The Way of the Spirit

THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT

regard him as a god who has brought them great prosperity which would vanish if he left them. We presume, therefore, that your ladyship will proceed to Egypt as soon as possible and use your personal influence to withdraw him from his unhappy situation. We are informed that the people of the oasis are peaceable, but, if necessary, that the authorities will give you any assistance which may be required.”

Now the whole thing was out, and became a subject of general conversation at a hundred dinner tables. Moreover, it was rumoured that some years before Rupert Ullershaw had actually been seen in London. General Sir Alfred Alltalk declared that he had met him upon the steps of the Army and Navy Club, and a further ill-natured tale was whispered that he had come to see his wife, who would have nothing to do with him, because at that time he had ceased to be heir to the peerage. This story, which Edith was not wrong in ascribing to the indiscreet or malicious utterances of Dick, who was furious with disappointment and thirsting for revenge, soon reached her ears. Of course she contradicted it, but equally of course she had now no alternative but to go to Egypt.

“Ach!” said the Dowager Lady Devene, when Edith expatiated to her upon the hardship and dangers of the journey which she must undertake alone – “ach! if that is all, I will come with you as a companion. I am not afraid, and I have always wished to see the land where Pharaoh oppressed the Israelites. We will start next week, and in a month I hope to see my dear Rupert again – almost as much as you do,” she added, looking at Edith sideways.

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Now as this speech was made before several other people, Edith had no choice but to acquiesce, and indeed it had come to this – she also wished to see Rupert. Even in her somewhat flinty heart remorse had been at work of late years; also, she had wearied of her lonely life, and wished to put a stop to the scandals that were floating about concerning her, which, as she foresaw, would soon culminate in her being exposed to much annoyance from Dick. In fact, he was already threatening to blackmail her and making unpleasant remarks as to certain indiscreet letters that she had written to him after Rupert’s visit to London, in which that visit and other matters showing the extreme intimacy which existed between them were alluded to not too obscurely. So she arranged to depart for the East, accompanied by Lady Devene.

Before they sailed, she received a packet from the late Lord Devene’s bankers, which, they stated by a mouth of a confidential clerk, they had been directed to deliver to her one month after his death, and not before. On opening it she found that it contained that statement concerning herself made by her mother, to which Lord Devene had alluded. Also, there were two letters from him, one addressed to her and the other to Rupert, the latter being left open that she might read it.

That to herself was brief, and ran:

“I have given you all I can. Accept this wealth as a makeweight to the initial wrong I did to you by becoming your father. I was weak enough to hope that when I revealed that fact to you, you would show some affection towards a lonely and broken-hearted man. You, however, took another view, irritated perhaps by our previous somewhat acrimonious con-

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versation. I grieve to say that on such argumentative occasions I have never been quite able to master my tongue, and as you remarked, you seem to have inherited the weakness. At least I have not cared to expose myself to a second rebuff. I do not blame you, but it is true that from that day forward I made up my mind to end an existence which has become hateful to me. If its dregs could have been sweetened by the love of one who is, after all, my child, I should probably have been content to endure its physical and mental miseries whilst awaiting their natural termination. But it has been destined otherwise, so like some of those old Romans whom I so much admire, my day done, I go from this hated scene out into the utter darkness whence I came. Good-bye! May you be happier than your father,

“D.”

It was a horrible letter for a daughter to receive from the author of her being, but fortunately it did not affect Edith so much as would have been the case with many women. She felt that there was a certain injustice about the thing. To begin with, her father had taken her at her word after the incomprehensible male habit. Then she had spoken when utterly irritated, first by his bitter gibes and sarcasms, and secondly by being suddenly informed that she was quite another person than she had supposed herself to be for over thirty years. Still, now when it was too late, she felt grieved. It was generally Edith’s lot to be grieved – too late. Yes, she was grieved, no more, when others might have been paralysed with horror and unavailing remorse.

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Afterwards, she took out of its envelope and read the letter to Rupert. Here it is:

“Dear Devene, – For I give you the name which will be yours when you read this, if you should ever do so.

“I have learned all your story, or if not all of it, at least enough to show me how accurate was the estimate which I formed of you long ago. Had not fortune fought against you, you would have been a great man, if such a creature really exists, which I doubt, since in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, ‘great’ is only a popular translation of the vulgar word ‘successful.’

“I write now to express the sincere hope that if, as I believe, you are still living, you and Edith, forgetting your previous diversities, and many another trouble and sorrow, will agree to live together in the accustomed, time-hallowed fashion, and if possible leave children behind you to carry on the race. Not that it is worth carrying on, except, perhaps, for certain qualities of your own, but one must make sacrifices upon the altars of habit and sentiment. For what other possible reason can the populations of the earth be continued? Yet there is one – Nature – (perhaps in the wilderness you have found out what that word means) – commands what the good sense of her most cultivated children condemns as entirely useless and undesirable. Perhaps there is some ultimate object in this, though personally I can see none. To me it appears to be nothing more than a part of the blind brutality of things which decrees the continuance, at any rate for a little while, of the highly nervous, overbred and unsatisfactory animal called Man. Well, soon or late he will die of his own sufferings, that increase

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daily as he advances in the scale of progressive degeneracy, which he dignifies by the name of civilisation. Then perhaps Nature (God is your name for it) will enjoy a good laugh over the whole affair, but as human tears will have ceased to fall, what will that matter?

“Edith will tell you of the fashion of my end; how, worn out at length by grief – one of the worst gifts of the said civilisation, for the savage feels little – and bodily weakness – the worst gift of our primeval state, I have determined to put an end to both, though this is a fact which there is no need for you to blazon abroad.

