While she flitted into the next room to fetch a stamp, Mrs. Haughstone, her needles arrested in mid-air, looked steadily at Tom. Her face was white. She had watched the little scene intently.
'The only thing I cannot understand, Mr. Kelverdon,' she said in a low tone, her voice both indignant and sympathetic, 'is how my cousin can give pain to a man like you. It's the most heartless thing I've ever seen.'
'Me!' gasped Tom. 'But I don't understand you!'
'And for a creature like that!' she went on quickly, as Lettice was heard in the passage; 'a libertine,'—she almost hissed the word out—'who thinks every pretty woman is made for his amusement—and false into the bargain——'
Tom put the stamp on. A few minutes later he was again walking along the narrow little Luxor street, the sentences just heard still filling the silent air about him, emotions charging wildly, each detail of the familiar little journey associated already with present pain and with prophecies of pain to come. The bewilderment and confusion in him were beyond all quieting. One moment he saw the picture of a slender foot that deliberately crushed life into the dust, the next he gazed into gentle, loving eyes that would brim with tears if a single hair of his head were injured.
A cold and mournful wind blew down the street, ruffling the darkened river. The black line of hills he could not see. Mystery, enchantment hung in the very air. The long dry fingers of the palm trees rattled overhead, and looking up, he saw the divine light of the starry heavens.… Surely among those comforting stars he saw her radiant eyes as well.…
A voice, asking in ridiculous English the direction to a certain house, broke his reverie, and, turning round, he saw the sheeted figure of an Arab boy, the bright eyes gleaming in the mischievous little face of bronze. He pointed out the gateway, and the boy slipped off into the darkness, his bare feet soundless and mysterious on the sand. He disappeared up the driveway to the house—her house. Tom knew quite well from whom the telegram came. Tony had telegraphed to let her know of his safe arrival. So even that was necessary! 'And to-morrow morning,' he thought, 'he'll get my letter too. He'll come posting back again the very next day.' He clenched his teeth a moment; he shuddered. Then he added: 'So much the better!' and walked on quickly up the street. He posted her letter at the corner.
He went up to his bedroom. His sleepless nights had begun now.…
What was the use of thinking, he asked himself as the hours passed? What good did it do to put the same questions over and over again, to pass from doubt to certainty, only to be flung back again from certainty to doubt? Was there no discoverable centre where the pendulum ceased from swinging? How could she be at the same time both cruel and tender, both true and false, frank and secretive, spiritual and sensual? Each of these pairs, he realised, was really a single state of which the adjectives represented the extremes at either end. They were ripples. The central personality travelled in one or other direction according to circumstances, according to the pull or push of forces—the main momentum of the parent wave. But there was a point where the heart felt neither one nor other, neither cruel nor tender, false nor true. Where, on the thermometer, did heat begin and cold come to an end? Love and hate, similarly, were extremes of one and the same emotion. Love, he well knew, could turn to virulent hatred—if something checked and forced it back upon the line of natural advance. Could, then, her tenderness be thus reversed, turning into cruelty.… Or was this cruelty but the awakening in her of another thing?…
Possibly. Yet at the centre, that undiscovered centre at present beyond his reach, Lettice, he knew, remained unalterably steadfast. There he felt the absolute assurance she was his exclusively. His centre, moreover, coincided with her own. They were in the 'sea' together. But to get back into the sea, the Wave now rolling under them must first break and fall.…