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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The Weavers, by Gilbert Parker, v5
+#92 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: The Weavers, Volume 5.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6265]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on November 14, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WEAVERS, BY PARKER, V5 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WEAVERS
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+BOOK V.
+
+
+XXXV.     THE FLIGHT OF THE WOUNDED
+XXXVI.    "IS IT ALWAYS SO-IN LIFE?"
+XXXVII.   THE FLYING SHUTTLE
+XXXVIII.  JASPER KIMBER SPEAKS
+XXXIX.    FAITH JOURNEYS TO LONDON
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+THE FLIGHT OF THE WOUNDED
+
+              "And Mario can soothe with a tenor note
+               The souls in purgatory."
+
+"Non ti scordar di mi!"  The voice rang out with passionate stealthy
+sweetness, finding its way into far recesses of human feeling.  Women of
+perfect poise and with the confident look of luxury and social fame
+dropped their eyes abstractedly on the opera-glasses lying in their laps,
+or the programmes they mechanically fingered, and recalled, they knew not
+why--for what had it to do with this musical narration of a tragic
+Italian tale!--the days when, in the first flush of their wedded life,
+they had set a seal of devotion and loyalty and love upon their arms,
+which, long ago, had gone to the limbo of lost jewels, with the chaste,
+fresh desires of worshipping hearts.  Young egotists, supremely happy and
+defiant in the pride of the fact that they loved each other, and that it
+mattered little what the rest of the world enjoyed, suffered, and
+endured--these were suddenly arrested in their buoyant and solitary
+flight, and stirred restlessly in their seats.  Old men whose days of
+work were over; who no longer marshalled their legions, or moved at a nod
+great ships upon the waters in masterful manoeuvres; whose voices were
+heard no more in chambers of legislation, lashing partisan feeling to a
+height of cruelty or lulling a storm among rebellious followers; whose
+intellects no longer devised vast schemes of finance, or applied secrets
+of science to transform industry--these heard the enthralling cry of a
+soul with the darkness of eternal loss gathering upon it, and drew back
+within themselves; for they too had cried like this one time or another
+in their lives.  Stricken, they had cried out, and ambition had fled
+away, leaving behind only the habit of living, and of work and duty.
+
+As Hylda, in the Duchess of Snowdon's box, listened with a face which
+showed nothing of what she felt, and looking straight at the stage before
+her, the words of a poem she had learned but yesterday came to her mind,
+and wove themselves into the music thrilling from the voice in the stage
+prison:
+
+    "And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
+       For the fulness of the days?  Have we withered or agonised?
+     Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue
+        thence?
+       Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?"
+
+"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence?  Was it then so?
+The long weeks which had passed since that night at Hamley, when she had
+told Eglington the truth about so many things, had brought no peace,
+no understanding, no good news from anywhere.  The morning after she
+had spoken with heart laid bare.  Eglington had essayed to have a
+reconciliation; but he had come as the martyr, as one injured.  His
+egotism at such a time, joined to his attempt to make light of things,
+of treating what had happened as a mere "moment of exasperation," as "one
+of those episodes inseparable from the lives of the high-spirited," only
+made her heart sink and grow cold, almost as insensible as the flesh
+under a spray of ether.  He had been neither wise nor patient.  She had
+not slept after that bitter, terrible scene, and the morning had found
+her like one battered by winter seas, every nerve desperately alert to
+pain, yet tears swimming at her heart and ready to spring to her eyes at
+a touch of the real thing, the true note--and she knew so well what the
+true thing was!  Their great moment had passed, had left her withdrawn
+into herself, firmly, yet without heart, performing the daily duties of
+life, gay before the world, the delightful hostess, the necessary and
+graceful figure at so many functions.
+
+Even as Soolsby had done, who went no further than to tell Eglington his
+dark tale, and told no one else, withholding it from "Our Man"; as Sybil
+Lady Eglington had shrunk when she had been faced by her obvious duty, so
+Hylda hesitated, but from better reason than either.  To do right in the
+matter was to strike her husband--it must be a blow now, since her voice
+had failed.  To do right was to put in the ancient home and house of
+Eglington one whom he--with anger and without any apparent desire to have
+her altogether for himself, all the riches of her life and love--had
+dared to say commanded her sympathy and interest, not because he was a
+man dispossessed of his rights, but because he was a man possessed of
+that to which he had no right.  The insult had stung her, had driven her
+back into a reserve, out of which she seemed unable to emerge.  How could
+she compel Eglington to do right in this thing--do right by his own
+father's son?
+
+Meanwhile, that father's son was once more imperilling his life, once
+more putting England's prestige in the balance in the Soudan, from which
+he had already been delivered twice as though by miracles.  Since he had
+gone, months before, there had been little news; but there had been much
+public anxiety; and she knew only too well that there had been
+'pourparlers' with foreign ministers, from which no action came safe-
+guarding David.
+
+Many a human being has realised the apathy, the partial paralysis of the
+will, succeeding a great struggle, which has exhausted the vital forces.
+Many a general who has fought a desperate and victorious fight after a
+long campaign, and amid all the anxieties and miseries of war, has failed
+to follow up his advantage, from a sudden lesion of the power for action
+in him.  He has stepped from the iron routine of daily effort into a
+sudden freedom, and his faculties have failed him, the iron of his will
+has vanished.  So it was with Hylda.  She waited for she knew not what.
+Was it some dim hope that Eglington might see the right as she saw it?
+That he might realise how unreal was this life they were living,
+outwardly peaceful and understanding, deluding the world, but inwardly a
+place of tears.  How she dreaded the night and its recurrent tears, and
+the hours when she could not sleep, and waited for the joyless morning,
+as one lost on the moor, blanched with cold, waits for the sun-rise!
+Night after night at a certain hour--the hour when she went to bed at
+last after that poignant revelation to Eglington--she wept, as she had
+wept then, heart-broken tears of disappointment, disillusion, loneliness;
+tears for the bitter pity of it all; for the wasting and wasted
+opportunities; for the common aim never understood or planned together;
+for the precious hours lived in an air of artificial happiness and social
+excitement; for a perfect understanding missed; for the touch which no
+longer thrilled.
+
+But the end of it all must come.  She was looking frail and delicate, and
+her beauty, newly refined, and with a fresh charm, as of mystery or pain,
+was touched by feverishness.  An old impatience once hers was vanished,
+and Kate Heaver would have given a month's wages for one of those flashes
+of petulance of other days ever followed by a smile.  Now the smile was
+all too often there, the patient smile which comes to those who have
+suffered.  Hardness she felt at times, where Eglington was concerned,
+for he seemed to need her now not at all, to be self-contained, self-
+dependent--almost arrogantly so; but she did not show it, and she was
+outwardly patient.
+
+In his heart of hearts Eglington believed that she loved him, that her
+interest in David was only part of her idealistic temperament--the
+admiration of a woman for a man of altruistic aims; but his hatred of
+David, of what David was, and of his irrefutable claims, reacted on her.
+Perverseness and his unhealthy belief that he would master her in the
+end, that she would one day break down and come to him, willing to take
+his view in all things, and to be his slave--all this drove him farther
+and farther on a fatal, ever-broadening path.
+
+Success had spoiled him.  He applied his gifts in politics, daringly
+unscrupulous, superficially persuasive, intellectually insinuating, to
+his wife; and she, who had been captured once by all these things, was
+not to be captured again.  She knew what alone could capture her; and,
+as she sat and watched the singers on the stage now, the divine notes of
+that searching melody still lingering in her heart, there came a sudden
+wonder whether Eglington's heart could not be wakened.  She knew that it
+never had been, that he had never known love, the transfiguring and
+reclaiming passion.  No, no, surely it could not be too late--her
+marriage with him had only come too soon!  He had ridden over her without
+mercy; he had robbed her of her rightful share of the beautiful and the
+good; he had never loved her; but if love came to him, if he could but
+once realise how much there was of what he had missed!  If he did not
+save himself--and her--what would be the end?  She felt the cords drawing
+her elsewhere; the lure of a voice she had heard in an Egyptian garden
+was in her ears.  One night at Hamley, in an abandonment of grief-life
+hurt her so--she had remembered the prophecy she had once made that she
+would speak to David, and that he would hear; and she had risen from her
+seat, impelled by a strange new feeling, and had cried: "Speak!  speak to
+me!"  As plainly as she had ever heard anything in her life, she had
+heard his voice speak to her a message that sank into the innermost
+recesses of her being, and she had been more patient afterwards.  She had
+no doubt whatever; she had spoken to him, and he had answered; but the
+answer was one which all the world might have heard.
