Afterwards Part 48

Not that his stay would be long--a night at most--for he purposed journeying on to Cairo without loss of time, and as the boat drew nearer and nearer to the quay, whereon a crowd of gesticulating natives raised the unholy din which every traveller a.s.sociates with this particular landing, Anstice turned about and swung down the companion to take a last look round his dismantled cabin.

It was now nearly eight weeks since he had quitted Littlefield. Having disposed of his practice in the nick of time to a college friend who wished to settle in the country, and having also received an unexpected windfall in the shape of a small legacy from a distant relation, he had decided, after a short stay in London, to take a holiday before starting to work once more.

His choice of a destination had not been unaffected by the fact of Iris Cheniston's residence in the land of Egypt. Although he had no expectation of meeting her--for she and her husband were still somewhere in the desert, a couple of days' journey from Cairo--there was an odd fascination in the bare idea of inhabiting, even for a few weeks, the land which held the girl he still loved. For although he had long since determined that he must avoid Bruce Cheniston's wife if he wished to keep his secret inviolate, and incidentally attempt, by starving his pa.s.sion of its natural food, to keep his love unsullied by any hint of envy, any emotion of desire--well, all men are sophists at heart, and in spite of all his self-a.s.surances that he could visit Egypt without seeking to gain even a glimpse of Iris, ever in the background of his thoughts lay a delicious, barely formulated hope that possibly Fate might vouchsafe to him one fleeting vision on which his hungry heart might feed in the empty days which must needs ensue.

There had been changes in Littlefield since that November evening on which the truth concerning the anonymous letters had come to light.

After Tochatti's death it had naturally proved impossible altogether to hush up the tragedy and its immediate results, and although Anstice had done his best to mitigate the position for Major Carstairs and his wife, the inquest had proved a trying affair for all of them.

Since the woman was dead there was no need to keep the authorship of those letters a secret, and before he left Littlefield Anstice had the satisfaction of knowing that Mrs. Carstairs' name had been effectually cleared from the slur placed upon it by a censorious and ignorant world.

When once this was accomplished Major Carstairs insisted on carrying off his wife and Cherry for a long holiday in the south of France, and although Cherry wept bitterly at the thought of parting from her beloved Anstice, he was able to console her by a recital of the wonderful things she would behold by the sh.o.r.es of the azure Mediterranean.

He was surprised to find, when the real parting came, how hard it was to say good-bye to his friends. Although he considered himself unsociable, independent of the claims of friendship, forced, so to speak, into misanthropy by the circ.u.mstances of his life, he had grown to have a real esteem for Chloe Carstairs, and the spectacle of her new-born vitality, her radiant happiness, was one which gave him a very deep and genuine pleasure. As for Cherry, that quaint child had long since twined herself round his heart-strings, and although Major Carstairs was, comparatively speaking, a new acquaintance, Anstice respected the soldier as an honest man and a gentleman.

A week after their departure another blow befell Anstice in the sudden death of his friend Fraser Carey, and when at last he was summoned in haste to Carey's aid he found that the latter had suffered for years from a painful internal disease.

"But why not have submitted to an operation years ago?" Anstice asked him gently as he sat, impotent to help, by his friend's side in the light of the dying day. "It might have been successful"--he dare not say more--"and you would have been spared years of agonizing suffering."

The other man smiled, and his eyes for a moment lost their look of pain.

"Quite so," he said gently, "but at the same time I might--probably should--have died. I took the best advice, nearly ruined myself with visiting specialists"--he smiled very faintly--"and none could give me any a.s.surance that I should live through it. And I could not afford--then--to die."

"Not afford?" Anstice stared at him in amazement.

"No. You see"--his voice was a mere thread--"you see I had a wife, Anstice--oh, no one knows, and my secret is safe with you--and although I could not live with her ... she was not what the world calls a good woman, and her ideal of life was not one which I, as a clergyman, could a.s.sist her to realize--well, I could not let her sink altogether for want of money to keep some sort of home together."

"You sent her money?"

