"But fear nothing! The battle is not yours but God's! You will be
purified by your pilgrimage, your sins will be forgiven you, and when
death comes that stands at the foot of life's account, Paradise will
wait for you and the arms of the Merciful be open! In the name of the
Compassionate, peace!"
"Peace! Peace!" cried the vast mass in a voice that seemed to ring
through the empty dome of the sky. The men who had been standing before
Ishmael now prostrated themselves with their faces to the east, and then
rising to their feet they embraced each other. A subdued murmur passed
through the people, and at the next moment the crowd parted in many
places, leaving long, wide ways that went out from the foot of the tomb.
Down these paths the men passed in twos and threes as if going in
different directions, some north, some south, some east, some west.
Thus the hundred messengers set out on their pilgrimage, each his own
way, and none knowing if they should ever meet again. Though the eager,
emotional Egyptian people were ready to sob at sight of them, yet they
kept back their cries. Some of the women held out their children to be
kissed by their husbands as they passed, but they dried their own eyes
lest the men should see them weep.
The dawn was coming up by this time in a thin streak of pink across the
eastern sky, and the people watched the men as they passed away--beyond
the ruined tombs of the Caliphs, towards the barracks of the soldiers at
Abbassiah and over the reddening crest of the Mokattam Hills--until they
could be seen no more.
Then slowly as the great mass of the crowd had opened, it closed again,
and while women sobbed and men broke down in tears, the tall figure of
Ishmael, forgotten for a moment, was seen standing in the mystic light
of the dawn above the multitude of moving heads, and his throbbing voice
was heard pealing over them.
"O children of God," he cried, "be comforted! Go back to your homes and
wait! Be patient! Is not that what Islam means? Shed no tears for
those who have gone away from you. As sure as the sun will rise your
brethren will return. Look! Already it is gilding the fringes of the
clouds; it is sending away the spirits of darkness; it is approaching
the gates of morning! Even so in life or in death, in the spirit or in
the flesh, those who have left you will return, and when they come back
our Egypt will be God's."
With that, amid an answering cry from the people, he stepped down from
the tomb. Then the crowd parted as before, and he passed through them
towards the town in the direction of the Bab-en-Nasr, the Gate of
Victory. There was no shouting or waving of banners as he went away,
but only the silent Eastern greeting of hands to the lips and forehead,
with hardly a noise as loud as the sound of human breath.
The sun was now rising above the yellow Mokattam Hills, the day was
reddening over the desert, the gleaming streak of the Nile was shooting
out of the mist, and in the radiance of morning the crowd began to break
up and return to the city. Their eyes were shining with a new light, a
new joy, a new hope. They had come out to mourn and they were going
back rejoicing.
Hafiz was among the first to go. With his mouth full of a fresh message
he was flying back to Gordon. As he passed through the echoing streets
he met the band of one of the British battalions, and it was playing a
march from the latest opera.
*CHAPTER X*
Gordon, lying in his bed, heard the voice of Hafiz in the hall.
"Only me, Michael! All right! Don't get up yet."
At the next moment Hafiz himself, puffing and blowing, and with the cool
air of morning in his clothes, came dashing into the room.
"Halloa! Thought I was never coming back, I suppose! Couldn't tear
myself away--had to see it through--only just over. Tell you what,
though--I do believe ... yes, I do really believe that brute of a
Macdonald has set the trackers on to you! Coming down by El Azhar,
behold, two damned blacks--Soudanese, I mean--poking their noses into
the soft ground as if looking for footsteps. But no matter! We'll dish
the devil yet!"
Thus the good fellow, after the nightlong flight of his spirit among
sacred things, was giving way to the natural man, with chuckles and
crows and shouts of joy and even harmless oaths that had no bitterness
behind them.
"Lord God! you should have seen it, Gordon! Just like one of the
'Nights of the Prophet,' only bigger--yes, by my soul, bigger!"
Then, sitting on the side of the bed, he described the doings of the
night--how Ishmael had passed from group to group, comforting the
mourners and laying a soothing hand on every mother's sorrow, every
father's grief.
