.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 52343
   :PG.Title: The White Prophet, Volume II (of 2)
   :PG.Released: 2016-06-15
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Hall Caine
   :MARCREL.ill: \R. Caton Woodville
   :DC.Title: The White Prophet, Volume II (of 2)
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1909
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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THE WHITE PROPHET, VOLUME II
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   .. _`IT WAS HE!  IT WAS GORDON`:

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      :alt: IT WAS HE; IT WAS GORDON!

      IT WAS HE; IT WAS GORDON!

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      THE WHITE PROPHET

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      BY

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      HALL CAINE

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      ILLUSTRATED BY R. CATON WOODVILLE

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      IN TWO VOLUMES
      VOL II.

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      LONDON
      WILLIAM HEINEMANN
      1909

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      *Copyright London 1909 by William Heinemann and
      Washington U.S.A. by D. Appleton & Company*

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   ILLUSTRATIONS

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`It was he!  It was Gordon`_ . . . Frontispiece

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`Helena was in the gallery`_

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`"Yes; conspiracy against you and against England"`_

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`The Consul-General . . . was hurling his last
reproaches upon his enemies`_

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.. _`THE WHITE PROPHET`:

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   THE WHITE PROPHET

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   BOOK THREE—*Continued*

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   THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

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   CHAPTER XI

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When Helena awoke next morning she was immediately
conscious of a great commotion both within and
without the house.  After a moment Zenoba came into the
bedroom and began to tell her what had happened.

"Have you not heard, O Rani?" said the Arab
woman, in her oily voice.  "No?  You sleep so late,
do you?  When everybody is up and doing, too!  Well,
the Master has news that the great Bedouin is at
Omdurman and he is sending the people down to the
river to bring him up.  The stranger is to be received
in the mosque, I may tell you.  Yes, indeed, in the
mosque, although he is English and a Christian."

Then Ayesha came skipping into the room in wild
excitement.

"Rani!  Rani!" she cried.  "Get up and come
with us.  We are going now—this minute—everybody."

Helena excused herself; she felt unwell and would
stay in bed that day; so the child and the nurse went
off without her.

Yet left alone she could not rest.  The feverish
uncertainty of the night before returned with redoubled
force, and after a while she felt compelled to rise.

Going into the guest-room she found the house empty
and the camp in front of it deserted.  She was standing
by the door, hardly knowing what to do, when the
strange sound which she had heard on the night of the
betrothal came from a distance.

"*Lu-lu-lu-u-u!*"

It was the zaghareet, the women's cry of joy, and it
was mingled with the louder shouts of men.  The
stranger was coming! the people were bringing him on.
Who would he be?  Helena's anxiety was almost more
than her brain and nerves could bear.  She strained
her eyes in the direction of the jetty, past the Abbas
Barracks and the Mongers Fort.

The moments passed like hours, but at length the
crowd appeared.  At first sight it looked like a forest
of small trees approaching.  The forest seemed to sway
and to send out monotonous sounds as if moved by a
moaning wind.  But looking again, Helena saw what
was happening—the people were carrying green palm
branches and strewing them on the yellow sand in
front of the great stranger.

He was riding on a white camel, Ishmael's camel,
and Ishmael was riding beside him..  Long before he
came near to her, Helena saw him, straining her sight
to do so.  He was wearing the ample robes of a Bedouin,
and his face was almost hidden by the sweeping shawl
which covered his head and neck.

But it was *he*!  It was Gordon!  Helena could not
mistake him.  One glance was enough.  Without looking
a second time she ran back to her bedroom, and
covered her eyes and ears.

For a time the voices of the people followed her
through the deadening walls.

"Lu-lu-u-u!" cried the women.

"La ilaha illa-llah!  La ilaha illa-llah!" shouted
the men.

But after a while the muffled sounds died away, and
Helena knew that the great company had passed on to
the mosque.  It was like a dream, a mirage of the mind.
It had come and it was gone, and in the dazed condition
of her senses she could almost persuade herself that she
had imagined everything.

Her impatience would not permit her to remain in
the house.  She, too, must go to the mosque, although
she had never been there before.  So putting on her
Indian veil she set out hurriedly.  When she came to
herself again she was in the gallery, people were making
way for her, and she was dropping into a place.  Then
she realised that she was sitting between Zenoba and
little Ayesha.

The mosque was a large, four-square edifice, full of
columns and arches, and with a kind of inner court
that was open to the sky and had minarets at every
corner.  The gallery looked down on this court, and
Helena saw below her, half in shadow, half in sunshine,
the heads of a great concourse of men in turbans,
tarbooshes, and brown felt skull-caps, all kneeling in
rows on bright red carpets.  In the front row, with
his face to the Kibleh (the niche towards Mecca),
Ishmael knelt in his white caftan, and by his side, with
all eyes upon him, as if every interest centred on that
spot, knelt the stranger in Bedouin dress.

It was Friday, and prayers were proceeding, now
surging like the sea, now silent like the desert, sometimes
started, as it seemed, by the voice of the unseen muezzin
on the minarets above, then echoed by the men on the
carpets below.  But Helena hardly heard them.  Of
one thing only was she conscious—that by the tragic
play of destiny *he* was there while *she* was here!

After a while she became aware that Ishmael had
risen and was beginning to speak, and she tried to
regain composure enough to listen to what he said.

"My brothers," he said, "it is according to the
precepts of the Prophet (peace to his name!) to
receive the Christian in our temples if he comes with the
goodwill of good Moslems and with a heart that is true
to them.  You know, O my brothers, whether I am a
Moslem or not, and I pray to the Most Merciful to bless
all such Christians as the one who is here to-day."

More of the same kind Ishmael said, but Helena
found it hard, in the tumult of her brain, to follow him.
She saw that both the women about her and the men
below were seized with that religious fervour which
comes to the human soul when it feels that something
grand is being done.  It was as though the memory of
a thousand years of hatred between Moslem and Christian,
with all its legacy of cruelty and barbarity, had
been wiped out of their hearts by the stranger on whom
their eyes were fixed—as though by some great act of
self-sacrifice and brotherhood he had united East and
West—and this fact of his presence at their prayers
was the sign and symbol of an eternal truce.

The sublime spectacle seemed to capture all their
souls, and when Ishmael turned towards the stranger
at last and laid his hand on his head and said—

"May God and His Prophet bless you for what you
have done for us and ours," the emotions of the people
were raised to the highest pitch, and they rose to their
feet as one man, and holding up their hands they cried,
the whole congregation together, in a voice that was
like the breaking of a great wave—

"You are now of us, and we are of you, and we are
brothers."

By this time the women in the gallery were weeping
audibly, and Helena, from quite other causes, was
scarcely able to control her feelings.  "Why did I come
here?" she asked herself, and then, seeing that the
Arab woman was watching her through the slits of her
jealous eyes, she got up and pushed her way out of the
mosque.

Back in her room, lying face down upon the bed, she
sought in vain to collect her faculties sufficiently to
follow and comprehend the course of events.  Yes, it
was Gordon.  He had come to join Ishmael.  Why had
she never thought of that as a probable sequel to what
had occurred in Cairo?  Had he not been turned out
by his own?  In effect cashiered from the army?
Forbidden his father's house?  And had she not
herself driven him away from her?  What sequel was more
natural—more plainly inevitable?

Then she grew hot and cold at a new and still more
terrifying thought—Gordon would come *there*!  How
could she meet him?  How look into his face?  A
momentary impulse to deny her own identity was put
aside immediately.  Impossible!  Useless!  Then how
could she account to Gordon for her presence in that
house?  Ishmael's wife!  According to Mohammedan
law and custom not only betrothed but married to him!

When she put her position to herself so, the thread
of her thoughts seemed to snap in her brain.  She
could not disentangle the knot of them.  A sense of
infidelity to Gordon, to the very spirit of love itself,
brought her for a moment the self-reproach and the
despair of a woman who has sinned.

In the midst of her pain she heard the light voices
of people returning to the house, and at the next moment
Ayesha and Zenoba came into her room.  The child
was skipping about, full of high spirits, and the Arab
woman was bitterly merry.

"Rani will be happy to hear that the Master is
bringing the stranger home," said Zenoba.

Helena turned and gazed at the woman with a stupefied
expression.  What she had foreseen as a terrifying
possibility was about to come to pass!  She opened
her mouth as if to speak but said nothing.

Meantime the Arab woman, in a significant tone that
was meant to cut to the core, went on to say that this
was the highest honour the Moslem could show the
unbeliever, as well as the greatest trust he could repose
in him.

