Donovan Pasha, and Some People of Egypt Part 19

It took d.i.c.ky's breath away. His own banking account seldom saw a thousand--deposit. d.i.c.ky told Kingsley he hadn't got it. Kingsley asked him to get it--he had credit, could borrow it from the bank, from the Khedive himself! The proposal was audacious--Kingsley could offer no security worth having. His enthusiasm and courage were so infectious, however, though his ventures had been so fruitless, that d.i.c.ky laughed in his face. Kingsley's manner then suddenly changed, and he a.s.sured d.i.c.ky that he would receive five thousand pounds for the thousand within a year. Now, d.i.c.ky knew that Kingsley never made a promise to any one that he did not fulfil. He gave Kingsley the thousand pounds. He did more. He went to the Khedive with Kingsley's whole case. He spoke as he had seldom spoken, and he secured a bond from Ismail, which might not be broken. He also secured three thousand pounds of the Khedive's borrowings from Europe, on Kingsley's promise that it should be returned five-fold.

That was how Kingsley got started in the world again, how he went mining in the desert afar, where pashas and mamours could not worry him. The secret of his success was purely Oriental. He became a slave-owner. He built up a city of the desert round him. He was its ruler. Slavery gave him steady untaxed labour. A rifle-magazine gave him security against marauding tribes, his caravans were never over powered; his blacks were his own. He had a way with them; they thought him the greatest man in the world. Now, at last, he was rich enough. His mines were worked out, too, and the market was not so good; he had supplied it too well.

d.i.c.ky's thousand had brought him five thousand, and Ismail's three thousand had become fifteen thousand, and another twenty thousand besides. For once the Khedive had found a kind of taxation, of which he got the whole proceeds, not divided among many as heretofore. He got it all. He made Kingsley a Bey, and gave him immunity from all other imposts or taxation. Nothing but an Egyptian army could have removed him from his desert-city.

Now, he was coming back--to-night at ten o'clock he would appear at the Khedivial Club, the first time in seven years. But this was not all. He was coming back to be married as soon as might be.

This was the thing which convulsed d.i.c.ky.

Upon the Nile at a.s.siout lived a young English lady whose life was devoted to agitation against slavery in Egypt. Perhaps the Civil War in America, not so many years before, had fired her spirit; perhaps it was pious enthusiasm; perhaps it was some altruistic sentiment in her which must find expression; perhaps, as people said, she had had a love affair in England which had turned out badly. At any rate she had come over to Egypt with an elderly companion, and, after a short stay at the Consulate, had begun the career of the evangel. She had now and then created international difficulty, and Ismail, tolerant enough, had been tempted to compel her to leave the country, but, with a zeal which took on an aspect of self-opinionated audacity, she had kept on. Perhaps her beauty helped her on her course--perhaps the fact that her superb egotism kept her from being timorous, made her career possible. In any case, there she was at a.s.siout, and there she had been for years, and no accident had come to her; and, during the three months she was at Cairo every year, pleading against slavery and the corvee, she increased steadily the respect in which she was held; but she was considered mad as Gordon. So delighted had Ismail been by a quiet, personal attack she made upon him, that without malice, and with an obtuse and impulsive kindness, he sent her the next morning a young Circa.s.sian slave, as a mark of his esteem, begging her through the swelling rhetoric of his messenger to keep the girl, and more than hinting at her value.

It stupefied her, and the laughter of Cairo added to her momentary embarra.s.sment; but she kept the girl, and prepared to send her back to her people.

The girl said she had no people, and would not go; she would stay with "My Lady"--she would stay for ever with "My Lady." It was confusing, but the girl stayed, worshipping the ground "My Lady" walked on. In vain My Lady educated her. Out of hearing, she proudly told whoever would listen that she was "My Lady's slave." It was an Egyptian paradox; it was in line with everything else in the country, part of the moral opera boufe.

