*CHAPTER XI*
When Helena awoke next morning she was immediately conscious of a great
commotion both within and without the house. After a moment Zenoba came
into the bedroom and began to tell her what had happened.
"Have you not heard, O Rani?" said the Arab woman, in her oily voice.
"No? You sleep so late, do you? When everybody is up and doing, too!
Well, the Master has news that the great Bedouin is at Omdurman and he
is sending the people down to the river to bring him up. The stranger
is to be received in the mosque, I may tell you. Yes, indeed, in the
mosque, although he is English and a Christian."
Then Ayesha came skipping into the room in wild excitement.
"Rani! Rani!" she cried. "Get up and come with us. We are going
now--this minute--everybody."
Helena excused herself; she felt unwell and would stay in bed that day;
so the child and the nurse went off without her.
Yet left alone she could not rest. The feverish uncertainty of the
night before returned with redoubled force, and after a while she felt
compelled to rise.
Going into the guest-room she found the house empty and the camp in
front of it deserted. She was standing by the door, hardly knowing what
to do, when the strange sound which she had heard on the night of the
betrothal came from a distance.
"_Lu-lu-lu-u-u!_"
It was the zaghareet, the women's cry of joy, and it was mingled with
the louder shouts of men. The stranger was coming! the people were
bringing him on. Who would he be? Helena's anxiety was almost more than
her brain and nerves could bear. She strained her eyes in the direction
of the jetty, past the Abbas Barracks and the Mongers Fort.
The moments passed like hours, but at length the crowd appeared. At
first sight it looked like a forest of small trees approaching. The
forest seemed to sway and to send out monotonous sounds as if moved by a
moaning wind. But looking again, Helena saw what was happening--the
people were carrying green palm branches and strewing them on the yellow
sand in front of the great stranger.
He was riding on a white camel, Ishmael's camel, and Ishmael was riding
beside him.. Long before he came near to her, Helena saw him, straining
her sight to do so. He was wearing the ample robes of a Bedouin, and
his face was almost hidden by the sweeping shawl which covered his head
and neck.
But it was _he_! It was Gordon! Helena could not mistake him. One
glance was enough. Without looking a second time she ran back to her
bedroom, and covered her eyes and ears.
For a time the voices of the people followed her through the deadening
walls.
"Lu-lu-u-u!" cried the women.
"La ilaha illa-llah! La ilaha illa-llah!" shouted the men.
But after a while the muffled sounds died away, and Helena knew that the
great company had passed on to the mosque. It was like a dream, a
mirage of the mind. It had come and it was gone, and in the dazed
condition of her senses she could almost persuade herself that she had
imagined everything.
Her impatience would not permit her to remain in the house. She, too,
must go to the mosque, although she had never been there before. So
putting on her Indian veil she set out hurriedly. When she came to
herself again she was in the gallery, people were making way for her,
and she was dropping into a place. Then she realised that she was
sitting between Zenoba and little Ayesha.
The mosque was a large, four-square edifice, full of columns and arches,
and with a kind of inner court that was open to the sky and had minarets
at every corner. The gallery looked down on this court, and Helena saw
below her, half in shadow, half in sunshine, the heads of a great
concourse of men in turbans, tarbooshes, and brown felt skull-caps, all
kneeling in rows on bright red carpets. In the front row, with his face
to the Kibleh (the niche towards Mecca), Ishmael knelt in his white
caftan, and by his side, with all eyes upon him, as if every interest
centred on that spot, knelt the stranger in Bedouin dress.
It was Friday, and prayers were proceeding, now surging like the sea,
now silent like the desert, sometimes started, as it seemed, by the
voice of the unseen muezzin on the minarets above, then echoed by the
men on the carpets below. But Helena hardly heard them. Of one thing
only was she conscious--that by the tragic play of destiny _he_ was
there while _she_ was here!
After a while she became aware that Ishmael had risen and was beginning
to speak, and she tried to regain composure enough to listen to what he
said.
