Part 19

Then drawing a chair up to the table, and fixing his eyeglasses over his spectacles, he turned the pages one by one and read passages here and there. Helena watched him while he did so, and in the changing expression of the hitherto hard, immobile, implacable face she saw the effect that was being produced.

"I cannot say how hard it is to me to be engaged in a secret means to frustrate my father's plans--it is like fighting one's own flesh and blood, and is not fair warfare....

"Neither can I say what a struggle it has been to me as an English soldier to make up my mind to intercept an order of the British army--it is like playing traitor, and I can scarcely bear to think of it....

"But all the same I know it is necessary. I also know _God_ knows it is necessary, and when I think of that my heart beats wildly....

"I am willing to give my life for England, whatever name she may know me by ... and I am willing to die for these poor Egyptians, because...

"This may be the last letter I shall write to you....

"May the great God of Heaven bless and protect you...."

The Consul-General was overwhelmed. The Grand Cadi's duplicity stifled him; Ishmael's innocence of conspiracy humiliated him, but his son's heroism crushed him, and made him feel like a little man.

Yet he had just now denounced his son as a traitor, handed him over to the military authorities, and, in effect, condemned him to death!

As the old man read Gordon's letters his iron face seemed to decompose. Helena could not bear to look at him any longer, and she had to turn her face away. At length she became conscious that he had ceased to read, and that his great, sad, humid eyes were looking at her.

"So you came here to plead with me for the life of my boy?" he said, and, as well as she could for the tears that were choking her, she answered--

"Yes."

He hesitated for a moment as if trying to summon courage to tell her something, and then, in a voice that was quite unlike his own, he said--

"Permit me to take these letters away for a few minutes."

And rising unsteadily, he left the room.

*CHAPTER IX*

When the Consul-General returned to the library he looked like a feeble old man of ninety. It was just as if twenty years of his life had been struck out of him in half-an-hour. The Sirdar stepped up to him in alarm, saying--

"What has happened?"

"Read these," he answered, handing to the Sirdar the letters he carried in his hand.

The Sirdar took the letters aside, and standing by the chimney-piece he looked at them. While he did so, his face, which had hitherto been grave and pale, became bright and ruddy, and he uttered little sharp cries of joy.

"I knew it!" he said. "Although I was at a loss to read the riddle of Gordon's presence at Ghezirah I knew there must be some explanation. If he had acted with a sense of conscience in the one case, he must have done so in the other.... Thank God! Splendid! Bravo! ... Of course you will stop the Commandant?"

The Consul-General, who had returned to his seat at the desk, did not reply, and the Sirdar, thinking to anticipate his objection, said eagerly--

"Why not? The Commandant will act as for himself, and nobody will know that you have been consulted.... That is to say," he added, with another oblique glance in the direction of the Grand Cadi, "nobody outside this room, and if anybody here should ever whisper a word about it, I'll ... I'll ... well, never mind; nobody will, nobody dare."

Then in the fever of his impatience the Sirdar proposed to call up the Commandant of Police on the telephone and tell him to consider his orders cancelled.

"Don't stir," he said. "I'll do it. Your Secretary will show me the box."

When, with a light step and a hopeful face, the Sirdar had gone out of the room on this errand the Cadi began for the first time to show signs of life. He coughed, cleared his throat, and made other noises indicative of a desire to speak, but the Consul-General, still sitting at the desk with the look of a shattered man, seemed to be unconscious of his presence. At length he said, in the hushed voice of one who was habitually afraid of being overheard--

"I regret ... sincerely regret ... that I have been again compelled to approach your Excellency's honourable person ... especially at a time like this, ... but a certain danger ... personal danger ... made me think that perhaps your Excellency would deign----"

Before he could say any more the Sirdar had returned to the library, with a long face and a slow step.

"Too late!" he said. "I called up the Commandant at his office, and they said he had gone to the Citadel. Then I called him up there, thinking I might still be in time. But no, the thing was over. Gordon was under arrest."

