"More than that, when you compare our Lord's trial and death with that
of this--this half-educated Arab out of the desert--this religious Don
Quixote who is a menace not only to Government but to the very structure
of civilised society--it's shocking, it's blasphemous, and I will not
listen to it."
The General was going out in white anger when he stopped at the door and
said--
"Gordon Lord, I take leave to think this man an impostor, and if you
want my view of how to deal with him and with the credulous simpletons
who are turning sedition into crime and crime into bloody anarchy, I
give it to you--'Martial law, sir, and no damned nonsense!'"
Save for one word Helena had not yet spoken, but now with
tightly-compressed lips, and such an expression on her face as Gordon
had never before seen there, she said--
"I hate that man! I hate him! I hate him!"
Her eyes blazed, and she looked straight into Gordon's face, as she
said, "I hate him because you are allowing yourself to be influenced in
his favour against your own father, and your own country. An
Englishman's duty is to stand by England, whatever she is and whatever
she does. And the duty of an English soldier is to fight for her and
ask no questions. She is his mother, and to inquire of himself whether
she is right or wrong, when her enemies are upon her, is not worthy of a
son."
The colour rushed to Gordon's face and he dropped his head.
"As for this man's teaching, it may transcend Egypt but it includes it,
and these people will take out of it only what they want, and what they
want is an excuse to resist authority and turn their best friends out of
the country. As for you," she said, with new force, "your duty is to go
to Alexandria and bring this man back to Cairo. It begins and ends
there, and has nothing to do with anything else."
Then Gordon raised his head and answered, "You are right, Helena. You
are always right. A son is not the judge of his father. And where
would England be to-day if her soldiers had always asked themselves
whether she was in the right or the wrong? I thought England would be
sinning against the light if she sent Ishmael Ameer to the Soudan and so
stifled a voice that might be the soul of the East, but I know nothing
about him except what his friends have told me.... After all, grapes
don't grow on pine trees, and the only fruit we see is ... I'll see the
man for myself, Helena, and if I find he is encouraging the rioters ...
if even in his sermons in the mosques ... Hafiz and the Moslems are to
tell me what he says in them.... They must tell me the truth, though
... Whatever the consequences ... they must tell me the truth. They
shall--my God, they _must_."
*CHAPTER XI*
The clock struck six, and Gordon rose to go. Helena helped him to belt
up the sword he had taken off and to put on his military greatcoat.
Then she threw a lace scarf over her head and went out with him into the
garden that they might bid good-bye at the gate.
The sun was going down by this time, the odourless air of the desert was
cooler and fresher than before, and all nature was full of a soothing
and blissful peace.
"Don't go yet; you have a few minutes to spare still. Come," said
Helena, and taking his hand she drew him to a blossom-thatched arbour
which stood on the edge of the ramparts.
There, with the red glow on their faces, as on the face of the great
mosque which stood in conscious grandeur by their side, they looked out
in silence for some moments on the glittering city, the gleaming Nile,
the yellow desert, and all the glory of the sky.
It was just that mysterious moment between day and night when the earth
seems to sing a silent song which only the human heart can hear, and,
stirred by an emotion she could scarcely understand, Helena, who had
been so brave until now, began to tremble and break down, and the woman
in her to appear.
"Don't think me foolish," she said, "but I feel--I feel as if--as if
this were the last time you and I were to be together."
"Don't unman me, Helena," said Gordon. "The work I have to do in
Alexandria may be dangerous, but don't tell me you are afraid----"
"It isn't that. I shouldn't be fit to be a soldier's daughter or to
become--to become a soldier's wife if I were afraid of that. No, I'm
not afraid of that, Gordon. I shall never allow myself to be afraid of
that. But----"
"But what, Helena?"
"I feel as if something has broken between you and me, and we shall
never be the same to each other after to-night. It frightens me. You
are so near, yet you seem so far away. Coming out of the house a moment
ago, I felt as if I had to take farewell of you, here and now."
Without more ado Gordon took her firmly in his arms, and with one hand
on her forehead that he might look full in her face, he said--
"You are not angry with me, Helena--for what I said to your father just
now?"
"No, oh no! you were speaking out of your heart, and perhaps it was
partly that----"
"You didn't agree with me, I know that quite well, but you love me
still, Helena?"
"Don't ask me that, dear."
"I must. I am going away, so speak out, I entreat you. You love me
still, Helena?"
"I am here. Isn't that enough?" she said, putting her arms about his
neck and laying her head on his breast.
He kissed her, and there was silence for some moments more. Then in a
sharp, agitated whisper she said--
"Gordon, that man is coming between us."
