"Now go! Go back to your quarters and consider yourself under arrest.
Or take my advice and be off altogether. Quit the army you have
dishonoured and the friends you have disgraced and hide your infamous
conduct in some foreign land. Leave the room at once!"
Gordon had stood through this gross indignity bolt upright and without
speaking. His face had become deadly white and his colourless lower lip
had trembled. At the end, while the old General was taking gusts of
breath, he tried to say something, but his tongue refused to speak. At
length he staggered rather than walked to the door, and with his hand on
the handle he turned and said quietly, but in a voice which his father
never forgot--
"General, the time may come when it will be even more painful to you to
remember all this than it has been to me to bear it."
Then he stumbled out of the room.
*CHAPTER XXIV*
Out in the hall he had an impulse to turn towards Helena's room on the
right, but through his half-blind eyes he saw Helena herself on the
left, standing by the open entrance to the garden, with her handkerchief
at her mouth.
"Helena!"
She made a little nervous cry, but stifling it in her throat she turned
hotly round on him.
"You told me that love was above everything," she said, "and this is how
you love me!"
Torn as he was to his heart's core, outraged as he believed himself to
be, he made a feeble effort to excuse himself.
"I couldn't help it, Helena,--it was impossible for me to act
otherwise."
"Oh, I know! I know!" she said. "You were doing what you thought to be
right. But I am no match for you. You have duties that are higher than
your duty to me."
Her tone cut him to the quick, and he tried to speak but could not.
Like a drowning man he stretched out his hand to her, but she made no
response.
[Illustration: He stretched out his hand to her, but she made no
response]
"It was not to be, I see that now," she said, while her eyes filled and
her bosom heaved. "I am not worthy of you. But I loved you and I
thought you loved me, and I believed you when you told me that nothing
could come between us."
Again he tried to speak, to explain, to protest, but his tongue would
not utter a sound.
"If you had really loved me you would have been ready to ... even to....
But I was mistaken and I am punished, and this is how it is to end!"
"Helena, for God's sake--" he began, but he could bear no more. He did
not see that the girl's love was fighting with her pride. The hideous
injustice of it all was working like madness in his brain, and after a
moment he turned to go.
As he walked across the garden the ground under his feet sounded hollow
in his ears like the ground above a new-covered grave. When he reached
the gate he thought he heard Helena calling in a pleading, sobbing
voice--
"Gordon!"
But when he turned to look back she had disappeared. Then bareheaded,
without helmet or sword, with every badge of rank and honour gone, he
pulled the gate open and staggered into the square.
*CHAPTER XXV*
Helena returned to her father's room, and found the two old men getting
ready to go. In the Pasha's face there were traces of that impulse to
smile which comes to shallow natures in the presence of another person's
troubles. But the face of the Consul-General was a tragic sight. The
square-set jaw hung low, and the eyes were heavy as with unshed tears.
It was easy to see that the iron man was deeply moved--that the depths
of his ice-bound soul were utterly broken up.
Only in short, disjointed sentences did he speak at all. It was about
his enemies--the corrupt, cruel, and hypocritical upholders of the old
dark ways. They had bided their time; they had taken their revenge;
they had hit him at last where he could least bear a blow; they had
struck him in the face with the hand of his only son.
"There is no shame left in them," he said, and then he turned to Helena
as if intending to say some word of sympathy. He wanted to tell her
that he had hoped for other things, and would have been happy if they
had come to pass. But when he saw the girl standing before him with her
red eyes and pale cheeks, he hesitated, grasped her hand, held it for a
moment, and then walked away without a word.
The Military Secretary accompanied the Consul-General and the Pasha to
their carriages, and so father and daughter were left together. The
General, labouring under the most painful of all senses, the sense of
having done an unworthy thing, walked for some minutes about the room,
and talked excitedly, while Helena sat on the sofa in silence, and,
resting her chin on her hand, looked fixedly before her.
"Well, well, it's all over, thank God! It couldn't be helped, either!
It had to be! Better as it is, too, than if it had come later on....
How hot I am! My throat is like fire. Get me a drink of water, girl."
"Let me give you your medicine, father. It's here on the desk," said
Helena.
"No, no! Water, girl, water! That's right! There! ... He has gone, I
suppose? Has he gone? Yes? Good thing too! Hope I'll never see him
again! I never will--never! ... How my head aches! No wonder either!"
"You're ill, father--let me run for the doctor."
"Certainly not. I'm all right. Sit down, girl. Sit down and don't
worry.... You mustn't mind me. I'm a bit put out--naturally! It's hard
for you, I know, but don't cry, Helena!"
"I'm not crying, father--you see I'm not."
"That's right! That's right, dear! It's hard for you, I say, but then
it isn't easy for me either. I liked him. I did, I confess it. I
really liked him, and to ... to do that was like cutting off one's own
son. But ... give me another drink of water, Helena ... or perhaps if
you think you ought to run ... no, give me the medicine and I'll be
better presently."
She poured out a dose and he drank it off.
"Now I'll lie down and close my eyes. I soon get better when I lie down
and close my eyes, you know. And don't fret, dear. Think what an escape
you've had! Merciful heavens! A traitor! Think if you had married a
traitor! A man who had sold himself to the enemies of England! I was
proud of you when you showed him that--come what would--you must stand
by your country. Splendid! Just what I expected of you, Helena!
Splendid!"
After a while his excited speech and gusty breathing softened down to
silence and to something like sleep, and then Helena sat on a stool
beside the sofa and covered her face with her hands. A hot flush
mounted to her pale cheeks when she remembered that it had not been for
England that she had acted as she had, but first for her father and next
for herself.
Perhaps she ought to have told Gordon why she could not leave her
father. If she had done so he might have acted otherwise. But the real
author of the whole trouble had been the Egyptian. How she hated that
man! With all the bitterness of her tortured heart she hated him!
As for Gordon, traitor or no traitor, he had been above them all! Far,
far above everybody! Even the Consul-General, now she came to think of
it, had been a little man compared with his son.
With her face buried in both hands and the tears at last trickling
through her fingers, she saw everything over again, and one thing above
all--Gordon standing in silence while her father insulted and degraded
him.
The General opened his eyes, and seeing Helena at his feet he tried to
comfort her, but every word he spoke went like iron into her soul.
"I'm sorry for you, Helena--very sorry! We must bear this trouble
together, dear. Only ourselves again now, you know, just as it was five
years ago at home. Your dark hour, this time, darling, but I'll make it
up to you. Come, kiss me, Helena," and, drying her weary eyes, she
kissed him.
The afternoon sun was then reddening the alabaster walls of the mosque
outside, and they heard a surging sound as of a crowd approaching. A
moment later little black Mosie ran in to say that the new Mahdi was
coming, and almost before the General and Helena could rise to their
feet a tall man in white Oriental costume entered the room. He came in
slowly, solemnly, and with head bent, saying--
"Excuse me, sir, if I come without ceremony."
"Ishmael Ameer?" asked the General.
"My name is Ishmael--you are the Commander of the British forces. May I
speak with you alone?"
The General stood still for a moment, measuring his man from head to
foot, and then said--
"Leave us, Helena."