CHAPTER XXIII.THE WHEEL TURNSThis meal in Mea’s house proved to be the beginning of a very curious existence for the four persons chiefly concerned in our history. Every day, or almost every day, they met, and the solemn farce was carried on. Mea and Rupert played their parts of courteous hosts, Edith and Dick those of obliged and interested guests, while Tabitha watched them all with her quiet eyes and wondered what would befall when the truce came to an end. Soon she and Mea were very good friends, so good that from time to time the latter would even lift a corner of the veil of Eastern imperturbability which hid her heart, and suffer her to guess what pain and terrors racked her. Only of these matters they did not speak; not to do so was a part of the general conspiracy of silence.Edith was with Rupert as often as possible; she even took long rides which she hated, in order to share his company, whilst with a feverish earnestness he discoursed to her of all things in heaven and earth, except those things which leapt to the lips of both of them. She watched him at his work, and learned to understand how great that work was and how well it had been done. She perceived that he was adored by all, from Mea herself down to the little children that could hardly walk, and began to comprehend the qualities which made him thus universally beloved. More—the truth may as well be told at once—now, for the first time in her life, they produced a deep impression upon her.At last Edith began to fall in love with, or if that is too strong a term, at any rate really to admire her husband, not his nature only, but his outward self as well, that self which to her had once seemed so hateful, especially when she compared him with another man. Now, by some strange turn of the wheel of her instincts, it was that other man who was hateful, from whom she shrank as once she had shrunk from Rupert, taking infinite pains to avoid his company, and still more the tendernesses which he occasionally tried to proffer; he who also had grown very jealous. The fact of Mea’s obvious adoration of Rupert may, of course, in the case of a character like Edith’s, have had much to do with this moral and physicalvolte-face,but it was by no means its only cause. Retribution had fallen upon her; the hand of Fate had pressed her down before this man’s feet.Yet the worst of it was that she made no real progress with him. Rupert was most courteous and polite, very charming indeed, but she felt that all these things were an armour which she could not pierce, that as he had once said, his nature and his spirit rose in repugnance against her. Twice or thrice she took some opportunity to touch him, only to become aware that he shrank from her, not with the quick movement of a man who desires to avoid being betrayed into feeling, or led into temptation, but because of an unconquerable innate distaste—quite a different thing. She remembered his dreadful words of divorce, how he had said that henceforth he hated her, and that even should she in the future swear that she loved him, he would not lay a finger-tip upon her. Why should he indeed when another woman, more faithful, more spiritual—and yes, she must admit it, more lovely, was the companion of his every waking thought and hour.See Edith now after she has spent fourteen days in her husband’s company. She is tired with the long ride she has taken in the hot sun just to be with him, feigning an interest in things which she did not understand, about the propagation of date-palms, for instance, as though she cared anything whether they grew from seed or offshoots. Tired, too, with her long, unceasing effort to show him her best side, to look cool and attractive in that heat and mounted on a skittish horse which frightened her. (How, she wondered, did Mea contrive never to seem hot or to lose her dignity, and why did her hair always remain so crisp and unruffled even beneath her white head-dress?) Annoyed also by Dick, who had accompanied her home and showed his ever-growing jealousy in a most unpleasant fashion, firing arrow after arrow of his coarse sarcasm at her, even reminding her of that afternoon years ago when her husband was supposed to be dead and she became engaged to him. She had scarcely replied; it did not seem worth while, only in her heart she vowed that should she ever have an opportunity, she would be rid of Dick once and for all. Yes, she did not care what he might say or what letters he threatened to publish, she would face it out and have done with him, as she wished that she had found courage to do long ago.Now she was in her own room, and stretched face downwards upon her angarib or native bedstead, she sobbed in the bitterness of her soul. All her wiles, all her charm could not prevail against that small but royal-looking Eastern woman with the ready wit, the single aim, the mysterious face and the eyes like Fate, who had risen up against her and taken with gratitude the man whom she had once rejected, contented if only she might own his heart. Had it been otherwise, quarrels might have arisen, or he might have wearied of her; but that was the worst of it, where there was no marriage there could be no wearying. Always she stretched before him a garden of Eden, a paradise from which he was turned back by the flame-sworded angels of his own strict righteousness and oath. And into the rival garden which she, Edith, had to offer, whereof the gates, once so locked and barred, now stood wide, he showed no wish to wander.What would be the end of it, when, at the expiration of the month again she faced that alien multitude with their stony, contemptuous eyes? Oh! surely then she would hear that he had taken counsel with himself and that conscience of his; that he found no law which forced him to return to a woman who had spurned him; that he offered her his title and his wealth and wished her well, but that himself he would bide where he was and discuss philosophy, and doubtless other things, with his lady Tama, the beautiful and perfect.It was too much. Edith gave way to grief uncontrolled, her sobs echoed in the empty room so loudly that Tabitha heard them through the thin partition wall and came in to see what was the matter.“Are you ill?” she asked.Edith in her night-dress sat up on the angarib, her face wet with tears, her hair falling about her shoulders.“I suppose so,” she answered. “At least I am unhappy, which is the same thing.”“What about? Has that Dick—?”“Oh! never mind Dick; I am tired of Dick.”