"Can't tell what the deuce it is in the man--whether it's the prophet or
the poet or the diviner--but he doesn't need that anybody should tell
him anything, because he _knows_."
It was not at first that Gordon, coming out of the long night of his
sufferings, caught the contagion of Hafiz's good spirits, but his weary,
bloodshot eyes began to shine when Hafiz described Ishmael's appeal to
the people to leave everything behind them and go with him into the
desert--out of the empire of man into the empire of Allah.
"It was thrilling! _Wallahi_! You had to hear it, though! It was not
so much what he said as something in the man himself that set all your
nerves tingling."
And when Hafiz went on to tell of Ishmael's appeal for help, not to the
saints, the men whom God had cleansed of all sins, the souls that were
as pure as the sands of the sea-shore and as fruitless, but to the
sinners, the sin-laden and sin-stained, to whom the peace of life and
the repose of death were both denied, he felt Gordon's hand clutching at
his own and his whole body quivering.
"Sinners, not saints--did he say that, Hafiz?"
"Yes! 'Come to me, my brothers,' he said. 'Your purification is here.
A pilgrimage is before you that will cleanse you from all sin.' They
took him at his word too. Good Lord! You never saw such scrambling!
Such a crew! Sinners, by Jove! Some of them the most notorious
scoundrels in Cairo--rich rascals who have been living for themselves
all their lives and beggaring everybody about them. Assassins too, or
men who have been suspected of being so. Yet there they were, fighting
for a chance of going out to starvation and danger and death."
Gordon's eyes were running over by this time, but they were glistening
too, like the sun when it shines through a cloud of rain.
"Open the curtains, Hafiz," he said, and when Hafiz had done so it was
almost as if an angel of hope had parted them and come sweeping with a
stream of sunlight into the room.
Then Hafiz told of the going away of the hundred messengers, of
Ishmael's triumphant prediction that they would come back, and finally
of the return of the people to their homes with the flow as of a great
tide, filled with a new spirit, comforted, changed, transformed,
transfigured.
"And Ishmael himself?" asked Gordon.
"He has gone also," said Hafiz.
"Where has he gone?"
"That was kept quiet, but the Chancellor was there, and I got it out of
him--he has gone to Khartoum."
"Khartoum?"
"That's where he comes from--where he lived in his youth, at all events.
He has to take the early train for Upper Egypt, so he'll be on his way
already. Oh, something is going to happen! Wait! You'll see! Couldn't
find out exactly what the men were told to do, but Government has its
work cut out for it."
"There was to be no resistance to the rule of England--do you say he
said that, Hafiz?"
"That's true. 'Do you wish to drive England out of Egypt? Go home,' he
said, 'this pilgrimage is not yours. Do you expect to conquer by the
sword? Stand back! This work is not for you.' All the same there'll be
a mighty stir at the Ministry of the Interior. Omdehs and Moudirs and
all the miscellaneous blackguards will be watching Ishmael and his men.
So much the better for us, my boy. Now's your time! Now's your
opportunity!"
While Gordon listened a great burden seemed to fall from him; a sort of
electric revelation appeared to suffuse the path that had been so
obscure a few moments before. His prayers seemed to be answered; the
bright glory of a new hope seemed to be born within him and he thought
he saw his way at last.
Though his career as a soldier was at an end; though his father, his
mother and Helena were gone from him; though he had lost everything he
had loved and been proud of; though the ways of life seemed to be for
ever closed to him and the world had no use for him any longer, and he
was beaten and broken and alone, there was One who was with him
still--there was God!
"With our God is forgiveness," and in the immensity and majesty of His
compassion, the Almighty had willed it that he, even he, might yet do
something.
He would join the forces of the new prophet!
Why not? Their cause was a good one. It was not a crusade of Egypt
against England, but of right against wrong, of justice against
injustice, of belief against unbelief, of God against the world.
Hold! A traitor to his Church and country?
No, for this was the great universal war--the war of an empire that had
no boundaries, the holy war that had been waged all the earth over and
all the ages through--the war of religion and truth against the powers
of darkness and death.
So thinking God's hand was leading him, he saw himself--white man and
Christian and British soldier though he was--following Ishmael Ameer
into the desert, working by his side, and then coming back at last when
his sin had been forgiven and his redemption won.
