CHAPTER II.TWO LETTERSWhen Rupert reached his camp beyond the great temple, he asked the sergeant of his guard whether the Sheik Ibrahim had been there with his servants. The soldier answered that he had seen no sheik.“He must have been watching to find me alone; lucky I had my pistol with me,” thought Rupert to himself.Then he ate his dinner, and afterwards sat down and wrote a report of this and other matters to his superiors in Cairo. As he finished copying the paper, to his surprise he heard a steamer hoot, and next minute his orderly informed him that a boat coming up stream was making fast opposite to the temple.“So old Bakhita was right, after all. What long ears she must have,” thought Rupert, as he started to board the steamer.She proved to be a Government boat from Assouan, carrying a company of Egyptian troops under the command of a brother-officer of his own, who brought him despatches and private letters. Though one of the latter was in the handwriting of his mother, from whom he was most anxious to hear, as no letter of hers had reached him for some time, it was characteristic of Rupert that he read the despatches first. Amongst other things, these contained an order that he should proceed at once to Cairo, there to advise with his chiefs on certain matters connected with the state of affairs in the Wady-Halfa district. They informed him also that the officer who brought them would stay to carry on his work at Abu-Simbel.As the boat was to start down Nile at dawn, Rupert spent most of the night in making arrangements with his successor, and in instructing him as to the political position. When this duty was finished, and the company of soldiers had been disembarked and camped, his own packing claimed attention, so that, in the end, he did not get aboard the steamer till nearly four o’clock in the morning—that is, about an hour before she cast off. Going at once to his cabin, Rupert opened his mother’s envelope, to find that the letter within was written with pencil, and in a very shaky hand. Consumed by anxiety, he began to read. It ran as follows;—My Dearest Son,—My last letter to you was that which I wrote to say how thankful I was to hear that by God’s mercy you had safely passed the great dangers of the battle of Toski, and the delight with which I saw you so favourably spoken of in the official despatches reporting the victory.That was five weeks ago, and I have not written since because, dear Rupert, I have been somewhat seriously ill and was not able to do so. Nor would I let anyone else write lest you should be frightened. One night, Rupert, whilst reading my Bible before going to bed, a very strange feeling suddenly came over me, and I remember no more for two days. When I recovered consciousness the doctor told me that I had had a stroke, I could not quite make out of what kind, nor does it matter. He added, not then but afterwards, that for a while my condition was precarious, and intimated to me that although all danger had passed for the present and I might live for years, this was without doubt a warning. Of course I understood what he meant and asked no more.My dearest boy, as you know, I do not fear death, especially if it should come in so merciful a form. But on the other hand, I do not wish to die without seeing you again. So, if it is possible, and your career will not be greatly injured thereby, I write to ask you to come to England as soon as you can, for, Rupert, it is now well over eleven years since you left home, during all which time I have not seen your face except in dreams.I cannot write much, for my left arm is paralysed, and all that side of my body very stiff and helpless, which makes it difficult for me to sit up, so I am asking your cousin, Edith Bonnythorne, to tell you what news there is. One piece, however, I must mention, since a young woman might not like to speak of it in writing to a gentleman.There has been another of those sad disappointments in Lord Devene’s family, the sixth, I think, since his remarriage. This time the child, a boy, was born at seven months. Every possible effort was made to save his life; indeed I am told that the poor little thing was put into a kind of incubator, the latest invention, which is said to be very successful in such cases. But it was of no use, the child died. So, although I know you care nothing about it, you are once more his heir, and I think likely to remain so.Poor Lady Devene has been to see me. She is a good sort of woman, although very narrow in her religious views, I think she calls herself a Calvinist (fancyhismarrying a Calvinist!). She grieves more over the fact that the child was not christened than because of its sad death. Indeed, speaking half in German and half in English, as is her way when moved, she said right out that she believed it died because Lord Devene would not have the ceremony performed lest it should catch a chill, and added that she was sure no child of theirs would ever live unless her husband abandoned his godless and free-thinking ways. Lastly, she declared that she wished she had never married him, but supposed that it was so ordained in punishment of her sins, the worst of which was