CHAPTER XLII. THE LOOM OF DESTINY
It was many a day since the Duchess of Snowdon had seen a sunrise, and the one on which she now gazed from the deck of the dahabieh Nefert, filled her with a strange new sense of discovery and revelation. Her perceptions were arrested and a little confused, and yet the undercurrent of feeling was one of delight and rejuvenation. Why did this sunrise bring back, all at once, the day when her one lost child was born, and she looked out of the windows of Snowdon Hall, as she lay still and nerveless, and thought how wonderful and sweet and green was the world she saw and the sky that walled it round? Sunrise over the Greek Temple of Philae and the splendid ruins of a farther time towering beside it! In her sight were the wide, islanded Nile, where Cleopatra loitered with Antony, the foaming, crashing cataracts above, the great quarries from which ancient temples had been hewed, unfinished obelisks and vast blocks of stone left where bygone workmen had forsaken them, when the invader came and another dynasty disappeared into that partial oblivion from which the Egyptian still emerges triumphant over all his conquerors, unchanged in form and feature. Something of its meaning got into her mind.
“I wonder what Windlehurst would think of it. He always had an eye for things like that,” she murmured; and then caught her breath, as she added: “He always liked beauty.” She looked at her wrinkled, childish hands. “But sunsets never grow old,” she continued, with no apparent relevance. “La, la, we were young once!”
Her eyes were lost again in the pinkish glow spreading over the grey-brown sand of the desert, over the palm-covered island near. “And now it’s others’ turn, or ought to be,” she murmured.
She looked to where, not far away, Hylda stood leaning over the railing of the dahabieh, her eyes fixed in reverie on the farthest horizon line of the unpeopled, untravelled plain of sand.
“No, poor thing, it’s not her turn,” she added, as Hylda, with a long sigh, turned and went below. Tears gathered in her pale blue eyes. “Not yet—with Eglington alive. And perhaps it would be best if the other never came back. I could have made the world better worth living in if I had had the chance—and I wouldn’t have been a duchess! La! La!”
She relapsed into reverie, an uncommon experience for her; and her mind floated indefinitely from one thing to another, while she was half conscious of the smell of coffee permeating the air, and of the low resonant notes of the Nubian boys, as, with locked shoulders, they scrubbed the decks of a dahabieh near by with hempshod feet.
Presently, however, she was conscious of another sound—the soft clip of oars, joined to the guttural, explosive song of native rowers; and, leaning over the rail, she saw a boat draw alongside the Nefert. From it came the figure of Nahoum Pasha, who stepped briskly on deck, in his handsome face a light which flashed an instant meaning to her.
“I know—I know! Claridge Pasha—you have heard?” she said excitedly, as he came to her.
He smiled and nodded. “A messenger has arrived. Within a few hours he should be here.”