"Yes. I sent what I could from my stipend--it wasn't much--G.o.d's ministers are supposed to be content with the promises of treasure in heaven," said Carey, with a hint of humour in his weak tone. "I made a little, too, by writing for the reviews. But it was precarious, Anstice, precarious; and I dared not risk dying, and leaving her in want."

"And now?" Anstice had noted the tense in which he spoke of his wife, and he guessed the answer before the other spoke.

"She is dead--she died three weeks ago," said Carey quietly. "And now I can give up the struggle myself----"

"I wish to G.o.d you had told me earlier," said Anstice vehemently. "At least I might have done something for you----"

"Oh, I had alleviations," said Carey slowly. "When the pain grew unendurable I had remedies which gave me some relief. But I knew that if I told you you would seek to persuade me to a course I really could not have adopted. You mustn't mind me saying it, Anstice. Perhaps I have been wrong all through." His voice was wistful. "But I did what I thought was right--and luckily for us poor men G.o.d judges us by our intentions, so to speak, and not by the results."

The words returned to Anstice's mind three days later as he stood by the graveside of his friend, and in his heart he wondered whether it were indeed true that what men called failure might, in the eyes of G.o.d, spell a great and glorious success.

The next person to leave Littlefield was Sir Richard Wayne. For since his daughter's wedding he had been finding life without her almost unbearable, and at length he avowed that the English climate in winter was altogether more than any sensible man could be expected to endure--a somewhat surprising statement from a former M.F.H.--and declared his intention of paying a visit to Iris and her husband in Egypt forthwith.

It was of Sir Richard Wayne that Anstice was thinking half an hour later when the _Moldavia_ had come to her berth at the quay and he was about to leave the ship on which the short and prosperous voyage had been made.

However much the theory of the astral body of man may be denied or ridiculed, there is no doubt that an unusually vivid thought-presentment of a friend frequently precedes the appearance of that friend in the flesh, and it is certain that the mental image of Sir Richard Wayne had been, for some reason, so strongly before Anstice's mind that in a tall, grey-clad figure pushing his way vigorously through the crowd of natives he was inclined to see a striking resemblance to the object of his thoughts.

He told himself, rather impatiently, that the notion was absurd. He had been dwelling for so long on the vision of Sir Richard's daughter that he had lost, for the moment, his sense of reality, and he turned aside to reclaim his baggage from the vociferous Arabs who wished, so it appeared, to appropriate both it and him, without casting another glance in the direction of Sir Richard's double.

Yet the hallucination persisted. He could have sworn he heard Sir Richard's voice raised in protest as the crowding natives impeded his progress towards the gangway of the boat; and at last Anstice turned fully round, with half-ashamed curiosity, to see what manner of man this was who wore the semblance and spoke in the tongue of Sir Richard Wayne.

As his black eyes roved over the intervening faces they were caught and held by another pair of eyes--grey eyes these, in whose clear and frank depths was a strong resemblance to those other wide grey eyes he loved, and in the next moment Anstice realized that a miracle had happened, and that the first person to give him greeting in this land of mystery was none other than Sir Richard Wayne himself.

About the gladness of the other's greeting there could be no two opinions. Utterly disregarding the touts and porters who swarmed round him Sir Richard came forward with outstretched hand, and his eyes fairly shone with joy and with something that looked like relief.

"Anstice! By all that's wonderful!" He wrung the younger man's hand heartily as he spoke. "How came you here--and are you landing for good, or just taking a look round this G.o.d-forsaken old iniquity of a town?"

"I'm leaving the ship for good. Want to have a look at Cairo ... interesting place, I've always heard." For a second Anstice faltered, feeling as though his friend must see through his pretence, and guess that it was because this land enshrined the one woman in the world that he was here. But Sir Richard gave no sign of disbelief, and Anstice was emboldened to proceed. "But you--what are you doing here? I thought you were somewhere in the desert with--your daughter."

"So I was, so I was." Sir Richard hesitated, then spoke rapidly.

"Anstice, are you alone--and disengaged? I mean--could your stay in Cairo be postponed for a few days? I want--I came down here to look for a doctor--never thinking I'd have the luck to find you----"

"A doctor?" Beneath the spur of his quick mind Anstice grew pale. "Is someone ill? Not--not your daughter?"

