"Hush! I know that gentleman. Leave him alone, sirs, please. Let him
go."
With heart and soul aflame, Gordon walked away, intending to take the
first cab that came along and then forgetting to do so. One wild
thought now took possession of him and expelled all other thoughts. He
must go back to the Citadel and accuse the General of his gross
injustice. He must say what he meant to say when he stood by the door
as he was going out.
The General should hear it--he should, and by ---- he must!
The brandy was working in his brain by this time, and in the blind
leading of passion everything that happened on the way seemed to fortify
his resolve. The streets of the native city were now surging with
people, as a submerged mine surges with the water that runs through it.
He knew where they were going--they were going to El Azhar--and when he
came to the great mosque he had to fight his way through a crowd that
was coming from the opposite direction, with the turbaned head of a very
tall man showing conspicuously in the midst of the multitude, who were
chanting verses from the Koran and crying in chorus, "La ilaha
illa-llah."
At sight of this procession, knowing what it meant--that the Moslems
were going to the doomed place, to defend it or to die--a thousand
confused forms danced before Gordon's eyes. His impatience to reach the
Citadel became feverish, and he began to run, but again at the foot of
the hill on which the fortress stands he was kept back. This time it
was by a troop of cavalry who were trotting hard towards El Azhar. He
saw his deputy, Macdonald, with his blotchy face and his monocle, but he
was himself seen by no one, and in the crush he was almost ridden down.
The Citadel, when he reached it, seemed to be deserted, even the sentry
standing with his back to him in the sentry-box as he hurried through.
There was nobody in the square of the mosque or yet at the gate to the
General's garden, which was open, and the door of the house, when he
came to it, was open too. With the hot blood in his head, his teeth
compressed, and his nostrils quivering, he burst into the General's
office and came face to face with the old soldier as he was rising from
the sofa. Thus in the blind swirl of circumstance the two men met at
the moment when the heart of each was full of hatred for the other.
They were brave men both of them, and never for one instant had either
of them known what it was to feel afraid. They were not afraid now, but
they had loved each other once, and up from what deep place in their
souls God alone can say, there came a wave of feeling that fought with
their hate. The General no longer wanted to punish Gordon, but only
that Gordon should go away, while Gordon's rage, which was to have
thundered at the General, broke into an agonising cry.
"What are you doing here? Didn't I order you to your quarters? Do you
wish me to put you under close arrest? Get off!"
"Not yet. You and I have to settle accounts first. You have behaved
like a tyrant. A tyrant--that's the only word for it! If I was guilty
of insubordination, you were guilty of outrage. You had a right to
arrest me, and to order that I should be court-martialled, but what
right had you to condemn me before I was tried and punish me before I
was sentenced? Before or after, what right had you to break my sword
and tear off my medals? Degradation is obsolete in the British
Army--what right had you to degrade me? Before my father, too, and
before Helena--what _right_ had you?"
"Leave my house instantly; leave it, leave it!" said the General, his
voice coming thick and hoarse.
"Not till you hear what I've come to tell you," said Gordon, and then he
repeated the threat--who knows on what inherited cell of his brain
imprinted--which his father had made forty years before.
"I've come to tell you that I'll go back to my quarters and you shall
court-martial me to-morrow _if you dare_. Before that, England may know
by what is done to-night that I refused to obey your order because I'm a
soldier, not a murderer. But if she never knows," he cried, in his
breaking voice, "and you try me and condemn me and degrade me even to
the ranks, I'll get up again--do you hear me?--I'll get up again, and
win back all I've lost and more--until I'm your own master and you'll
have to obey _me_."
The General's face became scarlet, and lifting his hand as if to strike
Gordon, he cried, in a choking voice--
"Go, before I do something----"
But Gordon in the delirium of his rage heard nothing except the sound of
his own quivering voice.
"More than that," he said, "I'll win back Helena. She was mine, and you
have separated her from me and broken her heart as well as my own. Was
that the act of a father, or of a robber and a tyrant? But she will
come back to me, and when you are dead and in your grave we shall be
together, because ... Stop that! Stop it, I say!"
The General, unable to command himself any longer, had snatched up the
broken sword from the floor and was making for Gordon as if to smite
him.
