The Weavers, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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Yes, she knew he would understand! She flung up her head to the sun and
the pulse-stirring air, and, as she did so, she saw his cavalcade
approaching. She was sure it was he, even when he was far off, by the
same sure instinct that convinced him. For an instant she hesitated. She
would turn back, and meet him with the crowd. Then she looked around. The
desert was deserted by all save herself and himself and those who were
with him. No. Her mind was made up. She would ride forward. She would be
the first to welcome him back to life and the world. He and she would
meet alone in the desert. For one minute they would be alone, they two,
with the world afar, they two, to meet, to greet--and to part. Out of all
that Fate had to give of sorrow and loss, this one delectable moment, no
matter what came after.
"David!" she cried with beating heart, and rode on, harder and harder.
Now she saw him ride ahead of the others. Ah, he knew that it was she,
though he could not see her face! Nearer and nearer. Now they looked into
each other's eyes.
She saw him stop his camel and make it kneel for the dismounting. She
stopped her horse also, and slid to the ground, and stood waiting, one
hand upon the horse's neck. He hastened forward, then stood still, a few
feet away, his eyes on hers, his helmet off, his brown hair, brown as
when she first saw it--peril and hardship had not thinned or greyed it.
For a moment they stood so, for a moment of revealing and understanding,
but speechless; and then, suddenly, and with a smile infinitely touching,
she said, as he had heard her say in the monastery--the very words:
"Speak--speak to me!"
He took her hand in his. "There is no need--I have said all," he
answered, happiness and trouble at once in his eyes. Then his face grew
calmer. "Thee has made it worth while living on," he added.
She was gaining control of herself also. "I said that I would come when I
was needed," she answered less, tremblingly.
"Thee came alone?" he asked gently.
"From Assouan, yes," she said in a voice still unsteady. "I was riding
out to be by myself, and then I saw you coming, and I rode on. I thought
I should like to be the first to say: 'Well done,' and 'God bless you!'"
He drew in a long breath, then looked at her keenly. "Lord Eglington is
in Egypt also?" he asked.
Her face did not change. She looked him in the eyes.
"No, Eglington would not come to help you. I came to Nahoum, as I said I
would."
"Thee has a good memory," he rejoined simply. "I am a good friend," she
answered, then suddenly her face flushed up, her breast panted, her eyes
shone with a brightness almost intolerable to him, and he said in a low,
shaking voice:
"It is all fighting, all fighting. We have done our best; and thee has
made all possible."
"David!" she said in a voice scarce above a whisper.
"Thee and me have far to go," he said in a voice not louder than her own,
"but our ways may not be the same."
She understood, and a newer life leaped up in her. She knew that he loved
her--that was sufficient; the rest would be easier now. Sacrifice, all,
would be easier. To part, yes, and for evermore; but to know that she had
been truly loved--who could rob her of that?
"See," she said lightly, "your people are waiting--and there, why, there
is my cousin Lacey. Tom, oh, Cousin Tom!" she called eagerly.
Lacey rode down on them. "I swan, but I'm glad," he said, as he dropped
from his horse. "Cousin Hylda, I'm blest if I don't feel as if I could
sing like Aunt Melissa."
"You may kiss me, Cousin Tom," she said, as she took his hands in hers.
He flushed, was embarrassed, then snatched a kiss from her cheek. "Say,
I'm in it, ain't I? And you were in it first, eh, Cousin Hylda? The rest
are nowhere--there they come from Assouan, Kaid, Nahoum, and the Nubians.
Look at 'em glisten!"
A hundred of Kaid's Nubians in their glittering armour made three sides
of a quickly moving square, in the centre of which, and a little ahead,
rode Kaid and Nahoum, while behind the square-in parade and gala
dress-trooped hundreds of soldiers and Egyptians and natives.