that being dazzled by the prospect of so brilliant a match, she had accepted what he told her about his religious principles without satisfying herself that he spoke the truth. I hear that there was a great quarrel between them as to this matter of the christening, in which she seems to have had the best of it, although he would not give way, for Tabitha (that is her name) is very stolid and strong-willed when she likes. At any rate, he lost his temper and became violent, saying he wished that either she or he were dead, to which she answered that she did not take chloral. I tell you all this because I think you ought to know. It is a sad story, and I cannot help believing that there is something in what poor Lady Devene says. Do try to come to see me, my dearest, dearest Rupert.—Your ever loving mother,MARY ULLERSHAWRupert was deeply moved by the contents of this letter. His mother was the one being whom he really loved upon earth; and although of course he always contemplated such a possibility in a vague fashion, the fact that she might die at any moment, that she had indeed been very near to death, absolutely overwhelmed him. He had never taken any leave heretofore: first, because he shrank from returning to England and the inevitable meeting with Lord Devene, and secondly, for the reason that his career had moved forward so rapidly from point to point and from place to place, that at no given time had it been convenient so to do without the loss of some considerable opportunity.Now he knew that in this matter he had been wrong and selfish, also that it might be too late to repair his fault. Rupert determined then and there that he would sail for home by the first steamer, even if he had to resign his commission in the Egyptian Army in order to do so. His mind made up on this point, he took up the second envelope directed in clear and fastidious-looking writing to Lieutenant-Colonel Ullershaw, C.B., D.S.O., etc., etc., Egyptian Army.“Well, she has got it all in—just like Edith,” he thought to himself, as his eye fell upon this somewhat elaborate superscription. Then he opened and read the letter.Like all that came from her—and he received several every year, since it seemed that Edith Bonnythorne did not wish her absent relative to forget her—it was long, well-balanced and worded, giving the idea that it had been carefully composed and perhaps copied. It began with warm congratulations to her dear Cousin Rupert upon his escape from harm in the battle of Toski, of which she said she had read the accounts with her heart in her mouth, and on the credit that he had won, which, she added, made her even prouder of him than she had been before.Then it told him all the details of his mother’s illness, whereof the issue, she said, had been awaited with the greatest anxiety, since, for a few hours, it was thought that she must die.Next she passed on to general news, informing him that horse-racing, gambling debts and general extravagance had involved Dick Learmer, who was a cousin of both of them, in such difficulties that bankruptcy proceedings had been commenced against him. In the end, however, Lord Devene had come to the rescue and compounded with his creditors. Moreover, he had appointed him his private secretary, with good pay—for he earned nothing at the Bar—and as he was a capital speaker and popular, talked of putting him up to contest, in the Liberal interest, that division of the county in which the Devene estates were situated, as he disliked the sitting member, a Conservative, and wished to oust him.“So,” added Edith, “Dick has fallen on his feet again when it seemed all over with him. I confess that I am glad both for his own sake and because these family scandals are very disagreeable.”Lord Devene himself, she continued, was in a dreadful state of mind over the death of the baby boy. Indeed she could never have believed that anything would have moved him so much. Also, his domestic relations appeared to be very unhappy, as he and his wife constantly quarrelled over religious questions. What was more, on the whole she had the best of it, since his gibes and sarcasms took not the slightest effect upon her and she seldom lost her temper. What would be the end of it Edith could not guess, but he was growing to look quite old and ill. The letter ended by imploring Rupert to come home to visit his mother, whom otherwise he might not see again, and to rest a little while after so many years of hard work. Further, it would, she was sure, be to his interest to make the acquaintance of the leading people in London, who were always ready to push on a successful man with good social and professional prospects if only they remembered that he existed.Rupert laid this letter down by that from his mother and began to think, for he was too tired and excited with various emotions to be able to sleep.He remembered the last time that he had seen Edith Bonnythorne and Dick Learmer. It was when he was lying ill after that terrible affair many years before. They were both of them second cousins of his own and of each other, being, like all the rest of the family, descendants by the male or female side of the old Ullershaw