After that, there was silence for some moments while the Sirdar looked again at the letters which he was still holding in his hands. At one moment he raised his eyes, and turning to the Consul-Gencral he said--

"You'll not call down the troops from Abbassiah?"

"No."

"And you'll allow this man Ishmael and his visionary followers to come into Cairo if they've a mind to?"

The Consul-General bent his head.

"Good!" said the Sirdar. "At all events that will shut the mouths of the fine birds who must be getting ready to crow."

But a look of alarm came into the Grand Cadi's eyes, such as comes into the eyes of a hawk when an eagle is about to pounce upon it.

"Surely," he said, "his Excellency does not intend to allow this horde of fifty thousand fanatics to pour themselves into the capital?"

Whereupon the Sirdar turned sharply upon the man and answered--

"That is exactly what his Excellency _does_ intend to do."

"But what is to become of _me_?" asked the Cadi. "This is exactly the errand I came upon. Already the people are threatening me, and I came to ask for protection. I am suspected of giving information to his Excellency. Will his Excellency desert me ... leave me to the mercy of this man Ishmael, this corrupter and destroyer of the faith?"

Then the Consul-General, who had sat with head down, the picture of despair, rose to his full height and faced the Grand Cadi.

"Listen," he said, with a flash of his old fire. "I give your Eminence twenty-four hours to leave Egypt. If the _people_ do not dispose of you after that time, as sure as there is a British Minister in Constantinople, _I will_."

Tho look of alarm on the Cadi's cunning face was smitten into an expression of terror. Not a word more did he say. One glance he gave at the letters in the Sirdar's hands, and then rising, with a low bow, and touching his breast and forehead, he turned to leave the room. Meantime the Sirdar had rung the bell for Ibrahim, and then stepping to the door, he had opened it. The ample folds of the Cadi's sleeves swelled as he walked, and he passed out like a human bat.

Being alone with the Sirdar, the Consul-General's mind went back to Helena.

"Poor child!" he said. "I hadn't the heart to tell her what I had done. Go to her, Reg. She's in the drawing-room. Give her back her letters, and tell her what has happened. Then take her to the Princess Nazimah. Poor girl! Poor Gordon!"

The Sirdar made some effort to comfort him, but it was hard to say anything now to the man who in the days of his strength had hated all forms of sentimentality. Yet the shadow of supernatural powers seemed to be over him, for he muttered some simple, almost child-like words about the Almighty permitting him to fall because he had wandered away from Him.

"Janet! My poor Janet!" the old man murmured, and his humbled head hung low.

The Sirdar could bear no more, and he quietly left the library.

As he approached the drawing-room he heard voices within. Fatimah was with Helena. All the mother-heart in the Egyptian woman had warmed to the girl in her trouble, and, forgetful of the difference of class, they were clasped in each other's arms.

The Sirdar could see by the tears that were trickling down Helena's cheeks that already she knew everything, but, all the same, he told her that Gordon had been handed over to the military authorities. She stood the fire of the sad news without flinching, and a few minutes afterwards they were in the Sirdar's carriage on their way to the Princess Nazimah's, the black boy on his donkey trotting proudly behind.

"We must not lose heart, though," said the Sirdar. "Now that I come to think of it, to be court-martialled may be the beat thing that can happen to him. He'll have a good deal to say for himself. And whatever the sentence may be, there's the Army Council, and there's the Secretary of State, and there's the King himself, you know."

"Then you think there's some hope still?" she said faintly, but sweetly.

"I'm certain there is," said the Sirdar; and as the carriage passed under the electric arc-lamps in the streets he could see that Helena's wet eyes were shining.

After a while she asked where Gordon was imprisoned, and was told that he was at the Citadel, but that he was in officer's quarters, and that his Egyptian foster-brother, Hafiz Ahmed, was permitted to be with him.

