CHAPTER XXXII – THINKING THINGS OVER
Benifett Bindane was seated on the front verandah of the Residency one afternoon, when Lord Barthampton drove up to the door in his high dogcart. He rose from his chair, and going to the steps, shook hands with the younger man somewhat less limply than was his wont.
“Is Lady Muriel in?” asked the visitor.
Mr. Bindane shook his head. “I’m afraid not; but I think she’ll be home to tea. Come in and have a drink.”
He led him into the library, and rang the bell. “What will you have?” he asked. “A whiskey and soda?”
“Thanks,” Lord Barthampton replied. “I’ve given up the temperance stunt. I think one needs something with a punch in it now that the weather’s getting hot.”
A servant entered the room, and Mr. Bindane, playing the host with relish, ordered the refreshments.
Charles Barthampton had seen Muriel more than once since her return from the desert, and now he had come with the determination to make her a proposal of marriage. He was nervous, therefore, and soon he was helping himself liberally from the decanter and with marked moderation from the syphon. While doing so he thought he observed the older man’s eye upon him, and felt that candour would not here come amiss.
“I’m fortifying myself,” he laughed, holding up his glass. “Fact is, I’m going to pop the question this afternoon.”
Mr. Bindane nodded slowly, with seeming abstraction, and his lordship decided that a little drama ought to be added to his words.
“Yes,” he said, bracing his shoulders bravely, “this suspense is too much for me; so I’m going to rattle the dice with Fate, and win all or lose all at a single throw. What d’you think of my chances?”
“Not much,” replied Mr. Bindane, gloomily. “Lady Muriel is a difficult sort of girl. Still, she may be suffering from a reaction: you may catch her on the rebound.”
The words slipped from him without intention; but as soon as they were spoken he realized that he would either have to explain them or cover them up as best he could.
“How d’you mean?” came the inevitable question, and Mr. Bindane’s brains were immediately set rapidly to work. He knew that Lord Barthampton was running after the girl’s fortune: such a chase seemed a very natural thing to his business mind; and he did not suppose that the suitor would be deterred by hearing that the lady’s hand had already been given temporarily to another.
“Well,” he replied, “you know, of course, that she was by way of being in love with your cousin a short time ago.”
His visitor scowled. “No, I didn’t know that,” he muttered. “Confound the fellow! – he’s always getting in my way. I wish he’d stay in the desert, and not come back.”
“Yes, so do I,” Mr. Bindane remarked. “I want him to live out there, and manage this Company I’m trying to launch. Frankly, that is why I wish you success. At present it is Lady Muriel who attracts him to Cairo; and if by any chance she should marry him, my plans would be spoilt.”
“Oh, I see,” said the other, a look of cunning coming into his red face. “So we both want the same thing.”
“Yes,” replied Mr. Bindane. The conspiracy interested him, the more so because he felt that he was acting in the best interests of Daniel, for whom he had conceived an unbounded admiration. He thought that he was wasted at the Residency: there was no money in his present work, whereas, if he entered the proposed Company’s employment, he might rise to great wealth. Nor would he ever be happy in Cairo, certainly not if he were tied to Lady Muriel: she was not the right wife for him. She was too flighty, and this escapade of hers in the desert stamped her as a woman of loose morals, who would bring only sorrow to a man of Daniel Lane’s temperament.
Lord Barthampton leaned forward. “Did she see much of him in the Oases?” he asked.
Mr. Bindane hesitated. He did not like to give the secret away; yet he felt that if this burly and rather unscrupulous young man were in possession of the facts, he might terrorize Lady Muriel into marrying him. Then Cairo would cease to have any attraction for Daniel Lane. “She saw a great deal of him,” he replied at length.
“Why, was he with your party?”
Mr. Bindane’s lips moved flabbily, but he did not speak.
“I thought you told me the other day that he wasn’t with you,” Lord Barthampton added.
“Yes, that’s so,” the other answered. “He wasn’t.”
His visitor got up suddenly from his chair. “Do you mean that she was with him?” he asked, incredulously.
“That is a secret,” Mr. Bindane replied, a little scared, but at the same time calming himself with the assurance that he was acting for the best.
Lord Barthampton paced the floor, chewing his lips, his heavy brows knitted. “I see,” he said, at length. “And you think that it will help me if I hold this piece of information over her head.”
Mr. Bindane’s blank expression indicated that nothing of the kind had entered his head – in fact, that nothing of any kind had ever entered it. “You could have heard it from the natives,” he said. “They all know she was at El Hamrân while we went north. If I hadn’t let it slip out like this, no doubt you would have heard it from somebody else in time.”
