Bella Donna: A Novel

by Robert Hichens

And in bed that night, or over a last solitary pipe outside the tent, Nigel would be thinking, "By Jove, Ruby is a trump to put up with Mohammed's messes after the food she's always been accustomed to!" Whereas, before, he had been congratulating himself on having engaged at a high rate the greatest treasure of a camp cook that could be found in the whole of Egypt.

Perpetually, in a hundred ways, she brought to his memory the extravagant luxury in which for so many years she had lived. Yet she never seemed to be regretting, but always to be congratulating herself on the fact, that she had abandoned it for a different, more Spartan way of life. Often, in fact generally, she talked as if they were poor people, as if she had married a quite poor man.

"I can't let you be reckless," she would say, when perhaps he suggested something that would put them to extra expense. "It isn't as if we were rich. I love spending money, but I should hate to run you into debt."

And if Nigel began to explain that he could perfectly well afford whatever it was, she would gently, and gaily too, ignore or sweep away his remarks with a "You forget how different your position is now that your brother's got an heir." Once, however, he persisted, and made a sort of statement of his affairs to her, his object being to prove to her that they had "plenty to go on with." The result was scarcely what he had anticipated. For a moment she seemed to be struck dumb with a strong surprise. Then, apparently recovering herself, she said decisively, "If that is all we've got, I am perfectly right to be parsimonious. And besides, it's an excellent thing for me to have to think about money. I've always been accustomed to spend far too much. I've lived much too extravagantly, too brilliantly, all my life. A change to simplicity and occasional self-denial will do me all the good in the world, whether I like it at first or not."

And she smothered a sigh, and smiled at him with a sort of gentle determination. But she never overacted her part, she never underlined anything. Directly she saw that she had gained her end, had "got home," she passed on to a different topic. Never did she persistently play the martyr. She knew how soon a man secretly gets sick of the martyr-wife. But, in one way or another, she kept Nigel simmering in appreciation of her.

And in contenting his soul she did not forget to content him in other ways; she never allowed him to lose sight of the fact that she was still a beautiful and voluptuous woman, and that she belonged wholly to him. And so gradually she woke up in him the peculiar and terrible need of her that a certain type of woman can wake in a certain type of man. She taught him to be grateful to her for a double joy: the moral joy of the high-minded man who has, or who thinks he has, through a woman in some degree fulfilled his ideal of conduct, and the physical joy of the completely natural and vigorous man who legitimately links with his moral satisfaction a satisfaction wholly different. To both spirit and body she held the torch, and each was warmed by the glow, and made cheerful and glad by the light.

Nigel had cared for her in England, had loved her in the Villa Androud; but that care, that love, were as nothing to the feeling for her that sprang up in him in the midst of the springing green things that made a Paradise of the Fayyūm. He was a man who got very near to Nature, whose heart beat very near to Nature's generous heart, and often, when he stood shoulder-high in a silver-green sea of sugar-cane, or looked up to the tufted palms that made a murmuring over his head, or listened to the rustle of corn in the sunshine, or to the swish of the heavily-podded doura in the light wind that came in from the desert, he would compare his growing love for Ruby to the growing of Nature's children in this beneficent clime. And the luxuriant richness of the green world round about him seemed to have its counterpart within him.

But there was the desert, too, always near to remind him of the arid wastes of the world—of the arid wastes that needed reclaiming in humanity, in himself.

And in his great joy he never lost one of his most beautiful natural graces, the grace of an unostentatious humility.

The racial reticence of the Englishman about the things he cares for most kept him from telling his wife of what was happening in his mind and heart, despite his apparent frankness, which often seemed that of a boy; and some of it she was too devoid of all spirituality, all moral enthusiasm, to divine. But she summed him up pretty accurately, knew as a rule pretty thoroughly "where she was with him"; and though she sometimes wondered how things could be as they were in him, or in any one, still she knew that so they were.