"Stand away! You are an old man and I am not a coward. Drop that, or
by God you----"
But the General, losing himself utterly, flung himself on Gordon with
the broken sword, his voice gone in a husky growl and his breath coming
in hoarse gusts.
The struggle was short but terrible. Gordon in the strength of his
young manhood first laid hold of the General by the upper part of the
breast to keep him off, and then, feeling that his hand was wounded, he
gripped at the old man's throat with fingers that clung like claws. At
the next moment he snatched the sword from the General, and at the same
instant, with a delirious laugh, he flung the man himself away.
The General fell heavily with a deep groan and a gurgling cry. Gordon,
with a contemptuous gesture, threw the broken sword on the floor, and
then with the growl of a wild creature he turned to go.
"Fight me--would you, eh! Kill me, perhaps! We've settled accounts at
last--haven't we?"
But hearing no answer he turned at the door to look back and saw the
General lying where he had fallen, outstretched and still. At that
sight the breath seemed to go out of his body at one gasp. His head
turned giddy, and the red gleams of the sunset which were deflected into
the room appeared to his half-blind eyes to cover everything with blood.
*CHAPTER XXIX*
Gordon stood with his mouth open, the brute sense struck out of him by
the dead silence. Then he said--
"Get up! Why don't you get up?" hardly knowing what he was saying.
He got no answer, and a horrible idea began to take shape in his mind.
Though so hot a moment ago, he shivered and his teeth began to chatter.
He looked around him for a moment in the dazed way of a man awakening
from a nightmare, and then stepped up on tiptoe to where the General
lay.
Raising his head he looked at him, and found it hard to believe that
what he vaguely feared had happened. There was no sign of injury
anywhere. The eyes were open, and they looked fixedly at him with so
fierce a stare that they seemed to jump out of their sockets.
"Stunned--that's all--stunned by the fall," he thought, and seeing a
bottle of brandy on the shelf of the desk he got up and poured a little
into the medicine glass, and then, kneeling and lifting the General's
head again, he forced the liquor through the tightly compressed lips.
It ran out as it went in, and, with gathering fear and fumbling fingers,
Gordon unbuttoned the General's frock coat and laid a trembling hand
over his heart. At one moment he thought he felt a beat, but at the next
he knew it was only the throb of his own pulse.
At that the world seemed for a moment to be blotted out, and when he
came to himself again he was holding the General in his arms and calling
to him--
"General! General! Speak to me! For God's sake speak to me."
In the torrent of his remorse he was kissing the General's forehead, and
crying over his face, but there was no response.
Then a great trembling shook his whole body, and dropping the head
gently back to the floor he rose to his feet. The General was dead, and
he knew it.
He had seen death a hundred times before, but only on the battlefield,
amid the boom of cannon, the wail of shell, the snap of rifles, and the
oaths of men, but now it filled him with terror.
The silence was awful. A minute ago the General had been a living man,
face to face with him, and the room had been ringing with the clashing
of their voices; but now this breathless hush, this paralysing
stillness, in which the very air seemed to be dead, for something was
gone as by the stroke of an almighty hand, and there was nothing left
but the motionless figure at his feet.
"What have I done?" he asked, and when he told himself that in his
headstrong wrath he had killed a man, his head spun round and round.
He, who had refused to obey orders because he would not commit murder
was guilty of murder himself! What devil out of hell had ordered things
so that as the very consequence of refusing to commit a crime he had
become a criminal?
"God have pity upon me and tell me it is not true," he thought.
But he knew it was true, and when he told himself that the man he had
killed was his General his pain increased tenfold. The General had
loved him and favoured him, been proud of him and upheld him, and never,
down to the coming of this trouble, had their friendship been darkened
by a cloud.
"Oh, forgive me! God forgive me!" he thought.
In his blind misery, which hardly saw itself yet for what it was, the
impulse came to him to carry the burden of his sin, too heavy for
himself, to Helena, that she might help him to bear it; and he had taken
some steps towards the door leading to her room when it struck him as a
blow on the brain that she was the daughter of the dead man, and he was
going to her for comfort after killing her father.
