She looks at him, dumb, frenzied with the intense longing to throw herself actually at his feet, but yet held back by some irresistible power she cannot comprehend, any more than one can comprehend the stifling, overpowering force in a nightmare.
It is the simple result of her life, her breeding, her virtue, her character, her habits of control and reserve. She is the fashionable, well-brought-up girl, with all her sensitive instincts in revolt against forcing herself upon a man indifferent to her, and full of an overwhelming instinctive timidity that her desire is wild to break down and cannot.
She stares at him, lost in a sense of bitter pain. All her vigorous life seems wrung with pain, and in that torture, in which every nerve seems bruised and quivering, a faint smile twists at last the pale, trembling lips. "You would have made a good vivisector!" she says. Then, before he has time to answer, she turns the handle of the door behind her, opens it and goes out.
A second after the street door closes, and Stephen stands on the dining-room mat, looking down the empty hall. Thoroughly disturbed and excited, with all his own passion surging heavily through his blood, and her last sentence—that he does not understand any more than he understands his own cruelty—ringing in his ears, he hesitates a minute, and then re-enters the dining-room, shuts to the door, and walks savagely up and down.
"Extraordinary girl!" he mutters. "What does she want? What can I do? She knows I can say nothing at present, when I'm going into the work-house myself! But what a splendid creature she is! Lots of 'go' in her. Well, I don't care. I'll have her one day; but there's no use making a lot of talk about it now."
May walked away from his doorstep, no longer a sane human being, responsible for its actions. The whole physical, nervous system, weakened by months of self-control, and night following night of sleeplessness, was hopelessly dislocated now.
The whole weight of her excited passion, flung back upon the sensitive brain, turned it from its balance. It had been a brilliant brain, and that very excitability that had lent its brilliance was fatal to it now.
The hopeless passion ran like a corroding poison through the inflammable tissue.
She had put the matter to the test, and found that truth of which the mere possibility had been torture. He had absolutely rejected her. "He could not care for me," she kept repeating, as the silent air round her seemed full of his cold, short laughs.
His passion for her was dead. It had existed, surely—those looks of his, the sudden violence of his touch when there was any excuse for the slightest contact with her—or had it all been some curious dream?
She could not tell now, but whether it had been or not, it was no longer. To her that seemed the only explanation of his words and tones. To the tender female nature the depth of brutality in the passion of the male—that is, in fact, the very sign of it—remains always an enigma.
After the scene just passed, it seemed to the girl impossible, ludicrous, to suppose that Stephen loved her.
She had already made great allowance for him. She had a large share of the gift of her sex—intuition; and she had understood more than many women would have done, but to-night he had gone beyond the limits of her imagination.
"No man would be so intensely unkind to a woman he cared for," she argued. "For nothing, when there is no need."
She was not an unreasonable, nor selfish, nor silly girl. Had Stephen told her he loved her, but that they must suppress their passion, that she must wait, she would have obeyed him, and waited months, years, gone down to her grave waiting, in patient fidelity to him. Her qualities of control were as fine as his, and her devotion to a man who loved her would have been limitless, but, acting according to his views, Stephen had taken some trouble to convince her he was not the man, and she was convinced.
And being convinced, the vision of her life without him seemed just then a dismal waste, impossible to face.
In most of the actions of the human being, the physical state of the person at the time is the principal factor, and May's whole physical frame, violently over-strained, craved for rest—rest that the excited brain could not give. Rest was the urgent demand pressed by the breaking nervous system, and from these two thoughts—rest, oblivion—grew the dangerous thought of Death.
"Sleep and forget! but I can't," she thought, "and if I do, there is the horrible awakening;" and again her fatigue suggested all the past sleepless nights, and the craving of the body urged the brain to find better means of satisfying it, in the same way as the appetite for food forces the brain to devise methods for procuring it.
She walked on in a straight line from Stephen's house, and the road happened to pass a post-office. May stopped and looked absently through its lighted, notice-covered panes.
"Send him a few lines," she thought; "because I am so stupid, I could not tell him enough, and then—"
She did not finish the sentence, but all beyond was blank peace. She went in, bought a letter-card, and wrote:—
"I could have loved you devotedly, intensely, had you wished it, but you have made it clear to-night that you do not want love—at any rate, not mine. I have discovered that I have courage enough to die, but not to live without you. I am going to the sea now, and in an hour we shall be separated for ever. I shall know nothing and you will care nothing, so it seems a good arrangement. My last thought will be of you, my last desire for you, my last breath your name."
She fastened it with an untrembling hand, passed out of the office, posted it, and went straight down a side street to the parade.