"My brothers," he said, "it is according to the precepts of the Prophet
(peace to his name!) to receive the Christian in our temples if he comes
with the goodwill of good Moslems and with a heart that is true to them.
You know, O my brothers, whether I am a Moslem or not, and I pray to the
Most Merciful to bless all such Christians as the one who is here
to-day."
More of the same kind Ishmael said, but Helena found it hard, in the
tumult of her brain, to follow him. She saw that both the women about
her and the men below were seized with that religious fervour which
comes to the human soul when it feels that something grand is being
done. It was as though the memory of a thousand years of hatred between
Moslem and Christian, with all its legacy of cruelty and barbarity, had
been wiped out of their hearts by the stranger on whom their eyes were
fixed--as though by some great act of self-sacrifice and brotherhood he
had united East and West--and this fact of his presence at their prayers
was the sign and symbol of an eternal truce.
The sublime spectacle seemed to capture all their souls, and when
Ishmael turned towards the stranger at last and laid his hand on his
head and said--
"May God and His Prophet bless you for what you have done for us and
ours," the emotions of the people were raised to the highest pitch, and
they rose to their feet as one man, and holding up their hands they
cried, the whole congregation together, in a voice that was like the
breaking of a great wave--
"You are now of us, and we are of you, and we are brothers."
By this time the women in the gallery were weeping audibly, and Helena,
from quite other causes, was scarcely able to control her feelings.
"Why did I come here?" she asked herself, and then, seeing that the Arab
woman was watching her through the slits of her jealous eyes, she got up
and pushed her way out of the mosque.
Back in her room, lying face down upon the bed, she sought in vain to
collect her faculties sufficiently to follow and comprehend the course
of events. Yes, it was Gordon. He had come to join Ishmael. Why had
she never thought of that as a probable sequel to what had occurred in
Cairo? Had he not been turned out by his own? In effect cashiered from
the army? Forbidden his father's house? And had she not herself driven
him away from her? What sequel was more natural--more plainly
inevitable?
Then she grew hot and cold at a new and still more terrifying
thought--Gordon would come _there_! How could she meet him? How look
into his face? A momentary impulse to deny her own identity was put
aside immediately. Impossible! Useless! Then how could she account to
Gordon for her presence in that house? Ishmael's wife! According to
Mohammedan law and custom not only betrothed but married to him!
When she put her position to herself so, the thread of her thoughts
seemed to snap in her brain. She could not disentangle the knot of
them. A sense of infidelity to Gordon, to the very spirit of love
itself, brought her for a moment the self-reproach and the despair of a
woman who has sinned.
In the midst of her pain she heard the light voices of people returning
to the house, and at the next moment Ayesha and Zenoba came into her
room. The child was skipping about, full of high spirits, and the Arab
woman was bitterly merry.
"Rani will be happy to hear that the Master is bringing the stranger
home," said Zenoba.
Helena turned and gazed at the woman with a stupefied expression. What
she had foreseen as a terrifying possibility was about to come to pass!
She opened her mouth as if to speak but said nothing.
Meantime the Arab woman, in a significant tone that was meant to cut to
the core, went on to say that this was the highest honour the Moslem
could show the unbeliever, as well as the greatest trust he could repose
in him.
"Have you never heard of that in your country, O Rani? No? It is true,
though! Quite true!"
People supposed that every Moslem guarded his house so jealously that no
strange man might look upon his wife, but among the Arabs of the desert,
when a traveller, tired and weary, sought food and rest, the Sheikh
would sometimes send him into his harem and leave him there for three
days with full permission to do as he thought well.
"But he must never wrong that harem, O lady! If he does the Arab husband
will kill him! Yes, and the faithless wife as well!"
So violent was the conflict going on within her that Helena hardly heard
the woman's words, though the jealous spirit behind them was piercing
her heart like needles. She became conscious of the great crowd
returning, and it was making the same ululation as before, mingled with
the same shouts. At the next moment there came a knock at the bedroom
door and Abdullah's voice, crying--
"Lady! Lady!"
