Part 16

Half blind with tears which belied her brave words, Helena had been writing the letter to Gordon which Mosie was waiting to take away. She had told him not to think of her, for she was quite able to take care of herself whatever happened. Then wiping the tears from her eyes, she had smiled as she told him to forget the nonsense she had written about Jezebel and her Jewish blood, and to remember that until Ishmael's work was "finished" and he entered Cairo she ran no risk by remaining in his camp.

She had got thus far when she thought she heard a step on the sand outside, but raising her eyes to look and seeing nothing except the red and white stars from the rockets that rained through the air at Ghezirah, she resumed her letter, telling herself, as she did so, that if the worst came to the worst and matters reached an unexpected crisis with Ishmael, she could defeat him again, as she had done before, by diplomacy, by finesse, and by woman's wit.

"I suppose you are in the thick of it by this time, for I see that the illuminations at Ghezirah have already begun. My dear, my dear, my----"

Her last word was not yet written when she heard Ishmael's tremulous whisper of the name he knew her by, and, starting up as if she had received an electric shock, she saw the Egyptian coming into her tent with the glittering eyes of one who was about to accomplish some joyous task. At the next moment, before she knew what was happening, she found herself clasped in his arms.

"My life! My heart! My eyes! My own!" he was saying in hot and impetuous whispers, and, raising her face to his face, he was kissing her on the lips.

She struggled to liberate herself, but felt like a helpless child in his strong, irresistible grasp.

"Leave me! Let me go!" she said, with heat and anger, but he did not seem to hear her or to be conscious of her resistance.

"Oh, how glad I am!" he said. "Our journey is at an end! Our new life is about to begin! How happy we shall be!"

All the blood in Helena's body rushed to her cheeks, and, putting up her hands between their faces, she demanded angrily--

"What do you mean by this? What are you doing?"

Yet still he did not hear her, for his passion was overpowering him, its intoxicating voice was ringing through his whole being, and he continued to pour into her ears a torrent of endearing words.

"Yes, yes, our new life is about to begin! It is to begin to-night--now!"

Helena was overwhelmed with fear, but suddenly, by the operation of an instinct which she did not comprehend, she smiled up into Ishmael's smiling face--a feeble, frightened, involuntary smile--and, pointing to the open mouth of the tent, she said, with a sense of mingled cunning and confusion--

"Be careful! Look!"

Ishmael loosened his hold of her, and, stepping back to the tent's mouth, he began to close and button it.

While he did so, Helena watched him and asked herself what she ought to do next. Cry for help? It would be useless. There were none to hear her except Ishmael's own people, and they worshipped him and looked upon her as his wife, his property, his slave, his chattel. Escape? Impossible! More than ever impossible for what (at her own direction) he was doing now.

"Then what am I to do?" she asked herself, and before she had found an answer Ishmael, having sealed up the tent, was returning with outstretched arms, as if with the intention of embracing and kissing her again.

She read in his great wild eyes the light of a passion which she had never seen in a man's face before, but she put on a bold front in spite of the terror which possessed her, thrust out her right hand to keep him off, looked him full in the face, and cried--

"No, no! You shall not! On no account! No!"

At that he dropped his outstretched arms, but, still smiling his joyous smile, he continued to approach her, saying, as he did so, in a tone of affectionate surprise and remonstrance--

"Why, what is this, O my Rani? Have we not joined hands under the handkerchief? Are you not my wife? Am I not your husband? It is true that I pledged myself to renunciation. But renunciation is wrong. It is against religion--against God."

He came nearer. She could feel his hot breath upon her face. It made her shiver with the race-feeling she had experienced before.

"And then, how can I continue to deny myself?" he said. "I am like one who has been dying of hunger in the sight of food. You are my joy, my flower, my treasure. God has given you to me. You are mine."

With that he threw his irresistible arms about her again, and, bringing his glittering eyes close to her eyes, he whispered--

"My Rani! My wife!"

