"Go, sir! Let your prisoner be handed over to the military authorities
without one moment's further delay."
It was like the breaking away of an avalanche, and after it thsre came
the same awful stillness. No one spoke. The Commandant bowed and left
the room.
The Consul-General returned to his seat at the desk, and, digging his
elbows into the blotting-pad, rested his head on his hands. The Sirdar
stood sideways with one arm on the chimney-piece. The Cadi sat in his
smug silence with his claw-like hands still clasped in front of his
breast.
They heard the Commandant's heavy step and the click of his spurs as he
walked across the marble floor of the hall. They heard the front door
close with a bang. Still no one spoke, and the silence seemed to be
everlasting.
Then they heard the outer bell ringing loudly. They heard the front door
opened and then closed again, as if somebody had been admitted. At the
next moment, Ibrahim, looking as if he had just seen a ghost, had come,
with his slippered feet, into the library, and was stammering--
"If you please, your Excellency ... if you please, your Ex----"
"Speak out, you fool--who is it?" said the Consul-General.
"It is ... it is Miss ... Miss Helena, your Excellency."
The Consul-General's face contracted for an instant as if he were trying
to recover the plain sense of where he was and what was going on. Then
he rose and went out of the room, Ibrahim following him.
The Sirdar and the Grand Cadi were left together. They did not speak nor
exchange a sign. The Sirdar felt that the Cadi's presence had
contributed to the late painful scene--that it had been a silent, subtle
devilish influence against Gordon--and he was conscious of an almost
unconquerable desire to take the man by the throat and wring his neck as
he would wring the neck of a bird of prey.
A quarter of an hour passed. Half-an-hour. Still the two men did not
speak. And the Consul-General did not return.
*CHAPTER VIII*
Meantime Helena, in another room, still wearing her mixed Eastern and
Western dress, was sitting by a table in an attitude of supplication,
with her arms outstretched and her hands clasped across a corner of it,
speaking earnestly and rapidly to the Consul-General, who was standing
with head down in front of her.
Pale, in spite of the heat of the South and the sun of the desert, very
nervous, flurried, and a little ashamed, yet with a sense of urgent
necessity, she was telling him all that had happened since she left
Cairo--how she had gone to Khartoum under an impulse of revenge that was
inspired by a mistaken idea of the cause of her father's death; how,
being there, she had been compelled to accept the position of Ishmael's
nominal wife or go back with her errand unfulfilled; how she had come to
know of the base proposals of certain of the Ulema, and how, at length,
when Ishmael had succumbed to the last of them, she had written and
dispatched her letter saying he was coming into Cairo in disguise.
Then in her soft voice, with its deep note, she told of Gordon's arrival
in Khartoum; of his own tragic mistake and awful sufferings; of his
confession to her; of her confession to him; and of how she realised her
error, but found herself powerless to overtake or undo it.
Finally she told the Consul-General of Gordon's determination to take
Ishmael's place, being impelled to do so by the firmest conviction that
his father was being deceived by some one in Cairo, by the certainty
that Ishmael could not otherwise be moved from his fanatical purpose,
and that while the consequences of his own arrest must be merely
personal to himself, the result of Ishmael's death at the hands of the
authorities might be a holy war, which would put Egypt in the right and
England in the wrong, and cover his father's honoured name with infamy.
The old man listened eagerly, standing as long as he could on the same
spot, then walking to and fro with nervous and irregular steps, but
stopping at intervals as if breathless from an overpowering sense of the
hand of fate.
Having finished her story, Helena produced Gordon's letters from the
little handbag which hung from one of her arms, and having kissed them,
as if the Consul-General had not been present, she began with panting
affection to read passages from them in proof of what she had said.
Being a woman, she knew by instinct what to read first, and one by one
came the passionate words which told of Gordon's affection for the
father whom he felt bound to resist.
"'My father,'" she read, "'is a great man who probably does not need and
would certainly resent my compassion, but, Lord God, how I pity him!
Deceived by false friends, alone in his old age, after all he has done
for Egypt!'"