+
+Down deep in her nature was an inalienable loyalty, was a simple,
+old-fashioned feeling that "they two," she and Eglington, should cleave
+unto each other till death should part.  He had done much to shatter
+that feeling; but now, as she listened to Mario's voice, centuries of
+predisposition worked in her, and a great pity awoke in her heart.  Could
+she not save him, win him, wake him, cure him of the disease of Self?
+
+The thought brought a light to her eyes which had not been there for many
+a day.  Out of the deeps of her soul this mist of a pure selflessness
+rose, the spirit of that idealism which was the real chord of sympathy
+between her and Egypt.
+
+Yes, she would, this once again, try to win the heart of this man; and so
+reach what was deeper than heart, and so also give him that without which
+his life must be a failure in the end, as Sybil Eglington had said.  How
+often had those bitter anguished words of his mother rung in her ears--
+"So brilliant and unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, so sure of
+winning a great place in the world .  .  .  so calculating and determined
+and ambitious !"  They came to her now, flashed between the eager
+solicitous eyes of her mind and the scene of a perfect and everlasting
+reconciliation which it conjured up--flashed and were gone; for her will
+rose up and blurred them into mist; and other words of that true
+palimpsest of Sybil Eglington's broken life came instead: "And though he
+loves me little, as he loves you little too, yet he is my son, and for
+what he is we are both responsible one way or another."  As the mother,
+so the wife.  She said to herself now in sad paraphrase, "And though he
+loves me little, yet he is my husband, and for what he is it may be that
+I am in some sense responsible."  Yet he is my husband!  All that it was
+came to her; the closed door, the drawn blinds; the intimacy which shut
+them away from all the world; the things said which can only be said
+without desecration between two honest souls who love each other; and
+that sweet isolation which makes marriage a separate world, with its own
+sacred revelation.  This she had known; this had been; and though the
+image of the sacred thing had been defaced, yet the shrine was not
+destroyed.
+
+For she believed that each had kept the letter of the law; that, whatever
+his faults, he had turned his face to no other woman.  If she had not
+made his heart captive and drawn him by an ever-shortening cord of
+attraction, yet she was sure that none other had any influence over him,
+that, as he had looked at her in those short-lived days of his first
+devotion, he looked at no other.  The way was clear yet.  There was
+nothing irretrievable, nothing irrevocable, which would for ever stain
+the memory and tarnish the gold of life when the perfect love should be
+minted.  Whatever faults of mind or disposition or character were his--
+or hers--there were no sins against the pledges they had made, nor the
+bond into which they had entered.  Life would need no sponge.  Memory
+might still live on without a wound or a cowl of shame.
+
+It was all part of the music to which she listened, and she was almost
+oblivious of the brilliant throng, the crowded boxes, or of the Duchess
+of Snowdon sitting near her strangely still, now and again scanning the
+beautiful face beside her with a reflective look.  The Duchess loved the
+girl--she was but a girl, after all--as she had never loved any of her
+sex; it had come to be the last real interest of her life.  To her eyes,
+dimmed with much seeing, blurred by a garish kaleidoscope of fashionable
+life, there had come a look which was like the ghost of a look she had,
+how many decades ago.
+
+Presently, as she saw Hylda's eyes withdraw from the stage, and look at
+her with a strange, soft moisture and a new light in them, she laid her
+fan confidently on her friend's knee, and said in her abrupt whimsical
+voice: "You like it, my darling; your eyes are as big as saucers.  You
+look as if you'd been seeing things, not things on that silly stage, but
+what Verdi felt when he wrote the piece, or something of more account
+than that."
+
+"Yes, I've been seeing things," Hylda answered with a smile which came
+from a new-born purpose, the dream of an idealist.  "I've been seeing
+things that Verdi did not see, and of more account, too.  .  .  .
+Do you suppose the House is up yet?"
+
+A strange look flashed into the Duchess's eyes, which had been watching
+her with as much pity as interest.  Hylda had not been near the House of
+Commons this session, though she had read the reports with her usual
+care.  She had shunned the place.
+
+"Why, did you expect Eglington?" the Duchess asked idly, yet she was
+watchful too, alert for every movement in this life where the footsteps
+of happiness were falling by the edge of a precipice, over which she
+would not allow herself to look.  She knew that Hylda did not expect
+Eglington, for the decision to come to the opera was taken at the last
+moment.
+
+"Of course not--he doesn't know we are here.  But if it wasn't too late,
+I thought I'd go down and drive him home."
+
+The Duchess veiled her look.  Here was some new development in the
+history which had been torturing her old eyes, which had given her and
+Lord Windlehurst as many anxious moments as they had known in many a day,
+and had formed them into a vigilance committee of two, who waited for the
+critical hour when they should be needed.
+
+"We'll go at once if you like," she replied.  "The opera will be over
+soon.  We sent word to Windlehurst to join us, you remember, but he won't
+come now; it's too late.  So, we'll go, if you like."
+
+She half rose, but the door of the box opened, and Lord Windlehurst
+looked in quizzically.  There was a smile on his face.
+
+"I'm late, I know; but you'll forgive me--you'll forgive me, dear lady,"
+he added to Hylda, "for I've been listening to your husband making a
+smashing speech for a bad cause."
+
+Hylda smiled.  "Then I must go and congratulate him," she answered, and
+withdrew her hand from that of Lord Windlehurst, who seemed to hold it
+longer than usual, and pressed it in a fatherly way.
+
+"I'm afraid the House is up," he rejoined, as Hylda turned for her opera-
+cloak; "and I saw Eglington leave Palace Yard as I came away."  He gave a
+swift, ominous glance towards the Duchess, which Hylda caught, and she
+looked at each keenly.
+
+"It's seldom I sit in the Peers' Gallery," continued Windlehurst;
+"I don't like going back to the old place much.  It seems empty and
+hollow.  But I wouldn't have missed Eglington's fighting speech for a
+good deal."
+
+"What was it about?" asked Hylda as they left the box.  She had a sudden
+throb of the heart.  Was it the one great question, that which had been
+like a gulf of fire between them?
+
+"Oh, Turkey--the unpardonable Turk," answered Windlehurst.  "As good a
+defence of a bad case as I ever heard."
+
+"Yes, Eglington would do that well," said the Duchess enigmatically,
+drawing her cloak around her and adjusting her hair.  Hylda looked at her
+sharply, and Lord Windlehurst slyly, but the Duchess seemed oblivious of
+having said anything out of the way, and added: "It's a gift seeing all
+that can be said for a bad cause, and saying it, and so making the other
+side make their case so strong that the verdict has to be just."
+
+"Dear Duchess, it doesn't always work out that way," rejoined Windlehurst
+with a dry laugh.  "Sometimes the devil's advocate wins."
+
+"You are not very complimentary to my husband," retorted Hylda, looking
+him in the eyes, for she was not always sure when he was trying to baffle
+her.
+
+"I'm not so sure of that.  He hasn't won his case yet.  He has only
+staved off the great attack.  It's coming--soon."
+
+"What is the great attack?  What has the Government, or the Foreign
+Office, done or left undone?"  "Well, my dear--" Suddenly Lord
+Windlehurst remembered himself, stopped, put up his eyeglass, and with
+great interest seemed to watch a gay group of people opposite; for the
+subject of attack was Egypt and the Government's conduct in not helping
+David, in view not alone of his present danger, but of the position of
+England in the country, on which depended the security of her highway to
+the East.  Windlehurst was a good actor, and he had broken off his words
+as though the group he was now watching had suddenly claimed his
+attention.  "Well, well, Duchess," he said reflectively, "I see a new
+nine days' wonder yonder."  Then, in response to a reminder from Hylda,
+he continued: "Ah, yes, the attack!  Oh, Persia--Persia, and our feeble
+diplomacy, my dear lady, though you mustn't take that as my opinion,
+opponent as I am.  That's the charge, Persia--and her cats."
+
+The Duchess breathed a sigh of relief; for she knew what Windlehurst had
+been going to say, and she shrank from seeing what she felt she would
+see, if Egypt and Claridge Pasha's name were mentioned.  That night at
+Harnley had burnt a thought into her mind which she did not like.  Not
+that she had any pity for Eglington; her thought was all for this girl
+she loved.  No happiness lay in the land of Egypt for her, whatever her
+unhappiness here; and she knew that Hylda must be more unhappy still
+before she was ever happy again, if that might be.  There was that
+concerning Eglington which Hylda did not know, yet which she must know
+one day--and then!  But why were Hylda's eyes so much brighter and softer
+and deeper to-night?  There was something expectant, hopeful, brooding in
+them.  They belonged not to the life moving round her, but were shining
+in a land of their own, a land of promise.  By an instinct in each of
+them they stood listening for a moment to the last strains of the opera.