Helena knew that the hour she had looked forward to with dread had come at length; she saw that the diplomacy, the finesse, the woman's wit she had counted upon to save her, were useless to quell the passion which flashed from Ishmael's eyes and throbbed in his voice, and she made one last and violent effort to escape from his arms.

"Let me go! Let me go!" she cried.

"Am I doing wrong?" he said. "No, no! I would not harm you for all the kingdoms of the world. But every wife must submit to her husband."

"No, no, no!" she cried, in tones of repulsion and loathing.

"Yes, yes, yes!" he replied, still more tenderly, still more passionately. "But if she is a good woman she has her modesty, her shield of shame. That is only right, only natural. It makes her the more sweet, the more dear, the more charming----"

Helena felt his arms tightening about her; she knew that he was lifting her off her feet, and realised that she was beins carried across the tent.

Then she remembered the assurances she had given to Gordon, the promises she had made to herself; and hardly conscious of what she did until it was done, or what she was saying until it was said, she brought her open hands heavily down upon his face, and cried in a fury of wrath and scorn--

"Let me go, I tell you! You shall! You must! Can't you see that you are hateful and odious to me--that you are a black man and I am a white woman?"

At the next moment she felt Ishmael's arms relax, and she found herself on her feet. A sense of immense, immeasurable relief came over her. A sense of triumph, too, for what she had said she would do she had done.

When she recovered herself sufficiently to look at Ishmael again, he was standing apart from her and his head was down. He could no longer deceive himself. A whirlwind of chaotic darkness had swept over him. The storm of his passion was gone.

Helena saw that he was deeply wounded, and, notwithstanding the aversion he had inspired in her a moment before, she pitied him from the bottom of her heart.

"I am sorry for what I said just now," she murmured in a low tone. "It was hateful of me, and I ask your pardon."

She was still panting, and she had to pause for breath, but he did not reply, and after a moment she began to excuse herself, saying falteringly--

"But you must see that ... that there could never have been anything between you and me, because ... because----"

Raising his eyes, he looked not into her face but at the veil that was fixed to her hair, and she found it difficult to go on.

"Did you not say yourself," she said, "that marriage was not joining hands under a handkerchief, or repeating words after a Cadi, but a sacrament of love, mutual love, and that everything else was sin? Therefore----"

"Well?"

"Therefore if ... if I do not love you----"

"And you do not?"

"No."

"Allah! Allah!" he muttered, in a voice that seemed to come up out of the depths of his soul, and at the next moment he sank down on to the angerib which was close behind him.

But hardly had he done so when he leapt to his feet again, and in a voice that rang with wrath he said--

"Then why did you betroth yourself to me? I put no constraint upon you. If you had told me that your heart was far from me, I should have gone no further. But I gave you time to consider, and you came to me of your own free will. Why was this? Answer me. I have a right to know that, at all events."

It came into her mind to reply that when they were betrothed he did not ask her if she loved him, and she did not understand that she was to belong to him. But what was the use of defending herself? On what ground could she justify her conduct?

"Or if," he said, and his voice shook with the intensity of his emotion--"if it was after our betrothal that your heart left me--if something I said or did lost me your love--why did you follow me from Khartoum? You might have stayed there. I was willing to leave you behind me. Why did you follow me over the desert? Why did you come with my company? Why are you here now?"

She found it impossible to answer him, and feeling how deeply she had wronged him, yet how impossible, how unthinkable, how inconceivable it was that she could have acted otherwise than she had, in the light of her great and undying love for Gordon, she clasped her hands in front of her face and burst into a flood of tears.

Her tears drove away his anger in a moment, for he mistook the cause of them, and, deeply and incurably wounded as he was, a wave of sympathy and compassion passed over him. Drawing her hands from her face and holding them in his own, he looked steadfastly into her wet eyes, and said in a softer voice--

"I see how it has been, O my Rani. You followed the teacher, not the man; the message, not the poor soiled volume it was written in, and perhaps you were right--quite right."

Every word he uttered went like iron into Helena's soul.

