The Desert Healer

by E. M. Hull

For a moment Carew’s heart seemed to stand still and under the deep tan his face went suddenly white. She had come to him—God in heaven, she had come to him! Hosein’s tall figure was wavering curiously before him as he forced a question in a voice he did not recognise for his own.

“Where?”

“In the salon, lord,” replied Hosein and gave way with another deep salaam. And the whispering swish-swish of his robes had died away before Carew moved.

“In the salon—” He started violently. She had come to him—and he—. His face was rigid as he went towards the painted door.

It yielded to his touch and swung to noiselessly behind him, too noiselessly to be heard by her who, at the further end of the room, was standing before the portrait from which she had stripped the curtains that had veiled it for so many years. She was humming a little song, a frankly indecent song of the boulevards, her copper-crowned head thrown back, her gleaming shoulders twitching from time to time with a petulant movement of impatience.

And behind her, leaning against the portiere in which his hands were clenched, Carew stood as if turned to stone staring—staring—not at the slender, girlish form he had hoped and yet dreaded to see, but at the tall sinuously graceful figure of the woman who had been his wife. His wife—that brazen thing of shame, half naked in a dress whose audacity revolted him! Fool, fool to have thought his own mad longing possible!—to have thought that she—He wrenched his thoughts from her. And the other? Why had he not guessed, why had nothing warned him when he sat listening in the little winter garden to the angry protests of Patrice Lemaire and the caustic comments of the Austrian who “was also of Vienna!” And yet, how could he have known, how imagine that she could ever come into his life again. And why had she come? To dupe him once more, to try and make of him again the same besotted fool who had loved her with the blind ardour of a man’s first passion? That love was dead, killed by her own duplicity. Between them was an unbridgeable gulf—and the memory of a tiny fragile child abandoned with callous indifference. A rush of cold rage filled him and with blazing eyes he swept across the room.

His soft-booted feet made no sound on the thick rugs and still unconscious of his presence the woman broke off her song with a yawn and a flippant remark addressed to the portrait, and turned to find him at her elbow. For what seemed an eternity they stared at each other, her eyes but little below the level of his, then she turned away with an odd little strangled sound that might have been either a sob or a laugh.

“Why are you here?” His deep voice was hard as steel and she raised her head slowly and looked at him, a look in which there was latent admiration, wonder, and an underlying suggestion of cunning curiously blended. “I saw you at the ball. They told me you were going back to the desert. I had to come,” she faltered.

“Why?” His face was devoid of all expression as he flung the single word at her. With a lithe, almost feline movement of her graceful body that was undisguisedly alluring she swayed nearer, her eyes all languorous appeal, her hands outstretched towards him. “I came because I could not stay away,” she whispered, her voice a subtle caress, “because—because—oh, Gervas, can’t you understand? I had to come—because—I—love you, because I have always loved you—in spite of what I did. And I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t think, I didn’t realise, he swept me off my feet. And then when it was too late—too late”—her arms were round his neck, her palpitating limbs pressed close to his—“can you guess what I suffered, can you guess what my life has been! Gervas, you loved me once, for the sake of that love forgive me now, forgive—”

Throughout her amazing declaration he had stood like a rock, his face averted. But as her voice died away in a trembling whisper he turned his head quickly, too quickly for the comfort of the woman who clung to him with passionate fervidness for in the eyes that dropped almost instantly under his searching gaze he read, not the love and contrition her words implied, but a look of hard, eager cupidity. The look of a gambler who watches a last and desperate throw. It was not a tardy desire for his forgiveness but some other motive which as yet he did not understand that had driven her to seek a reconciliation with the man who had once been clay in her hands. Though his heart was dead to her, almost he had pitied her, almost he had believed her. The sobbing pleading voice, the absolute abandon with which she had flung herself upon him had been a wonderful piece of acting. She played her part with a skill and eloquence that, but for that last fatal slip, had almost convinced him. But self-convicted she stood for what she was, a consummate mistress of deceit—a liar as she had always been. To how many others had she made that same glib appeal? To how many others had she tendered the charms she so lavishly displayed? The hateful thought leaped unbidden to his mind as he looked at her with a kind of horror, fastidiously conscious of the deterioration that was so visibly apparent in her. The beautiful face so close to his was exquisite as he remembered it, but he seemed to see it suddenly with new eyes—the face of a woman lost to every sense of morality. To what had she sunk during the years since she had left him? What had she become—she who had been his wife, who had been the mother of his son! “Une femme de moeurs légères.” The Austrian’s sneering voice seemed to echo hideously through the silent room and with a shudder he unclasped her fingers and put her from him.