Burning Sands

She utterly failed to picture this man in the rôle of husband: she could imagine him as a companion or even as a lover, but as a husband never! Husbands were people in top-hats, black coats, and stripey trousers, with whom one went to St. Margaret’s, Westminster, and then to somebody’s villa on the Riviera, “kindly lent,” etc.; they had a lot of old family servants who sniffed at you and said that such-and-such wasn’t his lordship’s custom; they wanted sons and heirs, and, if you failed to provide them, they cynically made you try again; they developed money troubles sooner or later, and cut down your expenses at the moment when you wanted to rebuild the ballroom; as the years passed they became coldly courteous or hotly ill-tempered; and finally you were either divorced or else laid by their crumbling side in the family vault, in the sure and certain hope – thank God – that there were no marriages in heaven.

But Daniel Lane was not of this autocratic class; nor could she picture him living in England. If he succeeded to the Barthampton earldom he would make an appalling mess of it; if he had to wear London clothes he would look a sight; and if he shared the conjugal bed, it would probably be on the roof or in the shrubbery, with gnats and things biting your nose or an icy wind blowing around your legs.

She noticed her father’s strategic dispositions one morning just after Christmas, when Charles Barthampton called to take her to a military review. She went into the study to tell him of her proposed absence; but Lord Blair put his foot down, saying to her that if she attended this particular function she ought to do so in the company of a civilian, so as to avoid inter-regimental jealousies: a palpable excuse which did not bear scrutiny. He suggested that Daniel Lane should go with her; and before Lord Barthampton could escape, his cousin was sent for, and Muriel went off into the garden in annoyance, leaving the three men together in the hall. Lord Blair thereupon tripped back to his study, bidding Daniel offer his cousin refreshment in the library.

Lord Barthampton, however, was scowling with anger, and would have taken his departure immediately. But Daniel took him by the arm in a grip which, though friendly, was one of iron, and, forcing him into a chair, handed him a cigar.

“Have a whisky-and-soda?” he then suggested.

“No,” his cousin grunted. “I’m a teetotaller, damn you.”

Daniel chuckled. “Good for you,” he laughed. “Have some barley water?”

At this Lord Barthampton scrambled to his feet, but Daniel gently pushed him back into the chair.

“I want to have a talk with you,” he said. “I want to tell you how glad I am to see that you are pulling yourself together. You look a different man already.”

His cousin glared at him warily from under his heavy brows. “Yes,” he replied, “I’m not going to give you any excuse for turning me out. When you do so, you’ll have to do it against my father’s wishes and intentions; and I hope he’ll come back from the grave and haunt you.”

He spoke with dramatic gloom, and Daniel could not help being sorry for him.

“Oh, don’t worry yourself,” he assured him. “As long as you behave yourself decently, you’re quite safe.”

“I doubt it,” the other muttered, despondently.

“I heard the other day,” said Daniel, “from one of your brother officers that you’d sworn off cards too.”

Charles Barthampton puffed viciously at his cigar. “I suppose you’ll rob me of all my fun before I’m through with you. Hadn’t you better ask me whether I’ve joined the Y.M.C.A., and regularly say my prayers?”

“No, I’ll leave that to you,” Daniel answered with a smile. “But there’s one thing I should like to ask you: have you taken any steps yet to give anything to the poor?”

His cousin shook his head.

“Well, hurry up and do so,” said Daniel.

Once more Lord Barthampton rose from his chair, and this time to his relief, he was not pushed back again. “I’m late for the show,” he grumbled, “and anyway it’s no fun staying here, being put through my paces. You’ve got all the cards, and the game’s in your hands. It makes me sick.”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Daniel replied, and he spoke with sincerity. “But don’t worry yourself. You’re going on fine.”

With that he let him go.

Upon the following day, Lord Blair again acted in a manner which showed the movement of his thoughts. Muriel was going out to lunch at Mena House, and Daniel suggested that she and the Bindanes should ride over to his camp to tea. Lord Blair appeared to be delighted at the proposal, and gave it such hearty support that Muriel was constrained to accept the invitation.

