A Desert Drama | Page 3

ragged,
untidy women,--they were all challenges to her conscience, and she
plunged in bravely at her work of reformation. As she could not speak a
word of the language, however, and was unable to make any of the

delinquents understand what it was that she wanted, her passage up the
Nile left the immemorial East very much as she had found it, but
afforded a good deal of sympathetic amusement to her fellow-travellers.
No one enjoyed her efforts more than her niece, Sadie, who shared with
Mrs. Belmont the distinction of being the most popular person upon the
boat. She was very young,--fresh from Smith College,--and she still
possessed many both of the virtues and of the faults of a child. She had
the frankness, the trusting confidence, the innocent straightforwardness,
the high spirits, and also the loquacity and the want of reverence. But
even her faults caused amusement, and if she had preserved many of
the characteristics of a clever child, she was none the less a tall and
handsome woman, who looked older than her years on account of that
low curve of the hair over the ears, and that fulness of bodice and skirt
which Mr. Gibson has either initiated or imitated. The whisk of those
skirts, and the frank incisive voice and pleasant, catching laugh were
familiar and welcome sounds on board of the Korosko. Even the rigid
Colonel softened into geniality, and the Oxford-bred diplomatist forgot
to be unnatural with Miss Sadie Adams as a companion.
The other passengers may be dismissed more briefly. Some were
interesting, some neutral, and all amiable. Monsieur Fardet was a
good-natured but argumentative Frenchman, who held the most
decided views as to the deep machinations of Great Britain and the
illegality of her position in Egypt. Mr. Belmont was an iron-grey,
sturdy Irishman, famous as an astonishingly good long-range rifle-shot,
who had carried off nearly every prize which Wimbledon or Bisley had
to offer. With him was his wife, a very charming and refined woman,
full of the pleasant playfulness of her country. Mrs. Shiesinger was a
middle-aged widow, quiet and soothing, with her thoughts all taken up
by her six-year-old child, as a mother's thoughts are likely to be in a
boat which has an open rail for a bulwark. The Reverend John Stuart
was a Non-conformist minister from Birmingham,--either a
Presbyterian or a Congregationalist,--a man of immense stoutness, slow
and torpid in his ways, but blessed with a considerable fond of homely
humour, which made him, I am told, a very favourite preacher and an
effective speaker from advanced radical platforms.

Finally, there was Mr. James Stephens, a Manchester solicitor (junior
partner of Hickson, Ward, and Stephens), who was travelling to shake
off the effects of an attack of influenza. Stephens was a man who, in
the course of thirty years, had worked himself up from cleaning the
firm's windows to managing its business. For most of that long time he
had been absolutely immersed in dry, technical work, living with the
one idea of satisfying old clients and attracting new ones, until his mind
and soul had become as formal and precise as the laws which he
expounded. A fine and sensitive nature was in danger of being as
warped as a busy city man's is liable to become. His work had become
an engrained habit, and, being a bachelor, he had hardly an interest in
life to draw him away from it, so that his soul was being gradually
bricked up like the body of a mediæval nun. But at last there came this
kindly illness, and Nature hustled James Stephens out of his groove,
and sent him into the broad world far away from roaring Manchester
and his shelves full of calf-skin authorities. At first he resented it
deeply. Everything seemed trivial to him compared to his own petty
routine. But gradually his eyes were opened, and he began dimly to see
that it was his work which was trivial when compared to this wonderful,
varied, inexplicable world of which he was so ignorant. Vaguely he
realised that the interruption to his career might be more important than
the career itself. All sorts of new interests took, possession of him; and
the middle-aged lawyer developed an after-glow of that youth which
had been wasted among his books. His character was too formed to
admit of his being anything but dry and precise in his ways, and a trifle
pedantic in his mode of speech; but he read and thought and observed,
scoring his "Baedeker" with underlinings and annotations as he had
once done his "Prideaux's Commentaries." He had travelled up from
Cairo with the party, and had contracted a friendship with Miss Adams
and her niece. The young American girl, with her chatter, her audacity,
and