Within three months David and Hope had seen the hills of Moab from the
top of the Mount of Olives; watched the sun go down over the Sea of
Galilee; plucked green boughs from the cedars on Lebanon; broken into
placid exclamations of delight in the wild orchard of nectarine blossoms
by the lofty ruins of Baalbac; walked in that street called Straight at
Damascus; journeyed through the desert with a caravan to Palmyra when
the Druses were up; and, at last, looked upon the spot where lived that
Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.
In this land they stayed; and even now far up the Nile you will hear of
the Two Strange People who travelled the river even to Dongola and some
way back--only some way back, for a long time. In particular you will
hear of them from an old dragoman called Mahommed Ramadan Saggara, and
a white-haired jeweller of Assiout, called Abdul Huseyn. These two
men still tell the tale of the two mad English folk with faces like
no English people ever seen in Egypt, who refused protection in their
travels, but went fearlessly among the Arabs everywhere, to do good and
fear not. The Quaker hat and saddened drab worked upon the Arab mind to
advantage.
In Egypt, David and Hope found their pious mission--though historians
have since called it “whimsical and unpractical”: David’s to import the
great Syrian donkey, which was to banish the shame of grossly burdening
the small donkey of the land of Pharaoh; and Hope’s to build schools
where English should be taught, to exclude “that language of Belial,”
as David called French. When their schemes came home to Framley, with
an order on David’s bankers for ten thousand pounds, grey-garbed
consternation walked abroad, and in meeting the First Day following
no one prayed or spoke for an hour or more. At last, however, friend
Fairley rose in his place and said:
“The Lord shall deliver the heathen into their hands.”
Then the Spirit moved freely and severely among them all, and friend
Fairley was, as he said himself, “crowded upon the rails by the
yearlings of the flock.” For he alone of all Framley believed that David
and Hope had not thrown away the Quaker drab, the shovel hat and the
poke bonnet, and had gone forth fashionable, worldly and an hungered,
among the fleshpots of Egypt. There was talk of gilded palaces,
Saracenic splendours and dark suggestions from the Arabian Nights.
Still, the ten thousand pounds went to David and Hope where they
smilingly laboured through the time of high Nile and low Nile, and
khamsin and sirocco, and cholera, and, worse than all, the banishments
to the hot Siberia of Fazougli.
But Mahommed Ramadan Saggara babbles yet of the time when, for one day,
David threw away his shovel hat; and Abdul Huseyn, the jeweller, tells
how, on the same day, the Sitt--that is, Hope--bought of him a ring of
turquoises and put it on her finger with a curious smile.
That day David and Hope, the one in a pith helmet, the other with a
turquoise ring on her left hand, went to dine with Shelek Pasha, the
Armenian Governor of the province, a man of varied talents, not least of
which was deceit of an artistic kind. For, being an Armenian, he said he
was a true Christian, and David believed him, though Hope did not; and
being an Oriental, he said he told the truth; and again David believed
him, though Hope did not. He had a red beard, an eye that glinted red
also, and fat, smooth fingers which kept playing with a string of beads
as though it were a rosary.
As hard as he worked to destroy the Quaker in David, she worked against
him; and she did not fear the end, for she believed in David Hyam of
Framley. It was Shelek Pasha’s influence, persistently and adroitly used
for two years, which made friend David at last put aside for this one
day his Quaker hat. And the Pasha rejoiced; for, knowing human nature
after a fashion, he understood that when you throw the outer sign
away--the sign to you since your birth, like the fingers of your
hand--the inner grace begins decadence and in due time disappears.
Shelek Pasha had awaited this with Oriental patience, for he was sure
that if David gave way in one thing he would give way in all--and with
a rush, some day. Now, at last, he had got David and Hope to dine with
him; he had his meshes of deceit around them.
When they came to dinner Shelek Pasha saw the turquoise ring upon the
finger of friend Hope, and this startled him and pleased him. Here, he
knew, was his greatest enemy where David was concerned, and yet this
pretty Saint Elizabeth was wearing a fine turquoise ring with a poke
bonnet, in a very worldly fashion. He almost rubbed his eyes, it was so
hard to believe; for time and again he had offered antichi in bracelets,
rings and scarabs, and fine cottons from Beni-Mazar; and had been
promptly and firmly told that the Friends wore no jewelry nor
gay attire. Shelek Pasha, being a Christian--after the Armenian
fashion--then desired to learn of this strange religion, that his own
nature might be bettered, for, alas! snares for the soul are many in the
Orient. For this Hope had quietly but firmly referred him to David.
Then he had tried another tack: he had thrown in his interest with her
first school in his mudirieh; he got her Arab teachers from Cairo who
could speak English; he opened the large schoolhouse himself with great
ceremony, and with many kavasses in blue and gold. He said to himself
that you never could tell what would happen in this world, and it was
well to wait, and to watch the approach of that good angel Opportunity.
With all his devices, however, he could not quite understand Hope, and
he walked warily, lest through his lack of understanding he should, by
some mischance, come suddenly upon a reef, and his plans go shipwreck.