“What is it, then? Rupert?”“Yes, of course. Are you blind, Tabitha?”“Ach! I think I see as far as most. But why should you weep over Rupert so loudly that I can hear you through a wall? He is very kind to you.”“Kind, kind, kind?” answered Edith, increasing her emphasis upon each repetition of the word. “Yes, he is kind as he would be to any troublesome woman who had wandered here. I do not want his kindness.”“What, then, do you want? His anger?”“No; I want—his love.”“You can’t buy that for less than nothing, especially when there is another merchant in the market,” remarked Tabitha thoughtfully.“I don’t know what you call for less than nothing, Tabitha. Is everything that I have to give less than nothing?”“Mein Gott! I see. You do mean that you are in love with him yourself?”“Yes, I suppose that is what I mean. At any rate, he is my husband—I have a right to him.”Again Lady Devene reflected, then said:“I always did wonder if it would end so. If you can come to care, pity it was not long ago. Why have you put it off so long, Edith? Now I think that perhaps it will be too late. What’s your English proverb?—one day behind the fair.”“If that is all you have to say, you might have stopped in your room,” answered Edith, between her sobs.“Himmel! what more can I say than the truth? I did not cook this pudding, Edith. You cook it, and you must eat it. What is the good to cry out that it is nasty now. Still I am sorry for you, my poor Edith, who find out that if you throw enough stones into the air, sometimes one fall upon your head.”“Go away, please,” said Edith; “I don’t want to be pitied, and I don’t want to be lectured. Leave me alone to eat what you call my pudding.”“Very well,” answered Tabitha quietly, “but you take my advice, you ask God to make it sweeter, which you always forget to do.”“I have forgotten too long, I am afraid,” said Edith, throwing herself down again on the angarib and turning her face to the wall.There were other sore hearts in Tama that night. For instance, Rupert could not fail to see, if not all, at any rate a great deal of what was passing in his wife’s mind. He understood that she was earnestly sorry for what she had done and heartily wished it undone. He was sure, also, from his knowledge of their previous close relations, from the by no means obscure hints that she gave him, and from what he observed of them when they were together, that throughout she had acted under the influence of Dick, who had made love to her both before their marriage and after his own supposed death, which influence no longer had weight with her, although she still greatly feared the man. Indeed, upon this matter he had other sources of information—Tabitha, who told him a great deal, and Dick himself who had tried to blacken Edith in his eyes by letting little facts escape him—accidentally. Thus it came out that hehadbeen lunching with Edith alone on that New Year’s Eve when Rupert returned to England, and by inference that they were then on exceedingly intimate terms.As a matter of fact, this revelation and others had an opposite effect to that which was intended. They caused Rupert to make allowances for Edith, and to understand that what he had set down to mere cruelty and self-seeking, was perhaps attributable to some passion which possessed her for this despicable man. He knew enough of the world to be aware of the positive loathing with which a woman who is thus afflicted will generally look upon any other man, even one whom she has previously loved.Now, pondered the gentle and compassionate Rupert, supposing that he being apparently dead, his wife in name had given way to this impulse and engaged herself to Dick with the usual affectionate ceremonies (and he gathered that something of the sort had happened), and that then there appeared that dead man as he was at the time. Well, should not allowances be made for her, after all, she who, he was sure, had already repented in sackcloth and ashes, and to whom this Dick was, to put it mildly, no longer agreeable?Meanwhile, hard as he might strive to conquer it—for was not this an excellent opportunity to exercise his own doctrines of renunciation and forgiveness?—he was possessed by a longing which at times became almost uncontrollable, if not to twist Learmer’s neck, at least to kick him with contumely out of Tama, where, it may be added, he was already making himself a nuisance in various ways.Such was the case against himself. But on the other hand, he must face the terrible fact that those words which he had spoken in the London drawing-room were, so far as he was concerned, utterly irrevocable. The sudden detestation, the shrinking of body and of soul that he had then conceived for his wife, remained quite unaltered. To talk with her was well enough, but the thought of returning to her made him absolutely shudder.Yet the fact that to enter on to married life with Edith would be to him the greatest purgatory; would mean also abandoning all his hopes and interests in order to seek others which he did not desire, could not, his conscience told him, affect the rights of the matter. If it was his duty to go, these things should not be considered. But there was Mea, who had to be considered. After all that had come and gone between them, was it his duty to abandon her also? even though the pure devotion and deep respect which he bore to her might perhaps be the real cause of much of the active repulsion his wife inspired in him—the converse, in short, of her case with Dick.Mea, he knew, was wrapt up in him; for his sake she had put away marriage and entered on the curious mode of life that had proved so unexpectedly happy and successful. If he left her, he believed that she would probably die, or would at least be miserable for the rest of her days. Could it be expected of him that because of an empty ceremony, whereof the other contracting party had at once violated the spirit, he must do this great wrong to a beloved woman, who had violated nothing except her own human impulses, which she, an Eastern, trod down in order that he might be able to keep to the very letter of his strict Western law?The worst of it was that through all this terrible struggle, while his soul drifted upon a sea of doubt, from Mea herself Rupert received not the slightest help. Whether it were through pride, or a stern determination to let things take their appointed course uninfluenced by her, she spoke no pleading word, she made no prayer to his pity or his love. Their life went on as