"You must lend me these letters a little longer, my dear. And remember
what I said before--there's still the Secretary of State, and there's
still the King."
*CHAPTER XIV*
The strength in Helena's face was not belied by the will behind it.
Within an hour she was at work to save Gordon's life. Going to the
officer who had acted as Judge Advocate, she learned that the sentence
would not go to headquarters for confirmation until after two days. In
those two days she achieved wonders.
First, she approached the President of the Court and made sure that the
recommendation to mercy would go to London by the same mail that carried
the report of the proceedings.
Next she visited the Lieutenant-Colonel of every regiment of the Army of
Occupation and secured his signature and the signatures of his
fellow-officers to a petition asking for the commutation of the
sentence.
Two days and two nights she spent in this work, and everybody at
Abbassiah and at the Citadel knew what the daughter of the late General
was doing. A woman is irresistible to a soldier; a beautiful woman in
distress is overpowering; all the Army was in love with Helena; every
soldier was her slave.
When on the evening of the second day she returned to the house of the
Princess, she found three "Tommies," two in khaki and one in Highland
plaid, waiting for her in the hall. They produced a thick packet of
foolscap, badly disfigured by finger-prints and smelling strongly of
tobacco, containing four thousand signatures to her appeal.
Perhaps her greatest triumph, however, was with Colonel Macdonald.
"I must have his help, too," she said to the Princess, whereupon her
Highness put a finger to her nose and answered--
"If you must, my heart, you must, but remember--when you want a dog's
service address him as 'Sir.'"
She did. With a blush she told the Colonel (it was a dear, divine
falsehood) that Gordon had said he had had no personal animosity against
him, and was sorry if at a moment of undue excitement he had behaved
badly.
The curmudgeon took the apology according to his kind, saying that in
his opinion an officer who struck a brother-officer publicly and before
his men deserved to be shot or drummed out of the army, but still, if
Colonel Lord was ashamed of what he had done----
Helena's eyes flashed with anger, but she compelled herself to smile and
to say--
"He is, I assure you he is." And before the big Highlander knew what he
was doing he had written to headquarters at Helena's dictation, to say
that inasmuch as his own quarrel with Colonel Gordon Lord had been
composed, that count in the offence might, so far as he was concerned,
be wiped out.
The sweet double-face told him how good and noble and even Christ-like
this was of him, and then, marching off with the letter, said to
herself, "The brute!"
Meantime Hafiz, acting through his uncle the Chancellor, got the Ulema
of El Azhar to send a message to the Foreign Minister saying, with many
Eastern flourishes, that what General Graves had ordered Gordon to do,
what his subordinate had done, was a deep injury to the religious
susceptibilities of the Mohammedan people.
Besides this, the Sirdar sent a secretary with Gordon's letters, and
reams of written explanations of his conduct to the permanent head of
the War Office, a friend--a firm disciplinarian but a man of strong
humanity. Why had the prisoner refused to plead? Because he did not
wish to accuse his dead General. Why had he made no explanation of his
desertion and of his conduct at the time of his arrest? Because he did
not wish to impeach his father. Why had he intercepted an order of the
Army? Because he had been inspired solely by a desire to prevent the
tumultuous effusion of blood, and he had prevented it.
Finally, as a technical point of the highest importance, could it be
deemed that the troops in Egypt were on active service when there was no
such declaration to that effect as Section 189(2) of the Army Act
required?
Within two days everything was done, and then there was nothing left but
to await results. Helena wanted to go up to see Gordon, but she was
afraid to do so. When sorrow is shared it is lessened, but suspense
that is divided is increased.
After five days the Sirdar began to hear from London and to send his
news to Helena over the telephone. The matter was to be submitted to his
Majesty personally--had she any objection to the King seeing Gordon's
letters? So very intimate? Well, what of that? The King was a good
fellow, and there was nothing in the world that touched him so nearly as
a beautiful woman, except a woman in love and in trouble.
Then came two days of grim, unbroken silence and then--a burst of great
news.
In consideration of Colonel Lord's distinguished record as a soldier and
his unblemished character as a man; out of regard to the obvious purity
of his intentions and the undoubted fact that the order he disobeyed had
led to irreparable results; remembering the great provocation he had
received and not forgetting the valuable services rendered by his father
to England and to Egypt, the King had been graciously pleased to grant
him a free pardon under the Great Seal!
This coming first as a private message from the head of the War Office,
threw the Sirdar into an ecstasy of joy. He called up the
Consul-General immediately, and repeated the glad words over the
telephone, but no answer came back to him except the old man's audible
breathing as it quivered over the wires.
Then he thought of Helena, but with a soldier's terror of tears in the
eyes of a woman, even tears of joy, he decided to let Hafiz carry the
news to her.
"Tell her to go up to the Citadel and break the good tidings to Gordon,"
he said, speaking to Egyptian headquarters.
Nothing loath, Hafiz went bounding along to the house of the Princess
and blurted out his big message, expecting that it would be received
with cries of delight, but to his bewilderment, Helena heard it with
fear and trembling, and, becoming weak and womanish all at once, she
seemed to be about to faint.
Hafiz, with proper masculine simplicity, became alarmed at this, but the
Princess began to laugh.
"What!" she cried. "You that have been as brave as a lion with her cub
while your man's life has been in danger, to go mooing now--_now_--like
a cow with a sick calf!"
Helena recovered herself after a moment, and then Hafiz delivered the
Sirdar's mandate, that she was to go up to the Citadel and break the
good news to Gordon.
"But I daren't, I daren't," she said, still trembling.
