"Peace be with you both! Peace!"--and passed out of the room.
They stood where he had left them in the middle of the room, with faces
to the ground and their hands quivering in each other's clasp until the
sound of his footsteps had died away. Then Gordon said--
"Shall we go into the garden, Helena?"
"Yes," she replied in a whisper.
They went out hand in hand, and walked to the arbour on the edge of the
ramparts. There, on that loved spot, the past rolled back on them like
billows of the soul. The bushes seemed to have grown, the bougainvillea
was more purple than before, the air was full of the scent of blossom,
and everything was turning to love and to song.
They did not speak, but they put their arms about each other, and looked
down on the wide panorama below--the city, the Nile, the desert, the
Pyramids, and that old, old Sphinx whose scarred face had witnessed so
many incidents in the story of humanity, and was now witnessing the last
incident of one story more.
How long they stood there in their great happiness they never knew, but
they were called back to themselves by a shrill, clear voice that came
from a minaret behind them--
"God is Most Great! God is Most Great!"
Then, turning in the direction of the voice, they saw a white figure on
a white camel ascending the yellow road that leads up to the fort on the
top of the Mokattam hills and onward to the desert.
"Look," said Gordon. "Is it----?"
Without speaking, Helena bent her head in assent.
With hands still clasped and quivering, they watched the white figure as
it passed away. It stopped at the crest of the hill, and looked back
for a moment; then turned again and went on. At the next moment it was
gone.
And then once more came the voice from the minaret, like the voice of an
angel winging its way through the air--
[Illustration: Music fragment]
*EPILOGUE*
Lord Nuneham lived ten years longer, but never, after the first profound
sensation caused by his retirement, was he heard of again. The House of
Lords did not see him; he was never found on any public platform, and no
publisher could prevail upon him to write the story of his life.
He bought a majestic but rather melancholy place in Berkshire, one of
the great historic seats of an extinguished noble family, and there,
under the high elms and amid the green and cloudy landscape of his own
country, he lived out his last years in unbroken obscurity.
It has been well said that deep tragedy is the school of great men, but
there was one ray of sunshine to brighten Lord Nuneham's solitude. On a
table, by his bedside, in a room darkened by rustling leaves, stood two
photographs in silver frames. They were of two boys, one dark like his
mother, the other fair like his father, both bright and strong and
clear-eyed. Down to the end the old man never went to bed without
taking up these pictures and looking at them, and as often as he did so,
a faint smile would pass over his seamed and weary face.
After a while the world forgot that he was alive, and when he died the
public seemed to be taken by surprise. "I thought he died ten years
ago," said somebody.
Gordon held his post as General in command of the British army in Egypt
for four successive terms, his appointment being renewed, first by the
wish of the War Office, and afterwards at the request of the Egyptian
Government. The civil occupation having become less active since his
father's time (the new Consul-General being a pale shadow of his
predecessor), the military occupation became more important, and except
for his subjection to headquarters, Gordon appeared to stand in the
position of a military autocrat. But in the difficult and delicate task
of maintaining order in a foreign country without exasperating the
feelings of the native people, he showed great tact and sympathy. While
allowing the utmost liberty to thought, whether political or religious,
he never for a moment permitted it to be believed that the Government
could be defied with impunity in matters affecting peace, order, life,
and property.
For this the best elements honoured him, and when the poor and
illiterate, who were sometimes the victims of extremists whose only aim
was to throw flaming torches into pits of inflammable gas, saw that he
was just as ready to put down lawlessness among Europeans as among
Egyptians, they loved as well as trusted him. His life in Egypt lessened
the gulf which Easterns always find between Christians and Christianity,
and whenever he had to return to England, the streets of Cairo would be
red with the tarbooshes of the people who ran to the railway-station to
see him off. "Maa-es-salamah, brother!" they would say, with the
simplicity of children, and then, "Don't forget we will be waiting for
you to come back."
Gordon's love for the Egyptians never failed him, and he was entirely
happy in his home, where Helena developed the summer bloom of beautiful
womanhood, and where the light, merry sound of the voices of her two
young boys was always ringing like music through the house.