“No doubt,” the other answered, and he drained his glass once more.
Benifett Bindane also rose from his chair. He was alarmed, and the qualms of conscience were upon him. “Of course it was just an escapade,” he murmured. “I don’t suppose there was anything wrong in it.”
“Well, I won’t use the information, unless I’ve got to,” said Lord Barthampton.
As they issued from the library, they heard the sound of an automobile driving up to the door. “That’s probably her,” Mr. Bindane remarked. “You’d better go and wait in the drawing-room, and I’ll make myself scarce.”
He patted the young man on the shoulders and hurried up the stairs to his room, while Charles Barthampton, nervously tidying himself, went into the drawing-room, where a footman was arranging the tea-table.
He had not long to wait. In a few minutes Muriel entered, and, seeing him, held out her hand.
“Hullo!” she said. “You here again?”
“I don’t seem to be able to keep away from you for long,” he sighed. “Can I see you alone?”
Muriel glanced at him quickly. There was an expression of ludicrous agony upon his face, and she knew full well what he had come to say to her. “Let’s have tea, first,” she answered. “It will fortify us.”
He stared anxiously at her, but all further preliminary remarks were checked by the entrance of Kate Bindane; and soon two or three callers were ushered in.
It was a long time before he managed successfully to outstay the other visitors; but at length he found himself alone with Muriel. The removal of the tea-tray caused another interruption; and he refrained with difficulty from cursing aloud when the footman again entered to switch on the lights.
At last, however, the moment for his declaration arrived, and Muriel settled herself down upon the cushions of the sofa to hear him, as though she were preparing to listen to a recital upon the grand piano. “Now tell me,” she said, “what it is that you want to say to me.”
He was standing in front of her, the fingers of his hand scratching his ear. He cleared his throat. “Well, it’s like this,” he began. “Ever since I’ve known you I’ve felt that there was something lacking in my life…”
“I was wondering how you’d begin,” she said, interrupting him.
He flushed, and hastened on with his prepared speech. “Even soldiers, you know, long for the comforts of home. I suppose every Englishman likes to think of his own fireside…”
“Not in this weather, surely,” she put in, again interrupting him.
He hurried on. “… With the woman he loves, seated before him, after the day’s toil is over.”
“Are you proposing to me?” she asked, wishing mercifully to cut him short.
“Well, yes, I am,” he answered, with a deep sigh. “Ah, don’t be cruel to me. You know that I love you. I’m quite well off: I can give you a fairly comfortable time of it.”
“Yes, but they say you have led a very wild life,” she told him. “You said yourself that you drank.”
“I’ve sown my wild oats, little woman,” he sighed.
“But drink is such a dreadful thing,” she murmured. “I wonder your conscience hasn’t pricked you. Or are you one of those people who have no conscience, only a religion?”
Without waiting to reply he returned to the speech which he had memorized, and drew a picture of his English home: the snow on the ground at Noël, the bells of the little church ringing, the Yule log, and his tenants singing carols to them as they dined in the great hall. It reminded Muriel of a Christmas-card – something with sparkling stuff powdered over it, and “Hark, the herald angels sing” printed in the corner.
Lord Barthampton, however, was very much touched by his own eloquence; and, coming close to her, he held out his hands. “Will you?” he said, brokenly.
“I must have time to think,” she answered. “This is so sudden.” Then, with deep seriousness, she added: “Yes, I want to think it over.”
“Well, I’m going off to the Fayoum tomorrow to shoot,” he told her. “May I come for my answer in three days from now?”
“Very well,” she replied.
He seized her hand in his, and pressed it fervently to his lips. Then, as though overcome with emotion, he whispered, “God bless you, little woman,” and, turning, walked slowly out of the room.
CHAPTER XXXIII – THE RETURN
Daniel’s work at El Hamrân was soon accomplished. When he returned there with the police, he was not empowered to use the aid of the law further than to restore order, to release the camels which had been seized, and to liberate Ibrahîm from his illegal semi-captivity. The officer in command of the troopers, however, was aware that the messengers who had been dispatched at top speed to Cairo would bring back instructions to him to act in accordance with the Englishman’s dispositions; and thus Ibrahîm had been recognized already as Sheikh by the time that the official confirmation of his appointment arrived, and when the men who had made the journey to El Khargeh returned home, the abortive revolt was a thing of the past.