"Have you never heard of that in your country, O
Rani?  No?  It is true, though!  Quite true!"

People supposed that every Moslem guarded his house
so jealously that no strange man might look upon his
wife, but among the Arabs of the desert, when a
traveller, tired and weary, sought food and rest, the
Sheikh would sometimes send him into his harem and
leave him there for three days with full permission to
do as he thought well.

"But he must never wrong that harem, O lady!
If he does the Arab husband will kill him!  Yes, and
the faithless wife as well!"

So violent was the conflict going on within her that
Helena hardly heard the woman's words, though the
jealous spirit behind them was piercing her heart like
needles.  She became conscious of the great crowd
returning, and it was making the same ululation as
before, mingled with the same shouts.  At the next
moment there came a knock at the bedroom door and
Abdullah's voice, crying—

"Lady!  Lady!"

Helena reeled a little in rising to reply, and it was
with difficulty that she reached the door.

"Master has brought Sheikh Omar Benani back and
is calling for the lady.  What shall I say?"

Helena fumbled the hem of her handkerchief in her
fingers, as she was wont to do in moments of great
agitation.  She was asking herself what would happen
if she obeyed Ishmael's summons.  Would Gordon see
through her motive in being there?  If so, would he
betray her to Ishmael?

Already she could hear a confused murmur in the
guest-room, and out of that murmur her memory
seemed to grasp back, as from a vanishing dream, the
sound of a voice that had been lost to her.

She felt as if she were suffocating.  Her breathing
was coming rapidly from the depth of her throat.  Yet
the Arab woman was watching her, and while a whirlwind
was going on within she had to preserve a complete
tranquillity without.

"Say I am coming," she said.

The supreme moment had arrived.  With a great
effort she gathered up all her strength, drew her Indian
shawl over her head in such a way that it partly
concealed her face, and then, pallid, trembling, and with
downcast eyes she walked out of the room.





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   CHAPTER XII

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Gordon had that day experienced emotions only less
poignant than those of Helena.  In the early morning,
after parting with Osman, the devoted comrade of his
desert journey, he had encountered the British
Sub-Governor of Omdurman, a young Captain of Cavalry
who had once served under himself but now spoke to
him, in his assumed character as a Bedouin, with a
certain air of command.

This brought him some twinges of wounded pride,
which were complicated by qualms of conscience, as he
rode through the streets, past the silversmiths' shops,
where grave-looking Arabs sold bracelets and necklets;
past the weaving quarter, where men and boys were
industriously driving the shuttle through the strings of
their flimsy looms; past the potter's bazaar and the
grain market, all so sweet and so free from their former
smell of sun-dried filth and warm humanity packed
close together.

"Am I coming here to oppose the power that in so
few years has turned chaos into order?" he asked
himself, but more personal emotions came later.

They came in full flood when the ferry steamer, by
which he crossed the river, approached the bank on the
other side, and he saw standing there, near to the spot
on which the dervishes landed on the black night of
the fall of Khartoum, a vast crowd of their sons and
their sons' sons who were waiting to receive him.

Again came qualms of conscience when out of this
crowd stepped Ishmael Ameer, who kissed him on both
cheeks and led him forward to his own camel amid the
people's shouts of welcome.  Was he, as a British
soldier, throwing in his lot with the enemies of his
country?  As an Englishman and a Christian was he
siding with the adversaries of religion and civilisation?

The journey through the town to the mosque, with
the lu-lu-ing and the throwing of palm branches before
his camel's feet, was less of a triumphal progress than
an abject penance.  He could hardly hold up his head.
Sight of the bronze and black faces about him, shouting
for him.—for him of another race and creed—making
that act his glory which had led to his crime—this was
almost more than he could bear.

But when he reached the mosque; when he found
himself, unbeliever though he was, kneeling in front of
the Kibleh; when Ishmael laid his hand on his head and
called on God to bless him, and the people cried with
one voice, "You are of us and we are brothers," the
sense of human sympathy swept down every other
emotion, and he felt as if at any moment he might
burst into tears.

And then, when prayers were over and Ishmael
brought up his uncle, and the patriarchal old man, with
a beard like a flowing fleece, said he was to lodge at his
house; and finally when Ishmael led him home and
took him to his own chamber and called to Abdullah to
set up another angerib, saying they were to sleep in
the same room, Gordon's twinges of pride and qualms
of conscience were swallowed up in one great wave of
human brotherhood.

But both came back, with a sudden bound, when
Ishmael began to talk of his wife, and sent the
servant to fetch her.  They were sitting in the
guest-room by this time, waiting for the lady to come to
them, and Gordon felt himself moved by the inexplicable
impulse of anxiety he had felt before.  Who was this
Mohammedan woman who had prompted Ishmael to a
scheme that must so surely lead to disaster?  Did she
know what she was doing?  Was she betraying him?

Then a door on the women's side of the house opened
slowly and he saw a woman enter the room.  He did
not look into her face.  His distrust of her, whereof he
was now half ashamed, made him keep his head down
while he bowed low during the little formal ceremony
of Ishmael's presentation.  But instantly a certain
indefinite memory of height and step and general bearing
made his blood flow fast, and he felt the perspiration
breaking out on his forehead.

A moment afterwards he raised his eyes, and then it
seemed as if his hair stood upright.  He was like a man
who has been made colour-blind by some bright light.
He could not at first believe the evidence of his senses
that she who appeared to be before him was actually
there.

He did not speak or utter a sound, but his embarrassment
was not observed by Ishmael, who was clapping his
hands to call for food.  During the next few minutes
there was a little confusion in the room—Black Zogal
and Abdullah were laying a big brass tray on tressels
and covering it with dishes.  Then came the ablutions
and the sitting down to eat—Gordon at the head of
the table, with Ishmael on his right and old Mahmud
on his left, and Helena next to Ishmael.

The meal began with the beautiful Eastern custom
of the host handing the first mouthful of food to his
guest as a pledge of peace and brotherhood, faith and
trust.  This kept Gordon occupied for the moment, but
Helena had time for observation.  In the midst of her
agitation she could not help seeing that Gordon had
grown thinner, that his eyes were bloodshot and his
nostrils pinched as if by physical or moral suffering.
After a while she saw that he was looking across at her
with increasing eagerness, and under his glances she
became nervous and almost hysterical.

Gordon, on his part, had now not the shadow of a
doubt of Helena's identity, but still he did not speak.
He, too, noticed a change—Helena's profile had grown
more severe, and there were dark rims under her large
eyes.  He could not help seeing these signs of the pain
she had gone through, though his mind was going like
a windmill under constantly changing winds.  Why
was she there?  Could it be that the great sorrow
which fell upon her at the death of her father had
made her fly to the consolation of religion?

He dismissed that thought the instant it came to
him, for behind it, close behind it, came the recollection
of Helena's hatred of Ishmael Ameer and of the jealousy
which had been the first cause of the separation
between themselves.  "Smash the Mahdi," she had said,
not altogether in play.  Then why was she there?
Great God! could it be possible ... that after the
death of the General ... she had——

Gordon felt at that moment as if the world were
reeling round him.

Helena, glancing furtively across the table, was sure
she could read Gordon's thoughts.  With the certainty
that he knew what had brought her to Khartoum she
felt at first a crushing sense of shame.  What a fatality!
If anybody had told her that she would be overwhelmed
with confusion by the very person she had been trying
to avenge, she would have thought him mad, yet that was
precisely what Providence had permitted to come to pass.

The sense of her blindness and helplessness in the
hands of destiny was so painful as to reach the point
of tears.  When Gordon spoke in reply to Ishmael's or
old Mahmud's questions the very sound of his voice
brought memories of their happy days together, and,
looking back on the past of their lives and thinking
where they were now, she wanted to run away and cry.

All this time Ishmael saw nothing, for he was talking
rapturously of the great hope, the great expectation,
the near approach of the time when the people's
sufferings would end.  A sort of radiance was about him,
and his face shone with the joy and the majesty of the
dreamer in the full flood of his dream.

When the meal was over the old man, who had been
too busy with his food to see anything else, went off
to his siesta, and then, the dishes being removed and
the servants gone, Ishmael talked in lower tones of the
details of his scheme—how he was to go into Cairo, in
advance, in the habit of a Bedouin such as Gordon
wore, in order to win the confidence of the Egyptian
Army, so that they should throw down the arms which
no man ought to bear, and thus permit the people of
the pilgrimage, coming behind, to take possession of the
city, the citadel, the arsenal, and the engines of war,
in the name of God and His Expected One.

