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Page 26
I think it very strange of you to leave us like that, but
of course you are your own mistress. We are sorry and
hope it will soon be over and you will join us again,
unless you prefer your other friends, the Maynards. We
have packed your clothes and sent them to Cook's for your
orders, and we have paid your hotel bill. Let us know
when you can join us.
MRS. EVERSHAM.
That was all. No word of real sympathy--no declaration of help.
Passive acceptance of her predicament--perhaps indeed a retributive
feeling of its fitness for her folly. They were annoyed.... Packing
her clothes must have been a bother--so was paying her hotel bill.
She crumpled the telegram with an angry little hand. Evidently they
had done none of the telephoning she had begged of them. Surely
there would have been time for that, if only they had hurried a
little! She remembered with a sort of hopeless rage their maddening
deliberateness.... Well, they were gone off to the Nile--the
telegram, she saw, had been sent as they were on their way to the
boat--and she had nothing more to hope from them! But surely the
other people, the consul, the ambassador, the mysterious medical
authorities, would understand when they had read her letters.
She sent another note to the Captain, asking to be called when the
doctor came, and then she sat down at the little white table and
began again to write.
But not to Falconer. Never would she beg of him, never, she
resolved, with a tightening of her soft lips. She would never let
him know how miserable she was over this stupid scrape; when she
returned to the hotel she would carry affairs with a high hand and
hold forth upon the interesting quaintness of her experience and the
old-world charm of her hostess. She laughed, in angry mockery. Never
to him, after their quarrel, would she confess herself.
The letter was to a young man whose gray eyes she remembered as very
kind and whose chin as very vigorous. He would do things, she
thought. And he would understand--he was an American. And dimly she
felt that she didn't want him to think she had utterly forgotten
her promise of the evening before last, and she didn't want him to
be filled with whatever dismal impression the Evershams were giving
out. So she dwelt very lightly upon her annoyance at being detained,
and asked him please to see the consul or the English Ambassador or
somebody in power and hurry matters up a little, as her rightful
caretakers had taken themselves off to the Nile. And she said
nothing stupid about the strangeness of her writing to him after
only speaking to him twice and never being really presented. She
merely added, "Please hurry things--I hate being a prisoner," and
sealed and addressed it with a flourish to William B. Hill, and sent
it off by the maid, and felt oddly comforted by the memory of
Billy's vigorous chin.
The heat of the rose-and-white room was stifling now as the slant
sun of afternoon burned through the closed blinds and drawn
hangings. Languidly she curled up upon the sofa and pillowed her
heavy head on the scented silk, and so, drowsing with fitful dreams,
she lost the sense of the lagging hours.
She roused to find the maid at hand with more water jars, and, when
she had bathed, the girl reappeared and beckoned her to follow.
Perhaps the doctor was below, thought Arlee; perhaps the consulate
had sent for her! With flying feet she followed down the dark old
stairs and across the anteroom into the dim salon, only to find a
candle-lighted table set for dinner in the middle of the room and
Captain Kerissen bowing ceremoniously beside it.
In the blankness of her disappointment she scarcely grasped what he
was saying about the dinner hour being early and his sister being
indisposed. She interrupted with a breathless demand for news:
"And my letters--surely there has been time for answers!"
"Answers, yes," he replied, "but not such as I could wish for your
sake."
"You mean----?"
"The English have written to me and request that I cease to trouble
the department with my importunities. For I myself had written to
them again, that I might find grace in your eyes by accomplishing
your desires. They say to me that it is useless. The plague is more
serious than the convenience of my visitors, and all must be done
according to rule. When there is no danger you may depart."
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