it had gone for over seven years. They met, they talked, they ministered to the sick, they dispensed justice, they balanced their accounts, just as though there were no Dick and no Edith upon the earth. Only from time to time he caught her watching him with those great, faithful eyes, that were filled with wonder and an agony of fear. It was on his head, and his alone, and sometimes he felt as though his brain must give beneath the pressure of this ordeal. He fell back upon the principles of his religion; he sought light in prayer and wrestlings; but no light came. He was forsaken; unhelped he wandered towards that fatal day, the day of decision.Richard Learmer also had been observing events, and as a result, found himself in sore trouble. He perceived that Edith was drawing nearer to Rupert. At first he had thought that she was actuated by self-interest only, but during the last few days, many signs and tokens had convinced him that something deeper drove her on, that now the man attracted her, that she wished to win his love. Further, Tabitha had told him so outright, suggesting that the best thing he could do was to make himself scarce, as he was wanted by nobody. He had refused with a smothered oath, and gone away to chew the cud of his rage and jealousy.It was a very bitter cud. His great fortunes had passed from him; they were the property of Rupert. The only creature that he had cared for was passing from him also; she and her money were going to be the property of Rupert, in fact as well as in name. Of course there remained the possibility that he would reject her, but in this Dick did not for one moment believe. There was too much at stake. It was inconceivable that a man would throw up everything in order to remain the sheik of an Arab tribe, a position from which he might be deposed by any conspiracy or accident. Doubtless he was temporising merely to save his face with the other woman, and to make himself appear of more value in the eyes of Edith.So Rupert was going to take everything and leave him absolutely nothing. What a difference the existence of this man made to him! If he had died! If he should chance to die! Then how changed would be his own future. Edith would soon drift back to him, after her fashion when Rupert was out of the way, and he, Dick, would be the master of her and of more wealth than even he could spend, the honoured lord of many legions, instead of a shady and discredited person with not a prospect on the earth, except that of the infirmary or the workhouse. If only a merciful Providence should be pleased to remove this stumbling-block!But Providence showed no sign of stirring. Then why not help it? At first Dick shrank from the idea, to which, however, his mind became accustomed by degrees. Just for amusement, he considered half-a-dozen ways in which the thing might be done, but sinking the morality of the question, put them all aside as too risky. The world called such deeds by an ugly name, and if they were found out, avenged them in a very ugly fashion. Indeed, the fate of anyone who was suspected of having interfered with Rupert in this oasis would doubtless prove particularly unpleasant. It was not to be thought of, but if only Fate would come to the rescue, could he help it if by some fortunate chance he were appointed its instrument?The student of life may sometimes have noticed that there does seem to exist an evil kind of entity which, with Dick, we may call Fate, that is on the look-out for trustworthy tools of his character, and now, just in the nick of time, that Fate made its bow to him. It happened thus. Dick had several natives with him, one of whom he had hired as a dragoman at Tewfikiyeh. When they started on their ride across the desert, this man seemed well enough, but two days after they reached the oasis he began to be ailing. Apparently he suffered from ague and nervous depression, after which he developed glandular swellings in various parts of his body.At first Dick, who, it will be remembered, had some acquaintance with medicine, thought that he was going to be very ill, but in the end the swellings burst, and he gradually recovered. When he was about again, Dick asked the man, who could speak English, what he considered had been the matter with him, whereon he replied that, although he said nothing of it for fear lest his companions should turn him out, he believed that he had been attacked by plague, as the day before he left Tewfikiyeh, where there were several cases, he had gone to visit a relative who died of it while he was in the house.“Indeed,” said Dick, “then I bid you say nothing of it now, for though I think you are mistaken, if once that idea got round, these people would quarantine us all upon the mountain-top, or turn us into the desert.”Then, as no one else seemed to be unwell, he tried to dismiss the matter from his mind, nor did he mention it at all.A few nights later; it was on the seventh day after Edith, weeping on her angarib, had made her confession to Tabitha, Dick returned from the town in a very evil temper. Feeling that a crisis was at hand, and that he must come to terms while he could, he had attempted to make more confidences to Rupert, and had even hinted that if the latter were interested in them, there existed certain letters written by Edith which he might like to read. Rupert said nothing, so taking his silence as an encouragement, Dick went on:“Look here, Rupert; speaking as one man to another, you understand, of course, that I am in a most difficult position. I thought myself the heir to about a million pounds’ worth of property, but the happy circumstance of your having survived deprives me of everything. I thought also that I was the proud possessor of the reversion to your wife’s affections; indeed, she left me little doubt uponthatpoint, for which of course you, who were nominally dead, cannot blame her. These, too, must go with the rest, since naturally Edith knows on which side her bread is buttered. Now I make you a business proposition: You provide me with what I must have, enough to live on—let us say, a capital sum of £300,000, which you can very well spare, and we will balance our accounts once and for all.”“And if I don’t?” asked Rupert quietly, for he wished to get to the bottom of this man’s baseness.“Then,” answered Dick, “I am afraid that instead of a sincere friend Edith and yourself will find me, let us say, a candid critic. There are many ill-natured and envious people who would be glad to read those letters, and, like the Sibylline books, they may go up in price.”