"England remembers, though, and if--" but the old man looked into his
face and his next words died on his lips.
The engine was getting up steam, and its rhythmic throb was shaking the
glass roof overhead when Gordon and Hafiz, wearing their military
greatcoats, came up the platform. They had carefully timed it to arrive
at the last moment. A gleam of light came into the father's face at the
sight of his son. Gordon stepped up, Hafiz fell back, Lord Nuneham
entered the carriage.
"Well, good-bye, old friend," said the old man, shaking hands warmly
with the Sirdar. "I may see you again--in my exile in England, you
know."
Then he turned to Gordon and took his outstretched hand. Father and son
stood face to face for the last time. Not a word was spoken. There was
a long, firm, quivering hand-clasp--and that was all. At the next
moment the train was gone.
The Sirdar stood watching it until it disappeared, and then he turned to
Gordon, and, thinking of the England the Consul-General had loved, the
England he had held high, he said, speaking of him as if he were already
dead--
"After all, my boy, your father was one of the great Englishmen."
Gordon could not answer him, and after a while they shook hands and
separated. The two young soldiers walked back to the Citadel, through
the native streets. The "Nights of the Prophet" were nearly over, and
the illuminations were being put out.
Hafiz talked about the Khedive--he had just arrived at Kubbeh; then
about Ishmael--the Prophet had shut himself up in the Chancellor's house
and was permitting nobody to see him.
"His Highness has asked Ishmael to be Imam to-morrow morning, but it is
thought that he is ill--it is even whispered that he is going mad."
said Hafiz.
Gordon did not speak until they reached the foot of the hill. Then he
said--
"I must go up and lie down. Good-night, old fellow! God bless you!"
*CHAPTER XVII*
Half-an-hour earlier, Gordon's guard, now transformed into his soldier
servant, had been startled by the appearance of an Egyptian, wearing the
flowing white robes of a Sheikh, and asking in almost faultless English
for Colonel Lord.
"The Colonel has gone to the station to see his lordship off to England,
but I'm expecting him back presently," said the orderly.
"I'll wait," said the Sheikh, and the orderly showed, him into Gordon's
room.
"Looks like a bloomin' death's-head! Wonder if he's the bloomin'
Prophet they're jawrin' about!"
Since coming into Cairo Ishmael had been a prey to thoughts that were
indeed akin to madness. Perhaps he was seized by one of those nervous
maladies in which a man no longer belongs to himself. Certainly he
suffered the pangs of heart and brain which come only to the purest and
most spiritual souls in their darkest hours, and seem to make it
literally true that their tortured spirits descend into hell.
Now that his anxiety for his followers was relaxed and their hopes had
in some measure been realised, his mind swung back to the sorrowful
decay and ruin that had fallen upon himself. It was no longer the shame
of the prophet but the bereavement of the man that tormented him. His
lacerated heart left him no power of thinking or feeling anything but
the loss of Helena.
Again he saw her beaming eyes, her long black lashes, and her smiling
mouth. Again he heard her voice, and again the sweet perfume of her
presence seemed to be about him. That all this was lost to him for
ever, that henceforth he had to put away from him all the sweetness, all
the beauty, all the tenderness of a woman's life linked with his,
brought him a paroxysm of pain in which it seemed as if his heart would
break and die.
He recalled the promises he had made to himself, of taking up the life
of a man when his work was done. His work was done now--in some sort
ended, at all events--but the prize he had promised himself had been
snatched away. She was gone, she who had been all his joy. An
impassable gulf divided them. The infinite radiance of hope and love
that was to have crowned his restless and stormy life had disappeared.
Henceforth he must walk through the world alone.
"O God, can it be?" he asked himself, with the startled agony of one who
awakes from single-pillowed sleep and remembers that he is bereaved.
If anything had been necessary to make his position intolerable, it came
with the thought that all this was due to the treachery of the man he
had loved and trusted, the man he had believed to be his friend and
brother, the one being, besides the woman, who had gone to his heart of
hearts. The Rani had confessed to him that she loved "Omar," and
notwithstanding that all his life he had struggled to liberate himself
from the prejudices of his race, yet now, in the melancholy broodings of
his Eastern brain, he could not escape from the conclusion that the only
love possible between a man and the wife of another was guilty love.
When he thought of that both body and soul seemed to be afire, and he
became conscious of a feeling about "Omar" which he had never
experienced before towards any human creature--a feeling of furious and
inextinguishable hatred.
He began to be afraid of himself, and just as a dog will shun its kind
and hide itself from sight when it feels the poison of madness working
in its blood, so Ishmael, under the secret trouble which he dared reveal
to none, shut himself up in his sleeping-room in the old Chancellor's
house.
