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In the profound stillness their footsteps and low laughter sounded up the wooden stairs. Then a door shut somewhere in the house, and the night absorbed them into herself. "Ce n'est pas le mort qui separe le plus les individus." De Coulevain. And what of Lenox, after Honor Desmond's sympathetic exertions on his behalf?
"We fly!" whispered a lingerer with nervous laughter, and hastily the young people hurried into their tcharchafs and veils, murmuring among themselves, with sidelong glances at that white figure whose cold hand and cheek they had just touched, hastily they sped, like light-footed nymphs in some witches' robes, down the long room, while Madame de Coulevain drew back a strand of the girl's dark hair and murmured, "But smile, my dear," to the still figure and escaped with the guests.
This was Madame de Coulevain, teacher of French and literature to the jeunes filles of Cairo, former governess of Aimée, returned now to her old room in the palace for the wedding preparations. There was history behind madame's sculptured face.
Only this numb coldness, this dumb, helpless certainty of a destiny about to be accomplished.... Only this hopeless, useless brooding upon that strange brief past. There was a stir at the door and on her shuffling, slippered feet old Miriam entered, handing some packages to Madame de Coulevain.
"But it is too late," she said tremulously. "Is it too late for me to help you?" At that her eyes rose to his again in a swift flash of hunted fear. "Oh, take me away from him!" she breathed suddenly, unpremeditately. "Somehow somewhere " Another figure came towards them. Madame De Coulevain in all her severe elegance of black.
It was the marriage chant of Miriam's native village, an old love song that had come down the wind of centuries. Mrs. Hendricks, thrusting in the final pins, paid not the slightest attention and Madame de Coulevain displayed interest only in the packages. If she saw the stiffening of the girl's face and the rigid aversion of her eyes from the old nurse's adulation she gave no sign.
I turn aside from their plays in the theatre and in the library as I turn aside from the fictions of Pierre de Coulevain and Arnold Bennett. I love to fashion wreathes of my own and if two young men will now step forward to the lecturer's bench I will take delight in crowning them with my own hands.
Sympathetic as Madame de Coulevain might be in her inmost heart and Aimée divined in her an understanding pity for the necessities of existence never would that sympathy betray her to rashness.
The sound of that soft, hidden water added to her feeling of isolation and remoteness from everything that had been her life before she thought fleetingly, almost indifferently of her friends, Azima, who to-day had crowned her for happiness, and fond, foolish old Miriam and Madame de Coulevain and Tewfick Pasha, weakly cruel, but amiable; she thought of them all, as unreal figures from whom she had long taken leave.
Intuitively she shrank from any question to the pasha, realizing the folly and futility of exposing her suspicion. If he needed to lie, lie he would and in her understanding of that, she read her own acceptance of the possibility of his needing to lie. Madame de Coulevain? Madame had never known her mother. Only old Miriam had known her mother and Miriam was the pasha's slave.
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