Daniel, however, was unable to reconcile the two parties, and the feud thereafter continued its tedious course, though now in a more underground manner. He was disappointed in the failure of his attempts at conciliation, and was disgusted at the bickerings and the petty insults exchanged between the one faction and the other. The tranquillity of the desert had been rudely disturbed.
It was, thus, with a feeling of relief that he packed up his belongings once more, and turned his face towards Cairo. It was now the middle of April, and he crossed the desert in a blaze of burning sunshine, but his mind was so much occupied with his thoughts that he took little notice of his surroundings. The shimmer of heat rising from the sand, the haze of the distances, and the red dusk of the warm evenings, seemed but to carry his sad heart into the region of speculation; and, at nights, the stars and the crescent of the new moon lifted him into a sphere in which his brain worked with terrible clarity.
He saw his life spread out before his inward consciousness like a tale written in a fair hand upon an open scroll, wherein his mistakes and his shortcomings were inscribed in bolder letters, very apparent to the eye. It seemed to him that his attitude towards Muriel, towards humanity, had been illiberal, too one-sided. There had been need of so much greater tolerance: he had been too inclined to be impulsive, to jump to a conclusion.
In teaching Muriel the lesson that the love between a man and a woman should be a thing of frankness and permanence, not snatched at in secret, nor lightly conceived, he had learned as much as he had taught. He had found in her all manner of qualities to which he had paid insufficient regard – dignity, control, bravery in face of danger, and courage to act according to the dictates of her heart.
He saw now that while she had walked the pathways of that world which he had despised, he had taken refuge, like a coward, in the desert; yet she, in spite of the pitfalls and the sloughs which he had shunned, was not at heart contaminated. She had honestly believed that he had wished her to come to him in the desert, and she had obeyed him. A less impulsive man would have treated her mistake gently, and with more understanding, as being something for which her lax education and not her brave heart was to blame.
In an agony of mind he asked himself whether he had really lost her. He would go to her; he would make her look right into his mind, so that she should see how greatly he had need of her. But would she have pity on him?
Would she have pity on him?.. Suddenly an essential aspect of the relationship of man and woman flashed before him. Man, mighty man, was but a lonely, blundering wanderer, a weak thing, a dweller in the desert, seeking where to lay his head. With all his strength, with all his masterful handling of events, man was yet a vagabond in the world, until he had found his mate; and woman, in spite of the greater sway of her thoughtless instincts, held for him the keys, as it were, of his heart’s home. From the summit of her weakness she could look down upon his strength, and could smile at his struggle to surmount the obstacles which he had placed in his own path. In the loneliness of his soul she could look down and pity him, and take him to her breast, and heal his wounds.
Over and over again he asked himself whether she would turn from him when he came to her now, or whether she would forgive and be forgiven. He was feeling mentally and physically tired, yet he found no respite from his dark thoughts as he jogged along; and when at last he came into sight of Cairo and the Pyramids he was nigh exhausted by his anxiety to know what was to be his fate.
He reached his old camping-ground at about three o’clock in the afternoon, and in a short time one of the tents had been erected, wherein he was able to have a wash and a change of clothes. He then left his retainers to pitch the other tents and to arrange the camp, and, mounting his camel once more, rode to Mena House, where he boarded the electric tram for Cairo.
Weary though he was, he was desperately impatient to find Muriel and to get this matter settled at once. Nothing else was of the slightest importance.
At the terminus of the tramway he jumped into a carriage, calling to the coachman to drive “like the wind” to the Residency; and, arrived there, he handed to the bowab at the gate a generous sum, telling him to keep the driver waiting for a good half-hour before paying him off, so that the sweating horses should have a rest after their exertions.
In the hall he asked a footman whether Lord Blair were in, and was surprised to hear that he had not yet returned from the Sudan. Lady Muriel, he was told, was in the garden with Lord Barthampton: the man thought that they were in the alcove beside the river. Mr. and Mrs. Bindane were out driving, and the Secretaries had all gone home.
Daniel hastened through the house, and out by the door at the back. His legs were aching, but he went down the stone steps of the terrace two at a time, and hurried across the lawn, his heart full of foreboding. He could not understand why Muriel should be entertaining his cousin.
At the rose bushes which screened the alcove, however, he paused; for the thought came to him with renewed terror that he might be an unwelcome visitor.
But, even as he came to a halt, he heard his cousin’s voice, and for a moment he could not help playing the eavesdropper.
“Yes,” he was saying, “you’ll have to marry me, or I shall tell all I know, and then there’ll be a fine old scandal. Come on, now, give me a kiss.”
