"Have just seen Hafiz. The dear old fellow came racing up here at six
o'clock this morning, with his big round face like the aurora borealis,
shining in smiles and tears. Heavens, how he laughed and cried and
swore and sweated!
"He thought his letter about my mother's death had brought me back, and
when I gave him a hint of my real errand he nearly dropped with terror.
It seems that among my old colleagues in Cairo my reputation is now of
the lowest, being that of a person who was bribed--God knows by whom--to
do what I did. As a consequence it will go ill with me, according to
Hafiz, if I should be discovered, but as that is pretty certain to
happen in any case I am not too much troubled, and find more interest in
the fact that your boy Mosie is staying at the Agency and that
consequently my father must have received your letter.
"My dear Helena, my 'mystic sense' has been right again. The Grand Cadi
continues to pay secret visits to the Consul-General. That much Hafiz
could say from his intercourse with his mother, and it is sufficient to
tell me that, by keeping a running sore open with my father, the
scoundrel counts on destroying not only Ishmael but England, by leading
her to such resistance as will result in bloodshed, and thus dishonour
her in the eyes of the civilised world and leave Egypt a cockpit in
which half the foreign Powers will fight for themselves, no matter who
may suffer.
"What should I do? God knows! I have an almost unconquerable impulse
to go straight to my father and open his eyes to what is going on. He
is enveloped by intrigues and surrounded by enemies in high places--his
Egyptian Ministers, the creatures of his own creation; some of the
foreign diplomats, the European leeches who suck his blood while they
pretend to be his friends, and above all this rascally Cadi, with his
sleek face and double-sword game.
"But what can I say? What positive fact can I yet point to? Will my
father believe me if I tell him that Ishmael's following which is coming
up to Cairo is not, as he thinks, an armed force? That the Grand Cadi &
Co. are a pack of lying intriguers, each one playing for his own hand?
"My father is a great man who probably does not need and would certainly
resent my compassion, but, Lord God, how I pity him! Alone, in his old
age, after all he has done for Egypt! As for his Secretaries and
Advisers, he has not brought them up to help him, and I would enlarge
the Biblical warning about not putting one's trust in princes to include
parvenus as well.
"My dear Helena, where are you now, I wonder? What is happening to you?
What occurred after I left Khartoum? These are the questions which
during half the day and nearly the whole of the night are hammering,
hammering, hammering on my brain. Ishmael was to follow me in a few
days, so I suppose you are on the desert by this time. The desert! In
the midst of that vast horde! The scourings of a whole continent! Poor
old Hafiz had something like a fit when I told him you were not in
England but in the Soudan, yet as a fatalist he feels bound to believe
that everything will work out for the best and he asks me to send his
high regard to you.
"It gives one a strange sensation, and is almost like seeing things from
another state of existence, to be here in Cairo walking about
unrecognised amid the familiar sights, and hearing the gun fired from
the Citadel every day; but the sharpest twinge comes of the hacking
thought of where _you_ are and what circumstances surround you. In
fact, memory is always playing some devilish trick with me and raking up
thoughts of the condition in which I found you in Khartoum.
"Helena, my dear Helena, I have an immense faith in your strength and
your courage. You are mine, mine, mine--remember that! _I_ do--I have
to--all the time. That is what sets me at ease in my dark hours and
gives sleep, as the Arabs say, to my eyelids. For the rest, we must
resign ourselves and continue to wait for the direction of fate. The
fact that I was not arrested in the character of Ishmael immediately on
my arrival in Cairo makes me think Hafiz may be right--that, _D.V._ one
way or another, God knows how, everything is working out for the best.
It's damned easy to say that, I know, but, upon my soul, dearest, I
believe it. So keep up heart, my poor old girl, and God bless you!
GORDON.
"_P.S._--I'll hold this letter back until I think you must be nearing
Assouan, and then send it _D.V._ by safe hands to be delivered to you
there.
"_P.P.S._--I open my envelope to tell you of a new development! I am
invited with the Chancellor of El Azhar to the Consul-General's dinner
in honour of the King's Birthday. This, in the character of Sheikh Omar
Benani, who is, it seems, the chief of the tribe of the Ababdah,
inhabiting the wild country between Assouan and the Red Sea, a person
with a great reputation for wealth and wisdom, and a man whose word is
truth.