"I thought a woman lived by her heart alone," he said, "and that when she betrothed herself it must be for love, not from any higher and nobler motive, but it seems I was wrong--quite wrong. I thought, too," he said, "that where love was," and here his voice thickened and almost broke, "there was neither black nor white, neither race nor caste; but it seems I was wrong in that also. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me!"

He lifted her hands in his own long and delicate ones and put them to his lips, and then gently let them fall.

"But God knows best what is good for us," he said, "and perhaps ... perhaps He has sent me this as a warning and a punishment, lest ... lest I forget ... in the love of home and wife and children, the task the great task He has laid upon me. In-sha-allah! In-sha-allah!"

With that he turned to leave the tent, a shaken and agitated and totally different man from the man who had entered it; and Helena, notwithstanding that she was deeply moved, again felt a sense of immense, immeasurable relief.

But at the next moment a feeling akin to terror seized her, for while Ishmael was unbuttoning the canvas at the tent's mouth there came, over the dull rumble of many sounds outside, a clear, sharp voice, crying--

"Ishmael Ameer! Ishmael Ameer! Urgent news! Where are you?"

Helena's heart stood still. She seemed to know in advance what was coming. The hour of Ishmael's downfall had arrived, and he was to hear that he had been betrayed. She had escaped from her physical danger--what, now, of her moral peril?

*CHAPTER III*

A moment later Ishmael had torn the mouth of the tent open. An Egyptian was standing there in the turban and farageeyah of an Alim. The man, who was solemnly making his salaams, held a lantern in one hand and a letter in the other. Behind him, against the dark sky, were a number of Ishmael's own people. Their mouths were open, and fear was on their faces.

"What words are these, oh my brother?" asked Ishmael.

Without speaking, the Alim offered him the letter. It was that of the Chancellor of El Azhar, written immediately after the arrest of Gordon.

Ishmael took it, and standing under the lamp that hung from the pole of the tent he read it. For some moments he did not move or raise his eyes, but little by little his face assumed a death-like rigidity, and at length the paper crinkled in his trembling fingers.

So strong had been his faith in his mission, and so firm his conviction that God would not allow anything to interfere with its fulfilment, that it was almost impossible for him to take in the truth--that his cause was lost, that his pilgrimage was wasted, that his people could not enter Cairo, and their hope was at an end.

When at length he raised his eyes he looked with an expression of blank bewilderment into Helena's face.

"See," he said, in a tone of piteous helplessness, and he put the letter into her reluctant hand.

The blood rushed to Helena's head, stars danced before her eyes, and it was with difficulty that she could see to read. But there was little need to do so, for already she knew, as by a sense of doom, what the letter contained.

In a moment the people behind the Alim grew more and more numerous. The mouth of the tent became choked with them, and their faces were blotched with lights and shadows from the lamp within. They were talking eagerly among themselves, in low tones, full of dread. At length one of them spoke to Ishmael.

"Is it bad news, O Master?" he asked, but with the expressionless voice of one who knew already what the answer would be.

There was a moment of strained silence, and then Ishmael turned again to Helena, and said in the same tone of piteous helplessness as before--

"Read it to them. Let them know the worst, O Rani."

Helena could find no escape. With a fearful effort she began to read the letter aloud. But hardly had she finished the first clause of it--telling Ishmael that his messenger and missionary had been betrayed into the hands of the Government by means of a message sent into Cairo from some one who stood near to him in his own camp--than a deep groan came from the people at the mouth of the tent.

Black Zogal was there with his wild eyes, and by his side stood old Zewar Pasha with his suspicious looks.

"Who is the traitor, O Master?" asked the old man in his rasping voice, and it seemed to Helena that while he spoke every eye, except Ishmael's, was fixed upon her face.

Then a fearful thing befell. Ishmael, the man of peace, whom none had ever seen in any mood but one of tenderness and love, broke into a torrent of fierce passion.

"Allah curse him whoever he is!" he cried. "Curse him in his lying down, and in his getting up! Curse him in the morning splendour, and in the still of night! Curse him in the life that now is, and in the life that is to come!"

