The Weavers Part 30

She leaned towards David, and said eagerly: "But you are satisfied--you are satisfied with your work for poor Egypt?"

"Thee says 'poor Egypt,'" he answered, "and thee says well. Even now she is not far from the day of Rameses and Joseph. Thee thinks perhaps thee knows Egypt--none knows her."

"You know her--now?"

He shook his head slowly. "It is like putting one's ear to the mouth of the Sphinx. Yet sometimes, almost in despair, when I have lain down in the desert beside my camel, set about with enemies, I have got a message from the barren desert, the wide silence, and the stars." He paused.

"What is the message that comes?" she asked softly. "It is always the same: Work on! Seek not to know too much, nor think that what you do is of vast value. Work, because it is yours to be adjusting the machinery in your own little workshop of life to the wide mechanism of the universe and time. One wheel set right, one flying belt adjusted, and there is a step forward to the final harmony--ah, but how I preach!" he added hastily.

His eyes were fixed on hers with a great sincerity, and they were clear and shining, yet his lips were smiling--what a trick they had of smiling! He looked as though he should apologise for such words in such a place.

She rose to her feet with a great suspiration, with a light in her eyes and a trembling smile.

"But no, no, no, you inspire one. Thee inspires me," she said, with a little laugh, in which there was a note of sadness. "I may use 'thee,'

may I not, when I will? I am a little a Quaker also, am I not? My people came from Derbyshire, my American people, that is--and only forty years ago. Almost thee persuades me to be a Quaker now," she added. "And perhaps I shall be, too," she went on, her eyes fixed on the crowd pa.s.sing by, Eglington among them.

David saw Eglington also, and moved forward with her.

"We shall meet in Hamley," she said composedly, as she saw her husband leave the crush and come towards her. As Eglington noticed David, a curious enigmatical glance flashed from his eyes. He came forward, however, with outstretched hand.

"I am sorry I was not at the Foreign Office when you called to-day.

Welcome back to England, home--and beauty." He laughed in a rather mirthless way, but with a certain empress.e.m.e.nt, conscious, as he always was, of the onlookers. "You have had a busy time in Egypt?" he continued cheerfully, and laughed again.

David laughed slightly, also, and Hylda noticed that it had a certain resemblance in its quick naturalness to that of her husband.

"I am not sure that we are so busy there as we ought to be," David answered. "I have no real standards. I am but an amateur, and have known nothing of public life. But you should come and see."

"It has been in my mind. An ounce of eyesight is worth a ton of print.

My lady was there once, I believe"--he turned towards her--"but before your time, I think. Or did you meet there, perhaps?" He glanced at both curiously. He scarcely knew why a thought flashed into his mind--as though by some telepathic sense; for it had never been there before, and there was no reason for its being there now.

Hylda saw what David was about to answer, and she knew instinctively that he would say they had never met. It shamed her. She intervened as she saw he was about to speak.

"We were introduced for the first time to-night," she said; "but Claridge Pasha is part of my education in the world. It is a miracle that Hamley should produce two such men," she added gaily, and laid her fan upon her husband's arm lightly. "You should have been a Quaker, Harry, and then you two would have been--"

"Two Quaker Don Quixotes," interrupted Eglington ironically.

"I should not have called you a Don Quixote," his wife lightly rejoined, relieved at the turn things had taken. "I cannot imagine you tilting at wind-mills--"

"Or saving maidens in distress? Well, perhaps not; but you do not suggest that Claridge Pasha tilts at windmills either--or saves maidens in distress. Though, now I come to think, there was an episode." He laughed maliciously. "Some time ago it was--a la.s.s of the cross-roads. I think I heard of such an adventure, which did credit to Claridge Pasha's heart, though it shocked Hamley at the time. But I wonder, was the maiden really saved?"

Lady Eglington's face became rigid. "Well, yes," she said slowly, "the maiden was saved. She is now my maid. Hamley may have been shocked, but Claridge Pasha has every reason to be glad that he helped a fellow-being in trouble."

"Your maid--Heaver?" asked Eglington in surprise, a swift shadow crossing his face.

"Yes; she only told me this morning. Perhaps she had seen that Claridge Pasha was coming to England. I had not, however. At any rate, Quixotism saved her."

David smiled. "It is better than I dared to hope," he remarked quietly.