All this he poured out in the rapturous language of
one who saw no impediments, no dangers, no perils
from chance or treachery, and then, turning to where
Helena sat with her face aflame and her eyes cast down,
he gave her the credit of everything that had been
thought of, everything that was to be done.

"Yes, it was the Rani who suggested it," he said,
"and when the triumph of peace is won God will write
it on her forehead."

The afternoon had passed by this time, and the sun,
which had gone far round to the West, was glistening
like hammered gold along the river, in the line of the
forts of Omdurman.  It was near to the hour for
evening prayers, and Helena was now trembling under a
new thought—the thought that Ishmael would soon be
called out to speak to the people who gathered in the
evening in front of the house, and then she and Gordon
would be left alone.

When she thought of that she felt a desire which
she had never felt before and never expected to feel—a
desire that Ishmael might remain to protect her from
the shock of the first word that would be spoken when
he was gone.

Gordon on his part, too, was feeling a thrill of the
heart from his fear of the truth that must fall on him
the moment he and Helena were left together.

But Black Zogal came to the open door of the guest-room,
and Ishmael, who was still on the heights of his
fanatical rapture, rose to go.

"Talk to him, Rani!  Tell him everything!  About
the kufiah you intend to make, and all the good plans
you proposed to prevent bloodshed."

The two unhappy souls, still sitting at the empty
table, heard his sandalled footsteps pass out behind
them.

Then they raised their eyes and for the first time
looked into each other's faces.





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   CHAPTER XIII

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When they began to speak it was in scarcely audible
whispers.

"Helena!"

"Gordon!"

"Why are you here, Helena?  What have you come
for?  You disliked and distrusted Ishmael Ameer when
you heard about him first.  You used to say you hated
him.  What does it all mean?"

Helena did not answer immediately.

"Tell me, Helena.  Don't let me go on thinking
these cruel thoughts.  Why are you here with Ishmael
in Khartoum?"

Still Helena did not answer.  She was now sitting
with her eyes down, and her hands tightly folded in her
lap.  There was a moment of silence while he waited
for her to speak, and in that silence there came the
muffled sound of Ishmael's voice outside, reciting the
Fatihah—

"Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures——"

When the whole body of the people had repeated the
solemn words there was silence in the guest-room again,
and, in the same hushed whisper as before, but more
eagerly, more impetuously, Gordon said—

"He says you put this scheme into his mind, Helena.
If so, you must know quite well what it will lead to.
It will lead to ruin—inevitable ruin; bloodshed—perhaps
great bloodshed."

Helena found her voice at last.  A spirit of defiance
took possession of her for a moment, and she said
firmly—

"No, it will never come to that.  It will all end before
it goes so far."

"You mean that he will be ... will be *taken*?"

"Yes, he will be taken the moment he sets foot in
Cairo.  Therefore the rest of the plan will never be
carried out, and consequently there will be no bloodshed."

"Do you *know* that, Helena?"

Her lips were compressed; she made a silent motion
of her head.

"*How* do you know it?"

"I have written to your father."

"You have ... written ... to my father?"

"Yes," she said, still more firmly.  "He will know
everything before Ishmael arrives, and will act as he
thinks best."

"Helena!  Hel——"

But he was struck breathless both by what she said
and by the relentless strength with which she said it.
There was silence again for some moments, and once
more the voice of Ishmael came from without—

"There are three holy books, O my brothers—the
took of Moses and the Hebrew prophets, the book of
the Gospel of the Lord Jesus, and the plain book of the
Koran.  In the first of these it is written: 'I know
that my Redeemer liveth and that He shall stand at
the latter day upon the earth.'"

Gordon reached over to where Helena sat at the side
of the table, with her eyes fixed steadfastly before her,
and touching her arm he said in a whisper so low that
he seemed to be afraid the very air would hear—

"Then ... then .... you are sending him *to his death*!"

She shuddered for an instant as if cut to the quick;
then she braced herself up.

"Isn't that so, Helena?  Isn't it?"

With her lips still firmly compressed she made the
same silent motion of her head.

"Is that what you came here to do?"

"Yes."

"To possess yourself of his secrets and then——?"

"There was no other way," she answered, biting her
under-lip.

"Helena!  Can it be possible that you have deliberately——"

He stopped, as if afraid to utter the word that was
trembling on his tongue, and then said in a softer
voice—

"But why, Helena?  Why?"

The spirit of defiance took possession of her again, and
she said—

"Wasn't it enough that he came between you and
me, and that our love——"

"Love!  Helena!  Helena!  Can you talk of our
love *here* ... *now*?"

She dropped her head before his flashing eyes, and
again he reached over to her and said in the same
breathless whisper—

"Is *this* love ... for me ... to become the wife
of another man? ... Helena, what are you saying?"

She did not speak; only her hard breathing told
how much she suffered.

"Then think of the other man!  His wife!  When a
woman becomes a man's wife they are one.  And to
marry a man in order to ... to ... Oh, it is
impossible!  I cannot believe it of you, Helena."

Suddenly, without warning, she burst into tears, for
something in the tone of his voice rather than the
strength of his words had made her feel the shame of
the position she occupied in his eyes.

After a moment she recovered herself, and, in wild
anger at her own weakness, she flamed out at him,
saying that if she was Ishmael's wife it was in name
only, that if she had married Ishmael it was only as a
matter of form, at best a betrothal, in order to meet his
own wish and to make it possible for her to go on with
her purpose.

"As for love ... *our* love ... it is not *I* who
have been false to it.  No, never for one single moment
... although ... in spite of everything ... for even
when you were gone ... when you had abandoned
me ... in the hour of my trouble, too ... and I had
lost all hope of you ... I——"

"Then why, Helena?  You hated Ishmael and wished
to put him down while you thought he was coming
between you and me.  But why ... when all seemed to
be over between us——"

Her lips were twitching and her eyes were ablaze.

"You ask me why I wished to punish him?" she
said.  "Very well, I will tell you.  Because—" she
paused, hesitated, breathed hard, and then said,
"because *he killed my father*."

Gordon gasped, his face became distorted, his lips
grew pale, he tried to speak but could only stammer
out broken exclamations.

"Great God!  Hele——"

"Oh, you may not believe it, but I *know*," said Helena.

And then, with a rush of emotion, in a torrent of hot
words, she told him how Ishmael Ameer had been the
last man seen in her father's company; how she had
seen them together and they were quarrelling; how her
father had been found dead a few minutes after Ishmael
had left him; how *she* had found him; how other
evidence gave proof, abundant proof, that violence, as
a contributory means at least, had been the cause of
her father's death; and how the authorities knew this
perfectly, but were afraid, in the absence of conclusive
evidence, to risk a charge against one whom the people
in their blindness worshipped.

"So I was left alone—quite alone—for you were gone
too—and therefore I vowed that if there was no one
else *I* would punish him."

"And that is what you——"

"Yes."

"O God!  O God!"

Gordon hid his face in his hands, being made speechless
by the awful strength of the blind force which
had governed her life and led her into the tragic
tangle of her error.  But she misunderstood his
feeling, and with flashing, almost blazing eyes, though
sobs choked her voice for a moment, she turned on
him and said—

"Why not?  Think of what my father had been to
me and say if I was not justified.  Nobody ever
loved me as he did—nobody.  He was old, too, and
weak, for he was ill, though nobody knew it.  And then
this ... this barbarian ... this hypocritical ... Oh,
when I think of it I have such a feeling of physical
repulsion for the man that I can scarcely sit by
his side."

Saying this she rose to her feet, and standing before
Gordon, as he sat with his face covered by his hands,
she said, with intense bitterness, as if exulting in the
righteousness of her vengeance—

"Let him go to Damietta or to death itself if need
be.  Doesn't he deserve it?  Doesn't he?  Uncover
your face and tell me.  Tell me if ... if ... tell me
if——"

She was approaching Gordon as if to draw away his
hands when she began to gasp and stammer as though
she had experienced a sudden electric shock.  Her eyes
had fallen on the third finger of his left hand, and they
fixed themselves upon it with the fascination of fear.
She saw that it was shorter than the rest, and that,
since she had seen it before, it had been injured and
amputated.

Her breath, which had been labouring heavily, seemed
to stop altogether, and there was silence once more, in
which the voice of Ishmael came again—

"When the Deliverer comes will he find peace on the
earth?  Will he find war?  Will he find corruption and
the worship of false gods?  Will he find hatred and
vengeance?  Beware of vengeance, O my brothers!
It corrupts the heart; it pulls down the pillars of the
soul!  Vengeance belongs to God, and when men take
it out of His hands He writes black marks upon their
faces."

