The Yoke Part 40

"And thou canst sleep this night in an open boat?"

She nodded.

"To-morrow, then," he continued, taking her hand, "we shall reach Nehapehu, where I can hide thee with some of the peasantry on my father's lands. And there thou canst abide until I go to Tape and return.

"Thou must know," he continued, explaining, "the Athor of the hills is not my first sacrilege. Once I committed a worse. My father was the royal sculptor to Rameses and is now Meneptah's murket." Rachel glanced at him shyly and sought to withdraw her hand, for she recognized the loftiness of the t.i.tle. But he retained his clasp. "He is a mighty genius. He planned and executed Ipsambul. For that, which is the greatest monument to Rameses, the Incomparable Pharaoh loved him, and while the king lived my father was overwhelmed with his favors. Nor did the royal sculptor's good fortune wane, as is the common fate of favorites, for the great king planned that my father's house should be honored even after his death though the dynasties change. So Rameses gave him a signet of lapis lazuli, and its inscription commanded him who sat at any time thereafter on the throne of Egypt to honor the prayer of its bearer in the unspeakable name of the Holy One.

"After the death of Rameses," the narrator went on, "we went to Tape, my father and I, to inscribe the hatchments and carve the scene of the Judgment of the Dead in the tomb of the great king. Now, I am my father's only child and have been taught his craft. I have been an apt pupil, and he had no fear in trusting me with the execution of the fresco. I had long been in rebellion, practising in secret my lawless ideas, and I was seized with an uncontrollable aversion to marring those holy walls with the conventional ugliness commanded by the ritual. I a.s.sembled my ideas and dared. I worked rapidly and well.

The work was done before my father discovered it." Kenkenes paused and laughed a little.

"Suffice it to say the fresco was erased. And the solemnity of the crypt was hardly restored before my father found that his sacred signet, which he always wore, was gone. Nay, nay, I might not search for it more than the fruitless once, for he declared, and of a truth believed firmly, that the great king had reclaimed his gift. I did not and never have I believed it. Now I need the signet and I shall go after it on the strength of that belief.

"Having found it, I shall appeal to Meneptah for thy liberty and safety and whatever boon thou wouldst have and for myself. What thinkest thou? Shall I go on?"

Rachel smiled and looked up at him gratefully.

"I will go with thee, Kenkenes," she said.

Her ready confidence and the easiness of his name on her lips filled him with joy. "Ah! ye ungentle Hathors!" he mourned to himself, "why may I not tell her how much I love her?"

But the white hand which he pressed against his breast asked its release with gentle reluctance, and he set it free.

Once again the silence fell and was not frequently broken thereafter.

There was no invitation in her manner, and he could not speak what he would.

The sun dropped behind the Libyan hills and the heights filled with shadow. At length he said:

"It is time."

Lifting her to her feet, the ape attending them, he went toward the Nile, hand in hand with Rachel, his love all untold.

CHAPTER XX

THE TREASURE CAVE

The sudden night had just fallen, and there was an incomplete moon in the west. But already the desert was full of feeble shadows and silver inters.p.a.ces, and all that tense silence of evening upon unpeopled localities.

Kenkenes stood upon the top of a huge monolith, listening. Below, with only her face in the faint moonlight, was Rachel, looking up to him.

Anubis, oppressed by the voiceless expectancy of the two young people, crouched at his master's feet. For a while there was only the ringing turmoil of his own quickened blood in the young man's ears. But presently, up from the southern slope, rose the sound he had heard some minutes before--a long, quavering note, ending in a high eery wail.

Kenkenes was familiar with the screams of wild beasts, and he knew the irreconcilable differences between them and the human voice. Instantly he sent back across the hollow a strong reply that the startled echoes repeated again and again. Almost immediately the first cry was repeated, but a desperate power had entered into it. Kenkenes dropped from his point of vantage.

"Some one calleth, of a surety," he said, "and by the voice, it is a woman."

"It is Deborah come up from the camp to seek for me!" Rachel exclaimed.

"I doubt not. But the G.o.ds are surely with her, to fend the beasts from her in this savage place. It is well we came this way."

With all the haste possible on the rough slope, they descended. The ground was familiar to Kenkenes, for the niche was near the foot of the declivity.

