The Weavers, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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Achmet--Higli! No others knew. The light of a fateful fanaticism was in
his eyes. David read him as an open book, and saw the madness come upon
him.
"Neither Higli, nor Achmet, nor any of thy fellow-conspirators has
betrayed thee," David said. "God has other voices to whisper the truth
than those who share thy crimes. I have ears, and the air is full of
voices."
Harrik stared at him. Was this Inglesi, then, with the grey coat,
buttoned to the chin, and the broad black hat which remained on his head
unlike the custom of the English--was he one of those who saw visions and
dreamed dreams, even as himself! Had he not heard last night a voice
whisper through the dark "Harrik, Harrik, flee to the desert! The lions
are loosed upon thee!" Had he not risen with the voice still in his ears
and fled to the harem, seeking Zaida, she who had never cringed before
him, whose beauty he had conquered, but whose face turned from him when
he would lay his lips on hers? And, as he fled, had he not heard, as it
were, footsteps lightly following him--or were they going before him?
Finding Zaida, had he not told her of the voice, and had she not said:
"In the desert all men are safe--safe from themselves and safe from
others; from their own acts and from the acts of others"? Were the lions,
then, loosed upon him? Had he been betrayed?
Suddenly the thought flashed into his mind that his challenger would not
have thrust himself into danger, given himself to the mouth of the Pit,
if violence were intended. There was that inside his robe, than which
lightning would not be more quick to slay. Had he not been a hunter of
repute? Had he not been in deadly peril with wild beasts, and was he not
quicker than they? This man before him was like no other he had ever met.
Did voices speak to him? Were there, then, among the Christians such holy
men as among the Muslims, who saw things before they happened, and read
the human mind? Were there sorcerers among them, as among the Arabs?
In any case his treason was known. What were to be the consequences?
Diamond-dust in his coffee? To be dropped into the Nile like a dog? To be
smothered in his sleep?--For who could be trusted among all his slaves
and retainers when it was known he was disgraced, and that the Prince
Pasha would be happier if Harrik were quiet for ever?
Mechanically he drew out his watch and looked at it. It was nine o'clock.
In three hours more would have fallen the coup. But from this man's words
he knew that the stroke was now with the Prince Pasha. Yet, if this pale
Inglesi, this Christian sorcerer, knew the truth in a vision only, and
had not declared it to Kaid, there might still be a chance of escape. The
lions were near--it would be a joy to give a Christian to the lions to
celebrate the capture of Cairo and the throne. He listened intently to
the distant rumble of the lions. There was one cage dedicated to
vengeance. Five human beings on whom his terrible anger fell in times
past had been thrust into it alive. Two were slaves, one was an enemy,
one an invader of his harem, and one was a woman, his wife, his
favourite, the darling of his heart. When his chief eunuch accused her of
a guilty love, he had given her paramour and herself to that awful death.
A stroke of the vast paw, a smothered roar as the teeth gave into the
neck of the beautiful Fatima, and then--no more. Fanaticism had caught a
note of savage music that tuned it to its height.
"Why art thou here? For what hast thou come? Do the spirit voices give
thee that counsel?" he snarled.
"I am come to ask Prince Harrik to repair the wrong he has done. When the
Prince Pasha came to know of thy treason--"
Harrik started. "Kaid believes thy tale of treason?" he burst out.
"Prince Kaid knows the truth," answered David quietly. "He might have
surrounded this palace with his Nubians, and had thee shot against the
palace walls. That would have meant a scandal in Egypt and in Europe. I
besought him otherwise. It may be the scandal must come, but in another
way, and--"
"That I, Harrik, must die?" Harrik's voice seemed far away. In his own
ears it sounded strange and unusual. All at once the world seemed to be a
vast vacuum in which his brain strove for air, and all his senses were
numbed and overpowered. Distempered and vague, his soul seemed spinning
in an aching chaos. It was being overpowered by vast elements, and life
and being were atrophied in a deadly smother. The awful forces behind
visible being hung him in the middle space between consciousness and
dissolution. He heard David's voice, at first dimly, then
understandingly.
"There is no other way. Thou art a traitor. Thou wouldst have been a
fratricide. Thou wouldst have put back the clock in Egypt by a hundred
years, even to the days of the Mamelukes--a race of slaves and murderers.
God ordained that thy guilt should be known in time. Prince, thou art
guilty. It is now but a question how thou shalt pay the debt of treason."
In David's calm voice was the ring of destiny. It was dispassionate,
judicial; it had neither hatred nor pity. It fell on Harrik's ear as
though from some far height. Destiny, the controller--who could escape
it?