The night was still, bound in a frosty silence. The temperature sank momentarily, and the icy grip intensified in the air. Overhead the sky was black, and glittered coldly with the winter stars. Beside and behind her and before her not a living creature's footstep broke the silence. The sea lay smooth, black, and motionless on her left, like some huge sleeping monster.
She walked on rapidly: a glorious, vigorous, living, youthful figure, full of that tremendous activity of brain and pulse and blood, so valuable when there is a use for it, so dangerous when thrown back upon itself.
"How I could have loved him, worshipped him, lived for him, had he but wanted me!" is the one instinctive cry of her whole nature.
At the first easy descent to the beach she turns from the parade, and goes down, passing without hesitation from the light down to the moist darkness of the beach. To get away into oblivion, to escape from this maddening sense of pain, to lose it, let it go from her like a garment in the black water, is her only impelling instinct.
She sees the glimmer of the water before her without a shudder. How much dearer and more inviting it seems to her tired eyes than her bed at home, where so many, many sleepless, anguished nights have been spent! Here—rest and sleep, with no awakening to a grey and barren to-morrow. The thought of Death is lost. Desire for the cessation of pain is keener at its height than even the desire for life.
She stumbles on the wet, black beach at the water's edge, and then finds where it is slipping like oil over the sand.
She walks forward, and the chill of the water rises round her ankles, then her knees, then her waist, and then she throws herself face forwards on it, as she once thought to fling herself on his breast.
In a half-drunken satisfaction she stretches her arms out in it and commences to swim towards the horizon. "Like his arms!" she thinks, as the water encircles her. "Like his lips!" she thinks, as it presses on her throat. "And as cold as his nature."
The following morning is calm and still—a perfect specimen of wintry beauty. A light frost covers the ground and sparkles on the trees.
There is a faint chill in the clear air, a tranquil calm on the gently rising and falling sea and in the lucid sky.
The sunlight falling on Stephen's bed and across his sleeping face shows a smile there, and his arm, lying on the coverlet—an arm thinned by constant fever and night-sweats—rests, in his thoughts, round her neck; that white neck so sweetly familiar in his dreams.
After a time he wakes and yawns, and turns his head heavily towards the window; and farther as the happy unconsciousness of sleep recedes from his face, and recollection and intelligence come back to it, more clearly show the haggard lines, traced all over it, of self-repression, seaming and marking it at five-and-twenty.
"Another day to be got through," he thinks merely, as Nature's most precious gift—the light—pours glowing through the panes.
When half-an-hour later he opens his door to take in his boots, he finds two letters with them, and at the sight of one his heart beats hard.
The other is in the girl's handwriting, and he lays it on his toilet-table, with the thought, "Asking me to go and see her, I suppose," and turns to the other with a mad impatience.
This is evidently the official letter with reference to his post—the post that means to him but this one thing: her possession.
He bursts it open, and in less than two seconds his eye takes in its news: he has the appointment.
The blood leaps over his face, and an exultant fire runs through his frame and along his veins.
He replaces the letter quietly in its cover with but the slightest tremor of his fingers.
Then he gets up from the bedside and stands in the middle of the room, looking through the sparkling panes.
"I have her!" he is thinking. "Yes, by God! at last I have her!"
The day is glorified; life is transfigured.
Through his whole body mounts that boundless exhilaration of desire on the point of satisfaction. Not momentary desire, easily and recently awakened, but the long desire that has been goaded and baited to fury through weeks and months of repression, and tempered to a terrible acuteness in pain and suffering, like steel by flame.
And now triumph, and a delight beyond expression, bounds like an electrified pulse throughout all his strong, vigorous frame.
The lines seem to fade from his face, the mouth relaxes, and then he laughs, as he makes a step towards the window, flings it open, and leans out into the keen air.
"At last I can speak out decently. No one could think I cared for her money, or any of that rot now. How unexpected!—this morning! Now I can tell her I'm free, independent! I am glad I waited—it was much better. Far better, as I said, to be patient. Last night I almost—and now I'm very glad I didn't."
He draws his head back, and turns to the glass to shave with a light heart.
As he does so, he sees her letter again, and picks it up. "You darling!" he thinks, "I'll make you understand all now."
Some miles westward of the pier, some fathoms deep, out of reach of the quiet sunlight lying on the surface, tosses the girl's body, senseless and pulseless, with all the million possibilities of pleasure that filled those keen nerves and supple limbs gone out of them for ever, and Stephen draws out her despairing letter of eternal farewell, with a smile lighting up his handsome, pleasing face.
"Yes, it was much better to wait," he murmurs, "I don't approve of rushing things!"