who had married a brewer’s heiress, and accumulated the vast fortune that was now in the possession of Lord Devene. Edith was the daughter of a certain Mr. Bonnythorne, a High-Church clergyman, who went over to Rome, into a monastery indeed, and died there. The wife from whom he had separated some time before he took this step, it was said because of her friendship with her relative, Lord Devene, of whom Mr. Bonnythorne disapproved, was a woman of extraordinary beauty, charm, and wit, but she also had died long ago.Dick Learmer, the next heir to the entailed Devene wealth after Rupert himself, though the title would not descend to him under the special remainders of the original Patent, was the son of a Chancery barrister of Spanish extraction, whose family, the real name of which was Lerma, had been naturalised in England for some generations. This Mr. Learmer had died young, leaving his wife, another of the Ullershaws, and his son Richard well provided for, but no more. After her mother’s death, Edith Bonnythorne, who had nothing, went to live with the widowed Mrs. Learmer, and thus it came about that she and Dick were brought up very much together. It was said, or so Rupert had heard, that the childless Lord Devene wished to take her into his own house, but that his first wife, Clara, refused to receive her, which was one of the causes of the estrangement between her and her husband.Rupert could recall, with great distinctness, the appearance of Dick Learmer and Edith Bonnythorne as they had stood beside his bedside all those years ago. At that time Dick was in his twenty-second year. First he had intended to be a doctor, but after a while gave up medicine and began to eat his dinners for the Bar, to which profession he now belonged. He was then a dissipated and extravagant young man, but singularly handsome, and very popular among women. Perhaps they admired his fine dark and rather languid eyes, shaded by long lashes, his oval face and richly-coloured complexion, and his curling chestnut hair, all of which he had inherited with his Spanish blood. Or his somewhat sentimental yet passionate disposition, and the readiness of his address may have appealed to them. At any rate, they liked him, and his cousin, Edith Bonnythorne, then still a school-girl, was no exception to this rule, although even at that age she knew his faults and would lecture him upon them.She had been a beautiful child, this Edith, with her tall figure and light, graceful carriage, so much so that people often turned to look at her; very regular features, delicately-arched eyebrows, a broad forehead, upon which the rippling hair of reddish gold grew low; large dark blue eyes, somewhat heavy-lidded; a perfectly chiselled nose and mouth, with red lips that opened a little over the white teeth when she smiled; small feet and hands, tapering fingers and almond-shaped nails. Such was Edith’s appearance as Rupert remembered her.Well, he must go home; he must see all these people, which, with the exception of his mother, was the last thing that he wished to do. Their lives and his, which had diverged so widely, were about to cross again, so, continuing this line of thought, he set himself to recollect what he had heard of them of late years. After all, it was not much, for he had never made any inquiries.Lord Devene’s second wife, whom he married within ten months of Clara’s death, was, he understood, a German of good family, who had filled the place of companion to a dowager lady of title. He had married her, so Rupert heard, on what he called scientific principles; in short, because German women were supposed to be models of the domestic virtues. But why she had married Lord Devene he had no idea, unless it were because he was Lord Devene. The results had not been quite satisfactory; indeed, as these letters showed, marriage on scientific principles had, in this case, proved a dismal failure.Of course all this was much to his own temporal advantage, but the fact gave Rupert little joy; indeed, he would have been glad without reservation if his cousin Devene were at that moment the father of a flourishing family of sons. He did not want to succeed to the wealth and title, should he live to do so; he had no liking for this kind of inherited pomp which he had done nothing to earn, or for the life that it would involve. With the mysterious sixth sense, which most of us have in greater or less degree, he understood, indeed he was sure, that these honours and riches would bring him no happiness; moreover, for reasons that the reader can guess, he detested the very name of Devene. Still this was the present situation, and he could only hope that it might change.For the rest, his cousin, the handsome, pleasure-loving, sensuous-natured, and unprincipled Dick Learmer, of whom Edith spoke in her letter, had so far closely followed the course which he would have predicted for him. On his mother’s death he had come into his moderate fortune of about £1,000 a year, and dissipated it with graceful ease. Now he was hanger-on and head bottle-washer to Lord Devene, the worst fate, Rupert reflected, that could befall most men, and one that was in no way improved