“O Daniel, Daniel,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears, “you oughtn’t to have left me here alone. You oughtn’t, you oughtn’t.”
And some time later, still staring out of the window, she said: “Did you go away because you wanted me to follow you? Must I humiliate myself and come to you? O Daniel, my darling, how I hate you!”
[CHAPTER XXIV—THE GREAT ADVENTURE]
As the days passed, and the Bindanes’ departure for the Oases drew near, Muriel’s rather feeble resolution not to accompany them steadily weakened. Lord Blair had done his best to alter her decision, and the Great Man could be a clever strategist: his daughter, indeed, would have had little chance of opposing his wishes successfully in this matter even had she battled against him with a whole heart, but in the vacillating condition to which love had brought her she had no chance at all.
“Don’t be a dam’ fool,” Kate Bindane said to her one morning at the Residency. “What’s the good of moping about outside the ropes like a heavyweight with a stomach-ache? You know you’re fed up with everybody here: Gor’ blimy!—why don’t you swallow your maidenly pride, and put on the gloves, and have three rounds with Fate? It’s better to be counted out than never to have boxed at all. Tennyson.”
Thus it came about that at the end of February, when Lord Blair took the train southwards upon his journey to the Sudan, Lady Muriel set out westwards as a member of the Bindanes’ elaborate caravan. The start was made one morning from Mena House, and so great was the general confusion and hullabaloo that Muriel’s thoughts did not begin to clarify themselves until a ride of two hours had brought them to the rocky valley wherein they halted to eat their luncheon.
Here, seating herself upon the rocks at the foot of the cliff, she shaded her eyes with her hand, and surveyed the animated scene with amused interest. There was Kate, in a white coat and skirt, and a sun-helmet, stumping over the sand to cure the “pins-and-needles” from which she was suffering; her husband, in a grey flannel suit and a green-veiled helmet, was still seated upon his camel as though he had forgotten to dismount; his man, Dixon, rather fat and red, and wearing his new gaiters apparently back to front, was hastening to his master’s assistance; and the two imposing native dragomans, in silks all aflutter in the wind, were shouting unnecessary orders to the Egyptian cook and sofragi to hasten the luncheon.
A few yards down the valley a khaki-clad Egyptian police-officer, wearing his red tarboush, or fez, at a rakish angle, was giving instructions to his four negro troopers; a fat native gentleman from the Ministry of Agriculture was mopping his forehead as he stood beside his grumbling camel, and the Egyptian secretary to the party, a dapper youth with mud-coloured complexion and coal-black eyes, had just thrown himself down in the shade and had removed the tarboush from his close-cropped head, in conscious defiance of local etiquette.
The baggage camels, carrying the camp equipment, the stores, and the tanks of water, were lurching at a walking pace along the valley, led by blue-robed camel-men, under the orders of the caravan-master, a grey-bearded Arab who rode sleepily at the head of the line. These were not to halt at the midday hour, but, pushing ahead, they would be overtaken later in the day by the swifter riding-camels; and Muriel watched them now as they slowly jogged along the little-used track between the yellow cliffs, the brilliant sun striking down upon them from a deep blue sky in which compact little bundles of snow-white cloud went scudding past.
There was a boisterous breeze blowing, and the tingling glow of the sun and wind upon her cheeks, as she sat perched high upon the rocks, seemed to match the exhilaration of her heart. The morning’s ride had shaken her brain free from the heavy gloom of the last three weeks; and already the shining open spaces of the desert had produced their effect upon her, so that she felt as though her mind had had a cold bath.