It was morning on the Blue Nile. The turbulent blue river rolled joyously between its banks, for it was high Nile, and a swift, light breeze was blowing—the companion of the Dawn. The vault of the sky seemed arched at a great height above the earth, springing clearly, without any object to break the line from the horizon of gold sand, and full of those white, filmy, light-filled gleaming clouds that are one of the wonders and glories of Upper Egypt and the Soudan. It was a morning and a scene to make a man's heart rise high in his breast, and cry out, as his eyes turned from the level-sanded desert floor, through sunlit space, to the vaulted roof, "After all, the world is a good house to live in."
Slowly the strong yellow sunlight poured over the plain, the bank and the river, gilding every ripple; and, as the light grew, hundreds of delicate shapes—the forms of the ibis and flamingo and crane, and other river-fowl—became visible, crowding down the dark banks, with flapping of white and crimson wings, and stretching of legs, and opening of beaks, rustling down, shaking their feathers, to bathe and drink of the Blue River.
Wonderful light, and miraculous, gleaming, cloud-filled sky, and wonderful birds preening their plumage and calling to each other, and wonderful breeze-swept water, bluer than the bluest depths of the Indian Ocean.
It was still so early that, in the whole stretch of rollicking, tumbling, buoyant waters between bank and bank, only one piece of river-craft could be seen. This pushed onward, cleaving through the little billows in the teeth of the morning breeze. It was a tiny naphtha launch—a horrid, fussy, smoking little thing, cutting through breeze and water, and diffusing a scent of oil and greased iron in the pure and radiant air. A white bird on the bank looked at it, and rose with a startled note of alarm, and a flight of lovely-salmon-coloured colleagues followed. The others merely looked up and paused, with their wings wide stretched, and then went on calmly with their toilets—they had seen it before.
In the launch, of which the whole centre was taken by the naphtha-stove—the engine by courtesy—sat a young Englishman, whose face had that frank, attractive look of one whose thoughts are kindly, well disposed to all the world; and at stem and stern stood, erect and silent, the white-clothed figure of a boy from the Soudan. Lithe, graceful forms supported long necks and straight-featured faces, black as if carved out of smooth ebony, and contrasting strangely with the white turbans of stiff linen twisted deftly into a high crest above the brows. Swiftly the little boat ran on for a mile or two against wind, with its three silent and motionless occupants; then one boy turned, and pronounced solemnly the two words, "Mister, Omdurman!"
This was accompanied with a gracious wave of his hand towards the bank, as he leant forward to stop the engine, and his companion turned the boat to land.
Omdurman, as seen from the river level, looks like nothing but a long streak of duller yellow on the real gold of the African sand. Its tiny, square, flat-roofed mud-houses are not, with few exceptions, higher than six feet, and there is nothing else save them and their dreary, yellow-brown, muddy monotony in the whole village: not a palm, not a flower, not one blade of grass, simply a collection of low mud-houses, with trampled mud-paths between, and here and there an open, brown, dusty square.
The stillness and heat of the day were settling down now: the first wild, cool youth of the morning was past, and the Englishman felt the heat of the desert rise from the ground and strike his face, like the blow of a flail, as he stepped on land. He expected the Soudanese boys to follow, as they generally did on similar excursions—one to secure the boat and sit and wait beside it, and the other to accompany himself, carry his tripod and camera, and act as guide and general escort. To-day the boy stood in the boat, and addressed him earnestly:
"Boat wanted by other misters: let us go back: take them. We make much money; come again evening, take you home."
"But, you young ruffians, what am I to do out here alone? I don't know the way, and I want you to carry my things," expostulated the Englishman, vainly trying to adjust a pair of blue goggles over his eyes, smarting already in the intolerable glare from the sand, while striving not to let drop his camera, fiercely cuddled under one arm, and its tripod of steel legs and an overcoat balanced on the other.
The black remained for a moment impassive, statuesque, wrapped in reflection. Then he brightened:
"Me know," he said, suddenly springing from the boat. "Me take you my house. Sister show you the way: sister carry mister's things."
The Englishman stared for a moment into the eager, intelligent face, strangely handsome, though in ebony. After all, do we not think a well-carved table beautiful, although sometimes, even because, it is in ebony? Thenhebrightened:
"Very good; take me to your house, and let me see your sister," he said good-humouredly; adding inwardly, "If she's anything like you, she'll be the very thing for the camera."
They turned from the cool, rolling, billowy water inwards towards the desert and the huts of Omdurman, and the heat rose up and struck their cheeks each step they took.