The two unhappy people sitting together in the guest-room
seemed to hear their very hearts beat.  At length
Gordon, making a great call on his resolution, began to
speak.

"Helena!"

"Well?"

"It is all a mistake—a fearful, frightful mistake."

She listened without drawing breath—a vague
foreshadowing of the truth coming over her.

"Ishmael Ameer did not kill your father."

Her lips trembled convulsively; she grew paler and
paler every moment.

"I know he did not, Helena, because—" (he covered
his face again) "because I know who did."

"Then who ... who was it?"

"He did not intend to do it, Helena."

"Who was it?"

"It was all in the heat of blood."

"Who was——"

He hesitated, then stammered out, "Don't you see,
Helena?—it was I."

She had known in advance what he was going to say,
but not until he had said it did the whole truth fall
on her.  Then in a moment the world itself seemed
to reel.  A moral earthquake, upheaving everything,
had brought all her aims to ashes.  The mighty force
which had guided and sustained her soul (the sense
of doing a necessary and a righteous thing) had
collapsed without an instant's warning.  Another force,
the powerful, almost brutal force of fate, had broken it
to pieces.

"My God!  My God!  What has become of me?"
she thought, and without speaking she gazed blankly
at Gordon as he sat with his eyes hidden by his injured
hand.

Then in broken words, with gasps of breath, he told
her what had happened, beginning with the torture of
his separation from her at the door of the General's
house.

"You said I had not really loved you—that you had
been mistaken and were punished and ... and that
was the end."

Going away with the memory of these words in his
mind, his wretched soul had been on the edge of a vortex
of madness in which all its anger, all its hatred, had
been directed against the General.  In the blind
leading of his passion, torn to the heart's core, he had
then returned to the Citadel to accuse the General of
injustice and tyranny.

"'Helena was mine,' I said, 'and you have taken
her from, me, and broken her heart as well as my own.
Is that the act of a father?'"

Other words he had also said, in the delirium of his
rage, mad and insulting words such as no father could
bear; then the General had snatched up the broken
sword from the floor and fallen on him, hacking at his
hand—see!

"I didn't want to do it, God knows I did not, for
he was an old man and I was no coward, but the hot
blood was in my head, and I laid hold of him by the
throat to hold him off."

He uncovered his face—it was full of humility and
pain.

"God forgive me, I didn't know my strength.  I
flung him away; he fell.  I had killed him—my
General, my friend!"

Tears filled his eyes.  In her eyes, also, tears were
gathering.

"Then you came to the door and knocked.  'Father!'
you said.  'Are you alone?  May I come in?'  Those
were your words, and how often I have heard them
since!  In the middle of the night, in my dreams, O
God, how many times!"

He dropped his head and stretched a helpless arm
along the table.

"I wanted to open the door and say, 'Helena, forgive
me, I didn't mean to do it, and that is the truth,
as God is my witness.'  But I was afraid—I fled away."

She was now sitting with her hands clasped in her lap
and her eyelids tightly closed.

"Next day I wanted to go back to you, but I dared
not do so.  I wanted to comfort you—I could not.  I
wanted to give myself up to justice—it was impossible,
there was nothing for me to do except to fly away."

The tears were rolling down his thin face to his
pinched nostrils.

"But I could not fly from myself or from ... from
my love for you.  They told me you had gone to
England.  'Where is she to-night?' I thought.  If I
had never really loved you before I loved you now.
And you were gone!  I had lost you for ever."

Emotion choked his voice; tears were forcing themselves
through her closed eyelids.  There was another
moment of silence and then, nervously, hesitatingly, she
put out her hand to where his hand was lying on the
table and clasped it.

The two unhappy creatures, like wrecked souls about
to be swallowed up in a tempestuous ocean, saw one
raft of hope—their love for each other, which had
survived all the storms of their fate.

But just as their hands were burning as if with fever,
and quivering in each other's clasp like the bosom of
a captured bird, a voice from without fell on their ears
like a trumpet from the skies.  It was the voice of the
muezzin calling to evening prayers from the minaret of
the neighbouring mosque:—

.. figure:: images/img-023.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: Music fragment: God is Most Great! God is Most Great!

   Music fragment: God is Most Great! God is Most Great!

It seemed to be a supernatural voice, the voice of
an accusing angel, calling them back to their present
position.  Ishmael—Helena—the betrothal!

Their hands separated and they rose to their feet.
One moment they stood with bowed heads, at opposite
sides of the table, listening to the voice outside, and
then, without a word more, they went their different
ways—he to his room, she to hers.

Into the empty guest-room, a moment afterwards,
came the rumbling and rolling sound of the voices of
the people, repeating the Fatihah after Ishmael—

"Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures....
Direct us in the right way, O Lord ... not the way of
those who go astray."





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   CHAPTER XIV

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That day the Sirdar had held his secret meeting of the
Ulema, the Sheikhs and Notables of Khartoum.  Into
a room on the ground floor of the Palace, down a dark,
arched corridor, in which British soldiers stood on
guard, they had been introduced one by one—a group
of six or eight unkempt creatures of varying ages, and
of different degrees of intelligence, nearly all wearing
the farageeyah.

They sat awkwardly on the chairs which had been
ranged for them about a mahogany table, and while
they waited they talked in whispers.  There was a
tense, electrical atmosphere among them, as of internal
dissension, the rumbling of a sort of subterranean
thunder.

But this subsided instantly, when the voice of the
sergeant outside, and the clash of saluting arms,
announced the coming of the Sirdar.  The Governor-General,
who was in uniform and booted and spurred
as if returning from a ride, was accompanied by his
Inspector-General, his Financial Secretary, the Governor
of the town, and various minor officers.

He was received by the Sheikhs, all standing, with
sweeping salaams from floor to forehead, a circle of
smiles and looks of complete accord.

The Sirdar, with his ruddy and cheerful face, took
his seat at the head of the table and began by asking,
as if casually, who was the stranger that had arrived
that day in Khartoum.

"A Bedouin," said the Cadi.  "One whom Ishmael
Ameer loves and who loves him."

"Yet a *Bedouin*, you say?" asked the Sirdar, in an
incredulous tone, and with a certain elevation of the
eyebrows.

"A Bedouin, O Excellency," repeated the Cadi,
whereupon the others, without a word of further
explanation, bent their turbaned heads in assent.

Then the Sirdar explained the reason for which he
had called them together.

"I am given to understand," he said, "that the idea
is abroad that the Government has been trying to
introduce changes into the immutable law of Islam,
which forms an integral part of your Moslem religion,
and is therefore rightly regarded with a high degree of
veneration by all followers of the Prophet.  If anybody
is telling you this, or if any one is saying that there is
any prejudice against you because you are Mohammedans,
he is a wicked and mischievous person, and I
beg of you to tell me who he is."

Saying this, the Sirdar looked sharply round the
table, but met nothing but blank and expressionless
faces.  Then turning to the Cadi, who as Chief
Judge of the Mohammedan law-courts had been
constituted spokesman, he asked pointedly what Ishmael
Ameer was saying.

"Nothing, O Excellency," said the Cadi; "nothing
that is contrary to the Sharia—the religious law of
Islam."

"Is he telling the people to resist the Government?"

The grave company about the table silently shook
their heads.

"Do you know if he has anything to do with a
conspiracy to resist the payment of taxes?"

The grave company knew nothing.

"Then what is he doing, and why has he come to
Khartoum?  Pasha, have *you* no explanation to make
to me?" asked the Sirdar, singling out a vivacious old
gentleman, with a short, white, carefully oiled beard—a
person of doubtful repute who had once been a
slave-dealer and was now living patriarchally, under the
protection of the Government, with his many wives
and concubines.

The old black sinner cast his little glittering eyes
around the room and then said—

"If you ask me, O Master, I say, Ishmael Ameer is
putting down polygamy and divorce and ought himself
to be put down."

At that there was some clamour among the Ulema,
and the Sirdar thought he saw a rift through which he
might discover the truth, but the Pasha was soon silenced,
and in a moment there was the same unanimity as
before.