Swiftly the two cavalcades approached each other, the desert ringing with
the cries of the Bedouins, the Nubians, and the fellaheen. They met on an
upland of sand, from which the wide valley of the Nile and its wild
cataracts could be seen. As men meet who parted yesterday, Kaid, Nahoum,
and David met, but Kaid's first quiet words to David had behind them a
world of meaning:
"I also have come back, Saadat, to whom be the bread that never moulds
and the water that never stales!" he said, with a look in his face which
had not been there for many a day. Superstition had set its mark on
him--on Claridge Pasha's safety depended his own, that was his belief;
and the look of this thin, bronzed face, with its living fire, gave him
vital assurance of length of days.
And David answered: "May thy life be the nursling of Time, Effendina. I
bring the tribute of the rebel lions once more to thy hand. What was
thine, and was lost, is thine once more. Peace and salaam!" Between
Nahoum and David there were no words at first at all. They shook hands
like Englishmen, looking into each other's eyes, and with pride of what
Nahoum, once, in his duplicity, had called "perfect friendship."
Lacey thought of this now as he looked on; and not without a sense of
irony, he said under his breath, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a
Christian!"
But in Hylda's look, as it met Nahoum's, there was no doubt--what woman
doubts the convert whom she thinks she has helped to make? Meanwhile, the
Nubians smote their mailed breasts with their swords in honour of David
and Kaid.
Under the gleaming moon, the exquisite temple of Philae perched on its
high rock above the river, the fires on the shore, the masts of the
dahabiehs twinkling with lights, and the barbarous songs floating across
the water, gave the feeling of past centuries to the scene. From the
splendid boat which Kaid had placed at his disposal David looked out upon
it all, with emotions not yet wholly mastered by the true estimate of
what this day had brought to him. With a mind unsettled he listened to
the natives in the forepart of the boat and on the shore, beating the
darabukkeh and playing the kemengeh. Yet it was moving in a mist and on a
flood of greater happiness than he had ever known.
He did not know as yet that Eglington was gone for ever. He did not know
that the winds of time had already swept away all traces of the house of
ambition which Eglington had sought to build; and that his nimble tongue
and untrustworthy mind would never more delude and charm, and wanton with
truth. He did not know, but within the past hour Hylda knew; and now out
of the night Soolsby came to tell him.
He was roused from his reverie by Soolsby's voice saying: "Hast nowt to
say to me, Egyptian?"
It startled him, sounded ghostly in the moonlight; for why should he hear
Soolsby's voice on the confines of Egypt? But Soolsby came nearer, and
stood where the moonlight fell upon him, hat in hand, a rustic modern
figure in this Oriental world.
David sprang to his feet and grasped the old man by the shoulders.
"Soolsby, Soolsby," he said, with a strange plaintive-note in his voice,
yet gladly, too. "Soolsby, thee is come here to welcome me! But has she
not come--Miss Claridge, Soolsby?"
He longed for that true heart which had never failed him, the simple soul
whose life had been filled by thought and care of him, and whose every
act had for its background the love of sister for brother--for that was
their relation in every usual meaning--who, too frail and broken to come
to him now, waited for him by the old hearthstone. And so Soolsby, in his
own way, made him understand; for who knew them both better than this old
man, who had shared in David's destiny since the fatal day when Lord
Eglington had married Mercy Claridge in secret, had set in motion a long
line of tragic happenings?
"Ay, she would have come, she would have come," Soolsby answered, "but
she was not fit for the journey, and there was little time, my lord."
"Why did thee come, Soolsby? Only to welcome me back?"
"I come to bring you back to England, to your duty there, my lord."
The first time Soolsby had used the words "my lord," David had scarcely
noticed it, but its repetition struck him strangely.
"Here, sometimes they call me Pasha and Saadat, but I am not 'my lord,'"
he said.
"Ay, but you are my lord, Egyptian, as sure as I've kept my word to you
that I'd drink no more, ay, on my sacred honour. So you are my lord; you
are Lord Eglington, my lord."
David stood rigid and almost unblinking as Soolsby told his tale,
beginning with the story of Eglington's death, and going back all the
years to the day of Mercy Claridge's marriage.