It was a small and silent chamber at the back, overlooking a little
paved courtyard containing a well, and bounded by a very high wall that
shut off sight and sound of the city outside. Once a day an old man in
a blue galabeah came into the court to draw water, and twice a day a
servant of the Sheikhs came into the room with food. Save for these
two, and the old Chancellor himself at intervals, Ishmael saw no one for
nine days, and in the solitude and semi-darkness of his self-imposed
prison a hundred phantoms were bred in his distempered brain.
On the second day after his retirement the Chancellor came to tell him
that his emissary, his missionary, "Omar Benani," had been identified on
his arrest, that in his true character as Colonel Lord he was to be
tried by his fellow-officers for his supposed offences as a soldier at
the time of the assault on El Azhar, and that the only sentence that
could possibly be passed upon him would be death. At this news, which
the Chancellor delivered with a sad face, Ishmael felt a fierce but
secret joy.
"God's arm is long," he told himself. "He allowed the man to escape
while his aims were good, but now he is going to punish him for his
treachery and deceit."
Three days afterwards the old Chancellor came again to say that Colonel
Lord had been tried and condemned to death, as everybody had foreseen
and expected, but nevertheless the sympathy of all men was with him,
because he was seen to have acted from the noblest motives, withstanding
his own father for what he believed to be the right, and exposing
himself to the charge of being a bad son and a poor patriot in order to
prevent bloodshed; that he had indeed prevented bloodshed by preventing
a collision of the British and Native armies; that it had been by his
efforts that the pilgrimage had been able to enter Cairo in peace; and
that in recognition of the great sacrifice made by the Christian soldier
for the love of humanity, the Ulema were joining with others in
petitioning his King to pardon him.
At this news a chill came over Ishmael. His heart grew cold as stone,
and when the Chancellor was gone, he found himself praying--
"Forbid it, O God, forbid it! Let not Thy justice be taken out of Thine
awful hand."
Four days later the old Chancellor came yet again to say that the King's
Pardon had been granted; that Colonel Lord was free; that the people
were rejoicing; that everybody attributed the happy issue of the
Christian's case mainly to zealous efforts on his behalf of the woman
who loved him, the daughter of the dead General whose unwise command had
been the cause of all his trouble; and finally that it was expected that
these two would soon heal their family feud by marriage.
At this news Ishmael's tortured heart was aflame and his brain was
reeling. The thought that "Omar" was not to be punished, that he was to
be honoured, that he was to be made happy, filled him with passions
never felt before. Behind the strongest and most spiritual soul there
lurks a wild beast that seems to be ever waiting to destroy it, and in
the torment of Ishmael's heart the thought came to him that, as his
earthly judges were permitting the guilty one to escape, God called on
him to punish the man.
Irresistible as the thought was, it brought a feeling of indescribable
dread. "I must be going mad," he told himself, remembering how he had
spent his life in the cause of peace. All day long he fought against a
hatred that was now so fierce that it seemed as if death alone could
satisfy it. His soul wrestled with it, battled for life against it, and
at length conquered it, and he rose from his knees saying to himself--
"No, vengeance belongs to God! When did He ask for my hand to execute
it?"
But the compulsion of great passion was driving him on, and after
dismissing the thought of his own wrongs he began to think of the
Rani's. Where was she now? What had become of her? He dared not ask.
Ashamed, humiliated, abased, he had become so sensitive to pain on the
subject of the woman whom he had betrothed, the woman who had betrayed
him, the woman he still loved in spite of everything, that he was even
afraid that some one might speak of her.
But in the light of what the Chancellor had said about the daughter of
the General, he pictured the Rani as a rejected and abandoned woman.
This thought was at first so painful that it deprived him of the free
use of his faculties. He could not see anything plainly. His mind was a
battlefield of confused sights, half hidden in clouds of smoke. That,
after all the Rani had sacrificed for "Omar"--her husband, her
happiness, and her honour--she should be cast aside for another--this
was maddening.
He asked himself what he was to do. Find her and take her back?
Impossible! Her heart was gone from him. She would continue to love
the other man, whatever he might do to her. That was the way of all
women--Allah pity and bless them!
Then a flash of illumination came to him in the long interval of his
darkness. He would liberate the Rani, _and the man she loved should
marry her_! No matter if she belonged to another race--he should marry
her! No matter if she belonged to another faith--he should marry her!
And as for himself--_his sacrifice should be his revenge_!
"Yes, that shall be my revenge," he thought.
This, in the wild fire of heart and brain, was the thought with which
Ishmael had come to Gordon's door, and being shown into the soldier's
room he sat for some time without looking about him. Then raising his
eyes and gazing round the bare apartment, with its simple bed, its
table, its shelves of military boots, its stirrups and swords and
rifles, he saw on the desk under the lamp a large photograph in a frame.