"Then *what* is he?" asked the Sirdar, whereupon a
venerable old Sheikh, after the usual Arabic compliments
and apologies, said that, having seen the new
teacher with his own eyes and talked with him, he had
now not the slightest doubt that Ishmael was a man
sent from God, and therefore that all who resisted him,
all who tried to put him down, would perish miserably.
At these words the electrical atmosphere which had
been held in subjection seemed to burst into flame.  In
a moment six tongues were talking together.  One
Sheikh, with wild eyes, told of Ishmael's intercourse
with angels.  Another knew a man who had seen him
riding with the Prophet in the desert.  A third had
spoken to somebody who had seen angels, in the form
of doves, descending upon him from the skies, and a
fourth was ready to swear that one day, while Ishmael
was preaching in the mosque, people heard a voice from
heaven crying, "Hear him!  He is My messenger!"

"What was he preaching about?" said the Sirdar.

"The last days, the coming of the Deliverer," said
the Sheikh with the wild eyes, in an awesome whisper.

"What Deliverer?"

"Seyidna Isa—our Lord Jesus—the White Christ that
is to come."

"Is this to be soon?"

"Soon, O Excellency, very soon."

After this outburst there was a moment of tense and
breathless silence, during which the Sirdar sat with his
serious eyes fixed on the table, and his officers,
standing behind, glanced at each other and smiled.

Immediately afterwards the Sirdar put an end to
the interview.

"Tell your people," he said, "that the Government
has no wish to interfere with your religious beliefs
and feelings, whatever they may be; but tell them
also, that it intends to have its orders obeyed, and that
any suspicion of conspiracy, still more of rebellion, will
be instantly put down."

The group of unkempt creatures went off with sweeping
salaams, and then the Sirdar dismissed his officers
also, saying—

"Bear in mind that you are the recognised agents of
a just and merciful Government, and whatever your
personal opinions may be of these Arabs and their
superstitions, please understand that you are to give
no anti-Islamic colour to your British feelings.  At the
same time remember that we have worked for the
redemption of the Soudan from a state of savagery, and
we cannot allow it to be turned back to barbarism in
the name of religion."

Both the Ulema and the other British officials being
gone, the Sirdar was alone with his Inspector-General.

"Well?" he said.

"Well?" repeated the Inspector-General, biting the
ends of his close-cropped moustache.  "What more did
you expect, sir?  Naturally the man's own people were
not going to give him away.  They nearly did so,
though.  You heard what old Zewar Pasha said?"

"Tut!  I take no account of that," said the Sirdar.
"The brothers of Christ Himself would have put Him
down, too—locked Him up in an asylum, I dare say."

"That's exactly what I would do with Ishmael Ameer,
anyway," said the Inspector-General.  "Of course he
performs no miracles, and is attended by no angels.
His removal to Torah, and his inability to free himself
from a Government jail, would soon dispel the belief
in his supernatural agencies."

"But how can we do it?  Under what pretext?  We
can't imprison a man for preaching the second coming
of Christ.  If we did, our jails would be pretty full at
home, I'm thinking."

The Inspector-General laughed.  "Your old error,
dear Sirdar.  You can't apply the same principles to
East and West."

"And your old Parliamentary cant, dear friend!
I'm sick to death of it."

There was a moment of strained silence, and then the
Inspector-General said—

"Ah well, I know these holy men, with their sham
inspirations and their so-called heavenly messages.  They
develop by degrees, sir.  This one has begun by proclaiming
the advent of the Lord Jesus, and he will end
by hoisting a flag and claiming to be the Lord Jesus
himself."

"When he does that, Colonel, we'll consider our
position afresh.  Meantime it may do us no mischief
to remember that if the family of Jesus could have
dealt with the founder of our own religion as you would
deal with this olive-faced Arab there would probably
be no Christianity in the world to-day."

The Inspector-General shrugged his shoulders and
rose to go.

"Good-night, sir."

"Good-night, Colonel," said the Sirdar, and then he
sat down to draft a dispatch to the Consul-General—

"Nothing to report since the marriage, betrothal, or
whatever it was, of the 'Rani' to the man in question.
Undoubtedly he is laying a strong hold on the imagination
of the natives and acquiring the allegiance of large
bodies of workers; but I cannot connect him with any
conspiracy to persuade people not to pay taxes or with
any organised scheme that is frankly hostile to the
continuance of British rule.

"Will continue to watch him, but find myself at
fearful odds owing to difference of faith.  It is one of
the disadvantages of Christian Governments among
people of alien race and religion, that methods of revolt
are not always visible to the naked eye, and God knows
what is going on in the sealed chambers of the mosque.

"That only shows the danger of curtailing the liberty
of the vernacular press, whatever the violence of its
sporadic and muddled anarchy.  Leave the press alone,
I say.  Instead of chloroforming it into silence give it
a tonic if need be, or you drive your trouble
underground.  Such is the common sense and practical
wisdom of how to deal with sedition in a Mohammedan
country, let some of the logger-headed dunces who
write leading articles in England say what they will.

"If this man should develop supernatural pretensions
I shall know what to do.  But without that,
whether he claim divine inspiration or not, if his people
should come to regard him as divine, the very name
and idea of his divinity may become a danger, and I
suppose I shall have to put him under arrest."

Then remembering that he was addressing not only
the Consul-General but a friend, the Sirdar wrote—

"'Art Thou a King?'  Strange that the question of
Pontius Pilate is precisely what we may find in our
own mouths soon!  And stranger still, almost ludicrous,
even farcical and hideously ironical, that though for
two thousand years Christendom has been spitting on
the pusillanimity of the old pagan, the representative
of a Christian Empire will have to do precisely what
he did.

"Short of Pilate's situation, though, I see no right
to take this man, so I am not taking him.  Sorry to
tell you so, but I cannot help it.

"Our love from both to both.  Trust Janet is feeling
better.  No news of our poor boy, I suppose?"

"Our boy" had for thirty years been another name
for Gordon.





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   CHAPTER XV

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Grave as was the gathering in the Sirdar's Palace at
Khartoum, there was a still graver gathering that day
at the British Agency in Cairo—the gathering of the
wings of Death.

Lady Nuneham was nearing her end.  Since Gordon's
disgrace and disappearance she had been visibly fading
away under a burden too heavy for her to bear.

The Consul-General had been trying hard to shut
his eyes to this fact.  More than ever before, he had
immersed himself in his work, being plainly impelled
to fresh efforts by hatred of the man who had robbed
him of his son.

Through the Soudan Intelligence Department in Cairo
he had watched Ishmael's movements in Khartoum,
expecting him to develop the traits of the Mahdi and
thus throw himself into the hands of the Sirdar.

It was a deep disappointment to the Consul-General
that this did not occur.  The same report came to him.
again and again.  The man was doing nothing to justify
his arrest.  Although surrounded by fanatical folk,
whose minds were easily inflamed, he was not trying to
upset governors or giving "divine" sanction for the
removal of officials.

But meantime some mischief was manifestly at work
all over the country.  From day to day Inspectors had
been coming in to say that the people were not paying
their taxes.  Convinced that this was the result of
conspiracy, the Consul-General had shown no mercy.

"Sell them up," he had said, and the Inspectors,
taking their cue from his own spirit but exceeding his
orders, had done his work without remorse.

Week by week the trouble had deepened, and when
disturbances had been threatened he had asked the
British Army of Occupation, meaning no violence, to
go out into the country and show the people England's
power.

Then grumblings had come down on him from the
representatives of foreign nations.  If the people were
so discontented with British rule that they were refusing
to pay their taxes, there would be a deficit in the
Egyptian treasury—how then were Egypt's creditors to
be paid?

"Time enough to cross the bridge when you come to
it, gentlemen," said the Consul-General, in his stinging
tone and with a curl of his iron lip.

If the worst came to the worst England would pay,
but England should not be asked to do so because
Egypt must meet the cost of her own government.
Hence more distraining and some inevitable violence in
suppressing the riots that resulted from evictions.

Finally came a hubbub in Parliament, with the
customary "Christian" prattlers prating again.  Fools!
They did not know what a subtle and secret conspiracy
he had to deal with while they were crying out against
his means of killing it.

He *must* kill it!  This form of passive resistance,
this attack on the Treasury, was the deadliest blow
that had ever yet been aimed at England's power in
Egypt.

But he must not let Europe see it!  He must make
believe that nothing was happening to occasion the
least alarm.  Therefore to drown the cries of the people
who were suffering not because they were poor and
could not pay, but because they were perverse and
would not, he must organise some immense demonstration.