by the prospect of becoming a dummy member of Parliament; a puppet who must dance in whatever fashion pleased his patron and paymaster. Rupert remembered also that some years before he had heard talk of an engagement between Dick and their cousin Edith. If there was ever any truth in this rumour, evidently it had come to nothing. Probably there was some truth once, for he remembered that even when she was still a girl Dick always appeared to be attached to Edith, an affection which she seemed to reciprocate. Doubtless if this surmise were correct, she had shown her good sense by putting an end to the affair when she came to know the man’s true character.As for Edith herself, by an arrangement, of which he did not quite understand the details, but that seemed to be convenient to them both, financially and otherwise, for the last five years she had been living in his mother’s house, whither she migrated on the death of Mrs. Learmer. Although in her letters to him his mother never wrote of her with enthusiasm, on the other hand, she never complained of her, unless it were a complaint to say that Edith seemed dissatisfied with her prospects and position in life, which, she added, was not wonderful when her great beauty and considerable talents were taken into account. How did it happen, Rupert wondered, that a person who was said to be so lovely, and, to judge from her photographs, with justice; so clever also, had reached her present age without marrying? Probably it was because she had met nobody whom she cared about, and if so, this did credit to her heart, as the breaking off of her relations with Dick, if they ever existed, had done to her common-sense.Well, doubtless he would soon find out all about these matters for himself, and—the steamer was starting. With a sigh Rupert put his letters into his pocket and went on deck. In the east the sun rose, a huge, golden ball, and its straight, powerful rays struck full on the colossi seated above the door of Abu-Simbel, and penetrated in spears of light far into the temple’s mysterious and pillared depths. As they smiled on him when first he saw them, so those solemn, stony giants smiled on him in farewell. He wondered whether he would ever look on them again, these hoary monuments that had stared their adieux to so many generations of Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Saracens, and Christian men. He did not know, and yet again that sixth sense told him that he would. So did old Bakhita, for when a few minutes afterwards they steamed past her hut, she stood upon the bank and called to him:“Farewell, Rupert Bey! farewell for a little while—till you come once more!”He waved his hand and watched her tall figure until a bend of the river hid it, then, feeling drowsy at last, Rupert went into his cabin and lay down to sleep.
When Rupert reached his camp beyond the great temple, he asked the sergeant of his guard whether the Sheik Ibrahim had been there with his servants. The soldier answered that he had seen no sheik.
“He must have been watching to find me alone; lucky I had my pistol with me,” thought Rupert to himself.
Then he ate his dinner, and afterwards sat down and wrote a report of this and other matters to his superiors in Cairo. As he finished copying the paper, to his surprise he heard a steamer hoot, and next minute his orderly informed him that a boat coming up stream was making fast opposite to the temple.
“So old Bakhita was right, after all. What long ears she must have,” thought Rupert, as he started to board the steamer.
She proved to be a Government boat from Assouan, carrying a company of Egyptian troops under the command of a brother-officer of his own, who brought him despatches and private letters. Though one of the latter was in the handwriting of his mother, from whom he was most anxious to hear, as no letter of hers had reached him for some time, it was characteristic of Rupert that he read the despatches first. Amongst other things, these contained an order that he should proceed at once to Cairo, there to advise with his chiefs on certain matters connected with the state of affairs in the Wady-Halfa district. They informed him also that the officer who brought them would stay to carry on his work at Abu-Simbel.
As the boat was to start down Nile at dawn, Rupert spent most of the night in making arrangements with his successor, and in instructing him as to the political position. When this duty was finished, and the company of soldiers had been disembarked and camped, his own packing claimed attention, so that, in the end, he did not get aboard the steamer till nearly four o’clock in the morning—that is, about an hour before she cast off. Going at once to his cabin, Rupert opened his mother’s envelope, to find that the letter within was written with pencil, and in a very shaky hand. Consumed by anxiety, he began to read. It ran as follows;—
My Dearest Son,—My last letter to you was that which I wrote to say how thankful I was to hear that by God’s mercy you had safely passed the great dangers of the battle of Toski, and the delight with which I saw you so favourably spoken of in the official despatches reporting the victory.