“Have you them here?” asked Rupert.“Do you take me for a fool,” he answered, “to trust such precious documents to the chances of desert travel, or possibly to the investigations of Arab thieves? No; they are safe enough in England.”“Where you intend to use them for purposes of blackmail.”“That is an ugly word, Rupert, but I will not quarrel with it, who, as I have remarked, must live.”Now Rupert turned on him.“I don’t believe,” he said, “that there is anything in your letters which either Edith or I need fear; I am sure that she would never commit herself too far with a man like you. Dick Learmer, you are a villain! You have been at the bottom of all the unhappy differences between Edith and myself. It was you, I have discovered from Tabitha and from letters which have reached me, who got me sent to the Soudan immediately after my marriage, as I believe—God forgive you!—in the hope that I should be killed. It was you, by your false information and plots, who subsequently blackened my character, and as soon as I was thought to be dead, tried to take my wife. Now, unless you can be bought off, you threaten to blacken hers also, and indeed, have already done so to some extent. I repeat that you are a villain. Do what you like; I will never speak to you again,” and lifting the palm riding switch which he held in his hand, Rupert struck him with it across the face.With a savage curse Dick snatched at his revolver.“Don’t draw that if you value your life,” said Rupert. “You are watched, and whether you succeed in murdering me or not, you will be instantly cut down. Take my advice; go for a few days’ shooting on the hills until your people can get the camels up from the far grazing lands, and then march. Be off now, and don’t attempt to speak to either Edith or myself again, or I will have you bundled into the desert, with your camels or without them.”So Dick went with a face like the face of a devil, and with a heart full of hate, jealousy, and the lust of vengeance.When he reached his house, it was reported to him that another of his people was very sick in a little outbuilding. He looked at him through the window-place, and after what the first man had told him—having refreshed his memory by reading up its symptoms in his handbook of medicine—had not the slightest difficulty in recognising a bad and undoubted case of plague, which, doubtless, had been contracted from the dragoman who recovered. Now Dick made up his mind at once that he would take Rupert’s advice and go on a three or four days’ shooting trip. Accordingly, he gave the necessary orders to start an hour before the dawn; then he sat down and thought a while, rubbing the red mark on his cheek where Rupert’s whip had struck him.How could he be revenged? Oh! how could he be revenged? Of a sudden, a positive inspiration arose in his mind. Rupert was an amateur doctor; Rupert loved attending to the sick, and here was a case well worthy of his notice. Perhaps that Fate for which he had longed was appointing him, Dick, its instrument. He took a piece of paper and wrote this note:A desire to help another alone induces me to communicate with you. One of my men is very ill with some sort of fever. Under all the circumstances, I cannot stop to nurse him myself, as otherwise I should like to do, having, you remember, asked your kind leave to shoot, and made arrangements to start at dawn. Perhaps if you have time you will visit him and give him some medicine; if you do not, I fear that he must die.R.L.Summoning the recovered dragoman who was to be left behind to see to the camels when they arrived, he bade him take this letter to Zahed as soon as the shooting expedition had started in the morning, and if he were questioned, to say that his comrade was very sick, but that he did not know what was the matter with him.“If only he would catch the plague!” muttered Dick to himself, between his clenched teeth. “No one could blame me, and he might—no, that would be too muck luck.”Before daybreak, having been informed that the man was apparently no worse, Dick rode away with his attendants.Rupert duly received the letter, and about seven o’clock ordered his mule, and started for the place where the man lay.“Whither go you?” asked Mea, who met him.Her voice was anxious, for she feared that he was about to visit Edith.“To see a sick man up yonder at Learmer’s house.”“So! It was reported to me that he started at dawn to hunt buck for some days on the mountain slopes. Why does he not doctor his own sick, he who told me that he understands medicine?”“I advised him to go out hunting, Mea, and afterwards to leave this place.”“I know. You struck him, did you not? A strange thing for you to do, Rupert.”“I am ashamed to say I did,” he answered. “That man is a low fellow and a slanderer, Mea.”“I know that also, but whom did he slander this time, the lady yonder, or me? Nay, I will not ask, but I say to you, Rupert, beware of a low fellow and a slanderer whom you have struck and who wished to draw his pistol on you.”“I can look after myself, I think,” he replied, with a laugh.“Yes, Rupert, you can face a lion or an elephant, but you hold your head too high to see a snake. Of what is this servant sick? I heard that they had strange illness up there.”“I don’t know; Nile fever, I suppose. Will tell you when I have seen him.”“You should eat before you visit a fever case; have you done so?”“No; I am not afraid of fevers, and I can’t breakfast so early,” and he made as though he would go on.“One moment,” she said, laying her hand upon his bridle. “Why did you not come to visit me last evening? As our hours together perhaps may be few, I miss you.”“I’ll tell you,” he answered, smiling. “I was engaged in making my will, which took a lot of thinking though it is short enough. You see, Mea, I am a very rich man now, and it so happens that under our law I can leave my property as I desire, because the settlements are at an end, which he from whom I inherited it could not do. Now, after that trouble with Learmer I remembered that if I die, as we all may do, he would probably take my lands and wealth, which I did not wish. So as the lawyers in England wrote to me to do, I made a will, signed and had it witnessed properly by four of our people who can write, and gave it to Bakhita to keep for the present. Now, Mea, let me go and see this man.”“May I come with you?” she asked.“Nay, how can I tell from what he suffers. I will be back presently.”