Had he not heard the voices in the night--"The lions are loosed upon
thee"? He did not answer David now, but murmured to himself like one in a
dream.
David saw his mood, and pursued the startled mind into the pit of
confusion. "If it become known to Europe that the army is disloyal, that
its officers are traitors like thee, what shall we find? England, France,
Turkey, will land an army of occupation. Who shall gainsay Turkey if she
chooses to bring an army here and recover control, remove thy family from
Egypt, and seize upon its lands and goods? Dost thou not see that the
hand of God has been against thee? He has spoken, and thy evil is
discovered."
He paused. Still Harrik did not reply, but looked at him with dilated,
fascinated eyes. Death had hypnotised him, and against death and destiny
who could struggle? Had not a past Prince Pasha of Egypt safeguarded
himself from assassination all his life, and, in the end, had he not been
smothered in his sleep by slaves?
"There are two ways only," David continued--"to be tried and die publicly
for thy crimes, to the shame of Egypt, its present peril, and lasting
injury; or to send a message to those who conspired with thee, commanding
them to return to their allegiance, and another to the Prince Pasha,
acknowledging thy fault, and exonerating all others. Else, how many of
thy dupes shall die! Thy choice is not life or death, but how thou shalt
die, and what thou shalt do for Egypt as thou diest. Thou didst love
Egypt, Eminence?"
David's voice dropped low, and his last words had a suggestion which went
like an arrow to the source of all Harrik's crimes, and that also which
redeemed him in a little. It got into his inner being. He roused himself
and spoke, but at first his speech was broken and smothered.
"Day by day I saw Egypt given over to the Christians," he said. "The
Greek, the Italian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, everywhere they
reached out, their hands and took from us our own. They defiled our
mosques; they corrupted our life; they ravaged our trade, they stole our
customers, they crowded us from the streets where once the faithful lived
alone. Such as thou had the ear of the Prince, and such as Nahoum, also
an infidel, who favoured the infidels of Europe. And now thou hast come,
the most dangerous of them all! Day by day the Muslim has loosed his hold
on Cairo, and Alexandria, and the cities of Egypt. Street upon street
knows him no more. My heart burned within me. I conspired for Egypt's
sake. I would have made her Muslim once again. I would have fought the
Turk and the Frank, as did Mehemet Ali; and if the infidels came, I would
have turned them back; or if they would not go, I would have destroyed
them here. Such as thou should have been stayed at the door. In my own
house I would have been master. We seek not to take up our abode in other
nations and in the cities of the infidel. Shall we give place to them on
our own mastaba, in our own court-yard--hand to them the keys of our
harems? I would have raised the Jehad if they vexed me with their envoys
and their armies." He paused, panting.
"It would not have availed," was David's quiet answer. "This land may not
be as Tibet--a prison for its own people. If the door opens outward, then
must it open inward also. Egypt is the bridge between the East and the
West. Upon it the peoples of all nations pass and repass. Thy plan was
folly, thy hope madness, thy means to achieve horrible. Thy dream is
done. The army will not revolt, the Prince will not be slain. Now only
remains what thou shalt do for Egypt--"
"And thou--thou wilt be left here to lay thy will upon Egypt. Kaid's ear
will be in thy hand--thou hast the sorcerer's eye. I know thy meaning.
Thou wouldst have me absolve all, even Achmet, and Higli, and Diaz, and
the rest, and at thy bidding go out into the desert"--he paused--"or into
the grave."
"Not into the desert," rejoined David firmly. "Thou wouldst not rest.
There, in the desert, thou wouldst be a Mahdi. Since thou must die, wilt
thou not order it after thine own choice? It is to die for Egypt."
"Is this the will of Kaid?" asked Harrik, his voice thick with wonder,
his brain still dulled by the blow of Fate.
"It was not the Effendina's will, but it hath his assent. Wilt thou write
the word to the army and also to the Prince?"
He had conquered. There was a moment's hesitation, then Harrik picked up
paper and ink that lay near, and said: "I will write to Kaid. I will have
naught to do with the army."
"It shall be the whole, not the part," answered David determinedly. "The
truth is known. It can serve no end to withhold the writing to the army.
Remember what I have said to thee. The disloyalty of the army must not be
known. Canst thou not act after the will of Allah, the all-powerful, the
all-just, the all-merciful?"
