"You must forgive me, dear--I've not been what I ought to have been to
you."
"No, Janet, no, it is I----"
He could not utter another word, but he rose to his feet, and, clasping
his wife in his arms, he kissed her on her wrinkled forehead and her
whitened hair more fervently than he had ever done in their youth.
At the next moment the old lady was speaking about Helena. The
Consul-General would see her off in the morning, and he was to give all
her motherly love to her. He was also to warn her to take good care of
herself on the voyage, and not to be anxious or to repine.
"Tell her to remember what I said, dear. She is going back to England,
but that doesn't matter in the least. God keeps all His promises, and
He will keep His promise in this case too--I'm sure He will. Tell her
that, dear."
The Consul-General answered "Yes" and "Yes" to all her messages, but he
did not hear them. Bent almost double, with the light of his wearied
eyes almost extinct, he stumbled out of the room. He was no longer
angry with Gordon, but he was choking with hatred and scorn, and above
all, with jealousy of the man who had robbed him of his son, the man who
had robbed his wife of her only pride and joy, and left them, hopeless
and old and lone.
At the door of his bedroom one of his secretaries was waiting for him
with a paper in his hand.
"Well, well, what is it now?" he asked.
"An important telegram from, the Soudan, sir," said the secretary.
"Ishmael Ameer has turned up in Khartoum."
Then the austere calm of the stern old man deserted him for a moment,
and the pent-up agony of the broken and bankrupt hopes of a lifetime
broke into a shout.
"Damn him! Damn him! Tell the Sirdar to kill him like a dog," he
cried, and his secretary fled in a fright.
*CHAPTER XVIII*
Hours passed before the Consul-General slept. He was telling himself
that there were now two reasons why he should suppress and destroy the
man Ishmael Ameer.
First because "this madman, this fanatic, this false prophet," under the
cloak of religion and the mantle of prophecy, was a cover for the
corruption and the self-seeking which in the name and the guise of
Nationalism were trying to drive England out of the valley of the Nile;
because he was the rallying-point of the retrograde forces which were
doing their best to destroy whatever seeds of civilisation had been
implanted in the country during forty sleepless years; because he was
trying to turn prosperity back to bankruptcy, order back to anarchy, and
the helpless millions of the unmoving and the uncomplaining peasantry
back to slavery and barbarity; because, in a word, he was the head
centre of the schools and nurseries of sedition which were undoing the
hard labour of his lifetime and striving to wipe his name out of Egypt
as utterly as if he had never been.
This was the first of the Consul-General's two reasons why he should
suppress and destroy Ishmael Ameer, and the second was still more
personal and more intimate.
His second reason was because "this madman, this fanatic, this false
prophet" had stepped in between him and the one hope of his life--the
hope of founding a family. That hope had been a secret which he
believed he had never betrayed to any one, not even to his wife, but all
the more on that account it had been sweet and sacred. Born in a moment
of fierce anger and in a spirit of revenge, it had grown to be his
master passion. It had cheered his darkest hours, brightened his
heaviest labour, exalted his drudgery into duty, given joy to his
success, and wings to his patriotism itself.
That, at the end of his life of hard work, and as the reward and the
crown of it, he should see the name he had made for himself among the
great names of the British nation, and that his son should succeed to
it, and his son's son, and his son's son's son, being all peers of the
realm and all Nunehams--this had been the cherished aspiration of his
soul.
But now his high-built hope was in the dust. By robbing him of his
son--his only son--"this madman, this fanatic, this false prophet" had
turned his one aim to ashes. When he was old, too, and his best powers
were spent, and his life was behind him, and there was nothing before
him but a few short years of failing strength and then--the end.
"Damn him! Damn him!" he cried again in the darkness as he rolled about
in his bed.
But when he tried to think out some means, some swift and secret
tribunal, perhaps, by which he could suppress and destroy the man
Ishmael, who had laid waste his life and was joining with the worst
elements in Egypt to make the government of the country impossible, he
had to tell himself how powerless after all was the machinery of Western
civilisation against the hypocritical machinations of Eastern
fanaticism.
On the one side the clogs and impediments of representative government,
and on the other the subtlety, secrecy, duplicity, and deceit of men
like Ishmael Ameer. If he could only scotch these troubles once for all
by a short and sharp military struggle--how different the results would
be!
But with every act of his life watched from Whitehall, and with
operations of frightful urgency kept back by cable; dogged by foreign
diplomats who, professing to be England's friends, were yet waiting to
find their opportunity in the hour of England's need; vilified by
boobies in Parliament who did not know the difference between the East
and the West, between the Mousky and the Mile End Road, and were
constantly sending the echo of their parrot-like prattle down the
Mediterranean to add to the difficulties of his position in Cairo;
scolded by Secretaries of State who were appointed to their places for
no better reason than their power to command votes; gibed at by
journalists at home who could not see that a free press and a foreign
occupation were things that could never exist together; and preached at
by religious milksops in the pulpit who were so simple as to suppose
that the black man and the white man were one flesh, that all men were
born free and equal, and that it was possible to govern great nations
according to the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount--what could he do
against the religious delirium of an ignorant Eastern populace, who were
capable of mistaking a manifest impostor, practising his spiritual
legerdemain, for a Prophet, a Redeemer, a Mahdi, a Messiah, a Christ?
Nothing!
He had found that out to his bitter disappointment during the past few
days, when, working with Western machinery, he had tried in vain to
catch the man Ishmael in some seditious expression that would enable the
Government to lay him openly by the heels.