+The light leaped higher in Hylda's eyes.
+
+"Beautiful--oh, so beautiful!" she said, her hand touching the Duchess's
+arm.
+
+The Duchess gave the slim warm fingers a spasmodic little squeeze.  "Yes,
+darling, beautiful," she rejoined; and then the crowd began to pour out
+behind them.
+
+Their carriages were at the door.  Lord Windlehurst put Hylda in.  "The
+House is up," he said.  "You are going on somewhere?"
+
+"No--home," she said, and smiled into his old, kind, questioning eyes.
+"Home!"
+
+"Home!" he murmured significantly as he turned towards the Duchess and
+her carriage.  "Home!" he repeated, and shook his head sadly.
+
+"Shall I drive you to your house?" the Duchess asked.
+
+"No, I'll go with you to your door, and walk back to my cell.  Home!" he
+growled to the footman, with a sardonic note in the voice.
+
+As they drove away, the Duchess turned to him abruptly.  "What did you
+mean by your look when you said you had seen Eglington drive away from
+the House?"
+
+"Well, my dear Betty, she--the fly-away--drives him home now.  It has
+come to that."
+
+"To her house--Windlehurst, oh, Windlehurst!"
+
+She sank back in the cushions, and gave what was as near a sob as she had
+given in many a day.  Windlehurst took her hand.  "No, not so bad as that
+yet.  She drove him to his club.  Don't fret, my dear Betty."
+
+Home!  Hylda watched the shops, the houses, the squares, as she passed
+westward, her mind dwelling almost happily on the new determination to
+which she had come.  It was not love that was moving her, not love for
+him, but a deeper thing.  He had brutally killed love--the full life of
+it--those months ago; but there was a deep thing working in her which was
+as near nobility as the human mind can feel.  Not in a long time had she
+neared her home with such expectation and longing.  Often on the doorstep
+she had shut her eyes to the light and warmth and elegance of it, because
+of that which she did not see.  Now, with a thrill of pleasure, she saw
+its doors open.  It was possible Eglington might have come home already.
+Lord Windlehurst had said that he had left the House.  She did not ask if
+he was in--it had not been her custom for a long time--and servants were
+curious people; but she looked at the hall-table.  Yes, there was a hat
+which had evidently just been placed there, and gloves, and a stick.  He
+was at home, then.
+
+She hurried to her room, dropped her opera-cloak on a chair, looked at
+herself in the glass, a little fluttered and critical, and then crossed
+the hallway to Eglington's bedroom.  She listened for a moment.  There
+was no sound.  She turned the handle of the door softly, and opened it.
+A light was burning low, but the room was empty.  It was as she thought,
+he was in his study, where he spent hours sometimes after he came home,
+reading official papers.  She went up the stairs, at first swiftly, then
+more slowly, then with almost lagging feet.  Why did she hesitate?  Why
+should a woman falter in going to her husband--to her own one man of all
+the world?  Was it not, should it not be, ever the open door between
+them?  Confidence--confidence--could she not have it, could she not get
+it now at last?  She had paused; but now she moved on with quicker step,
+purpose in her face, her eyes softly lighted.
+
+Suddenly she saw on the floor an opened letter.  She picked it up, and,
+as she did so, involuntarily observed the writing.  Almost mechanically
+she glanced at the contents.  Her heart stood still.  The first words
+scorched her eyes.
+
+     "Eglington--Harry, dearest," it said, "you shall not go to sleep
+     to-night without a word from me.  This will make you think of me
+     when .  .  .  "
+
+Frozen, struck as by a mortal blow, Hylda looked at the signature.  She
+knew it--the cleverest, the most beautiful adventuress which the
+aristocracy and society had produced.  She trembled from head to foot,
+and for a moment it seemed that she must fall.  But she steadied herself
+and walked firmly to Eglington's door.  Turning the handle softly, she
+stepped inside.
+
+He did not hear her.  He was leaning over a box of papers, and they
+rustled loudly under his hand.  He was humming to himself that song she
+heard an hour ago in Il Trovatore, that song of passion and love and
+tragedy.  It sent a wave of fresh feeling over her.  She could not go
+on--could not face him, and say what she must say.  She turned and passed
+swiftly from the room, leaving the door open, and hurried down the
+staircase.  Eglington heard now, and wheeled round.  He saw the open
+door, listened to the rustle of her skirts, knew that she had been there.
+He smiled, and said to himself:
+
+"She came to me, as I said she would.  I shall master her--the full
+surrender, and then--life will be easy then."
+
+Hylda hurried down the staircase to her room, saw Kate Heaver waiting,
+beckoned to her, caught up her opera-cloak, and together they passed down
+the staircase to the front door.  Heaver rang a bell, a footman appeared,
+and, at a word, called a cab.  A minute later they were ready:
+
+"Snowdon House," Hylda said; and they passed into the night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+"IS IT ALWAYS SO--IN LIFE?"
+
+The Duchess and her brother, an ex-diplomatist, now deaf and patiently
+amiable and garrulous, had met on the doorstep of Snowdon House, and
+together they insisted on Lord Windlehurst coming in for a talk.  The two
+men had not met for a long time, and the retired official had been one of
+Lord Windlehurst's own best appointments in other days.  The Duchess had
+the carriage wait in consequence.
+
+The ex-official could hear little, but he had cultivated the habit of
+talking constantly and well.  There were some voices, however, which he
+could hear more distinctly than others, and Lord Windlehurst's was one of
+them--clear, well-modulated, and penetrating.  Sipping brandy and water,
+Lord Windlehurst gave his latest quip.  They were all laughing heartily,
+when the butler entered the room and said, "Lady Eglington is here, and
+wishes to see your Grace."
+
+As the butler left the room, the Duchess turned despairingly to
+Windlehurst, who had risen, and was paler than the Duchess.  "It has
+come," she said, "oh, it has come!  I can't face it."
+
+"But it doesn't matter about you facing it," Lord Windlehurst rejoined.
+"Go to her and help her, Betty.  You know what to do--the one thing."
+He took her hand and pressed it.
+
+She dashed the tears from her eyes and drew herself together, while her
+brother watched her benevolently.
+
+He had not heard what was said.  Betty had always been impulsive, he
+thought to himself, and here was some one in trouble--they all came to
+her, and kept her poor.
+
+"Go to bed, Dick," the Duchess said to him, and hurried from the room.
+She did not hesitate now.  Windlehurst had put the matter in the right
+way.  Her pain was nothing, mere moral cowardice; but Hylda--!
+
+She entered the other room as quickly as rheumatic limbs would permit.
+Hylda stood waiting, erect, her eyes gazing blankly before her and rimmed
+by dark circles, her face haggard and despairing.
+
+Before the Duchess could reach her, she said in a hoarse whisper: "I have
+left him--I have left him.  I have come to you."
+
+With a cry of pity the Duchess would have taken the stricken girl in her
+arms, but Hylda held out a shaking hand with the letter in it which had
+brought this new woe and this crisis foreseen by Lord Windlehurst.
+"There--there it is.  He goes from me to her--to that!"  She thrust the
+letter into the Duchess's fingers.  "You knew--you knew!  I saw the look
+that passed between you and Windlehurst at the opera.  I understand all
+now.  He left the House of Commons with her--and you knew, oh, you knew!
+All the world knows--every one knew but me."  She threw up her hands.
+"But I've left him--I've left him, for ever."
+
+Now the Duchess had her in her arms, and almost forcibly drew her to a
+sofa.  "Darling, my darling," she said, "you must not give way.  It is
+not so bad as you think.  You must let me help to make you understand."
+
+Hylda laughed hysterically.  "Not so bad as I think!  Read--read it,"
+she said, taking the letter from the Duchess's fingers and holding it
+before her face.  "I found it on the staircase.  I could not help but
+read it."  She sat and clasped and unclasped her hands in utter misery.
+"Oh, the shame of it, the bitter shame of it!  Have I not been a good
+wife to him?  Have I not had reason to break my heart?  But I waited,
+and I wanted to be good and to do right.  And to-night I was going to try
+once more--I felt it in the opera.  I was going to make one last effort
+for his sake.  It was for his sake I meant to make it, for I thought him
+only hard and selfish, and that he had never loved; and if he only loved,
+I thought--"
+
+She broke off, wringing her hands and staring into space, the ghost of
+the beautiful figure that had left the Opera House with shining eyes.