"What does it mean? One thing certainly--that acting on the information
contained in your letter the authorities are mistaking me for Ishmael
Ameer, and proposing some scheme to capture me. But why don't they take
me without further ado? What unfathomable reason can there be for the
delay in doing so? Intrigue on intrigue! I must wait and see.
"Meantime I am asking myself where the real Ishmael is and what he is
doing now? Is the belief in his 'divine' guidance increasing? Is he
acquiring the influence of a Mahdi? If so, God help him! God help his
people! God help my father! God help everybody!
"But sit tight, my girl! Something good is going to happen to us! I
feel it, I know it! All my love to you, Helena! Maa-es-salamah!"
*CHAPTER V*
I
"KHARTOUM.
"MY DEAR, DEAR GORDON,--Gone! You are actually gone! I can hardly
believe it. It must be like this to awaken from chloroform after losing
one's right hand, only it must be something out of my heart in this
instance, for though I have not shed a tear since you went away and do
not intend to shed one, I have a wild sense of weeping in the desolate
chambers of my soul.
"Writing to you? Certainly I am. Gordon, do you know what you have
done for me? You have given me faith in your 'mystic senses,' and by
virtue of certain of my own I am now sure that you are not dead, and
that you are not going to die, so I am writing to you out of the chaos
that envelops me, having no one here to speak to, literally no one, and
being at present indifferent to the mystery of what is to become of my
letter.
"It seems I fainted in the mosque after that wild riot of barbaric
sounds, and did not come back to full consciousness until next morning,
and then I found the Arab woman and the child attending on me in my
room. Naturally I thought I might have been delirious and I was in
terror lest I had betrayed myself, so I asked what I had been saying in
my sleep, whereupon Zenoba protested that I had said nothing at all, but
Ayesha, the sweet little darling, said I had been calling upon the great
White Pasha (meaning General Gordon) whose picture (his statue) was by
the Palace gates. What an escape!
"Of course my first impulse was to run away, but at the next moment I
saw that to do so would be to defeat your own scheme in going, and that
as surely as it had been your duty to go into Cairo, it was mine to
remain in Khartoum. But all the same I felt myself to be a captive--as
surely a captive as any white woman who was ever held in the Mahdi's
camp--and it did not sweeten my captivity to remember that I had first
become a prisoner of my own free will.
"If I am a captive I am under no cruel tyrant, though, and Ishmael's
kindness is killing me. I was certainly wrong about him in Cairo, and
his character is precisely the reverse of what I expected. Little
Ayesha tells me that during the night I lay unconscious her father did
not sleep at all, but kept coming into the guest-room every hour to ask
for news of me, and now he knocks at my door a dozen times a day, asking
if I am better, and saying 'To morrow, please God, you will be well.'
It makes me wretched, and brings me dreadfully near to the edge of
tears, remembering what I have done to him and how certainty his hopes
will be destroyed.
"Naturally his people have taken his cue, and last night Black Zogal
gathered up a crowd of half-crazy creatures like himself to say a prayer
for me at the Saint's house which is just outside my window.
"'Thou knowest our White Lady, O Father Gabreel, that she is betrothed
to our Master, and that his heart is low and his bread is bitter because
she is sick. Make her well if it please God, O Father Gabreel!' Thus
the simple-hearted children of the desert called down God's spirit to
their circle of fire for me, and after loud cries of 'Allah! Allah!'
going on for nearly an hour, they seemed to be content, for Zogal said--
"'Abu Gabreel hears, O my brothers, and to-morrow, please God, our
sister will be well.'
"I had been reaching up in bed to look and listen, and when all was over
I wanted to lay down my head and howl.
"The time has come for the people to start on their pilgrimage, but
Ishmael insists upon postponing the journey until I have quite
recovered. Meantime Zenoba is trying to make mischief, and to-day when
the door of my room was ajar, I heard her hinting to Ishmael that the
White Lady was not really ill but only pretending to be--a bit of
treachery for which she got no thanks, being as sharply reproved as she
was on the morning of your mother's letter.
"That woman makes a wild cat of me. I can't help it--I hate her! Of
course I see through her, too. She is in love with Ishmael, and though
I ought to pity her pangs of jealousy there are moments when I want to
curse her religion and the dawn of the day of her birth and her mother
and her grandmother.
"There! You see I have caught the contagion of the country; but I am
really a little weak and out of heart to-night, dear, so perhaps I had
better say good-night! Good-night, my dearest!"