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Page 107
He stood staring down at the water with which his friend had so lately
prepared himself for the hour of prayer; he stooped to pick up the
white handkerchief he had evidently dropped.
And he stood and stared and stared as he turned the little lace-trimmed
square over and over in his hand. It was wringing wet, it smelt
faintly of the perfume the girl he loved had always used; it had her
initials woven in one corner.
"My God!" he whispered, as he looked round the little room; then
crossed to the spot near the curtain where the sand had been disturbed,
and then followed the prints of small feet across the floor to the
further side.
"My God!" he repeated. "I understand." He turned his head and looked
back at the curtain which divided him from his friend. "Carden, old
fellow, I understand what you gave your life to make me understand."
And his heart beat with a great love and a greater gratitude as he
parted the curtain and went out into the desert. He did not once turn
to look back, else might he have seen a speck on the horizon, moving at
the incredible speed with which a camel can race as it slithers across
the sands.
CHAPTER XXXIV
"In Rama was there a voice heard . . .
Rachel weeping for her children, and would not
be comforted, because they were not."
ST. MATTHEW, II.
"Hugh!"
As she called to her son from her high seat upon the camel the woman
was the only living thing to be seen in the desert. In her simplicity,
her colouring, her solitude, she was biblical; she might have been a
woman of the Old Testament asking for succour or sanctuary at the tent
of Abraham pitched between Beth-el and Hai; she might have been a woman
fleeing from the wrath of Moses, who gave unto sin its strength when,
out of sheer solicitude for the soul-welfare of the masses, he made
laws about things to which in the innocence of their hearts they had,
up till then, never given two thoughts.
Leave that corner piece of pasture unhedged, and it's odds on that not
a single soul will tramp or want to tramp over it, from one year's end
to another; hedge it, close it with padlocked gate, prop up the warning
_re_ trespassers and see if you don't find a wide track of footprints
across it in the morning.
Yes; the picture was biblical.
Rebecca must have worn exactly the same fashioned clothes as this
woman, and doubtless Leah had become pink-eyed through the tears of
vexation she had shed over the ancestral humped quadruped she had
ridden; and most certainly Lot's wife, Ruth, Solomon's wives and
appendages, Jezebel, and every other woman mentioned in the Bible once
watched just such a dawn rise across just such a desert.
We change our fashions, our fixed opinions, the colour of our hair and
the pattern of our socks when the fancy seizes us, but neither time nor
man has changed the desert--so far. Thank heaven for it, there is
still one place left in which we can go to die or be re-born--in seemly
solitude.
The grief of Rachel was shadowed upon the face of Jill, the wife of the
Arab, as she sat quite still, looking down at the pool of orange light
flung from the tent out onto the sand; then she sighed, the little sigh
of the anxious heart which, like the wind that springs up and sweeps
over your dwelling, and is gone, heralding the storm, is the forerunner
of the grief which will ere long overwhelm you.
She knew!
The lover, the wife, the brother, the friend, can temporarily blind
themselves with the blinkers of false hope and can blunt the stabbing
spear of hideous fear with sharp-edged reasoning, but the
_mother_--never.
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