"Yet wait! What about my father?" he thought.
But he could not think of his father at the same time as he thought of
his return. He remembered his mother, though, and saw himself taking
her in his arms and saying, "Mother, I've come back to you, as you
always said I would. I only meant to do what was right, and if I did
what was wrong, God has pardoned me."
And then far off, very far, hardly daring to see itself yet, in his
awakened soul there was a hope of Helena. Somehow and somewhere he would
meet her again--he knew not how or where or when, but Heaven knew
everything, and the end would be with God.
Thus with a labouring and quivering heart, and with clouded eyes that
were running over, he sat on his bed, looking into the stream of
sunlight that was pouring into the room, and feeling with an immense joy
that God had manifested His will at last.
Meanwhile Hafiz, still tuning his speech to the spirit of the natural
man, was chuckling and crowing over his new chance of getting Gordon out
of the country.
"Damn it all, man, we'll beat them yet, if you'll only leave yourself to
me. And you will, I know you will!"
"Hafiz," said Gordon, "you thought last night you could help me to get
away from here--do you still think you could?"
"Certainly! Isn't that what I'm saying?"
"Do you think you could do it now?"
"Why not ... that is to say, if you are well enough ... It's your hand,
isn't it?"
"That's nothing--only a sore finger, you know."
"God! A sore finger, and old Michael says it's gone--half of it,
anyway! But if it had been half your arm it wouldn't have stopped
you--I know that quite well. So if you're game I'm ready. The sooner
the better too! The dear old Patriarch will close his eyes, and as for
Michael----"
"What day is this, Hafiz?" said Gordon--he had lost count of time.
"Monday--that's the worst of it. The steamer doesn't sail until
Saturday, and you'll have to stay in Alexandria until ... Or wait! Why
not take a foreign boat? The French one to Marseilles, or--let me
think--the Italian boat to Messina. The very thing! She sails on
Wednesday. You can join the English ship at Naples. Splendid! Better
than joining her at Alexandria. There's Helena, you know.
"Helena?"
"A woman's a woman after all, my boy. Mind I don't say Helena would
give you away, but she might--not having seen you since her father's
death and then coming so unexpectedly upon you at Alexandria--at the
ship's side, perhaps. Better not risk it. Get out of the country
before you meet her--away from that brute of a Macdonald and all the
tags and bobs of the Intelligence Department."
"I'll want a disguise of some sort, Hafiz."
"Good idea!" said Hafiz, slapping his knee. "You can't set foot in the
streets of Cairo without being recognised. Then if I'm right about the
trackers ... but we'll not talk about that. Something Eastern, eh? What
do you say to a Coptic priest? Old Michael could lend us a black gown
and a black turban. Or no, a Bedouin, going to Naples for ammunition!
Why, it happens every day! Splendid costume! Covers your head and
nearly all your face, you know ... Oh, we'll lick him, the big, bloated,
blithering ... Ha, ha! Effendi thinks he holds the field, and he is
walking about the city like a leopard among dogs. But wait! We'll
see!"
Then getting up from the side of the bed and walking to and fro in the
room, Hafiz laughed out loud in his savage joy at the thought of
defeating Macdonald, until Gordon said--
"I shall want a man to go with me. Can you find me a man, Hafiz?" and
thereupon the good fellow's spirits dropped suddenly and his laughing
mouth began to lag.
"A man? To go with you? Well, I ... I thought of doing that myself,
Gordon ... as far as the boat I mean ... just to see the last of you ...
not knowing when I may ... But perhaps you're right. I might cause you
to be suspected, and then ... Yes, I must give that up, I suppose."
"That's all right, Hafiz--we'll meet again somewhere," said Gordon, and
when Hafiz's face had brightened afresh he added--
"I'll want camels, Hafiz--two good, strong camels."
"Camels? Why, what the deuce.... Ah, of course! What a fool I am!
Every station watched! Wonder I never thought of that before! The
jackals are all along the line, and if you had gone by train, damn it,
man! where should we have been? In Macdonald's mousetraps in no time!
