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Page 102
She sat back and pushed the hair from her forehead; then rose and
tiptoed to the curtain. She put out her hand, and drew back; then,
urged by a desire which clamoured for definite knowledge, parted the
curtain and looked in. She looked for just one second, then staggered
back and back as far as the crystal basin filled with the clear water
which was used in prayer; and she stood with her arms outstretched, and
fingers spread between her eyes, and the picture she herself had
painted in the thoughtlessness of youth, and then swung round, with her
back to the Tent of Death and looked down into the water, and, as
though a veil had been lifted from before her eyes, looked back along
the past, and forward into the future.
As in a flash she saw the wreck she had made of her life by throwing
away the substance of a good man's love for the fantastic conviction
that, as she was not as other girls, she must therefore go a-venturing
through the world's mazy high-ways and by-ways until she had found her
own particular niche.
She saw the picture of herself proclaiming it to her life by throwing
away the substance of a good man's godmother's letter of invitation to
Egypt. She saw the girl's lips moving. What was she saying?
"I want to find my own nail and hang for one hour by myself, if it's on
a barn door or the wall of a mosque--as long as I am by myself."
Then the picture faded, to give place to another in which she saw
herself sitting in the moonlight beside Ben Kelham; the honest, slow,
lovable man standing at that very moment a grim picture of despair,
divided only by a curtain from her, through whom, indirectly, he had
killed his friend.
What was she saying to him in this dream-picture?
"I don't know enough to marry; I want to know what love really is,
first . . ."
What was he saying in reply?
". . . You will learn your lesson all right, dear, and suffer a bit,
dear, but you will come to me in the end."
She suddenly knelt and plunged her hand down into the water, breaking
the smooth surface into a thousand miniature waves which turned, as she
stared, into the mocking smiles of her acquaintances and friends; and
she knelt quite still until the surface was once more smooth, out of
which, as she stared, looked the tragic face of the dead man's mother
and the grief-stricken, shamed face of her beloved godmother.
The gossip, the scandal, with her name linked as lover to that dead
man; the chuckles, the sly lifting of eyebrow and pursing of lips when
it should be known that the other man, the dead man's greatest friend,
had come upon them unawares, alone in the tent at night?
The story of this struggle, the shooting of the treacherous friend--for
who would believe the story, told by the principals in the drama, of a
wounded lion which had turned and disappeared into the night?
There would be the inquest, the inquiry, the arrest for murder and the
trial, in which she and all those she loved would be pilloried, through
her fault, in the eyes of the world.
She stared down at the water, which seemed to hold her hands in the icy
grip of death--her hands--look! what was that?--what had happened to
them?
They were spotted with red!
She tore at her handkerchief and rubbed them; under the water, rubbed
hard, rubbed frantically, but the red spots were there on her hands, on
her handkerchief, on the water--the red she had seen when she had
looked . . .
She flung the handkerchief from her and rose to her feet, shaking
convulsively from head to foot.
Poor child! Half-crazed from horror, light-headed from fatigue and
want of food, she had mistaken the reflection of the jewelled Hawk she
wore at her breast, thrown by the lamp upon the water, for the stain
she had seen and which had looked like a crimson rose above the heart
of Hugh Carden Ali, as he lay asleep, with his feet turned towards
Mecca.
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