There was an instant's pause, and then suddenly Harrik placed the paper
in his palm and wrote swiftly and at some length to Kaid. Laying it down,
he took another and wrote but a few words--to Achmet and Diaz. This
message said in brief, "Do not strike. It is the will of Allah. The army
shall keep faithful until the day of the Mahdi be come. I spoke before
the time. I go to the bosom of my Lord Mahomet."
He threw the papers on the floor before David, who picked them up, read
them, and put them into his pocket.
"It is well," he said. "Egypt shall have peace. And thou, Eminence?"
"Who shall escape Fate? What I have written I have written."
David rose and salaamed. Harrik rose also. "Thou wouldst go, having
accomplished thy will?" Harrik asked, a thought flashing to his mind
again, in keeping with his earlier purpose. Why should this man be left
to trouble Egypt?
David touched his breast. "I must bear thy words to the Palace and the
Citadel."
"Are there not slaves for messengers?" Involuntarily Harrik turned his
eyes to the velvet curtains. No fear possessed David, but he felt the
keenness of the struggle, and prepared for the last critical moment of
fanaticism.
"It were a foolish thing to attempt my death," he said calmly. "I have
been thy friend to urge thee to do that which saves thee from public
shame, and Egypt from peril. I came alone, because I had no fear that
thou wouldst go to thy death shaming hospitality."
"Thou wast sure I would give myself to death?"
"Even as that I breathe. Thou wert mistaken; a madness possessed thee;
but thou, I knew, wouldst choose the way of honour. I too have had
dreams--and of Egypt. If it were for her good, I would die for her."
"Thou art mad. But the mad are in the hands of God, and--"
Suddenly Harrik stopped. There came to his ears two distant sounds--the
faint click of horses' hoofs and that dull rumble they had heard as they
talked, a sound he loved, the roar of his lions.
He clapped his hands twice, the curtains parted opposite, and a slave
slid silently forward.
"Quick! The horses! What are they? Bring me word," he said.
The slave vanished. For a moment there was silence. The eyes of the two
men met. In the minds of both was the same thing.
"Kaid! The Nubians!" Harrik said, at last. David made no response.
The slave returned, and his voice murmured softly, as though the matter
were of no concern: "The Nubians--from the Palace." In an instant he was
gone again.
"Kaid had not faith in thee," Harrik said grimly. "But see, infidel
though thou art, thou trustest me, and thou shalt go thy way. Take them
with thee, yonder jackals of the desert. I will not go with them. I did
not choose to live; others chose for me; but I will die after my own
choice. Thou hast heard a voice, even as I. It is too late to flee to the
desert. Fate tricks me. 'The lions are loosed on thee'--so the voice said
to me in the night. Hark! dost thou not hear them--the lions, Harrik's
lions, got out of the uttermost desert?"
David could hear the distant roar, for the menagerie was even part of the
palace itself.
"Go in peace," continued Harrik soberly and with dignity, "and when Egypt
is given to the infidel and Muslims are their slaves, remember that
Harrik would have saved it for his Lord Mahomet, the Prophet of God."
He clapped his hands, and fifty slaves slid from behind the velvet
curtains.
"I have thy word by the tomb of thy mother that thou wilt take the
Nubians hence, and leave me in peace?" he asked.
David raised a hand above his head. "As I have trusted thee, trust thou
me, Harrik, son of Mahomet." Harrik made a gesture of dismissal, and
David salaamed and turned to go. As the curtains parted for his exit, he
faced Harrik again. "Peace be to thee," he said.
But, seated in his cushions, the haggard, fanatical face of Harrik was
turned from him, the black, flaring eyes fixed on vacancy. The curtain
dropped behind David, and through the dim rooms and corridors he passed,
the slaves gliding beside him, before him, and behind him, until they
reached the great doors. As they swung open and the cool night breeze
blew in his face, a great suspiration of relief passed from him. What he
had set out to do would be accomplished in all. Harrik would keep his
word. It was the only way.
As he emerged from the doorway some one fell at his feet, caught his
sleeve and kissed it. It was Mahommed Hassan. Behind Mahommed was a
little group of officers and a hundred stalwart Nubians. David motioned
them towards the great gates, and, without speaking, passed swiftly down
the pathway and emerged upon the road without. A moment later he was
riding towards the Citadel with Harrik's message to Achmet. In the
red-curtained room Harrik sat alone, listening until he heard the far
clatter of hoofs, and knew that the Nubians were gone. Then the other
distant sound which had captured his ear came to him again. In his fancy
it grew louder and louder. With it came the voice that called him in the
night, the voice of a woman--of the wife he had given to the lions for a
crime against him which she did not commit, which had haunted him all the
years. He had seen her thrown to the king of them all, killed in one
swift instant, and dragged about the den by her warm white neck--this
slave wife from Albania, his adored Fatima. And when, afterwards, he came
to know the truth, and of her innocence, from the chief eunuch who with
his last breath cleared her name, a terrible anger and despair had come
upon him. Time and intrigue and conspiracy had distracted his mind, and
the Jehad became the fixed aim and end of his life. Now this was gone.