Thus it came about, that soon after four o’clock Daniel was helping his three visitors to dismount from the hired camels which had jolted them over the desert to his tents; and no sooner had the attendant camel-men taken charge of the animals, than he found himself smilingly following in his friends’ wake as Muriel began enthusiastically to conduct them around the camp, as though she were its proprietress.

She pointed out the various lockers and revealed their contents with pride; she showed how this table folded up, or how that chair could be converted into a bed; she called attention to the portable book-shelf, and held up for inspection some of the volumes which she had arranged; she introduced the three yellow dogs, and explained the merits of the kennel she had built for them.

In her interest and pride in the work of her hands there was a complete absence of self-consciousness; and the situation engendered so warm a sense of intimacy that she found herself calling Daniel by his Christian name, as though this had long been her habit.

When tea had been drunk and the sun was setting, Kate Bindane took her husband by the arm and suggested a stroll. At this, however, Muriel’s mind returned to the conventions, and she intimated her desire to accompany them. But Kate, profiting by Daniel’s momentary absence with Benifett Bindane, argued the point with her.

“You stay with Mr. Lane, old girl,” she said. “He wants to be with you, I’m sure; and any way I want to be alone with Benifett. Damn it, we’re on our honeymoon!”

There was a touch of wistfulness in her friend’s jocular words; and Muriel had seen enough of their married life to be understanding. Kate Bindane had a romantic heart under her uncompromising exterior; and her cold-blooded husband, to whom she was obviously devoted, must have played the lover about as ardently as a jellyfish. But out here in the solitude, the glory of the setting sun might infuse a little warmth into his veins, and might lift his thoughts above those schemes of commercial enterprise which seemed to constitute his sole interest in Egypt.

The two couples therefore separated for a while; and Muriel strolled with Daniel to a cluster of rocks, amidst which they presently seated themselves upon the slope of a sand-drift, facing towards the south and west. Before them, framed between the great boulders of sun-browned limestone, the desert stretched out to the purple hills in the distance; and above the hills the glory of the cloud-flecked western sky was spread like a vision of the Isles of the Blessed.

The evening was warm and windless, and no sound came to their ears except the occasional twitter of an early bat, and the far-off wail of a circling kestrel. It was as though some magical leap through time had been accomplished, whereby they two had alighted upon the earth in an age before the advent of man and beast, or after the last trump had left the planet again desolate. Yet there was no sense of death in these rock-strewn spaces, but rather a pulse of sleeping nature which held the reiterated promise of life. The sand upon which they lay was warm and golden, and the rocks about them were not cold nor dead to the touch.

Muriel lay upon the slope, her hands behind her head; and Daniel, sitting beside her, and looking down at her with his calm blue eyes, had the sunset as his aureola, so that he put her in mind of some figure by Bonozzo Gozzoli painted against gold. His massive head and shoulders seemed to tower above her like those of a rugged presence rising out of the rocks and sand of the wilderness; and she noticed for the first time that his face was reminiscent of Watts’ “Samson,” a picture which had always delighted her.

Neither she nor he found any need of words, and for some time there was almost complete silence between them, so that one might have supposed the spell of the desert to have bewitched them. His hands idly played with the sand; and, as the grains ran between his fingers, she seemed to feel the memories of all her days slipping from her, until only this one little moment of the present remained.

“Well?” she asked at last, and there was the question of all the ages in her eyes.

“No man can escape his destiny,” he replied; but the words did not seem to be detached: rather they were the conclusion of a mute analysis to which they had both contributed.

Again there fell a silence between them, a silence, however, so filled with unspoken words that in it their relationship grew immeasurably more close. The glory of the sunset began to fade, and the veil of the twilight descended gently about them; but in their hearts it was dawn, and the sunrise was very near.

At length he arose and stretched his arms to their full extent. Muriel gazed up at him, wondering how he would choose to seal the compact which, so it seemed, had been made between them in this period of their silence. Suddenly she was conscious that her heart was beating fast, and its throbbing brought her back from her dream.