+
+The Duchess caught the cold hands.  "Yes, yes, darling, I know.  I
+understand.  So does Windlehurst.  He loves you as much as I do.  We know
+there isn't much to be got out of life; but we always hoped you would get
+more than anybody else."
+
+Hylda shrank, then raised her head, and looked at the Duchess with an
+infinite pathos.  "Oh, is it always so--in life?  Is no one true?  Is
+every one betrayed sometime?  I would die--yes, a thousand times yes, I
+would rather die than bear this.  What do I care for life--it has cheated
+me!  I meant well, and I tried to do well, and I was true to him in word
+and deed even when I suffered most, even when--"
+
+The Duchess laid a cheek against the burning head.  "I understand, my own
+dear.  I understand--altogether."
+
+"But you cannot know," the broken girl replied; "but through everything I
+was true; and I have been tempted too when my heart was aching so, when
+the days were so empty, the nights so long, and my heart hurt--hurt me.
+But now, it is over, everything is done.  You will keep me here--ah, say
+you will keep me here till everything can be settled, and I can go away
+--far away--far--!"
+
+She stopped with a gasping cry, and her eyes suddenly strained into the
+distance, as though a vision of some mysterious thing hung before her.
+The Duchess realised that that temptation, which has come to so many
+disillusioned mortals, to end it all, to find quiet somehow, somewhere
+out in the dark, was upon her.  She became resourceful and persuasively
+commanding.
+
+"But no, my darling," she said, "you are going nowhere.  Here in London
+is your place now.  And you must not stay here in my house.  You must go
+back to your home.  Your place is there.  For the present, at any rate,
+there must be no scandal.  Suspicion is nothing, talk is nothing, and the
+world forgets--"
+
+"Oh, I do not care for the world or its forgetting!" the wounded girl
+replied.  "What is the world to me!  I wanted my own world, the world of
+my four walls, quiet and happy, and free from scandal and shame.  I
+wanted love and peace there, and now .  .  .  !"
+
+"You must be guided by those who love you.  You are too young to decide
+what is best for yourself.  You must let Windlehurst and me think for
+you; and, oh, my darling, you cannot know how much I care for your best
+good!"
+
+"I cannot, will not, bear the humiliation and the shame.  This letter
+here--you see!"
+
+"It is the letter of a woman who has had more affaires than any man in
+London.  She is preternaturally clever, my dear--Windlehurst would tell
+you so.  The brilliant and unscrupulous, the beautiful and the bad, have
+a great advantage in this world.  Eglington was curious, that is all.
+It is in the breed of the Eglingtons to go exploring, to experiment."
+
+Hylda started.  Words from the letter Sybil Lady Eglington had left
+behind her rushed into her mind: "Experiment, subterfuge, secrecy.
+'Reaping where you had not sowed, and gathering where you had not
+strawed.' Always experiment, experiment, experiment!"
+
+"I have only been married three years," she moaned.  "Yes, yes, my
+darling; but much may happen after three days of married life, and love
+may come after twenty years.  The human heart is a strange thing."
+
+"I was patient--I gave him every chance.  He has been false and
+shameless.  I will not go on."
+
+The Duchess pressed both hands hard, and made a last effort, looking into
+the deep troubled eyes with her own grown almost beautiful with feeling
+--the faded world-worn eyes.
+
+"You will go back to-night-at once," she said firmly.  "To-morrow you
+will stay in bed till noon-at any rate, till I come.  I promise you that
+you shall not be treated with further indignity.  Your friends will stand
+by you, the world will be with you, if you do nothing rash, nothing that
+forces it to babble and scold.  But you must play its game, my dearest.
+I'll swear that the worst has not happened.  She drove him to his club,
+and, after a man has had a triumph, a woman will not drive him to his
+club if--my darling, you must trust me!  If there must be the great
+smash, let it be done in a way that will prevent you being smashed also
+in the world's eyes.  You can live, and you will live.  Is there nothing
+for you to do?  Is there no one for whom you would do something, who
+would be heart-broken if you--if you went mad now?"
+
+Suddenly a great change passed over Hylda.  "Is there no one for whom you
+would do something?"  Just as in the desert a question like this had
+lifted a man out of a terrible and destroying apathy, so this searching
+appeal roused in Hylda a memory and a pledge.  "Is there no one for whom
+you would do something?"  Was life, then, all over?  Was her own great
+grief all?  Was her bitter shame the end?
+
+She got to her feet tremblingly.  "I will go back," she said slowly and
+softly.
+
+"Windlehurst will take you home," the Duchess rejoined eagerly.  "My
+carriage is at the door."
+
+A moment afterwards Lord Windlehurst took Hylda's hands in his and held
+them long.  His old, querulous eyes were like lamps of safety; his smile
+had now none of that cynicism with which he had aroused and chastened the
+world.  The pitiful understanding of life was there and a consummate
+gentleness.  He gave her his arm, and they stepped out into the moonlit
+night.  "So peaceful, so bright!" he said, looking round.
+
+"I will come at noon to-morrow," called the Duchess from the doorway.
+
+A light was still shining in Eglington's study when the carriage drove
+up.  With a latch-key Hylda admitted herself and her maid.
+
+The storm had broken, the flood had come.  The storm was over, but the
+flood swept far and wide.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+THE FLYING SHUTTLE
+
+Hour after hour of sleeplessness.  The silver-tongued clock remorselessly
+tinkled the quarters, and Hylda lay and waited for them with a hopeless
+strained attention.  In vain she tried devices to produce that monotony
+of thought which sometimes brings sleep.  Again and again, as she felt
+that sleep was coming at last, the thought of the letter she had found
+flashed through her mind with words of fire, and it seemed as if there
+had been poured through every vein a subtle irritant.  Just such a
+surging, thrilling flood she had felt in the surgeon's chair when she was
+a girl and an anesthetic had been given.  But this wave of sensation led
+to no oblivion, no last soothing intoxication.  Its current beat against
+her heart until she could have cried out from the mere physical pain, the
+clamping grip of her trouble.  She withered and grew cold under the
+torture of it all--the ruthless spoliation of everything which made life
+worth while or the past endurable.
+
+About an hour after she had gone to bed she heard Eglington's step.  It
+paused at her door.  She trembled with apprehension lest he should enter.
+It was many a day since he had done so, but also she had not heard his
+step pause at her door for many a day.  She could not bear to face it all
+now; she must have time to think, to plan her course--the last course of
+all.  For she knew that the next step must be the last step in her old
+life, and towards a new life, whatever that might be.  A great sigh of
+relief broke from her as she heard his door open and shut, and silence
+fell on everything, that palpable silence which seems to press upon the
+night-watcher with merciless, smothering weight.
+
+How terribly active her brain was!  Pictures--it was all vivid pictures,
+that awful visualisation of sorrow which, if it continues, breaks the
+heart or wrests the mind from its sanity.  If only she did not see!  But
+she did see Eglington and the Woman together, saw him look into her eyes,
+take her hands, put his arm round her, draw her face to his!  Her heart
+seemed as if it must burst, her lips cried out.  With a great effort of
+the will she tried to hide from these agonies of the imagination, and
+again she would approach those happy confines of sleep, which are the
+only refuge to the lacerated heart; and then the weapon of time on the
+mantelpiece would clash on the shield of the past, and she was wide awake
+again.  At last, in desperation, she got out of bed, hurried to the
+fireplace, caught the little sharp-tongued recorder in a nervous grasp,
+and stopped it.
+
+As she was about to get into bed again, she saw a pile of letters lying
+on the table near her pillow.  In her agitation she had not noticed them,
+and the devoted Heaver had not drawn her attention to them.  Now,
+however, with a strange premonition, she quickly glanced at the
+envelopes.  The last one of all was less aristocratic-looking than the
+others; the paper of the envelope was of the poorest, and it had a
+foreign look.  She caught it up with an exclamation.  The handwriting was
+that of her cousin Lacey.
