“Well!” had snapped Grandads, who was ready to take his ships of the desert into almost any kind of a port to protect himself from the storm of failure which threatened to burst.
“I think you are making a great mountain out of your mole-hill.”
“Meaning?”
“Lefort. There are others who understand as much about horses as he does. I do—for one—almost—and so does Abdul, who did all the spadework under him. Let me be vet, with Abdul for head groom and——”
“Wh-a-a-t?” Sir Richard had sprung from his canvas chair with a bound which would have done credit to a jerboa, or kangaroo rat. “You! In charge of the horses—you—and what do you know of camels, may I ask?”
“As much, dearest, as anybody, which amounts to nothing. If it’s sick, it usually makes up its obstinate mind to die, so there’s no use worrying about that; if you want to get an extra hour of work out of it, you give it a most noisome lump of barley-meal and water, and add a cupful of whisky if you want to make it waltz; if you want it to go to the right, touch it on the left, and vice versa, and if it’s out on a non-stop run, hang your coat over its head to pull it up. It will go for six days in the summer and, I believe, ten in the winter without a drink, and is warranted to eat everything it comes across; in fact, I saw Mahli making breakfast off your oldest pair of night slippers this very morning.”
All that she had said was true. She was a magnificent horsewoman, and there was mighty little she did not know about horses; in fact, up to her fifteenth birthday she had unequally divided her time between her lessons and her horses, to the decided detriment of the former; then, upon the death of her mother, had entreated to be allowed to accompany her grandfather to Egypt. He, unpractical in everything that did not concern the finding of water in desert places, had consented, and, acting upon some motherly soul’s advice, offered directly they had arrived in Cairo, had pushed her promptly under the sheltering wings of the Misses Cruikshanks.
But she might as well have pleaded with the Great Pyramid this night of stars as she had sat, just outside the tent, with her beautiful head against the canvas whilst her distracted kinsman had figuratively rent his raiment in wrath.
“You!” he had cried. “What authority would you have over the pack of rapscallions who look after the shameless beasts called camels, any one of which, in the eyes of the average Mohammedan, is of a hundred times more value than a woman? I know all about woman’s rights in England, but let me tell you that that means nothing, absolutely less than nothing out here, where she is not even allowed to possess a soul of her own, much less a vote. No! if I can’t find a man to fill the post, I will resign myself to having failed, throw up my position in the Irrigation Department, and take to bee-keeping in England.”
And Helen Raynor, who firmly believed that if a thing is to happen it happens, and that nothing can prevent it from happening, also vice versa, had ridden some miles out into the silence, where she had hobbled her mare and sat down upon the hummock to think things over. She sat facing the direction in which Ismailiah lay, sat quite still, until the peacefulness of the desert seemed to enfold her and to wipe out the memory of the past weeks, which had gone far to disturb the tranquillity she so loved to bring into the daily life of the camp. She looked all round in utter content and lifted her face to the stars and listened to the great silence, unbroken now, even by the love song, then sat forward and stared in the direction of Ismailiah.