_ THIRD PART. MY HONEYMOON
FORTY-FIFTH CHAPTER
From that hour forward my husband was a changed man. His manner to me, so brusque before, became courteous, kind, almost affectionate. Every morning he would knock at the door of my state-room to ask if I had slept well, or if the movement of the steamer had disturbed me.
His manner to Alma was charming. He was up before breakfast every day, promenading the deck with her in the fresh salt air. I would slide back my window and hear their laughter as they passed, above the throb of the engines and the wash of the sea. Sometimes they would look in upon me and joke, and Alma would say:
"And how's Margaret Mary this morning?"
Our seats in the saloon had been changed. Now we sat with Alma at the Captain's table, and though I sorely missed the doctor's racy talk about Martin Conrad I was charmed by Alma's bright wit and the fund of her personal anecdotes. She seemed to know nearly everybody. My husband knew everybody also, and their conversation never flagged.
Something of the wonderful and worshipful feeling I had had for Alma at the Sacred Heart came back to me, and as for my husband it seemed to me that I was seeing him for the first time.
He persuaded the Captain to give a dance on our last night at sea, so the awnings were spread, the electric lights were turned on, and the deck of the ship became a scene of enchantment.
My husband and Alma led off. He danced beautifully and she was dressed to perfection. Not being a dancer myself I stood with the Captain in the darkness outside, looking in on them in the bright and dazzling circle, while the moon-rays were sweeping the waters like a silver fan and the little waves were beating the ship's side with friendly pats.
I was almost happy. In my simplicity I was feeling grateful to Alma for having wrought this extraordinary change, so that when, on our arrival at Port Said, my husband said,
"Your friend Madame Lier has made no arrangements for her rooms at Cairo--hadn't I better telegraph to our hotel, dear?" I answered, "Yes," and wondered why he had asked me.
Our hotel was an oriental building, situated on an island at the further side of the Nile. Formerly the palace of a dead Khedive, who had built it in honour of the visit of an Empress, it had a vast reception hall with a great staircase.
There, with separated rooms, as in London, we remained for three months. I was enthralled. Too young and inexperienced to be conscious of the darker side of the picture before me, I found everything beautiful. I was seeing fashionable life for the first time, and it was entrancing.
Lovely and richly-dressed ladies in silk, velvet, lace, and no limit of jewellery--the dark French women, the blonde German women, the stately English women, and the American women with their flexuous grace. And then the British soldiers in their various uniforms, the semi-Turks in their red tarbooshes, and the diplomats of all nationalities, Italian, Austrian, French, German--what a cosmopolitan world it was, what a meeting-place of all nations!
Every hour had its interest, but I liked best the hour of tea on the terrace, for that was the glorious hour of woman, when every condition invested her dress with added beauty and her smile with greater charm.
Such a blaze of colour in the sunshine! Such a sea of muslin, flowers, and feathers! Such lovely female figures in diaphanous clouds of toilettes, delicate as gossamer and varied as the colours in the rainbow! They were like a living bouquet, as they sat under the shade of the verandah, with the green lawns and the palm trees in front, the red-coated orchestra behind, and the noiseless forms of swarthy Bednouins and Nubians moving to and fro.
Although I had been brought up in such a different world altogether I could not help being carried away by all this beauty. My senses burgeoned out and my heart seemed to expand.
As for Alma and my husband, they seemed to belong to the scene of themselves. She would sit at one of the tea-tables, swishing away the buzzing flies with a little whip of cord and cowries, and making comments on the crowd in soft undertones which he alone seemed to catch. Her vivid and searching eyes, with their constant suggestion of laughter, seemed to be picking out absurdities on every side and finding nearly everybody funny.
She found me funny also. My innocence and my convent-bred ideas were a constant subject of jest with her.
"What does our dear little Margaret Mary think of that?" she would say with a significant smile, at sights that seemed to me quite harmless.
After a while I began to have a feeling of indefinable uneasiness about Alma. She was daily redoubling her cordiality, always calling me her "dearest sweetest girl," and "the oldest friend she had in the world." But little by little I became conscious of a certain commerce between her and my husband in which I had no part. Sometimes I saw her eyes seeking his, and occasionally I heard them exchange a few words about me in French, which (because I did not speak it, being uncertain of my accent) they thought I did not understand.
Perhaps this helped to sharpen my wits, for I began to see that I had gone the wrong way to work with my husband. Instead of trying to make myself fall in love with my husband, I should have tried to make my husband fall in love with me.
When I asked myself how this was to be done I found one obvious answer--I must become the sort of woman my husband admired and liked; in short I must imitate Alma.
I resolved to do this, and after all that has happened since I feel a little ashamed to tell of the efforts I made to play a part for which I was so ill-fitted by nature and education.
Some of them were silly enough perhaps, but some were almost pathetic, and I am not afraid that any good woman will laugh at the futile shifts I was put to, in my girlish ignorance, to make my husband love me.
"I must do it," I thought. "I must, I must!" _