In due course, the lady came to hear of the English slave-owner, who ruled the desert-city and was making a great fortune out of the labours of his slaves. The desert Arabs who came down the long caravan road, white with bleached bones, to a.s.siout, told her he had a thousand slaves. Against this Englishman her anger, was great. She unceasingly condemned him, and whenever she met d.i.c.ky Donovan she delivered her attack with delicate violence. Did d.i.c.ky know him? Why did not he, in favour with Ismail, and with great influence, stop this dreadful and humiliating business? It was a disgrace to the English name. How could we preach freedom and a higher civilisation to the Egyptians while an Englishman enriched himself and ruled a province by slavery? d.i.c.ky's invariable reply was that we couldn't, and that things weren't moving very much towards a higher civilisation in Egypt. But he asked her if she ever heard of a slave running away from Kingsley Bey, or had she ever heard of a case of cruelty on his part? Her reply was that he had given slaves the kourbash, and had even shot them. d.i.c.ky thereupon suggested that Kingsley Bey was a government, and that the kourbash was not yet abolished in the English navy, for instance; also that men had to be shot sometimes.

At last she had made a direct appeal to Kingsley Bey. She sent an emba.s.sy to him--d.i.c.ky prevented her from going herself; he said he would have her deported straightway, if she attempted it. She was not in such deadly earnest that she did not know he would keep his word, and that the Consulate could not help her would have no time to do so. So, she confined herself to an elaborate letter, written in admirable English and inspired by most n.o.ble sentiments. The beauty that was in her face was in her letter in even a greater degree. It was very adroit, too, very ably argued, and the moral appeal was delicate and touching, put with an eloquence at once direct and arresting. The invocation with which the letter ended was, as Kingsley Bey afterwards put it, "a pitch of poetry and humanity never reached except by a Wagner opera."

Kingsley Bey's response to the appeal was a letter to the lady, brought by a sarraf, a mamour and six slaves, beautifully mounted and armed, saying that he had been deeply moved by her appeal, and as a proof of the effect of her letter, she might free the six slaves of his emba.s.sy.

This she straightway did joyfully, and when they said they wished to go to Cairo, she saw them and their horses off on the boat with gladness, and she shook them each by the hand and prayed Heaven in their language to give them long plumes of life and happiness. Arrived at Cairo these freemen of a.s.siout did as they had been ordered by Kingsley--found Donovan Pasha, delivered a certain letter to him, and then proceeded, also as they had been ordered, to a certain place in the city, even to Ismail's stables, to await their master's coming.

This letter was now in d.i.c.ky's hand, and his mirth was caused by the statement that Kingsley Bey had declared that he was coming to marry My Lady--she really was "My Lady," the Lady May Harley; that he was coming by a different route from "his n.i.g.g.e.rs," and would be there the same day. d.i.c.ky would find him at ten o'clock at the Khedivial Club.

My Lady hated slavery--and unconsciously she kept a slave; she regarded Kingsley Bey as an enemy to civilisation and to Egypt, she detested him as strongly as an idealistic nature could and should--and he had set out to marry her, the woman who had bitterly arraigned him at the bar of her judgment. All this play was in d.i.c.ky's hands for himself to enjoy, in a perfect dress rehearsal ere ever one of the Cairene public or the English world could pay for admission and take their seats. d.i.c.ky had in more senses than one got his money's worth out of Kingsley Bey. He wished he might let the Khedive into the secret at once, for he had an opinion of Ismail's sense of humour; had he not said that very day in the presence of the French Consul, "Shut the window, quick! If the consul sneezes, France will demand compensation!" But d.i.c.ky was satisfied that things should be as they were. He looked at the clock--it was five minutes to ten. He rose from the table, and went to the smoking-room. In vain it was sought to draw him into the friendly circles of gossiping idlers and officials. He took a chair at the very end of the room and opposite the door, and waited, watching.

Precisely at ten the door opened and a tall, thin, loose-knit figure entered. He glanced quickly round, saw d.i.c.ky, and swung down the room, nodding to men who sprang to their feet to greet him. Some of the Egyptians looked darkly at him, but he smiled all round, caught at one or two hands thrust out to him, said: "Business--business first!" in a deep ba.s.s voice, and, hastening on, seized both of d.i.c.ky's hands in his, then his shoulders, and almost roared: "Well, what do you think of it?

Isn't it all right? Am I, or am I not, d.i.c.ky Pasha?"

"You very much are," answered d.i.c.ky, thrust a cigar at him, and set him down in the deepest chair he could find. He sprawled wide, and lighted his cigar, then lay back and looked down his long nose at his friend.