At that thought he stopped and laid hold of the desk for support, being
so weak that he could scarcely keep on his legs. He remembered Helena's
love for the General, how much of her young life she had given to him,
and how the quarrel that had divided himself from her had come of her
determination not to leave her father as long as he lived. And now he
had killed him!
Beads of sweat started from his forehead, but after a moment he told
himself that if he could not expect comfort from Helena it was his duty
to comfort her--to break the news to her. He saw himself doing so.
"Helena, listen, dear; be brave." "What is it?" "Your father--is--is
dead." "Dead?" "Worse, a thousandfold worse--he is murdered."
"Murdered?" "It was all in the heat of blood--the man didn't know what
he was doing." "Who was it--who was it?" "Don't you see, Helena--it
was I."
He had turned again to the door leading to Helena's room when another
blow from an invisible hand seemed to fall upon him. He saw Helena's
eyes fixed on his face in the intensity of her hate, and he heard her
voice driving him away. "Go, let me never see you again!" That was
more than he could bear, and staggering to the sofa he sat down.
Some minutes passed. The red glow in the room deepened to a dull brown,
and at one moment there was a groan in the gathering gloom. He heard it
and looked up, but there was nobody there and then he realised that it
was he who had groaned. At another moment his mind occupied itself with
lesser things. He saw that one finger of his left hand was badly
wounded, and he bound it up in his handkerchief. Then he looked at
himself in a mirror that hung on the wall in front of the sofa, but he
could not see his face distinctly--eyes, nose, and mouth being blurred.
He did not attempt to escape. Never for an instant did it occur to him
to run away.
The sun went down behind the black Pyramids across the Nile, and after a
while the dead silence of the evening of the Eastern day was broken by
the multitudinous cries of the muezzin, which came up from the city
below like a deep ground-swell on a rugged coast.
After that Gordon knelt again by the General's body, trying to believe
he was not dead. The eyes were still open, but all the light had gone
out of them, and seeing their stony stare the thought came to him that
the General's soul was with him in the room. The stupor of his senses
had suddenly given way to a supernatural acuteness, and at one moment he
imagined he felt the touch of a hand on his shoulder.
At the next instant he was plainly conscious of a door opening and
closing in the inner part of the house, and of light and rapid footsteps
approaching. He knew what had occurred--Helena had been out on the
terrace or in the parade ground and had just come back.
She was now in the next room, breathing hard as if she had been running.
He could hear the rustling of her skirt and her soft step as she walked
towards the door of the General's office.
At the next moment there came a knock, but Gordon, held his breath and
made no answer.
Then "Father!" in a tremulous voice, full of fear, as if Helena knew
what had happened.
Still Gordon made no reply, and the frightened voice came again.
"Are you alone now? May I come in?"
Then Gordon felt an impulse to throw the door open and confess
everything, saying, "I did it, Helena, but I didn't intend to do it. He
threw himself upon me, and I flung him off and he fell, and that is the
truth, as God is my witness."
But he could not do this, because he was afraid. He who had never
before known fear, he who had stood in the firing line when hordes of
savage men had galloped down with fanatical cries--he was trembling now
at the thought of meeting a woman's face.
So, treading softly, he stole out of the room by the outer door, the
door leading to the gate, and as he closed it behind him he felt that
the door of hope also was now for ever closed between Helena and him.
But going through the garden he had to pass the arbour, and at sight of
that loved spot a wave of tender memories swept over him, and in pity of
Helena's position he wanted to return. She would be in her father's
room by this time, standing over his dead body and alone in her great
grief.
"I will go back," he thought. "She has no one else. She may curse me,
but I cannot leave her alone. I will go back--I will--I must!"
That was what his soul was saying to itself, but at the same time his
body was carrying him away--through the open gate and across the
deserted square, swiftly, stealthily, like a criminal leaving the scene
of his crime.
The day was now gone, the twilight was deep, and as he passed under the
outer port of the Citadel in the dead silence of the unquickened air, a
voice like that of an accusing angel, telling of judgment to come, fell
upon his ear. It was the voice of the last of the muezzin on the
minaret of the Mohammed Mosque calling to evening prayer--"God is Most
Great! God is Most Great!"
[Illustration: Music fragment]