘sorrowing widow’ may divorce me, and thereby empower me to give the name of Tundering-West to my son and leave him in my will the property I abandoned! A pretty muddle!”
He turned away, sick at heart. “O England, England!” he whispered. “Dear nation of hypocrites!—at all costs keeping up the pretence so that the traditional example may be set for coming generations.... Presently they will remove this tablet, and instead they will scrawl across their memories the words: ‘He failed in his duty, because he hid not his dirty linen.’”
He almost ran from the church.
During the continuation of his walk he came upon two of the villagers, but in each case he was able to turn to the hedge as though searching for the last remaining blackberries, and so avoided a face-to-face encounter. His road led him past theback of the woods of the Manor, those woods whither he had so often fled for comfort; and it occurred to him that before walking the further two miles to Jenny’s cottage he might whistle the call which used to bring the poacher to him in the old days. It was just the sort of misty afternoon on which Smiley was wont to slip in amongst the trees.
He therefore stepped into a gap in the encircling hedge of bramble and thorn, the straight muddy road passing into the haze behind him, and the brown, misty woods, carpeted with wet leaves, before him; and, curving his hand around his mouth, he uttered that long low whistle which sounded like the wail of a lost soul, and which more than once had struck terror into the heart of some passing yokel.
Thrice he repeated it, pausing between to listen for the answering call and the familiar cracking of the twigs; and he was about to make a final attempt when of a sudden he heard a slight sound upon the road some fifty yards away. Turning quickly, he saw the ragged, well-remembered figure dart out from the hedge into the middle of the road, eagerly running to right and left like a dog that has lost the scent. He was hatless, and his mop of dirty red hair was unmistakable.
Jim stepped out into the roadway, and thereat Smiley-face came bounding towards him, his arms stretched wide, his smile extending from ear to ear, and his little blue eyes agleam.
“Hullo, Smiley, old sport!” said Jim, holding out his hand; but he was wholly unprepared for the scene which followed.
Smiley’s knees seemed to give way under him, and, snatching at Jim’s hand, he stumbled and fell forward upon the grass at the roadside, panting, coughing, and laughing. “O God! O God! O God!” he gasped. “I knew you was alive, sir: I knew it in me bones.”
He pulled himself up on to his knees, and held Jim’s hand to his face, hugging it in a sort of frenzy of animal delight.
“Get up!” said Jim, sharply. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I dunno,” Smiley answered, sheepishly, clambering to his feet. “I felt sort o’ dizzy-dazzy like. I get took like that sometimes. I ’ad the doctor to me once: he told old Jenny it was my ticket home. That’s what ’e said it was: I heerd ’im say it to ’er.”
“Been ill, have you?” Jim asked, putting his hand on the poacher’s shoulder, and observing now how haggard the face had grown.
“I’ll be fit as a fiddle now you’ve come back,” he answered, laughing. “I knew you wasn’t dead! Murdered, they said you was; but I says to old Jenny: ‘I’ll not believe it,’ I says; ‘not with ’im able to floor I with one twist of his ’and. ’E’s just gone off tramping,’ I says. ’E’s gone back to the roads.... ’E never could abide a bedroom.’”
“Well, you were right, Smiley,” Jim replied. “I couldn’t stick it any longer, and so I quitted. But I mustn’t be seen, you understand. I’m dead. I’ve only come down here to get into touch with you, and find out how things are going on.”
“Friends stick to friends,” the poacher crooned, intoning the words like a chant. “I never ’ad nofriend except you. It seems like I given you everything I got inside my ’ead.”
They entered the wood together, and sat down side by side upon a fallen tree trunk. Jim questioned him about Dolly, and was told that she was living quietly at the Manor, a little widow in a pretty black dress; and that her mother sometimes came to stay with her, but was not at present in Eversfield, so far as he knew.
“Do you think she misses me?” Jim asked.
Smiley wagged his head. “I wouldn’t like to say for sure,” he answered; “but betwixt you and me, sir, that there Mr. Merrivall do spend a deal o’ time at the Manor. Jane Potts, his ’ousekeeper, be terrible mad about it. They do say her watches him like a ferret. It’s jealousy, seeing her’s been as good as a wife to ’im, these many years. But he’s that took with your lady, sir, he can’t see what’s brewing. Seems like as they’d make a match of it when her mourning’s up.”
“The devil they would!” Jim exclaimed, his face lighting up. “Why, then, she’ll be very willing to divorce me.... That’s good news, Smiley!”
The poacher looked perplexed. “Divorce you?” he asked. “Baint you staying dead, then?”
Jim put his hand on Smiley’s shoulder again. “Look here,” he said, “I told you once that if ever I confided my troubles to anybody it would be to you. Can I trust you to hold your tongue?”
Smiley exposed all his yellow teeth in a wide grin. “You can trust I through thick and thin, same as what you said once. They could tear myliver out, but they’d not make I tell what you said I mustn’t tell; and that’s gospel.”
Thereupon Jim explained the whole situation to him, telling him how in a far country he had found again the woman he ought to have married, and how he hoped that Dolly would free him.
“It’s life or death, Smiley,” he said earnestly. “If my wife welcomes me back from the grave, and claims her rights, I shall put a bullet through my head, for I could not be the husband of a sham thing now that I know what it is to love a real woman. Oh, man, I’m devoured by love. I’m burning to be back with her, and with the son she has borne me. Don’t you see I’m in hell, and the fires of hell are consuming me?”
The poacher scratched his towsled red hair. “Yes, I see,” he said. “And I reckon her’s waiting for you over there in them furrin lands where the sun’s shining and the birds are singing. When they told I you was dead I says to old Jenny you’d only gone to those countries you used to talk about, where the trees are green the year round, and you look down into the water and see the trout a-sliding over mother-o’-pearl. ‘’E’s heard the temple-bells a-calling,’ I says, ‘the same as ’e sang about that day in the parish-room,’ I says, ‘and ’e’s just sitting lazy by the river, and maybe the queen of them parts is a-kissing of ’is ’and.’”
Jim laughed aloud. “Smiley, you’re a poet,” he said, “but you came pretty near the truth, only it was I who was kissingherhand.”
For a while longer they talked, but at length Jim proposed that the poacher should go at once to TedBarnes, the postman, and find out whether Mrs. Darling was at the Manor or not, and if not, perhaps Ted could be induced to tell him the address to which her letters were forwarded. “Say you want to send her a couple of rabbits,” Jim suggested, with a laugh. He looked at his watch. “It will be dusk in two hours or so. Meet me here at about that time, just before it is dark.”
Smiley seemed eager to be of service, and, repeatedly touching his forelock, went off on his mission in high spirits, turning round to wave a dirty hand to his adored friend as he glided away amongst the tree trunks into the haze. Thereupon Jim set off for a walk in the direction of the neighbouring village of Bedley-Sutton, in order to pass the time; and it was an hour later that he returned to the woods of the Manor.
