"Because--what?" asked Ishmael again.
"Oh, I don't know--I can't think--but I beg you, I entreat you not to
let Omar go into Cairo."
Her agitated voice caused another moment of silence, and then Ishmael
said in a soft, indulgent tone--
"I understand you, O my Rani. This may be the task of greatest danger,
but it is the place of highest honour too, and you would fain see no man
except your husband assigned to it. But Omar is of me and I am of him,
and there can be no pride nor jealousy between us."
And then, taking Gordon by the right hand, while with his left he was
holding Helena, he said--
"Omar, my friend, my brother!"
"El Hamdullillah!" cried the Sheikhs again, and then one by one they
rose to go.
Helena rose too, and with her face aflame and her breath coming in gusts
she hurried back to her room. The Arab woman followed her in a moment,
and with a mocking smile in her glinting eyes, she said--
"How happy you must be, O lady, that some one else than your husband is
to go into that place of danger!"
But Helena could bear no more.
"Go out of the room this moment! I cannot endure you! I hate you! Go,
woman, go!" she cried.
Zenoba fled before the fury in her lady's face, but at the next moment
Helena had dropped to the floor and burst into a flood of tears.
When she regained possession of herself, the child, Ayesha, was
embracing her and, without knowing why, was weeping over her wet cheeks.
*CHAPTER XXI*
Now that Gordon was to take Ishmael's place, Helena found herself deeper
than ever in the toils of her own plot. She could see nothing but death
before him as the result of his return to Cairo. If his identity were
discovered, he would die for his own offences as a soldier. If it were
not discovered, he would be executed for Ishmael's conspiracies as she
had made them known.
"Oh, it cannot be! It must not be! It shall not be!" she continued to
say to herself, but without seeing a way to prevent it.
Never for a moment, in her anxiety to save Gordon from stepping into the
pit she had dug for Ishmael, did she allow herself to think that, being
the real cause of her father's death, he deserved the penalty she had
prepared for the guilty man. Her mind had altered towards that event
since the man concerned in it had changed. The more she thought of it
the more sure she became that it was a totally different thing, and in
the strict sense hardly a crime at all.
In the first place, she reminded herself that her father had suffered
from an affection of the heart which must have contributed to his death,
even if it had not been the principal cause of it. How could she have
forgotten that fact until now?
Remembering her father's excitement and exhaustion when she saw him
last, she could see for the first time, by the light of Gordon's story,
what had afterwards occurred--the burst of ungovernable passion, the
struggle, the fall, the death.
Then she told herself that Gordon had not intended to kill her father,
and whatever he had done had been for love of her. "Helena was mine,
and you have taken her from me, and broken her heart as well as my own."
Yes, love for her and the torment of losing her had brought Gordon back
to the Citadel after he had been ordered to return to his quarters.
Love for her, and the delirium of a broken heart, had wrung out of him
the insults which had led to the quarrel that resulted in her father's
death.
In spite of her lingering tenderness for the memory of her father, she
began to see how much he had been to blame for what had happened--to
think of the gross indignity, the frightful shame, the unmerciful and
even unlawful degradation to which in his towering rage he had subjected
Gordon. The scene came back to her with horrible distinctness now--her
father crying in a half-stifled voice, "You are a traitor! A traitor
who has consorted with the enemies of his country!" and then tearing
Gordon's sword from its scabbard and breaking it across his knee.
But seeing this, she also saw her own share in what had occurred. At
the moment of Gordon's deepest humiliation she had driven him away from
her. Her pride had conquered her love, and instead of flinging herself
into his arms as she ought to have done, whether he was in the right or
in the wrong, when everybody else was trampling upon him, she had
insulted him with reproaches and turned her back upon him in his
disgrace.
That scene came back to her, too--Gordon at the door of the General's
house, with his deadly white face and trembling lips, stammering out, "I
couldn't help it, Helena--it was impossible for me to act otherwise,"
and then, bareheaded as he was, and with every badge of rank and honour
gone, staggering across the garden to the gate.
When she thought of all this now it seemed to her that, if anybody had
been to blame for her father's death, it was not Gordon, but herself.
His had been the hand, the blind hand only, but the heart that had
wrought the evil had been hers.
"Oh, it cannot be! it shall not be!" she continued to say to herself,
and just as she had tried to undo her work with Ishmael when he was bent
on going into Cairo, so she determined to do the same with Gordon, now
that he had stepped into Ishmael's place. Her opportunity came soon.
A little before mid-day of the day following the meeting of the Sheikhs,
she was alone in the guest-room, sitting at the brass table that served
her as a desk--Ishmael being in the camp, Zenoba and the child in the
town, and old Mahmud still in bed--when Gordon came out of the men's
quarter and walked towards the door as if intending to pass out of the
house.
He had seen her as he came from his bedroom, with one of her hands
pressed to her brow, and a feeling of inexpressible pity and unutterable
longing had so taken possession of him, with the thought that he was
soon to lose her--the most precious gift life had given him--that he had
tried to steal away.
But instinctively she felt his approach, and with a trembling voice she
called to him, so he returned and stood by her side.
"Why are you doing this?" she said. "You know what I mean. Why are you
doing it?"
"You know quite well why I am doing it, Helena. Ishmael was determined
to go to his death. There was only one way to prevent him. I had to
take it."
"But you are going to death yourself--isn't that so?"
He did not answer. He was trying not to look at her.
"Or perhaps you see some way of escape--do you?"
Still he did not speak--he was even trying not to hear her.
"If not, why are you going into Cairo instead of Ishmael?"
"Don't ask me that, Helena. I would rather not answer you."
Suddenly the tears came into her eyes, and after a moment's silence she
said--
"I know! I understand! But remember your father. He loves you. You
may not think it, but he does--I am sure he does. Yet if you go into
Cairo you know quite well what he will do."
"My father is a great man, Helena. He will do his duty whatever
happens--what he believes to be his duty."
"Certainly he will, but all the same, do you think he will not suffer!
And do you wish to put him into the position of being compelled to cut
off his own son? Is that right? Can anything--anything in the world--
make it necessary?"
Gordon did not answer her, but under the strain of his emotion he
tightened his lips, and his pinched nostrils began to dilate like the
nostrils of a horse.
"Then remember your mother, too," said Helena. "She is weak and ill. It
breaks my heart to think of her as I saw her last. She believes that
you have fled away to some foreign country, but she is living in the
hope that time will justify you, and then you will be reconciled to your
father, and come back to her again. Is this how you would come back? ...
Oh, it will kill her! I'm sure it will!"
She saw that Gordon's strong and manly face was now utterly discomposed,
and she could not help but follow up her advantage.
"Then think a little of me too, Gordon. This is all my fault, and if
anything is done to you in Cairo it will be just the same to me as if I
had done it. Do you wish me to die of remorse?"
She saw that he was struggling to restrain himself, and turning her
beautiful wet eyes upon him and laying her hand on his arm, she said--
"Don't go back to Cairo, Gordon! For my sake, for your own sake, for
our love's sake----"