"Ishmael Ameer?"
"Yes."
"What utter absurdity, Helena!"
"No, I'm telling you the truth. That man is coming between us. I know
it--I feel it--something is speaking to me--warning me. Listen! Last
night I saw it in a dream. I cannot remember what happened but he was
there, and you and I, and your father and mine, and then----"
"My dear Nell, how foolish! But I see what has happened. When did you
receive the Princess Nazimah's letter?"
"Last night--just before going to bed."
"Exactly! And you were brooding over what she said of the needle
carrying only one thread?"
"I was thinking of it--yes."
"You were also thinking of what you had said yourself in your letter to
me--that if I resisted my father's will the results might be serious for
all of us?"
"That too, perhaps."
"There you are, then--there's the stuff of your dream, dear. But don't
you see that whatever a man's opinions and sympathies may be, his
affections are a different matter altogether--that love is above
everything else in a man's life--yes, everything--and that even if this
Ishmael Ameer were to divide me from my father or from your
father--which God forbid!--he could not possibly separate me from you?"
She looked up into his eyes and said--there was a smile on her lips
now--"Could nothing separate you and me?"
"Nothing in this world," he answered.
Her trembling lips fluttered up to his, and again there was a moment of
silence. The sun had gone down, the stars had begun to appear, and,
under the mellow gold of mingled night and day, the city below, lying in
the midst of the desert, looked like a great jewel on the soft bosom of
the world.
"You must go now, dear," she whispered.
"And you will promise me never to think these ugly thoughts again?"
"'Love is above everything'--I shall only think of that. Good-bye!"
"Good-bye!" he said, and he embraced her passionately. At the next
moment he was gone.
Shadows from the wing of night had gathered over the city by this time,
and there came up from the heart of it a surge of indistinguishable
voices, some faint and far away, some near and loud, the voices of the
muezzins calling from a thousand minarets to evening prayers--and then
came another voice from the glistening crest of the great mosque on the
ramparts, clear as a clarion and winging its way through the upper air
over the darkening mass below--
"God is Most Great! God is Most Great!"
[Illustration: Music fragment]
*CHAPTER XII*
At half-past six Gordon was at the railway-station. He found his
soldier servant half-way down the platform, on which blue-shirted
porters bustled to and fro, holding open the door of a compartment
labelled "Reserved." He found Hafiz also, and with him were two
pale-faced Egyptians, in the dress of Sheikhs, who touched their
foreheads as Gordon approached.
"These are the men you asked for," said Hafiz.
Gordon shook hands with the Egyptians, and then standing between them,
with one firm hand on the shoulder of each and the light of an electric
arc lamp in their faces, he said--
"You know what you've got to do, brothers?"
"We know," the men answered.
"The future of Egypt, perhaps of the East, may depend upon what you tell
me--you will tell me the truth?"
"We will tell you the truth, Colonel."
"If the man we are going to see should be condemned on your report and
on my denunciation you may suffer at the hands of his followers.
Protect you as I please, you may be discovered, followed, tracked
down--you have no fear of the consequences?"
"We have no fear, sir."
"You are prepared to follow me into any danger?"
"Into any danger."
"To death if need be?"
"To death if need be, brother."
"Step in, then," said Gordon.
At the next moment there was the whistle of the locomotive, and then
slowly, rhythmically, with its heavy volcanic throb shaking the platform
and rumbling in the glass roof, the train moved out of the station on
its way to Alexandria.
*CHAPTER XIII*
Ishmael Ameer was the son of a Libyan carpenter and boat-builder who,
shortly before the days of the Mahdi, had removed with his family to
Khartoum. His earliest memory was of the solitary figure of the great
white Pasha, on the roof of the palace, looking up the Nile for the
relief army that never arrived, and of the same white-headed Englishman,
with the pale face, who, walking to and fro on the sands outside the
palace garden, patted his head and smiled.
His next memory was of the morning after the fall of the desert city,
when, awakened by the melancholy moan of the great ombeya, the
elephant-horn that was the trumpet of death, he heard the hellish
shrieks of the massacre that was going on in the streets, and saw his
mother lying dead in front of the door of the inner closet in which she
had hidden him, and found his father's body on the outer threshold.
He was seven years of age at this time, and being adopted by an uncle, a
merchant in the town who had been rich enough to buy his own life, he
was sent in due course first to the little school of the mosque in
Khartoum, and afterwards, at eighteen, to El Azhar in Cairo, where, with
other poor students, he slept in the stifling rooms under the flat roof
and lived on the hard bread and the jars of cheese and butter which were
sent to him from home.