There was still another hour to wait before he might expect Smiley’s return; and he therefore strolled through the silent woods, visiting with gloomy curiosity the various well-remembered scenes of his days of captivity. “How could I ever have stood it?” he questioned himself; yet at the back of his mind there was the overwhelming consciousness that here was the home of his forefathers, the home he wished to hand on to his son, but that now it belonged to Dolly, a woman to whom he felt no sense of relationship, and ultimately it would pass out of his family, unless he laid claim to it anew.
The turmoil in his mind was extreme, and his dilemma was made more desperate by the thought that Monimé, whose instinctive wisdom and practical sympathy might now be so helpful, must beshut out from these events and kept in ignorance of his perplexity. He yearned to write to her and make a clean breast of it, yet he feared the blighting effect of such a confession of crude error and deception. With his whole heart he detested himself.
His wandering footsteps led him at length to a point not far distant from the bottom of the Manor garden. He had been threading his way unconsciously through undergrowth and brambles, carrying his coat over his arm and his hat in his hand; and he was about to step out on to the mossy pathway which led to the garden gate when suddenly he heard voices at no great distance, and with beating heart, he stepped back into a thicket and crouched there behind the tall-growing bracken.
A moment later he was staring with flushed face at the approaching figures of Dolly and George Merrivall, who were strolling towards him, she gazing up at her middle-aged companion, and he, his arm about her, looking down at her with his large fish-like eyes. The picture stamped itself savagely upon his mind.
Dolly was wearing a smart black coat and skirt, and a black-and-white scarf was flung around her neck. A saucy little black felt hat, adorned with a stiff feather, showed up her golden hair and the fair complexion of her childlike face. Merrivall, in a new walking-suit of grey homespun, a large cap to match, and grey stockings covering his thin legs, seemed to be clothed to approximate to the grey haze of the afternoon; and even his face appeared grey, like the dead ashes of a fire long burnt out.
Soon they were close at hand, and Jim could hear their words.
“O George,” Dolly was saying, “how frightening the woods are in the half-light! I believe they really are haunted. Why did you dare me to come here?”
“It was you who proposed it,” he answered, shortly.
“Did I?” she replied, looking up at him with innocent eyes. “Well, I’m not really afraid when you are with me. You’re so strong, so protective. I suppose there’s nothing in the world that could frighten you.”
“Not many things,” he agreed, with a brave toss of his head.
She pressed his arm. “You know, that’s what I always missed so much in poor Jim. I could never look to him for protection; I could never lean on him. And, you see, I’m such a little coward, really: you should see me running sometimes from some silly thing that has startled me.”
“My little fawn!” he murmured, lifting her hand to his lips.
Jim’s eyes were wild. “The same old game!” he muttered to himself, as he peered at them between the wet, brown leaves of the bracken.
“You need a man to take care of you,” Merrivall continued. “How long must we wait before we can announce our engagement?”
“You are impatient, George,” she replied. “Even though I never really loved Jim, I feel I ought to give his memory the tribute of the usual year. People who don’t know how he forced me to marry him and how brutally he ill-treated me, would say unkind things if I married you any sooner than that.”
Merrivall remained silent for a moment, standing still upon the mossy pathway. “Nobody would know if we got married at once at a registry office,” he said at length. “We could go abroad for some months.”
She looked up at him archly. “A wife is a very expensive thing you know,” she smiled. “Why, a woman’s clothes alone cost a fortune. You see it isn’t only what shows on the outside—it’s all the wonderful things underneath....”
They passed on out of earshot, leaving Jim, who remembered so well her tricks, consumed by fierce anger, and overwhelmed by his destiny. If Dolly married this man, the final complication would be reached, and the legal difficulties would be multiplied out of all reckoning. Moreover, the thought that the home of the Tundering-Wests should pass to a washed-out drunken remittance man enhanced the value of the estate a hundredfold in his eyes. He felt inclined to reveal himself at once: he was mad with rage at her misrepresentation of the facts of their relationship.
A few moments later Merrivall stopped short, looking at his watch; and, as he turned, Jim could hear again his words. “Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “I shall be late for the whist drive. What am I thinking of!”
He took Dolly’s hand and ran back at a jog-trot towards the gate. As soon as they had passed him and were hidden by the bend in the path, Jim rose to his feet and hurried after them. He had no settled purpose: he wished only to follow them. When he came within fifty yards of the border of the woods, however, he paused behind a tree, andwatched Merrivall as he hastened across the garden, leaving Dolly panting at the gate. She was perhaps a little annoyed at his precipitation, and thought it more dignified to let him be, now that she was back in the safety of her garden and the fearsome woods were behind her.
After a lapse of a minute or two Jim observed that she was looking from side to side as though she had lost something, and soon he could see that she had dropped one of her gloves, and was trying to pluck up her courage to enter the gloomy dimness of the haunted woods once more in order to find it. His eye searched the pathway, and presently he discerned the missing glove lying not more than a few yards from him, a little further into the woods.
He had no time to conceal himself before Dolly came running down the pathway, looking furtively to right and left. She passed without seeing him and retrieved the glove; but as she turned to retrace her steps she caught sight of him and started back, uttering a cry of fright.
Flight seemed useless to Jim: the crisis had come, and in his bitter wrath he gladly faced it. Slowly and deliberately he stepped forward on to the pathway and stood there barring her way. His raincoat and hat were still amongst the bracken at his former place of hiding, and now he stood silently in the grey and ghostly haze, wearing an old suit of clothes which she knew well, his dark hair falling untidily about his forehead, his face ashen white, his eyes burning with anger, his whole attitude menacing and vindictive.
Dolly’s terror was horrible to behold. Her righthand and arm beat at the air conclusively; the knuckles of her left hand were thrust between her chattering teeth; her eyes were dilated, and her eyebrows seemed to have gone up into her hair.
“I didn’t mean it, Jim!” she gasped. “I didn’t mean it! Go away! I’ll tell him the truth; I’ll tell him you were good to me ... O God, take him away!... Go back to your grave, Jim. O God, take him away, take him away ...!”
Her voice rose to a shriek; and, falling upon her knees, she beat the soft moss of the pathway with her fists in frenzy.
“Get up, you little fool!” Jim snapped. “I’m not a ghost. I’m alive: look at me.”
She stared at him with her mouth open, crawled forward, and rose to her feet. Suddenly, as the truth seemed to dawn upon her, the colour surged into her cheeks, and there came an expression of hatred into her face which Jim had not seen before, and which wholly surpassed the animosity he himself felt.
“You’realive?” she gasped. “You weren’t murdered? You’ve just played a trick on me?”
“Yes,” he answered. “I didn’t mean to turn up again, only circumstances have compelled me to.”