Merla stood that morning at her hut doorway looking out—out towards the river she could not see, for the banks rise and the desert falls slightly behind them. She stood on the threshold, and the sun beat on her Eastern face, and showed it was very good. She was sixteen, and, like her brothers who ran the naphtha launch for the English, she was straight and erect, tall and lithe and supple, with a wonderful stateliness and majesty of carriage, though she had never been taught deportment nor attended physical culture classes. Merla was beautiful, with the perfect beauty of line that belongs to her race, and possessed the straight, high forehead, the broad, calm brow that tells of its intelligence and nobility. She knew, however, nothing of her own beauty. She never cared for staring into the little squares of glass that the girls of the village would buy in the market-place, nor coveted the long strings of blue glass beads that the Bishareens brought in such numbers to sell in Omdurman; nor did it specially please her to lay the beads against her neck, and see them slide up and down on her smooth skin as she breathed, though her companions would thus sit for hours cross-legged before their little mirrors, breathing deep to note how their beads rose and fell and glistened in the light.
Merla loved much better to steal out of the hut at night, when the oil-lamp smoked against the mud wall and the air was heavy, into the pure calm darkness of the desert, and gaze up at the stars, and listen to the far-off tom-toms beating fitfully against the stillness. And if ever any little coins came into her possession, it seemed unkind to spend them on glass or beads when there was always milk and oil needed in the house. And if, when these were bought, there was any coin left, then her real luxury was to buy food for the poor thin camel that lay at night in the mud-yard behind their hut, and to go and feed it secretly in the starlight. And she would press her hands into the soft fur of its neck as it leant towards her, feeling that delight that springs from being kind and loving, and being loved. The law of her life was love, a law springing naturally in her mind, as the beauty and health in her body. Her father, her mother, her brothers were all loved by her; and, beyond these, the unfortunate camels and the donkeys whose sides bled where the girths cut them as the careless Englishmen rode them in and out of the village to and from the Mahdi's tomb, and the lean, barking curs in the mud street that seldom barked as she passed by. All these she loved and sympathised with, though she had not been taught sympathy any more than she had been taught grace.
This morning she was radiant and happy as she looked through the quivering, yellow light that danced above the sand towards the river. Last night she had fed the camel and caressed it, and she had listened, half awe-struck, to the tom-toms in the distance. The music had seemed to come to her ears with a new sound. The breeze had blown from the river with a new kiss to her face. She was growing into a woman, and the sap of life was rising fast and vigorous within her, lifting her up with the boundless joy of life. And as she looked, two white spots, a crested turban and a solar topee, appeared over the edge of the bank, moving towards her.
"My sister!" said the Soudanese boy, with a regal air, when they stood at the mudhouse door. And some instinct, as he was young and foolish, made the Englishman drag off both goggles and solar topee for a moment, and so Merla looked up and saw him with the sun bright on his light Saxon hair and friendly blue eyes.
"Merla," went on the boy rapidly to his sister in his own tongue, "this English mister from Khartoum must have a guide to Kerreree. I go back to the boat: other Englishman want me. You go to Kerreree, Show everything; carry black box for him—carry everything. Salaam, Stanhope Mister."
And, without waiting for either assent or dissent, he swiftly, yet without any loss of dignity or show of hurry, departed. Merla's large eyes were downcast. She was a free woman, and came and went unveiled, nor was it impossible for her to talk to the white people, for her parents were poor and humble, and glad to make piastres in any way they could. One of her sisters was a water-carrier at the hotel in Khartoum, and she might be engaged there also when she was older. But still she held her eyes down, for she felt embarrassed and oppressed, and, besides, the topee and the goggles had been replaced, and they spoilt the vision she had seen first of the English face.
"Well, Merla, if that's your name, will you come with me?" the Englishman said lightly. He knew the tongue well that her brothers spoke, not in any of its refinement and subtlety, but in the ordinary distorted way an Englishman usually speaks a foreign tongue.
"I will ask if I may," she returned simply, in a low voice, and drew back into the dark hut behind her. After a moment she reappeared. "My mother and my brother have ordered it," she said calmly. "I am ready."
Struck by the philosophic, impassive accent of her voice, and not feeling at all flattered, the young man added in rather a nettled tone:
"But I hope it's not disagreeable to you. You are willing to come?"
Then Merla looked at him steadily from under her calm, widely-arching brows: "I am willing." A calm pride enwrapped all her countenance, and it seemed as if she said it somewhat as a victim might say, "I am willing," on being led to the altar of sacrifice. Yet her eyes were radiant, and seemed to smile on him.
The young Englishman was puzzled, as young England mostly is by the East, and, seeing this, the girl added, "Certainly I am willing; it is fated I should go with you. Give me the black box."
But it goes against the grain of an Englishman to let a woman carry his baggage, though he hires her to do it, and he held his camera back from her.
