The Weavers Part 29

"No, you are thinking of my husband. The laboratory is his."

"But the retorts are yours."

"The precipitations are his."

"Ah, well, at least you help him to fuse the const.i.tuents!... But now, be quite confidential to an old man who has experimented too. Is your husband really an amateur scientist, or is he a scientific amateur? Is it a pose or a taste? I fiddled once--and wrote sonnets; one was a pose, the other a taste."

It was mere persiflage, but it was a jest which made an unintended wound. Hylda became conscious of a sudden sharp inquiry going on in her mind. There flashed into it the question, Does Eglington's heart ever really throb for love of any object or any cause? Even in moments of greatest intimacy, soon after marriage, when he was most demonstrative towards her, he had seemed preoccupied, except when speaking about himself and what he meant to do. Then he made her heart throb in response to his confident, ardent words--concerning himself. But his own heart, did it throb? Or was it only his brain that throbbed?

Suddenly, with an exclamation, she involuntarily laid a hand upon Windlehurst's arm. She was looking down the room straight before her to a group of people towards which other groups were now converging, attracted by one who seemed to be a centre of interest.

Presently the eager onlookers drew aside, and Lord Windlehurst observed moving up the room a figure he had never seen before. The new-comer was dressed in a grey and blue official dress, unrelieved save by silver braid at the collar and at the wrists. There was no decoration, but on the head was a red fez, which gave prominence to the white, broad forehead, with the dark hair waving away behind the ears. Lord Windlehurst held his eye-gla.s.s to his eye in interested scrutiny. "H'm,"

he said, with lips pursed out, "a most notable figure, a most remarkable face! My dear, there's a fortune in that face. It's a national a.s.set."

He saw the flush, the dumb amazement, the poignant look in Lady Eglington's face, and registered it in his mind. "Poor thing," he said to himself, "I wonder what it is all about--I wonder. I thought she had no unregulated moments. She gave promise of better things." The Foreign Minister was bringing his guest towards them. The new-comer did not look at them till within a few steps of where they stood. Then his eyes met those of Lady Eglington. For an instant his steps were arrested. A swift light came into his face, softening its quiet austerity and strength.

It was David.

CHAPTER XIX. SHARPER THAN A SWORD

A glance of the eye was the only sign of recognition between David and Hylda; nothing that others saw could have suggested that they had ever met before. Lord Windlehurst at once engaged David in conversation.

At first when Hylda had come back from Egypt, those five years ago, she had often wondered what she would think or do if she ever were to see this man again; whether, indeed, she could bear it. Well, the moment and the man had come. Her eyes had gone blind for an instant; it had seemed for one sharp, crucial moment as though she could not bear it; then the gulf of agitation was pa.s.sed, and she had herself in hand.

While her mind was engaged subconsciously with what Lord Windlehurst and David said, comprehending it all, and, when Lord Windlehurst appealed to her, offering by a word contribution to the 'pourparler', she was studying David as steadily as her heated senses would permit her.

He seemed to her to have put on twenty years in the steady force of his personality--in the composure of his bearing, in the self-reliance of his look, though his face and form were singularly youthful. The face was handsome and alight, the look was that of one who weighed things; yet she was conscious of a great change. The old delicate quality of the features was not so marked, though there was nothing material in the look, and the head had not a sordid line, while the hand that he now and again raised, brus.h.i.+ng his forehead meditatively, had gained much in strength and force. Yet there was something--something different, that brought a slight cloud into her eyes. It came to her now, a certain melancholy in the bearing of the figure, erect and well-balanced as it was. Once the feeling came, the certainty grew. And presently she found a strange sadness in the eyes, something that lurked behind all that he did and all that he was, some shadow over the spirit. It was even more apparent when he smiled.

As she was conscious of this new reading of him, a motion arrested her glance, a quick lifting of the head to one side, as though the mind had suddenly been struck by an idea, the glance flying upward in abstracted questioning. This she had seen in her husband, too, the same brisk lifting of the head, the same quick smiling. Yet this face, unlike Eglington's, expressed a perfect single-mindedness; it wore the look of a self-effacing man of luminous force, a concentrated battery of energy.

Since she had last seen him every sign of the provincial had vanished.

He was now the well-modulated man of affairs, elegant in his simplicity of dress, with the dignified air of the intellectual, yet with the decision of a man who knew his mind.

Lord Windlehurst was leaving. Now David and she were alone. Without a word they moved on together through the throng, the eyes of all following them, until they reached a quiet room at one end of the salon, where were only a few people watching the crowd pa.s.s the doorway.

"You will be glad to sit," he said, motioning her to a chair beside some palms. Then, with a change of tone, he added: "Thee is not sorry I am come?"

