"You hope to succeed where Maeterlinck failed."
"Maeterlinck thinks as a poet and only fails when he writes as a philosopher. Don, I wish I could have you beside me in my hours of doubt. Thessaly is inspiring, but his influence is sheerly intellectual. You have the trick of harmonising all that was discordant within myself. I see my work as a moving pageant and every figure is in its appointed place. I realise that all the knowledge of the world means nothing beside one short human existence. Upon the Ogam tablets, the Assyrian cylinders, the Egyptian monuments is written a wisdom perhaps greater than ours, but it is cold, like the stone that bears it; within ourselves it lives—all that knowledge, that universe of truth. What do the Egyptologists know of the message of Egypt? I have stood upon the summit of the Great Pyramid and have watched its shadow steal out and out touching the distant lands with its sceptre, claiming Egypt for its own; I have listened in the profound darkness at its heart to the voice of the silence and have thought myself an initiate buried, awaiting the unfolding of the mystic Rose of Isis. And science would have us believe that that wondrous temple is a tomb! A tomb! when truly it is a birthplace!"
His dark eyes glowed almost fiercely. To Don alone did he thus reveal himself, mantled in a golden rhetoric.
"Mitrahîna, too, the village on the mounds which cloak with their memorable ashes the splendour that was Memphis; who has not experienced the mournful allurement of those palm-groves amid which lie the fallen colossi of Rameses? But how many have responded to it? They beckon me, Don, bidding me to the gates of royal Memphis, to the palace of the Pharaoh. A faint breeze steals over the desert, and they shudder and sigh because palace and temple are dust and the King of the Upper and Lower Land is but a half-remembered name strange upon the lips of men. Ah! who that has heard it can forget the call, soft and mournful, of the palm-groves of Mitrahîna?
"I would make such places sacred and no vulgar foot should ever profane them. Once, as I passed the entrance to the tomb of Seti in the Valley of the Kings, I met a fat German coming out. He was munching sandwiches, and I had to turn aside; I believe I clenched my fists. A picture of the shameful Clodius at the feast of Bona Dea arose before me. My very soul revolted against this profanation of the ancient royal dead. To left and right upon the slopes above and perhaps beneath the very path along which the gross Teuton was retiring lay those who ruled the world ere Rome bestrode the seven hills, whose body-slaves were princes when the proud states and empires of to-day slumbered unborn in the womb of Time. Seti I! what a name of power! His face, Don, is unforgettable and his image seems to haunt those subterranean halls in which at last he had thought to find rest. To-day his tomb is a public resort, his alabaster sarcophagus an exhibit at the Sloane Museum, and his body, stripped of its regal raiment, is lying exposed to curious eyes in a glass case in Cairo!
"We honour the departed of our own times, and tread lightly in God's acre; why, because they passed from the world before Western civilisation had raised its head above primeval jungles, should we fail in our respect for Egypt's mightier dead? I tell you, Don, there is not one man in a million who understands; who, having the eyes to see, the ears to hear, has the soul to comprehend. And this understanding is a lonely, sorrowful gift. I looked out from an observation-post on the Somme over a landscape like the blasted heath in Macbeth. No living thing moved, but the earth was pregnant with agony and the roar of the guns from hidden pits was like that of the grindstones of hell. There, upon the grave of an epoc, I listened to that deathly music and it beckoned to me like the palm fronds of Mitrahîna and spoke the same message as the voice of the pyramid silence. Don! all that has ever been, is, and within us dwells the first and the last."
VII
A silence fell between them which endured for a long time, such an understanding silence as is only possible in rare friendships. Paul began to fill his pipe, and Don almost regretfully broke the spell. "My real mission," he said, "is to release you from a bargain into which you entered blindfolded, without realising that you had to deal with an utterly unprincipled partner."
"Whatever do you mean?"
"I owe a debt to the late Michael Duveen, Paul, which you generously offered to assist me in liquidating——"