Helena reeled a little in rising to reply, and it was with difficulty
that she reached the door.
"Master has brought Sheikh Omar Benani back and is calling for the lady.
What shall I say?"
Helena fumbled the hem of her handkerchief in her fingers, as she was
wont to do in moments of great agitation. She was asking herself what
would happen if she obeyed Ishmael's summons. Would Gordon see through
her motive in being there? If so, would he betray her to Ishmael?
Already she could hear a confused murmur in the guest-room, and out of
that murmur her memory seemed to grasp back, as from a vanishing dream,
the sound of a voice that had been lost to her.
She felt as if she were suffocating. Her breathing was coming rapidly
from the depth of her throat. Yet the Arab woman was watching her, and
while a whirlwind was going on within she had to preserve a complete
tranquillity without.
"Say I am coming," she said.
The supreme moment had arrived. With a great effort she gathered up all
her strength, drew her Indian shawl over her head in such a way that it
partly concealed her face, and then, pallid, trembling, and with
downcast eyes she walked out of the room.
*CHAPTER XII*
Gordon had that day experienced emotions only less poignant than those
of Helena. In the early morning, after parting with Osman, the devoted
comrade of his desert journey, he had encountered the British
Sub-Governor of Omdurman, a young Captain of Cavalry who had once served
under himself but now spoke to him, in his assumed character as a
Bedouin, with a certain air of command.
This brought him some twinges of wounded pride, which were complicated
by qualms of conscience, as he rode through the streets, past the
silversmiths' shops, where grave-looking Arabs sold bracelets and
necklets; past the weaving quarter, where men and boys were
industriously driving the shuttle through the strings of their flimsy
looms; past the potter's bazaar and the grain market, all so sweet and
so free from their former smell of sun-dried filth and warm humanity
packed close together.
"Am I coming here to oppose the power that in so few years has turned
chaos into order?" he asked himself, but more personal emotions came
later.
They came in full flood when the ferry steamer, by which he crossed the
river, approached the bank on the other side, and he saw standing there,
near to the spot on which the dervishes landed on the black night of the
fall of Khartoum, a vast crowd of their sons and their sons' sons who
were waiting to receive him.
Again came qualms of conscience when out of this crowd stepped Ishmael
Ameer, who kissed him on both cheeks and led him forward to his own
camel amid the people's shouts of welcome. Was he, as a British
soldier, throwing in his lot with the enemies of his country? As an
Englishman and a Christian was he siding with the adversaries of
religion and civilisation?
The journey through the town to the mosque, with the lu-lu-ing and the
throwing of palm branches before his camel's feet, was less of a
triumphal progress than an abject penance. He could hardly hold up his
head. Sight of the bronze and black faces about him, shouting for
him.--for him of another race and creed--making that act his glory which
had led to his crime--this was almost more than he could bear.
But when he reached the mosque; when he found himself, unbeliever though
he was, kneeling in front of the Kibleh; when Ishmael laid his hand on
his head and called on God to bless him, and the people cried with one
voice, "You are of us and we are brothers," the sense of human sympathy
swept down every other emotion, and he felt as if at any moment he might
burst into tears.
And then, when prayers were over and Ishmael brought up his uncle, and
the patriarchal old man, with a beard like a flowing fleece, said he was
to lodge at his house; and finally when Ishmael led him home and took
him to his own chamber and called to Abdullah to set up another angerib,
saying they were to sleep in the same room, Gordon's twinges of pride
and qualms of conscience were swallowed up in one great wave of human
brotherhood.
But both came back, with a sudden bound, when Ishmael began to talk of
his wife, and sent the servant to fetch her. They were sitting in the
guest-room by this time, waiting for the lady to come to them, and
Gordon felt himself moved by the inexplicable impulse of anxiety he had
felt before. Who was this Mohammedan woman who had prompted Ishmael to
a scheme that must so surely lead to disaster? Did she know what she
was doing? Was she betraying him?