It was the photograph of a woman in Western costume, and he told himself
in an instant who the woman was--she was the daughter of the General who
was dead.
He remembered that he had heard of her before, and that he had even
spoken about her to her father when he came to warn the General that the
order he was giving to Colonel Lord would lead to the injury of England
in Egypt and the ruin of his own happiness. From that day to this he had
never once thought of the girl, but now, recalling what the old
Chancellor had said of her devotion, her fidelity, her loyalty to the
man she loved, he turned his eyes from her picture lest the sight of it
should touch him with tenderness and make harder the duty he had come to
do.
"No, I will not look at it," he told himself, with the simplicity of a
sick child.
Trying to avoid the softening effects of the photograph under the lamp,
he saw another on the table by his side and yet another on the wall.
They were all pictures of the same woman, and hastily as he glanced at
them, there was something in the face of each that kindled a light in
his memory. Was it only a part of his haunting torment that, in spite
of the Western costume that obscured the woman in the photographs, her
brilliant, beaming eyes were the eyes of the Rani?
A wave of indescribable tenderness broke over him for a moment, an odour
of perfume, an atmosphere of sweetness and delicacy and charm, and then,
telling himself that all this was gone from him for ever, and that every
woman's face would henceforth remind him of her whom he had lost, the
hatred in his heart against Gordon gave him the pain of an open wound.
"O God, let me forget, let me forget!" he prayed.
Then suddenly, while he was in the tempest of these contrary emotions
which were whirling like hot sand in a sandstorm about his brain, he
heard a footstep on the stairs, followed by a voice outside the door.
It was the voice of Colonel Lord's soldier servant, and he was telling
his master who was within--an Arab, a Sheikh, in white robes and a
turban.
"He's coming! He's here," thought Ishmael.
With choking throat and throbbing heart he rose to his feet and stood
waiting. At the next moment the door was thrown open and the man he had
come to meet was in the room.
*CHAPTER XVIII*
With all his heart occupied by thoughts of his father, Gordon had hardly
listened to what Hafiz had been saying about Ishmael, but walking up the
hill and to the Citadel he began to think of him, and of Helena, and of
the bond of the betrothal which still bound them together.
"Until that is broken there can be nothing between her and me," he told
himself, and this was the thought in his mind at the moment when he
reached his quarters and his servant told him who was waiting within.
"Ishmael Ameer! Is it you?" he cried, as he burst the door open, and
stepping eagerly, cheerfully, almost joyfully forward, he stretched out
his hand.
But Ishmael drew back, and then Gordon saw that his eyes were swollen as
if by sleeplessness, that his lips were white, that his cheeks were
terribly pale, and that the expression of his face was shocking.
"Why, what is this? Are you ill?" he asked.
"Omar Benani," said Ishmael, "you and I are alone, and only God is our
witness. I have something to say to you. Let us sit."
He spoke in a low, tremulous tone, rather with his breath than with his
voice, and Gordon, after looking at him for an instant, and seeing the
smouldering fire of madness that was in the man's face, threw off his
greatcoat and sat down.
There was a moment in which neither spoke, and then Ishmael, still
speaking in a scarcely audible voice, said--
"Omar Benani, I am a son of the Beni Azra. Honour is our watchword.
When a traveller in the Libyan desert, tired and weary, seeks the tent
of one of my people, the master takes him in. He makes him free of all
that he possesses. Sometimes he sends the stranger into the harem
itself that the women may wash his feet. He leaves him there to rest
and to sleep. He puts his faith, his honour, the most precious thing God
has given him, into his hands. But," said Ishmael, with suppressed fire
flashing in his eyes, "if the stranger should ever wrong that harem, if
he should ever betray the trust reposed in him, no matter who he is or
where he flies to, the master will follow him and _kill him_!"
Involuntarily, seeing the error that Ishmael had fallen into, Gordon
rose to his feet, whereupon Ishmael, mistaking the gesture, held up his
hand.
"No," he said, "not that! I have not come to do that. I put _my_
honour in _your_ hands, Omar Benani. I made you free of my family.
Could I have done more? You were my brother, yet you outraged the
sacred rights of brotherhood. You tore open the secret chamber of my
heart. You deceived me, and robbed me and betrayed me, and you are a
traitor. But I am not here to avenge myself. Sit, sit. I will tell
you what I have come for."
Breathless and bewildered, Gordon sat again, and after another moment of
silence, Ishmael, with the light of a wild sorrow in his face, said--
"Omar Benani, there is one who has sacrificed everything for you. She
has broken her vows for you, sinned for you, suffered for you. That
woman is my wife, and by all the rights of a husband I could hold her.
But her heart is yours, and therefore ... therefore I _intend to give
her up_."
Involuntarily Gordon rose to his feet again, and again Ishmael held up
his hand.
