She made a gesture towards the floor. He obeyed it, and squatted down. She had meant to "get at" this man. Well, she had accidentally got at something in him. He was apparently of the type of those Moslems who are ready to rush upon cold steel in order to attain a sensual Paradise.
Her languor, her dreaming mood in the bright silence of this garden of oranges on the edge of the Nile—they were leaving her now. The shadûf man cried again, and again she remembered a night of her youth, again she remembered "Aîda," and the uprising of her nature. She had been punished for that uprising—she did not believe by a God, who educates, but by the world, which despises. Could she be punished again? It was strange that though for years she had defied the world's opinion, since she had married again she had again begun, almost without being aware of it, to tend secretly towards desire of conciliating it. Perhaps that was ungovernable tradition returning to its work within her. To-day she felt, in her middle life, something of what she had felt then in her youth. When she had met for the first time at the opera the man for whom afterwards she had ruined herself, his fierce attraction had fallen upon her like a great blow struck by a determined hand. It had not stunned her to stupidity; it had roused her to feverish life. Now, after years, she was struck another blow, and again the feverish life leaped up within her. But between the two blows what great stretches of experience, and all the lost good opinion of the world! In the deep silence of the orange-garden just then premonition whispered to her. She longed for the renewed cry of the fellah to drown that sinister voice, but when it came, distant, yet loud, down the alley between the trees, it seemed to her like premonition's voice, suddenly raised in menace against her. And she seemed to hear behind it, and very far away, the world which had been her world once more crying shame upon her. Then for a moment she was afraid of herself, as if she stood away from her own evil, and looked at it, and saw, with a wonder mingled with horror, how capable it was.
Would she again set out to earn a punishment?
But how could she be punished again? The world had surely done its worst, and so lost its power over her. The arm that had wielded the lash had wielded it surely to the limit of strength. There could be nothing more to be afraid of.
And then—Nigel stood before the eyes of her mind.
In the exquisite peace of this garden at the edge of the Nile a storm was surging up within her. And Baroudi sat there at her feet, impassive, immobile, with his still, luminous eyes always steadily regarding her.
"My husband will soon be coming back!" she said, abruptly.
"And I shall soon be going up the river to Armant, and from Armant to Esneh, and from Esneh to Kom Ombos and Aswàn."
She felt as if she heard life escaping from her into the
regions of the south, and a coldness of dread encompassed her.