Thus came to the Consul-General the scheme of the
combined festival of the King's Birthday and the —th
anniversary of the British Occupation of Egypt.  It
would do good to foreign Powers, for it would make
them feel that, not for the first time, England had
been the torch-bearer in a dark country.  It would
do good to the Egyptians, too, for it would force their
youngsters (born since Tel-el-Kebir) to realise the
strength of England's arm.

Thus had the Consul-General occupied himself while
his wife had faded away.  But at length he had been
compelled to see that the end was near, and towards
the close of every day he had gone to her room and
sat almost in silence, with bowed head, in the chair by
her side.

The great man, who for forty years had been the
virtual ruler of millions, had no wisdom that told him
what to say to a dying woman; but at last, seeing that
her pallor had become whiteness, and that she was
sinking rapidly and hungering for the consolations of
her religion, he asked her if she would like to take the
sacrament.

"It is just what I wish, dear," she answered, with
the nervous smile of one who had been afraid to ask.

At heart the Consul-General had been an agnostic
all his life, looking upon religion as no better than a
civilising superstition, but all the same he went
downstairs and sent one of his secretaries for the Chaplain
of St. Mary's—the English Church.

The moment he had gone out of the door Fatimah,
under the direction of the dying woman, began to
prepare the bedroom for the reception of the clergyman
by laying a side-table with a fair white cloth, a large
prayer-book, and two silver candlesticks containing new
candles.

While the Egyptian nurse did this the old lady looked
on with her deep, slow, weary eyes, and talked in
whispers, as if the wings of the august Presence that
was soon to come were already rustling in the room.
When all was done she looked very happy.

"Everything is nice and comfortable now," she said,
as she lay back to wait for the clergyman.

But even then she could not help thinking the one
thought that made a tug at her resignation.  It was
about Gordon.

"I am quite ready to die, Fatimah," she said, "but
I should have loved to see my dear Gordon once more."

This was what she had been waiting for, praying for,
eating her heart and her life out for.

"Only to see and kiss my boy!  It would have been
so easy to go then."

Fatimah, who was snuffling audibly, as she straightened
the eider-down coverlet over the bed, began to hint that
if her "sweet eyes" could not see her son she could
send him a message.

"Perhaps I know somebody who could see it reaches
him, too," said Fatimah, in a husky whisper.

The old lady understood her instantly.

"You mean Hafiz!  I always thought as much.
Bring me my writing-case—quick!"

The writing-case was brought and laid open before
her, and she made some effort to write a letter, but
the power of life in her was low, and after a moment
the shaking pen dropped from her fingers.

"*Ma'aleysh*, my lady!" said Fatimah soothingly.
"Tell me what you wish to say.  I will remember
everything."

Then the dying mother sent a few touching words
as her last message to her beloved son.

"Wait!  Let me think.  My head is a little ... just
a little ... Yes, this is what I wish to say,
Fatimah.  Tell my boy that my last thoughts were
about him.  Though I am sorry he took the side of the
false prophet, say I am certain he did what he thought
was right.  Be sure you tell him I die happy, because
I know I shall see him again.  If I am never to see him
in this world I shall do so in the world to come.  Say I
shall be waiting for him there.  And tell him it will
not seem long."

"Could you sign your name for him, my heart?"
said Fatimah, in her husky voice.

"Yes, oh yes, easily," said the old lady, and then
with an awful effort she wrote—

"Your ever-loving Mother."

At that moment Ibrahim in his green caftan, carrying
a small black bag, brought the English chaplain into
the room.

"Peace be to this house," said the clergyman, using
the words of his Church ritual, and the Egyptian nurse,
thinking it was an Eastern salutation, answered,
"Peace!"

The Chaplain went into the "boys' room" to put on
his surplice, and when he came out, robed in white,
and began to light the candles and prepare the vessels
which he placed on the side-table, the old lady was
talking to Fatimah in nervous whispers—

"His lordship?"  "Yes!"  "Do you think, my lady——"

She wanted the Consul-General to be present and was
half afraid to send for him; but just at that instant
the door opened again, and her pale, spiritual face lit up
with a smile as she saw her husband come into the room.

The clergyman was now ready to begin, and the old
lady looked timidly across the bed at the Consul-General
as if there were something she wished to ask
and dared not.

"Yes, I will take the sacrament with you, Janet,"
said the old man, and then the old lady's face shone
like the face of an angel.

The Consul-General took the chair by the side of the
bed and the Chaplain began the service—

"Almighty, ever-living God, Maker of mankind, who
dost correct those whom Thou dost love——"

All the time the triumphant words reverberated
through the room the dying woman was praying fervently,
her lips moving to her unspoken words and her
eyes shining as if the Lord of Life she had always loved
was with her now and she was giving herself to Him—her
soul, her all.

The Consul-General was praying too—praying for the
first time to the God he did not know and had never
looked to—

"If Thou art God, let her die in peace.  It is all I
ask—all I wish."

Thus the two old people took the sacrament together,
and when the Communion Service came to a close, the
old lady looked again at the Consul-General and asked,
with a little confusion, if they might sing a hymn.

The old man bent his head, and a moment later the
Chaplain, after a whispered word from the dying
woman, began to sing—

   |  "Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear,
   |  It is not night if Thou be near ..."
   |

At the second bar the old lady joined him in her
breaking, cracking voice, and the Consul-General, albeit
his throat was choking him, forced himself to sing with
her—

   |  "When the soft dews of kindly sleep
   |  My wearied eyelids gently steep..."
   |

It was as much as the Consul-General could do to
sing of a faith he did not feel, but he felt tenderly to
it for his wife's sake now, and with a great effort he
went on with her to the end—

   |  "If some poor wandering child of Thine
   |  Have spurned to-day the voice divine ..."
   |

The light of another world was in the old lady's eyes
when all was over, and she seemed to be already half
way to heaven.





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   CHAPTER XVI

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All the same there was a sweet humanity left in her,
and when the Chaplain was gone and the side-table
had been cleared, and she was left alone with her old
husband, there came little gleams of the woman who
wanted to be loved to the last.

"How are you now?" he asked.

"Better so much better," she said, smiling upon
him, and caressing with her wrinkled hand the other
wrinkled hand that lay on the eider-down quilt.

The great Consul-General, sitting on the chair by the
side of the bed, felt as helpless as before, as ignorant as
ever of what millions of simple people know—how to
talk to those they love when the wings of Death are
hovering over them.  But the sweet old lady, with the
wisdom and the courage which God gives to His own
on the verge of eternity, began to speak in a lively and
natural voice of the end that was coming and what was
to follow it.

He was not to allow any of his arrangements to
be interfered with, and, above all, the festivities
appointed for the King's Birthday were not to be disturbed.

"They must be necessary or you would not have
them, especially now," she said, "and I shall not be
happy if I know that on my account they are not
coming off."

And then, with the sweet childishness which the
feebleness of illness brings, she talked of the last King's
Birthday, and of the ball they had given in honour
of it.

That had been in their own house, and the dancing
had been in the drawing-room, and the Consul-General
had told Ibrahim to set the big green arm-chair for
her in the alcove, and sitting there she had seen
everything.  What a spectacle!  Ministers Plenipotentiary,
Egyptian Ministers, ladies, soldiers!  Such gorgeous
uniforms!  Such glittering orders!  Such beautiful
toilets!

The old lady's pale face filled with light as she thought
of all this, but the Consul-General dropped his head,
for he knew well what was coming next.

"And, John, don't you remember?  Gordon was
there that night, and Helena—dear Helena!  How
lovely they looked!  Among all those lovely people,
dear....  He was wearing every one of his medals
that night, you know.  So tall, so brave-looking, a
soldier every inch of him, and such a perfect English
gentleman!  Was there ever anything in the world so
beautiful?  And Helena, too!  She wore a silvery silk,
and a kind of coif on her beautiful black hair.  Oh,
she was the loveliest thing in all the room, I thought!
And when they led the cotillion—don't you remember
they led the cotillion, dear?—I could have cried, I was
so proud of them."

The Consul-General continued to sit with his head
down, listening to the old lady and saying nothing, yet
seeing the scene as she depicted it and feeling again the
tingling pride which he, too, had felt that night but
permitted nobody to know.

After a moment the beaming face on the bed became
clouded over, as if that memory had brought other
memories less easy to bear—dreams of happy days to
come, of honours and of children.

"Ah well, God knows best," she said in a tremulous
voice, releasing the Consul-General's hand.

The old man felt as if he would have to hurry out
of the room without uttering another word, but, as well
as he could, he controlled himself and said—

"You are agitating yourself, Janet.  You must lie
quiet now."

"Yes, I must lie quiet now, and think of ... of
other things," she answered.