Helena felt as if the tent itself as well as the black and copper-coloured faces at the mouth of it were reeling around her. But it was not alone the terror of Ishmael's curse, with its unrevealed reference to herself, that created her confusion. She was thinking of Gordon. What did his arrest imply? Did it mean that he had succeeded in the perilous task he had undertaken? Or did it mean that he had failed?

When she recovered consciousness of what was going on about her she heard, above a wild tumult of voices outside, the voice of a woman and the voice of a boy. She knew that the woman was Zenoba and the boy was Mosie. At the next moment both were coming headlong into the tent, the one dragging the other through a way that had been made for them. The boy's shaven black head was bare, his caftan was torn open at the breast, and his skin was bleeding at the neck as if vindictive fingers had been clutching him by the throat. The woman's swarthy face was bathed in sweat, twitching with excitement and convulsed with evil passions.

"There!" she cried. "There he is, O Master, and if you want to know who took the letter to the English lord, ask him."

"Who is he?" asked Ishmael.

"Your Rani's servant," replied the Arab woman, with a curl of her cruel lip. "He left Khartoum for Cairo a month ago and has not been seen until to-day."

Another deep groan came from the people at the tent's mouth, and again it seemed to Helena that every eye, except Ishmael's, was looking into her face.

Meantime Mosie, thinking the groan of the people was meant for him, and that his life was in danger from their anger, had broken away from the woman's grasp and flung himself at Ishmael's feet, crying--

"Mercy, O Master! I kiss your feet. I take refuge with God and with you. Save me, and I will tell you every thing."

Ishmael, who by this time had regained his self-command, motioned to the Arab woman to stand back. Then he questioned the boy calmly, and the boy answered him in a fever of fear, gasping and sobbing at every word.

"My boy, you have come out of Cairo?"

"Yes, O Master, yes."

"You went there from Khartoum?"

"Yes, yes, O Master, yes."

"You took a letter to the English lord?"

"Yes, Master, a letter to the English lord."

"From some one in Khartoum?"

"Yes, I will tell my Master everything--from some one in Khartoum."

"What treacherous man sent you with that letter?"

"No man at all, O Master. You see, I am telling my Master everything."

"Was it a woman?"

"Yes, Master, a woman. See, I kiss your feet. I keep nothing back from my Master."

Another groan came from the people at the tent's mouth, and the black boy clutched at Ishmael's white caftan as if to protect himself from their wrath. Ishmael himself had a confused sense of something terrible that had not yet taken shape in his mind. He looked round at Helena who was standing by the angerib at the back, but her head was down and her thoughts were far away.

"What woman, then?" he asked in a sterner voice.

"No, no, I cannot tell you that," said the boy.

"Speak, boy. You shall be safe. I will protect you from all harm. What woman was it?"

"Master, do not ask me. I dare not tell you."

"Listen," said Ishmael, and his voice grew hard and hoarse. "There is a traitor in my camp, and I must find out who it is. What treacherous woman sent you into Cairo with that letter?"

The boy struggled hard. His ugly black face under his shaven poll was distorted by fear. He hesitated, began to speak, then stopped altogether.

At that moment Helena came forward as if she had suddenly awakened from a dream, and Mosie saw her for the first time since he had been dragged into the tent. In another instant all fear had gone from his face and his eyes were blazing with courage.

"Tell me, I command you," said Ishmael.

"No, no, I will _never_ tell you," said the boy.

Again a groan--this time a growl--came from the people at the tent's mouth.

"Torment would make his tongue wag," said one.

"Beat the innocent until the guilty confess--it is a good maxim, O Master," said Zewar in his rasping tones.

Black Zogal, with his wild eyes, stepped out as if to lay hold of the lad, but Ishmael waved him back.

"Wait!" he said.

He was looking at Helena again, and his face had undergone a fearful change.

"My boy," he said, still keeping his eyes on Helena, "if you do not tell me I must give you back to the people."

At that the boy broke into a paroxysm of hysterical sobs.

"No, no, my Master will not do that. But see," he said, tearing wider his torn caftan so as to expose his breast, "my Master himself shall kill me."

