CHAPTER XVIII

"A handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse."

I KINGS.

Whilst Damaris was trying to soothe her wounded pride at Karnak, Ben Kelham was suffering the tortures of the nethermost pit down Assouan way.

His heart was not in "lion" at all, it was literally at Damaris' feet.

He had not rushed away in pique after her refusal of him on the night of the fancy-dress ball; nor with any vague idea of causing her to regret her decision in realising the vacuum, in her existence which his absence might make. He had not an ounce of subtlety or vanity in his nature. He had gone because he thought it would be the decent thing to do as far as she was concerned, and also to hide his hurt and disappointment, which were deep. The rumour of lion was genuine and the excitement, extending far down the Nile, intense. In fact, with the aid of the Oriental's prodigal imagination the one royal beast of feminine persuasion which was reported as having been seen prowling around Deir el-Bahari had been multiplied to two pairs ravaging the outskirts of Assouan.

He sat drinking coffee with jolly Sybil Sidmouth and her nerve-stricken stepmother in the lounge of the Savoy Hotel in Assouan just at the moment when Damaris sat herself down on the broken column in the Hypostyle Hall.

"Jolly bad luck we've had, haven't we?" said Sybil.

Kelham nodded his head. The last post had come in, with nothing for him but a few letters from home.

"Yes, rotten!" he replied after a moment. "She might have sent me a line."

Sybil's stepmother moved restlessly in her chair.

Ridden with nerves, she was also mother of twin-daughters neurotic and plain who, sered by nature and yellowed by time and on the wrong side of the matrimonial hedge, had been only too glad to foist her on to the plump shoulders of jolly, capable, pretty Sybil and to get rid of them both for the winter.

In the last week or so a sprouting of hope had pierced the matchmaking soil in the querulous lady's really well-intentioned heart, for, like the proverbial half-loaf, a step-son-in-law is distinctly better than none at all.

But Sybil only smiled at the absent-mindedness of the young man's remark.

For weeks she had been the recipient of his confidences. He had dragged her, suffocating, down into the mud-depths of the diffidence in which he wallowed; had tugged her, gasping, to the Olympian heights from which he viewed a world of love, all rosy-red; had flung her, well-nigh senseless from exhaustion, upon the saw-teethed rocks of despair; and had taken her paddling in the wash of his vapourings.

She was absolutely heart-whole, with a firm belief in the "lion" rumour, and later, long after the end of this story, became the jolly, popular wife of the great eye-specialist to whom she had rushed when, after a soul-shaking scene with her step-sisters, she had missed the target entirely at Bisley.

As it happened, the duchess had written, but in a moment of most unusual aberration had put Khartoum on the envelope instead of Assouan, so that it was months, long after the end of this story, that the letter reached him. Strange is it how the lives of men are wrecked or made through the most trivial happenings.

The grain of dust in the eye; the mudbank in the river; the hen in the road! Just think of the outcome of such insignificant incidents.

The last letter he had received had been written in Heliopolis on the eve of her grace's sudden decision; the one that had gone astray had been mailed in Luxor, and had contained the request that, when he had shot the lion he would take the carcase or the skin as a present to Damaris at the Winter Palace Hotel and wait there until her return from the Oasis of Khargegh.

There was no doubt about the fact that he was genuinely in love.

Lion or no lion in the vicinity, he would sit dreaming for hours amongst the rock tombs at full noon or fall of evening or by the light of the sickle-moon; a perfectly absurd proceeding where big game is concerned. Food or sleep meant nothing to him, so that his usual good-temper was sharpened and his undoubted good looks enchanced by a certain romantic gauntness under the cheek-bone. People seemed as ghosts to him, so absorbed was he in his love and his pain; so that his act of rising when Mrs. Sidmouth took what she thought to be a diplomatic departure was purely mechanical.

Then Sybil laughed, a jolly, ringing laugh, and laid her hand upon his arm.

"Why don't you run up to Heliopolis?"

"By jove, Sybil, that's an idea. You come along, too. Damaris would love to meet you; you're just her sort. Besides, there's nothing doing in lion here, it's only a yarn. Let's pack to-night and get off to-morrow. I'll go and see if we can get a private steamer—can't stick a public one, stopping every other minute to look at tombs!"

Sybil laughed.

"We'll go, Ben, it will be ripping. But to-morrow! How exactly like a man!"

Ben was contrite. He thought Sybil travelled with a kit-bag and her guns; he had forgotten Mamma.

Mamma protested. She was an invalid, with all an invalid's paraphernalia.

They started after the passing of a week in which Mrs. Sidmouth had a series of nerve-storms, and in which Sybil, to pass the time, wrote a four-page letter to Ellen Thistleton, which she duly received at breakfast.