This meal in Mea’s house proved to be the beginning of a very curious existence for the four persons chiefly concerned in our history. Every day, or almost every day, they met, and the solemn farce was carried on. Mea and Rupert played their parts of courteous hosts, Edith and Dick those of obliged and interested guests, while Tabitha watched them all with her quiet eyes and wondered what would befall when the truce came to an end. Soon she and Mea were very good friends, so good that from time to time the latter would even lift a corner of the veil of Eastern imperturbability which hid her heart, and suffer her to guess what pain and terrors racked her. Only of these matters they did not speak; not to do so was a part of the general conspiracy of silence.
Edith was with Rupert as often as possible; she even took long rides which she hated, in order to share his company, whilst with a feverish earnestness he discoursed to her of all things in heaven and earth, except those things which leapt to the lips of both of them. She watched him at his work, and learned to understand how great that work was and how well it had been done. She perceived that he was adored by all, from Mea herself down to the little children that could hardly walk, and began to comprehend the qualities which made him thus universally beloved. More—the truth may as well be told at once—now, for the first time in her life, they produced a deep impression upon her.
At last Edith began to fall in love with, or if that is too strong a term, at any rate really to admire her husband, not his nature only, but his outward self as well, that self which to her had once seemed so hateful, especially when she compared him with another man. Now, by some strange turn of the wheel of her instincts, it was that other man who was hateful, from whom she shrank as once she had shrunk from Rupert, taking infinite pains to avoid his company, and still more the tendernesses which he occasionally tried to proffer; he who also had grown very jealous. The fact of Mea’s obvious adoration of Rupert may, of course, in the case of a character like Edith’s, have had much to do with this moral and physicalvolte-face,but it was by no means its only cause. Retribution had fallen upon her; the hand of Fate had pressed her down before this man’s feet.
Yet the worst of it was that she made no real progress with him. Rupert was most courteous and polite, very charming indeed, but she felt that all these things were an armour which she could not pierce, that as he had once said, his nature and his spirit rose in repugnance against her. Twice or thrice she took some opportunity to touch him, only to become aware that he shrank from her, not with the quick movement of a man who desires to avoid being betrayed into feeling, or led into temptation, but because of an unconquerable innate distaste—quite a different thing. She remembered his dreadful words of divorce, how he had said that henceforth he hated her, and that even should she in the future swear that she loved him, he would not lay a finger-tip upon her. Why should he indeed when another woman, more faithful, more spiritual—and yes, she must admit it, more lovely, was the companion of his every waking thought and hour.
See Edith now after she has spent fourteen days in her husband’s company. She is tired with the long ride she has taken in the hot sun just to be with him, feigning an interest in things which she did not understand, about the propagation of date-palms, for instance, as though she cared anything whether they grew from seed or offshoots. Tired, too, with her long, unceasing effort to show him her best side, to look cool and attractive in that heat and mounted on a skittish horse which frightened her. (How, she wondered, did Mea contrive never to seem hot or to lose her dignity, and why did her hair always remain so crisp and unruffled even beneath her white head-dress?) Annoyed also by Dick, who had accompanied her home and showed his ever-growing jealousy in a most unpleasant fashion, firing arrow after arrow of his coarse sarcasm at her, even reminding her of that afternoon years ago when her husband was supposed to be dead and she became engaged to him. She had scarcely replied; it did not seem worth while, only in her heart she vowed that should she ever have an opportunity, she would be rid of Dick once and for all. Yes, she did not care what he might say or what letters he threatened to publish, she would face it out and have done with him, as she wished that she had found courage to do long ago.
Now she was in her own room, and stretched face downwards upon her angarib or native bedstead, she sobbed in the bitterness of her soul. All her wiles, all her charm could not prevail against that small but royal-looking Eastern woman with the ready wit, the single aim, the mysterious face and the eyes like Fate, who had risen up against her and taken with gratitude the man whom she had once rejected, contented if only she might own his heart. Had it been otherwise, quarrels might have arisen, or he might have wearied of her; but that was the worst of it, where there was no marriage there could be no wearying. Always she stretched before him a garden of Eden, a paradise from which he was turned back by the flame-sworded angels of his own strict righteousness and oath. And into the rival garden which she, Edith, had to offer, whereof the gates, once so locked and barred, now stood wide, he showed no wish to wander.
What would be the end of it, when, at the expiration of the month again she faced that alien multitude with their stony, contemptuous eyes? Oh! surely then she would hear that he had taken counsel with himself and that conscience of his; that he found no law which forced him to return to a woman who had spurned him; that he offered her his title and his wealth and wished her well, but that himself he would bide where he was and discuss philosophy, and doubtless other things, with his lady Tama, the beautiful and perfect.
It was too much. Edith gave way to grief uncontrolled, her sobs echoed in the empty room so loudly that Tabitha heard them through the thin partition wall and came in to see what was the matter.
“Are you ill?” she asked.
Edith in her night-dress sat up on the angarib, her face wet with tears, her hair falling about her shoulders.
“I suppose so,” she answered. “At least I am unhappy, which is the same thing.”
“What about? Has that Dick—?”
“Oh! never mind Dick; I am tired of Dick.”
“What is it, then? Rupert?”
“Yes, of course. Are you blind, Tabitha?”
“Ach! I think I see as far as most. But why should you weep over Rupert so loudly that I can hear you through a wall? He is very kind to you.”
