"Colonel, you are a Christian, and when your Divine Master was on earth
a great multitude came to Him in a desert place, and His disciples said,
'Send these people away that they may return to their villages and buy
themselves food.' And then your Master answered them, 'They need not
depart. Give ye them to eat.'"
Thus Ishmael was irresistible. There was nothing and nobody that seemed
to have the power to touch him.
*CHAPTER III*
"To every sun its moon--to every man a woman." Wise and powerful as
Ishmael was, people began to whisper that there was a woman who ruled
him. He submitted everything to her judgment, and was guided and even
governed by her counsel.
Who was this woman? A Soudanese? No! An Egyptian? No! Rumour had it
that she was a stranger, totally unknown to Ishmael down to the moment
of his coming back to the Soudan--a Muslemah (Mohammedan lady) from
India, the sister of a reigning prince of the Punjab, who having been
educated under British rule, and therefore Western influences, had
revolted against the captivity of the zenana, and broken away from her
own people.
Attracted by the fame of the new prophet as an emancipator of women and
a reformer of bad Mohammedan customs, this woman had, according to
report, followed him from Alexandria and Cairo to Khartoum, where she
had settled herself, with a black boy as her servant, at the house of
the Greek widow--the same who had formerly been the mistress of
Ishmael's first wife, Adila.
The black boy called his mistress "the Lady," and most of the people
about her knew her by the same name, but some called her the
Sitt-el-beda, the Khatoun (the White Lady), and others the Emirah, and
the Rani (the Princess, the Queen), in recognition of what they believed
to be her rank and wealth.
It was in the early days of Ishmael's return to Khartoum, when women of
all classes were coming to him unveiled, that he met with "the Princess"
first. Sitting alone in the late afternoon on the bank of a broad
stretch of land which was flooded by the high Nile, and looking across
its glistening waters to where the sky was red behind the shattered dome
of the Mahdi's tomb in Omdurman, he saw a young and beautiful woman
approaching him.
She seemed to him to be a splendid creature under those southern
skies--tall, well developed, with shining coal-black hair, long black
lashes and brilliant eyes, and a mouth that was full of fire and
movement. Her dress was such as is worn by Parsee ladies both in the
East and in the West, having nothing more noticeably Oriental than a
silken scarf which was bound about her head as a turban and a light,
silver-edged muslin veil that fell back on her shoulders.
She came up to him with a certain air of timidity, as of one who might
be afraid to be thought immodest or perhaps of being recognised, yet
with the proud bearing of a woman who had passed through life with a
high step and would not shrink from any consequences.
He rose to receive her, and she looked at him for a moment without
speaking--almost as if she had for an instant lost the power of speech,
being at last face to face with a man whom she had long thought of and
long sought.
On his side, too, there was a momentary silence and a look of
enthusiastic admiration which he tried in vain to control. The lady
seemed to see this in an instant, and an expression of joy which she
could not restrain shone in her face.
Then, gathering confidence, she began to tell him the object of her
visit to Khartoum--how, hearing so much about him, she had wished to see
him for herself, and now begged to be allowed to serve him in any way
whatever that lay within her power.
He listened to her with the same expression of enthusiastic admiration
in his face, and it would have been obvious to an observer that the lady
was congratulating herself upon the power of the impression she had
made. But at the next moment he set her a very humble task, namely that
of seeing to the welfare of the women who were employed at sixpence a
day by the Government to draw and carry water for the public streets.
The lady looked surprised and a little chagrined, but finding it
impossible to recede from the unconditional offer she had made she went
away to the work that had been given to her.
It was ugly and thankless work enough, for the water-women of Khartoum
were among the coarsest and most degraded of their sex, being chiefly of
the black tribes from south of Kordofan, going about bare from the waist
upwards and herding like animals in the brown huts that were beyond the
barracks outside the town.
After a little while "the Princess" came to Ishmael again, and this time
he was sitting with old Mahmud, his uncle, in the guest-room which
divided the women's side from the men's side in their house.