Then she asked if Ishmael and his people would be permitted to come into Cairo, and was told that they would, and that they might encamp in El Azhar if they cared to, Ishmael being nothing to the Sirdar but an inoffensive dreamer with a disordered brain.

Helena's lovely face looked almost happy. She was thinking of the light that was expected to shine at midnight from the minaret of the mosque of Mohammed Ali, and was telling herself that as soon as she reached the house of the Princess she would call up Hafiz at the Citadel and see what could be done.

Meantime Fatimah, who had gone to the Consul-General's bedroom to see that everything was in order, had felt something crunching under her feet, and picking it up, she found that it was the portrait of Gordon as a boy in his Arab fez. With many sighs she was putting the pieces aside when the old man entered the room. He did not seem to see her, and though she lingered some little while, he did not speak.

Sitting on the sofa, he rested his head on his hands mid looked fixedly at the carpet between his feet. Half-an-hour passed--an hour--two hours--but he did not move. At intervals the telegraphic machine, which stood in an alcove of the room, ticked for a time and then stopped. The debate on the Amendment to the Address was still going on, but that did not matter now. Nothing mattered except one thing---that he, he himself, had sent his own son to his death, thus cutting off his line, ending his family, and destroying the one hope and lodestar of his life.

"All well! It's all over!" he thought, and at length, switching off the lights, he went to bed.

While the great Proconsul slept his restless, troubled sleep the telegraphic machine ticked out in the darkness on the long slip of white paper that rolled on to the floor the future history of Egypt, and, in some sense, of the world.

Far away in London the Foreign Minister was speaking.

"I am one of those who think," he was saying, "that just as religious leaders, Popes as well as Mahdis, may go to wreck under the mental malady which permits them to believe they are the mouthpieces of the Almighty, so statesmen may be destroyed by the seeds of dissolution which power, especially absolute power, carries within itself.

"Holding this opinion, I also hold that to place one person in sole charge of millions of people of a different race, creed, and mode of thought, is to put a load on one man's shoulders which no man, whatever his power and influence, his integrity and the nobility of his principles, ought to be called upon to bear."

But the heavy-lidded house on the Nile was asleep. The Consul-General did not hear.

*CHAPTER X*

When Ishmael left Helena's tent he did not return to his own. In the torment of his soul he sought the solitude of the desert. For two hours he walked on the sand without knowing where he was going. The night was dark, save for an innumerable army of stars, an eastern night, still and fragrant, but the unhappy man was wandering in it like a creature accursed, a prey to the most terrible upheaval of the soul, the most bitter and sorrowful reflections.

His first thoughts were about Helena--that all the sweetness, all the loveliness which had been his joy by day and his dream by night belonged not to him, but to another.

"I am nothing to her," he told himself, and greater grief than he felt at that thought seemed to surpass the bounds of possibility.

But there was worse behind. At the next moment of his anguish he remembered that not only did Helena not love him, but he was repulsive to her. "Don't you see you are hateful and odious to me--that you are a black man, and I am a white woman?"

This was more than heartrending--it was physically excruciating, like poison creeping under the skin. But it had its spiritual torture also. He who had built his life on the belief that the sons and daughters of men were all children of one Father, had found out in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, within his own camp, in his own tent, that Nature gave the lie to his faith, and that he--he himself--was only as a black man to the white woman whom he called his wife.

"I thought that where love was there could be neither race nor colour, but I was wrong, quite wrong," he told himself again, and it seemed as if everything that had built up his soul was crumbling away.

But even worse than all this was the thought that Helena had betrayed him--she who had seemed to sacrifice so much. Pitiful delusion! Cruel snare!

It was maddening to think of the merely human side of his betrayal--that between the guilty wife and her lover he was only the husband who had to be got rid of--but the spiritual aspect was still more terrible. He who had allowed himself to believe that he was specially guided by God, that the Merciful had made him His messenger, had been deceived and duped, and was no more than a poor, weak, helpless man, who had been led away by his love for a woman.