“You can’t come back!” she cried, wringing her hands in such desperation that a certain degree of pity was added to Jim’s tumult of emotions. “You’re dead: you can’t come back to life again, you can’t, you can’t!... Spoiling everything like this, you beast!—you devil! Oh, I might have guessed it was all a dirty trick to spite me. You’ve been living with some other woman, I suppose. Well, go back to her. I’ve done with you. Nobody wants youhere: we all thanked Heaven when you died. You were always impossible.”
She moved to and fro, now twisting her gloves in her hands, now pointing at him with shaking fingers, and now clutching at her breast and throat.
“Well, there it is,” Jim said, feeling himself to be in the wrong. “I’m sorry about it all, but here I am, alive. I’m not going to bother you. All I want is for you to divorce me for desertion, so that I can be quit of you and Eversfield for the rest of my life.”
“Divorce you?” she repeated, furiously. “Divorce a dead man? Make myself a laughing stock? Why, I’ve only just paid for a memorial tablet for you in the church; a lying tablet, too, in which I’ve called myself your ‘sorrowing widow.’ It isn’t true. I felt no sorrow: I think I always detested you. I should never have married you if it hadn’t been for mother saying you were such a good match. And now, just when I’ve found a real man, a man who will look after me, you come sneaking home again, prowling about like a tramp, or a burglar, or something. I wish to God youweredead!”
Under her lashing tongue, Jim was nonplussed. He wanted to tell her how she had made his life impossible by her shams and pretences, her crude view of marriage, her intrinsic uselessness; but words were not forthcoming. “As far as you are concerned,” he said lamely, “I shall be dead as soon as you divorce me. It will mean postponing your marriage for a few months: that’s all.”
“What have you came back for?” she cried, at length. “Is it money you want? I suppose it’s a sort of blackmail.”
“No, I don’t want money,” he said. “I’ll leave you the bulk of the estate. But I may as well tell you right away, you will only have a life-interest in this place. On your death it will revert to me and my successors. Those are my terms; and if you don’t agree to them, I’ll claim the whole estate again and make you only an allowance.”
“Oh, you fiend!” she cried, beside herself once more with fury. “The utter cruelty and callousness of it! It’s just a practical joke you’ve played on me, coming back like a cad when we all thought you were dead and done with. I’ll tell everybody: I’ll make your name stink in the nostrils of every man who is a gentleman.”
Jim shrugged his shoulders; and, suddenly, to his amazement she leapt at him and dug her nails into his face. He grabbed hold of her arms, and for a dreadful moment they struggled like two savages. Then she broke loose from him and dashed away amongst the misty trees at the side of the pathway, stumbling through the bracken, and crying out to him disjointed words of fury. For some moments Jim stood staring after her, listening to the crackling of the twigs which marked her progress. She was working round, it seemed, towards the gate of the manor, and presently the sounds ceased, as though she had paused to get her breath.
Thereat Jim walked back towards his rendezvous, recovering his coat and hat on the way. His brain was confused and distracted, and a feeling of nausea was upon him. Passionately he hated himself; and miserably he asked himself what Monimé would think of the whole unsavoury business were she ever to hear of it.
Darkness was falling, and Jim, whose heart was in his boots, was beginning to feel cold in spite of the mildness of the day, when Smiley-face made his appearance, touching his forelock ingratiatingly.
“I been a long time, sir,” he explained, “but you know what that there Ted Barnes is. Slow to talk and wanting a power of persuading. But I got the address from ’im: ’ere it is, wrote on this paper.”
He handed Jim a slip of paper, upon which the address of a Kensington hotel was written. He was grinning triumphantly, as though he had performed some great service for his friend.
“Good lad,” said Jim. “That’s very smart of you. I say, Smiley: I’ve had the deuce of a time while you were in the village. I met my wife!”
The poacher smiled from ear to ear. “O Lordee!” he chuckled. “I reckon that ’ud give her a bit of a turn, like.”
Jim told him something of what had occurred, but Smiley’s attitude of frank amusement caused him to cut the story short; and it was not long before he brought the interview to an end.
As they shook hands at the edge of the wood, Smiley suddenly paused and raised his finger. “Did you hear anything?” he asked.
“No,” said Jim, after listening for a few moments.
“Thought I heard a step,” the poacher went on. “There’s a heap o’ tramps about these days. I seen ’em in the woods sometimes, but I don’t allow no one to poach there except me....”
He was in a loquacious mood, and Jim found it necessary to make a resolute interruption of the flow of his words by shaking him warmly by the hand once more and setting off down the dark lane in the direction of Oxford.
He reached London, somewhat dazed, in time for dinner, and by nine o’clock he was driving out to Kensington to pay a visit to Mrs. Darling. Now that Dolly knew that he was alive, it would be as well for him to enlist the services of her mother as soon as possible. He could, perhaps, make it worth her while to aid him in regard to the divorce.
Upon arriving at the small private hotel where she was staying he was shown into an unoccupied sitting-room.
“What name, sir?” asked the page.
“Mr. Tundering-West,” said Jim, apprehensive of the jolt the announcement would cause, but feeling that since a shock could not be avoided, it would be better for her to receive it before she entered the room.
He had not long to wait: after a few minutes of uncomfortable fiddling with his hat, Mrs. Darling suddenly bounced in, as though she had been kicked from behind. Then, with astonished eyes fixed on Jim, she shut the door and stood staring at him in complete silence.
“Yes,” he said, nervously smiling, “it’s me, Mrs. Darling!”
“Good gracious!” she gasped. “Jim! You—you—you lunatic! What on earth are you doing in the land of the living? You’re supposed to be dead and buried.”
“No, not buried,” he corrected her. “I was knifed, you remember, and dropped into the sea.”
She passed her hand across her forehead. “You mean you swam back home?” Her voice was awed.
“Something like that,” he laughed. “Anyway, here I am; and I’ve come to you to ask what I’m to do next. I’ve just had a talk with Dolly.”
Mrs. Darling threw up her hands, and therewith she set about his cross-examination, asking him a number of questions in regard to his life, and receiving a number of evasive replies. “My good man,” she said at length, “do you realize that Dolly is an established widow, on the look out, in fact, for another husband? Do you realize that we’ve had a solemn memorial service for you, and put a tablet up in the church?”
“Yes, I’ve seen it,” he answered. “It made me blush for shame.”
“I’m very glad to hear it,” she said. “You may well be ashamed that you have fallen so far short of the virtues attributed to you. I always think it is such a wonderful thing in nature that the only creatures who can blush are the only creatures who have occasion to.”
Considering that it was her daughter’s future which was at stake, Mrs. Darling seemed to Jim to be treating matters very lightly.
“Do you realize,” she went on, her voice rising, “that your will has been read, and Dolly owns everypenny you had, and gives me three hundred pounds a year allowance?”
“Only three hundred?” he remarked. “That’s mean. I’ll give you four.”
