“Why did thee come, Soolsby? Only to welcome me back?”
“I come to bring you back to England, to your duty there, my lord.”
The first time Soolsby had used the words “my lord,” David had scarcely noticed it, but its repetition struck him strangely.
“Here, sometimes they call me Pasha and Saadat, but I am not ‘my lord,’” he said.
“Ay, but you are my lord, Egyptian, as sure as I’ve kept my word to you that I’d drink no more, ay, on my sacred honour. So you are my lord; you are Lord Eglington, my lord.”
David stood rigid and almost unblinking as Soolsby told his tale, beginning with the story of Eglington’s death, and going back all the years to the day of Mercy Claridge’s marriage.
“And him that never was Lord Eglington, your own father’s son, is dead and gone, my lord; and you are come into your rights at last.” This was the end of the tale.
For a long time David stood looking into the sparkling night before him, speechless and unmoving, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent forward, as though in a dream.
How, all in an instant, had life changed for him! How had Soolsby’s tale of Eglington’s death filled him with a pity deeper than he had ever felt-the futile, bitter, unaccomplished life, the audacious, brilliant genius quenched, a genius got from the same source as his own resistless energy and imagination, from the same wild spring. Gone—all gone, with only pity to cover him, unloved, unloving, unbemoaned, save by the Quaker girl whose true spirit he had hurt, save by the wife whom he had cruelly wronged and tortured; and pity was the thing that moved them both, unfathomable and almost maternal, in that sense of motherhood which, in spite of love or passion, is behind both, behind all, in every true woman’s life.
At last David spoke.