Half-way down he called again, and the answer came up from the hiding-place of Athor. In another moment they were within and beside the prostrate form of the old Israelite. Rachel dropped on her knees, crying out in her solicitude. Her words were in the soft language of her own people and unintelligible to Kenkenes, but her voice trembled with concern. The old woman answered soothingly and at some length.

The narrative was frequently broken by low exclamations from Rachel, and at its end the girl turned to Kenkenes with a sob of anger.

"The Lord G.o.d break them in pieces and His fury be upon them!" she cried. "They set upon her and beat her and left her to the jackals!"

"Set consume them!" Kenkenes responded wrathfully. "How came they upon you? Did you not return to camp?"

"Nay, the mother heart in me would not suffer me to desert Rachel. I stayed without this place, and ye outstripped me when ye fled. After a time the fat servitor, rousing out of his swoon, came forth from here, and another, who had been lurking in the rocks, joined him, and the pair, in searching for you, discovered me and beat me with maces, leaving me for dead."

After a grim silence, broken only by the low weeping of Rachel, Kenkenes bade her continue.

"The search they made for you was not thorough, for one was ill and both were afraid. But they came upon the statue again, and the sight of it mocked them, so they overthrew it and broke it."

Kenkenes drew a sharp breath and glanced at the place where Athor should have been. Except for themselves, the niche was evidently vacant. The old woman continued:

"Then they descended into the camp of Israel. After a time I heard the sound of voices as if there were many men in the hills, and the heart of me was afraid. With much pain and travail I crept into this place, and here sounds come but faintly. But I heard sufficient to know that there were many who sought diligently, but whether they were our own people or the minions of thine enemy, Rachel, I could not with safety discover."

"Said they aught concerning their intents--this pair, who set upon you?" Kenkenes asked.

"O, aye, they bl.u.s.tered, and if they bring half of their threats to pa.s.s, it will go ill with thee, Egyptian. They will set the priests upon thee immediately; the hills will be searched; the Nile will be picketed. It behooves thee to have a care for thyself. As for Rachel, I know not what will become of her. She is penned out in the desert, for the camp is to be watched, and they boast that the hunt will end only with her capture."

"Let them look to it that it does not end with the choking of the swine who inspired it! I long to put him beyond the cure of leeches."

He made no answer to Deborah's words concerning Rachel's plight.

Deborah had disarranged his plans. He could not take the old woman, grievously wounded, on the long journey to Nehapehu, and, indeed, had she been well, his small boat might not hold together with a burden of three for a distance of half a hundred miles. For a moment his perplexity baffled his ingenuity.

It occurred to him that he might cross to the Memphian sh.o.r.e and procure a larger boat; but what would protect his helpless charges during the hours of absence, or in case he were taken? He realized that he dare not run a risk; his every movement must be safe and sure.

He could not ask the wounded Israelite to return to the camp now, seeing that she had suffered mistreatment at the hands of Har-hat's servants and deserted not.

"If there were but a grotto in the rocks--a cave or a tomb--" he stopped and smote his hands together.

"By Apis! I have it--the Tomb of the Discontented Soul!"

He turned to the two women, who had talked softly together in Hebrew, and spoke lightly in his relief.

"We have shelter for this night--safer than any other place in all Egypt. Trouble no more concerning that. Let me hide my sacrilege and rob them of indisputable evidence against me, and then we shall get to our refuge."

He lifted Deborah in his arms, and bearing her out into the open, left her with Rachel.

Then he reentered the shadowy niche. The night was not too dark to show the interior. Athor, a torso, broken in twain, headless, armless, was prostrate. It had been pushed over against the great cube that sheltered it and the fall against the hard limestone had ruined it.

Kenkenes clenched his hands and choked back the angry tears. To the artist the destruction partook of the heinousness of murder, of the pathos of death. He set about concealing the wreck with all speed, for he wished to be merciful to his eyes.

He collected the fragmentary members, and carrying them down the slope a little way, dug a grave for them in the sand. To the trench he rolled the trunk on the tamarisk cylinders, and buried all that was left of Athor the Golden. Over the grave he laid a flat stratum of rock that the wind might not uncover the ruin.