He was stepping away when she called on him to
turn her on her right side, for that was how she always
slept, and upon the Egyptian nurse coming hurrying
up to help, she said—

"No, no, not you, Fatimah—his lordship."

Then the Consul-General put his arms about her—feeling
how thin and wasted she was, and how little of
her was left to die—and turning her gently round he
laid her back on the pillow which Fatimah had in the
meantime shaken out.

While he did so her dim eyes brightened again, and
stretching her white hands out of her silk nightdress
she clasped them about his neck, with the last tender
efforts of the woman who wanted to be fondled to
the end.

The strain of talking had been too much for her,
and after a few minutes she sank into a restless doze,
in which the perspiration broke out on her forehead
and her face acquired an expression of pain, for sleep
knows no pretences.  But at length her features
became more composed and her breathing more regular,
and then the Consul-General, who had been standing
aside, mute with anguish, said in a low tone to Fatimah—

"She is sleeping quietly now," and then he turned
to go.

Fatimah followed him to the head of the stairs and
said in a husky whisper—

"It will be all over to-night, though—you'll see it
will."

For a moment he looked steadfastly into the woman's
eyes, and then, without answering her, walked heavily
down the stairs.

Back in the library, he stood for some time with his
face to the empty fireplace.  Over the mantelpiece
there hung a little picture, in a black-and-gilt frame,
of a bright-faced boy in an Arab fez.  It was more
than he could do to look at that portrait now, so he
took it off its nail and laid it, face down, on the marble
mantel-shelf.

Just at that moment one of his secretaries brought
in a despatch.  It was the despatch from the Sirdar,
sent in cypher but now written out at length.  The
Consul-General read it without any apparent emotion
and put it aside without a word.

The hours passed slowly; the night was very long;
the old man did not go to bed.  Not for the first time,
he was asking himself searching questions about the
mystery of life and death, but the great enigma was
still baffling him.  Could it be possible that while he
had occupied himself with the mere shows and semblance
of things, calling them by great names—Civilisation
and Progress—that simple soul upstairs had been
grasping the eternal realities?

There were questions that cut deeper even than that,
and now they faced him one by one.  Was it true that
he had married merely in the hope of having some one
to carry on his name and thus fulfil the aspirations of
his pride?  Had he for nearly forty years locked his
heart away from the woman who had been starving for
his love, and was it only by the loss of the son who
was to have been the crown of his life that they were
brought together in the end?

Thus the hoofs of the dark hours beat heavily on the
great Proconsul's brain, and in the awful light that
came to him from an open grave, the triumphs of the
life behind him looked poor and small.

But meantime the palpitating air of the room upstairs
was full of a different spirit.  The old lady had
apparently awakened from her restless sleep, for she
had opened her eyes and was talking in a bright and
happy voice.  Her cheeks were tinged with the glow of
health, and her whole face was filled with light.

"I knew I should see them," she said.

"See whom, my heart?" asked Fatimah, but without
answering her, the old lady, with the same rapturous
expression, went on talking.

"I knew I should, and I have!  I have seen both of
them!"

"Whom have you seen, my lady?" asked Fatimah
again, but once more the dying woman paid no heed
to her.

"I saw them as plainly as I see you now, dear.  It
was in a place I did not know.  The sun was so hot,
and the room was so close.  There was a rush roof and
divans all round the walls.  But Gordon and Helena
were there together, sitting at opposite sides of a table
and holding each other's hands."

"Allah!  Allah!" muttered Fatimah, with upraised hands.

The old lady seemed to hear her, for an indulgent
smile passed over her radiant face and she said in a
tone of tender remonstrance—

"Don't be foolish, Fatimah!  *Of course* I saw him.
The Lord said I should, and He never breaks His
promises.  'Help me, O God, for Christ's sake,' I said.
'Shall I see my dear son again?  O God, give me a
sign.'  And He did!  Yes, it was in the middle of the
night.  'Janet,' said a voice, and I was not afraid.
'Be patient, Janet.  You shall see your dear boy before
you die.'"

Her face was full of happy visions.  The life of this
world seemed to be no longer there.  A kind of life
from the other world appeared to reanimate the sinking
woman.  The near approach of eternity illumined
her whole being with a supernatural light.  She was
dying in a flood of joy.

"Oh, how good the Lord is!  It is so easy to go
now! ... John, you must not think I suffer any
longer, because I don't.  I have no pain now,
dear—none whatever."

Then she clasped her wasted hands together in
the attitude of prayer and said in a rustling
whisper—

"To-night, Lord Jesus!  Let it be to-night!"

After that her rapturous voice died away and her
ecstatic eyes gently closed, but an ineffable smile
continued to play on her faintly-tinted face, as if she
were looking on the wings that were waiting to bear
her away.

The doctor came in at that moment, and was told
what had occurred.

"Delirium, of course," he said.  A change had come;
the crisis was approaching.  If the same thing happened
at the supreme moment the patient was not to be
contradicted; her delusion was to be indulged.

It did not happen.

In the early hours of the morning the Consul-General
was called upstairs.  There was a deep silence in the
bedroom, as if the air had suddenly become empty
and void.  The day was breaking, and through the
windows that looked over to the Nile the white sails
of a line of boats gliding by seemed like the
passing of angels' wings.  Sparrows were twittering
in the eaves, and through the windows to the east
the first streamers of the sunrise were rising in the
sky.

The Consul-General approached the bed and looked
down at the pallid face on the pillow.  He wanted to
stoop and kiss it, but he felt as if it would be a
profanation to do so now.  His own face was full of
suffering, for the sealed chambers of his iron soul had been
broken open at last.

With his hands clasped behind his back he stood for
some minutes quite motionless.  Then laying one hand
on the brass head-rail of the bed, he leaned over his
dead wife and spoke to her as if she could hear.

"Forgive me, Janet!  Forgive me!" he said in a
low voice that was like a sob.

Did she hear him?  Who can say she did not?  Was
it only a ray from the sunrise that made the Egyptian
woman think that over the dead face of the careworn
and weary one, whose sweet soul was even then winging
its way to heaven, there passed the light of a loving
smile?





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   CHAPTER XVII

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Within three days the softening effects on the
Consul-General of Lady Nuneham's death were lost.  Out of
his very bereavement and the sense of being left friendless
and alone he became a harder and severer man
than before.  His secretaries were more than ever afraid
of him, and his servants trembled as they entered his
room.

It heightened his anger against Gordon to believe
that by his conduct he had hastened his mother's end.
In his absolute self-abasement there were moments
when he would have found it easier to forgive Gordon
if he had been a prodigal, a wastrel, prompted to do
what he had done by the grossest selfishness; but deep
down in some obscure depths of the father's heart the
worst suffering came of the certainty that his son had
been moved by that tragic earnestness which belongs
only to the greatest and noblest souls.

Still more hardening and embittering to the Consul-General
than the memory of Gordon was the thought of
Ishmael.  It intensified his anger against the Egyptian
to feel that having first by his "visionary mummery,"
by his "manoeuvring and quackery," robbed him of his
son, he had now, by direct consequence, robbed him of
his wife also.

All the Consul-General's bull-necked strength, all his
force of soul, were roused to fury when he thought of
that.  He was old and tired and he needed rest, but
before he permitted himself to think of retirement, he
must crush Ishmael Ameer.

Not that he allowed himself to recognise his vindictiveness.
Shutting his eyes to his personal motive, he
believed he was thinking of England only.  Ishmael
was the head-centre of an anarchical conspiracy which
was using secret and stealthy weapons that were more
deadly than bombs; therefore Ishmael must be put
down, he must be trampled into the earth, and his
movement must be destroyed.

But how?

Within a few hours after Lady Nuneham's funeral
the Grand Cadi came by night, and with many vague
accusations against "the Arab innovator," repeated his
former warning—

"I tell you again, O Excellency, if you permit that
man to go on it will be death to the rule of England
in Egypt."

"Then prove what you say—prove it, prove it," cried
the Consul-General, raising his impatient voice.

But the suave old Moslem judge either could not or
would not do so.  Indeed, being a Turkish official,
accustomed to quite different procedure, he was at a
loss to understand why the Consul-General wanted
proof.

"Arrest the offender first and you'll find evidence
enough afterwards," he said.

An English statesman could not act on lines like
those, so the Consul-General turned back to the
despatches of the Sirdar.  The last of them—the one
received during the dark hours preceding his wife's
death—contained significant passages—

"If this man should develop supernatural pretensions
I shall know what to do."