She sat up, and looked at him for a moment with fear in her eyes; for it was as though she had spoken words in the depths of her being which her tongue would have been too reticent to utter.

Daniel clasped his hands behind the back of his head, and stood watching her, a whimsical smile on his face. His expression was one of perplexity, almost of amusement at the incomprehensibility of Fate.

“Come,” he said, “we had better be going, Muriel, my dear.”

He took her hand in his and raised her to her feet.

“Yes, Daniel, we had better be going,” she replied.

She linked her arm in his; and thus they walked slowly back to the tents, he looking down at her, and she looking up at him, and around them the vast spaces of the desert already dim with the coming of night.

CHAPTER XVII – DESTINY

Upon the following morning, before eleven o’clock, Muriel installed herself in a hammock slung from the lower branches of a shady sycamore, some yards distant from the rose-bushes and shrubs which screened her favourite alcove, now appropriated by Daniel. She had brought with her from the house a handful of fashion-papers and illustrated journals, but these she did not read as, with one foot touching the ground, she swung herself gently to and fro. She looked up through the tracery of the foliage to the brilliant blue of the sky, and her mind was too occupied with her thoughts to give its attention to the latest manner in which the women of Paris, London, and New York were adorning their nakedness.

Little shafts of sunlight, like fiery rods, pierced through the cool blue shadow wherein she lay; and beyond the protection of the heavy foliage the lawn of newly-sown grass gleamed in the radiance of the morning. The faithful northwest wind, which almost daily blows over the desert from the Mediterranean, was gently rustling the greenery overhead, and rattling the hard leaves of the palms; and she could hear the cry of the circling kites above her, though she could only see these scavengers of the air when they swooped and tumbled down, as though in play, to snatch at any edible fragments floating upon the surface of the Nile.

All around her she was aware of the joy of existence, flashing out like laughter and vibrating like song. The water sprinkled upon the lawn by the garden hose seemed to be making merry in the sunshine; a black and grey cow lurching across the grass seemed to be overcome with hilarity; the palm-leaves swaying in the breeze might have been shaking with mirth; and the babbling of the river as it swirled past the terrace was like an endless lyric of well-being.

Muriel was too happily content to indulge in any profound self-analysis; but vaguely she was conscious that her life had entered upon a new phase, and shamelessly she asked herself whether the guiding hand were love. She had realized for some time that Rupert Helsingham had made a spurious impression upon her heart, and during the recent weeks of amusement she had come to wonder how it was that he had aroused any emotion in her, except that caused by his tragic death.

Now, however, she was aglow with buoyant happiness, and she had a persistent feeling that all was well with her. Yesterday, on her return from Daniel’s camp, she had spoken to Kate Bindane of this sense of well-being, and her friend’s reply had set her laughing.

“My dear,” Kate had said, “I’m sure I don’t want to mess up your bright picture of things; but in my opinion, look at it as you will, the joy of life is always some sort of an itch and the scratching of it.”

But today Muriel felt that the definition was false. Her happiness was intangible, and all that she could say with certainty was that it was the result of her little time of silence yesterday in the desert.

It had been so quiet and gentle, so entirely opposite to the prehistoric rough-and-tumble which might have been expected. Her thoughts went back to the incident of the curate at Eastbourne, who had banged her about on the sofa, and would have rolled her on the floor, had not the ten commandments suddenly affrighted him. She thought, too, of Rupert and his impassioned kisses: he had left red marks on her shoulder.

But Daniel had been so silent, so tender, and withal so genuine. He had seemed to be part of the vast sky and desert around him, enfolding her, and harming her not. Yet with a twist of his hand he could have killed her.

In the distance she heard the murmur of his voice as he talked to his native visitors in the alcove; and she had a curious feeling that his proximity was protective. She was no longer afraid, or even shy of him.

Presently, across the lawn, she saw him dismissing three silk-robed Egyptians; and, when they had taken their departure, he waved his hand to her before returning once more behind the screen of roses and trees. The signal was like the caress of an old friend, and by it her happiness was enhanced.