Daniel did not wait to hear more, but ran round the bushes on to the terrace beyond. At a glance he took in the situation. Lord Barthampton, his back turned to him, was endeavouring to take Muriel in his arms; and from behind the screen of his burly form, the girl’s figure was partly visible, struggling to escape.
Daniel leaped forward and grasped him by the scruff of the neck, flinging him aside so that he staggered across the terrace. He saw Muriel’s wide frightened eyes; and hardly realizing what he was doing, he put his arm about her.
She, too, forgot her relationship to him: she only knew that he had intervened between her and a half-drunken bully; and she clung to him, clung desperately, her hands clutching at his coat.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Daniel exclaimed, angrily staring at his cousin, who seemed to be about to spring upon him.
“What the Hell do you want here?” Lord Barthampton roared, his face scarlet.
Muriel pointed her finger at the furious man. “You’d better go,” she said. “Go and tell everybody whatever you like – I don’t care.” She turned to her protector. “There’s a lot of gossip about my having stayed at El Hamrân.”
Daniel stared from one to the other. “Well, and what is your answer to it?” he asked her, and, waiting for her reply, he seemed to hold his breath.
“I hav’n’t denied it,” she said, looking at him full in the face.
He uttered an exclamation, a sort of suppressed shout of joy. “Good for you!” he cried; and, forgetting all else, he snatched off his battered hat and flung it up into the air. Catching it again, he turned to his cousin. “I take it,” he said, “that you are trying to blackmail Lady Muriel. Is that it?”
“I have asked her to be my wife,” he answered, his fists clenched, “and it’s no damned business of yours.”
“Well,” said Daniel, “you’ve got your answer now, so you’d better go.”
Lord Barthampton was trembling with passion; he was beside himself. “Yes, I’ll go,” he shouted, “and you’ll very soon find, dear Cousin Daniel, that you and Lady Muriel will be cut by all Cairo, and Lord Blair will have to leave the country. I know enough to ruin the lot of you.”
Daniel looked at him steadily. “Don’t forget that I know something about you, too,” he replied; “and if you do what you say you’re going to do, I shall not consider you worthy to hold your present position any longer. And you’ve been drinking again, too: you’re half drunk now.”
“Very well then, dispossess me, you swine!” his cousin blurted out, coming close to him and shaking his fist so menacingly that Muriel took fresh hold upon Daniel’s coat. “Take the title and the money, and be damned to you! I’d rather be a penniless bastard than the smug pillar of society you’re trying to make of me. Good God! – I’ve stood enough from you, you pious hypocrite.”
Daniel laughed aloud. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “I’ve told you that so long as you behave yourself you’re quite safe. It surely isn’t so difficult as all that to be a gentleman.”
With a snort, Lord Barthampton lurched round, and, without another word, took his departure.
Muriel stepped back. “I don’t know what I’m clinging on to you like that for,” she said, with a smile. “What on earth does he mean about your taking his title and his money?”
“Oh, I’ll explain later,” he answered, rather listlessly. “It’s only that by law I ought to have inherited when his father died, not he. It’s a great joke, because, you see, he thinks I’ll dispossess him if he misbehaves himself; but, of course, really he’d have to go altogether to the dogs before I’d do such a thing. I don’t want the bother of being a peer, and I would be hopeless with a lot of money.”
Muriel looked up at him with wonder in her face. Quietly and naturally she linked her arm in his, “I’ve been wanting so much to be beastly to you, Daniel,” she said, and her voice was husky; “but it’s no good, my dear. When a man like Charles Barthampton curses you and tells you to take his money, and you simply laugh and say you don’t want it, what chance have I got of upsetting this disgusting unworldliness of yours? I should only hurt myself, not you.”
“No, you’re wrong there,” he answered. “You will hurt me more than I can bear, more than I can bear, Muriel, if you keep up this quarrel any longer. I don’t feel that I can stand it.”
There was a weariness in his voice which startled her, and, looking at him, she saw an expression in his eyes which made an instant and overwhelming appeal to her.
“Somehow,” he said, speaking hardly above a whisper, “I feel that all these misunderstandings are so superficial. D’you know, I believe that if you were to remain implacable I should simply collapse. I’ve never felt such a thing before in my whole life.”
It was the first time she had ever heard him speak in this way, and all her woman’s heart responded. “Oh, my dear,” she answered, putting her arm about his neck, “it’s no good pretending that we don’t belong to one another, is it?”
