When he had finished, Pentaur held out his hand for the paper, but Nebsecht folded it together, placed it in a little bag in which lay an amulet that his dying mother had hung round his neck, and said, breathing deeply:
“That is done. Farewell, Pentaur.”
But the poet held the physician back; he spoke to him with the warmest words, and conjured him to abandon his enterprise. His prayers, however, had no power to touch Nebsecht, who only strove forcibly to disengage his finger from Pentaur’s strong hand, which held him as in a clasp of iron. The excited poet did not remark that he was hurting his friend, until after a new and vain attempt at freeing himself, Nebsecht cried out in pain, “You are crushing my finger!”
A smile passed over the poet’s face, he loosened his hold on the physician, and stroked the reddened hand like a mother who strives to divert her child from pain.
“Don’t be angry with me, Nebsecht,” he said, “you know my unlucky fists, and to-day they really ought to hold you fast, for you have too mad a purpose on hand.”
“Mad?” said the physician, whilst he smiled in his turn. “It may be so; but do you not know that we Egyptians all have a peculiar tenderness for our follies, and are ready to sacrifice house and land to them?”
“Our own house and our own land,” cried the poet: and then added seriously, “but not the existence, not the happiness of another.”
“Have I not told you that I do not look upon the heart as the seat of our intelligence? So far as I am concerned, I would as soon be buried with a ram’s heart as with my own.”
“I do not speak of the plundered dead, but of the living,” said the poet. “If the deed of the paraschites is discovered, he is undone, and you would only have saved that sweet child in the hut behind there, to fling her into deeper misery.”
Nebsecht looked at the other with as much astonishment and dismay, as if he had been awakened from sleep by bad tidings. Then he cried: “All that I have, I would share with the old man and Uarda.”
“And who would protect her?”
“Her father.”
“That rough drunkard who to-morrow or the day after may be sent no one knows where.”
“He is a good fellow,” said the physician interrupting his friend, and stammering violently. “But who ‘would do anything to the child? She is so so. … She is so charming, so perfectly—sweet and lovely.”
With these last words he cast down his eyes and reddened like a girl.
“You understand that,” he said, “better than I do; yes, and you also think her beautiful! Strange! you must not laugh if I confess—I am but a man like every one else—when I confess, that I believe I have at length discovered in myself the missing organ for beauty of form—not believe merely, but truly have discovered it, for it has not only spoken, but cried, raged, till I felt a rushing in my ears, and for the first time was attracted more by the sufferer than by suffering. I have sat in the hut as though spell-bound, and gazed at her hair, at her eyes, at how she breathed. They must long since have missed me at the House of Seti, perhaps discovered all my preparations, when seeking me in my room! For two days and nights I have allowed myself to be drawn away from my work, for the sake of this child. Were I one of the laity, whom you would approach, I should say that demons had bewitched me. But it is not that,”—and with these words the physician’s eyes flamed up—“it is not that! The animal in me, the low instincts of which the heart is the organ, and which swelled my breast at her bedside, they have mastered the pure and fine emotions here—here in this brain; and in the very moment when I hoped to know as the God knows whom you call the Prince of knowledge, in that moment I must learn that the animal in me is stronger than that which I call my God.”
The physician, agitated and excited, had fixed his eyes on the ground during these last words, and hardly noticed the poet, who listened to him wondering and full of sympathy. For a time both were silent; then Pentaur laid his hand on his friend’s hand, and said cordially:
“My soul is no stranger to what you feel, and heart and head, if I may use your own words, have known a like emotion. But I know that what we feel, although it may be foreign to our usual sensations, is loftier and more precious than these, not lower. Not the animal, Nebsecht, is it that you feel in yourself, but God. Goodness is the most beautiful attribute of the divine, and you have always been well-disposed towards great and small; but I ask you, have you ever before felt so irresistibly impelled to pour out an ocean of goodness on another being, whether for Uarda you would not more joyfully and more self-forgetfully sacrifice all that you have, and all that you are, than to father and mother and your oldest friend?”
Nebsecht nodded assentingly.
“Well then,” cried Pentaur, “follow your new and godlike emotion, be good to Uarda and do not sacrifice her to your vain wishes. My poor friend! With your—enquiries into the secrets of life, you have never looked round upon itself, which spreads open and inviting before our eyes. Do you imagine that the maiden who can thus inflame the calmest thinker in Thebes, will not be coveted by a hundred of the common herd when her protector fails her? Need I tell you that amongst the dancers in the foreign quarter nine out of ten are the daughters of outlawed parents? Can you endure the thought that by your hand innocence may be consigned to vice, the rose trodden under foot in the mud? Is the human heart that you desire, worth an Uarda? Now go, and to-morrow come again to me your friend who understands how to sympathize with all you feel, and to whom you have approached so much the nearer to-day that you have learned to share his purest happiness.”
Pentaur held out his hand to the physician, who held it some time, then went thoughtfully and lingeringly, unmindful of the burning glow of the mid-day sun, over the mountain into the valley of the king’s graves towards the hut of the paraschites.
Here he found the soldier with his daughter. “Where is the old man?” he asked anxiously.
“He has gone to his work in the house of the embalmer,” was the answer. “If anything should happen to him he bade me tell you not to forget the writing and the book. He was as though out of his mind when he left us, and put the ram’s heart in his bag and took it with him. Do you remain with the little one; my mother is at work, and I must go with the prisoners of war to Harmontis.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
While the two friends from the House of Seti were engaged in conversation, Katuti restlessly paced the large open hall of her son-in-law’s house, in which we have already seen her. A snow-white cat followed her steps, now playing with the hem of her long plain dress, and now turning to a large stand on which the dwarf Nemu sat in a heap; where formerly a silver statue had stood, which a few months previously had been sold.
He liked this place, for it put him in a position to look into the eyes of his mistress and other frill-grown people. “If you have betrayed me! If you have deceived me!” said Katuti with a threatening gesture as she passed his perch.
“Put me on a hook to angle for a crocodile if I have. But I am curious to know how he will offer you the money.”
“You swore to me,” interrupted his mistress with feverish agitation, “that you had not used my name in asking Paaker to save us?”
“A thousand times I swear it,” said the little man.
“Shall I repeat all our conversation? I tell thee he will sacrifice his land, and his house-great gate and all, for one friendly glance from Nefert’s eyes.”
“If only Mena loved her as he does!” sighed the widow, and then again she walked up and down the hall in silence, while the dwarf looked out at the garden entrance. Suddenly she paused in front of Nemu, and said so hoarsely