"And him that never was Lord Eglington, your own father's son, is dead
and gone, my lord; and you are come into your rights at last." This was
the end of the tale.
For a long time David stood looking into the sparkling night before him,
speechless and unmoving, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent
forward, as though in a dream.
How, all in an instant, had life changed for him! How had Soolsby's tale
of Eglington's death filled him with a pity deeper than he had ever
felt-the futile, bitter, unaccomplished life, the audacious, brilliant
genius quenched, a genius got from the same source as his own resistless
energy and imagination, from the same wild spring. Gone--all gone, with
only pity to cover him, unloved, unloving, unbemoaned, save by the Quaker
girl whose true spirit he had hurt, save by the wife whom he had cruelly
wronged and tortured; and pity was the thing that moved them both,
unfathomable and almost maternal, in that sense of motherhood which, in
spite of love or passion, is behind both, behind all, in every true
woman's life.
At last David spoke.
"Who knows of all this--of who I am, Soolsby?"
"Lady Eglington and myself, my lord."
"Only she and you?"
"Only us two, Egyptian."
"Then let it be so--for ever."
Soolsby was startled, dumfounded.
"But you will take your title and estates, my lord; you will take the
place which is your own."
"And prove my grandfather wrong? Had he not enough sorrow? And change my
life, all to please thee, Soolsby?"
He took the old man's shoulders in his hands again. "Thee has done thy
duty as few in this world, Soolsby, and given friendship such as few
give. But thee must be content. I am David Claridge, and so shall remain
ever."
"Then, since he has no male kin, the title dies, and all that's his will
go to her ladyship," Soolsby rejoined sourly.
"Does thee grudge her ladyship what was his?"
"I grudge her what is yours, my lord--"
Suddenly Soolsby paused, as though a new thought had come to him, and he
nodded to himself in satisfaction. "Well, since you will have it so, it
will be so, Egyptian; but it is a queer fuddle, all of it; and where's
the way out, tell me that, my lord?"
David spoke impatiently. "Call me 'my lord' no more. . . . But I will go
back to England to her that's waiting at the Red Mansion, and you will
remember, Soolsby--"
Slowly the great flotilla of dahabiehs floated with the strong current
down towards Cairo, the great sails swelling to the breeze that blew from
the Libyan Hills. Along the bank of the Nile thousands of Arabs and
fellaheen crowded to welcome "the Saadat," bringing gifts of dates and
eggs and fowls and dourha and sweetmeats, and linen cloth; and even in
the darkness and in the trouble that was on her, and the harrowing regret
that she had not been with Eglington in his last hour--she little knew
what Eglington had said to Faith in that last hour--Hylda's heart was
soothed by the long, loud tribute paid to David.
As she sat in the evening light, David and Lacey came, and were received
by the Duchess of Snowdon, who could only say to David, as she held his
hand, "Windlehurst sent his regards to you, his loving regards. He was
sure you would come home--come home. He wished he were in power for your
sake."
So, for a few moments she talked vaguely, and said at last: "But Lady
Eglington, she will be glad to see you, such old friends as you are,
though not so old as Windlehurst and me--thirty years, over thirty la,
la!"
They turned to go to Hylda, and came face to face with Kate Heaver.
Kate looked at David as one would look who saw a lost friend return from
the dead. His eyes lighted, he held out his hand to her.
"It is good to see thee here," he said gently. "And 'tis the cross-roads
once again, sir," she rejoined.
"Thee means thee will marry Jasper?"
"Ay, I will marry Jasper now," she answered. "It has been a long
waiting."
"It could not be till now," she responded.
David looked at her reflectively, and said: "By devious ways the human
heart comes home. One can only stand in the door and wait. He has been
patient."
"I have been patient, too," she answered.
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. Cute as she can be--"
Suddenly he swung himself down to the deck below. "The desert's the place
for me to-night," he said. Stepping ashore, he turned to where the
Duchess stood on the deck, gazing out into the night. "Well, give my love
to the girls," he called, waving a hand upwards, as it were to the wide
world, and disappeared into the alluring whiteness.
