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He spoke with an enthusiasm that was always mingled with a certain serene insouciance of the horses he had bred and of the races he had won in Alexandria and Cairo, of yachting, of big-game shooting up the Nile beyond Khartum in the country of the Shillouks, and of duck, pigeon, and jackal shooting in the Fayyūm and on the sacred Lake of Kurun.
And never before had he realized the brightness, even the brilliance, of his life, with its multitudinous changes and activities, its work the glorious sweating with the brown labourers in the sand flats at the edge of the Fayyūm its sport, its friendships, its strenuous and its quiet hours, so dearly valued because they were rather rare. It was a good life. It was almost a grand life.
Thinking with great rapidity in her nervous excitement and bitter jealousy, become tenfold more bitter now that the moment had arrived for her departure, she imagined what the woman must be: probably some exquisite, fair Circassian, young, very young, fifteen or sixteen years old, or perhaps a maiden from the Fayyūm, the region of lovely dark maidens with broad brows, oval faces, and long and melting black eyes.
You want a man's society sometimes. You mustn't always sit in my pocket. And besides, you're just off to the Fayyûm. I must get accustomed to an occasional lonely hour." He pressed his hand on hers. "I shall soon come back. And soon you shall come with me there." "I love this place," she said. "Are there any letters for me?"
The Fayyūm is a great and superb oasis situated upon a plateau of the desert of Libya, wonderfully fertile, rich, and bland, with a splendid climate, and springs of sweet waters which, carefully directed into a network of channels, spreading like wrinkles over the face of the land, carry life and a smiling of joy through the crowding palms, the olive and fruit trees, the corn and the brakes of the sugar-cane.
"I understand," she said, with an effort. She shut her lips tightly and was silent, thinking of Nigel's return, of her departure with him to the Fayyûm, while this man, on his luxurious floating home, went on towards the south. She had resolved to live for the day. But when does any jealous woman live for the day?
Very few whys stood just then between her and this man whom she scarcely knew. They went on talking in French. At first Baroudi continued to stand in the sun, and she looked up at him with composure from her place of shadow. "Armant is in this direction?" she said. "I do not say that, but it is not so far as the Fayyûm." "I know so little of Egypt. You must forgive my ignorance."
We can do that on our way to or from the Fayyūm when we have to pass through Cairo, as soon as I've arranged something for you." "You think of everything, Nigel." "Do you like to be thought for?" "No woman ever lived that did not." She softly pressed his hand. Then she lifted it and held it on her knee.
But when she spoke again her voice was lazy and calm? "I suppose you won't stay on the Nile for ever?" Again her fingers closed mechanically on one of the boxes. "But no! I shall have to go back to Assiut, and then to Cairo and Alexandria, the Delta, too." "And the Fayyūm? Haven't you property there? Isn't it one of the richest districts in Egypt?"
But, able to be short-sighted sometimes, although already in the dark moments of the night far-sighted and afraid, she had now often the sensation of an untrammelled liberty, realizing the spaces that lay between her and the Fayyûm, seeing no longer the eyes that asked gifts of her, hearing no longer the voice that pleaded for graces in her, that she could never make, could never display, though she might pretend to display them.
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