"I mean it, too," he said after a minute, and reached for a gla.s.s of water the waiter brought. "No, thanks, no whiskey--never touch it--good example to the slaves!" He laughed long and low, and looked at d.i.c.ky out of the corner of his eye. "Good-looking lot I sent you, eh?"

"Oosters, every one of 'em. b.u.t.ter wouldn't melt in their mouths. I learnt their grin, it suits my style of beauty." d.i.c.ky fitted the action to the word. "You'll start with me in the morning to a.s.siout?"

"I can start, but life and time are short."

"You think I can't and won't marry her?"

"This isn't the day of Lochinvar."

"This is the day of Kingsley Bey, d.i.c.ky Pasha."

d.i.c.ky frowned. He had a rare and fine sense where women were concerned, were they absent or present. "How very artless--and in so short a time, too!" he said tartly.

Kingsley laughed quietly. "Art is long, but tempers are short!" he retorted.

d.i.c.ky liked a Roland for his Oliver. "It's good to see you back again,"

he said, changing the subject.

"How long do you mean to stay?"

"Here?" d.i.c.ky nodded. "Till I'm married."

d.i.c.ky became very quiet, a little formal, and his voice took on a curious smoothness, through which sharp suggestion pierced.

"So long?--Enter our Kingsley Bey into the underground Levantine world."

This was biting enough. To be swallowed up by Cairo life and all that it involves, was no fate to suggest to an Englishman, whose opinion of the Levantine needs no defining. "Try again, d.i.c.ky," said Kingsley, refusing to be drawn. "This is not one huge joke, or one vast impertinence, so far as the lady is concerned. I've come back-b-a-c-k" (he spelled the word out), "with all that it involves. I've come back, d.i.c.ky."

He quieted all at once, and leaned over towards his friend. "You know the fight I've had. You know the life I've lived in Egypt. You know what I left behind me in England--nearly all. You've seen the white man work. You've seen the black ooster save him. You've seen the ten-times-a-failure pull out. Have I played the game? Have I acted squarely? Have I given kindness for kindness, blow for blow? Have I treated my slaves like human beings? Have I--have I won my way back to life--life?" He spread out a hand with a little grasping motion. "Have I saved the old stand off there in c.u.mberland by the sea, where you can see the snow on Skaw Fell? Have I? Do you wonder that I laugh? Ye G.o.ds and little fishes! I've had to wear a long face years enough--seven hard years, seven fearful years, when I might be murdered by a slave, and I and my slaves might be murdered by some stray brigade, under some general of Ismail's, working without orders, without orders, of course--oh, very much of course! Why shouldn't I play the boy to-day, little d.i.c.ky Donovan? I am a Mahommedan come Christian again. I am a navvy again come gentleman. I am an Arab come Englishman once more.

"I am an outcast come home. I am a dead man come to life."

d.i.c.ky leaned over and laid a hand on his knee. "You are a credit to c.u.mberland," he said. "No other man could have done it. I won't ask any more questions. Anything you want of me, I am with you, to do, or say, or be."

"Good. I want you to go to a.s.siout to-morrow."

"Will you see Ismail first? It might be safer--good policy."

"I will see My Lady first.... Trust me. I know what I'm doing. You will laugh as I do." Laughter broke from his lips. It was as though his heart was ten years old. d.i.c.ky's eyes moistened. He had never seen anything like it--such happiness, such boyish confidence. And what had not this man experienced! How had he drunk misfortune to the dregs! What unbelievable optimism had been his! How had he been at once hard and kind, tyrannical and human, defiant and peaceful, daring yet submissive, fierce yet just! And now, here, with so much done, with a great fortune and great power, a very boy, he was planning to win the heart of, and marry, his avowed foe, the woman who had condemned him without stint.