That was five weeks ago, and I have not written since because, dear Rupert, I have been somewhat seriously ill and was not able to do so. Nor would I let anyone else write lest you should be frightened. One night, Rupert, whilst reading my Bible before going to bed, a very strange feeling suddenly came over me, and I remember no more for two days. When I recovered consciousness the doctor told me that I had had a stroke, I could not quite make out of what kind, nor does it matter. He added, not then but afterwards, that for a while my condition was precarious, and intimated to me that although all danger had passed for the present and I might live for years, this was without doubt a warning. Of course I understood what he meant and asked no more.
My dearest boy, as you know, I do not fear death, especially if it should come in so merciful a form. But on the other hand, I do not wish to die without seeing you again. So, if it is possible, and your career will not be greatly injured thereby, I write to ask you to come to England as soon as you can, for, Rupert, it is now well over eleven years since you left home, during all which time I have not seen your face except in dreams.
I cannot write much, for my left arm is paralysed, and all that side of my body very stiff and helpless, which makes it difficult for me to sit up, so I am asking your cousin, Edith Bonnythorne, to tell you what news there is. One piece, however, I must mention, since a young woman might not like to speak of it in writing to a gentleman.
There has been another of those sad disappointments in Lord Devene’s family, the sixth, I think, since his remarriage. This time the child, a boy, was born at seven months. Every possible effort was made to save his life; indeed I am told that the poor little thing was put into a kind of incubator, the latest invention, which is said to be very successful in such cases. But it was of no use, the child died. So, although I know you care nothing about it, you are once more his heir, and I think likely to remain so.
Poor Lady Devene has been to see me. She is a good sort of woman, although very narrow in her religious views, I think she calls herself a Calvinist (fancyhismarrying a Calvinist!). She grieves more over the fact that the child was not christened than because of its sad death. Indeed, speaking half in German and half in English, as is her way when moved, she said right out that she believed it died because Lord Devene would not have the ceremony performed lest it should catch a chill, and added that she was sure no child of theirs would ever live unless her husband abandoned his godless and free-thinking ways. Lastly, she declared that she wished she had never married him, but supposed that it was so ordained in punishment of her sins, the worst of which was that being dazzled by the prospect of so brilliant a match, she had accepted what he told her about his religious principles without satisfying herself that he spoke the truth. I hear that there was a great quarrel between them as to this matter of the christening, in which she seems to have had the best of it, although he would not give way, for Tabitha (that is her name) is very stolid and strong-willed when she likes. At any rate, he lost his temper and became violent, saying he wished that either she or he were dead, to which she answered that she did not take chloral. I tell you all this because I think you ought to know. It is a sad story, and I cannot help believing that there is something in what poor Lady Devene says. Do try to come to see me, my dearest, dearest Rupert.—Your ever loving mother,
MARY ULLERSHAW
Rupert was deeply moved by the contents of this letter. His mother was the one being whom he really loved upon earth; and although of course he always contemplated such a possibility in a vague fashion, the fact that she might die at any moment, that she had indeed been very near to death, absolutely overwhelmed him. He had never taken any leave heretofore: first, because he shrank from returning to England and the inevitable meeting with Lord Devene, and secondly, for the reason that his career had moved forward so rapidly from point to point and from place to place, that at no given time had it been convenient so to do without the loss of some considerable opportunity.
Now he knew that in this matter he had been wrong and selfish, also that it might be too late to repair his fault. Rupert determined then and there that he would sail for home by the first steamer, even if he had to resign his commission in the Egyptian Army in order to do so. His mind made up on this point, he took up the second envelope directed in clear and fastidious-looking writing to Lieutenant-Colonel Ullershaw, C.B., D.S.O., etc., etc., Egyptian Army.
“Well, she has got it all in—just like Edith,” he thought to himself, as his eye fell upon this somewhat elaborate superscription. Then he opened and read the letter.
Like all that came from her—and he received several every year, since it seemed that Edith Bonnythorne did not wish her absent relative to forget her—it was long, well-balanced and worded, giving the idea that it had been carefully composed and perhaps copied. It began with warm congratulations to her dear Cousin Rupert upon his escape from harm in the battle of Toski, of which she said she had read the accounts with her heart in her mouth, and on the credit that he had won, which, she added, made her even prouder of him than she had been before.