A few minutes later she watched another caller being piloted by a native servant across the lawn to the alcove. He was a young effendi wearing European clothes and the usual red tarboush or fez – an unhealthy little man, who paused once to cough and to spit unpleasantly.

Lazily she watched the servant return to the house, and she hoped that Daniel was finding his new visitor interesting.

She closed her eyes, and sleep was stealing upon her when suddenly she was startled into full consciousness by the sharp crack of a pistol-shot. She sprang out of the hammock and stood for a moment staring about her, her heart beating.

The sound had come from the direction of the alcove, but now all was silent once more. Evidently nobody in the house had heard the shot; and she might have thought it to have been an illusion of sleep, had it not been for the manifest excitement of the birds which had risen from the branches of the trees around.

Almost without definite thought she hastened across the lawn, and paused, listening, near the rose bushes. A whimpering sound of moaning came to her ears; and at this she ran forward impulsively, and, a moment later, came to a sudden halt upon the secluded terrace.

Before her, upon the flagstones, crouched the figure of the young Egyptian. He was holding his right wrist in his left hand, and was staring up, with open mouth, at Daniel who stood over him, fingering a revolver which now he slipped quietly into his pocket as he caught sight of her.

“Go away, Muriel!” he exclaimed in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

The Egyptian struggled to his feet, but Daniel caught him by the arm and half dragged him to the marble bench.

“What’s happened?” she cried. “I heard a shot.”

“Did anybody else hear it?” he asked, so sharply that his voice startled her.

“I don’t think so,” she answered.

“Good,” he said. “This young man’s revolver went off by mistake: that’s all. Please go away.”

“O Daniel!” she cried, realizing the truth. “He tried to kill you!”

“Hush!” he whispered, impatiently. “Here, help me to tie up his wrist: I’ve broken it, I think.”

The Egyptian rocked himself to and fro, making no resistance as Daniel took hold of his injured arm, talking to him the while in Arabic, as though bidding him have no fear. With the would-be assassin’s handkerchief he bound up the injured wrist, while Muriel gave all the assistance of which her trembling fingers were capable; and then, with his own large handkerchief he improvised a sling, never ceasing meanwhile to soothe the man with soft words of sympathetic consideration, as though he had been a doctor called in to attend the victim of an accident.

When the bandaging had been accomplished, he turned to Muriel. “Now please go away, Muriel dear,” he said, “and thanks very much for your help. Remember, not a word about this to anybody at all.”

He smiled at her reassuringly, and obliged her to take her departure, again cautioning her to keep the incident secret. She walked across the lawn to the house, dazed and anxious; and thus she went up to her room, where, looking into the mirror, she was surprised to observe the paleness of her face.

Meanwhile Daniel sat upon the bench beside the Egyptian, smoking his pipe, and waiting for him to recover his composure. The incident had been so foolish, and the attempt upon his life so bungled, that he felt nothing but pity for the wretched man who, he presumed, had believed himself to be performing a patriotic act.

The Secret Service Agents had fully warned him of possible danger, and he had spotted this youth as a suspicious character as soon as he had entered the alcove. The man had been trembling visibly, and when his unsteady hand had fumbled in his pocket, Daniel had gripped his wrist on the instant that the revolver came into sight. The bullet had struck the balustrade and had gone singing into the river, while the weapon had fallen with a clatter upon the pavement.

Daniel had experienced no alarm, and now he felt no anger. He was determined, however, to get to the root of the plot; and it seemed to him far wiser to take action here and now, than to await a judicial enquiry.

As soon, therefore, as his assailant had ceased his moaning and his monotonous rocking to and fro, Daniel took him by his left arm, and led him across the lawn and round to the front gates of the Residency. Here he hailed one of the little open carriages from the stand at the other side of the square, and, helping the Egyptian into it, told the coachman to drive to the nearest hospital.

In the consulting room he explained to the doctor that the man was a friend of his who had injured his wrist by a fall; and soon the mischief was rectified and the arm put into splints.

Daniel then announced his intention of seeing him back to his house; but at this the man aroused himself from the silent stupor into which he had fallen, and vehemently protested.