Oh, yes, camels, of course. I'll get you camels. Good ones, too.
Bedouins always have good camels. Ha, ha! Effendi will go to the place
he is fit for, and God increase the might of Islam!"
"I'll want money too, Hafiz."
"Don't trouble about that. I've got a little myself--all you'll want to
get away."
"I'll want a good deal, Hafiz. There's a bundle of bank notes in the
top drawer of my desk at the barracks. You'll find the key in my
trousers' pocket, and if you can only contrive----"
"Of course I can. Your soldier boy has been asking after you ever since
you went away. He'll manage it. Macdonald's bloodhounds are beating
about the barracks, of course, but Tommy--trust Tommy to get the money
for you.... In your trousers' pocket, you say? ... All right. Here's
the key! ... Let me see, now--you'll want your berth booked--to Messina,
I mean. I'll do that myself and give you whatever's left ... I must
keep out of people's way until after Wednesday, though! No calling at
the Agency--not if I know it! My mother must be told I've been sent off
somewhere, and as for the Consul-General and the telephone--I'll break
the blessed receiver, that's what I'll do! ... Never mind about my not
seeing you off. Lord alive, that's nothing! Hope to get leave before
long, and then I'll slip over to England. So I'll not be saying
good-bye to you when you go away, Gordon--not altogether, you know--not
for good, I mean. And if all goes well with you and Helena----"
But the chuckling and the crowing and the laughing out loud in savage
exultation at the thought of beating Macdonald were beginning to break
down, and then Gordon, unable to keep back the truth any longer, said in
a voice that chilled the ear of Hafiz--
"Hafiz, old fellow!"
"Well?"
"I don't intend to go back to England."
"You don't intend to go back----"
"No."
"Then where the ... where are you going to, Charlie?"
"I'm going to Khartoum."
*CHAPTER XI*
During the earlier hours of the Night of Lamentation Helena sat in her
room looking over bundles of old letters and tying them up with ribbon.
The letters were nearly all from Gordon, but being written under
different conditions and meant to be read in happier hours, every
playful passage in them stung and every word of affection scorched.
She was waiting for the black boy to come back from the demonstration,
and thinking out a course of conduct. Instead of returning to England
she was to remain in Cairo, and by help of the new evidence she was to
compel the law to arrest and convict the guilty man. It was her right
to do so, and since the authorities, thinking of other things, were
shirking their responsibility, it was her duty, her solemn and sacred
duty.
What did State considerations matter to her? Nothing! She remembered
the predicament of the Army surgeon without compunction, and even when
she thought of the position of the Consul-General she did not care. Her
father was dead, Gordon was lost to her, she was a woman and she was
alone, and nothing else was of the smallest consequence. Thus seeing to
the bottom of her own misery, she had now no pity for anybody else.
At midnight the black boy had not returned, and being worn out with
sleeplessness, and assured by her other servants that Mosie was well
able to take care of himself, she went to bed. But the moonlight
filtered through the white window-blind, and she lay for some time with
wide-open eyes thinking what she would do next day. She would go down
to the Ministry of the Interior and set the law in motion. There would
be no time to lose, for if Ishmael escaped the consequences of
to-night's proceedings he might leave Cairo without delay.
She slept a few hours only, and when she awoke the sun was flecking with
fiery bars a window that faced to the east. While she lay on her back
with her arm under her head, looking at the ceiling, and working herself
up into a still greater hatred of Ishmael, there came a timid knock at
the door and the black boy entered the room. He was breathless and
dishevelled and full of apologies.
"Lady angry with Mosie? Mosie stop all night to tell lady everything,"
he said, and then he told her what had happened in the Mohammedan
cemetery--a wild, disordered, delirious story of the departure of the
hundred men.
"But the prophet himself--what has become of him?" asked Helena, raising
her head from her pillow.
"White Prophet gone," said Mosie.
"Gone?"
"Mosie follow him to station. White Prophet go by train, lady."
"By train?"
"Yes, lady. White Prophet go by train to Upper Egypt," said Mosie, and
then Helena heard no more.