Yet all the time he laughed in his sleeve, for he foresaw the day when
all this money the Two Strange People were spending in his mudirieh
should become his own. If he could not get their goods and estates
peaceably, riots were so easy to arrange; he had arranged them before.
Then, when the Two Strange People had been struck with panic, the Syrian
donkey-market, and the five hundred feddans of American cotton, and the
new schools would be his for a song--or a curse.
When he saw the turquoise ring on the finger of the little Quaker lady
he fancied he could almost hear the accompaniment of the song. He tore
away tender portions of roasted lamb with his fingers, and crammed them
into his mouth, rejoicing. With the same greasy fingers he put upon
Hope’s plate a stuffed cucumber, and would have added a clammy sweet
and a tumbler of sickly sherbet at the same moment; but Hope ate nothing
save a cake of dourha bread, and drank only a cup of coffee.
Meanwhile, Shelek Pasha talked of the school, of the donkey-market,
the monopoly of which the Khedive had granted David; and of the
new prosperous era opening up in Egypt, due to the cotton David had
introduced as an experiment. David’s heart waxed proud within him
that he had walked out of Framley to the regeneration of a country. He
likened himself to Joseph, son of Jacob; and at once the fineness of his
first purposes became blunted.
As Shelek Pasha talked on, of schools, of taxes, of laws, of government,
to David, with no hat on--Samson without his hair--Hope’s mind was
working as it had never worked before. She realised what a prodigious
liar Shelek Pasha was; for, talking benignly of equitable administration
as he did, she recalled the dark stories she had heard of rapine and
cruel imprisonment in this same mudirieh.
Suddenly Shelek Pasha saw the dark-blue eyes fastened upon his face
with a curious intentness, a strange questioning; and the blue of the
turquoise on the hand folded over the other in the grey lap did not
quite reassure him. He stopped talking, and spoke in a low voice to his
kavass, who presently brought a bottle of champagne--a final proof
that Shelek Pasha was not an ascetic or a Turk. As the bottle was being
opened the Pasha took up his string of beads and began to finger them,
for the blue eyes in the poke bonnet were disconcerting. He was about to
speak when Hope said, in a clear voice:
“Thee has a strange people beneath thee. Thee rules by the sword, or
the word of peace, friend?” The fat, smooth hands fingered the beads
swiftly. Shelek Pasha was disturbed, as he proved by replying in
French--he had spent years of his youth in France: “Par la force
morale, toujours, madame--by moral force, always,” he hastened to add
in English. Then, casting down his eyes with truly Armenian modesty,
he continued in Arabic: “By the word of peace, oh woman of the clear
eyes--to whom God give length of days!”
Shelek Pasha smiled a greasy smile, and held the bottle of champagne
over the glass set for friend David.
Never in his life had David the Quaker tasted champagne. In his eyes, in
the eyes of Framley, it had been the brew especially prepared by Sheitan
to tempt to ruin the feeble ones of the earth. But the doublet of
David’s mind was all unbraced now; his hat was off, his Quaker drab was
spotted with the grease of a roasted lamb. He had tasted freedom; he was
near to license now.
He took his hand from the top of the glass, and the amber liquid and the
froth poured in. At that instant he saw Hope’s eyes upon his, he saw her
hand go to the poke bonnet, as it were to unloosen the strings. He saw
for the first time the turquoise ring; he saw the eyes of Shelek Pasha
on Hope with a look prophesying several kinds of triumph, none palatable
to him; and he stopped short on that road easy of gradient, which Shelek
Pasha was macadamising for him. He put his hand up as though to pull his
hat down over his eyes, as was his fashion when troubled or when he was
setting his mind to a task.
The hat was not there; but Hope’s eyes were on his, and there were a
hundred Quaker hats or Cardinals’ hats in them. He reached out quickly
and caught Hope’s hand as it undid the strings of her grey bonnet. “Will
thee be mad, Hope?”
“All the world’s mad but thee and me, David, and thee’s a bit mad,” she
answered in the tongue of Framley.
“The gaud upon thy hand?” he asked sternly; and his eyes flashed from
her to Shelek Pasha, for a horrible suspicion crept into his brain--a
shameless suspicion; but even a Quaker may be human and foolish, as
history has shown.
“The wine at thine elbow, David, and thine hat!” she answered steadily.
David, the friend of peace, was bitterly angry. He caught up the glass
of champagne and dashed it upon the fine prayer-rug which Shelek Pasha
had, with a kourbash, collected for taxes from a Greek merchant back
from Tiflis--the rug worth five hundred English pounds, the taxes but
twenty Turkish pounds.
“Thee is a villain, friend,” he said to Shelek Pasha in a voice like a
noise in a barrel; “I read thee as a book.”
“But through the eyes of your wife, effendi; she read me first--we
understand each other!” answered the Governor with a hateful smile,
knowing the end of one game was at hand, and beginning another instantly
with an intelligent malice.
Against all Quaker principles David’s sinful arm was lifted to strike,
but Hope’s hand prevented him, and Shelek Pasha motioned back the
Abyssinian slaves who had sprung forward menacingly from behind a
screen.
Hope led the outraged David, hatless, into the street.