A minute or two passed. She hoped that her polite little partner would quickly return to take her back to the ballroom, in which the music had again begun. She felt stupid and curiously tongue-tied. She wanted to make some remark, if only as a reminder to him of his manners.
The remark which at length she made, however, was foolish, and unworthy of her: she knew this before the words had passed her lips. “You seem to find the garden very interesting,” she said.
He turned round slowly, a whimsical smile upon his face. “Very,” he answered; and then, after an embarrassing pause, “I haven’t seen any roses for six months: I’m revelling in them.”
“Do you live in the desert?” she asked.
“Yes, most of my time. It’s a fine free life.”
“Oh, one can be free anywhere,” she replied. She felt an indefinable desire to be contrary.
“Nonsense!” he answered, abruptly. “You don’t call yourself free, do you, in those diamonds and those absurd shoes?”
He turned again to the garden and breathed in the scent of the roses, with head thrown back. To Lady Muriel’s joy Rupert Helsingham returned at this moment, followed by a footman.
“Lord Blair will see you at once,” he said.
The girl gave a sigh of relief which she hoped Mr. Lane would observe; but in this she was disappointed, for, with a nod to her partner and a good-natured bow to herself, he strode away.
“A very odd fellow,” remarked Helsingham, when they were alone once more. “His manners are atrocious; but what can one expect from a man who spends his life in the desert?”
“What makes him live there?” she asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Being a crank, I suppose. He’s studying Bedouin manners and customs, or something. He’s a great Arabic scholar.”
“He made me feel rather uncomfortable,” she said, as she rose from her chair and laid her fingers on her partner’s arm.
“Yes, he’s boorish,” he replied, smoothing his sleek, dark hair with his disengaged hand.
“It isn’t that, quite,” she corrected him, her eyebrows puckering. “But he made me feel that I was of no importance whatsoever, and, being a woman, I resented it. He brushed me aside, like the sentry.”
“He was probably shy,” her companion suggested, for conciliation was his métier. “And of course he must have been tired after that long ride.”
“No,” she said, as they entered the ballroom, “I don’t think he was in the least bit shy; and, as for being tired, could anything make a man of that kind tired? He looks like a Hercules, or a Samson, or something unconquerable of that sort.”
Rupert Helsingham glanced quickly at her. There was a tone in her voice which suggested that their visitor’s personality had at once imposed itself on her mind. Women, he understood, were often attracted by masculine strength and brutality. He had known cases where an assumption of prehistoric manners had been eminently successful in the seduction of the weaker sex, painfully more successful, indeed, than had been his own well-bred dalliance with romance.
A school-friend had told him once that no girl could resist the man who took her by the throat, or pulled back her head by the hair, or, better still, who picked her up in his arms and bit her in the neck. He wondered whether Lady Muriel was heavy, and, with a sort of timorous audacity, he asked himself whether she would be likely to enjoy being bitten. He would have to be careful of Daniel Lane: he did not want any rivals.
She led him across to the three elderly ladies. He was her partner also for the present dance; but Muriel, throwing herself into a chair beside Lady Smith-Evered, told him that she would prefer not to take the floor. He glanced at the forbidding aspect of the three, and admired what he presumed to be her self-sacrifice in the interests of diplomacy.
“Rupert, my dear,” said the General’s wife, “do be an angel and bring us some ices.”
“What a willing little fellow he is,” murmured Mrs. Froscombe, as he hurried away on his errand, and there was a tone of derision in her voice.
“He’s always very helpful,” Lady Smith-Evered retorted, somewhat sharply, for he was her pet.
“I think he’s a dear,” said Muriel. “Nice manners are a tremendous asset. I hate churlishness.”
“I think you seldom meet with churlishness in Englishmen,” remarked Madam Pappadoulopolos. Her husband had told her to flatter the English whenever she could.
Muriel laughed. “I don’t know so much about that,” she replied. “On the veranda just now I met an Englishman who, to say the least, was not exactly courteous.”
“Oh, who was that?” asked her chaperone, with interest.
“A certain Daniel Lane,” she replied.
Lady Smith-Evered gave a gesture of impatience. “Oh, that man!” she exclaimed. “He’s in Cairo again, is he? He’s an absolute outsider.”
“What is he? – What’s he do?” Muriel asked, desiring further particulars.
“Ah! That’s the mystery,” said Lady Smith-Evered, with a look of profound knowing. “Incidentally, my dear, he is said to keep a harîm of Bedouin women somewhere out in the desert. I shouldn’t be surprised if every night he beat them all soundly and sent them where the rhyme says.”
She laughed nastily, and Muriel made a grimace.
CHAPTER II – THE FREEDOM OF THE DESERT
Lord Blair rose from his chair as the door opened, and removed from his thin, furtive nose a pair of large horn-rimmed spectacles which he always wore when quite alone in his study.
“Come in, come in, my dear Mr. Lane,” he exclaimed, taking a few blithe steps forward and shaking his visitor warmly by the hand. “I’m very well, thank you, very well indeed, and so are you, I see. That’s right, that’s good, – splendid! Dear me, what physique! What a picture of health! How did you get here so quickly? – do take a seat, do be seated. Yes, yes, to be sure! Have a cigar? Now, where did I put my cigars?”
He pushed a leather arm-chair around, so that it faced his own desk chair, and began at once to hunt for his cigar-box, lifting and replacing stacks of papers and books, glancing rapidly, like some sort of rodent, around the room, and then again searching under his papers.
“Thanks,” said Daniel Lane, “I’ll smoke my pipe, if it won’t make you sick.”
“Tut, tut!” Lord Blair laughed, extending his delicate hands in a comprehensive gesture. “I sometimes smoke a pipe myself: I enjoy it. A good, honest, English smoke! Dear me, where are my cigars?”
Lord Blair was a little man of somewhat remarkable appearance – remarkable, that is to say, when considered in relation to his historic name and excellent diplomatic record. In a company of elderly club waiters he would, on superficial observation, have passed unnoticed. He bore very little resemblance to his daughter; and, in fact, he was often disposed to believe his late wife’s declaration, made whenever she desired to taunt him, that Muriel was no child of his. Lady Blair had had many lovers; and it is notorious that twenty odd years ago in Mayfair there was an exceptionally violent epidemic of adultery.
He himself had thin auburn hair, now nearly grey, neatly parted in the middle; nervous, quick-moving brown eyes; closely cut ‘mutton-chop’ whiskers; an otherwise clean-shaven, sharp-featured face; and a wide mouth, furnished with two somewhat apparent rows of false teeth. His smile was kindly and gracious, and his expression, in spite of a certain vigilance, mild.
The evening dress which he was now wearing was noteworthy in four particulars: his collar was so big