That evening the Two Strange People went to Abdul Huseyn, the jeweller,
and talked with him for more than an hour; for Abdul Huseyn, as
Egyptians go, was a kindly man. He had taught Arabic to David and Hope.
He would have asked more than twelve pieces of silver to betray them.
The next afternoon a riot occurred around the house of the Two Strange
People and the school they had built; and Shelek Pasha would have had
his spite of them, and his will of the donkey-market, the school, and
the cotton-fields, but for Abdul Huseyn and three Sheikhs, friends of
his--at a price--who addressed the crowd and quieted them. They declared
that the Two were mad folk with whom even the English folk would have
naught to do; that they were of those from whom God had taken the souls,
leaving their foolish bodies on earth, and were therefore to be cared
for and protected, as the Koran said, be they infidel or the Faithful.
Furthermore, said Abdul Huseyn, in proof of their madness and a certain
sort of holiness, they wore hats always, as Arabs wore their turbans,
and were as like good Mahommedans as could be, sitting down to speak and
standing up to pray. He also added that they could not be enemies of the
Faithful, or a Christian Mudir would not have turned against them.
And Abdul Huseyn prevailed against Shelek Pasha--at a price; for Hope,
seeing no need for martyrdom, had not hesitated to open her purse.
Three days afterward, David, with Abdul Huseyn, went to the Palace of
the Khedive at Cairo, and within a week Shelek Pasha was on his way to
Fazougli, the hot Siberia. For the rage of the Khedive was great when he
heard what David and Abdul Huseyn told him of the murderous riot Shelek
Pasha had planned. David, being an honest Quaker--for now again he wore
his shovel hat--did not realise that the Khedive had only hungered for
this chance to confiscate the goods of Shelek Pasha. Was it not justice
to take for the chosen ruler of the Faithful the goods an Armenian
Christian had stolen from the poor? Before David left the Palace the
Khedive gave him the Order of the Mejidfeh, in token of what he had done
for Egypt.
In the end, however, David took three things only out of Egypt: his
wife, the Order of the Mejidfeh, and Shelek Pasha’s pardon, which he
strove for as hard as he had striven for his punishment, when he came
to know the Khedive had sent the Mudir to Fazougli merely that he might
despoil him. He only achieved this at last, again on the advice of Abdul
Huseyn, by giving the Khedive as backsheesh the Syrian donkey-market,
the five hundred feddans of cotton, and Hope’s new school. Then,
believing in no one in Egypt any more, he himself went with an armed
escort and his Quaker hat, and the Order of the Khedive, to Fazougli,
and brought Shelek Pasha penniless to Cairo.
Nowadays, on the mastaba before his grandson’s door, Abdul Huseyn, over
ninety “by the grace of Allah,” still tells of the backsheesh he secured
from the Two Strange People for his help on a certain day.
In Framley, where the whole truth never came, David and Hope
occasionally take from a secret drawer the Order of the Mejidfeh to look
at it, and, as David says, to “learn the lesson of Egypt once again.”
Having learned it to some purpose--and to the lifelong edification of
old friend Fairley, the only one who knew the whole truth--they founded
three great schools for Quaker children. They were wont to say to each
other, as the hurrying world made inroads on the strict Quaker life
to which they had returned: “All the world’s mad but thee and me, and
thee’s a bit mad.”