"But if I liberate her," he said, "if I divorce her, you must marry her.
_That_ is what I have come to say."
Utterly amazed and dumbfounded, Gordon could not at first find words to
speak, whereupon Ishmael, mistaking his silence, said--
"You need not be afraid of scandal. My people know something about the
letter that was sent into Cairo, but neither my people nor yours know
anything of the motives that inspired it. Therefore nobody except
ourselves will understand the reason for what is done."
He paused as if waiting for a reply, and then said in a voice that
quavered with emotion--
"Can it be possible that you hesitate? Do you suppose I am offering to
you what I do not wish to keep for myself? I tell you that if that poor
girl could say that her feeling for me was the same as before you came
between us.... But no, that is impossible! God, who is on high, looks
down on what I am doing, and He knows that it is right."
Gordon, still speechless with astonishment, twisted about to the desk,
which was behind him, and stretched out his hand as if with the
intention of taking up the photograph; but at that action, Ishmael, once
more mistaking his meaning, flashed out on him in a blaze of passion.
"Don't tell me you cannot do it. You must, and you shall! No matter
what pledges you may have made--you shall marry her. No matter if she
is of another race and faith--you shall marry her. She may be an
outcast now, but you shall find her and save her. Or else," he cried, in
a thundering voice, rising to his feet, and lifting both arms above
Gordon's head with a terrible dignity, "the justice of God shall
overtake you, His hand shall smite you, His wrath shall hurl you down."
Seeing that all the wild blood of the man's race was aflame, Gordon
leapt up, and laying hold of Ishmael's upraised arms he brought them, by
a swift wrench, down to his sides.
The two men were then face to face, the Arab with his dusky cheeks and
flashing black eyes, the Englishman with his glittering grey eyes and
lips set firm as steel. There was another moment of silence while they
stood together so, and then Gordon, liberating Ishmael's arms, said, in
a commanding voice--
"I have listened to you. Now you shall listen to me. Sit down."
More than the strength of Gordon's muscles, the unblanched look in his
face compelled Ishmael to obey. Then Gordon said--
"You believe you have been deceived and wronged, and you have been
deceived and wronged, but not in the way you think. The time has come
for you to learn the truth--the whole truth. You shall learn it now.
Look at this," he said, snatching up the photograph from the desk and
holding it out to Ishmael.
Ishmael tried to push the photograph away.
"Look at it, I say. Do you know who that is?"
At the next moment Ishmael was trembling in every limb, and without
voice, almost without breath, he was stammering, as he held the
photograph in his hand--
"The Rani?"
"Yes, and no," said Gordon. "That is the daughter of our late General."
It seemed to Ishmael that Gordon had said something, but he tried in
vain to realise what it was.
"Tell me," he stammered, "tell me."
Then, rapidly but forcibly, Gordon told him Helena's story, beginning
with the day on which Ishmael came to the Citadel--how she had
concluded, not without reason, that he had killed her father, he being
the last person to be seen with him alive, and how, finding that the law
and the Government were powerless to punish him, she had determined to
avenge her father's death herself.
Ishmael listened with mouth open, fixing on Gordon a bewildered eye.
"Was that why she came to Khartoum?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Why she prompted me to come into Cairo?"
"Yes."
"Why she wrote that letter?"
"Yes."
Overwhelmed with the terrible enlightenment, Ishmael fumbled his beads
and muttered, "Allah! Allah!"
Then Gordon told his own story--how he, too, acting under the impulse of
an awful error, had fled to the Soudan, leaving an evil name behind him
rather than kill his dear ones by the revelation of what he believed to
be the truth; how, finding the pit that had been dug for the innocent
man, he had thought it his duty as the guilty one to step into it
himself; and how, finally, being appeased on that point, he had
determined to come into Cairo in Ishmael's place in order to save both
him from the sure consequences of his determined fanaticism and his
father from the certain ruin that must follow upon the work of liars and
intriguers.
By this time Ishmael was no longer pale but pallid. His lips were
trembling, his heart was beating audibly. Again without voice, almost
without breath, he stammered--
"When you offered to take my place you knew that the Rani ... Helena ...
had sent that letter?"
Gordon bowed without speaking.
"You knew, too, that you might be coming to your death?"
Once more Gordon bowed his head.
"Coming to your death, that I ... that I might live?"
Gordon stood silent and motionless.
"Allah! Allah!" mumbled Ishmael, who was now scarcely able to hear or
see.
Last of all, Gordon returned to the story of Helena, showing how she had
suffered for the impulse of vengeance that had taken possession of her;
how she had wanted to fly from Ishmael's camp, but had remained there in
the hope of helping to save his people, and how at length she _had_
saved them by going to the Consul-General to prove that the pilgrims
were not an armed force, and by ordering the light that had led them
into the city.