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Page 75
Sybil Sidmouth and her mother, owing to lack of accommodation, brought
about by the crush of visitors in the huge caravanserai, had gone to
the Savoy; for which the man was secretly thankful.
He wanted to eat out his heart all by himself in the appalling
loneliness which had overwhelmed him when, on ringing up Heliopolis the
night before, he had learned that Damaris and the duchess had
transferred themselves to Luxor.
And you simply cannot indulge in your particular brand of _malaise_ or
dolour with an extreme optimist sitting opposite you at meals, or
adjacent to your elbow at most other times.
He anathematised the postal system of Egypt; his own haste in accepting
the girl's refusal; the oriental imagination which magnified cats into
lions; but, above all, the wash of that steamer (upon which Damaris had
returned from Denderah) which had re-floated his own craft and sent him
racing full steam ahead for Cairo.
Another hour of the infernal wait on the sandbank, and he would have
transferred himself to one of the scores of small boats and been
ferried across to Luxor, where he would have dined at the Winter Palace
Hotel, whilst waiting to catch the express to Cairo, and perhaps have
seen his beloved in the dining-room, or have heard that she was staying
there.
He was thoroughly irritated as he pondered in his deliberate way as to
the best thing to do.
Should he take the first train back to Luxor, or, as the duchess had
not seen fit to acquaint him as to her movements, should he stay where
he was, write her a letter, or send a telegram and wait for an answer?
Anyway, he was irritated enough to scowl at the commissionaire who was
rating a woman whom he had seen hanging about the street, doubtless
with intent of soliciting a nickel coin from one of the great white
race as he--or she--descended the steps to stroll along the street.
She made a few choice remarks upon the undoubted inclusion of a pig in
the commissionaire's parentage, in a curiously sibilant voice, then
limped away with a distressing swing of her body from the hips.
"Can't you keep those people quiet?" Kelham demanded angrily, as he
moved a chair further back, and lit a cigarette.
An hour had passed, in which he had come to no decision, when Fate, in
the shape of a page-boy, offered him the just-arrived, local morning
paper, which he took and read, with only half a mind upon the gossipy
contents.
"By Jove!" he suddenly exclaimed. "If that isn't a bit of luck!
Here's the very excuse for getting down there without kind of thrusting
myself upon them." He flattened out the paper and again read through
the paragraph which gave a most extraordinarily detailed account of the
immensely wealthy Hugh Carden Ali, his career at Harrow; his travels;
his stables in the desert; his birds and a hundred and one other
details calculated to interest those who like reading about other
people's most intimate affairs. It ended: ". . . Being a great
sportsman, the strange story of lion which is causing such uneasiness
and is likely to do harm to the Luxor season, has taken him to his
Tents of Purple and Gold, one of the wonders of modern Egypt and which
lie in the desert a little distance from the well-known Colossi."
He did not frown this time as he folded the paper and turned to watch
the commissionaire in conclave with a coal-black Ethiopian who, clad in
crimson tunic, enormous turban and with scimitar rattling at his side,
tendered an envelope.
"Yes, yes," said the hotel servant. "I will see that it is delivered
into the gentleman's own hands. And, tell me"--he lowered his voice as
he winked his eye--"has she returned from Alexandria?"
Qatim was caught in a quandary, and he cursed the vanity which had
urged him to don his most resplendent garments upon his errand to the
great hotel, to which he had come after a violent argument with
Zulannah.
With a heart full of hatred, and agony in her twisted limbs the woman
had hung about the streets in front of the hotel until she had seen the
man for whom she had felt such a sudden and fleeting love, and who was
the primary cause of her disfigurement.
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