They certainly did not stop en route to look at temples or tombs, but they made quite a long halt on the sandbank just above Luxor, onto which boats of all sizes and shapes so often run. The loss of time is irritating enough, goodness knows, in ordinary travelling and occurs quite frequently, but when one is love-driven and this maddening delay happens, then you have to make as big an exercise of self-control as when you rush onto the platform only to see the guard's van of your train disappearing into the tunnel.

And surely the gods laughed long and loud when Damaris chose that very day to return by public steamer from Denderah where she had been to visit the Temple of Hathor the Egyptian Aphrodite.

CHAPTER SIX

"But still his tongue ran on, the less Of weight it bore, with greater ease."

BUTLER.

Lady Thistleton's daughters were exhaustively energetic. It belied their colouring, which was dun and which, though of the same family, is distinct from mousey. It has infinitely more vim and a vast endurance and a great patience; also is it sullen and boring, but reliable.

Ellen, the elder, had been engaged to a younger son of The Inverness of Inverness. His colouring, except of course for the eyes, which were of a snapping blue, reminded one of a tomato salad dressed with chilis and smothered in mustard-sauce. His temper corresponded. They had fought over everything until they had smashed their engagement.

Berenice was engaged to a parson in Edinburgh, one of the Smythe-Smythes of London. She made a doormat of herself, loving the herculean minister, and, though longing to stay at home and get married, had, at her lover's earnest request, consented to accompany her mother and sister to Egypt instead.

To his fervent mind the loss of a few months of married life would be compensated for by the biblical discourses upon the Land of Moses with which, later on, as his wife, she would be able to enliven Mother's Meetings.

They admired Damaris a lot, though her independence and colouring shocked them not a little. In the seclusion of the double bedroom, as they brushed or twisted their lanky locks in Hindes', they whispered about her love-affair, which had presumably gone agley, and thrilled with a distinct feeling of wrong-doing over the gossip anent the mythical Sheikh.

If they had asked Damaris about the myth, she would have told them everything quite simply and truthfully. This would have cleared up the mist but spoilt the feeling of wrong-doing.

Lady Thistleton was large and recumbent and averse to sight-seeing, but after a heart-to-heart talk with her daughters had seen to it that Damaris had no time for moping.

Damaris went here, there and everywhere; played tennis; paid duty-calls, as you must when somebody extends her wing-feathers as shelter; acted in charades; attended concerts; and was thoroughly miserable.

Jane Coop was miserable too; so was the bulldog, and, through a certain unconfessed and indefinable vigilance they both felt called upon to exercise in behalf of their beloved mistress, were distinctly nervy.

"Drat the men!" had said the maid, giving pithy verbal expression to the ragged state of her nerves as she cut the stalks of the beautiful flowers which came daily without name or message. The dog's method of expressing himself was somewhat more violent; it consisted of the sudden seizure between his great teeth of the posterior portion of the nether garments of low-caste males, white or coloured.

You could almost tell the status of the male bipeds by casting a discreet eye upon their raiment, and as there was not a muzzle in Egypt big enough to fit the dog, it had ended in him being led or chained in polite society.

Damaris's table was next that of the Thistletons, who, with a vague memory maybe of their duty towards their neighbour as instilled on Sundays into their rebellious infantile heads, chatted brightly to right and to left of them at meals.

Full of the milk of human kindness, they allowed it to overflow into their writhing neighbours' jugs.

They broke through the glacial atmosphere which surrounds the Britisher's breakfast-table; newspaper propped against jam-pot was no barrier; their gladsome invitations or suggestions, dammed for the moment, would rise at last level with the paper's edge to trickle down the other side and mingle with the eggs and bacon, porridge, kidneys, or whatever trifle the plate might contain.

They read out scraps of news from the morning paper; they read out bits of home news from their stacks of correspondence, written for the most part on eight pages and in the sprawling, uncontrolled script of the woman who has nothing but trivialities with which to fill her day.

Their blood was blue, their upbringing beyond suspicion; they simply erred through a too-generous supply of the above-mentioned philanthropic fluid.

They had come home dead-beat the night before, but were first down to breakfast, as happy as could be at the thought of the strenuous day before them, and were ostentatiously comparing their books of notes or jottings when Damaris came in. They went everywhere with note-books in their hands, and made entries at the most inconvenient moments during their journey. To you or me they would have seemed but jottings, but Berenice could have read you a blank-verse love-poem in the thick markings of her fountain-pen; and Ellen a De Profundis from the hieroglyphics and inscriptions copied by her scratchy stylo and under which she essayed to bury the memory of the tomato-hued Inverness.

Damaris slid into her seat with an inward prayer that she might be allowed time to read her mail, which consisted of a fat letter from her godmother and a bulky one from home. "Perhaps Marraine will be back soon," she thought, opening the other letter first, as is a way with us perverse humans. Enclosed was an atrociously-written letter to her mother from her plain-as-a-pikestaff brother, written from Harrow.