Then a door on the women's side of the house opened slowly and he saw a
woman enter the room. He did not look into her face. His distrust of
her, whereof he was now half ashamed, made him keep his head down while
he bowed low during the little formal ceremony of Ishmael's
presentation. But instantly a certain indefinite memory of height and
step and general bearing made his blood flow fast, and he felt the
perspiration breaking out on his forehead.
A moment afterwards he raised his eyes, and then it seemed as if his
hair stood upright. He was like a man who has been made colour-blind by
some bright light. He could not at first believe the evidence of his
senses that she who appeared to be before him was actually there.
He did not speak or utter a sound, but his embarrassment was not
observed by Ishmael, who was clapping his hands to call for food.
During the next few minutes there was a little confusion in the
room--Black Zogal and Abdullah were laying a big brass tray on tressels
and covering it with dishes. Then came the ablutions and the sitting
down to eat--Gordon at the head of the table, with Ishmael on his right
and old Mahmud on his left, and Helena next to Ishmael.
The meal began with the beautiful Eastern custom of the host handing the
first mouthful of food to his guest as a pledge of peace and
brotherhood, faith and trust. This kept Gordon occupied for the moment,
but Helena had time for observation. In the midst of her agitation she
could not help seeing that Gordon had grown thinner, that his eyes were
bloodshot and his nostrils pinched as if by physical or moral suffering.
After a while she saw that he was looking across at her with increasing
eagerness, and under his glances she became nervous and almost
hysterical.
Gordon, on his part, had now not the shadow of a doubt of Helena's
identity, but still he did not speak. He, too, noticed a
change--Helena's profile had grown more severe, and there were dark rims
under her large eyes. He could not help seeing these signs of the pain
she had gone through, though his mind was going like a windmill under
constantly changing winds. Why was she there? Could it be that the
great sorrow which fell upon her at the death of her father had made her
fly to the consolation of religion?
He dismissed that thought the instant it came to him, for behind it,
close behind it, came the recollection of Helena's hatred of Ishmael
Ameer and of the jealousy which had been the first cause of the
separation between themselves. "Smash the Mahdi," she had said, not
altogether in play. Then why was she there? Great God! could it be
possible ... that after the death of the General ... she had----
Gordon felt at that moment as if the world were reeling round him.
Helena, glancing furtively across the table, was sure she could read
Gordon's thoughts. With the certainty that he knew what had brought her
to Khartoum she felt at first a crushing sense of shame. What a
fatality! If anybody had told her that she would be overwhelmed with
confusion by the very person she had been trying to avenge, she would
have thought him mad, yet that was precisely what Providence had
permitted to come to pass.
The sense of her blindness and helplessness in the hands of destiny was
so painful as to reach the point of tears. When Gordon spoke in reply
to Ishmael's or old Mahmud's questions the very sound of his voice
brought memories of their happy days together, and, looking back on the
past of their lives and thinking where they were now, she wanted to run
away and cry.
All this time Ishmael saw nothing, for he was talking rapturously of the
great hope, the great expectation, the near approach of the time when
the people's sufferings would end. A sort of radiance was about him,
and his face shone with the joy and the majesty of the dreamer in the
full flood of his dream.
When the meal was over the old man, who had been too busy with his food
to see anything else, went off to his siesta, and then, the dishes being
removed and the servants gone, Ishmael talked in lower tones of the
details of his scheme--how he was to go into Cairo, in advance, in the
habit of a Bedouin such as Gordon wore, in order to win the confidence
of the Egyptian Army, so that they should throw down the arms which no
man ought to bear, and thus permit the people of the pilgrimage, coming
behind, to take possession of the city, the citadel, the arsenal, and
the engines of war, in the name of God and His Expected One.
All this he poured out in the rapturous language of one who saw no
impediments, no dangers, no perils from chance or treachery, and then,
turning to where Helena sat with her face aflame and her eyes cast down,
he gave her the credit of everything that had been thought of,
everything that was to be done.