Within four years he had passed the highest examination at the Arabic
University, taking the rank of Alim (doctor of Koranic divinity), which
entitled him to teach and preach in any quarter of the Mohammedan world,
and then, by reason of his rich voice and his devout mind, he was made
Reader in the mosque of El Azhar.
Morality was low among the governing classes at that period, and when it
occurred that the Grand Cadi, who was a compound of the Eastern
voluptuary and the libertine of the Parisian boulevards, marrying for
the fourth time, made a feast that went on for a week, in which the days
were spent in eating and drinking and the nights in carousing of an
unsaintly character, the orgy so shocked the young Alim from the desert
that he went down to the great man's house to protest.
"How is this, your Eminence?" he said stoutly. "The Koran teaches
temperance, chastity, and contempt of the things of the world, yet you,
who are a tower and a light in Islam, have darkened our faces before the
infidel."
So daring an outrage on the authority of the Cadi had never been
committed before, and Ishmael was promptly flung into the streets, but
the matter made some noise, and led in the end to the expulsion of all
the Governors (the Ulema) of the University except the one man who,
being the first cause of the scandal, was also the representative of the
Sultan, and therefore could not be charged.
Meantime Ishmael, returning no more to El Azhar, had settled himself on
an island far up the river, and there practising extreme austerities, he
gathered a great reputation for holiness, and attracted attention
throughout the valley of the Nile by breathing out threatening and
slaughter, not so much against the leaders of his own people who were
degrading Islam as against the Christians, under whose hated bondage, as
he believed, the whole Mohammedan world was going mad.
So wide was the appeal of Ishmael's impeachment and so vast became his
following that the Government (now Anglo-Egyptian), always sure that,
after sand-storms and sand-flies, holy men of all sorts were the most
pernicious products of the Soudan, thought it necessary to put him down,
and for this purpose they sent two companies of Arab camel police,
promising a reward to the one that should capture the new prophet.
The two camel corps set out on different tracks, but each resolving to
take Ishmael by night, they entered his village at the same time from
opposite ends, met in the darkness, and fought and destroyed one
another, so that when morning dawned they saw their leaders on both
sides lying dead in the crimsoning light.
The gruesome incident had the effect of the supernatural on the Arab
intellect, and when Ishmael and his followers, with nothing but a stick
in one hand and the Koran in the other, came down with a roar of voices
and the sand whirling in the wind, the native remnant turned tail and
fled before the young prophet's face.
Then the Governor-General, an agnostic with a contempt for "mystic
senses" of all kinds, sent a ruckling, swearing, unbelieving company of
British infantry, and they took Ishmael without further trouble, brought
him up to Khartoum, put him on trial for plotting against the Christian
Governor of his province, and imprisoned him in a compound outside the
town.
But soon the Government began to see that though they had crushed
Ishmael they could not crush Ishmaelism, and they lent an ear to certain
of the leaders of his own faith, judges of the Mohammedan law courts,
who, having put their heads together, had devised a scheme to wean him
from his asceticism, and so destroy the movement by destroying the man.
The scheme was an old one, the vales of a woman, and they knew the very
woman for the purpose.
This was a girl named Adila, a Copt, only twenty years of age, and by no
means a voluptuous creature, but a little winsome thing, very sweet and
feminine, always freshly clad, and walking barefoot on the hot sand with
an erect confidence that was beautiful to see.
Adila had been the daughter of a Christian merchant at Assouan, and
there, six years before, she had been kidnapped by a Bisharin tribe,
who, answering her tears with rough comfort, promised to make her a
queen.
In their own way they did so, for those being the dark days of Mahdism,
they brought her to Omdurman and put her up to auction in the open
slave-market, where the black eunuch of the Caliph, after thrusting his
yellow fingers into her mouth to examine her teeth, bought her, among
other girls, for his master's harem.
There, with forty women of varying ages, gathered by concupiscence from
all quarters of the Soudan, she was mewed up in the close atmosphere of
two sealed chambers in the Caliph's crudely gorgeous palace, seeing no
more of her owner than his coffee-coloured countenance as he passed once
a day through the curtained rooms and signalled to one or other of their
bedecked and be-ringleted occupants to follow him down a hidden stairway
to his private quarters. At such moments of inspection Adila would sit
trembling and breathless, in dread of being seen, and she found her
companions only too happy to help her to hide herself from the
attentions they were seeking for themselves.
