Donovan Pasha, and Some People of Egypt Part 2

"I shouldn't wonder. Selamlik, the old leper, 'll lay in wait for him.

He'll get lost in the sugar-cane one of these evenings soon."

"Couldn't we..." d.i.c.ky paused.

Fielding started, looked at d.i.c.ky intently, and then shook his head sadly. "It's no good, d.i.c.ky. It never is."

"'While the lamp holds out to burn...'" said d.i.c.ky, and lighted another cigarette.

Precisely at seven o'clock Heatherby appeared. He had on a dress-suit, brown and rusty, a white tie made of a handkerchief torn in two, and a pair of patent leather shoes, scraggy and cracked.

Fielding behaved well, d.i.c.ky was amiable and attentive, and the dinner being ready to the instant, there was no waiting, there were no awkward pauses. No names of English people were mentioned, England was not named; nor Cairo, nor anything that English people abroad love to discuss. The fellah, the pasha, the Soudan were the only topics. Under Fielding's courtesy and d.i.c.ky's acute suggestions, Heatherby's weakened brain awaked, and he talked intelligently, till the moment coffee was brought in. Then, as Mahommed Seti retired, Heatherby suddenly threw himself forward, his arms on the table, and burst into sobs.

"Oh, you fellows, you fellows!" he said. There was silence for a minute, then he sobbed out again: "It's the first time I've been treated like a gentleman by men that knew me, these fifteen years. It--it gets me in the throat!"

His body shook with sobs. Fielding and d.i.c.ky were uncomfortable, for these were not the sobs of a driveller or a drunkard. Behind them was the blank failure of a life--fifteen years of miserable torture, of degradation, of a daily descent lower into the pit, of the servitude of shame. When at last he raised his streaming eyes, Fielding and d.i.c.ky could see the haunting terror of the soul, at whose elbow, as it were, every man cried: "You are without the pale!" That look told them how Heatherby of the Buffs had gone from table d'hote to table d'hote of Europe, from town to town, from village to village, to make acquaintances who repulsed him when they discovered who he really was.

Shady Heatherby, who cheated at cards!

Once Fielding made as if to put a hand on his shoulder and speak to him, but d.i.c.ky intervened with a look. The two drank their coffee, Fielding a little uneasily; but yet in his face there was a new look: of inquiry, of kindness, even of hope.

Presently d.i.c.ky flashed a look and nodded towards the door, and Fielding dropped his cigar and went on deck, and called down to Holgate the engineer:

"Get up steam, and make for Luxor. It's moonlight, and we're safe enough in this high Nile, eh, Holgate?"

"Safe enough, or aw'm a Dootchman," said Holgate. Then they talked in a low voice together. Down in the saloon, d.i.c.ky sat watching Heatherby. At last the Lost One raised his head again.

"It's worth more to me, this night, than you fellows know," he said brokenly.

"That's all right," said d.i.c.ky. "Have a cigar?"

He shook his head. "It's come at the right time. I wanted to be treated like an Englishman once more--just once more."

"Don't worry. Take in a reef and go steady for a bit. The milk's spilt, but there are other meadows...." d.i.c.ky waved an arm up the river, up towards the Soudan!

The Lost One nodded, then his eyes blazed up and took on a hungry look.

His voice suddenly came in a whisper.

"Gordon was a white man. Gordon said to me three years ago: 'Come with me, I'll help you on. You don't need to live, if you don't want to. Most of us will get knocked out up there in the Soudan.' Gordon said that to me. But there was another fellow with Gordon who knew me, and I couldn't face it. So I stayed behind here. I've been everything, anything, to that swine, Selamlik Pasha; but when he told me yesterday to bring him the daughter of the Arab he killed with his kourbash, I jibbed. I couldn't stand that. Her father had fed me more than once. I jibbed--by G.o.d, I jibbed! I said I was an Englishman, and I'd see him d.a.m.ned first.

I said it, and I shot the horse, and I'd have shot him--what's that?"

There was a churning below. The Amenhotep was moving from the bank.

"She's going--the boat's going," said the Lost One, trembling to his feet.

"Sit down," said d.i.c.ky, and gripped him by the arm. "Where are you taking me?" asked Heatherby, a strange, excited look in his face.

"Up the river."

He seemed to read d.i.c.ky's thoughts--the clairvoyance of an overwrought mind: "To--to a.s.souan?" The voice had a curious far-away sound.

"You shall go beyond a.s.souan," said d.i.c.ky. "To--to Gordon?" Heatherby's voice was husky and indistinct.