“Kind, kind, kind?” answered Edith, increasing her emphasis upon each repetition of the word. “Yes, he is kind as he would be to any troublesome woman who had wandered here. I do not want his kindness.”
“What, then, do you want? His anger?”
“No; I want—his love.”
“You can’t buy that for less than nothing, especially when there is another merchant in the market,” remarked Tabitha thoughtfully.
“I don’t know what you call for less than nothing, Tabitha. Is everything that I have to give less than nothing?”
“Mein Gott! I see. You do mean that you are in love with him yourself?”
“Yes, I suppose that is what I mean. At any rate, he is my husband—I have a right to him.”
Again Lady Devene reflected, then said:
“I always did wonder if it would end so. If you can come to care, pity it was not long ago. Why have you put it off so long, Edith? Now I think that perhaps it will be too late. What’s your English proverb?—one day behind the fair.”
“If that is all you have to say, you might have stopped in your room,” answered Edith, between her sobs.
“Himmel! what more can I say than the truth? I did not cook this pudding, Edith. You cook it, and you must eat it. What is the good to cry out that it is nasty now. Still I am sorry for you, my poor Edith, who find out that if you throw enough stones into the air, sometimes one fall upon your head.”
“Go away, please,” said Edith; “I don’t want to be pitied, and I don’t want to be lectured. Leave me alone to eat what you call my pudding.”
“Very well,” answered Tabitha quietly, “but you take my advice, you ask God to make it sweeter, which you always forget to do.”
“I have forgotten too long, I am afraid,” said Edith, throwing herself down again on the angarib and turning her face to the wall.
There were other sore hearts in Tama that night. For instance, Rupert could not fail to see, if not all, at any rate a great deal of what was passing in his wife’s mind. He understood that she was earnestly sorry for what she had done and heartily wished it undone. He was sure, also, from his knowledge of their previous close relations, from the by no means obscure hints that she gave him, and from what he observed of them when they were together, that throughout she had acted under the influence of Dick, who had made love to her both before their marriage and after his own supposed death, which influence no longer had weight with her, although she still greatly feared the man. Indeed, upon this matter he had other sources of information—Tabitha, who told him a great deal, and Dick himself who had tried to blacken Edith in his eyes by letting little facts escape him—accidentally. Thus it came out that hehadbeen lunching with Edith alone on that New Year’s Eve when Rupert returned to England, and by inference that they were then on exceedingly intimate terms.
As a matter of fact, this revelation and others had an opposite effect to that which was intended. They caused Rupert to make allowances for Edith, and to understand that what he had set down to mere cruelty and self-seeking, was perhaps attributable to some passion which possessed her for this despicable man. He knew enough of the world to be aware of the positive loathing with which a woman who is thus afflicted will generally look upon any other man, even one whom she has previously loved.
Now, pondered the gentle and compassionate Rupert, supposing that he being apparently dead, his wife in name had given way to this impulse and engaged herself to Dick with the usual affectionate ceremonies (and he gathered that something of the sort had happened), and that then there appeared that dead man as he was at the time. Well, should not allowances be made for her, after all, she who, he was sure, had already repented in sackcloth and ashes, and to whom this Dick was, to put it mildly, no longer agreeable?
Meanwhile, hard as he might strive to conquer it—for was not this an excellent opportunity to exercise his own doctrines of renunciation and forgiveness?—he was possessed by a longing which at times became almost uncontrollable, if not to twist Learmer’s neck, at least to kick him with contumely out of Tama, where, it may be added, he was already making himself a nuisance in various ways.
Such was the case against himself. But on the other hand, he must face the terrible fact that those words which he had spoken in the London drawing-room were, so far as he was concerned, utterly irrevocable. The sudden detestation, the shrinking of body and of soul that he had then conceived for his wife, remained quite unaltered. To talk with her was well enough, but the thought of returning to her made him absolutely shudder.
Yet the fact that to enter on to married life with Edith would be to him the greatest purgatory; would mean also abandoning all his hopes and interests in order to seek others which he did not desire, could not, his conscience told him, affect the rights of the matter. If it was his duty to go, these things should not be considered. But there was Mea, who had to be considered. After all that had come and gone between them, was it his duty to abandon her also? even though the pure devotion and deep respect which he bore to her might perhaps be the real cause of much of the active repulsion his wife inspired in him—the converse, in short, of her case with Dick.
Mea, he knew, was wrapt up in him; for his sake she had put away marriage and entered on the curious mode of life that had proved so unexpectedly happy and successful. If he left her, he believed that she would probably die, or would at least be miserable for the rest of her days. Could it be expected of him that because of an empty ceremony, whereof the other contracting party had at once violated the spirit, he must do this great wrong to a beloved woman, who had violated nothing except her own human impulses, which she, an Eastern, trod down in order that he might be able to keep to the very letter of his strict Western law?
The worst of it was that through all this terrible struggle, while his soul drifted upon a sea of doubt, from Mea herself Rupert received not the slightest help. Whether it were through pride, or a stern determination to let things take their appointed course uninfluenced by her, she spoke no pleading word, she made no prayer to his pity or his love. Their life went on as it had gone for over seven years. They met, they talked, they ministered to the sick, they dispensed justice, they balanced their accounts, just as though there were no Dick and no Edith upon the earth. Only from time to time he caught her watching him with those great, faithful eyes, that were filled with wonder and an agony of fear. It was on his head, and his alone, and sometimes he felt as though his brain must give beneath the pressure of this ordeal. He fell back upon the principles of his religion; he sought light in prayer and wrestlings; but no light came. He was forsaken; unhelped he wandered towards that fatal day, the day of decision.
