Gilbert Parker

“ A quick laugh passed David’s lips. “Men are not made so easily. I think I know the trowel and the mortar that built that wall! Thee will marry him, friend?”
Her eyes burned as she looked at him. She had been eternally dispossessed of what every woman has the right to have—one memory possessing the elements of beauty. Even if it remain but for the moment, yet that moment is hers by right of her sex, which is denied the wider rights of those they love and serve. She had tasted the cup of bitterness and drunk of the waters of sacrifice. Married life had no lure for her. ”

“ What does it matter to thee what chances to Nahoum? Thou hast his place with me. My secrets are thine. They shall all be thine—for years I have sought an honest man. Thou art safe whether to go or to stay.”
“It may be so. I heed it not. My life is as that of a gull—if the wind carry it out to sea, it is lost. As my uncle went I shall go one day. Thee will never do me ill; but do I not know that I shall have foes at every corner, behind every mooshrabieh screen, on every mastaba, in the pasha’s court-yard, by every mosque? Do I not know in what peril I serve Egypt?” ”

“ As the Duchess disappeared with David, a swift change came over Lacey. He spun round on one toe, and, like a boy of ten, careered around the deck to the tune of a negro song.
“Say, things are all right in there with them two, and it’s my turn now,” he said. “Cute as she can be, and knows the game! Twice a widow, and knows the game! Waiting, she is down in Cairo, where the orange blossom blows. I’m in it; we’re all in it—every one of us. Cousin Hylda’s free now, and I’ve got no past worth speaking of; and, anyhow, she’ll understand, down there in Cairo. ”

“ But now—now there was the old unschooled simplicity, the unique and lonely personality, the homely soul and body bending to one root-idea, losing themselves in a wave of duty. Again he was to her, once more, the dreamer, the worker, the conqueror—the conqueror of her own imagination. She had in herself the soul of altruism, the heart of the crusader. Touched by the fire of a great idea, she was of those who could have gone out into the world without wallet or scrip, to work passionately for some great end.
And she had married the Earl of Eglington! ”

“ Presently, as if with an effort, he rose to his feet, took the red fez from his head, and fanned himself with it for a moment. “Don’t you forget it, pasha; the Saadat will win. He can’t be beaten, not in a thousand years. Here he comes.”
Nahoum got to his feet, as David came quickly through the small gateway of the court-yard, his head erect, his lips smiling, his eyes sweeping the place. He came forward briskly to them. It was plain he had not heard the evil news.
“Peace be to thee, Saadat, and may thy life be fenced about with safety!” said Nahoum. ”

“ I come to ask for work to do with thee. Do I not know Prince Kaid? He had come to distrust us all. As stale water were we in his taste. He had no pleasure in us, and in our deeds he found only stones of stumbling. He knew not whom to trust. One by one we all had yielded to ceaseless intrigue and common distrust of each other, until no honest man was left; till all were intent to save their lives by holding power; for in this land to lose power is to lose life. No man who has been in high place, has had the secrets of the Palace and the ear of the Prince, lives after he has lost favour. ”

“ Thou dost measure thyself against Nahoum? In patience and with care have I trained myself for the battle. The bulls of Bashan may roar, yet my feet are shod with safety. Thou wouldst go to Kaid and tell him thy affrighted tale. I tell thee, thou wilt not go. Thou hast reason yet, though thy blood is hot. Thou art to Claridge Pasha like a brother—as to his uncle before him, who furnished my father’s palace with carpets. The carpets still soften the fall of my feet in my father’s palace, as they did soften the fall of my brother’s feet, the feet of Foorgat Bey. ”

“ David remembered the far-off day of his own wild rebellion in Hamley. From that day forward he had better realised that in the hearts of so many of the human race there was a passion to forget themselves; to blot out, if for a moment only, the troubles of life and time; or, by creating a false air of exaltation, to rise above them. Once in the desert, when men were dying round him of fever and dysentery, he had been obliged, exhausted and ill, scarce able to drag himself from his bed, to resort to an opiate to allay his own sufferings, that he might minister to others. ”

“ Hast thou done well, oh, Effendina, to turn from thine own people? Did not thine own father, and did not Mehemet Ali, live to a good age? Who were their physicians? My father and I, and my father’s father, and his father’s father.”
“Thou canst cure me altogether?” asked Kaid hesitatingly.
“Wilt thou not have faith in one of thine own race? Will the infidel love thee as do we, who are thy children and thy brothers, who are to thee as a nail driven in the wall, not to be moved? Thou shalt live—Inshallah, thou shalt have healing and length of days!” ”

“ The misery and the tyranny and the unrequited love were all behind her, the disillusion and the loss and the undeserved insult to her womanhood—all, all were sunk away into the unredeemable past. Here, in Egypt, where she had first felt the stir of life’s passion and pain and penalty, here, now, she lost herself in a beautiful, buoyant dream. She was riding out to meet the one man of all men, hero, crusader, rescuer—ah, that dreadful night in the Palace, and Foorgat’s face! But he was coming, who had made her live, to whom she had called, to whom her soul had spoken in its grief and misery. ”