II

On her wide veranda, a stone's-throw from the banks of the Nile, My Lady sat pen in hand and paper-pad upon her knee. She had written steadily for an hour, and now she raised her head to look out on the swift-flowing, muddy water, where broad khia.s.sas floated down the stream, laden with bersim; where feluccas covered the river, bearing natives and donkeys; where faithful Moslems performed their ablutions, and other faithful Moslems, their sandals laid aside, said their prayers with their faces towards Mecca, oblivious of all around; where blue-robed women filled their goolahs with water, and bore them away, steady and stately; where a gang of conscripts, chained ankle to ankle, followed by a crowd of weeping and wailing women, were being driven to the anchorage of the stern-wheeled transport-steamer. All these sights she had seen how many hundred times! To her it was all slavery. The laden khia.s.sas represented the fruits of enforced labour; the ablutions and prayers were but signs of submission to the tyranny of a religion designed for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, a creed and code of gross selfishness--were not women only admitted to Heaven by the intercession of their husbands and after unceasing prayer? Whether beasts of burden, the girl with the goolah, women in the harem, or servants of pleasure, they were all in the bonds of slavery, and the land was in moral darkness. So it seemed to her.

How many times had she written these things in different forms and to different people--so often, too often, to the British Consul at Cairo, whose patience waned. At first, the seizure of conscripts, with all that it involved, had excited her greatly. It had required all her common-sense to prevent her, then and there, protesting, pleading, with the kava.s.s, who did the duty of Ismail's Sirdar. She had confined herself, however, to asking for permission to give the men cigarettes and slippers, dates and bread, and bags of lentils for soup. Even this was not unaccompanied by danger, for the Mahommedan mind could not at first tolerate the idea of a lady going unveiled; only fellah women, domestic cattle, bared their faces to the world. The conscripts, too, going to their death--for how few of them ever returned?--leaving behind all hope, all freedom, pa.s.sing to starvation and cruelty, at last to be cut down by the Arab, or left dying of illness in the desert, they took her gifts with sullen faces. Her beautiful freedom was in such contrast to their torture, slavery of a direful kind. But as again and again the kava.s.ses came and opened midnight doors and s.n.a.t.c.hed away the young men, her influence had grown so fast that her presence brought comfort, and she helped to a.s.suage the grief of the wailing women. She even urged upon them that philosophy of their own, which said "Malaish" to all things--the "It is no matter," of the fated Hamlet. In time she began to be grateful that an apathetic resignation, akin to the quiet of despair, was the possession of their race. She was far from aware that something in their life, of their philosophy, was affecting her understanding.

She had a strong brain and a stronger will, but she had a capacity for feeling greater still, and this gave her imagination, temperament, and--though it would have shocked her to know it--a certain credulity, easily trans.m.u.table into superst.i.tion. Yet, as her sympathies were, to some extent, rationalised by stern fact and everlasting custom, her opposition to some things became more active and more fervid.

Looking into the distance, she saw two or three hundred men at work on a ca.n.a.l, draining the property of Selamlik Pasha, whose tyrannies, robberies, and intrigues were familiar to all Egypt, whose palaces were almost as many as those of the notorious Mouffetish. These men she saw now working in the dread corvee had been forced from their homes by a counterfeit Khedivial order. They had been compelled to bring their own tools, and to feed and clothe and house themselves, without pay or reward, having left behind them their own fields untilled, their own dourha unreaped, their date-palms, which the tax-gatherer confiscated.

Many and many a time--unless she was prevented, and this at first had been often--she had sent food and blankets to these poor creatures who, their day's work done, prayed to G.o.d as became good Mahommedans, and, without covering, stretched themselves out on the bare ground to sleep.

It suggested that other slavery, which did not hide itself under the forms of conscription and corvee. It was on this slavery her mind had been concentrated, and against it she had turned her energies and her life. As she now sat, pen in hand, the thought of how little she had done, how futile had been all her crusade, came to her. Yet there was, too, a look of triumph in her eyes. Until three days ago she had seen little result from her labours. Then had come a promise of better things. From the Englishman, against whom she had inveighed, had been sent an olive branch, a token--of conversion? Had he not sent six slaves for her to free, and had she not freed them? That was a step.

She pictured to herself this harsh expatriated adventurer, this desert ruler, this slave-holder--had he been a slave-dealer she could herself have gladly been his executioner--surrounded by his black serfs, receiving her letter. In her mind's eye she saw his face flush as he read her burning phrases, then turn a little pale, then grow stern.