+
+She got into bed with a mind suddenly swept into a new atmosphere, and
+opened the flimsy cover.  Shutting her eyes, she lay still for a moment
+--still and vague; she was only conscious of one thing, that a curtain
+had dropped on the terrible pictures she had seen, and that her mind was
+in a comforting quiet.  Presently she roused herself, and turned the
+letter over in her hand.  It was not long--was that because its news was
+bad news?  The first chronicles of disaster were usually brief!  She
+smoothed the paper out-it had been crumpled and was a little soiled-and
+read it swiftly.  It ran:
+
+     DEAR LADY COUSIN--As the poet says, "Man is born to trouble as the
+     sparks fly upward," and in Egypt the sparks set the stacks on fire
+     oftener than anywhere else, I guess.  She outclasses Mexico as a
+     "precious example" in this respect.  You needn't go looking for
+     trouble in Mexico; it's waiting for you kindly.  If it doesn't find
+     you to-day, well, manana.  But here it comes running like a native
+     to his cooking-pot at sunset in Ramadan.  Well, there have been
+     "hard trials" for the Saadat.  His cotton-mills were set on fire-
+     can't you guess who did it?  And now, down in Cairo, Nahoum runs
+     Egypt; for a messenger that got through the tribes worrying us tells
+     us that Kaid is sick, and Nahoum the Armenian says, you shall, and
+     you shan't, now.  Which is another way of saying, that between us
+     and the front door of our happy homes there are rattlesnakes that
+     can sting--Nahoum's arm is long, and his traitors are crawling under
+     the canvas of our tents!
+
+     I'm not complaining for myself.  I asked for what I've got, and,
+     dear Lady Cousin, I put up some cash for it, too, as a man should.
+     No, I don't mind for myself, fond as I am of loafing, sort of
+     pottering round where the streets are in the hands of a pure police;
+     for I've seen more, done more, thought more, up here, than in all my
+     life before; and I've felt a country heaving under the touch of one
+     of God's men--it gives you minutes that lift you out of the dust and
+     away from the crawlers.  And I'd do it all over a thousand times for
+     him, and for what I've got out of it.  I've lived.  But, to speak
+     right out plain, I don't know how long this machine will run.
+     There's been a plant of the worst kind.  Tribes we left friendly
+     under a year ago are out against us; cities that were faithful have
+     gone under to rebels.  Nahoum has sowed the land with the tale that
+     the Saadat means to abolish slavery, to take away the powers of the
+     great sheikhs, and to hand the country over to the Turk.  Ebn Ezra
+     Bey has proofs of the whole thing, and now at last the Saadat knows
+     too late that his work has been spoiled by the only man who could
+     spoil it.  The Saadat knows it, but does he rave and tear his hair?
+     He says nothing.  He stands up like a rock before the riot of
+     treachery and bad luck and all the terrible burden he has to carry
+     here.  If he wasn't a Quaker I'd say he had the pride of an
+     archangel.  You can bend him, but you can't break him; and it takes
+     a lot to bend him.  Men desert, but he says others will come to take
+     their place.  And so they do.  It's wonderful, in spite of the holy
+     war that's being preached, and all the lies about him sprinkled over
+     this part of Africa, how they all fear him, and find it hard to be
+     out on the war-path against him.  We should be gorging the vultures
+     if he wasn't the wonder he is.  We need boats.  Does he sit down and
+     wring his hands?  No, he organises, and builds them--out of scraps.
+     Hasn't he enough food for a long siege?  He goes himself to the
+     tribes that have stored food in their cities, and haven't yet
+     declared against him, and he puts a hand on their hard hearts, and
+     takes the sulkiness out of their eyes, and a fleet of ghiassas comes
+     down to us loaded with dourha.  The defences of this place are
+     nothing.  Does he fold his hands like a man of peace that he is,
+     and say, 'Thy will be done'?  Not the Saadat.  He gets two soldier-
+     engineers, one an Italian who murdered his wife in Italy twenty
+     years ago, and one a British officer that cheated at cards and had
+     to go, and we've got defences that'll take some negotiating.  That's
+     the kind of man he is; smiling to cheer others when their hearts are
+     in their boots, stern like a commander-in-chief when he's got to
+     punish, and then he does it like steel; but I've seen him afterwards
+     in his tent with a face that looks sixty, and he's got to travel a
+     while yet before he's forty.  None of us dares be as afraid as we
+     could be, because a look at him would make us so ashamed we'd have
+     to commit suicide.  He hopes when no one else would ever hope.  The
+     other day I went to his tent to wait for him, and I saw his Bible
+     open on the table.  A passage was marked.  It was this:
+
+     "Behold, I have taken out of thy hand the cup of trembling, even the
+     dregs of the cup of my fury; thou shalt no more drink it again: "But
+     I will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee; which have
+     said to thy soul, Bow down, that we may go over; and thou hast laid
+     thy body as the ground, and as the street, to them that went over.
+
+     I'd like to see Nahoum with that cup of trembling in his hand, and
+     I've got an idea, too, that it will be there yet.  I don't know how
+     it is, but I never can believe the worst will happen to the Saadat.
+     Reading those verses put hope into me.  That's why I'm writing to
+     you, on the chance of this getting through by a native who is
+     stealing down the river with a letter from the Saadat to Nahoum, and
+     one to Kaid, and one to the Foreign Minister in London, and one to
+     your husband.  If they reach the hands they're meant for, it may be
+     we shall pan out here yet.  But there must be display of power; an
+     army must be sent, without delay, to show the traitors that the game
+     is up.  Five thousand men from Cairo under a good general would do
+     it.  Will Nahoum send them?  Does Kaid, the sick man, know?  I'm not
+     banking on Kaid.  I think he's on his last legs.  Unless pressure is
+     put on him, unless some one takes him by the throat and says: If you
+     don't relieve Claridge Pasha and the people with him, you will go to
+     the crocodiles, Nahoum won't stir.  So, I am writing to you.
+     England can do it.  The lord, your husband, can do it.  England will
+     have a nasty stain on her flag if she sees this man go down without
+     a hand lifted to save him.  He is worth another Alma to her
+     prestige.  She can't afford to see him slaughtered here, where he's
+     fighting the fight of civilisation.  You see right through this
+     thing, I know, and I don't need to palaver any more about it.  It
+     doesn't matter about me.  I've had a lot for my money, and I'm no
+     use--or I wouldn't be, if anything happened to the Saadat.  No one
+     would drop a knife and fork at the breakfast-table when my obit was
+     read out--well, yes, there's one, cute as she can be, but she's lost
+     two husbands already, and you can't be hurt so bad twice in the same
+     place.  But the Saadat, back him, Hylda--I'll call you that at this
+     distance.  Make Nahoum move.  Send four or five thousand men before
+     the day comes when famine does its work and they draw the bowstring
+     tight.
+
+     Salaam and salaam, and the post is going out, and there's nothing in
+     the morning paper; and, as Aunt Melissa used to say: "Well, so much
+     for so much!"  One thing I forgot.  I'm lucky to be writing to you
+     at all.  If the Saadat was an old-fashioned overlord, I shouldn't be
+     here.  I got into a bad corner three days ago with a dozen Arabs--
+     I'd been doing a little work with a friendly tribe all on my own,
+     and I almost got caught by this loose lot of fanatics.  I shot
+     three, and galloped for it.  I knew the way through the mines
+     outside, and just escaped by the skin of my teeth.  Did the Saadat,
+     as a matter of discipline, have me shot for cowardice?  Cousin
+     Hylda, my heart was in my mouth as I heard them yelling behind me--
+     and I never enjoyed a dinner so much in my life.  Would the Saadat
+     have run from them?  Say, he'd have stayed and saved his life too.
+     Well, give my love to the girls!
+
+                    Your affectionate cousin,
+
+                                        Tom LACEY.
+
+     P.S.-There's no use writing to me.  The letter service is bad.  Send
+     a few thousand men by military parcel-post, prepaid, with some red
+     seals--majors and colonels from Aldershot will do.  They'll give the
+     step to the Gyppies.  T.
+
+
+Hylda closed her eyes.  A fever had passed from her veins.  Here lay her
+duty before her--the redemption of the pledge she had made.  Whatever her
+own sorrow, there was work before her; a supreme effort must be made for
+another.  Even now it might be too late.  She must have strength for what
+she meant to do.  She put the room in darkness, and resolutely banished
+thought from her mind.
+
+The sun had been up for hours before she waked.  Eglington had gone to
+the Foreign Office.  The morning papers were full of sensational reports
+concerning Claridge Pasha and the Soudan.  A Times leader sternly
+admonished the Government.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+JASPER KIMBER SPEAKS
+
+That day the adjournment of the House of Commons was moved "To call
+attention to an urgent matter of public importance"--the position of
+Claridge Pasha in the Soudan.  Flushed with the success of last night's
+performance, stung by the attacks of the Opposition morning papers,
+confident in the big majority behind, which had cheered him a few hours
+before, viciously resenting the letter he had received from David that
+morning, Eglington returned such replies to the questions put to him that
+a fire of angry mutterings came from the forces against him.  He might
+have softened the growing resentment by a change of manner, but his
+intellectual arrogance had control of him for the moment; and he said to
+himself that he had mastered the House before, and he would do so now.
+Apart from his deadly antipathy to his half-brother, and the gain to
+himself--to his credit, the latter weighed with him not so much, so set
+was he on a stubborn course--if David disappeared for ever, there was at
+bottom a spirit of anti-expansion, of reaction against England's world-
+wide responsibilities.  He had no largeness of heart or view concerning
+humanity.  He had no inherent greatness, no breadth of policy.  With
+less responsibility taken, there would be less trouble, national and
+international--that was his point of view; that had been his view long
+ago at the meeting at Heddington; and his weak chief had taken it,
+knowing nothing of the personal elements behind.
+
+The disconcerting factor in the present bitter questioning in the House
+was, that it originated on his own side.  It was Jasper Kimber who had
+launched the questions, who moved the motion for adjournment.  Jasper had
+had a letter from Kate Heaver that morning early, which sent him to her,
+and he had gone to the House to do what he thought to be his duty.  He
+did it boldly, to the joy of the Opposition, and with a somewhat sullen
+support from many on his own side.  Now appeared Jasper's own inner
+disdain of the man who had turned his coat for office.  It gave a lead to
+a latent feeling among members of the ministerial party, of distrust, and
+of suspicion that they were the dupes of a mind of abnormal cleverness
+which, at bottom, despised them.
+
+With flashing eyes and set lips, vigilant and resourceful, Eglington
+listened to Jasper Kimber's opening remarks.
+
+By unremitting industry Jasper had made a place for himself in the House.
+The humour and vitality of his speeches, and his convincing advocacy of
+the cause of the "factory folk," had gained him a hearing.  Thickset,
+under middle size, with an arm like a giant and a throat like a bull,
+he had strong common sense, and he gave the impression that he would wear
+his heart out for a good friend or a great cause, but that if he chose to
+be an enemy he would be narrow, unrelenting, and persistent.  For some
+time the House had been aware that he had more than a gift for criticism
+of the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
+
+His speech began almost stumblingly, his h's ran loose, and his grammar
+became involved, but it was seen that he meant business, that he had that
+to say which would give anxiety to the Government, that he had a case
+wherein were the elements of popular interest and appeal, and that he was
+thinking and speaking as thousands outside the House would think and
+speak.
+
+He had waited for this hour.  Indirectly he owed to Claridge Pasha all
+that he had become.  The day in which David knocked him down saw the
+depths of his degradation reached, and, when he got up, it was to start
+on a new life uncertainly, vaguely at first, but a new life for all that.
+He knew, from a true source, of Eglington's personal hatred of Claridge
+Pasha, though he did not guess their relationship; and all his interest
+was enlisted for the man who had, as he knew, urged Kate Heaver to marry
+himself--and Kate was his great ambition now.  Above and beyond these
+personal considerations was a real sense of England's duty to the man who
+was weaving the destiny of a new land.
+
+"It isn't England's business?" he retorted, in answer to an interjection
+from a faithful soul behind the ministerial Front Bench.  "Well, it
+wasn't the business of the Good Samaritan to help the man that had been
+robbed and left for dead by the wayside; but he did it.  As to David
+Claridge's work, some have said that--I've no doubt it's been said in the
+Cabinet, and it is the thing the Under-Secretary would say as naturally
+as he would flick a fly from his boots--that it's a generation too soon.
+Who knows that?  I suppose there was those that thought John the Baptist
+was baptising too soon, that Luther preached too soon, and Savonarola was
+in too great a hurry, all because he met his death and his enemies
+triumphed--and Galileo and Hampden and Cromwell and John Howard were all
+too soon.  Who's to be judge of that?  God Almighty puts it into some
+men's minds to work for a thing that's a great, and maybe an impossible,
+thing, so far as the success of the moment is concerned.  Well, for a
+thing that has got to be done some time, the seed has to be sown, and
+it's always sown by men like Claridge Pasha, who has shown millions of
+people--barbarians and half-civilised alike--what a true lover of the
+world can do.  God knows, I think he might have stayed and found a cause
+in England, but he elected to go to the ravaging Soudan, and he is
+England there, the best of it.  And I know Claridge Pasha--from his youth
+up I have seen him, and I stand here to bear witness of what the working
+men of England will say to-morrow.  Right well the noble lord yonder
+knows that what I say is true.  He has known it for years.  Claridge
+Pasha would never have been in his present position, if the noble lord
+had not listened to the enemies of Claridge Pasha and of this country, in
+preference to those who know and hold the truth as I tell it here to-day.
+I don't know whether the noble lord has repented or not; but I do say
+that his Government will rue it, if his answer is not the one word
+'Intervention!'  Mistaken, rash or not, dreamer if you like, Claridge
+Pasha should be relieved now, and his policy discussed afterwards.  I
+don't envy the man who holds a contrary opinion; he'll be ashamed of it
+some day.  But"--he pointed towards Eglington--"but there sits the
+minister in whose hands his fate has been.  Let us hope that this speech
+of mine needn't have been made, and that I've done injustice to his
+patriotism and to the policy he will announce."
+
+"A set-back, a sharp set-back," said Lord Windlehurst, in the Peers'
+Gallery, as the cheers of the Opposition and of a good number of
+ministerialists sounded through the Chamber.  There were those on the
+Treasury Bench who saw danger ahead.  There was an attempt at a
+conference, but Kimber's seconder only said a half-dozen words, and sat
+down, and Eglington had to rise before any definite confidences could be
+exchanged.  One word only he heard behind him as he got up.  It was the
+word, "Temporise," and it came from the Prime Minister.
+
+Eglington was in no mood for temporising.  Attack only nerved him.  He
+was a good and ruthless fighter; and last night's intoxication of success
+was still in his brain.  He did not temporise.  He did not leave a way of
+retreat open for the Prime Minister, who would probably wind up the
+debate.  He fought with skill, but he fought without gloves, and the
+House needed gentle handling.  He had the gift of effective speech to a
+rare degree, and when he liked he could be insinuating and witty, but he
+had not genuine humour or good feeling, and the House knew it.  In debate
+he was biting, resourceful, and unscrupulous.  He made the fatal mistake
+of thinking that intellect and gifts of fence, followed by a brilliant
+peroration, in which he treated the commonplaces of experienced minds as
+though they were new discoveries and he was their Columbus, could
+accomplish anything.  He had never had a political crisis, but one had
+come now.
+
+In his reply he first resorted to arguments of high politics, historical,
+informative, and, in a sense, commanding; indeed, the House became
+restless under what seemed a piece of intellectual dragooning.  Signs of
+impatience appeared on his own side, and, when he ventured on a solemn
+warning about hampering ministers who alone knew the difficulties of
+diplomacy and the danger of wounding the susceptibilities of foreign
+and friendly countries, the silence was broken by a voice that said
+sneeringly, "The kid-glove Government!"
+
+Then he began to lose place with the Chamber.  He was conscious of it,
+and shifted his ground, pointing out the dangers of doing what the other
+nations interested in Egypt were not prepared to do.
+
+"Have you asked them?  Have you pressed them?" was shouted across
+the House.  Eglington ignored the interjections.  "Answer!  Answer!"
+was called out angrily, but he shrugged a shoulder and continued his
+argument.  If a man insisted on using a flying-machine before the
+principle was fully mastered and applied--if it could be mastered and
+applied--it must not be surprising if he was killed.  Amateurs sometimes
+took preposterous risks without the advice of the experts.  If Claridge
+Pasha had asked the advice of the English Government, or of any of the
+Chancellories of Europe, as to his incursions into the Soudan and his
+premature attempts at reform, he would have received expert advice that
+civilisation had not advanced to that stage in this portion of the world
+which would warrant his experiments.  It was all very well for one man to
+run vast risks and attempt quixotic enterprises, but neither he nor his
+countrymen had any right to expect Europe to embroil itself on his
+particular account.
+
+At this point he was met by angry cries of dissent, which did not come
+from the Opposition alone.  His lips set, he would not yield.  The
+Government could not hold itself responsible for Claridge Pasha's relief,
+nor in any sense for his present position.  However, from motives of
+humanity, it would make representations in the hope that the Egyptian
+Government would act; but it was not improbable, in view of past
+experiences of Claridge Pasha, that he would extricate himself from his
+present position, perhaps had done so already.  Sympathy and sentiment
+were natural and proper manifestations of human society, but governments
+were, of necessity, ruled by sterner considerations.  The House must
+realise that the Government could not act as though it were wholly a free
+agent, or as if its every move would not be matched by another move on
+the part of another Power or Powers.
