The Hawk of 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.
CHAPTER XX
"_I was never less alone than when by myself_."
GIBBON.
Next morning, with her chaperon's energetic daughters, Damaris found
herself one of the herd foregathered on the Nile bank preparatory to
the excursion to the Valley of the Kings, and later in the afternoon by
mountain path over the ridge to that marvel of antiquity the
Terrace-Temple of Deir el-Bahari.
"I don't want to go, Janie dear," she said, the preceding night, whilst
the devoted maid wielded strong-bristled brushes on the burnished
short-cropped hair.
"Better go, dearie. One must be polite, even if the heart breaks."
Jane Coop's literary plane swung between a three-penny weekly entitled
"Real Stories from High Life" and Ouida's novels, which latter she had
bought second-hand in the Charing Cross Road and kept sandwiched
between her Bible and "Grandmother's Herb Recipes."
"But I don't want to go. I hate crowds, and I can't take Wellington.
Every native flies from him since he got behind the Musical Colossus
and growled. You remember? They thought it was the statue speaking,
and the dear old darling was only trying to catch a lizard."
The bulldog loathed Egypt.
He was always either in disgrace or being talked to in baby language.
He had seen next to nothing of his beloved mistress, and his digestion
had been almost ruined by the amount of chocolates he had eaten out of
pure boredom.
"Take me," he said, every time his beloved went out, as plainly as
could be by means of his beautiful face and down-cast tail. But
excursions had grown rarer and rarer and his slender middle more and
more defined through grief.
"My heart isn't breaking, Janie!" Damaris declared, sitting up in bed.
"I know it isn't, dearie. There's nothing to break it over, _I'm_
sure. I was just repeating from 'Her Scarlet Sin', where the beautiful
heroine is torn between two stools as it were."
Jane Coop had no use for knights who left the field of combat; and as
for the tales which were duly carried to her of an Arabian chief who
followed her young mistress in the desert and sent her bunches of
flowers and such-like trash, well! it was all you could expect if you
left your own country for heathen parts!
To Jane Coop, rides in the desert in Egypt were just as much a part of
the day's programme as rides on donkeys at holiday-time had been in
Margate, before interfering people began to make a fuss about the
rider's weight.
"You mind your own hedges, Maria Hobson, and see that your own cattle
don't go a-straying, with their monkey tricks," she had said tartly and
not over-lucidly, to her grace's maid, who had heard from someone who
had heard from someone else that Miss Hethencourt was out at all hours
of the night, here, there and everywhere. "I know what time she comes
in and where she has been, and who with, and that's quite enough for
me. Thank you, I can shepherd my own flock!"
She was not exactly within the confines of truth in her statement, but
having learned in her youth to diagnose the hurt of dumb animals, she
felt she was fully qualified to treat her beloved child's unrest
without any verbal aid from outsiders.
Yet something, a warning from the future, maybe, had prompted her to
speak this night as she stood beside the bed, looking down upon the
beauty of the child to whom she seemed, more than anyone else, to stand
in the position of sponsor.
"Will you promise me one thing, dearie?"
She stroked the red head lovingly as it leant against the motherly
bosom upon which had so often rested errant lambs and stricken pullets.
"Yes, Janie darling. I would promise you anything!"