This lasted nearly a year, and then came a day when the howling in the
streets outside, the wailing of shells overhead, and the crashing of
cannon-ball in the dome of the Mahdi's tomb, told the imprisoned women,
who were creeping together in corners and clinging to each other in
terror, that the English had come at last, and that the Caliph had
fallen and fled.
When Adila was set at liberty by the English Sirdar she learned that, in
grief at the loss of their daughter, her parents had died, and so,
ashamed to return to Assouan, after being a slave girl in Omdurman, she
took service with a Greek widow who kept a bakery in Khartoum.
It was there the Sheikhs of the law-courts found her, and they proceeded
to coax and flatter her, telling her she had been a good girl who had
seen much sorrow, and therefore ought to know some happiness now, to
which end they had found a husband to marry her, and he was a fine
handsome man, young and learned and rich.
At this Adila, remembering the Caliph, and thinking that such a person
as they pictured could only want her as the slave of his bed, turned
sharply upon them and said, "When did I ask you to find me a man?" and
the Sheikhs had to go back discomfited.
Meanwhile Ishmael, raving against the Christians who were corrupting
Mohammedans while he was lying helpless in his prison, fell into a
fever, and the Greek mistress of Adila, hearing who had been meant for
her handmaiden, and fearing the girl might think too much of herself,
began to taunt and mock her.
"They told you he was rich, didn't they?" said the widow. "Well, he has
no bread but what the Government gives him, and he is in chains and he
is dying, and you would only have had to nurse him and bury him. That's
all the husband you would have got, my girl, so perhaps you are better
off where you are."
But the widow's taunting went wide, for as soon as Adila had heard her
out she went across to the Mohammedan court-house and said--
"Why didn't you tell me it was Ishmael Ameer you meant?"
The Sheikhs answered with a show of shame that they had intended to do
so eventually, and if they had not done so at first it was only out of
fear of frightening her.
"He's sick and in chains, isn't he?" said Adila.
They admitted that it was true.
"He may never come out of prison alive--isn't that so?"
They could not deny it.
"Then I want to marry him," said Adila.
"What a strange girl you are!" said the Sheikhs, but without more ado
the contract was made while Ishmael was so sick that he knew little
about it, the marriage document was drawn up in his name, Adila signed
it, half her dowry was paid to her, and she promptly gave the money to
the poor.
Next day Ishmael was tossing on his angerib in the mud hut which served
for his cell when he saw his Soudanese guard come in, followed by four
women, and the first of them was Adila, carrying a basket full of cakes
such as are made in that country for a marriage festival. One moment
she stood over him as he lay on his bed with what seemed to be the dews
of death on his forehead, and then putting her basket on the ground she
slipped to her knees by his side and said--
"I am Adila. I belong to you now, and have come to take care of you."
"Why do you come to me?" he answered. "Go away. I don't want you."
"But we are married, and I am your wife, and I am here to nurse you
until you are well," she said.
"I shall never be well," he replied. "I am dying and will soon be dead.
Why should you waste your life on me, my girl? Go away, and God bless
you. Praise to His name!"
With that she kissed his hand and her tears fell over it, but after a
moment she wiped her eyes, rose to her feet, and turning briskly to the
other women she said--
"Take your cakes and be off with you--I'm going to stay."
*CHAPTER XIV*
Three weeks longer Ishmael lay in the grip of his fever, and day and
night Adila tended him, moistening his parched lips and cooling his hot
forehead, while he raged against his enemies in his strong delirium,
crying, "Down with the Christians! Drive them away! Kill them!" Then
the thunging and roaring in his poor brain ceased, and his body was like
a boat that had slid in an instant out of a stormy sea into a quiet
harbour. Opening his eyes, with his face to the red wall, in the cool
light of a breathless morning, he heard behind him the soft and mellow
voice of a woman who seemed to be whispering to herself or to Heaven,
and she was saying--
"Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil; for Thine is
the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Amen."
"What is that?" he asked, closing his eyes again, and at the next moment
the mellow voice came from somewhere above his face--
"So you are better? Oh, how good that is! I am Adila. Don't you
remember me?"
"What was that you were saying, my girl?"
"That? Oh, that was the prayer of the Lord Isa (Jesus)."
"The Lord Isa?"
"Don't you know? Long ago my father told me about Him, and I've not
forgotten it even yet. He was only a poor man, a poor Jewish man, a
carpenter, but He was so good that He loved all the world, especially
sinful women when they were sorry, and little helpless children. He
never did harm to His enemies either, but people were cruel and they
crucified Him. And now He is in heaven, sitting at God's right hand,
with Mary His mother beside Him."