He looked at her with joy in his face, and led her towards the marble seat under the palms. “We’ve got a great deal to tell each other,” he said.
They had, indeed, so much to tell that the sun went down behind the Pyramids while yet they were talking, and the dusk gathered about them.
At length they arose and walked back to the house; but now they were laughing like two children, and as they crossed the lawn their arms were still linked together.
Kate Bindane, having returned from her drive, was standing at the drawing-room window as they approached the house.
“Great Scott!” she exclaimed, turning to her husband. “Come here, Benifett: just look at that!”
He arose from his chair, laying aside the Financial News which he had been reading; but he gave no more than a single glance through the open window. Then he returned to his newspaper, and looked at it with listless eyes and open mouth.
Two days later a telegram was received saying that Lord Blair would arrive from the south by special train on the following morning at ten A.M.
Soon after breakfast next day, therefore, Daniel presented himself at the Residency to take Muriel to the station. He was dressed in a suit of grey flannels; and as he crossed the hall, he was carrying his now famous old felt hat in one hand and his pipe in the other.
Here, to his dismay, he came upon Sir Frank Lestrange and John Dregge, both dressed as though they were about to attend a London wedding, and carrying their gloves and silk hats in their hands.
“Great Scott!” he exclaimed. “What on earth are you rigged out like that for?”
“We’re going to the station,” replied Lestrange, somewhat stiffly. “Aren’t you coming too?”
“Sure,” said Daniel.
“I’m afraid you’ll be rather out of the picture,” remarked the punctilious Mr. Dregge, and he uttered a short laugh. “Two of the Princes, and most of the Ministers and Advisers will be there, not to mention the General in full war-paint.”
“Gee!” muttered Daniel. “In this hot weather, too! I guess I’ll look the only sane person on the platform.”
John Dregge glanced at his companion, and he at him, as Daniel, waving his hat to them, went towards the dining-room to find Muriel; but they were too startled even to exchange glances when, at the door of that room, the Great Man’s daughter made her appearance, and stood on tiptoe, holding up her face to be kissed by Daniel.
The scene at the railway-station, half an hour later, was very disconcerting to a man so recently come from the wilds; but Daniel either managed somehow to conceal his embarrassment or felt none at all. Upon the platform the inevitable piece of red carpet was spread, and under the draped British and Egyptian flags several frock-coated celebrities were standing, the Europeans wearing silk hats, the Egyptians the more becoming red tarboushes. A guard of honour of British and native troops was drawn up near the iron palings; and at intervals down the whole length of the platform stood brown-skinned policemen, their hands looking curiously farcical in white cotton gloves.
Muriel’s cool pink dress, her shady hat, and her parasol, gave by contrast a remarkable appearance of discomfort and heat to the assembled males; and Daniel appeared to be the only man present who could turn his head or swing his limbs with ease. Strange to say, his unceremonious clothes were inappropriate only in European eyes. The native mind regarded them as perfectly suitable to one who was already recognized as a kind of court philosopher: a Mohammedan holding a similar office would probably have been garbed in the coarse robe of a derwîsh. It was thus noteworthy that while the Westerners regarded him askance, the Orientals greeted him with particular respect, so that even John Dregge presently began to walk beside him and to converse with him – in marked contrast to his earlier attitude of distant disdain.
At length the white, dusty train panted into the station; and the black-faced engine-driver, by means of a desperate struggle with the breaks, managed to manœuvre the entrance of the saloon to a reasonable proximity to the red carpet.
“Now for the little surprise for Father,” said Muriel, and suddenly she linked her arm in Daniel’s, allowing her hand to rest upon his own.
Lord Blair, hat in hand, stepped on to the platform, and, at a sharp word of command, the guard of honour presented arms.
He did not seem to see the crowd of waiting dignitaries: he stared at Muriel and Daniel, a wide smile revealing the two even rows of his false teeth.
“Dear me, dear me!” he exclaimed, kissing his daughter’s cheek. “My dear Muriel! How are you, Daniel? This is capital, capital! You two, arm in arm…”
“Yes, Father,” Muriel laughed, “we’re going to be married, … please.”
“Aha!” chuckled Lord Blair. “I knew it, I knew it! A little bird told me. Well, well! – I’m delighted. A Lane and a Blair: capital, splendid!”
Frank Lestrange stepped forward anxiously glancing at the native Princes. “Their Highnesses, sir, …” he whispered.
“Ah, yes, to be sure,” said Lord Blair, turning to them, and holding out his hand. “I beg you to excuse me for speaking first to my daughter and my future son-in-law.”