"I've got to get a key-thought," he muttered to himself, as he walked
swiftly on, till only faint sounds came to him from the riverside. In the
letter he had written to Hylda, which was the turning-point of all for
her, he had spoken of these "key-thoughts." With all the childishness he
showed at times, he had wisely felt his way into spheres where life had
depth and meaning. The desert had justified him to himself and before the
spirits of departed peoples, who wandered over the sands, until at last
they became sand also, and were blown hither and thither, to make beds
for thousands of desert wayfarers, or paths for camels' feet, or a
blinding storm to overwhelm the traveller and the caravan; 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.
GLOSSARY
Aiwa----Yes.
Allah hu Achbar----God is most Great.
Al'mah----Female professional singers, signifying "a learned female."
Ardab----A measure equivalent to five English bushels.
Backsheesh----Tip, douceur.
Balass----Earthen vessel for carrying water.
Bdsha----Pasha.
Bersim----Clover.
Bismillah----In the name of God.
Bowdb----A doorkeeper.
Dahabieh----A Nile houseboat with large lateen sails.
Darabukkeh----A drum made of a skin stretched over an earthenware funnel.
Dourha----Maize.
Effendina----Most noble.
El Azhar----The Arab University at Cairo.
Fedddn----A measure of land representing about an acre.
Fellah----The Egyptian peasant.
Ghiassa----Small boat.
Hakim----Doctor.
Hasheesh----Leaves of hemp.
Inshallah----God willing.
Kdnoon----A musical instrument like a dulcimer.
Kavass----An orderly.
Kemengeh----A cocoanut fiddle.
Khamsin----A hot wind of Egypt and the Soudan.
Kourbash----A whip, often made of rhinoceros hide.
La ilaha illa-llah----There is no deity but God.
Malaish----No matter.
Malboos----Demented.
Mastaba----A bench.
Medjidie----A Turkish Order.
Mooshrabieh----Lattice window.
Moufettish----High Steward.
Mudir----The Governor of a
Mudirieh, or province.
Muezzin----The sheikh of the mosque who calls to prayer.
Narghileh----A Persian pipe.
Nebool----A quarter-staff.
Ramadan----The Mahommedan season of fasting.
Saadat-el-bdsha----Excellency Pasha.
Sdis----Groom.
Sakkia----The Persian water-wheel.
Salaam----Eastern salutation.
Sheikh-el-beled----Head of a village.
Tarboosh----A Turkish turban.
Ulema----Learned men.
Wakf----Mahommedan Court dealing with succession, etc.
Welee----A holy man or saint.
Yashmak----A veil for the lower part of the face.
Yelek----A long vest or smock.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "WEAVERS":
A cloak of words to cover up the real thought behind
Antipathy of the man in the wrong to the man in the right
Antipathy of the lesser to the greater nature
Begin to see how near good is to evil
But the years go on, and friends have an end
Cherish any alleviating lie
Does any human being know what he can bear of temptation
Friendship means a giving and a getting
He's a barber-shop philosopher
Heaven where wives without number awaited him
Honesty was a thing he greatly desired--in others
How little we can know to-day what we shall feel tomorrow
How many conquests have been made in the name of God
Monotonously intelligent
No virtue in not falling, when you're not tempted
Of course I've hated, or I wouldn't be worth a button
One does the work and another gets paid
Only the supremely wise or the deeply ignorant who never alter
Passion to forget themselves
Political virtue goes unrewarded
She knew what to say and what to leave unsaid
Smiling was part of his equipment
Sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home
Soul tortured through different degrees of misunderstanding
The vague pain of suffered indifference
There is no habit so powerful as the habit of care of others
There's no credit in not doing what you don't want to do
To-morrow is no man's gift
Tricks played by Fact to discredit the imagination
Triumph of Oriental duplicity over Western civilisation
We want every land to do as we do; and we want to make 'em do it
We must live our dark hours alone
When God permits, shall man despair?
Woman's deepest right and joy and pain in one--to comfort