+
+Then followed a brilliant and effective appeal to his own party to
+trust the Government, to credit it with feeling and with a due regard
+for English prestige and the honour brought to it by Claridge Pasha's
+personal qualities, whatever might be thought of his crusading
+enterprises.  The party must not fall into the trap of playing the game
+of the Opposition.  Then, with some supercilious praise of the "worthy
+sentiments" of Jasper Kimber's speech and a curt depreciation of its
+reasoning, he declared that: "No Government can be ruled by clamour.  The
+path to be trodden by this Government will be lighted by principles of
+progress and civilisation, humanity and peace, the urbane power of
+reason, and the persuasive influence of just consideration for the rights
+of others, rather than the thunder and the threat of the cannon and the
+sword!"
+
+He sat down amid the cheers of a large portion of his party, for the end
+of his speech had been full of effective if meretricious appeal.  But the
+debate that followed showed that the speech had been a failure.  He had
+not uttered one warm or human word concerning Claridge Pasha, and it was
+felt and said, that no pledge had been given to insure the relief of the
+man who had caught the imagination of England.
+
+The debate was fierce and prolonged.  Eglington would not agree to any
+modification of his speech, to any temporising.  Arrogant and insistent,
+he had his way, and, on a division, the Government was saved by a mere
+handful of votes--votes to save the party, not to indorse Eglington's
+speech or policy.
+
+Exasperated and with jaw set, but with a defiant smile, Eglington drove
+straight home after the House rose.  He found Hylda in the library with
+an evening paper in her hands.  She had read and reread his speech, and
+had steeled herself for "the inevitable hour," to this talk which would
+decide for ever their fate and future.
+
+Eglington entered the room smiling.  He remembered the incident of the
+night before, when she came to his study and then hurriedly retreated.
+He had been defiant and proudly disdainful at the House and on the way
+home; but in his heart of hearts he was conscious of having failed to
+have his own way; and, like such men, he wanted assurance that he could
+not err, and he wanted sympathy.  Almost any one could have given it to
+him, and he had a temptation to seek that society which was his the
+evening before; but he remembered that she was occupied where he could
+not reach her, and here was Hylda, from whom he had been estranged,
+but who must surely have seen by now that at Hamley she had been
+unreasonable, and that she must trust his judgment.  So absorbed was he
+with self and the failure of his speech, that, for a moment, he forgot
+the subject of it, and what that subject meant to them both.
+
+"What do you think of my speech, Hylda?" he asked, as he threw himself
+into a chair.  "I see you have been reading it.  Is it a full report?"
+
+She handed the paper over.  "Quite full," she answered evenly.
+
+He glanced down the columns.  "Sentimentalists!" he said as his eye
+caught an interjection.  "Cant!" he added.  Then he looked at Hylda, and
+remembered once again on whom and what his speech had been made.  He saw
+that her face was very pale.
+
+"What do you think of my speech?" he repeated stubbornly.
+
+"If you think an answer necessary, I regard it as wicked and
+unpatriotic," she answered firmly.
+
+"Yes, I suppose you would," he rejoined bitingly.  She got to her feet
+slowly, a flush passing over her face.  "If you think I would, did you
+not think that a great many other people would think so too, and for the
+same reason?" she asked, still evenly, but very slowly.  "Not for the
+same reason," he rejoined in a low, savage voice.
+
+"You do not treat me well," she said, with a voice that betrayed no hurt,
+no indignation.  It seemed to state a fact deliberately; that was all.
+
+"No, please," she added quickly, as she saw him rise to his feet with
+anger trembling at his lips.  "Do not say what is on your tongue to say.
+Let us speak quietly to-night.  It is better; and I am tired of strife,
+spoken and unspoken.  I have got beyond that.  But I want to speak of
+what you did to-day in Parliament."
+
+"Well, you have said it was wicked and unpatriotic," he rejoined, sitting
+down again and lighting a cigar, in an attempt to be composed.
+
+"What you said was that; but I am concerned with what you did.  Did your
+speech mean that you would not press the Egyptian Government to relieve
+Claridge Pasha at once?"
+
+"Is that the conclusion you draw from my words?" he asked.
+
+"Yes; but I wish to know beyond doubt if that is what you mean the
+country to believe?"
+
+"It is what I mean you to believe, my dear."
+
+She shrank from the last two words, but still went on quietly, though her
+eyes burned and she shivered.  "If you mean that you will do nothing, it
+will ruin you and your Government," she answered.  "Kimber was right,
+and--"
+
+"Kimber was inspired from here," he interjected sharply.
+
+She put her hand upon herself.  "Do you think I would intrigue against
+you?  Do you think I would stoop to intrigue?" she asked, a hand
+clasping and unclasping a bracelet on her wrist, her eyes averted, for
+very shame that he should think the thought he had uttered.
+
+"It came from this house--the influence," he rejoined.
+
+"I cannot say.  It is possible," she answered; "but you cannot think that
+I connive with my maid against you.  I think Kimber has reasons of his
+own for acting as he did to-day.  He speaks for many besides himself; and
+he spoke patriotically this afternoon.  He did his duty."
+
+"And I did not?  Do you think I act alone?"
+
+"You did not do your duty, and I think that you are not alone
+responsible.  That is why I hope the Government will be influenced by
+public feeling."  She came a step nearer to him.  "I ask you to relieve
+Claridge Pasha at any cost.  He is your father's son.  If you do not,
+when all the truth is known, you will find no shelter from the storm
+that will break over you."
+
+"You will tell--the truth?"
+
+"I do not know yet what I shall do," she answered.  "It will depend on
+you; but it is your duty to tell the truth, not mine.  That does not
+concern me; but to save Claridge Pasha does concern me."
+
+"So I have known."
+
+Her heart panted for a moment with a wild indignation; but she quieted
+herself, and answered almost calmly: "If you refuse to do that which is
+honourable--and human, then I shall try to do it for you while yet I bear
+your name.  If you will not care for your family honour, then I shall try
+to do so.  If you will not do your duty, then I will try to do it for
+you."  She looked him determinedly in the eyes.  "Through you I have lost
+nearly all I cared to keep in the world.  I should like to feel that in
+this one thing you acted honourably."
+
+He sprang to his feet, bursting with anger, in spite of the inward
+admonition that much that he prized was in danger, that any breach with
+Hylda would be disastrous.  But self-will and his native arrogance
+overruled the monitor within, and he said: "Don't preach to me, don't
+play the martyr.  You will do this and you will do that!  You will save
+my honour and the family name!  You will relieve Claridge Pasha, you will
+do what Governments choose not to do; you will do what your husband
+chooses not to do--Well, I say that you will do what your husband
+chooses to do, or take the consequences."
+
+"I think I will take the consequences," she answered.  "I will save
+Claridge Pasha, if it is possible.  It is no boast.  I will do it, if it
+can be done at all, if it is God's will that it should be done; and in
+doing it I shall be conscious that you and I will do nothing together
+again--never!  But that will not stop me; it will make me do it, the last
+right thing, before the end."
+
+She was so quiet, so curiously quiet.  Her words had a strange solemnity,
+a tragic apathy.  What did it mean?  He had gone too far, as he had done
+before.  He had blundered viciously, as he had blundered before.
+
+She spoke again before he could collect his thoughts and make reply.
+
+"I did not ask for too much, I think, and I could have forgiven and
+forgotten all the hurts you have given me, if it were not for one thing.
+You have been unjust, hard, selfish, and suspicious.  Suspicious--of me!
+No one else in all the world ever thought of me what you have thought.
+I have done all I could.  I have honourably kept the faith.  But you have
+spoiled it all.  I have no memory that I care to keep.  It is stained.
+My eyes can never bear to look upon the past again, the past with you--
+never."
+
+She turned to leave the room.  He caught her arm.  "You will wait till
+you hear what I have to say," he cried in anger.  Her last words had
+stung him so, her manner was so pitilessly scornful.  It was as though
+she looked down on him from a height.  His old arrogance fought for
+mastery over his apprehension.  What did she know?  What did she mean?
+In any case he must face it out, be strong--and merciful and affectionate
+afterwards.
+
+"Wait, Hylda," he said.  "We must talk this out."
+
+She freed her arm.  "There is nothing to talk out," she answered.
+"So far as our relations are concerned, all reason for talk is gone."
+She drew the fatal letter from the sash at her waist.  "You will think so
+too when you read this letter again."  She laid it on the table beside
+him, and, as he opened and glanced at it, she left the room.