It must be confessed that for a while Egypt had a hard and almost tragic
time. After the Consul-General's departure she went through a period of
storm and stress. There were both errors and crimes. These were the
inevitable results of progressive stages of self-rule; and even anarchy,
the travail of a nation's birth, was not altogether unknown. During the
earlier years there were some to regret the absence of the mailed fist
of Lord Nuneham, and to question the benefit of quasi-Western
institutions in an Eastern country. But the atmosphere cleared at last,
the sinister anticipations were falsified, a bold and magnanimous policy
brought peace, and the destinies of Egypt were firmly united to those of
the country that had given her a new lease of life and liberty.
England never regretted what she had done on that day, when, true to her
high traditions, she decided that a great nation had no longer any right
to govern, with absolute and undivided authority, another race living
under another sky. And her reward seems likely to come in a way that
might have been least expected. As "God chooseth His fleshly instruments
and with imperfect hearts doeth His perfect work," He seems to have put
it into the hearts of the Arab people to sink their tribal differences
and to act at the prompting of the gigantic myth with which the Grand
Cadi deceived the Consul-General.
Indeed, those who gaze into the future as into a crystal say that the
time is near when the long drama of dissension that has been played
between Arabs and Turks will end in the establishment of a vast Arabic
Empire, extending from the Tigris and the Euphrates Valley to the
Mediterranean, and from the Indian Ocean to Jerusalem, with Cairo as its
capital, the Khedive as its Caliph, and England as its lord and
protector. No one can foreshadow the future, but this was Napoleon's
greatest dream, and the nation that can realise it will hold the peace
of the world in the palm of its almighty hand.
And Ishmael?
After he left Cairo he was never seen again by any one who could
positively identify him. Some say he returned to the home of his
childhood on the Libyan desert, and that he died there; others that he
went back to Khartoum and thence to the heart of the Sahara, and that he
is still alive. However this may be, it is certain that his
disappearance has had the effect of death, that it has deepened the
impression of his life, and that a huge shadow of him remains on those
among whom he lived and laboured.
It was said on the day of his departure that Black Zogal, who followed
him to the last with the fidelity of a human dog, kept close at his
heels until he came to the top of the Mokattam Hills, where the Master
sent him back after strictly charging him to tell no one which way he
was going. Since then, however, Zogal has given it out (with every
appearance of believing his own story) that he saw Ishmael ascend to
heaven from the Gebel Mokattam in a blinding whirlwind of celestial
light, a flight of angels carrying him away.
A Saint's House has been built for Black Zogal on the spot on which he
says he saw the ascent; the half-crazy Soudanese inhabits it, and its
outer walls are almost covered with the small flags which devotees have
brought and fixed to them in their childlike effort to show reverence.
Nothing could exceed the boundless affection which is still felt for
Ishmael by those who came into immediate contact with him. He seems to
have inspired them with a love which survives absence and could even
conquer death. Everybody who ever spoke to him has a story to tell of
his wisdom, his power, and his tenderness. The number of his "miracles"
has increased tenfold, and though not described as sinless, he is always
talked of as if he were divine.
His Mouled (his birthday, a conjectural date) is celebrated by
ceremonies which almost outrival the "Nights of the Prophet." About the
Saint's House on the Mokattam Hills a huge encampment of tents is made,
and there, under the blaze of thousands of dazzling lights, the
Dervishes hold their Zikrs amid scenes of frantic excitement due to
exhibitions of hypnotic suggestion which even include the gift of
tongues, while more serious-minded Sheikhs repeat a long record of
Ishmael's genealogy. This is a very circumstantial story, with a vague
resemblance to something which Christians speak of with bated
breath--how, when his mother, who was a virgin, was bearing him, an
angel appeared to her in a dream and said, "You carry the Lord of Man,"
and how, when the child was delivered, three great Sheikhs came from
Mecca to pay reverence to him, having seen a star in the sky which told
them where he was to be born.
In the course of years a great body of Ishmael's "Sayings" have been
gathered up. Some of them are authentic, but most of them are out of
the wisdom of the ages, and not a few are directly borrowed from the
Christian gospels which the Moslems, as a whole, do not know. Whatever
their sources, they are deeply treasured. Women chant them to the
children at their knees, and men lisp them, with their last breath and
then die with brave faces.