Her head fell back to her pillow and she covered her eyes with her
hands. The guilty man was gone, the authorities had allowed him to go,
and if the evil-doer was to be punished there was nothing left but
personal vengeance.
Every tender impulse of her heart was now dead. Overwhelmed as by a new
burden, and haunted by a dark responsibility--that of seeing God's
vengeance brought down upon her father's murderer--she saw herself at
one moment prompting Gordon to kill Ishmael. Why not? There was no
other way. Gordon should kill Ishmael Ameer because Ishmael Ameer had
killed her father!
At the next moment the recollection that Gordon had gone took her back
once more to the bitterest part of her suffering. She had always
thought that when God made Gordon He had made him without fear, yet he
had run away from the consequences of being court-martialled. It was
intensely painful to her to despise Gordon, but do what she would she
could not help feeling a growing contempt for him. If he had only stood
up to his punishment she would have been proud of him, and even if he
had been drummed out of the army, or any fate had befallen him less
terrible than death, he would have found her standing by his side.
But he had fled, he had left her, and being useless for all purposes of
righteous vengeance, a woman without a man behind her, she could do
nothing now but go back to England.
During the next three days she was kept busy by the mechanical
preparations for her departure. There was not much she had to do, for
the contents of the General's house belonged to the army, and beyond her
own and her father's personal possessions there was little to pack up,
yet the black boy was always beside her, with a helping hand but a
lagging lip and many plaintive lamentations.
"Lady not want Mosie any more now--no?"
On the Thursday he came running into Helena's room to say that Lady
Nuneham, with her Egyptian maid, had come to call on her.
Helena met Gordon's mother at the door, the sweet old soul with her
pale, spiritual face, suffering visibly, but bearing herself bravely as
she stepped out of her closely curtained carriage and crossed the garden
path, under the white heat of the noonday sun, with one arm through
Fatimah's, and a trembling hand on the ebony handle of a walking-stick.
As soon as she reached the hall the old lady lifted her veil and
stretched out her arms to Helena and kissed her, and then patted her
shoulder with her mittened hand as if Helena had been a child and she
had come to comfort her.
"My poor Helena! It's hard for you, I know, but if God sends the cross
He sends the strength to carry it. I've always found it so, my dear,"
she said, and when she was seated on the sofa with Helena beside her,
she began to talk of her own father, how they had been everything to
each other, and when he had died she had thought she could not live
without him, but God had been good--He had sent her her husband and
then----
But that was a blind alley down which she could walk no further, for
there was one name that was trembling on the lips of both women and
neither of them could yet bring herself to speak it.
"When my mother died, too--I was married then and living here in Cairo,
but mother couldn't leave the old home in Massachusetts where I was
brought up as a child ... Poor mother, she used to play Blind-man's-buff
in the hall with me, I remember, for we were far away from other people
and I had no little playmates ... when she died I thought I should have
died too, but God was good to me again--He sent me my own child, my boy,
my----"
It was just as if all roads converged to one centre, and to escape from
it the old lady began to talk of little things, asking simple questions
and giving motherly advice, while Helena held down her head and drew the
hem of her handkerchief through her fingers.
"You are sailing on Saturday, are you not?"
"Yes, on Saturday."
"You must take good care of yourself, dearest. It is hot in Cairo, but
it may be cool in Alexandria and even cold on the sea. Put some warm
clothing on, dear--some nice warm underclothing, you know."
She was sure to meet pleasant people on the steamer and they would see
her safely into the train at Marseilles. It would be such an agreeable
break to travel overland, through Paris, and when she reached London----
"Have you anybody to meet you in London, Helena?"
Still drawing the hem of her handkerchief through her fingers, Helena
shook her head.
"I'm sorry for that, dear, very sorry."
Arriving in London was so trying, so bewildering, especially to a woman.
Such crowds, such confusion! It always made her feel so helpless. And
then she had the Consul-General to look after her, and once Gordon had
come to meet her too. He was at the Staff College at that time, and
before she alighted from the carriage she had seen him forging his way
down the platform, and he kissed his hand to her----
But the sweet old thing could bear up no longer, and while Helena
pressed her handkerchief to her lips, she said--
"O Helena, how happy we might have been! It's wrong of me, I know it's
wrong, but I can't reconcile myself to it even yet. 'Why is my life
prolonged?' I have often thought, and then I have told myself it was
because God intended that I should live to see my dear children happy.