She saw him, after a sleepless night, haunted by her warnings, her appeal to his English manhood. She saw him rise, meditative and relenting, and send forthwith these slaves for her to free. Her eye glistened again, as it had shone while she had written of this thing to the British Consul at Cairo, to her father in England, who approved of her sympathies and lamented her actions. Had her crusade been altogether fruitless, she asked herself. Ismail's freed Circa.s.sian was in her household, being educated like an English girl, lifted out of her former degradation, made to understand "a higher life"; and yesterday she had sent away six liberated slaves, with a gold-piece each, as a gift from a free woman to free men. It seemed to her for a moment now, as she sat musing and looking, that her thirty years of life had not been--rather, might not be-in vain.

There was one other letter she would write--to Donovan Pasha, who had not been ardent in her cause, yet who might have done so much through his influence with Ismail, who, it was said, liked him better than any Englishman he had known, save Gordon. True, Donovan Pasha had steadily worked for the reduction of the corvee, and had, in the name of the Khedive, steadily reduced private corvee, but he had never set his face against slavery, save to see that no slave-dealing was permitted below a.s.souan. Yet, with her own eyes she had seen Abyssinian slaves sold in the market-place of a.s.siout. True, when she appealed to him, Donovan Pasha had seen to it that the slave-dealers were severely punished, but the fact remained that he was unsympathetic on the large issue. When appealed to, the British Consul had petulantly told her that Donovan Pasha was doing more important work. Yet she could only think of England as the engine of civilisation, as an evangelising power, as the John the Baptist of the nations--a country with a mission. For so beautiful a woman, of so worldly a stock, of a society so in the front of things, she had some Philistine notions, some quite middle-cla.s.s ideals. It was like a d.u.c.h.ess taking to Exeter Hall; but few d.u.c.h.esses so afflicted had been so beautiful and so young, so much of the worldly world--her father was high in the household of an ill.u.s.trious person.... If she could but make any headway against slavery--she had as disciples ten Armenian pashas, several wealthy Copts, a number of Arab sheikhs, and three Egyptian princes, sympathetic rather than active--perhaps, through her father, she might be able to move the ill.u.s.trious person, and so, in time, the Government of England.

It was a delightful dream--the best she had imagined for many a day. She was roused from it by the scream of a whistle, and the hoonch-hoonch of a sternwheel steamer. A Government boat was hastening in to the bank, almost opposite her house. She picked up the field-gla.s.s from the window-sill behind her, and swept the deck of the steamer. There were two figures in English dress, though one wore the tarboosh. The figure shorter and smaller than the other she recognised. This was Donovan Pasha. She need not write her letter to him, then. He would be sure to visit her. Disapprove of him as she did from one stand-point, he always excited in her feelings of homesickness, of an old life, full of interests--music, drama, art, politics, diplomacy, the court, the hunting-field, the quiet house-party. He troubled her in a way too, for his sane certainty, set against her aspiring credulity, arrested, even commanded, her sometimes.

Instinctively she put out her hand to gather in flying threads of hair, she felt at the pearl fastening of her collar, she looked at her brown shoes and her dress, and was satisfied. She was spotless. And never had her face shone--really shone--to such advantage. It had not now the brilliant colours of the first years. The climate, her work in hospital building, her labours against slavery, had touched her with a little whiteness. She was none the less good to see.

Who was this striding along with Donovan Pasha, straight towards her house? No one she had ever seen in Egypt, and yet in manner like some one she had seen before--a long time before. Her mind flashed back through the years to the time when she was a girl, and visited old friends of her father in a castle looking towards Skaw Fell, above the long valley of the Nidd. A kind of mist came before her eyes now.

When she really saw again, they were at the steps of the veranda, and Donovan Pasha's voice was greeting her. Then, as, without a word but with a welcoming smile, she shook hands with d.i.c.ky, her look was held, first by a blank arrest of memory, then by surprise.

d.i.c.ky turned for his office of introduction but was stayed by the look of amus.e.m.e.nt in his friend's face, and by the amazed recognition in that of My Lady. He stepped back with an exclamation, partly of chagrin.

He saw that this recognition was no coincidence, so far as the man was concerned, though the woman had been surprised in a double sense. He resented the fact that Kingsley Bey had kept this from him--he had the weakness of small-statured men and of diplomatic people who have reputations for knowing and doing. The man, all smiling, held out his hand, and his look was quizzically humorous as he said: