David thanked him for the letter. Lacey became red in the face. He tried to say something, but failed. “Thee wishes to say something to me, friend?” asked David.
“I’m full up; I can’t speak. But, say—”
“I am going to the Palace now. Come back at noon if you will.”
He wrung David’s hand in gratitude. “You’re going to do it. You’re going to do it. I see it. It’s a great game—like Abe Lincoln’s. Say, let me black your boots while you’re doing it, will you?”
David pressed his hand.
CHAPTER IX. THE LETTER, THE NIGHT, AND THE WOMAN
“To-day has come the fulfilment of my dream, Faith. I am given to
my appointed task; I am set on a road of life in which there is no
looking back. My dreams of the past are here begun in very truth
and fact. When, in the night, I heard Uncle Benn calling, when in
the Meeting-house voices said, ‘Come away, come away, and labour,
thou art idle,’ I could hear my heart beat in the ardour to be off.
Yet I knew not whither. Now I know.
“Last night the Prince Pasha called me to his Council, made me
adviser, confidant, as one who has the ear of his captain—after he
had come to terms with me upon that which Uncle Benn left of land
and gold. Think not that he tempted me.
“Last night I saw favourites look upon me with hate because of
Kaid’s favour, though the great hall was filled with show of
cheerful splendour, and men smiled and feasted. To-day I know that
in the Palace where I was summoned to my first: duty with the
Prince, every step I took was shadowed, every motion recorded, every
look or word noted and set down. I have no fear of them. They are
not subtle enough for the unexpected acts of honesty in the life of
a true man. Yet I do not wonder men fail to keep honest in the
midst of this splendour, where all is strife as to who shall have
the Prince’s favour; who shall enjoy the fruits of bribery,
backsheesh, and monopoly; who shall wring from the slave and the
toil-ridden fellah the coin his poor body mints at the corvee, in
his own taxed fields of dourha and cucumbers.
“Is this like anything we ever dreamed at Hamley, Faith? Yet here
am I set, and here shall I stay till the skein be ravelled out.
Soon I shall go into the desert upon a mission to the cities of the
South, to Dongola, Khartoum, and Darfur and beyond; for there is
trouble yonder, and war is near, unless it is given to me to bring
peace. So I must bend to my study of Arabic, which I am thankful I
learned long ago. And I must not forget to say that I shall take
with me on my journey that faithful Muslim Ebn Ezra. Others I shall
take also, but of them I shall write hereafter.
“I shall henceforth be moving in the midst of things which I was
taught to hate. I pray that I may not hate them less as time goes
on. To-morrow I shall breathe the air of intrigue, shall hear
footsteps of spies behind me wherever I go; shall know that even the
roses in the garden have ears; that the ground under my feet will
telegraph my thoughts. Shall I be true? Shall I at last whisper,
and follow, and evade, believe in no one, much less in myself, steal
in and out of men’s confidences to use them for my own purposes?
Does any human being know what he can bear of temptation or of the
daily pressure of the life around him? what powers of resistance
are in his soul? how long the vital energy will continue to throw
off the never-ending seduction, the freshening force of evil?
Therein lies the power of evil, that it is ever new, ever fortified
by continuous conquest and achievements. It has the rare fire of
aggression; is ever more upon the offence than upon the defence;
has, withal, the false lure of freedom from restraint, the throbbing
force of sympathy.
“Such things I dreamed not of in Soolsby’s but upon the hill, Faith,
though, indeed, that seemed a time of trial and sore-heartedness.
How large do small issues seem till we have faced the momentous
things! It is true that the larger life has pleasures and expanding
capacities; but it is truer still that it has perils, events which
try the soul as it is never tried in the smaller life—unless,
indeed, the soul be that of the Epicurean. The Epicurean I well
understand, and in his way I might have walked with a wicked grace.
I have in me some hidden depths of luxury, a secret heart of
pleasure, an understanding for the forbidden thing. I could have
walked the broad way with a laughing heart, though, in truth, habit
of mind and desire have kept me in the better path. But offences
must come, and woe to him from whom the offence cometh! I have
begun now, and only now, to feel the storms that shake us to our
farthest cells of life. I begin to see how near good is to evil;
how near faith is to unfaith;