"Yes, it was the Rani who suggested it," he said, "and when the triumph
of peace is won God will write it on her forehead."
The afternoon had passed by this time, and the sun, which had gone far
round to the West, was glistening like hammered gold along the river, in
the line of the forts of Omdurman. It was near to the hour for evening
prayers, and Helena was now trembling under a new thought--the thought
that Ishmael would soon be called out to speak to the people who
gathered in the evening in front of the house, and then she and Gordon
would be left alone.
When she thought of that she felt a desire which she had never felt
before and never expected to feel--a desire that Ishmael might remain to
protect her from the shock of the first word that would be spoken when
he was gone.
Gordon on his part, too, was feeling a thrill of the heart from his fear
of the truth that must fall on him the moment he and Helena were left
together.
But Black Zogal came to the open door of the guest-room, and Ishmael,
who was still on the heights of his fanatical rapture, rose to go.
"Talk to him, Rani! Tell him everything! About the kufiah you intend
to make, and all the good plans you proposed to prevent bloodshed."
The two unhappy souls, still sitting at the empty table, heard his
sandalled footsteps pass out behind them.
Then they raised their eyes and for the first time looked into each
other's faces.
*CHAPTER XIII*
When they began to speak it was in scarcely audible whispers.
"Helena!"
"Gordon!"
"Why are you here, Helena? What have you come for? You disliked and
distrusted Ishmael Ameer when you heard about him first. You used to
say you hated him. What does it all mean?"
Helena did not answer immediately.
"Tell me, Helena. Don't let me go on thinking these cruel thoughts.
Why are you here with Ishmael in Khartoum?"
Still Helena did not answer. She was now sitting with her eyes down,
and her hands tightly folded in her lap. There was a moment of silence
while he waited for her to speak, and in that silence there came the
muffled sound of Ishmael's voice outside, reciting the Fatihah--
"Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures----"
When the whole body of the people had repeated the solemn words there
was silence in the guest-room again, and, in the same hushed whisper as
before, but more eagerly, more impetuously, Gordon said--
"He says you put this scheme into his mind, Helena. If so, you must know
quite well what it will lead to. It will lead to ruin--inevitable ruin;
bloodshed--perhaps great bloodshed."
Helena found her voice at last. A spirit of defiance took possession of
her for a moment, and she said firmly--
"No, it will never come to that. It will all end before it goes so
far."
"You mean that he will be ... will be _taken_?"
"Yes, he will be taken the moment he sets foot in Cairo. Therefore the
rest of the plan will never be carried out, and consequently there will
be no bloodshed."
"Do you _know_ that, Helena?"
Her lips were compressed; she made a silent motion of her head.
"_How_ do you know it?"
"I have written to your father."
"You have ... written ... to my father?"
"Yes," she said, still more firmly. "He will know everything before
Ishmael arrives, and will act as he thinks best."
"Helena! Hel----"
But he was struck breathless both by what she said and by the relentless
strength with which she said it. There was silence again for some
moments, and once more the voice of Ishmael came from without--
"There are three holy books, O my brothers--the took of Moses and the
Hebrew prophets, the book of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus, and the plain
book of the Koran. In the first of these it is written: 'I know that my
Redeemer liveth and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the
earth.'"
Gordon reached over to where Helena sat at the side of the table, with
her eyes fixed steadfastly before her, and touching her arm he said in a
whisper so low that he seemed to be afraid the very air would hear--
"Then ... then .... you are sending him _to his death_!"
She shuddered for an instant as if cut to the quick; then she braced
herself up.
"Isn't that so, Helena? Isn't it?"
With her lips still firmly compressed she made the same silent motion of
her head.
"Is that what you came here to do?"
"Yes."
"To possess yourself of his secrets and then----?"
"There was no other way," she answered, biting her under-lip.
"Helena! Can it be possible that you have deliberately----"
He stopped, as if afraid to utter the word that was trembling on his
tongue, and then said in a softer voice--
"But why, Helena? Why?"