"Why do you come to tell me this? What has it got to do with me? The
case before us is perfectly clear. By some tangle of devilish
circumstances the wrong man has been arrested to-night. But your
prisoner is wanted by the military authorities for other offences. Very
well, let him be handed over to them."
The Sirdar now saw that he had not only to fight the father for his own
flesh and blood, but the man for himself. He looked across the room to
where the Grand Cadi sat in smug silence, with his claw-like hands
clasped before his breast, and then, as if taking a last chance, he
said--
"Nuneham, the prisoner is your son."
"All the more reason why I should treat him as I should treat anybody
else."
"Your only son."
"Humph!"
"If anything happens to him--if he dies before you--your family will
come to an end when you are gone."
The old man trembled. The Sirdar was cutting him in the tenderest
place--ploughing deep into his lifelong secret.
"Your name will be wiped out. _You_ will have wiped it out, Nuneham."
The old man was shaking like a rock which vibrates in an earthquake. To
steady his nerves he took a pen and held it firmly in the fingers of
both hands.
"If you tell the Commandant to hand him over to the military
authorities, it will be the same in the court of your conscience as if
you had done it. _You will have cut off your own line_."
The old man fought hard with himself. It was a fearful struggle.
"More than that, it will be the same--it will be the same when you come
to think of it--as if with that pen in your hands you had signed your
own son's death-warrant."
The pen dropped, as if it had been red-hot, from the old man's trembling
fingers. Still he struggled.
"If my son is a guilty man, let the law deal with him as it would deal
with any other," he said, but his voice shook--it could scarcely sustain
itself.
The Sirdar saw that, deep under the frozen surface. the heart of the old
man was breaking up; he knew that the shot that killed Gordon would kill
the Consul-General also; and he felt that he was now pleading for the
life of the father as well as of the son.
"It's not as if the boy were a prodigal, a wastrel," he said. "He is a
gentleman, every inch of him, and if he has gone wrong, if he has acted
improperly, it has only been from the highest impulses. He has
sincerity and he has courage, and they are the noblest virtues of the
soul."
The old man's head was down, but he was conscious that the Cadi's cruel
eyes were upon him.
"He's a soldier, too. In some respects the finest young soldier in the
army, whoever the next may be. He saw his first fighting with me, I
remember. It was at Omdurman. He had taken the Khalifa's flag. The
Dervish who carried it had treacherously stabbed his comrade, and when
he came up with fire and tears in his eyes and said, 'I killed him like
a dog, sir,' 'My God,' I said to myself, 'here is a soldier born.'"
The old man was silent, but he was still conscious that the Cadi's cruel
eyes were upon him, watching him, interrogating him, saying, "What will
you do now, I wonder?"
"God has never given me a son," continued the Sirdar, "but from that day
to this I have always felt as if that boy belonged also to myself."
The old man was breaking up rapidly; but still he would not yield.
"His mother loved him, too. Perhaps he was the only human thing that
came between her and her God. She is dead, and they say the dead see
all. Who knows, Nuneham?--she may be waiting now to find out what you
are going to do."
The strain was terrible. The two old friends, one visibly moved and
making no effort to conceal his emotion, the other fighting hard with
the dark spirits of pride and wrath!
The Sirdar's mind went back to the days when they were young men
themselves, at Sandhurst together, and approaching the Consul-General,
he put one hand on his shoulder and said--
"Nuneham--John Nuneham--John--Jack--give the boy another chance. Let
him go."
Then with a cry of agony and with an oath, never heard from his lips
before, the Consul-General rose from his seat and said--
"No, no, no! You come here asking me to put my honour into the hands of
my enemies--to leave myself at the mercy of any scoundrel who cares to
say that the measure I mete out to others is not that which I keep for
my own. You come, too, excusing my son's offences against military law,
but saying nothing of the other crimes in which you have this very night
caught him red-handed."