And David answered: “May thy life be the nursling of Time, Effendina. I bring the tribute of the rebel lions once more to thy hand. What was thine, and was lost, is thine once more. Peace and salaam!” Between Nahoum and David there were no words at first at all. They shook hands like Englishmen, looking into each other’s eyes, and with pride of what Nahoum, once, in his duplicity, had called “perfect friendship.”
Lacey thought of this now as he looked on; and not without a sense of irony, he said under his breath, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian!”
But in Hylda’s look, as it met Nahoum’s, there was no doubt—what woman doubts the convert whom she thinks she has helped to make? Meanwhile, the Nubians smote their mailed breasts with their swords in honour of David and Kaid.
Under the gleaming moon, the exquisite temple of Philae perched on its high rock above the river, the fires on the shore, the masts of the dahabiehs twinkling with lights, and the barbarous songs floating across the water, gave the feeling of past centuries to the scene. From the splendid boat which Kaid had placed at his disposal David looked out upon it all, with emotions not yet wholly mastered by the true estimate of what this day had brought to him. With a mind unsettled he listened to the natives in the forepart of the boat and on the shore, beating the darabukkeh and playing the kemengeh. Yet it was moving in a mist and on a flood of greater happiness than he had ever known.
He did not know as yet that Eglington was gone for ever. He did not know that the winds of time had already swept away all traces of the house of ambition which Eglington had sought to build; and that his nimble tongue and untrustworthy mind would never more delude and charm, and wanton with truth. He did not know, but within the past hour Hylda knew; and now out of the night Soolsby came to tell him.
He was roused from his reverie by Soolsby’s voice saying: “Hast nowt to say to me, Egyptian?”
It startled him, sounded ghostly in the moonlight; for why should he hear Soolsby’s voice on the confines of Egypt? But Soolsby came nearer, and stood where the moonlight fell upon him, hat in hand, a rustic modern figure in this Oriental world.
David sprang to his feet and grasped the old man by the shoulders. “Soolsby, Soolsby,” he said, with a strange plaintive-note in his voice, yet gladly, too. “Soolsby, thee is come here to welcome me! But has she not come—Miss Claridge, Soolsby?”
He longed for that true heart which had never failed him, the simple soul whose life had been filled by thought and care of him, and whose every act had for its background the love of sister for brother—for that was their relation in every usual meaning—who, too frail and broken to come to him now, waited for him by the old hearthstone. And so Soolsby, in his own way, made him understand; for who knew them both better than this old man, who had shared in David’s destiny since the fatal day when Lord Eglington had married Mercy Claridge in secret, had set in motion a long line of tragic happenings?
“Ay, she would have come, she would have come,” Soolsby answered, “but she was not fit for the journey, and there was little time, my lord.”