"Take these," he said; "they are lighter," and he gave the little tripod to her, and so they started down the mud sun-baked street that leads through Omdurman to the desert, and out towards the battle-ground of Kerreree. There were few people stirring; the men had already started to their work in the fields by the Nile, or on the river itself, and the women kept within the close darkness of the huts mixing and baking meal for the evening's food. Merla walked on swiftly and silently like a shadow at Stanhope's side through the mud village, and then on into the silent heat of the desert beyond. Here the fury of the sun was intense. The river was out of sight, lying low between its banks. To infinite distance on every side of them stretched the plain, and the soil here was not golden sand, but curiously black, like powdered coal or lava. Not a living thing moved near them; only, far away towards the horizon, now and then passed a string of camels of some Bedouins travelling. They walked on in silence. Stanhope found the walking heavy, as his heeled boots sank into the loose, black soil, and it was difficult to keep up with the swift, easy steps of the bare black feet beside him. His duck suit was damp, and the line of flesh exposed between cuff and glove on his wrist was burnt to a livid red already in the smiting heat. Suddenly Merla's eyes fell on this, and she stopped. Over her head she wore a loose veil of coarse white muslin. As she stopped, she unwound this from her hair, and tore two strips from it. Stanhope stopped too, well pleased at the pause.
"You burn your English skin; the flesh will come off," she said gravely, and before he quite realised it, she had passed one of the muslin strips round and tied it on his wrist. Stanhope's instinct was to protest at once, but there was something in the girl's earnestness and the tender interest with which she put the muslin on his hand that checked him. Also the pain, whenever his sharp cuff touched the seared skin, was unpleasant, and made him really appreciate the improvised protection.
"Your pretty veil, Merla, you've torn it up for me," he remarked regretfully as they started again. Merla glanced at him suddenly; she said nothing, but the pride and joy in her eyes startled the man beside her. He could find no more words, and silence fell on them again till Merla roused him from a reverie by saying indifferently:
"Look! that white heap there—bones, dead men, dead horses. This side, white bones too; many dead here—many bones."
Stanhope looked round. Everywhere, scattered in heaps, shone the white bones. They had come to the edge of the battlefield. Before them rose the little hill of Teb-el-Surgham, crowned by its cairn of black stones and rocks, surrounded by whitened bones and skulls, from the summit of which the English watched the defeat of the Khalifa's force. Stanhope cast his eyes over the dreary, black, blood-soaked plain, on which there was no blade of grass, no plant, no flower—only black rock and white bones, that shimmered together in the torrid heat.
"Horrible! Merla, war is horrible! Come and sit down; I'm dead tired. Let's sit down here against this rock and rest."
Stanhope threw himself down by one of the rocks at the base of the hill, and leant back against it. The girl took her place on the sand opposite him, with her feet tucked under her. Not far from them lay a skull, turned upwards to the glaring sky.
"Will you let me photograph you?" he asked after a minute's gazing at the rich dark beauty of the youthful face, "or is it against your customs?"
"It is against our customs," Merla answered, her hands closing hard on the tripod beside her. What terror it would mean for her to stand before that great black box, and have that evil black eye glare upon her for long seconds! She had seen her countrywomen flee shrieking to their huts, when the Englishmen approached with their black boxes.
"But you will do it for me, won't you?" answered Stanhope persuasively, having set his heart on the picture.
"Yes, I will do it for you; it is right, if you wish it," she answered steadily.
Stanhope accepted at once such a convenient theory, and sprang up to fix the tripod and the camera in order, and the girl sat still on the sand watching him, cold with terror in the burning air.
"Now, pick up that skull and hold it out in your hand, so. Yes, that's right. Now, stand a little further back. Yes, that's perfect."
There was no difficulty in getting her to pose. The natural attitudes of her race are all perfect poses. And Merla stood erect, facing the camera, with the emblem of death in her hand.
"Thank you; I am very much obliged! That'll be a first-rate picture," he said gratefully when he had finished, and Merla sat down with a strange swimming feeling of joy rushing over her. Stanhope was some time fussing with his camera, and putting it back in its case out of the light. Then he wanted lunch, and drew forth a sandwich-case and a wine-flask. The girl would only eat very little, and would not taste the wine. Stanhope, who was very hungry and thirsty, ate all his sandwiches and drank all the wine, and began to feel very bright, refreshed, and exhilarated.
"Do you know you are very beautiful?" he remarked, as he stretched himself comfortably in the shade of the rock and gazed at her, seated sedately on the sand in front of him.
"Beautiful?" she repeated slowly, reflectively, "am I? The white camel that lives down by the market square is beautiful, and so was the Mahdi's tomb."
"Well, you are more beautiful even than the white camel or the Mahdi's tomb," returned Stanhope, laughing. "And what do you think of me?" he added curiously. "Where do I come in the list? somewhere close after the white camel, I hope."
