CHAPTER XIX
THE PASSING OF THE CLOUD
(1871—1872)
Tell whoso hath sorrow
Grief shall never last:
E'en as joy hath no morrow,
So woe shall go past.
Alf Laylah wa Laylah
(Burton's "Arabian Nights").
THE recall from Damascus was the hardest blow that ever befell the Burtons. They felt it acutely; and when time had softened the shock, a lasting sense of the injury that had been done to them remained. Isabel felt it perhaps even more keenly than her husband. The East had been the dream of her girlhood, the land of her longing from the day when she and her lover first plighted their troth in the Botanical Gardens, and the reality of her maturer years. But the reality had been all too short. To the end of her life she never ceased to regret Damascus; and even when in her widowed loneliness she returned to England twenty years after the recall, with her life's work well-nigh done, and waiting, as she used to say, for the