Destiny had tripped him up. Kaid and the infidel Inglesi had won.
As the one great passion went out like smoke, the woman he loved, whom he
had given to the lions, the memory of her, some haunting part of her,
possessed him, overcame him. In truth, he had heard a voice in the night,
but not the voice of a spirit. It was the voice of Zaida, who, preying
upon his superstitious mind--she knew the hallucination which possessed
him concerning her he had cast to the lions--and having given the
terrible secret to Kaid, whom she had ever loved, would still save Harrik
from the sure vengeance which must fall upon him. Her design had worked,
but not as she intended. She had put a spell of superstition on him, and
the end would be accomplished, but not by flight to the desert.
Harrik chose the other way. He had been a hunter.
He was without fear. The voice of the woman he loved called him. It came
to him through the distant roar of the lions as clear as when, with one
cry of "Harrik!" she had fallen beneath the lion's paw. He knew now why
he had kept the great beast until this hour, though tempted again and
again to slay him.
Like one in a dream, he drew a dagger from the cushions where he sat, and
rose to his feet. Leaving the room and passing dark groups of waiting
slaves, he travelled empty chambers and long corridors, the voices of the
lions growing nearer and nearer. He sped faster now, and presently came
to two great doors, on which he knocked thrice. The doors opened, and two
slaves held up lights for him to enter. Taking a torch from one of them,
he bade them retire, and the doors clanged behind them.
Harrik held up the torch and came nearer. In the centre of the room was a
cage in which one great lion paced to and fro in fury. It roared at him
savagely. It was his roar which had come to Harrik through the distance
and the night. He it was who had carried Fatima, the beloved, about his
cage by that neck in which Harrik had laid his face so often.
The hot flush of conflict and the long anger of the years were on him.
Since he must die, since Destiny had befooled him, left him the victim of
the avengers, he would end it here. Here, against the thing of savage
hate which had drunk of the veins and crushed the bones of his fair wife,
he would strike one blow deep and strong and shed the blood of sacrifice
before his own was shed.
He thrust the torch into the ground, and, with the dagger grasped
tightly, carefully opened the cage and stepped inside. The door clicked
behind him. The lion was silent now, and in a far corner prepared to
spring, crouching low.
"Fatima!" Harrik cried, and sprang forward as the wild beast rose at him.
He struck deep, drew forth the dagger--and was still.
CHAPTER XIII
ACHMET THE ROPEMAKER STRIKES
War! War! The chains of the conscripts clanked in the river villages; the
wailing of the women affrighted the pigeons in a thousand dovecotes on
the Nile; the dust of despair was heaped upon the heads of the old, who
knew that their young would no more return, and that the fields of dourha
would go ungathered, the water-channels go unattended, and
the onion-fields be bare. War! War! War! The strong, the
broad-shouldered--Aka, Mahmoud, Raschid, Selim, they with the bodies of
Seti and the faces of Rameses, in their blue yeleks and unsandalled
feet--would go into the desert as their forefathers did for the Shepherd
Kings. But there would be no spoil for them--no slaves with swelling
breasts and lips of honey; no straight-limbed servants of their pleasure
to wait on them with caressing fingers; no rich spoils carried back from
the fields of war to the mud hut, the earth oven, and the thatched roof;
no rings of soft gold and necklaces of amber snatched from the fingers
and bosoms of the captive and the dead. Those days were no more. No
vision of loot or luxury allured these. They saw only the yellow sand,
the ever-receding oasis, the brackish, undrinkable water, the withered
and fruitless date-tree, handfuls of dourha for their food by day, and
the keen, sharp night to chill their half-dead bodies in a half-waking
sleep. And then the savage struggle for life--with all the gain to the
pashas and the beys, and those who ruled over them; while their own
wounds grew foul, and, in the torturing noon-day heat of the white waste,
Death reached out and dragged them from the drooping lines to die.
Fighting because they must fight--not patriot love, nor understanding,
nor sacrifice in their hearts. War! War! War! War!