The shame of his betrayal was stifling, the sense of his downfall was crushing, but still more painful was the consciousness of the penalty which his people would have to pay for the pride and blind love which had misled him. They had followed him across the desert, suffering all the pains of the long and toilsome journey, buoyed up by the hopes with which he had inspired them; they had trusted and loved and looked up to him, hardly distinguishing between his word and the word of God, and now--their leader was deceived, their hopes were dead, the mirage of their dreams had disappeared.

Thinking of this in the agony of his despair, he asked himself why God had permitted it to come to pass that not himself only, but the whole body of his people should suffer. "Why, O God, why?" he cried, lifting up his arms to the sky.

For some moments a cloud passed between him and the faith which had so long sustained him. He began to deplore his lofty mission, and to remember with regret his earlier days in Khartoum with the simple girl who loved him and lay on the angerib in his arms. He had been humble then--content to be a man; and recalling one by one the touching memories of his life with Adila--in their prison, brightened by rays of love, in their poor desert home, illuminated more than a palace by the expectation of the child that was to come--his heart failed him, and he wanted to curse the destiny which had led him to a greatness wherein all was vain.

The wild insurrection in his soul had left him no time to think which course he was taking, but wandering across the Sakkara desert he had by this time come to the foot of the Sphinx.

Calm, immovable, tremendous, the great scarred face was gazing in passionless meditation into the luminous starlight, asking, as it had asked through the long yesterday of the past, as it will continue to ask through the long to-morrow of the future, the everlasting question, the question of humanity, the question of all suffering souls--

"Why?"

Why should man aim higher than he can reach? Why should he give up the joys of humanity for divine dreams that can never be realised? Why should he be a victim to the devilish powers, within and without, which are always waiting to betray and destroy him? Why should God forsake him just when he is striving to serve Him best?

"Allah! Allah! Why? Why?" he cried.

But his higher nature speedily regained its supremacy. It came to him as a flash of light in his darkness that the true explanation of his downfall was that God was punishing him for his presumption in allowing the idolatry of his people to carry him away from his first humility--to forget his proper place as a man, and to think of himself as if he were a god.

This led him to thoughts of atonement, and in a moment the image of death came to him--his own death--as a sacrifice. He began to see what he had now to do. He had to take all that had happened upon himself. He had to call his people together and to say, "I lied to you! I was a false prophet! I deceived myself, and in deceiving myself I deceived you also! The wonderful world I promised you--the Redeemer I foretold--all, all is vain!"

And then--what then? What of himself--the betrayed, the betrayer? After he had parted from the people with their broken hearts, he would deliver himself up to the authorities. He had done no wrong to the Government, but he had sinned against his followers, and he had sinned against God, and God would accept the one punishment for the other.

Yes, he would go into Cairo and say, "I am here--you want me--take me!"

His regenerated soul saw in his death not only his own salvation, but, the salvation of his people also. It was not clear to him how this was to come to pass, but death had always been a gain to great causes, and God was over all!

Under this sublime resolution his heart became almost buoyant. He turned to go back to the camp, and as he walked he thought of Helena again. The tender love which had filled his whole being for months could not be banished in an hour, and he began to tell himself that perhaps after all she had not been to blame. Love could not be ruled by a rudder like a boat. The white woman could not help but love the white man. It was a woman's way to risk everything, to sacrifice everybody, to commit sin and even crime for the man she loved--how many good women had done so!

That was the temptation to which the Rani had succumbed, and he--yes, he also--must submit to the pains of it. They were hard, they were cruel, they cut to the core, but with the idea of death before him they could now be borne.

He remembered his unbridled wrath with the Rani, his ferocious violence, and he felt ashamed. It was almost impossible to believe that he had really laid hands upon her and tried to strangle her.

He remembered how he had left her, face down on the angerib, in her misery and remorse. The picture in his mind's eye of the weeping woman in her tent made his heart bleed with pity.

He must go back to her. His people might suspect that she was the author of their trouble, and in their fury they might threaten her. He must conceal her fault. He must take her sin upon himself.