“I can see you solemnly lifting your eyes and saying: ‘Lo! a judgment. What the man drove that unfortunate woman to has fallen back upon his own head. (Under the circumstances ‘unfortunate’ is the exact word that you will use, tempered by a romantic sigh, whereas, in fact, poor Clara was but a very ordinary and middle-class kind of sinner, who did not even shrink from the ruin of the boy whom she pretended to love.) How wonderful is the retribution of Providence! The same death, the same means of death!’

“Well, you will be quite wrong. Whether one suffers from sleeplessness or from the fear of intolerable exposure does not matter. One takes the most convenient method to end it, and in this case they happen to be identical. There is no Providence, no poetic justice about the business, nothing but what novelists, or rather their critics, call the ‘long arm of coincidence.’

“Good-bye! I wonder what you have been doing all these years in the Soudan. I should like to hear the story from you; I am sure that it must be interesting. But I am quite convinced

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CHAPTER XXI

ZAHED

Rupert was disturbed in his mind. No one was less superstitious. He had advanced spiritually beyond the reach of superstition. He had grasped the great fact still not understood by the vast majority of human beings, that the universe and their connection with it is a mighty mystery whereof nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of a thousand are still veiled to men. These are apt to believe, as Lord Devene believed, that this thousandth part which they see bathed in the vivid, daily sunlight is all that there is to see. They imagine that because only one tiny angle of the great jewel catches and reflects the light, the rest must be dark and valueless. They look upon the point of rock showing above the ocean and forget that in its secret depths lies hid a mountain range, an island, a continent, a world, perhaps, whereof this topmost peak alone appears.

With Rupert, to whom such reflections were familiar, it was not so. Yet perhaps, because he remembered that every outward manifestation, however trivial, doubtless has its root in some hidden reason, and that probably the thing we call coincidence does not in truth exist, it did trouble and even alarm him when, riding one morning with Mea down a deep

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cleft in Tama, he heard upon the cliff, to the right of them, the wild and piercing music of the Wandering Players. Looking up, he saw upon the edge of that cliff those strange musicians, swathed as before in such a fashion that their faces were invisible, three of them blowing on their pipes and two keeping time with the drums, for the benefit, apparently, of the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, since no biped was near to them.

He hailed them angrily from the valley, but they took not the slightest notice, only blew more weirdly and beat the louder. He tried to get up to them, but discovered that in order to do so he must ride round for five miles. This he accomplished at last, only to find that they were gone, having probably slipped down the slope of the mountain away into their home, the desert. Indeed, it was reported to him afterwards that some people, accompanied by two donkeys, had been seen in the distance tramping across the sand.

“Why are you so vexed, Rupert?” asked Mea, when they descended the cliffs again, after their fruitless search.

“I don’t know,” he answered, with a laugh, “but that music is associated with disagreeable recollections in my mind. The first time we heard it, you remember, was just before I lost my foot and eye, and the next time was as I embarked upon the ship on my way to England, an unhappy journey. What have they come for now, I wonder?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, with her sweet smile; “but I at least have no cause to fear them. After their first visit I saved you; after their second you came back to me.”

“And after their third –?” asked Rupert.

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“After their third I have said, I do not know; but perhaps it means that we shall take a long journey together.”

“If that’s all, I don’t care,” he replied. “What I dread is our taking journeys away from each other.”

“I thank you,” she answered, bowing to him gravely, “your words are pleasant to me, and I bless those musicians who made you speak them, as I am sure that our roads branch no more.”

So, still smiling at each other like two happy children, they rode on. They visited the salt works which Rupert had established to the enormous benefit of everyone in the oasis. Passing through groves of young date-palms that he had planted, they came to the breeding grounds of camels, mules, and horses, the last of which had attained a great reputation, and having inspected the studs, turned back through the irrigated lands that now each year produced two crops instead of one.

“You have done well for us, Rupert,” said Mea, as they headed homewards. “Tama has not been so wealthy since the days of my forefathers, who called themselves kings, and now that the Khalifa is broken and the land has become safe, this is but a beginning of riches.”

“I don’t know about that,” he answered, with his jolly laugh, “but I have done very well for myself. Do you know that out of my percentage I have saved more money than I can spend? Now I am going to build a hospital and hire a skilled man to attend to it, for I am tired of playing doctor.”

“Yes,” she answered, “I have thought of it before, only I said nothing because it means bringing white folk into the place,

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and we are so happy without them. Also, our people do not like strangers.”

“I understand,” he answered; “but the Europeans have discovered us already. It is impossible to keep them out now that we pay taxes to the Government. You remember that man a few months ago who came to tell me that I am Lord Devene, and that since I became so my wife is making inquiries about me. I would not see him, and you sent him away, but he, or others, will be back again soon.”

“And then will you wish to leave with him, Rupert, and take your own place in the West?” she asked anxiously.

“Not I,” he answered, “not if they offered to make me a king.”

“Well, why should you?” Mea said, with her sweet little laugh, “who are already a king here,” and she touched her breast; “and there,” and she nodded towards some people who bowed themselves before him; “and everywhere,” and she waved her hand at the oasis of Tama in general.

“Well,” he answered, “the first is the only crown I want.” Then, having no more words to say, this strange pair, di-

vorced for the kingdom of Heaven’s sake, yet wedded indeed, if ever man and woman have been, for truly their very souls were one, looked at each other tenderly. They had changed somewhat since we saw them last over seven years before. Their strange life had left its seal upon them both. Mea’s face was thinner, the rich, full lips had a little wistful droop; the great, pleading eyes had grown spiritual, as though with continual looking over the edge of the world; the air of mystery which her features always wore had deepened; also, her figure

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