"Fools! Fools! Fools!"
Why could not people see that all this vapouring unrest in Eastern
dominions was a religious question from first to last; that it was
Islamism against Christianity, slavery against liberty, corruption
against purity, the backwash of retrogression against the flowing tide
of progress; and that to fight the secret methods of the mosque and the
insidious crimes of a vicious superstition with any weapons less swift
and sure than the rifle and the rope was to be weak and wicked.
"If I could only permit myself to meet Eastern needs by Eastern means,"
he thought, "intrigue by intrigue, subtlety by subtlety, secrecy by
secrecy, duplicity by duplicity, treachery by treachery, deceit by
deceit!"
"And why not?" he asked himself suddenly. "In a desperate case like
this, why not? In the face of anarchical conspiracy and menace to
public safety, why not? Before the catastrophe comes, why not?" he
asked himself again and again during the long hours in which he lay
awake.
"It is a case of civilisation on the one side and a return to barbarism
on the other. Why not? Why not?"
And this, with the cruel memory of his wasted hopes, was the last
thought present to his mind before he slept.
It was late when he awoke in the morning, and then, remembering that he
had promised to call on Helena before her departure, he rang the bell
that he might order his carriage to take him up to the Citadel. Ibrahim
answered it, and brought him a number of letters. The first of them to
come to hand was a letter from Helena herself. It was written with many
signs of haste, and some of emotion, and it ran--
"DEAR LORD NUNEHAM,--Do not come up to see me off to-morrow morning, and
please forgive me for all the unnecessary trouble I have given you. I
cannot go back to England--I really cannot--it is impossible. There is
nothing for me there but a useless and lonely life--oh, how lonely and
how full of bitter and cruel memories!
"On the other hand there seems to be something I can do in Egypt, and
though it is not the kind of work a woman would choose for herself I
cannot and I will not shrink from it.
"To tell you the truth at once, I am on the point of taking the night
train _en route_ for Khartoum, but that is a secret which I am revealing
to nobody else, so I beseech you to say nothing about it. I also
beseech you not to follow me nor to send after me nor to inquire about
me in any way, and lest the Sirdar and his officers should recognise me
on my arrival in the Soudan (though I shall try to make it difficult for
them to do so) I beg of you to ask them to forget that they have ever
seen me before and to leave me entirely alone."
The Consul-General dropped the hand that held the letter and thought,
"What on earth does the girl intend to do, I wonder?"
"You may ask me why I am going to Khartoum, and I find it hard to answer
you, but you will remember that another person is reported to have gone
there already, and perhaps you will put the two facts together. That
person is neither your friend nor mine. He has wrecked my life and
darkened your happiness. He has also been an evil influence in the
country, and, thus far, you have tried in vain to punish him. Let me
help you to do so. I can--I am sure I can--and before I have finished
with the man who has injured both of us I shall have done some service
to England and to Egypt as well.
"Don't think I am mad or that I am idly boasting, and please don't
despise my help because I am only a woman. In the history of the world
women have saved nations even when kings and armies have failed. And if
that has happened in the past may it not happen in the future also? It
can, and it shall."
Again the Consul-General dropped the hand that held the letter and he
looked fixedly before him for a moment.
"Dear Lord Nuneham, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that,
if I am not mad and if I am not boasting, I am cruel and revengeful and
vindictive. I am sorry if you are thinking that, sir, but if so I cannot
help it. I have lost my father and I have lost Gordon, and I am alone
and my heart is torn. Oh, if you knew how much this means to me you
would not judge me too harshly. When I think of my father in his grave
and of Gordon in disgrace--at the ends of the earth, perhaps--never to
be seen or heard of any more--I feel that anything is
justified--anything--that will punish the man who has brought things to
this pass."
The Consul-General removed his spectacles, wiped away the moisture that
had gathered on them, put them back, and resumed the reading of the
letter.
"Sometimes I tell myself I might have saved Gordon if I had been less
proud and hard--if I had told him more, and allowed him to feel that I
could see things from his side also. But it is too late to think of
that. I can think of nothing now but how to degrade and destroy the man
who deceived and misled him, and is deceiving and misleading these poor
Egyptian people also, and will end, as such men always end, in sowing
the sand of their deserts with blood.
"But don't be afraid that I shall permit myself to do anything
unwomanly, or that I shall ever be false for a moment to the love--the
wronged and outraged love--which prompts me. Gordon is gone, I have
lost him, but I can never do that--never!
"I know exactly how far I intend to go, and I shall go no farther. I
also know exactly what I intend to do, and I shall do it without fear or
remorse.
"Good-bye, or rather _au revoir_! You will hear from me or perhaps see
me again before long, I think, and then--then your enemy and mine and
Gordon's as well as England's and Egypt's will be in your hands.
"HELENA GRAVES.
"Please don't speak about this to Lady Nuneham. Give her my fondest,
truest love, and let her believe that I have gone home to England. It
would only make her unhappy to be told what I intend to do, and she
might even think me a wicked woman. You will not think that, I
hope--will you?"
The letter dropped on to the counterpane out of the Consul-General's
hand, and again he looked fixedly before him. After a moment his
wearied old eyes began to gleam with light and fire.
"What did I say when I saw her first?" he thought. "This girl has the
blood of the great women of the Bible--the Deborahs who were mothers in
Israel; aye, and the Jaels who avenged her."