Then it told him all the details of his mother’s illness, whereof the issue, she said, had been awaited with the greatest anxiety, since, for a few hours, it was thought that she must die.
Next she passed on to general news, informing him that horse-racing, gambling debts and general extravagance had involved Dick Learmer, who was a cousin of both of them, in such difficulties that bankruptcy proceedings had been commenced against him. In the end, however, Lord Devene had come to the rescue and compounded with his creditors. Moreover, he had appointed him his private secretary, with good pay—for he earned nothing at the Bar—and as he was a capital speaker and popular, talked of putting him up to contest, in the Liberal interest, that division of the county in which the Devene estates were situated, as he disliked the sitting member, a Conservative, and wished to oust him.
“So,” added Edith, “Dick has fallen on his feet again when it seemed all over with him. I confess that I am glad both for his own sake and because these family scandals are very disagreeable.”
Lord Devene himself, she continued, was in a dreadful state of mind over the death of the baby boy. Indeed she could never have believed that anything would have moved him so much. Also, his domestic relations appeared to be very unhappy, as he and his wife constantly quarrelled over religious questions. What was more, on the whole she had the best of it, since his gibes and sarcasms took not the slightest effect upon her and she seldom lost her temper. What would be the end of it Edith could not guess, but he was growing to look quite old and ill. The letter ended by imploring Rupert to come home to visit his mother, whom otherwise he might not see again, and to rest a little while after so many years of hard work. Further, it would, she was sure, be to his interest to make the acquaintance of the leading people in London, who were always ready to push on a successful man with good social and professional prospects if only they remembered that he existed.
Rupert laid this letter down by that from his mother and began to think, for he was too tired and excited with various emotions to be able to sleep.
He remembered the last time that he had seen Edith Bonnythorne and Dick Learmer. It was when he was lying ill after that terrible affair many years before. They were both of them second cousins of his own and of each other, being, like all the rest of the family, descendants by the male or female side of the old Ullershaw who had married a brewer’s heiress, and accumulated the vast fortune that was now in the possession of Lord Devene. Edith was the daughter of a certain Mr. Bonnythorne, a High-Church clergyman, who went over to Rome, into a monastery indeed, and died there. The wife from whom he had separated some time before he took this step, it was said because of her friendship with her relative, Lord Devene, of whom Mr. Bonnythorne disapproved, was a woman of extraordinary beauty, charm, and wit, but she also had died long ago.
Dick Learmer, the next heir to the entailed Devene wealth after Rupert himself, though the title would not descend to him under the special remainders of the original Patent, was the son of a Chancery barrister of Spanish extraction, whose family, the real name of which was Lerma, had been naturalised in England for some generations. This Mr. Learmer had died young, leaving his wife, another of the Ullershaws, and his son Richard well provided for, but no more. After her mother’s death, Edith Bonnythorne, who had nothing, went to live with the widowed Mrs. Learmer, and thus it came about that she and Dick were brought up very much together. It was said, or so Rupert had heard, that the childless Lord Devene wished to take her into his own house, but that his first wife, Clara, refused to receive her, which was one of the causes of the estrangement between her and her husband.
Rupert could recall, with great distinctness, the appearance of Dick Learmer and Edith Bonnythorne as they had stood beside his bedside all those years ago. At that time Dick was in his twenty-second year. First he had intended to be a doctor, but after a while gave up medicine and began to eat his dinners for the Bar, to which profession he now belonged. He was then a dissipated and extravagant young man, but singularly handsome, and very popular among women. Perhaps they admired his fine dark and rather languid eyes, shaded by long lashes, his oval face and richly-coloured complexion, and his curling chestnut hair, all of which he had inherited with his Spanish blood. Or his somewhat sentimental yet passionate disposition, and the readiness of his address may have appealed to them. At any rate, they liked him, and his cousin, Edith Bonnythorne, then still a school-girl, was no exception to this rule, although even at that age she knew his faults and would lecture him upon them.
She had been a beautiful child, this Edith, with her tall figure and light, graceful carriage, so much so that people often turned to look at her; very regular features, delicately-arched eyebrows, a broad forehead, upon which the rippling hair of reddish gold grew low; large dark blue eyes, somewhat heavy-lidded; a perfectly chiselled nose and mouth, with red lips that opened a little over the white teeth when she smiled; small feet and hands, tapering fingers and almond-shaped nails. Such was Edith’s appearance as Rupert remembered her.
