The Weavers: a tale of England and Egypt of fifty years ago - Complete. Gilbert Parker

half hour ago.

      A new factor had also entered into the equation which had been presented to David by Kaid with so flattering an insistence. He sat in the place where Kaid had left him, his face drawn and white, his eyes burning, but with no other “sign of agitation. He was frozen and still. His look was fastened now upon the door by which the Prince Pasha would enter, now upon the door through which he had passed to the rescue of the English girl, whom he had seen drive off safely with her maid. In their swift passage from the Palace to the carriage, a thing had been done of even greater moment than the killing of the sensualist in the next room. In the journey to the gateway the girl David served had begged him to escape with her. This he had almost sharply declined; it would be no escape, he had said. She had urged that no one knew. He had replied that Kaid would come again for him, and suspicion would be aroused if he were gone.

      “Thee has safety,” he had said. “I will go back. I will say that I killed him. I have taken a life, I will pay for it as is the law.”

      Excited as she was, she had seen the inflexibility of his purpose. She had seen the issue also clearly. He would give himself up, and the whole story would be the scandal of Europe.

      “You have no right to save me only to kill me,” she had said desperately. “You would give your life, but you would destroy that which is more than life to me. You did not intend to kill him. It was no murder, it was punishment.” Her voice had got harder. “He would have killed my life because he was evil. Will you kill it because you are good? Will you be brave, quixotic, but not pitiful? … No, no, no!” she had said, as his hand was upon the gate, “I will not go unless you promise that you will hide the truth, if you can.” She had laid her hand upon his shoulder with an agonised impulse. “You will hide it for a girl who will cherish your memory her whole life long. Ah—God bless you!”

      She had felt that she conquered before he spoke as, indeed, he did not speak, but nodded his head and murmured something indistinctly. But that did not matter, for she had won; she had a feeling that all would be well. Then he had placed her in her carriage, and she was driven swiftly away, saying to herself half hysterically: “I am safe, I am safe. He will keep his word.”

      Her safety and his promise were the new factor which changed the equation for which Kaid would presently ask the satisfaction. David’s life had suddenly come upon problems for which his whole past was no preparation. Conscience, which had been his guide in every situation, was now disarmed, disabled, and routed. It had come to terms.

      In going quickly through the room, they had disarranged a table. The girl’s cloak had swept over it, and a piece of brie-a-brae had been thrown upon the floor. He got up and replaced it with an attentive air. He rearranged the other pieces on the table mechanically, seeing, feeling another scene, another inanimate thing which must be for ever and for ever a picture burning in his memory. Yet he appeared to be casually doing a trivial and necessary act. He did not definitely realise his actions; but long afterwards he could have drawn an accurate plan of the table, could have reproduced upon it each article in its exact place as correctly as though it had been photographed. There were one or two spots of dust or dirt on the floor, brought in by his boots from the garden. He flicked them aside with his handkerchief.

      How still it was! Or was it his life which had become so still? It seemed as if the world must be noiseless, for not a sound of the life in other parts of the Palace came to him, not an echo or vibration of the city which stirred beyond the great gateway. Was it the chilly hand of death passing over everything, and smothering all the activities? His pulses, which, but a few minutes past, were throbbing and pounding like drums in his ears, seemed now to flow and beat in very quiet. Was this, then, the way that murderers felt, that men felt who took human life—so frozen, so little a part of their surroundings? Did they move as dead men among the living, devitalised, vacuous calm?

      His life had been suddenly twisted out of recognition. All that his habit, his code, his morals, his religion, had imposed upon him had been overturned in one moment. To take a human life, even in battle, was against the code by which he had ever been governed, yet he had taken life secretly, and was hiding it from the world.

      Accident? But had it been necessary to strike at all? His presence alone would have been enough to save the girl from further molestation; but, he had thrown himself upon the man like a tiger. Yet, somehow, he felt no sorrow for that. He knew that if again and yet again he were placed in the same position he would do even as he had done—even as he had done with the man Kimber by the Fox and Goose tavern beyond Hamley. He knew that the blow he had given then was inevitable, and he had never felt real repentance. Thinking of that blow, he saw its sequel in the blow he had given now. Thus was that day linked with the present, thus had a blow struck in punishment of the wrong done the woman at the crossroads been repeated in the wrong done the girl who had just left him.

      A sound now broke the stillness. It was a door shutting not far off. Kaid was coming. David turned his face towards the room where Foorgat Bey was lying dead. He lifted his arms with a sudden passionate gesture. The blood came rushing through his veins again. His life, which had seemed suspended, was set free; and an exaltation of sorrow, of pain, of action, possessed him.

      “I have taken a life, O my God!” he murmured. “Accept mine in service for this land. What I have done in secret, let me atone for in secret, for this land—for this poor land, for Christ’s sake!”

      Footsteps were approaching quickly. With a great effort of the will he ruled himself to quietness again. Kaid entered, and stood before him in silence. David rose. He looked Kaid steadily in the eyes. “Well?” said Kaid placidly.

      “For Egypt’s sake I will serve thee,” was the reply. He held out his hand. Kaid took it, but said, in smiling comment on the action: “As the Viceroy’s servant there is another way!”

      “I will salaam to-morrow, Kaid,” answered David.

      “It is the only custom of the place I will require of thee, effendi. Come.”

      A few moments later they were standing among the consuls and officials in the salon.

      “Where is Nahoum?” asked Kaid, looking round on the agitated throng.

      No one answered. Smiling, Kaid whispered in David’s ear.

CHAPTER VII. THE COMPACT

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      One by one the lights went out in the Palace. The excited guests were now knocking at the doors of Cairene notables, bent upon gossip of the night’s events, or were scouring the bazaars for ears into which to pour the tale of how David was exalted and Nahoum was brought low; how, before them all, Kaid had commanded Nahoum to appear at the Palace in the morning at eleven, and the Inglesi, as they had named David, at ten. But they declared to all who crowded upon their words that the Inglesi left the Palace with a face frozen white, as though it was he that had met debacle, while Nahoum had been as urbane and cynical as though he had come to the fulness of his power.

      Some, on hearing this, said: “Beware Nahoum!” But those who had been at the Palace said: “Beware the Inglesi!” This still Quaker, with the white shining face and pontifical hat, with his address of “thee” and “thou,” and his forms of speech almost Oriental in their imagery and simplicity, himself an archaism, had impressed them with a sense of power. He had prompted old Diaz Pasha to speak of him as a reincarnation, so separate and withdrawn he seemed at the end of the evening, yet with an uncanny mastery in his dark brown eyes. One of the Ulema, or holy men, present had said in reply to Diaz: “It is the look of one who hath walked with Death and bought and sold with Sheitan the accursed.” To Nahoum Pasha, Dim had said, as the former left the Palace, a cigarette between his fingers: “Sleep not nor slumber, Nahoum. The world was never lost by one earthquake.” And Nahoum had replied with a smooth friendliness: “The world is not reaped in one harvest.”

      “The day is at hand—the East against the West,” murmured