"No, not Iris." Unconsciously Anstice breathed a sigh of relief and the older man glanced at him curiously. "It is Bruce--my son-in-law--who's ill; and I've come down here to find a doctor. Couldn't get one in Cairo--it seems the pilgrims have just returned from Mecca bringing their pet cholera along with them, and the city's got a scare--so I came down here to meet the boat, meaning to bribe the ship's surgeon to come back into the desert with me. If he wouldn't respond to _bakshish_ I should have tried kidnapping," finished Sir Richard grimly, and Anstice smiled.

"No need to do that, sir. I'm here, and I'm ready and willing to do all you require. But first, hadn't I better put in a claim to my belongings?

It seems to me these rascals would think precious little of making off with all the lot!"

"Yes--better let me see to it for you," said Sir Richard quickly. "We've not too much time for the train to Cairo as it is. If you will go and bespeak an _arabeah_ I'll get your baggage."

And as Anstice moved to obey, a very tumult in his heart, Sir Richard turned back to the wildly-shouting crowd and succeeded in reclaiming Anstice's portmanteau and Gladstone bag from the clutches of the blue-robed fiends who fought one another for its possession.

When they were clear of the quay, driving behind the two long-tailed little horses along the glaring streets, beneath the thinly-leaved and dusty trees, Anstice turned to Sir Richard interrogatively.

"Now, sir, can you tell me what's wrong? Mr. Cheniston is ill, you say.

Do you know the nature of his illness?"

"Enteric, I'm afraid," Sir Richard informed him gravely. "He went on a shooting expedition a week or two ago with the rich Egyptian for whom he has been carrying through a big irrigation job, and one day, when, through a miscalculation, the wine and provisions did not turn up, the party lunched at a mud-village on eggs and coffee. Being particularly thirsty Bruce indulged in a small gla.s.s of water with slices of citron, and although the host's servants swore by the Beard of the Prophet and so on through all their most sacred oaths that they had boiled the water first, the odds are that they had not, and that it came straight from the river or some indescribably polluted well. It seems that the pilgrims had pa.s.sed that way, and owing to their pleasing habit of dropping a little of their precious 'holy' water into the wells they meet, some of those wells are absolute hotbeds of infection, so to speak."

"Whew!" Anstice whistled to express his consternation. "And then, of course, Mr. Cheniston came home and sickened for this illness."

"Yes. At first he made light of it, said the expedition had been fatiguing, he had a touch of the sun, and so on. But at last the disease manifested itself unmistakably, and three days ago I set out for Cairo to try to get some medical help."

"There is no doctor out there?"

"No. You see it is only a tiny village--hardly that--a settlement in the midst of a little colony of Bedouins. Iris was first persuaded to go there by a woman she met in Cairo, a Padre's wife who had gone out--at least the Padre had--to try the effect of the climate on weak lungs.

They have one kiddie, a child of seven or eight, and they were so pleased with the place that they stayed on, and were the only white people in the village, with the exception of a young Australian who had lost his money and went out there to try to grow vegetables, and a rather eccentric French artist who set up his studio in a sort of disused fort built on a high rocky plateau about a mile above the little settlement. He has gone back to France now, taking with him some really marvellous studies of the desert, so they say."

"How far is the place from Cairo?"

"About a day and a half's journey on horseback. Of course, if it had been possible to bring Bruce in to Cairo that would have been the best thing. But we daren't take the risk. Mrs. Wood, the Padre's wife, is a first-cla.s.s nurse, and she and Iris are doing their very best for the poor fellow. But still"--Sir Richard shook his head--"there's no doubt the illness has got a fast grip of him, and I'm afraid of the result, Anstice, I confess I am afraid."

He broke off for a moment, then resumed in a brisker tone:

"Well, here is the station, and now we may expect another uproar over your precious baggage. The best thing to do is to single out one fellow and promise him good _bakshish_ if he gets rid of the others; and here is Mahomed, who is a first-cla.s.s fellow for the job!"