At the next moment Helena's hand was on Ishmael's arm.

"Let the boy go," she said. "I can tell the rest."

A gloomy chill traversed Ishmael's heart. He had a sense of spiritual paralysis--as if everything in the world were crumbling and crashing down to impotent wreck and ruin.

His people at the tent's mouth were muttering among themselves. He dismissed them, sending everybody away including the boy and the Arab woman. Most of them went off grudgingly, ungraciously, for the first time reluctant to obey his will.

Then he closed up the mouth of the tent, and was once more alone with Helena.

*CHAPTER IV*

In spite of the dread with which, for more than a month, Helena had looked forward to the hour in which Ishmael should hear of his betrayal, she felt none of the terror from that cause which she had feared and expected.

She could think of nothing but Gordon. Where was he now? What were they doing to him? It seemed to be the only possible explanation of his arrest that his scheme for the salvation of the people had failed. Would he be handed over to the military authorities? Would he be tried by court-martial? And what would be the punishment of his offences as a soldier? Sinking down on the angerib she pressed her hands over her brow and over her eyes that she might think of this and shut out everything else.

Meantime the mind of Ishmael was going through a conflict as strange and no less cruel. Although the plain evidences of his senses had already told him that he had been betrayed by the woman he loved, yet the dread of discovering the traitor in his own tent, in his own wife, filled him with terror, and he tried to escape from it.

Having fastened up the tent, he walked to and fro for some moments without speaking, and then sitting down by Helena's side and taking her hand and smoothing it, he said, in his throbbing, quivering voice--

"Rani, we have eaten bread and salt together. Be faithful with me--what woman sent that letter?"

Helena hardly heard what he was saying. She was still thinking of Gordon. "They will condemn him to death," she told herself.

"Rani," said Ishmael again, "we have lived under the same roof; you have shared with me the closest secrets of my soul. Tell me--what woman sent that letter?"

Helena looked at him and tried to listen, but Gordon's doom was ringing in her ears, and it drowned all the other sounds of life.

"Rani," said Ishmael once more, "though you denied me the rights of a husband, yet you are my wife. Our lives have been united not by man but by God, and in the presence of Him, whose name be exalted--of Him who reads all hearts--I ask you--what woman sent that letter?"

Helena heard him, yet terrible as his question was, and perilous as she knew her answer must be, she felt no fear. "If I tell him," she thought. "Why not? It does not matter now."

"Rani," said Ishmael yet again, "God gives me the right to command you. I _do_ command you. What woman sent that letter?"

"_I_ did," said Helena, and though the words were spoken in a faltering whisper they seemed to Ishmael like a deafening roar.

"Allah! Allah!" he cried, leaping to his feet, for though he had expected that reply he reeled under it as under a blow.

Helena realised what her answer meant to him, and again, from the bottom of her heart, she pitied him, but at the next moment her thoughts swung back to her own trouble.

She remembered that her father had admitted that the British army in Egypt was always on active service, and she asked herself what would happen to Gordon if the military authorities lost their heads in fear of insurrection. Would they try him by Field General Court-Martial? In that case would the Court be called instantly? Would the inquiry last only a few minutes? Would the sentence be carried into immediate effect?

"O God, can it be possible that it is all over already?" she asked herself.

Meantime Ishmael, after moments of suffering which seemed hours of eternity, was again struggling to resist the only conclusion the facts had left to him. It was true that the Rani had confessed to sending the letter which had led to the arrest of his messenger, but all his heart rebelled against the inference that she had intended to betray his cause and his people. Had she not cast in her own lot with them? Had she not come from a distant country and a richer home to live in their poor house in Khartoum? And had she not endured the hardship of the desert journey in their company?

Like a man who has been shipwrecked in a whirlwind of darkness, he was groping blindly through tempestuous waves for some means of rescue. At length a sort of raft of hope came to him, a helpless, impotent thing, but he clung to it, and sitting down by Helena's side again, he said, in the same piteous voice as before--