“ In the black years behind me among the Unclean, there was naught to fight—could one fight the dead, and the agony of death, and the poison of the agony! Life, it is done for me—am I not accursed? But to die fighting—ay, fighting for Egypt, since it must be, and fighting for thee, since it must be; to strike, and strike, and strike, and earn death! Must the dog, because he is a dog, die in the slime? Shall he not be driven from the village to die in the clean sand? Saadat, who will see in me Achmet Pasha, who did with Egypt what he willed, and was swept away by the besom in thy hand? ”

“ David looked into his eyes. “Not in a month shall thy work be completed, Effendina. Thou shalt live. God and thy strong will shall make it so.”
A light stole over the superstitious face. “No device or hatred, or plot, has prevailed against thee,” Kaid said eagerly. “Thou hast defeated all—even when I turned against thee in the black blood of despair. Thou hast conquered me even as thou didst Harrik.”
“Thou dost live,” returned David drily. “Thou dost live for Egypt’s sake, even as Harrik died for Egypt’s sake, and as others shall die.” ”

“ A poor sparrow on a tree-top, if you tell him he must not have it, he will hunt it down the world till it is his, as though it was a bird of paradise. And when he’s seen it fall at last, he’ll remember but the fun of the chase; and the bird may get to its tree-top again—if it can—if it can—if it can, my lord! That is what his father was, the last Earl, and that is what he is who left my door but now. He came to snatch old Soolsby’s palace, his nest on the hill, to use it for a telescope, or such whimsies. He has scientific tricks like his father before him. ”

“ When his footsteps were among us there was peace; War entered not the village, nor the call of war. Now our homes are as those that have no roofs. As a nest decayed, as a cave forsaken, As a ship that lieth broken on the beach, Is the house where we were born. Out in the desert did we bury our gold, We buried it where no man robbed us, for his arm was strong. Now are the jars empty, gold did not avail To save our young men, to keep them from the chains. God hath swallowed his voice, or the sea hath drowned it, Or the Nile hath covered him with its flood ”

“ With a perversity which only such men know, such heart as he had turned to the unknown Quaker girl who had rebuked him, scathed him, laid bare his soul before himself, as no one ever had done. To Eglington it was a relief that there was one human being—he thought there was only one—who read him through and through; and that knowledge was in itself as powerful an influence as was the secret between David and Hylda. ”

“ I would labour for the land of Egypt, for by work shall we fulfil ourselves, redeem ourselves. Saadat, I would labour, but my master has taken away from me the anvil, the fire, and the hammer, and I sit without the door like an armless beggar. What work to do in Egypt save to help the land, and how shall one help, save in the Prince’s service? There can be no reform from outside. If I laboured for better things outside Kaid’s Palace, how long dost thou think I should escape the Nile, or the diamond-dust in my coffee? ”

“ Life giving and taking, and absorbing and destroying, and destroying and absorbing, till the circle of human existence wheel to the full, and the task of Time be accomplished.
On the gorse-grown common above Hamley, David and Faith, and David’s mother Mercy, had felt the same soul of things stirring—in the green things of green England, in the arid wastes of the Libyan desert, on the bosom of the Nile, where Mahommed Hassan now lay in a nugger singing a song of passion, Nature, with burning voice, murmuring down the unquiet world its message of the Final Peace through the innumerable years. ”

“ Listen, O Kaid, son of the stars and the light of day. God hath exalted thee. Thou art the Egyptian of all the Egyptians. In thy hand is power. But thou art mortal even as I. Behold, O Kaid, in the hour that I was born thou wast born, I in the dust without thy Palace wall, thou amid the splendid things. But thy star is my star. Behold, as God ordains, the Tree of Life was shaken on the night when all men pray and cry aloud to God—even the Night of the Falling Leaves. ”

“ Will you not understand, Nahoum? “Yonder, I see the tribes that harry me. The great guns firing make the day a burden, the nights are ever fretted by the dangers of surprise, and there is scarce time to bury the dead whom sickness and the sword destroy. From the midst of it all my eyes turn to you in Cairo, whose forgiveness I ask for the one injury I did you; while I pray that you will seek pardon for all that you have done to me and to those who will pass with me, if our circle is broken. Friend, Achmet the Ropemaker is here fighting for Egypt. Art thou less, then, than Achmet? ”

“ Destiny chose them, as Destiny chose Claridge Pasha as the man who should supplant me, who should attempt to do these mad things for Egypt against the judgment of the world—against the judgment of your husband. Shall I have better judgment than the chancellories of Europe and England—and Lord Eglington?”
“Excellency, you know what moves other nations; but it is for Egypt to act for herself. You ask me why I did not go to the Effendina. I come to you because I know that you could circumvent the Effendina, even if he sent ten thousand men. It is the way in Egypt.” ”