Ah, my darling, it would have been so beautiful! My children and
perhaps my children's children. If I could only have seen them all
together once! It would have been so easy to go then. But now my son
is gone--I don't know what has become of him--and my daughter--my sweet
daughter that was to be----"
Helena sank to her knees. "Mother!" she said, and burying her face in
Lady Nuneham's shoulder, she felt, for the first time in her life, that
a mother's heart was beating against her own.
After a while the old lady, whose arms had been about Helena's neck,
began to stroke her forehead and the top of her head and to say in a
calmer voice--
"It was wrong of me to repine, dear. Happiness does not depend on us.
It depends on God, and we should leave everything to Him. He will do
what is best. I'm sure He will."
Then in a nervous way she attempted to defend Gordon. They were not to
be too hard on him. No doubt he thought he was doing what was right.
"And he was, too, wasn't he? In a sense at least. Don't you think so,
Helena?"
Helena could not answer, but she made a helpless motion with her head.
They were not to suppose he meant to forsake them either, and if he had
fled away he was not thinking of himself only--they might be sure of
that. He never did--never had done--never once since he was a child.
"You couldn't give him a handful of sweets when he was a boy but he
asked for another for Hafiz."
Perhaps he was thinking of his father--that if he gave himself up and
there was an inquiry, a court-martial, the Consul-General would suffer
in his influence in Egypt and his esteem in England. Perhaps he was
thinking of Helena herself--that it might seem as if her father's death
had been hastened by the painful scene with himself. And perhaps he was
thinking a little of his mother, too--of the pain she would suffer at
sight of her husband and her son at war before the world.
However this might be, he would come back. She knew he would. Oh yes,
she knew quite well he would come back. For four days she had asked
God, and He had answered her at last.
"'Help me, O God, for Christ's sake!' I said. 'Will my dear son come
back to me? Shall I see him again? O God, give me a sign.' And He did,
my dear. Yes, it was just before dawn this morning. 'Janet!' said a
voice, and I was not afraid. 'Be patient, Janet! All will be well!'"
Helena dared not look up, being afraid to penetrate by so much as a
glance the sanctity of the old lady's soul.
"So you see it's wrong to repine, dear. Everything will work out for
the best. You are going to England, but that doesn't matter in the
least. We'll all come together again yet. And when my dear ones are
united, my sweet daughter and my boy, my brave, brave boy----"
The old lady's voice was quivering with the excitement of her joy, when
Fatimah, who had stood aside in silence, stepped forward and said--
"Better go home now, my lady. His lordship will be waiting for his
lunch."
Lady Nuneham took Helena's head between her hands and kissed her on the
forehead, then dropped her veil and rose to her feet by help of
Fatimah's arm on the one side and her stick on the other.
"Good-bye for the present, Helena! Be sure you write as soon as you get
to England. Take good care of yourself on the voyage, dear. And don't
forget to put on some nice warm underclothing, you know. Good-bye!"
Helena saw her to the door, the sweet, helpless old child, living by the
life of her beautiful love. As she passed down the path she waved her
delicate hand in its silken mitten, and Helena said farewell to her with
her eyes, knowing she would see her no more.
*CHAPTER XII*
After a while Helena began to think tenderly of Gordon, and to conjure
up the beautiful moments of their love--the moment in the arbour before
he set off for Alexandria, the moment in his quarters when she had to
slip off her glove and dip her finger in the glass from which he drank
her health, and above all, the moment of their first meeting, when he
said he loved Egypt and the Egyptians, and everything and everybody, and
they laughed and looked into each other's eyes, and smiled without
speaking, and he took her hand and kept on holding it, and a world of
warm impulses coursed through her veins, and something whispered to her,
"It is he!"
But thinking like this about Gordon only made her remember with even
more bitterness than before the man who had taken him away from her.