"I must cover her with my cloak," he thought.

Thus thirsting with a desire to drink the cup of his degradation to the dregs, Ishmael got back to camp. It was full of touching sights. Instead of the flare of the lights and the tumult of the excited crowds which he had left behind him, there were now only the ashes of dying fires and the melancholy moanings of the people who were sitting about them.

He made his way first to Helena's tent, and, standing by the mouth of it, he called to her.

"Rani!"

A woman who had been lying on the angerib rose to answer him. It was Zenoba.

"Alas! Your Rani has gone, O Master," she said, with mock sympathy but ill-concealed tones of triumph.

"Gone?"

"She was afraid the people might kill her, so she fled away."

"Fled away?"

"I did my best to keep her for your sake, but she loves herself more than you, and that's the truth, O Master."

Ishmael groaned and staggered, but the woman showed no pity.

"Better have contented yourself with a woman of your own people, who would have been true and faithful," she said in a bitter whisper.

Covered with shame, Ishmael turned away. He looked for Zogal.

The black Dervish was at that moment struggling to sustain the people's faith in the Master and his mission by means of a pagan superstition.

"Give me a mutton bone," he had said, and having received one, he had looked at it long and steadfastly in order to read the future.

As Ishmael came up to the smouldering fire about which Zogal and his company were squatting, the wild-eyed Dervish was saying--

"It will be well! Allah will preserve His people, and the Master will be saved! Did I not tell thee the bone never lies?"

"Zogal," said Ishmael, "sound the horn, and let the people be brought together."

The sky was dark. The stars had gone out. It was not yet midnight.

*CHAPTER XI*

At the next moment the melancholy notes of the great horn rang out over the dark camp, and within a few minutes an immense multitude had gathered.

It was a strange spectacle under the blank darkness of the sky. Men carrying lanterns, which cast coarse lights upward into their swarthy faces, were standing in a surging and murmuring mass, while women, like shadows in the gloom, were huddling together on the outskirts of the crowd.

They were Ishmael's faithful people, all of them, broken-hearted believers in his spiritual mission, for at the shadow of disaster those who had followed him for personal gains alone had gone.

Ishmael caused the people to be drawn up in a great square, and then, mounting a camel, he rode into the midst of them. He was seen to be in a state of great excitement.

"Brothers," he said, "we have passed through many hard days together. You have shared with me your joys and your sorrows. I have shared with you my hopes and my dreams. We are one."

Touched to the heart by his voice as much as his words, the people cried--

"May God preserve thee!"

"Nay," he cried, "may God punish me, for I have permitted myself to be deceived."

The people thought he was going to speak of the woman who was understood to have betrayed him, but he did not do so.

"Look!" he cried, pointing towards the pyramid. "We stand amid the ruins of a pagan world. Where are the Kings and Counsellors who slept in these desolate places? Gone! All gone! Have not strangers from a far country taken away their bodies to wonder at? Where is the king who built this tomb? He thought himself the equal of God, yet what was he? A man, shaped out of a little clay! And I?" he said, "I, too, have been drunk with power. I have been living in the greatness of my own strength. I have permitted myself to believe that I was the messenger of God, and therefore God--God has brought me down. He has laid me in the dust. Blessed be the name of God!"

Only the broken ejaculations of the people answered him, and he went on without pausing--

"In bringing me down He has brought down my people also. Alas for you, my brothers! You cannot go into Cairo. The armed forces of the Government are waiting there to destroy you. Therefore turn back and go home. Forgive your leader who has led you astray. And God preserve and comfort you!"

"And you, O Master?" cried a voice that rose above the confused voices of the people.

Ishmael paused for a moment, and then said--

"In times of great war and pestilence God has accepted an atonement, and perhaps He will do so now. I will go into Cairo and deliver myself to the Government. I will say, 'The man you hold was arrested instead of me. I am your true prisoner. Take me and let him--and let my poor followers--go free.'"