"Yes, here's Fielding; he'll give you the tip. Sit down." d.i.c.ky gently forced him down into a chair. Six months later, a letter came to d.i.c.ky from an Egyptian officer, saying that Heatherby of the Buffs had died gallantly fighting in a sortie sent by Gordon into the desert.

"He had a lot of luck," mused d.i.c.ky as he read. "They don't end that way as a rule."

Then he went to Fielding, humming a certain stave from one of Watts's hymns.

THE PRICE OF THE GRINDSTONE--AND THE DRUM

He lived in the days of Ismail the Khedive, and was familiarly known as the Murderer. He had earned his name, and he had no repentance. From the roof of a hut in his native village of Manfaloot he had dropped a grindstone on the head of Ebn Haroun, who contended with him for the affections of Aha.s.sa, the daughter of Haleel the barber, and Ebn Haroun's head was flattened like the cover of a pie. Then he had broken a cake of dourha bread on the roof for the pigeons above him, and had come down grinning to the street, where a hesitating mounted policeman fumbled with his weapon, and four ghaffirs waited for him with their naboots.

Seti then had weighed his chances, had seen the avenging friends of Ebn Haroun behind the ghaffirs, and therefore permitted himself to be marched off to the mudirieh. There the Mudir glared at him and had him loaded with chains and flung into the prison, where two hundred convicts arrayed themselves against myriad tribes which, killed individually, made a spot on the wall no bigger than a threepenny-bit! The carnage was great, and though Seti was sleepless night after night it was not because of his crime. He found some solace, however, in provoking his fellow-prisoners to a.s.saults upon each other; and every morning he grinned as he saw the dead and wounded dragged out into the clear suns.h.i.+ne.

The end to this came when the father of Seti, Abou Seti, went at night to the Mudir and said deceitfully: "Effendi, by the mercy of Heaven I have been spared even to this day; for is it not written in the Koran that a man shall render to his neighbour what is his neighbour's? What should Abou Seti do with ten feddans of land, while the servant of Allah, the Effendi Insagi, lives? What is honestly mine is eight feddans, and the rest, by the grace of G.o.d, is thine, O effendi."

Every feddan he had he had honestly earned, but this was his way of offering backsheesh.

And the Mudir had due anger and said: "No better are ye than a Frank to have hidden the truth so long and waxed fat as the Nile rises and falls.

The two feddans, as thou sayest, are mine."

Abou Seti bowed low, and rejoined, "Now shall I sleep in peace, by the grace of Heaven, and all my people under my date-trees--and all my people?" he added, with an upward look at the Mudir.

"But the rentals of the two feddans of land these ten years--thou hast eased thy soul by bringing the rentals thereof?"

Abou Seti's glance fell and his hands twitched. His fingers fumbled with his robe of striped silk. He cursed the Mudir in his heart for his bitter humour; but was not his son in prison, and did it not lie with the Mudir whether he lived or died? So he answered:

"All-seeing and all-knowing art thou, O effendi, and I have reckoned the rentals even to this hour for the ten years--fifty piastres for each feddan--"

"A hundred for the five years of high Nile," interposed the Mudir.

"Fifty for the five lean years, and a hundred for the five fat years,"

said Abou Seti, and wished that his words were poisoned arrows, that they might give the Mudir many deaths at once. "And may Allah give thee greatness upon thy greatness!"

"G.o.d prosper thee also, Abou Seti, and see that thou keep only what is thine own henceforth. Get thee gone in peace."

"At what hour shall I see the face of my son alive?" asked Abou Seti in a low voice, placing his hand upon his turban in humility.

"To-morrow at even, when the Muezzin calls from the mosque of El Ha.s.san, be thou at the west wall of the prison by the Gate of the Prophet's Sorrow, with thy fastest camel. Your son shall ride for me through the desert even to Farafreh, and bear a letter to the bimbas.h.i.+ there. If he bear it safely, his life is his own; if he fail, look to thy feddans of land!"

"G.o.d is merciful, and Seti is bone of my bone," said Abou Seti, and laid his hand again upon his turban. That was how Mahommed Seti did not at once pay the price of the grindstone, but rode into the desert bearing the message of the Mudir and returned safely with the answer, and was again seen in the cafes of Manfaloot. And none of Ebn Haroun's friends did aught, for the world knew through whom it was that Seti lived--and land was hard to keep in Manfaloot and the prison near.

But one day a kava.s.s of the Khedive swooped down on Manfaloot, and twenty young men were carried off in conscription. Among them was Seti, now married to Aha.s.sa, the fellah maid for whom the grindstone had fallen on Ebn Haroun's head. When the fatal number fell to him and it was ordained that he must go to Dongola to serve in the Khedive's legions, he went to his father, with Aha.s.sa wailing behind him.

"Save thyself," said the old man with a frown.