Besides the impression he has produced upon the people, which is strong
and likely to be enduring, Ishmael seems to have an almost unaccountable
fascination for Arabic scholars and theologians. A number of the
professors at El Azhar are already deep in metaphysical disputations
about the inner significance of the words attributed to him, and it is
whispered that the venerable Chancellor (now nearly a hundred years of
age) is compiling a book, half biography and half commentary, that is
full of mystical meanings.
More extraordinary still, it seems probable that a large and gorgeous
mosque will be built in Ishmael's honour, and that he who loved best to
worship in that temple of the open desert whereof the dome is the sky,
he who cared so little about dogmatic theology that he never even wrote
a line, may, by the wild irony of fate, become the founder of a sect in
Islam which will teach everything he fought against and practise
everything he condemned.
Chief among the subjects of disputation is Ishmael's expectation of a
Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, though the Ulema, less concerned with the
spirit than with the letter of the prophet's hope, are divided as to the
source of it. Some say it is plainly indicated in the Koran and the
traditions; others, more widely read, say it is borrowed from the Hebrew
Bible, while a few refer it to a vague and misty antiquity.
Hardly less interesting to the theologians is the question of Ishmael's
identity. Nearly all agree that there was an element of the
supernatural about him, so hard is it to attribute to men of ordinary
human passions the great movements that affect the world. But while
there are those who believe him to have been the Mahdi, sent expressly
to earth to destroy Anti-Christ, that is to say, the Consul-General, an
influential group hold to the opinion that he was, and is, Seyidna
Isa--our Lord Jesus.
About this latter view there gathers a strange and not unimpressive
theory--that Jesus (who, according to the Islamic faith, did not die on
the cross) reappears at intervals among different races--now among the
Jews, now among the Indians, now among the Arabs--and that He will
continue to make these manifestations until the world is ready for the
greatest happiness obtainable by man--the establishment of the Kingdom
of God.
But not all the disputations of the wise heads of El Azhar can rob the
humble of the object of their veneration. Ishmael came from the people,
and with the people he will always remain. His blameless life, his
touching history, his deep humanity, his simple teaching, and above all
his lofty hopes, have made him Sultan of a vast empire of souls--the
empire of the poor, the oppressed, the down-trodden, and the
broken-hearted. From the central heart of the East his spirit came as a
ray of sunlight, inspiring men in the dark places to live nobly, to die
bravely, and to keep up their courage to the last.
_And what of Ishmael's influence in the West?_
_Nothing! European historians have written since his time without
saying a word about him. One of them, who devotes long chapters to
accounts of the bombardment of Alexandria, the battle of Tel-el-Kebir,
the craven flight of Arabi and his theatrical scene with the Khedive in
Abdeen Square, and yet other chapters to the building of the Assouan dam
and the construction of the Cape-to-Cairo railway, dismisses Ishmael's
pilgrimage from Khartoum in five lines of a section dealing with_
"_Mahdism and Sedition in the Soudan._"
_And indeed, so hard do we find it, in spite of our civilisation and
Christianity, to believe that the things of the spirit may be more
helpful in sustaining our steps and shaping our destinies than any
forces we can weigh, measure, and calculate, that it is difficult to
think of any real welcome in the cities of the West for one whose only
teaching was that great wealth is an inheritance taken by force from the
Almighty; that property beyond the proper needs of civilised human life
is pillage; and that God so loves the world that He will come in person
to govern it and to save mankind from its suffering and the consequences
of its sins._
_Certainly the mere thought of any one holding these opinions, least of
all an Arab, the son of a boat-builder, born on the Libyan desert,
brought up in the depths of the Soudan, educated in the stagnant schools
of El Azhar, wearing sandals and a turban, and probably eating with his
fingers--the mere thought of such a one, in the present year of grace,
forcing his way into the Cathedrals and Parliament Houses of
Westminster, Washington, Rome, Berlin, and Paris, where Archbishops
officiate in embroidered copes and Ministers prepare budgets towards the
re-paganisation of the world, would at least provoke a smile._
_Nevertheless there are some who think that the world is not ruled by
its great men but by its great ideas; that these ideas are few and very
old; that when humanity needs to renew itself it has only to go back to
them; and that it is not so often in the "sick hurry" of civilised
communities as out of the calm solitude of the desert that we hear the
sublime but simple notes of the World's One Voice._