Then, as she gazed at him steadfastly, without replying at all, he felt rather piqued, and took off his blue glasses and squared his fine shoulders against the rock.
"Oh, you!" said the girl softly at last, "You are like nothing on earth, lord! You are like the sun when he first comes over the plain, or the moon at night, when it floats, white and shining, through the blue spaces!"
She sat sedately still, but her breast heaved under the straight, white tunic: her eyes were full of soft fire: her voice was low, and quivered with enthusiasm. Stanhope flushed scarlet. Confused and startled, he stared into her eyes, and so they sat, silent, gazing at each other.
That same afternoon there was a big fair or bazaar in the trampled mud square in the centre of the Soudanese village that lies higher up the river at the back of Khartoum. The place was gay with colour and crowded with moving figures. From long distances, from far-off villages down and up the river, the natives had come in, either to sell or to buy along the wide, dusty road that went out from either side of the square, leading each way north and south. The mud-huts stood all round the square, backed by some date-palms, for Khartoum and the village behind it are more favoured with shade than sun-baked Omdurman. And in the centre of the square stood or sat the natives, buying and selling, chaffering and gesticulating. Some were Bishareens, with straight forms and features, and black bodies almost covered with long strings and chains of beads. They stood about gracefully to be admired, with their wooly hair fluffed out at right angles to their head, for the occasion. Some were corn-merchants, sitting leisurely before a heap of golden grain piled up loosely on the ground. Others stood by patiently with their fowls or goats or camels, feeding them with green fodder; and others had vivid scarlet rugs and carpets of native make spread out on the uneven ground. And all day long the noise of the merchants, and the cry of the fowls, and the groan of the camels, and the dust of the square, and the smoke of the cooking fires went up from the bazaar.
In one corner of it, on a square of blue carpet, spread beneath his camel's nose, sat a merchant who had been observed to come early to the fair. He appeared to be a man of some substance, for he was clothed, and the camel kneeling beside him was fat and sleek, and would easily make two of the thin camels of Khartoum. Opposite him, sitting on his heels and holding out two lean hands to tend the small fire that smoked between them, was another, obviously poorer, from his smaller amount of dress and flesh.
"It is true: your Merla is the pearl of the desert. I have heard it from my mother," observed the merchant reflectively. "Still, think, my brother, a good riding camel that can be hired out to the Englishmen every day for thirty piastres the day; in a short time you will feed on goat's flesh, and wear boots, with all that money."
The black eyes of the listener sparkled, but he objected shrewdly enough.
"My daughter eats not as much as a camel, and the English want not a camel every day."
The stranger, fat and comfortable-looking, with a certain amount of opulent Oriental good looks, waved his hand with a lordly gesture.
"Let it not be said that Balloon is an oppressor of the poor. Give me the pearl, and this knife shall go with the camel, also this piece of blue carpet—a noble offer, my brother; where will you find such another?"
He drew from his crimson sash a longish knife, keen-bladed, with trueblue, Eastern steel, and having a good bone-handle, on which the fingers clasped easily. The other took the knife and gazed at it intently.
"'Tis but a poor thing," he said at last, indifferently thrusting it into the cloths twisted round his waist. "Yet the camel and the carpet may suit me, and, as you say, you need not the girl at present, I will agree, as I am a poor man, and the poor are ever under the heel of the rich. The girl shall be sent to your house on your return."
"I go now northwards, and shall return by the full moon; disappoint me not, Krino or it shall be evil for you."
"I disappoint no man," replied Krino calmly, taking over from the other the string of the camel, and the fine beast turned its dark, soft head, and looked with liquid eyes on its new owner.
The sky began to show an orange and crimson glow behind the palms, and many cooking-fires now gleamed like spots of blood upon the sand, and the figures still came and went, and talked and bartered, for the goods were not nearly all sold, and the heaps of fine corn were still high in many places, and the fair would go on to-morrow and the next day. But Krino got up and took his way homeward, exulting over his bargain, and leading the camel.
At the same hour, lower down the Nile, at Omdurman, the river lay calm now, without a ripple, and bathed in gold; a stream of liquid gold it seemed, asleep between its deep-green banks, and only now and then did a white-sailed felucca glide by in the golden evening light.
Two figures came down from the desert to the Nile out of the flat, heated air of the plain to the divine freshness by the water. Here, in the cool, golden light, they paused slow and reluctant to part.
"Good-night, Merla! Are you unhappy that I must go?"
The girl raised her face, and looked at him with steadfast eyes.
"The sun gilds the black rock, but the rock cannot expect the sun to stay. I am quite happy. Good-night!"
