If he had lost her, after all!
CHAPTER XXIII
BELSHAZZAR COMES BACK TO STAY
In her apartments at the Grand Hotel de Esbekie-yeh in Cairo, a wan-faced girl was looking wearily out over the splendid panorama spread before her. In the heel of the afternoon the level rays of the sun were gilding parti-colored minarets of mosque and palaces with barbaric splendor. In the distance the Shoubrah palaces gleamed even more fairy-like than usual; the Abbasieyeh camps were astir with multi-hued life, and on its frowning rock the distant citadel was a gem in red bronze.
On the bosom of the world's most mysterious river, the brown sails were gleaming like the wings of great birds, and inshore the graceful lateens under the dipping shadoofs were closely folded as they lay at rest. Over beyond Ghizeh loomed the Pyramids which she was to visit on the morrow, the Sphinx in its majesty between. It was fairyland, in truth, the most gorgeous riot of color and mystery in the whole world, and yet she saw it not. The languorous air was heavy almost to oppression with the blended odor of jasmine, orange, citron, and the thousand and one flowers of the myriad gardens, mingled with the reek of the bazaars and the indescribable breath of the Nile. And yet she was all unconscious of it.
For in the nostrils of her introspection there was only the spicy tang of lemonias and sagebrush, and the eyes of her soul saw only a little glade embowered with artemesia and clematis, nestled deep in the forbidding cleft in the Rocky Mountains, many thousand miles away. A glade where lay a dead man with the snarl of baffled hatred petrified on his discolored lips, and another wounded almost to death, his head clasped close to the bosom of a woman whom she should be logically hating as woman was never hated before.
And yet in the heart of her there was only pity for the woman, whose letter lay in her lap. For the hundredth time she read the tear-stained words, feeling a new accession of tenderness at each transcribed sob:
"Yesterday, at the 'horse-shoe bend' in Lost Cañon, I killed the man called Jasper Matlock, after he had shot Kenneth Douglass from ambush. Mr. Douglass was not injured seriously, but at the time I thought him dead. Somehow I found his revolver in my hands and the man was making a second attempt.
"Mr. Ballard—ah, the great hearts of these westerners—magnanimously sought to shield me from the consequences and publicity. As though all the publicity in the world mattered now.
"I have wronged you, but in one thing only: the lie about your engagement to Ellerslie. That was my doing. In everything else I had the justification of every law of Nature; I loved him far better than you could ever do, and he was logically mine if I could but win him. I was ready and eager to sacrifice all, while you in your pitiful selfishness and egotism turned from the glory laid at your feet and yielded him nothing. Oh, you fool! You poor, weak fool! To deny him even the small assurance of your vain little body, when you should have found, as I did, ecstatic exaltation in letting him trample on my soul.
"Oh! child, in your wealth of possession be generous and give me a little of your kindness, a little of your forgiveness. I have so little, so little of him. I know now that I have never even had his respect, at times barely his tolerance. And, God help me, I loved him so. Can you understand when I say that I love him even the more that he was always greater than the manifold arts I exercised upon him? That all my sacrifices, my tenderness, my adoration gave him out apathetic amusement? I was ever but a toy to divert him from the agony your neglect caused him and any other woman as fair would have sufficed as well.
"To my shame be it said that I knew it all the time; but I was hoping against hope. To-day I go away from here, and from him, forever. He will come to you as certainly as the iron flies to the magnet, and he will be suffering, penitent and purified. My share of him has been the coarse dross of passion that must be skimmed from the crucible of every strong man's hot heart; yours will be the refined gold of his soul's first and last real love. For God's sake, child, play with happiness no more, lest you lose it as I have done.
"In the bitterness of the days to come it would lessen the pain if I thought you could ever come to forgive me. I can see to write no more. Mayhap these tears will in time wash out the stain on my soul. That on my hands I must see forever. It is the visible proof of my atonement, for by it I gave back his life to you."
The paper was wet with her tears as she thrust it into the bosom of her dress. Beside the open window she knelt and prayed for the peace of a troubled soul. But it could never be—this home-coming of her lost love. Her heart, too, was dead; the feet of her idol had crumbled and the glorious fabric of her dreams was dust. The yellow drifting sands of the Libyan desert shimmering before her aching eyes were no more dry and lifeless than the dead love moldering In her heart. Never again would her pulses leap at the sound of his voice or her senses reel at his touch. That was as much a thing of the past as Thebes, Luzor, Karnak and Athor out yonder, a dead thing buried in the ashes of a murdered hope.