". . . it's awfully jolly," wrote the enthusiastic youngster, "being in Ben Kelham's house. They still talk about his last house-match against Bumbles. Don't you remember I'd just got over mumps and we went down for it? Bumbles had six to win and ten minutes to do it in when Howard was bowled, and Carden, their captain, went in and drove right over the Pav. He won the match by one, don't you remember? And then Kelham caught him magnificently in the slips just as time was up."

Damaris looked at a bunch of jasmine lying beside her plate, and sighed as she opened her godmother's letter; then sighed again, more profoundly.

The duchess had arrived at Khargegh without mishap. She described the journey, gradually ascending through the desert, then down through the narrow valley of rocks—the wastes of rock and gravel—the beautiful valley—the great plain to Mahariq-Khargegh with its date-palms, its filthy lanes, its mosques, with the limestone hills almost surrounding it.

"And we can't get any further, my dear. A report has come of the appearance near here of a notorious robber gang which has infested the desert farther south for years. I don't believe it myself—Hobson is furious, as the hotel we are in is not totally devoid of—shall I call them mosquitoes?—but the authorities refuse to allow us to proceed. I have sent a runner through to the friend I was going to see."—Damaris touched the jasmine at her side and sighed. "I will tell you the whole history when I return. So sad, my child; so very tragic. She may come to see me, as the authorities have no power over her. She is staying at her eldest son's house until his return. I will let you know my movements as soon as I can. Enjoy yourself. Dekko is very quiet; he is either apprehensive or going to moult."

Damaris smiled spasmodically when, as she put the letter down under the jasmine, her neighbours let off a broadside.

The head dragoman wanted to get up a party for Deir el-Bahari on the morrow. He had twenty pairs of donkeys, all of which were so accustomed, it seemed, to going about in a bunch that they refused to move a step if one pair was missing. Nineteen pairs had been filled from the different hotels, one pair was still minus riders. Would Damaris make a couple with Mr. Lumlough?

Mr. Lumlough, who was of the raw age of nineteen and who worshipped in secret at the girl's shrine, blushed divinely salmon-pink and coughed.

Damaris shook her head.

She longed to see the Temple, as she longed to go to Denderah, but not in a crowd; also, she longed to confide all her secrets (of which her visit to the Temple of Amnon was not one of the least) to her godmother. She was just the slightest bit scared, and, being very young, felt incapable of prescribing for her burnt finger-tips.

She had only to keep away from the fire, but, as I have already said, she was very young.

"Do, Damaris! We are taking our lunch on donkeys, as well."

"But why not let the empty pair go without riders? Or let Mr. Lumlough go on one and let the other trot by its side without anyone? I'm sure it would love a holiday."

No! These twenty pairs of donkeys belonged to an asinine Trades Union. The twenty pairs went together or not at all; they went up the steep hill with a human being on their backs or not at all; if one solitary moke out of the forty trades-unionists should be asked to climb a hill with nothing on its back, it would not move one step—no, not if the most luscious carrot feast awaited it at the top; and if it refused to budge, the thirty-nine others would support it by also refusing to budge! Yes! even if they held up the whole of the tourist season for eternity and never again tasted luscious carrot in all the years allotted to the asinine race. What is the good of customs if you don't stick to them? The donkeys' parents had always climbed that hill heavily-laden, and what was good enough for them was also good enough for their descendants!

"I think it's horrid of you, Damaris. Besides, what are you going to do all by yourself?" said Ellen, opening a letter bits of which she proceeded to read out. "Here's a letter from Sybil Sidmouth. She and Mr. Kelham are having a very poor time sitting about in the rocks and tombs all day and half the night."

"How romantic!" sighed Berenice. "All alone with Nature in an Egyptian desert! It reminds me of Omar's Jug and Loaf verse. How does it go?" She flipped through her notebook. "Ah! here it is." And she proceeded to read, with appropriate punctuation with her tea-spoon on the edge of her saucer:

"A book of verses underneath the bough A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and Thou Beside me, singing in the wilderness; O, wilderness were Paradise enow!"

She looked up, suddenly, surprised and indignant, at Ellen, who had kicked her violently under the table; then she tried to cover up her confusion at her unfortunate faux pas.

"Mrs. Sidmouth, of course, is far from well," she continued. But Ellen broke in, in her high staccato and appalling French:

"Revenons a nos moutons—or at least, our donkeys." She looked at Damaris, who, with over-bright eyes, laughed whole-heartedly at the feeble joke. "Do change your mind, Damaris. The guide is Yussuf, the very best, you know. Besides, we might see the lion."

"All right," said Damaris, tucking the jasmine into the belt of her white dress, which she had never done before. "I'll come. Twenty pairs of donkeys climbing up a hill will be an awfully funny sight,—don't you think so, Mr. Lumlough?"

She smiled across at Mr. Lumlough, who was thereupon transported to the portals of the seventh heaven with a piece of toast and marmalade in his right hand.