Thee--the old-fas.h.i.+oned simple Quaker word! She put her fingers to her eyes. Her senses were swimming with a distant memory. The East was in her brain, the glow of the skies, the gleam of the desert, the swish of the Nile, the cry of the sweet-seller, the song of the dance-girl, the strain of the darabukkeh, the call of the skis. She saw again the ghia.s.sas drifting down the great river, laden with dourha; she saw the mosque of the blue tiles with its placid fountain, and its handful of wors.h.i.+ppers praying by the olive-tree. She watched the moon rise above the immobile Sphinx, she looked down on the banqueters in the Palace, David among them, and Foorgat Bey beside her. She saw Foorgat Bey again lying dead at her feet. She heard the stir of the leaves; she caught the smell of the lime-trees in the Palace garden as she fled. She recalled her reckless return to Cairo from Alexandria. She remembered the little room where she and David, Nahoum and Mizraim, crossed a bridge over a chasm, and stood upon ground which had held good till now--till this hour, when the man who had played a most vital part in her life had come again out of a land which, by some forced obliquity of mind and stubbornness of will, she had a.s.sured herself she would never see again.

She withdrew her hand from her eyes, and saw him looking at her calmly, though his face was alight. "Thee is fatigued," he said. "This is labour which wears away the strength." He made a motion towards the crowd.

She smiled a very little, and said: "You do not care for such things as this, I know. Your life has its share of it, however, I suppose."

He looked out over the throng before he answered. "It seems an eddy of purposeless waters. Yet there is great depth beneath, or there were no eddy; and where there is depth and the eddy there is danger--always." As he spoke she became almost herself again. "You think that deep natures have most perils?"

"Thee knows it is so. Human nature is like the earth: the deeper the plough goes into the soil unploughed before, the more evil substance is turned up--evil that becomes alive as soon as the sun and the air fall upon it."

"Then, women like me who pursue a flippant life, who ride in this merry-go-round"--she made a gesture towards the crowd beyond--"who have no depth, we are safest, we live upon the surface." Her gaiety was forced; her words were feigned.

"Thee has pa.s.sed the point of danger, thee is safe," he answered meaningly.

"Is that because I am not deep, or because the plough has been at work?"

she asked. "In neither case I am not sure you are right."

"Thee is happily married," he said reflectively; "and the prospect is fair."

"I think you know my husband," she said in answer, and yet not in answer.

"I was born in Hamley where he has a place--thee has been there?" he asked eagerly.

"Not yet. We are to go next Sunday, for the first time to the Cloistered House. I had not heard that my husband knew you, until I saw in the paper a few days ago that your home was in Hamley. Then I asked Eglington, and he told me that your family and his had been neighbours for generations."

"His father was a Quaker," David rejoined, "but he forsook the faith."

"I did not know," she answered, with some hesitation. There was no reason why, when she and Eglington had talked of Hamley, he should not have said his own father had once been a Quaker; yet she had dwelt so upon the fact that she herself had Quaker blood, and he had laughed so much over it, with the amus.e.m.e.nt of the superior person, that his silence on this one point struck her now with a sense of confusion.

"You are going to Hamley--we shall meet there?" she continued.

"To-day I should have gone, but I have business at the Foreign Office to-morrow. One needs time to learn that all 'private interests and partial affections' must be sacrificed to public duty."

"But you are going soon? You will be there on Sunday?"

"I shall be there to-morrow night, and Sunday, and for one long week at least. Hamley is the centre of the world, the axle of the universe--you shall see. You doubt it?" he added, with a whimsical smile.

"I shall dispute most of what you say, and all that you think, if you do not continue to use the Quaker 'thee' and 'thou'--ungrammatical as you are so often."

"Thee is now the only person in London, or in England, with whom I use 'thee' and 'thou.' I am no longer my own master, I am a public servant, and so I must follow custom."

"It is destructive of personality. The 'thee' and 'thou' belong to you.

I wonder if the people of Hamley will say 'thee' and 'thou' to me. I hope, I do hope they will."

"Thee may be sure they will. They are no respecters of persons there.

They called your husband's father Robert--his name was Robert. Friend Robert they called him, and afterwards they called him Robert Denton till he died."

"Will they call me Hylda?" she asked, with a smile. "More like they will call thee Friend Hylda; it sounds simple and strong," he replied.

"As they call Claridge Pasha Friend David," she answered, with a smile.

"David is a good name for a strong man."

"That David threw a stone from a sling and smote a giant in the forehead. The stone from this David's sling falls into the ocean and is lost beneath the surface."

His voice had taken on a somewhat sombre tone, his eyes looked away into the distance; yet he smiled too, and a hand upon his knee suddenly closed in sympathy with an inward determination.

A light of understanding came into her face. They had been keeping things upon the surface, and, while it lasted, he seemed a lesser man than she had thought him these past years. But now--now there was the old unschooled simplicity, the unique and lonely personality, the homely soul and body bending to one root-idea, losing themselves in a wave of duty. Again he was to her, once more, the dreamer, the worker, the conqueror--the conqueror of her own imagination. She had in herself the soul of altruism, the heart of the crusader. Touched by the fire of a great idea, she was of those who could have gone out into the world without wallet or scrip, to work pa.s.sionately for some great end.

And she had married the Earl of Eglington!