+
+He stood with the letter in his hand, dumfounded.  "Good God!" he said,
+and sank into a chair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+FAITH JOURNEYS TO LONDON
+
+Faith withdrew her eyes from Hylda's face, and they wandered helplessly
+over the room.  They saw, yet did not see; and even in her trouble there
+was some subconscious sense softly commenting on the exquisite refinement
+and gentle beauty which seemed to fill the room; but the only definite
+objects which the eyes registered at the moment were the flowers filling
+every corner.  Hylda had been lightly adjusting a clump of roses when she
+entered; and she had vaguely noticed how pale was the face that bent over
+the flowers, how pale and yet how composed--as she had seen a Quaker
+face, after some sorrow had passed over it, and left it like a quiet
+sea in the sun, when wreck and ruin were done.  It was only a swift
+impression, for she could think of but one thing, David and his safety.
+She had come to Hylda, she said, because of Lord Eglington's position,
+and she could not believe that the Government would see David's work
+undone and David killed by the slave-dealers of Africa.
+
+Hylda's reply had given her no hope that Eglington would keep the promise
+he had made that evening long ago when her father had come upon them by
+the old mill, and because of which promise she had forgiven Eglington so
+much that was hard to forgive.  Hylda had spoken with sorrowful decision,
+and then this pause had come, in which Faith tried to gain composure and
+strength.  There was something strangely still in the two women.  From
+the far past, through Quaker ancestors, there had come to Hylda now this
+grey mist of endurance and self-control and austere reserve.  Yet behind
+it all, beneath it all, a wild heart was beating.
+
+Presently, as they looked into each other's eyes, and Faith dimly
+apprehended something of Hylda's distress and its cause, Hylda leaned
+over and spasmodically pressed her hand.
+
+"It is so, Faith," she said.  "They will do nothing.  International
+influences are too strong."  She paused.  "The Under-Secretary for
+Foreign Affairs will do nothing; but yet we must hope.  Claridge Pasha
+has saved himself in the past; and he may do so now, even though
+it is all ten times worse.  Then, there is another way.  Nahoum Pasha can
+save him, if he can be saved.  And I am going to Egypt--to Nahoum."
+
+Faith's face blanched.  Something of the stark truth swept into her
+brain.  She herself had suffered--her own life had been maimed, it had
+had its secret bitterness.  Her love for her sister's son was that of a
+mother, sister, friend combined, and he was all she had in life.  That he
+lived, that she might cherish the thought of him living, was the one
+thing she had; and David must be saved, if that might be; but this girl
+--was she not a girl, ten years younger than herself?--to go to Egypt
+to do--what?  She herself lived out of the world, but she knew the world!
+To go to Egypt, and--"Thee will not go to Egypt.  What can thee do?" she
+pleaded, something very like a sob in her voice.  "Thee is but a woman,
+and David would not be saved at such a price, and I would not have him
+saved so.  Thee will not go.  Say thee will not.  He is all God has left
+to me in life; but thee to go--ah, no!  It is a bitter world--and what
+could thee do?"
+
+Hylda looked at her reflectively.  Should she tell Faith all, and take
+her to Egypt?  No, she could not take her without telling her all, and
+that was impossible now.  There might come a time when this wise and
+tender soul might be taken into the innermost chambers, when all the
+truth might be known; but the secret of David's parentage was Eglington's
+concern most of all, and she would not speak now; and what was between
+Nahoum and David was David's concern; and she had kept his secret all
+these years.  No, Faith might not know now, and might not come with her.
+On this mission she must go alone.
+
+Hylda rose to her feet, still keeping hold of Faith's hand.  "Go back to
+Hamley and wait there," she said, in a colourless voice.  "You can do
+nothing; it may be I can do much.  Whatever can be done I can do, since
+England will not act.  Pray for his safety.  It is all you can do.  It is
+given to some to work, to others to pray.  I must work now."
+
+She led Faith towards the door; she could not endure more; she must hold
+herself firm for the journey and the struggle before her.  If she broke
+down now she could not go forward; and Faith's presence roused in her an
+emotion almost beyond control.
+
+At the door she took both of Faith's hands in hers, and kissed her cheek.
+"It is your place to stay; you will see that it is best.  Good-bye," she
+added hurriedly, and her eyes were so blurred that she could scarcely see
+the graceful, demure figure pass into the sunlit street.
+
+That afternoon Lord Windlehurst entered the Duchess of Snowdon's presence
+hurried and excited.  She started on seeing his face.
+
+"What has happened?" she asked breathlessly.  "She is gone," he
+answered.  "Our girl has gone to Egypt."
+
+The Duchess almost staggered to her feet.  "Windlehurst--gone!" she
+gasped.
+
+"I called to see her.  Her ladyship had gone into the country, the
+footman said.  I saw the butler, a faithful soul, who would die--or clean
+the area steps--for her.  He was discreet; but he knew what you and I are
+to her.  It was he got the tickets--for Marseilles and Egypt."
+
+The Duchess began to cry silently.  Big tears ran down a face from which
+the glow of feeling had long fled, but her eyes were sad enough.
+
+"Gone--gone!  It is the end!" was all she could say.  Lord Windlehurst
+frowned, though his eyes were moist.  "We must act at once.  You must go
+to Egypt, Betty.  You must catch her at Marseilles.  Her boat does not
+sail for three days.  She thought it went sooner, as it was advertised to
+do.  It is delayed--I've found that out.  You can start to-night, and--
+and save the situation.  You will do it, Betty?"
+
+"I will do anything you say, as I have always done."  She dried her eyes.
+
+"She is a good girl.  We must do all we can.  I'll arrange everything for
+you myself.  I've written this paragraph to go into the papers to-morrow
+morning: 'The Duchess of Snowdon, accompanied by Lady Eglington, left
+London last night for the Mediterranean via Calais, to be gone for two
+months or more.'  That is simple and natural.  I'll see Eglington.  He
+must make no fuss.  He thinks she has gone to Hamley, so the butler says.
+There, it's all clear.  Your work is cut out, Betty, and I know you will
+do it as no one else can."
+
+"Oh, Windlehurst," she answered, with a hand clutching at his arm, "if we
+fail, it will kill me."
+
+"If she fails, it will kill her," he answered, "and she is very young.
+What is in her mind, who can tell?  But she thinks she can help Claridge
+somehow.  We must save her, Betty."
+
+"I used to think you had no real feeling, Windlehurst.  You didn't show
+it," she said in a low voice.  "Ah, that was because you had too much,"
+he answered.  "I had to wait till you had less."  He took out his watch.
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY
+
+Aiwa----Yes.
+Allah hu Achbar----God is most Great.
+Al'mah----Female professional singers, signifying "a learned female."
+Ardab----A measure equivalent to five English bushels.
+
+Backsheesh----Tip, douceur.
+Balass----Earthen vessel for carrying water.
+Bdsha----Pasha.
+Bersim----Clover.
+Bismillah----In the name of God.
+Bowdb----A doorkeeper.
+
+Dahabieh----A Nile houseboat with large lateen sails.
+Darabukkeh----A drum made of a skin stretched over an earthenware funnel.
+Dourha----Maize.
+
+Effendina----Most noble.
+El Azhar----The Arab University at Cairo.
+
+Fedddn----A measure of land representing about an acre.
+Fellah----The Egyptian peasant.
+
+Ghiassa----Small boat.
+
+Hakim----Doctor.
+Hasheesh----Leaves of hemp.
+
+Inshallah----God willing.
+
+Kdnoon----A musical instrument like a dulcimer.
+Kavass----An orderly.
+Kemengeh----A cocoanut fiddle.
+Khamsin----A hot wind of Egypt and the Soudan.
+
+Kourbash----A whip, often made of rhinoceros hide.
+
+La ilaha illa-llah----There is no deity but God.
+
+Malaish----No matter.
+Malboos----Demented.
+Mastaba----A bench.
+Medjidie----A Turkish Order.
+Mooshrabieh----Lattice window.
+Moufettish----High Steward.
+Mudir----The Governor of a
+Mudirieh, or province.
+Muezzin----The sheikh of the mosque who calls to prayer.
+
+Narghileh----A Persian pipe.
+Nebool----A quarter-staff.
+
+Ramadan----The Mahommedan season of fasting.
+
+Saadat-el-bdsha----Excellency Pasha.
+Sdis----Groom.
+Sakkia----The Persian water-wheel.
+Salaam----Eastern salutation.
+Sheikh-el-beled----Head of a village.
+
+Tarboosh----A Turkish turban.
+
+Ulema----Learned men.
+
+Wakf----Mahommedan Court dealing with succession, etc.
+Welee----A holy man or saint.
+
+Yashmak----A veil for the lower part of the face.
+Yelek----A long vest or smock.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WEAVERS BY PARKER, V5 ***
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