David had been too late to stop it. It had grown to a head with
revolution and conspiracy. For months before he came conscripts had been
gathered in the Nile country from Rosetta to Assouan, and here and there,
far south, tribes had revolted. He had come to power too late to devise
another course. One day, when this war was over, he would go alone, save
for a faithful few, to deal with these tribes and peoples upon another
plane than war; but here and now the only course was that which had been
planned by Kaid and those who counselled him. Troubled by a deep danger
drawing near, Kaid had drawn him into his tough service, half-blindly
catching at his help, with a strange, almost superstitious belief that
luck and good would come from the alliance; seeing in him a protection
against wholesale robbery and debt--were not the English masters of
finance, and was not this Englishman honest, and with a brain of fire and
an eye that pierced things?
David had accepted the inevitable. The war had its value. It would draw
off to the south--he would see that it was so--Achmet and Higli and Diaz
and the rest, who were ever a danger. Not to himself: he did not think of
that; but to Kaid and to Egypt. They had been out-manoeuvred, beaten,
foiled, knew who had foiled them and what they had escaped; congratulated
themselves, but had no gratitude to him, and still plotted his
destruction. More than once his death had been planned, but the dark
design had come to light--now from the workers of the bazaars, whose
wires of intelligence pierced everywhere; now from some hungry fellah
whose yelek he had filled with cakes of dourha beside a bread-shop; now
from Mahommed Hassan, who was for him a thousand eyes and feet and hands,
who cooked his food, and gathered round him fellaheen or Copts or
Soudanese or Nubians whom he himself had tested and found true, and ruled
them with a hand of plenty and a rod of iron. Also, from Nahoum's spies
he learned of plots and counterplots, chiefly on Achmet's part; and these
he hid from Kaid, while he trusted Nahoum--and not without reason, as
yet.
The day of Nahoum's wrath and revenge was not yet come; it was his deep
design to lay the foundation for his own dark actions strong on a rock of
apparent confidence and devotion. A long torture and a great
over-whelming was his design. He knew himself to be in the scheme of a
master-workman, and by-and-by he would blunt the chisel and bend the saw;
but not yet. Meanwhile, he hated, admired, schemed, and got a sweet taste
on his tongue from aiding David to foil Achmet--Higli and Diaz were of
little account; only the injury they felt in seeing the sluices being
closed on the stream of bribery and corruption kept them in the toils of
Achmet's conspiracy. They had saved their heads, but they had not learned
their lesson yet; and Achmet, blinded by rage, not at all. Achmet did not
understand clemency. One by one his plots had failed, until the day came
when David advised Kaid to send him and his friends into the Soudan, with
the punitive expedition under loyal generals. It was David's dream that,
in the field of war, a better spirit might enter into Achmet and his
friends; that patriotism might stir in them.
The day was approaching when the army must leave. Achmet threw dice once
more.
Evening was drawing down. Over the plaintive pink and golden glow of
sunset was slowly being drawn a pervasive silver veil of moonlight. A
caravan of camels hunched alone in the middle distance, making for the
western desert. Near by, village life manifested itself in heavily laden
donkeys; in wolfish curs stealing away with refuse into the waste; in
women, upright and modest, bearing jars of water on their heads; in
evening fires, where the cover of the pot clattered over the boiling mass
within; in the voice of the Muezzin calling to prayer.
Returning from Alexandria to Cairo in the special train which Kaid had
sent for him, David watched the scene with grave and friendly interest.
There was far, to go before those mud huts of the thousand years would
give place to rational modern homes; and as he saw a solitary horseman
spread his sheepskin on the ground and kneel to say his evening prayer,
as Mahomet had done in his flight between Mecca and Medina, the distance
between the Egypt of his desire and the ancient Egypt that moved round
him sharply impressed his mind, and the magnitude of his task settled
heavily on his spirit.
"But it is the beginning--the beginning," he said aloud to himself,
looking out upon the green expanses of dourha and Lucerne, and eyeing
lovingly the cotton-fields here and there, the origin of the industrial
movement he foresaw--"and some one had to begin. The rest is as it must
be--"
There was a touch of Oriental philosophy in his mind--was it not Galilee
and the Nazarene, that Oriental source from which Mahomet also drew? But
he added to the "as it must be" the words, "and as God wills." He was
alone in the compartment with Lacey, whose natural garrulity had had a
severe discipline in the months that had passed since he had asked to be
allowed to black David's boots. He could now sit for an hour silent,
talking to himself, carrying on unheard conversations. Seeing David's
mood, he had not spoken twice on this journey, but had made notes in a
little "Book of Experience,"--as once he had done in Mexico. At last,
however, he raised his head, and looked eagerly out of the window as
David did, and sniffed.