“You cannot come with me,” he declared. “By God, I shall give no address.”

Daniel had been told by his agents an address at which a certain group of malcontents were known to meet; and, chancing the man’s connection with this fraternity, he now named the house to the driver. Theeffendi immediately sank back into the corner of the carriage with a look of terror upon his face which indicated clearly enough that the surmise had been correct.

“Do not fear,” said Daniel to him, “I mean you no harm. If God is willing I shall meet some of your friends, and we shall be able to talk over this matter.”

Once during the journey, when their carriage had come to a momentary standstill, in the crowded Mousky, Daniel observed a certain tension in his companion’s attitude which indicated that he was contemplating flight; and he was prepared, therefore, when the man made a sudden leap forward.

“Ass!” he exclaimed, pulling him down on to the seat. The meaning of the expression in Arabic is much the same as it is in English.

For the rest of the way Daniel kept an eye upon the injured man; but the sharp twinge of pain consequent upon his attempted flight had led him once more to prefer a condition of fatalistic apathy, and he made no second effort to escape.

A turning off the Mousky brought them into a winding native street, where a few low-class Greeks were the only European pedestrians to be observed in the crowd of Orientals; and at last the driver steered his carriage into a quiet alley, and pulled up before the arched doorway of a whitewashed house, the upper storeys of which projected outwards until they abutted those of the buildings on the opposite side.

Daniel assisted the Egyptian to alight, and, as they passed through the archway into the stone-flagged hall beyond, where the light was dim, warned him against treachery.

“I still have your loaded revolver in my pocket,” he reminded him. “I have come to speak to your friends, and if they are here you must lead me to them.”

For a moment the man hesitated, but Daniel accelerated matters by clapping his hands loudly, which is the Egyptian method of summoning a servant; and thereupon a door was opened at the head of the crazy flight of wooden stairs, and an untidy figure of a man in a blue-cotton shirt appeared before them.

“Are the others here?” asked Daniel, seeing that his companion was recognized.

“Upstairs,” the man answered, shortly, pointing to the gallery above him, and therewith returned whence he came, his slouching attitude displaying all the indifference of which the untrained Egyptian servant is so eminently capable.

“Lead the way,” said Daniel to his companion, who, recognizing the Kismet al Allah, the destiny of God, obeyed without protest, mounting the stairs in silence.

As they neared the shut door which had been indicated to them, the Egyptian was overcome with a fit of coughing, the rasping sound of which echoed through the house; and, as though the sound had been recognized, the door before them was immediately opened, and the pock-marked face and red tarboush of another young native effendi appeared.

“What’s this?” he exclaimed in astonishment, pointing to his friend’s injured arm. Then, seeing the Englishman, he checked himself warily.

Daniel took a step forward. “I have brought him back to you,” he said, affably. “He is hurt.”

A moment later they were inside the room, and Daniel was fingering the trigger of the revolver in his pocket, as he glanced from one to another of the five men confronting him. They had risen to their feet, and were standing in attitudes of manifest nervousness. They had evidently been disturbed at their midday meal, for it was now a little past noon: three or four dishes of food stood upon the floor, and the mouths of at least two of the men were full. The smell of garlic and stale tobacco smoke pervaded the room; and a shaft of sunlight striking through the window revealed a mass of flies hovering and buzzing around a plate of something which appeared to be cold minced meat.

“Peace be unto you!” said Daniel, using the Islamic salutation; and the men muttered the customary response, as though by force of habit.

Daniel stood with his back to the door which he had closed behind. “I ask your forgiveness for my intrusion,” he said, still speaking in Arabic, “but I thought the matter urgent. This morning this gentleman came to the Residency, where I have the honour of being employed, and fired the revolver at me which I am now holding in my pocket. But it pleased God to spare my life, and I immediately came to ask you why you wished my death. You know the words of the Prophet: ‘Man is a building erected by God, and he who destroys the building of God shall himself be destroyed.’”

The injured man had collapsed upon a stiff bench which stood against the wall, and was now rocking himself to and fro once more, the tears of pain and exasperation streaming down his face.