She was dressed still more attractively than before, in a
gold-embroidered bodice and a clinging diaphanous gown, and was attended
by her black boy. Ishmael salaamed and the old man struggled to his
feet as, with a certain air of embarrassment, she stepped forward and
begged to be pardoned if what she came to ask should displease the
Master.
Ishmael looked at her with the same expression of enthusiastic ecstasy
which she had observed before, and said--
"No, no, my sister cannot displease me. What is the request she wishes
to make?"
Then she told him that the work he had given her was good and necessary,
but was there nothing she could do for himself? She had been educated
in India by English governesses and could read English, French, and
German--could she act as his translator or interpreter? Having lived so
long among Arabs of the higher classes she had also taught herself to
write as well as speak Arabic--could she not serve him as his secretary?
Ishmael remembered his busy mornings with the messengers, agents,
emissaries, and missionaries who came to him from all corners of Egypt
and the Soudan, bringing many letters and foreign newspapers; and before
he had time to reflect on what he was doing, he had answered--
"Yes, such help is exactly what I need."
If any eyes less dim than old Mahmud's had been there at that moment
they would have seen a look of triumph in the lady's face which she
vainly struggled to conceal. But at the next moment it was full of
humility and gratitude as she bowed herself out and promised to come
again the following day.
Hardly had the lady gone when Ishmael's simple nature began to recover
itself from the spell of her sex and beauty, but the old uncle's
admiration was quite ungovernable, and he began to hint at the
possibility of yet more intimate relations between his nephew and the
devoted young Muslemah.
"I have always told you that you ought to marry again, a good woman and
a believer," he said; whereupon Ishmael, with the ecstasy created by
"the Princess's" loveliness still shining in his eyes, answered--
"No! I have always said, 'No, no, by Allah! One wife I had, and though
she was a Christian and had been a slave I loved her, and never, never
shall another woman take her place.'"
"Ah, well, God knows best what to do with us," said the old man. "But
life is a passing shadow and youth a departing guest."
Next morning the white lady came according to appointment, and Ishmael
set her to read some European newspapers containing accounts of recent
doings in Cairo.
She was translating these newspapers aloud when Ishmael's little
daughter Ayesha came bounding into the house, followed by her nurse, the
Arab woman Zenoba--the child barefoot as her mother used to be, and with
her mother's beautiful, erect confidence as she moved about, lightly
clad, with her middle small-girt by a scarlet sash over her pure white
shirt--the woman in her blue habarah and with a silver ring in her nose.
Ishmael presented both of them to the lady, whereupon the child, by an
instinctive impulse, ran over to her and kissed her hand and held it,
but the Arab woman only bowed with a look of suspicion, and, as long as
she remained in the guest-room, continued to watch out of the sidelong
slits of her eyes.
The Arab woman's obvious mistrust made more impression upon Ishmael than
his daughter's spontaneous liking, for as soon as he was alone with the
lady again he began to talk to her of the gravity of the task he had
undertaken, and of the need for caution and even secrecy with respect to
all his doings.
The lady's brilliant eyes glistened under their long black lashes as she
listened to him, and she answered his warnings with assuring words,
until, coming to closer quarters, he proposed that for his people's sake
rather than his own she should take an oath of fidelity to him and to
his cause.
At that she looked startled, and could with difficulty conceal her
agitation. And when he went on to recite the terms of the oath to
her--solemn terms, taking God and His prophet to witness that she would
never reveal anything which came to her knowledge within the walls of
that house--she seemed to be stifling with a sense of fear or shame.
Not as such, however, did Ishmael's unsuspecting nature recognise the
lady's embarrassment, but setting it down to the heat of the day, for
the khamseen, the hot wind, was blowing, he clapped his hands for water.
The Arab woman brought it in, although it was Abdullah's task to do so,
and she lingered long in the room, and looked searchingly at the lady
while Ishmael again recited his oath.
The lady did not at first respond, but continued to look out at the open
door on to the slow waters of the White Nile, and there was silence in
the air both within and without, save for the far-off hammering from the
dockyards across the river.