Presently she saw that there was a kind of dishonour to Gordon in hating
the Egyptian for that, and though she tried to justify herself by
thinking of Gordon's mother, and of the beautiful blind faith that was
doomed to death, she was compelled to go back at length to the one sure
ground on which she could continue to hate Ishmael and keep a good
conscience--that the man had killed her father.
So intensely did she work up her feelings on this subject that, awaking
in the middle of the night after Lady Nuneham's visit, she held out her
hands in bed and prayed to God to let His vengeance fall on the
Egyptian.
"Punish him, O God, punish him, punish, him! My father is dead! My
dear father is dead! He was so weak, so ill, so old! O God, let Thy
vengeance fall on the coward who killed him! Let Thy hand be on him as
long as he lives! Follow him wherever he goes! Destroy him whatever he
does! Let him never know another happy hour! Let him be an exile and
an outcast to the last hour of his life! O God, hear me, hear me!"
Next morning she felt ashamed of this outburst, but less because of its
bitterness than its futility, and then with a sense of utter
helplessness she began to feel the misery of being a woman. It was a
part of the cruel scheme of nature that, however injured and outraged, a
woman could do nothing. In the East, above all, she was
useless--useless for all purposes of justice or vengeance or revenge.
On the Friday afternoon, having made the last preparations for her
departure, she was sitting at her desk writing labels for her trunks and
portmanteaus, when Mosie dashed in upon her to say that the Princess
Nazimah, with sais and footmen and eunuchs, was driving up to the door.
A moment later the Princess entered the room. Her plump person,
redolent of perfume, was clad in a tussore silk gown, and under the
latest of Paris hats her powdered face was plainly visible through the
thinnest of chiffon veils.
"I hear you are leaving Egypt, so I've come to bid good-bye to you," she
said, and then taking Helena by the shoulders and looking into her face
she cried--
"Merciful powers, what has become of your eyes, my beauty? What have
you been doing to yourself, my moon?"
"Nothing," said Helena.
"Nothing? Don't tell me. You are not sleeping, no, nor eating either.
Come, sit down and tell me all about it," and sitting heavily on the
sofa, with Helena beside her, she proceeded to do the talking herself.
"But, my dear creature, my good girl, this is nonsense. Excuse the
word--nonsense! Good God! Is a girl to kill herself because her father
dies before her? Fathers do, and why shouldn't they? Mine did. He was
a beast. Excuse the word--a beast. Forty wives--or was it fifty?--but
he died nevertheless."
With that she lifted her veil, used a smelling bottle, and then began
again--
"I see what it is, though--your ways are not our ways, and all this
comes of your religion. It makes you think about death and the grave,
whereas ours tells us to think about life. Your Christianity is a
funeral mute, my dear, while Islam is a dancing girl, God bless her!
You groan and weep when your kindred die. We laugh and are happy, or if
we are not we ought to be. I'm sure I was when my first husband died.
'Thank the Lord he's gone,' I said. It's true I hadn't lived on the
best of terms with him, but then----"
"It's not my father's death only," began Helena haltingly, whereupon the
Princess said--
"Yes, of course! I've heard all about it. He's gone, and I suppose you
know no more than anybody else what has become of him. No?"
"No!"
"Ah, my dear, my moon, my beauty, all this wouldn't have happened if you
had taken my advice. When your Gourdan began to oppose his father you
should have stopped him. Yes, you could have done it. Of course you
could."
"I couldn't, Princess," said Helena.
"What? You mean to say you tried to and you couldn't? You couldn't get
him to give up that ridiculous holy man for a girl like ... Then God
have mercy upon us, what are you moaning about? Who ever heard of such
a thing? A young woman like you eating her heart out for the loss of a
man who prefers ... well, upon my word!"
The Princess put her smelling bottle to both nostrils in quick
succession, and then said--
"It's true I thought him the best of the bunch. In fact I simply lost
my heart to him. But if he had been the only man in the world ... Oh, I
know! You think he _is_ the only one. I thought that myself when my
first husband left me. It wasn't a Mahdi in his case. Only a milliner,
and I was ready to die of shame. But I didn't. I just put some kohl on
my eyes and looked round for another. It's true my second wasn't much
of a man, but a donkey of your own is better than a horse of somebody
else's."