Richard Learmer also had been observing events, and as a result, found himself in sore trouble. He perceived that Edith was drawing nearer to Rupert. At first he had thought that she was actuated by self-interest only, but during the last few days, many signs and tokens had convinced him that something deeper drove her on, that now the man attracted her, that she wished to win his love. Further, Tabitha had told him so outright, suggesting that the best thing he could do was to make himself scarce, as he was wanted by nobody. He had refused with a smothered oath, and gone away to chew the cud of his rage and jealousy.
It was a very bitter cud. His great fortunes had passed from him; they were the property of Rupert. The only creature that he had cared for was passing from him also; she and her money were going to be the property of Rupert, in fact as well as in name. Of course there remained the possibility that he would reject her, but in this Dick did not for one moment believe. There was too much at stake. It was inconceivable that a man would throw up everything in order to remain the sheik of an Arab tribe, a position from which he might be deposed by any conspiracy or accident. Doubtless he was temporising merely to save his face with the other woman, and to make himself appear of more value in the eyes of Edith.
So Rupert was going to take everything and leave him absolutely nothing. What a difference the existence of this man made to him! If he had died! If he should chance to die! Then how changed would be his own future. Edith would soon drift back to him, after her fashion when Rupert was out of the way, and he, Dick, would be the master of her and of more wealth than even he could spend, the honoured lord of many legions, instead of a shady and discredited person with not a prospect on the earth, except that of the infirmary or the workhouse. If only a merciful Providence should be pleased to remove this stumbling-block!
But Providence showed no sign of stirring. Then why not help it? At first Dick shrank from the idea, to which, however, his mind became accustomed by degrees. Just for amusement, he considered half-a-dozen ways in which the thing might be done, but sinking the morality of the question, put them all aside as too risky. The world called such deeds by an ugly name, and if they were found out, avenged them in a very ugly fashion. Indeed, the fate of anyone who was suspected of having interfered with Rupert in this oasis would doubtless prove particularly unpleasant. It was not to be thought of, but if only Fate would come to the rescue, could he help it if by some fortunate chance he were appointed its instrument?
The student of life may sometimes have noticed that there does seem to exist an evil kind of entity which, with Dick, we may call Fate, that is on the look-out for trustworthy tools of his character, and now, just in the nick of time, that Fate made its bow to him. It happened thus. Dick had several natives with him, one of whom he had hired as a dragoman at Tewfikiyeh. When they started on their ride across the desert, this man seemed well enough, but two days after they reached the oasis he began to be ailing. Apparently he suffered from ague and nervous depression, after which he developed glandular swellings in various parts of his body.
At first Dick, who, it will be remembered, had some acquaintance with medicine, thought that he was going to be very ill, but in the end the swellings burst, and he gradually recovered. When he was about again, Dick asked the man, who could speak English, what he considered had been the matter with him, whereon he replied that, although he said nothing of it for fear lest his companions should turn him out, he believed that he had been attacked by plague, as the day before he left Tewfikiyeh, where there were several cases, he had gone to visit a relative who died of it while he was in the house.
“Indeed,” said Dick, “then I bid you say nothing of it now, for though I think you are mistaken, if once that idea got round, these people would quarantine us all upon the mountain-top, or turn us into the desert.”
Then, as no one else seemed to be unwell, he tried to dismiss the matter from his mind, nor did he mention it at all.
A few nights later; it was on the seventh day after Edith, weeping on her angarib, had made her confession to Tabitha, Dick returned from the town in a very evil temper. Feeling that a crisis was at hand, and that he must come to terms while he could, he had attempted to make more confidences to Rupert, and had even hinted that if the latter were interested in them, there existed certain letters written by Edith which he might like to read. Rupert said nothing, so taking his silence as an encouragement, Dick went on:
“Look here, Rupert; speaking as one man to another, you understand, of course, that I am in a most difficult position. I thought myself the heir to about a million pounds’ worth of property, but the happy circumstance of your having survived deprives me of everything. I thought also that I was the proud possessor of the reversion to your wife’s affections; indeed, she left me little doubt uponthatpoint, for which of course you, who were nominally dead, cannot blame her. These, too, must go with the rest, since naturally Edith knows on which side her bread is buttered. Now I make you a business proposition: You provide me with what I must have, enough to live on—let us say, a capital sum of £300,000, which you can very well spare, and we will balance our accounts once and for all.”
“And if I don’t?” asked Rupert quietly, for he wished to get to the bottom of this man’s baseness.
“Then,” answered Dick, “I am afraid that instead of a sincere friend Edith and yourself will find me, let us say, a candid critic. There are many ill-natured and envious people who would be glad to read those letters, and, like the Sibylline books, they may go up in price.”
“Have you them here?” asked Rupert.
“Do you take me for a fool,” he answered, “to trust such precious documents to the chances of desert travel, or possibly to the investigations of Arab thieves? No; they are safe enough in England.”
“Where you intend to use them for purposes of blackmail.”
“That is an ugly word, Rupert, but I will not quarrel with it, who, as I have remarked, must live.”
Now Rupert turned on him.
“I don’t believe,” he said, “that there is anything in your letters which either Edith or I need fear; I am sure that she would never commit herself too far with a man like you. Dick Learmer, you are a villain! You have been at the bottom of all the unhappy differences between Edith and myself. It was you, I have discovered from Tabitha and from letters which have reached me, who got me sent to the Soudan immediately after my marriage, as I believe—God forgive you!—in the hope that I should be killed. It was you, by your false information and plots, who subsequently blackened my character, and as soon as I was thought to be dead, tried to take my wife. Now, unless you can be bought off, you threaten to blacken hers also, and indeed, have already done so to some extent. I repeat that you are a villain. Do what you like; I will never speak to you again,” and lifting the palm riding switch which he held in his hand, Rupert struck him with it across the face.
With a savage curse Dick snatched at his revolver.
“Don’t draw that if you value your life,” said Rupert. “You are watched, and whether you succeed in murdering me or not, you will be instantly cut down. Take my advice; go for a few days’ shooting on the hills until your people can get the camels up from the far grazing lands, and then march. Be off now, and don’t attempt to speak to either Edith or myself again, or I will have you bundled into the desert, with your camels or without them.”
So Dick went with a face like the face of a devil, and with a heart full of hate, jealousy, and the lust of vengeance.
When he reached his house, it was reported to him that another of his people was very sick in a little outbuilding. He looked at him through the window-place, and after what the first man had told him—having refreshed his memory by reading up its symptoms in his handbook of medicine—had not the slightest difficulty in recognising a bad and undoubted case of plague, which, doubtless, had been contracted from the dragoman who recovered. Now Dick made up his mind at once that he would take Rupert’s advice and go on a three or four days’ shooting trip. Accordingly, he gave the necessary orders to start an hour before the dawn; then he sat down and thought a while, rubbing the red mark on his cheek where Rupert’s whip had struck him.
How could he be revenged? Oh! how could he be revenged? Of a sudden, a positive inspiration arose in his mind. Rupert was an amateur doctor; Rupert loved attending to the sick, and here was a case well worthy of his notice. Perhaps that Fate for which he had longed was appointing him, Dick, its instrument. He took a piece of paper and wrote this note:
A desire to help another alone induces me to communicate with you. One of my men is very ill with some sort of fever. Under all the circumstances, I cannot stop to nurse him myself, as otherwise I should like to do, having, you remember, asked your kind leave to shoot, and made arrangements to start at dawn. Perhaps if you have time you will visit him and give him some medicine; if you do not, I fear that he must die.
R.L.
Summoning the recovered dragoman who was to be left behind to see to the camels when they arrived, he bade him take this letter to Zahed as soon as the shooting expedition had started in the morning, and if he were questioned, to say that his comrade was very sick, but that he did not know what was the matter with him.
“If only he would catch the plague!” muttered Dick to himself, between his clenched teeth. “No one could blame me, and he might—no, that would be too muck luck.”
Before daybreak, having been informed that the man was apparently no worse, Dick rode away with his attendants.
Rupert duly received the letter, and about seven o’clock ordered his mule, and started for the place where the man lay.
“Whither go you?” asked Mea, who met him.
Her voice was anxious, for she feared that he was about to visit Edith.
“To see a sick man up yonder at Learmer’s house.”
“So! It was reported to me that he started at dawn to hunt buck for some days on the mountain slopes. Why does he not doctor his own sick, he who told me that he understands medicine?”
“I advised him to go out hunting, Mea, and afterwards to leave this place.”
“I know. You struck him, did you not? A strange thing for you to do, Rupert.”
“I am ashamed to say I did,” he answered. “That man is a low fellow and a slanderer, Mea.”
“I know that also, but whom did he slander this time, the lady yonder, or me? Nay, I will not ask, but I say to you, Rupert, beware of a low fellow and a slanderer whom you have struck and who wished to draw his pistol on you.”
“I can look after myself, I think,” he replied, with a laugh.
“Yes, Rupert, you can face a lion or an elephant, but you hold your head too high to see a snake. Of what is this servant sick? I heard that they had strange illness up there.”
“I don’t know; Nile fever, I suppose. Will tell you when I have seen him.”
“You should eat before you visit a fever case; have you done so?”
“No; I am not afraid of fevers, and I can’t breakfast so early,” and he made as though he would go on.
“One moment,” she said, laying her hand upon his bridle. “Why did you not come to visit me last evening? As our hours together perhaps may be few, I miss you.”
“I’ll tell you,” he answered, smiling. “I was engaged in making my will, which took a lot of thinking though it is short enough. You see, Mea, I am a very rich man now, and it so happens that under our law I can leave my property as I desire, because the settlements are at an end, which he from whom I inherited it could not do. Now, after that trouble with Learmer I remembered that if I die, as we all may do, he would probably take my lands and wealth, which I did not wish. So as the lawyers in England wrote to me to do, I made a will, signed and had it witnessed properly by four of our people who can write, and gave it to Bakhita to keep for the present. Now, Mea, let me go and see this man.”
“May I come with you?” she asked.
“Nay, how can I tell from what he suffers. I will be back presently.”