Well, he must go home; he must see all these people, which, with the exception of his mother, was the last thing that he wished to do. Their lives and his, which had diverged so widely, were about to cross again, so, continuing this line of thought, he set himself to recollect what he had heard of them of late years. After all, it was not much, for he had never made any inquiries.
Lord Devene’s second wife, whom he married within ten months of Clara’s death, was, he understood, a German of good family, who had filled the place of companion to a dowager lady of title. He had married her, so Rupert heard, on what he called scientific principles; in short, because German women were supposed to be models of the domestic virtues. But why she had married Lord Devene he had no idea, unless it were because he was Lord Devene. The results had not been quite satisfactory; indeed, as these letters showed, marriage on scientific principles had, in this case, proved a dismal failure.
Of course all this was much to his own temporal advantage, but the fact gave Rupert little joy; indeed, he would have been glad without reservation if his cousin Devene were at that moment the father of a flourishing family of sons. He did not want to succeed to the wealth and title, should he live to do so; he had no liking for this kind of inherited pomp which he had done nothing to earn, or for the life that it would involve. With the mysterious sixth sense, which most of us have in greater or less degree, he understood, indeed he was sure, that these honours and riches would bring him no happiness; moreover, for reasons that the reader can guess, he detested the very name of Devene. Still this was the present situation, and he could only hope that it might change.
For the rest, his cousin, the handsome, pleasure-loving, sensuous-natured, and unprincipled Dick Learmer, of whom Edith spoke in her letter, had so far closely followed the course which he would have predicted for him. On his mother’s death he had come into his moderate fortune of about £1,000 a year, and dissipated it with graceful ease. Now he was hanger-on and head bottle-washer to Lord Devene, the worst fate, Rupert reflected, that could befall most men, and one that was in no way improved by the prospect of becoming a dummy member of Parliament; a puppet who must dance in whatever fashion pleased his patron and paymaster. Rupert remembered also that some years before he had heard talk of an engagement between Dick and their cousin Edith. If there was ever any truth in this rumour, evidently it had come to nothing. Probably there was some truth once, for he remembered that even when she was still a girl Dick always appeared to be attached to Edith, an affection which she seemed to reciprocate. Doubtless if this surmise were correct, she had shown her good sense by putting an end to the affair when she came to know the man’s true character.
As for Edith herself, by an arrangement, of which he did not quite understand the details, but that seemed to be convenient to them both, financially and otherwise, for the last five years she had been living in his mother’s house, whither she migrated on the death of Mrs. Learmer. Although in her letters to him his mother never wrote of her with enthusiasm, on the other hand, she never complained of her, unless it were a complaint to say that Edith seemed dissatisfied with her prospects and position in life, which, she added, was not wonderful when her great beauty and considerable talents were taken into account. How did it happen, Rupert wondered, that a person who was said to be so lovely, and, to judge from her photographs, with justice; so clever also, had reached her present age without marrying? Probably it was because she had met nobody whom she cared about, and if so, this did credit to her heart, as the breaking off of her relations with Dick, if they ever existed, had done to her common-sense.
Well, doubtless he would soon find out all about these matters for himself, and—the steamer was starting. With a sigh Rupert put his letters into his pocket and went on deck. In the east the sun rose, a huge, golden ball, and its straight, powerful rays struck full on the colossi seated above the door of Abu-Simbel, and penetrated in spears of light far into the temple’s mysterious and pillared depths. As they smiled on him when first he saw them, so those solemn, stony giants smiled on him in farewell. He wondered whether he would ever look on them again, these hoary monuments that had stared their adieux to so many generations of Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Saracens, and Christian men. He did not know, and yet again that sixth sense told him that he would. So did old Bakhita, for when a few minutes afterwards they steamed past her hut, she stood upon the bank and called to him:
“Farewell, Rupert Bey! farewell for a little while—till you come once more!”
He waved his hand and watched her tall figure until a bend of the river hid it, then, feeling drowsy at last, Rupert went into his cabin and lay down to sleep.