“It’s not yours to give,” she answered. “You’re dead—dead as mutton. You can’t play fast and loose with death like that, you know. When you’re murdered, you’re murdered, and there’s an end of it. It would make things absolutely impossible if people could go popping in and out of their graves like you are doing. Surely you can see that. What did Dolly say?”
“Oh, she was very upset,” he told her. “She stormed at me and called me every name under the sun; said she had always hated me; told me she was going to marry George Merrivall.”
“Well, what else did you expect? She says you ill-treated her horribly.”
“That’s a lie,” said Jim, sharply.
“Yes, so I told her,” Mrs. Darling replied. “I know you. You’re perfectly mad, but I always felt you were very decent to Dolly, considering what a little fraud she is.”
“Anyhow, I don’t mind her saying I ill-treated her,” he added, “if that’s any use for the purpose of our divorce.”
“Divorce?” cried Mrs. Darling. “Do you want her to divorce you? What for?”
“So that I can be quit of her, and marry again if I find the right woman.”
Mrs. Darling held up her hands. “What sublime courage! But you mustn’t let marriage become a habit, for the divorce courts are very slow, you know.I have a woman friend who is already three marriages ahead of her divorces. I should have thought that a man like you, who is something of a philosopher and thinker, would now shun marriage like the plague. But I suppose even the cleverest men.... There is the famous case of Socrates, who died of an overdose of wedlock.”
“Hemlock,” he corrected her.
“Ah, yes, to be sure. Perhaps it is simply your youth: you still look very young, in spite of your recent death. I remember, in the days before my bright future had resolved itself into a shady past, I, too, was an optimist about marriage. But I was soon cured. So long as he liked me, my husband was so terribly jealous of me. It was quite intolerable. He would not even let my eyes wander from him. Why, I remember once turning my head away from him for a moment because I had hiccups, and being instantly cured by his seizing my throat in a consequent fit of passion.... Were you ever jealous of Dolly?”
“No,” said Jim; “and this afternoon I saw her making love to George Merrivall without any feeling except annoyance with myself for ever having believed in her.”
“Poor Dolly,” sighed her mother. “I am devoted to her, as you know; but I do realize her faults, and I know what you had to put up with.”
For some time they discussed the possibilities of divorce, and Mrs. Darling was frankly business-like in regard to the financial side of the affair.
“Of course,” she said, “it is very hard to do business with you, my dear Jim, because you are anhonest man. I prefer dealing with crooks. It is so simple, because you always know that at some stage of the game they are going to try to trip you up. But with honest men, you never know what they’ll do next.”
The upshot of their conversation was an understanding that Mrs. Darling should go down next day to Eversfield and win her daughter over to the idea of divorce; and, this being arranged, he rose to go.
“Good-bye,” he said, warmly shaking her hand. “I can’t begin to thank you for your kindness, and generosity of mind.”
“Oh, nonsense!” she laughed. “I’m just a scheming old woman, Jim. As I’ve often told you, I’d sell my soul for an income; and in this case it is obvious that, since you are alive, you hold the family purse-strings. That’s why I am nice to you.”
“I don’t believe it,” he answered.
“Well, anyway,” she said, “I wish you well, dead or alive. Good-bye, my dear. May you be with the rich in this world and with the poor in the world to come.”
Jim arrived back at his hotel in a somewhat happier frame of mind, and went at once to his bedroom, tired after the adventures of the day. When he was in bed, however, he found that sleep had deserted him; and for some time he lay on his back, vainly endeavouring to quell the turbulence of the mob of his thoughts. The figure of Dolly kept presenting itself to his mind, and his inward ears heard her voice continuously railing at him and reproaching him.
Her pretty, silly little face seemed to push in upon his thoughts of Monimé; and suddenly he sat up, scared by the vividness of the impression, and wondering whether it were some sort of portent of coming calamity in regard to the new life for which he hoped so passionately. He switched on the light, and, kicking off the bedclothes, went across to the washstand and poured himself out a dose of whisky from his flask. The radiator was too hot, and the room felt stuffy; but, throwing open the window, a blast of cold air and wet sleet searched him to the skin, and obliged him to shut it again.
“Oh, what a God-forsaken country!” he muttered; and therewith fetched his guitar from its case, and sitting cross-legged upon the bed in his pyjamas, began twanging the strings and singing old songs in a minor key which sounded like dirges for the dead. The music soothed him, and soon he was pouring his whole heart into the melodies, oblivious to all around him. They were songs of love now, and as he sang his thoughts went out over the seas to Cairo where Monimé at this moment was probably lying asleep in her bed, her black hair spread upon the pillow.
There was a sharp knock upon the door. “Come in,” he called out, pausing in his song, but remaining seated upon the bed, with his fingers upon the strings of his guitar.
A red-faced, grey-moustached man of military appearance stumped into the room, clad in a brown dressing-gown. “Confound you, sir!” he roared. “If you don’t put that damned banjo away and go to bed, I’ll ring for the manager.”
“What’s it to do with you?” Jim asked, twanging the strings dreamily.
“It’s disturbing the whole hotel,” he answered. “Nobody can get a wink of sleep with that blasted noise going on. Damn it, sir!—have you no sense of duty to your neighbour?”
The question hit home: once again he had been proved wanting in consideration. “I’m most awfully sorry,” he said, with genuine contrition. “I’d clean forgotten I was in a hotel. Please forgive me. Have a whisky and soda? Have a cigar?”
His visitor did not deign to reply. He stared at Jim with hot, scowling eyes, and then, making a contemptuous gesture, left the room again, slamming the door after him.
“Well, that’s that,” Jim muttered, thereafter returning to bed, annoyed with himself and distressed that he should have caused annoyance to others. “What a swine I am,” he thought.
Matthew Arnold’s lines:—
Weary of myself, and sick of askingWhat I am, and what I ought to be....
Weary of myself, and sick of askingWhat I am, and what I ought to be....
Weary of myself, and sick of askingWhat I am, and what I ought to be....
Weary of myself, and sick of asking
What I am, and what I ought to be....
came into his brain, and gloomily he repeated them half aloud. Would Monimé marry him? Or would she, too, find him impossible? What a mess he had made of his life! Perhaps Dolly had been justified in her dislike of him.
With such thoughts as these he at last fell off to sleep.
Next morning, after breakfast, he picked up a newspaper in the smoking-room, and for some minutes read the foreign news without much interest.Then suddenly a set of headlines caught his attention, and caused him to sit up, aghast, in his chair. The printed words swayed before his eyes as he read the appalling news.
“Last night,” the story began, “the body of Mrs. Dorothy Tundering-West, widow of the late James Tundering-West, of the Manor, Eversfield, near Oxford, was found in a wood adjoining the grounds of the Manor. The back of the skull was smashed in, probably by a blow from a large stone which was found near by with bloodstains upon it. Mrs. West had been missing since four o’clock in the afternoon, and medical evidence indicates that death must have occurred at about that hour....”
With desperate haste his eyes travelled down the column. There was no doubt that she had been murdered, said the report, but the thick carpeting of damp leaves upon the ground had retained no impression of the offender’s footprints. She was lying on her face, and a second wound upon her forehead was probably caused by her fall. The motive was not apparent, for there had been no robbery, and there were no signs of a struggle.
The police, he read, attached some significance to the presence of a man of foreign appearance who was seen in the early afternoon picking berries from a hedge in the neighbourhood. In this connection it was recalled that Mr. Tundering-West had died by the hand of an assassin in Italy only a few months ago, and it was possible that the two crimes were both the outcome of some secret vendetta. What had induced the unfortunate lady to go intothe woods was a mystery, and perhaps indicated that she had been lured to her doom.
Jim’s first emotions were those of extreme horror at the crime, and pity for Dolly. The manner of her death appalled him; and though he was not conscious of any binding relationship to her, the catastrophe of her murder swept across his being like a fierce wind, as it were, uprooting the plantations of his overstocked brain, or like a breaking wave thundering on to the shingle of his multitudinous thoughts.
It was fortunate that he was alone in the smoking-room, for his agitation was such that his exclamations were uttered audibly, and soon he was pacing the floor, the newspaper crumpled in his hand. It seemed to be his fate that the crises of his life should be announced to him through the columns of the daily Press. In this manner he had read of his inheritance, of his supposed murder at Pisa, and now of the death of his wife. It was as though roguish powers had selected him as a victim on whom thus to spring surprises.
Who could have committed the crime? The thought of Smiley-face came immediately to his mind, but was as quickly dismissed again. The poacher, he knew, had been busy in the village getting Mrs. Darling’s address from the postman; and, moreover, his behaviour when they had met again clearly proclaimed his innocence. Possibly some tramp had been lurking in the woods, as Smiley had suspected, and Dolly had been assaulted by him as she ran from Jim. He remembered now with awe the sudden silence which had followedher loud flight through the crackling undergrowth.
The wretched Merrivall, he realized, would have to keep his movements well hidden; for if it were known that he had been in the woods with Dolly he would most assuredly be suspected, motive or no motive. If anybody had seen him running across the manor garden on his way to the forgotten whist-drive it would go hard with him.
Suddenly, following this thought, came the awful realization of his own peril. He, Jim, was the last man to see her alive; and in his own case a motive would not be lacking. Smiley-face would be certain to suspect him, and by some mistake might give the secret away.
And then—Mrs. Darling! She knew he had seen Dolly in the woods, she knew they had quarrelled violently! Of course, she would accuse him! The thought blared at him like a discordant trumpet, proclaiming his guilt to the world, while his heart drummed a wild accompaniment.
In bewilderment he ran blindly up the stairs to his bedroom and locked the door behind him.
For some time he sat in his bedroom, overwhelmed by horror and pity at Dolly’s death, and by the terrible menace of his own situation. Mrs. Darling would certainly denounce him to the police, for hardly could she think otherwise than that he was the murderer of her daughter, even though his open visit to her at her hotel would be difficult to reconcile with his guilt.
Fate seemed to be playing with him, torturing him, hitting him from all sides. If only he had postponed his visit to Mrs. Darling he would now be free to slip away as unnoticed as he had come, resuming his life in the Near East as Jim Easton, and being in no way suspected of the crime, for the silence of Smiley-face could be relied on.
But now he was done for! True, he was to-day a widower, and was therefore in a position to marry the woman whom he loved with a passion which seemed only to grow stronger as the complications increased. But he would be obliged to lie to her daily, throughout his life: there would always be this pitiable barrier of deception between them. And, moreover, the tragedy of Dolly’s death so filled his mind that any advantage it might have to himself was hardly able to be realized. He was profoundly shocked at her pitiable end, and its consequences were enveloped in gloom.
Even though Mrs. Darling were to hold her tongue, the Eversfield estate would none the less be wholly lost to him now, nor would his son ever reign there as a Tundering-West; for were he to lay claim to the property, or reveal the fact that he, James Tundering-West, was alive, Monimé would think he had gone to England and had done Dolly to death so as to be free to marry again. How could she think otherwise?
And, again, though he were for the time being to escape from the arm of the law, he could only marry Monimé at the risk of dragging her into a possible scandal in the future.
He paced his bedroom in his despair, now cursing himself for his actions, now screwing up his eyes to shut out the pitiful picture of Dolly, now laughing aloud, like a madman, at the nightmare of his own position. One thing was certain: he must leave England this very morning and make his way back to Cyprus or Egypt, or somewhere. Already Mrs. Darling might have notified the police. Fortunately she did not know his address, nor had she ever heard the name “Easton,” but doubtless the ports would be watched, and were he to delay his departure he would be caught.
In sudden haste which bordered on frenzy he packed his portmanteau and rang for his bill; and soon he was driving to the station, a huddled figure with hat pulled down over his eyes. He was far too early for the train, and, during the long wait every pair of eyes which looked into his set his heart beating with apprehension.
He had always been an outlaw: he had never fullyunderstood the basis of society, nor were the habits of the community altogether intelligible to him. He had gone his own ways, and had left organized humanity to go theirs. They had not molested one another. But now the State had a grievance against him, and soon it would be feeling out for him with its millions of antennæ, searching over hill and dale, city and field, with waving, creeping tentacles. He would have to duck and dodge continuously to avoid being caught, and always there would be in his heart the terror of that cruel, relentless mouth waiting to suck the life out of him.
His relief was intense when at the end of the day he found himself, still unmolested, in Paris. But he did not here stay his flight. All through the night he journeyed southwards, sitting with lolling head in the corner of a third-class compartment in a slow train—a mode of travelling which he had deemed the least conspicuous.
At length, upon the following evening, he reached Marseilles, where he put up at a small hotel at which he had stayed more than once under the name of Easton. He told the proprietor he had just come from Italy, a remark which led him to a frenzied erasing of labels from his baggage in his bedroom.
The next morning he made inquiries as to the steamers sailing east, and was relieved to find that a French liner was leaving for Alexandria in a few hours. He obtained a berth without difficulty and, after a period of horrible anxiety at the docks, found himself once more upon the high seas, the menace of the western world fading into the distance behind him, and the greater chances of the Orient ahead.
Thus he arrived back one morning upon the soil of Egypt, a fugitive from the terror of the law, all his nerves strained to breaking-point, his face pallid, his dark eyes wild. With aching heart he yearned for the serenity which Monimé exuded like the perfume of incense around her; he longed to be able to go to her and to bare his soul of its secrets, and to lay his heavy head upon her complacent breast; he craved for the comfort of those caressing hands which seemed in their soothing touch to be endowed with the mother-craft of all the ages.
Never before in his independent life had he felt so profound a desire for sympathy and companionship, yet now more than ever must he lock up his troubles in his own heart. He would write to her at Mena House Hotel, near Cairo, where she was staying, and tell her ... tell her what? That he could not live without her, that he had come back to her after but a couple of days in England, that she held for him the keys of heaven, that away from her he was in outer darkness. He would await her answer here in Alexandria, and by the time it arrived perhaps he would have recovered in some degree his equilibrium.
Feeling that his safety lay in the unbroken continuity of his life as Jim Easton, he went to the little Hotel des Beaux-Esprits, vaguely telling the proprietress that he had travelled over from Cyprus. Some London papers had just arrived and these, having come by a faster route, carried the news to the second morning after his departure from England. His hand shook as he searched the columns for the “Eversfield Murder,” and his excitement and reliefwere altogether beyond description when he read that George Merrivall’s housekeeper, Jane Potts, had been arrested and charged with the crime.
Eagerly he turned to the recent copies of the local newspaper in which the English telegrams were published daily, and here he read that the evidence against the woman was of such damning character that she had been committed for trial. He recalled how Smiley-face had spoken of this woman’s jealousy of Dolly, and it seemed evident that she had followed George Merrivall into the woods that day and had wreaked her vengeance on her rival.
Mrs. Darling, then, had not notified the police! Doubtless she had heard of the guilt of Jane Potts in time to prevent the further scandal in regard to himself. She must have realized at once that since he was not the murderer there was no good purpose to be served in revealing the fact that he was still alive. Possibly, indeed, she may have hoped to profit by Dolly’s death—she was the next-of-kin—and had no wish to resuscitate the rightful lord of the manor from his supposed grave beneath the waves of Pisa. He could quite imagine the pleasant, unscrupulous soul saying to him: “You remain dead, my lad, and make no claim to the estate, or I’ll force you also to stand your trial for the murder, whether you did it or not.”
He was free, then! He wanted to shout the tidings to the four corners of the world. He was free to go to Monimé, and to ask her to marry him. For a short time longer he would have to hide his identity: he must wait until Jane Potts had paid the penalty of her jealousy. Then he could pension offMrs. Darling, and, when all was settled and the estate once more in his possession, the opportune moment would have arrived for his clean breast to Monimé. She would understand; she would forgive! With him she would rejoice that by bequest their son would be made heir to a comfortable income and home, while they themselves would have the means to procure that house of their dreams, somewhere beside the blue Mediterranean, which should be their resting-place at desired intervals in their untrammelled wanderings over the face of the earth.
The sudden simplification of all his complexities, the disentangling of the web in which he had been struggling, had an immediate and palpable effect upon his appearance. His head was held high again, his eyes were no longer furtive, his step was buoyant. Not for another hour could he delay his reunion with Monimé, and to the astonished proprietress he announced a sudden change of plans, and was gone from the hotel within thirty minutes of his arrival.
He reached Cairo at mid-afternoon upon one of those warm and brilliant days which are the glory of early winter in Egypt, and was soon driving out in the Mena House motor-omnibus along the straight avenue of majestic acacia-trees leading from the city to the Pyramids, in the shadow of which the hotel stands at the foot of the glaring plateau of rock on the edge of the desert.
At the hotel he was told that Monimé was probably to be found at a point about half a mile to the north-west, where she had caused a tent to be erected, and was engaged upon the painting of a desert subject. He was in no mood to wait for her return atsundown; and, without visiting the bedroom which was assigned to him, he set out at once on foot to find her.
Through the dusty palm-grove behind the hotel he hastened, and up the slope of the sandy hill beyond, from the summit of which he could see the tent standing in the distance amongst the rolling dunes. Thereat he broke into a run, and went leaping down into the little valleys and scrambling up the low hills beyond, like a captive freed from the toils.
A few minutes later, mounting another eminence, he found himself immediately at the back of the tent, and here a native boy, who had been lying drowsing upon the warm sand, rose to his feet, and, in answer to a rapid question, told him that the lady was at work at the doorway of the tent.
Jim hurried forward, his heart beating, and the next moment he was face to face with Monimé.
“Jim!” she exclaimed in astonishment, throwing down her palette and brushes. “My dear boy, I thought you were in England.”
“So I was,” he laughed. “I was there just two days, and then ... I gave it up.”
He could restrain himself no further. “Oh, Monimé,” he cried, and flung his arms about her, kissing her throat and her cheeks and her mouth. She made a momentary show of protest, but her face was smiling; and soon he felt that droop of the limbs and heard that inhalation of the breath, and saw that closing of the eyes which, the world over, are the signs of a woman’s capitulation. No further words then were spoken; but, each enfolded in the arms of the other, with lips pressed to lips, theyhung as it were suspended between matter and spirit, while the sun tumbled from the skies, the hills of the desert were shattered, the valleys were cleft in twain, and there came into being for them a new earth and a new heaven.
When at length they stood back from one another, bewildered and spellbound, their whole existence had undergone an irreparable change; and each gazed at the other with unveiled eyes which revealed a naked soul. Now at last, as by an instantaneous flash of the miraculous hand of Nature, she was become blood of his blood, bone of his bone, and they two were for ever merged into one flesh.
Quietly, automatically, she put away her brushes and paints; then, coming back to him as he stood staring at her with a dazed expression upon his swarthy face, she put her arms about his neck and laid her lips upon his mouth.
“I never knew,” she whispered, “until you had gone that I belonged to you body and soul.”
He threw his head back and laughed in his exaltation. “To-morrow,” he said, “I shall go to the Consulate, and notify them that we are going to be married.”
She nodded her head calmly. “Yes,” she smiled, “I suppose it’s too late to do it to-day.”
The sun was going down behind the Pyramids as they returned with linked arms to the hotel; and for a moment that sense of foreboding which is so often felt at sunset in the desert, intruded itself upon his dream of happiness. There were banks of menacing cloud gathered upon the horizon; and from the village of El Kafr, at the foot of the GreatPyramid, there came the far-off throbbing of a drum, a sound which always has in it an element of alarm.
Jim turned to Monimé. “Tell me,” he urged, “that you have no doubts left in your mind.”
“No, I have no doubts,” she answered. “You and I and Ian—we are bound together now right to the end. It is Destiny.”
The period of three weeks which, by consular law, had to elapse before the ceremony of their marriage could be performed, was a time of blissful happiness to Jim. The open desert with its wind-swept spaces of glistening sand, and its ranges of low hills which carried the eye ever forward into its mysterious depths, enthralled him like an endless tale of adventure, or like a native flute-song that rises and falls in continuous changing melody. With Monimé he left the hotel each morning, and, having conducted her to her tent, he would wander over the untrodden wastes until the luncheon hour brought him back to her to share their picnic meal. He would come to her again at sundown, and together they would stroll back to civilization in time to see the last flush fade from the domes and minarets of the distant city. Or, when the painter’s inspiration failed her, they would mount their camels and go careering into the wilderness, riding through silent valleys and over breezy hills, talking eagerly as they went, and sending their laughter echoing amongst the rocks.
For him it was a lazy, sun-bathed existence, rich in the abundance of their love, and unmarred by any cares. He read in the papers that the trial of Jane Potts would not take place before March; and withthat assurance he returned to his earlier habit of detachment from the world’s doings, and did not again trouble even to glance at the news. Life was a new thing to him: it had begun again; and the tragic events of the past were, for the present, able to be forgotten.
Even a favourable letter from the publishers to whom he had sent his poems hardly aroused his excitement, so deeply was he in love. It was a somewhat patronizing letter, in which no great consideration for his artistic sensibilities was manifest. The manuscript was accepted for publication some time in the spring, on moderately satisfactory terms; but it was stated that the firm’s discretion must be admitted, and, owing to his inaccessibility, it might be necessary to rely on their own “readers” in the correction of the proofs. He was told, in fact, to leave the matter in their hands, and not to assert himself further than to cable his consent to this agreement; and this he did, without giving two thoughts to the matter. Some ten days later a contract arrived, which he was requested to sign; and having done so, he mailed it back to London, and went his joyous way.
Monimé had been commissioned to paint some pictures of the great rock-temple of Abu Simbel, in Lower Nubia, far up the Nile; and it was therefore decided that they should go there immediately after their marriage, by which time her work in the neighbourhood of the Pyramids would be completed. To this Jim looked forward eagerly; for there was something akin to rapture in the thought of faring forth, alone with his beloved, into distant places,where they would be undisturbed by the proximity of their entirely superfluous fellow-creatures.
At length the great day arrived, and, driving into Cairo, they were married in ten minutes at the Consulate, and thence they sped across to the English church, where the religious ceremony was quietly performed. That night, as in a dream, they travelled by sleeping-car to Luxor, and, next day, continued their ecstatic way to the Nubian frontier. Here the railroad terminates, and the remainder of the journey, therefore, had to be made by river.
The dahabiyeh which they had chartered awaited them at Shallâl, over against Philæ, just above the First Cataract; and their settling in was much simplified by the fact that the local police officer, sauntering on the wharf, recognized Jim, and at once put himself at their service. He had been in charge of the camel patrol which used to visit the gold mines; and Jim had shown him some kindness, which now he endeavoured to return by a noisy but effective show of his authority and patronage.
The vessel was not large, the interior accommodation consisting of a white-painted saloon, a narrow passage, from which a small cabin and a bathroom led off, and a fair-sized bedroom at the stern. Above their apartments was the deck, across which awnings of richly-coloured Arab tenting were drawn when the ship was not under sail. In the prow were the kitchen and quarters of the native sailors.
Abu Simbel is a hundred and seventy miles up stream from Shallâl; and, sailing from silver dawn to golden sunset, and mooring each night under the jewelled indigo of the skies, the journey occupiedsome five enchanted days. The beauty of the rugged country and their own hearts’ happiness, caused the hours to pass with the rapidity of a dream. Even the heat of the powerful sun seemed to be mitigated for them by the prevalent north-west wind, which bellied out the great sail and drove the heavy prow forward so that it divided the waters into two singing waves.
Now they sailed past dense and silent groves of palms backed by precipitous rocks; now they shattered the reflections of glacier-like slopes of yellow sand marked by no footprints; and now they glided into the shadow of dark and towering cliffs. Sometimes a ruined and lonely temple of the days of the Pharaohs would drift across the theatre of their vision; sometimes the huts of a village, built upon the shelving sides of a hill, would pass before their eyes and slide away into the distance; and sometimes across the water there would come to their ears the dreamy creaking of asâkiyeh, or water-wheel, and the song of the naked boy who drove the blindfolded oxen round and round its rickety platform.
At length in the darkness of early night they moored under the terrace of the great temple of Abu Simbel, and awoke at daybreak to see from the window of their cabin the four colossal statues of Rameses gazing high across their little vessel towards the dawn.
These mighty figures, sixty feet and more in height, carved out of the face of the cliff, sit in a solemn row, two on each side of the doorway which leads into the vast halls excavated in the living rock. Their serene eyes are fixed upon the eastern horizon,their lips are a little smiling, their hands rest placidly upon their knees; and now, in the first light of morning, they loomed out of the fading shadow like cold, calm figures of destiny, knowing all that the day would bring forth and finding in that knowledge no cause for vexation.
With a simultaneous impulse Jim and Monimé rose from their bed, and, quickly dressing, hastened up the sandy path to the terrace of the temple, that they might see the first rays of the sun strike upon those great, unblinking eyes.
They had not long to wait. Suddenly a warm flush suffused the pale, rigid faces, a flush that did not seem to be thrown from the sunrise. It was as though some internal flame of vitality had transmuted the hard rock into living flesh; it was as though the blood were coursing through the solid stone, and miraculous, monstrous life were come into being at the touch of the god of the sun. The eyes seemed to open wider, the lips to be about to open, the nostrils to dilate....
Monimé clasped hold of Jim’s hand. “They are going to speak,” she exclaimed. “They are going to rise up from their four thrones.”
In awe they stood, a little Hop o’ my Thumb and his wife, staring up out of the blue shadows of the terrace to the huge, flushed faces above them. But the miracle was quickly ended. The sun ascended from behind the eastern hills, and in its full radiance the colossal figures were once more turned to inanimate stone, to wait until to-morrow’s recurrence of that one supreme moment in which the pulse of life is vouchsafed to them.
During the day the dahabiyeh was towed a few yards to the south of the great bluff of rock in which the temple is cut, and was moored in a small, secluded bay, where it would be sheltered from the prying eyes of tourists who would be coming ashore from the weekly steamer. Here, on the one side, there were slopes of sand topped by palms and acacias, behind which were precipitous cliffs; and, on the other, the wide river stretched out to the opposite bank, where, amongst the trees at the foot of the rocky hills, stood the brown huts of the village of Farêk.
It was a hot little cove, and by day the sun beat down from cloudless blue skies upon the white dahabiyeh; but the richly-coloured awnings protected the deck, and a constant breeze brought a delectable coolness through the open windows of the cabins below, fluttering the little green silk curtains and gently swinging the hanging lamps. By night the moon and the stars shone down from the amazing vault of the heavens, and were reflected with such clarity in the still water of the bay that the vessel seemed to be floating in mid-air with planets above and below.
A scramble over the sand and the boulders around the foot of the headland brought one to the terraced forecourt of the temple where sat the four colossal statues; and at the side of this there was a mightyslope of golden sand, sweeping down from the summit of the cliffs, as though in an attempt to engulf the whole temple. A laborious climb up this drift led to the flat, open desert, which extended away into the distance, until, sharply defined against the intense blue of the sky, the far hills of the horizon shut off the boundless and vacant spaces of the Sahara beyond.
It was a place which, save at the coming of the tourist steamers, was isolated from the modern world: a place of ancient memories, where Hathor, goddess of love and local patroness of these hills, might be supposed still to gaze out from the shadows of the rocks with languorous, cow-like eyes, and to cast the spell of her influence upon all who chanced to tread this holy ground.
Of all the celestial beings worshipped by mankind this goddess must surely make the fullest appeal to a man in love, for she is the deification of the eternal feminine; and Jim, having lately studied something of the old Egyptian religion, deemed it almost a predestined fate that had brought him to this territory dedicated to a goddess who personified those very qualities that he loved in Monimé.
Hathor, the Ashtaroth and the Istar of Asia, was the patroness of all women. Identified with Isis, her worship extended in time to Rome, where she was at last absorbed into the Christian lore and became one with the Madonna, so that even to this day, in another guise, she accepts the adoration of countless millions.
Here at Abu Simbel, in her aspect as Lady of the Western Hills, she received into her divine armseach evening the descending sun, and tended him, as a woman tends a man, at the end of his day’s journey. As goddess of those who, like the sun, passed down in death to the nether regions, she appeared as a mysterious saviour amidst the foliage of her sacred sycamore, and gave water to their thirsty souls; while to the living she was the mistress of love and laughter, she was the presiding spirit at every marriage, she was the succouring midwife and the tender nurse at the birth of every child, and upon her broad bosom every dying creature laid its weary head.
In this charmed region, where yellow rocks and golden sand, green trees and blue waters, were met together under the azure sky, which again was one of the aspects of Hathor, Jim passed his days in supreme happiness, now working with tremendous mental energy at some poem which he was composing, now tramping for miles over the high plateau of the desert, whistling and singing as he went, and now basking in the sun upon the terrace of the temple where Monimé was painting. The benign influence of the great goddess seemed to act upon them, for daily their love grew stronger, working at them, as it were, with pliant hands, until it smoothed out their every thought and rounded their every action.
Each week the post-boat on its way to Wady Halfa delivered to them a letter from England in which Ian’s nurse gave them news of her charge; but this was almost their only connection with the outside world, for they usually avoided the temple when the weekly party of tourists were ashore. Eagerly they read these letters, which told of theboy’s boisterous health in the vigorous air of an English watering-place; and afterwards they would sit hand-in-hand talking of him and of his future. Jim was immensely proud of his son, and many were the plans that developed in his head for the child’s happiness and good standing. It would not be long now before he would be able to confess to Monimé his true name and position, and to tell her that a home and an income were assured to the boy.
Love is a kind of interpreter of the beauties of nature; and in these sun-bathed days Jim’s heart seemed to be opened to a greater appreciation of the wonders of creation than he had ever known before. In the winter season there is an amazing brilliancy of colour in a Nubian landscape, and the air is so clear that to him it seemed as though he were ever looking at some vast kaleidoscopic pattern of glittering jewels set in green and blue and gold, to which his brain responded with radiant scintillations of feeling.
In whatever direction his eyes chanced to turn he found some sight to charm him. Now it was a kingfisher hovering in mid-air beside the dahabiyeh, or falling like a stone into the water; now it was a bronzed goatherd, flute in hand, wandering with his flock under the acacias beside the water; and now it was a desert hare, with its little white tail, bounding away over the plateau at the summit of the cliffs. Sometimes a great flight of red flamingos would pass slowly across the blue sky; or in the darkness of the night the whirr of unseen wings would tell of the migration of a flock of wild duck. Sometimes in his rambles he would disturb the slumbersof a little jackal, which would go scuttling off into the desert, while he waved his hand to it. Or again, a lizard basking on a rock, or a pair of white butterflies dancing in the sunlit air, would hold him for a moment enthralled.
The grasses and creepers which grew amidst the tumbled boulders at the edge of the Nile would now attract his attention; and again a great palm, spreading its rustling branches to the sunlight and casting a liquid blue shadow upon the ground, would hold his gaze. Here there was the ribbed back of a sand-drift to delight him with its symmetry; there a distant headland jutting out into the mirror of the water. Sometimes he would lie face downwards upon the sand to admire the vari-coloured pebbles and fragments of stone—gypsum, quartz, flint, cornelian, diorite, syenite, hæmatite, serpentine, granite, and so forth; and sometimes he would go racing over the desert, bewitched by the riotous north wind itself and the sparkle of the air.
But ever he came back at length to the woman who, like the presiding Hathor, was the fount of this overflowing happiness of his heart. In the glory of the day he watched her as she walked in the sunlight, the breeze fluttering her pretty dress, or as she slid with him, laughing, down the slope of the great sand-drift beside the temple; or again as she ran hand-in-hand with him along the edge of the river after a morning swim, her black hair let down and tossing about her shoulders.
By night he watched her as she stood in the star-light, like a mysterious spirit of this ancient land; or as she came out from the dark halls of the temple,like the goddess herself, gliding towards him in a moonbeam with divine white arms extended, and the smile of everlasting love upon her shadowed lips. In the dim light of their cabin he saw her as she lay by his side, her eyes reflecting the gleam of the stars, the perfect curve of her breast scarcely apparent save to his touch, and her whispered words coming to him out of the veil of the midnight.
It is not easy to select from the nebulous narrative of these secluded days any particular occurrence which may here be recorded; yet there was no lack of incident, no dulness, no stagnation, such as he had experienced in the seclusion of Eversfield. Towards sunset one afternoon he and she were walking together upon the high desert at the summit of the cliffs, and were traversing an area which in Pharaonic days was used as a cemetery. Here there are a number of small square tomb-shafts cut perpendicularly into the flat surface of the rock, at the bottom of which the mummies of the Nubian princes of this district were interred. These burials have all been ransacked in past ages by thieves in search of the golden ornaments which were placed upon the bodies; and now the shafts lie open, partially filled with blown sand.
Presently Jim paused to throw a stone at a mark which chanced to present itself; but, missing his aim, he picked up a handful of pebbles and threw them one by one at his target until his idle purpose was accomplished. Meanwhile Monimé had strolled ahead, and Jim now ran forward to overtake her. The setting sun, however, dazzled his eyes, and suddenly he stumbled at the brink of one of these open tombs. There was a confused moment inwhich he clutched desperately at the edge of the rock, and then, falling backwards, his head struck the side of the shaft, and he went crashing to the bottom, twenty feet below, landing upon the soft sand with a thud which seemed to shake the very teeth in his jaws.
For some moments he sat dazed, while little points of light danced before his eyes, and the blood slowly ran down his cheek from a wound amidst his hair. Then he looked around him at the four solid walls which imprisoned him, and up at the square of the blue sky above him, and swore aloud at himself for a fool.
A few seconds later the horrified face of Monimé came into view at the top of the shaft, and, to reassure her, he broke into laughter, telling her he was unhurt and describing how the accident had happened.