"What!" cried the Princess again. "Not go and get the kisses and hugs
that ... Well, what a dunce I was to have that silver grey of yours made
so tight about the waist! For two pins I would put on your black veil
and go up myself and take all the young man has to give a woman."
Helena smiled (a watery smile) and declared she would go if Hafiz would
go with her. Hafiz was ready, and in less than half-an-hour they were
driving up to the Citadel in the Princess's carriage with the footmen
and saises and eunuch which her Highness, for all her emancipation,
thought necessary to female propriety in public.
Everything went well until they reached the fortress, and then, going up
the stone staircase to Gordon's quarters, Helena began to tremble more
than ever.
"Oh! Oh! I daren't! I must go home," she whispered.
"Lord, no! not now," said Hafiz. "Remember,--up there is some one who
thinks he is going to die, while here are we who know he isn't, and that
life will be doubly sweet if it's you that takes it back to him. Come,
sister, come!"
"Give me your arm, then," said Helena, and, panting with emotion and
perilously near to the point of tears, she went up, on shaking limbs, to
a door at which two soldiers, armed to the teeth, were standing on
guard.
At that moment Gordon, in the officer's bright room which had been given
to him as a cell, was leaning on the sill of the open window looking
steadfastly down at some object in the white city below. During the
past six days he had known what was being done on his behalf, and the
desire for life, which he had thought dead in him, had quickened to
suspense and pain.
To ease both feelings he had smoked innumerable cigarettes and made
pretence of reading the illustrated papers which his brother-officers
had poured in upon him, out of their otherwise dumb and helpless
sympathy. But every few minutes of every day he had leaned out of the
window to look first, with a certain pang, at the heavy-lidded house
which contained his father; next, with a certain sense of tears, at a
green spot covered with cypress trees which contained all that was left
of his mother, and finally, with a certain yearning, at the trellised
Eastern palace of the Princess Nazimah, which contained Helena.
This is what he was doing at the moment when Helena and Hafiz were
ascending the stairs, and just as he was asking himself for the
hundredth time why Helena did not come to see him, he heard his guard's
gruff tones mingled with a woman's mellow voice.
A deep note among the soft ones sent all the blood in his body galloping
to his heart, and turning round he saw the door of his room open and
Helena herself on the threshold.
One moment she stood there, with her sweet, care-worn face growing red
in her passion of joy, and then she rushed at him and fell on his
breast, throwing both arms about his neck, and crying--
"Such news, Gordon! Oh, my Gordon, I bring you such good, good news!
Such news, dear! Such news, oh such good news!"
Thus trying to tell her tidings at a breath, she told him nothing, but
continued to laugh and sob and kiss, and say what good news she brought
him.
Yet words were needless, and before Hafiz, whose fat wet face was
shining like a round window on an April day, could whisper "the King's
Pardon," Gordon, like the true lover he was, had said, and had meant
it--
"But you bring me nothing so good as yourself, dearest--nothing!"
*CHAPTER XV*
Helena was with Gordon the following morning when one of the guard came
in hurriedly and announced, amid gusts of breath, that the
Consul-General was coming upstairs.
Not without a certain nervousness Gordon rose to receive his father, but
he met him at the door with both hands outstretched. The old man took
one of them quietly, with the air of a person who was struggling hard to
hold himself in check. He took Helena's hand also, and when she would
have left the room he prevented her.
"No, no," he said; "sit down, my child--resume your seat."
It seemed to Gordon that his father looked whiter and feebler, yet even
firmer of will than ever, like a lion that had been shot and was dying
hard. His lips were compressed as he took the chair which Gordon
offered him, and when he spoke his voice was hard and a little bitter.
"First, let me give you good news," he said.
"Is it the Pardon?" asked Gordon.
"No, something else--perhaps, in a sense, something better," said the
old man.
He had received an unofficial message from the War Office to say that
the King, taking no half measures, intended to promote Gordon to the
rank of Major-General, and appoint him to the command of the British
Forces in Egypt.
Helena could hardly contain her joy at this fresh proof of good fortune,
but Gordon made no demonstration. He watched the pained expression in
the old man's face, and felt sure that something else was coming.
"It's a remarkable, perhaps unparalleled instance of clemency,"
continued the Consul-General, "and under the circumstances it may be
said to open up as momentous a mission as was ever confided to a
military commander."
"And you, father?" asked Gordon, not without an effort.
The old man laughed. A flush overspread his pale face for a moment.
Then he said--
"I? Oh, I ... I am dismissed."
"Dismissed?"
Gordon had gasped. Helena's lips had parted.
"That's what it comes to--stated in plain words and without diplomatic
flourishes. True, I had sent in my resignation, but ... the long and
the short of it is that after a debate on the Address, and the carrying
of an amendment, Downing Street has agreed that the time has come to
associate the people of Egypt with the government of the country."
"Well, sir?"
"Well, as that is a policy against which I have always set my face, a
policy I have considered premature, perhaps suicidal, the Secretary of
State has cabled that, being unable to ask me to carry into effect a
change that is repugnant to my principles, he is reluctantly compelled
to accept my resignation."
Gordon could not speak, but again the old man tried to laugh.
"Of course the pill is gilded," he continued, clasping his blue-veined
hands in front of his breast. "The Foreign Secretary told Parliament
that my resignation (on the ground of age and ill health, naturally) was
the heaviest blow that had fallen on English public life within living
memory. He also said that while other methods might be necessary for
the future, none could have been so good as mine in the past. And then
the King----"
"Yes, father?"
A hard, half-ironical smile passed over the old man's face.
"The King has been graciously pleased to grant me an Earldom, and even
to make me a Knight of the Garter."