"But that is not all," continued Hylda. "There is more. She had been used badly by a man who now wants to marry her--has tried to do so for years. Now, be prepared for a surprise, for it concerns you rather closely, Eglington. Fate is a whimsical jade. Whom do you think it is?

Well, since you could never guess, it was Jasper Kimber."

Eglington's eyes opened wide. "This is nothing but a coa.r.s.e and impossible stage coincidence," he laughed. "It is one of those tricks played by Fact to discredit the imagination. Life is laughing at us again. The longer I live, the more I am conscious of being an object of derision by the scene-shifters in the wings of the stage. What a cynical comedy life is at the best!"

"It all seems natural enough," rejoined David.

"It is all paradox."

"Isn't it all inevitable law? I have no belief in 'antic Fate.'"

Hylda realised, with a new and poignant understanding, the difference of outlook on life between the two men. She suddenly remembered the words of Confucius, which she had set down in her little book of daily life: "By nature we approximate, it is only experience that drives us apart."

David would have been content to live in the desert all his life for the sake of a cause, making no calculations as to reward. Eglington must ever have the counters for the game.

"Well, if you do not believe in 'antic Fate,' you must be greatly puzzled as you go on," he rejoined, laughing; "especially in Egypt, where the East and the West collide, race against race, religion against religion, Oriental mind against Occidental intellect. You have an unusual quant.i.ty of Quaker composure, to see in it all 'inevitable law.' And it must be dull. But you always were, so they say in Hamley, a monument of seriousness."

"I believe they made one or two exceptions," answered David drily. "I had a.s.surances."

Eglington laughed boyishly. "You are right. You achieved a name for humour in a day--'a gla.s.s, a kick, and a kiss,' it was. Do you have such days in Egypt?"

"You must come and see," David answered lightly, declining to notice the insolence. "These are critical days there. The problems are worthy of your care. Will you not come?"

Eglington was conscious of a peculiar persuasive influence over himself that he had never felt before. In proportion, however, as he felt its compelling quality, there came a jealousy of the man who was its cause.

The old antagonism, which had had its sharpest expression the last time they had met on the platform at Heddington, came back. It was one strong will resenting another--as though there was not room enough in the wide world of being for these two atoms of life, sparks from the ceaseless wheel, one making a little brighter flash than the other for the moment, and then presently darkness, and the whirring wheel which threw them off, throwing off millions of others again.

On the moment Eglington had a temptation to say something with an edge, which would show David that his success in Egypt hung upon the course that he himself and the weak Foreign Minister, under whom he served, would take. And this course would be his own course largely, since he had been appointed to be a force and strength in the Foreign Office which his chief did not supply. He refrained, however, and, on the moment, remembered the promise he had given to Faith to help David.

A wave of feeling pa.s.sed over him. His wife was beautiful, a creature of various charms, a centre of attraction. Yet he had never really loved her--so many sordid elements had entered into the thought of marriage with her, lowering the character of his affection. 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. It was a kind of confessional, comforting to a nature not self-contained. Now he restrained his cynical intention to deal David a side-thrust, and quietly said:

"We shall meet at Hamley, shall we not? Let us talk there, and not at the Foreign Office. You would care to go to Egypt, Hylda?"

She forced a smile. "Let us talk it over at Hamley." With a smile to David she turned away to some friends.

Eglington offered to introduce David to some notable people, but he said that he must go--he was fatigued after his journey. He had no wish to be lionised.

As he left the salon, the band was playing a tune that made him close his eyes, as though against something he would not see. The band in Kaid's Palace had played it that night when he had killed Foorgat Bey.

CHAPTER XX. EACH AFTER HIS OWN ORDER

With the pa.s.sing years new feelings had grown up in the heart of Luke Claridge. Once David's destiny and career were his own peculiar and self-a.s.sumed responsibility. "Inwardly convicted," he had wrenched the lad away from the natural circ.u.mstances of his life, and created a scheme of existence for him out of his own conscience--a pious egoist.

After David went to Egypt, however, his mind involuntarily formed the resolution that "Davy and G.o.d should work it out together."

He had grown very old in appearance, and his quiet face was almost painfully white; but the eyes burned with more fire than in the past.

As the day approached when David should arrive in England, he walked by himself continuously, oblivious of the world round him. He spoke to no one, save the wizened Elder Meacham, and to John Fairley, who rightly felt that he had a share in the making of Claridge Pasha.