Another moment and the little launch had sprung out from the deep shadowed bank on to the golden surface, and was steaming, amidst the gold and rosy ripples, back to Khartoum.
When Merla reached the little enclosure of stamped clay round her hut, she saw a new camel feeding there, and cried out for joy. She ran to it and clasped her hands about its velvet neck, and called to her father, as he sat smoking at the doorway, a dozen questions. Where had it come from? Whose was it? But the old man only chuckled and laughed, and would not answer.
"No, no," he thought, watching her with pride, as she played round the camel, "let the maiden wait to know the joy in store for her till the full moon; she is but a child."
Stanhope went that night to a dance at the palace at Khartoum, but he was late in arriving, and seemed very dull and absent-minded when he came, and flattered the women less than usual. "He used to be such a nice boy when he first came here," they complained amongst themselves, "but he was quite horrid to-night—he must be in love," and they all laughed, for every one knew there was no one in Khartoum to fall in love with except themselves, and he had not led any one of them to suppose she was the favoured one.
The night was calm, and in the purple, star-filled sky the moon was rising. It was at the full. The naphtha launch was on the river, but it moved silently; current was with it, and the light airs favourable, so there was no need of the engine; one single sail carried the boat easily over the buoyant water. The stars and the rising moon gleamed in the smooth, black ripples. Stanhope sat in the boat thinking, wrapped in a cruel reverie.
He felt he had sailed the craft of his life too near the perilous shore of unconventionality, and now he saw the rocks ahead of him plainly, on which it would be torn in pieces. Yet how to turn back, or move the helm to steer away from them?
"A month ago," he thought, as his eye caught the reflection of the rising moon in the water, "when that moon was young, I was free. Not a soul cared for me, whether I lived or died, and I cared for no one." Now there was one, he knew, who lived upon his coming, whose feet ran to meet him, whose eyes strained their vision to see his first approach. And he, too; he was no longer free. His heart went out to that other heart, beating for him alone so truly, so faithfully, full of such unquestioning adoration and obedience, in mud-walled sun-parched Omdurman.
When the launch touched the bank, he sprang out and walked swiftly up to their usual meeting-place: the deserted mud enclosure of a deserted hut—an unlovely meeting-place enough—but filled with the sweet air of the desert night and the royal light of the stars.
"My lord looks weary to-night," said Merla softly, after they had greeted each other, and had sat down side by side with their backs to the low wall.
"Yes, I am tired with thinking. What is to be the end of this, Merla? Where is our love drifting us to?"
"Why does my lord concern himself with that? We are in the hands of Fate."
Stanhope moved impatiently.
"Our fate is what we make it."
"It is not wise to enquire about our fate," replied Merla, and he saw her face grow grave with resolution in the dim light. "But I can tell you, if you like, what it will be: when you are ready, you will go back to your own people, your own life, and you will be very happy."
"And you—?" asked Stanhope in a whisper.
"I shall then have lived my life. I shall die and be buried out there," and she motioned to the desert. "I shall have given my lord happiness for a time: think what delight, what honour!"
Stanhope shuddered.
"Don't, don't, I can't bear to hear you; do you ask nothing for yourself from life?"
"Life has given me all now," returned Merla, with a proud smile on her face.
"Why should we not go home to my land together?" said Stanhope passionately, in that sudden revolt against the laws of custom that stirs all humanity at times. "Why should I not take you to live with me for always to be my wife? who would forbid me?"
Merla shook her head, and pressed hard on his hand lying beside her on the sand.
"The sun cannot lift the black rock from the desert and take it to dwell in the blue spaces; neither can the sun stay with the rock. You are grieving for me; do not. I am quite happy. I accept what must be. My life ends when you go."
For a wild moment it seemed to Stanhope that he must dare everything and take her. After all, she was intelligent: she could be educated. She was beautiful, youthful; and what a love she poured out at his feet!—different in calibre, in nature, different, from its root up, from any love he could hope to find again—a love that asked absolutely nothing for itself, not even the right to live, and yet would give its all unquestioningly, unsparingly. It is not a toy to be thrown away lightly, and Stanhope realised this.
"The blue spaces are cold and empty, Merla," he said, suddenly catching her to his breast. "You must come with me."
"No, lord, it is impossible; you speak only for me," whispered Merla, though she clasped his neck tightly. "You must go and live happy, and I shall die happy; even in my grave I shall remember your kisses."
An hour later, the moon was well up in the sky, though the light was not yet brilliant, and they parted by the wall of the cattle-byre with promises to meet on the morrow, and he turned and left her standing in the shadow; but some instinct moved him, and he returned and kissed her yet again, and said one more farewell; then he took the narrow track leading down to the river, and Merla knew that she must hasten home; for her father, who had been out in the early evening, would be returning. Before she left she turned back once more into the byre, and stood looking at the stars that she had communed with so often: a great sadness fell on her thoughts, a chill as after a final parting. As she turned to go, her eyes fell on a grey patch on the byre floor—his coat! He had left it behind. Merla gave a little laugh as she picked it up: the parting seemed less final now. She would keep it till the morrow. Would he want it? miss it? No, the night was so still and sultry; and, throwing it over her arm, she passed onwards to her hut.
As she neared the enclosure, her heart beat rapidly. A light was burning within the hut, and by the moonlight she saw the great camel moving restlessly in the narrow space outside. Angry voices reached her in sharp discussion—her father's and another. Just inside the enclosure she paused and listened, trembling, uncertain what this unusual clamour and strange voice might mean.
"I gave you my camel, my knife, and my carpet. Where is the Pearl I was promised? Is not the moon at the full?"
Merla heard these words with a thrill passing through every fibre. She knew her father had no pearl in his possession, but was not her name "Pearl of the Desert"? Next there came some confused murmur—seemingly words of apology—in her father's voice that she could not catch, but the stranger interrupted angrily:
"Unhappy man! tricked seller, tricked buyer, would you know where the Pearl is? would you know where your daughter hides? I have heard that she has been seen with a stranger, a white-faced stranger—I know not if he be a leper or an Englishman—" with a bitter laugh, "but in either case I want her not. Come, give me my knife, and I lead off my camel."
Merla's heart failed, for her father gave a shriek as he heard the accusation, and a shower of oaths and imprecations came to her shrinking ears. Nothing was clear any more; there was only clamour and raving in the hut. But once she caught the words, "to the river—does he go to the river?" and above all the storm of words there was the awful sound of the sharpening of a knife.
Like a shadow, noiseless and silent, Merla crept swiftly, under the shade of the camel's body, across the enclosure to the mud partition behind which her youngest brother slept, and roused him. "Nungoon!" she said breathlessly, gripping his shoulder, "take the track to the river, and run for your life. You will overtake the Englishman. Tell him this. 'Merla says: Run to the launch and get off the land quickly, and never come back to Omdurman, or come with a guard. They seek to kill you here.' Go, brother; run!"
The boy, startled from his sleep, gathered himself together and rose. His sister, leaning over him with ashy face and fixed eyes, seemed like Fate itself directing him. Moreover, Oriental youth is accustomed to obey unquestioningly. Without a word, simply with a sign of assent, he fled out of the enclosure, down the track to the river.
Merla stepped back and out of the yard, and stood waiting, silent as before; she had formed her resolution, and all fear was past. The mats in front of the door were suddenly pushed aside, and a streak of light fell across the yard, but it could not touch her, sheltered by the wall. She saw her father rush out, wild-eyed, and the long blade of the knife gleamed blue in the moonlight.
Then, as he dashed through the enclosure entrance, she moved her feet suddenly, scraping the sand, and then fled, wrapped in Stanhope's long light overcoat, up towards the desert, away from the river. Krino, blinded, maddened by passion, glanced at the wall whence came the scraping sound, and then, catching sight of a flying form in English dress, plunged with a cry of triumph after it. Merla fled like the wind along in the shadow of the wall, keeping in the darkness, with her head down, fearing lest her bare head or bare feet might betray her. But Krino's eyes were fixed on the silvery grey of the English overcoat, and, blind to all else, he raced on in the uncertain light with his eyes intent on the shoulders between which he would plunge his knife. Up through the heart of sleeping Omdurman, past silent huts and yellow walls that gleamed pale in the moonlight, through the village to the desert, hunted and hunter fled on, and Krino's heart rose in savage triumph.
"Fool! he cannot escape me now; by the river—yes, but not in the desert; he cannot escape."
And the desert was reached and entered, and still the two noiseless shadows fled over the sand.
Merla's strength was failing: her sight was reeling; she could run no more. Only the joy of knowing that each step led the enemy farther from her loved one had supported her till now. Now he was safe, he must be away on the friendly river. There had been ample time. Not now would it be possible for Krino to reach the river before her lover had embarked. It was well. All was well! And the black sand spun round her in the moonlight, as she heard the hiss of her father's breath behind her. She wavered. With a bound the man threw himself forward. One stab, and the keen blade sank through the flesh below the shoulder, driving her forward, and she fell face downwards on the sand.
Blind still with fury, the Soudanese bent down, tore at the head to drag it back that he might slash it from the body, and turned up the face to the moonlight. Fixed in agony and triumph, it looked back at him—the dead face of his daughter, the PEARL OF THEDESERT.