Ha!  There was hope in that!  The charlatan element
in Ishmael Ameer might carry him far if only the
temptation of popular idolatry were strong enough.

Once let a man deceive himself with the idea that
he was divine, nay, once let his followers delude
themselves with the notion of his divinity, and a civilised
Government would be bound to make short work of
him.  Whosoever and whatsoever he might be, that
man must die!

A sudden cloud passed over the face of the Consul-General
as he glanced again at the Sirdar's despatch
and saw its references to Christ.

"How senseless everybody is becoming in this world,"
he thought.

Pontius Pilate!  Pshaw!  When would religious
hypocrisy open its eyes and see that, according to all
the laws of civilised states, the Roman Governor had
done right?  Jesus claimed to be divine, His people
were ready to recognise Him as King; and whether
His kingdom was of this world or another, what did it
matter?  If His pretensions had been permitted they
would have led to wild, chaotic, shapeless anarchy.
Therefore Pilate crucified Jesus, and, scorned though
he had been through all the ages, he had done no more
than any so-called "Christian" governor would be
compelled to do to-day.

"Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews."  Why
would not people understand that these words were
written not in derision but in self-defence?  There
could be only one authority in Palestine then, and
there could be only one authority in Egypt now.

"If this visionary mummer, with his empty
quackeries, should develop the idea that he is divine,
or even the messenger of divinity, I will hang him like
a dog!" thought the Consul-General.





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   CHAPTER XVIII

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Five days after the death of Lady Nuneham the Consul-General
was reading at his breakfast the last copy of
the *Times* to arrive in Cairo.  It contained an anticipatory
announcement of a forthcoming Mansion House
Banquet in honour of the King's Birthday.  The
Foreign Minister was expected to speak on the "unrest
in the East, with special reference to the affair of El
Azhar."

The Consul-General's face frowned darkly, and he
began to picture the scene as it would occur.  The
gilded hall, the crowd of distinguished persons eating
in public, the mixed odours of many dishes, the pop
of champagne corks, the smoke of cigars, the buzz
of chatter like the gobbling of geese on a green, and
then the Minister, with his hand on his heart, uttering
timorous apologies for his Proconsul's policy, and
pouring out pompous platitudes as if he had newly
discovered the Decalogue.

The Consul-General's gorge rose at the thought.  Oh,
when would these people, who stayed comfortably at
home and lived by the votes of the factory-hands of
Lancashire and Yorkshire, and hungered for the shouts
of the mob, understand the position of men like
himself, who, in foreign lands, among alien races,
encompassed by secret conspiracies, were spending their
strength in holding high the banner of Empire?

"Having chosen a good man, why can't they leave
him alone?" thought the Consul-General.

And then, his personal feelings getting the better of
his patriotism, he almost wished that the charlatan
element in Ishmael Ameer might develop speedily;
that he might draw off the allegiance of the native
soldiers in the Soudan and break out, like the Mahdi,
into open rebellion.  That would bring the Secretary
of State to his senses, make him realise a real danger,
and see in the everlasting "affair of El Azhar" if not
light, then lightning.

The door of the breakfast-room opened and Ibrahim
entered.

"Well, what is it?" demanded the Consul-General
with a frown.

Ibrahim answered in some confusion that a small
boy was in the hall, asking to see the English lord.
He said he brought an urgent message, but would not
tell what it was or where it came from.  Had been
there three times before, slept last night on the ground
outside the gate, and could not be driven away—would
his lordship see the lad?

"What is his race?  Egyptian?"

"Nubian, my lord."

"Ever seen the boy before?"

"No ... yes ... that is to say ... well, now
that your lordship mentions it, I think ... yes I
think he came here once with Miss Hel ... I mean
General Graves's daughter."

"Bring him up immediately," said the Consul-General.

At the next moment a black boy stepped boldly into
the room.  It was Mosie.  His clothes were dirty, and
his pudgy face was like a block of dark soap splashed
with stale lather, but his eyes were clear and alert and
his manner was eager.

"Well, my boy, what do you want?" asked the
Consul-General.

Mosie looked fearlessly up into the stern face with
its iron jaw, and tipped his black thumb over his
shoulder to where Ibrahim, in his gorgeous green caftan,
stood timidly behind him.

At a sign from the Consul-General, the Egyptian
servant left the room, and then, quick as light, Mosie
slipped off his sandal, ripped open its inner sole, and
plucked out a letter stained with grease.

It was the letter which Helena had written in Khartoum.

The Consul-General read it rapidly, with an eagerness
which even he could not conceal.  So great, indeed,
was his excitement that he did not see that a second
paper (Ishmael's letter to the Chancellor of El Azhar)
had fallen to the floor until Mosie picked it up and
held it out to him.

"Good boy," said the Consul-General—the cloud had
passed and his face bore an expression of joy.

Instantly apprehending the dim purport of Helena's
hasty letter, the Consul-General saw that what he had
predicted and half hoped for was already coming to
pass.  It was to be open conspiracy now, not passive
conspiracy any longer.  The man Ishmael was falling
a victim to the most fatal of all mental maladies.
The Mahdist delusion was taking possession of him,
and he was throwing himself into the Government's hands.

Hurriedly ringing his bell, the Consul-General
committed Mosie to Ibrahim's care, whereupon the small
black boy, in his soiled clothes, with his dirty face and
hands, strutted out of the room in front of the Egyptian
servant, looking as proud as a peacock and feeling like
sixteen feet tall.  Then the Consul-General called for
one of his secretaries and sent him for the Commandant
of Police.

The Commandant came in hot haste.  He was a big
and rather corpulent Englishman, wearing a
blue-braided uniform and a fez—naturally a blusterous
person with his own people, but as soft-voiced as a
woman and as obsequious as a slave before his chief.

"Draw up your chair, Commandant—closer; now
listen," said the Consul-General.

And then in a low tone he repeated what he had
already learned from Helena's letter, and added what
he had instantly divined from it—that Ishmael Ameer
was to return to Cairo; that he was to come back in
the disguise of a Bedouin Sheikh; that his object was
to draw off the allegiance of the Egyptian army in
order that a vast horde of his followers might take
possession of the city; that this was to be done during
the period of the forthcoming festivities, while the
British army was still in the provinces, and that the
conspiracy was to reach its treacherous climax on the
night of the King's Birthday.

The Commandant listened with a gloomy face, and,
looking timidly into the flashing eyes before him, he
asked if his Excellency could rely on the source of his
information.

"Absolutely!  Infallibly!" said the Consul-General.

"Then," said the Commandant nervously, "I presume
the festivities must be postponed?"

"Certainly not, sir."

"Or perhaps your Excellency intends to have the
British army called back to Cairo?"

"Not that either."

"At least you will arrest the 'Bedouin'?"

"Not yet at all events."

The policy to be pursued was to be something quite
different.

Everything was to go on as usual.  Sports, golf,
cricket, croquet, tennis-tournaments, polo-matches,
race-meetings, automobile-meetings, "all the usual
fooleries and frivolities"—with crowds of sight-seers,
men in flannels and ladies in beautiful toilets—were to
be encouraged to proceed.  The police-bands were to
play in the public gardens, the squares, the streets,
everywhere.

"Say nothing to anybody.  Give no sign of any
kind.  Let the conspiracy go on as if we knew nothing
about it.  But——"

"Yes, my lord?  Yes?"

"Keep an eye on the 'Bedouin.'  Let every train
that arrives at the railway-station and every boat that
comes down the river be watched.  As soon as you
have spotted your man, see where he goes.  He may
be a fanatical fool, miscalculating his 'divine' influence
with the native soldier, but he cannot be working alone.
Therefore find out who visit him, learn all their
movements, let their plans come to a head, and, when the
proper time arrives, in one hour, at one blow we will
crush their conspiracy and clap our hands upon the
whole of them."

"Splendid!  An inspiration, my lord!"

"I've always said it would some day be necessary
to forge a special weapon to meet special needs, and
the time has come to forge it.  Meantime undertake
nothing hurriedly.  Make no mistakes, and see that
your men make none."

"Certainly, my lord."

"Investigate every detail for yourself, and above all
hold your tongue and guard your information with
inviolable secrecy."

"Surely, my lord."

"You can go now.  I'm busy.  Good-morning!"

"Wonderful man!" thought the Commandant, as
he went out at the porch.  "Seems to have taken a new
lease of life!  Wonderful!"

The Consul-General spent the whole of that day in
thinking out his scheme for a "special weapon," and
when night came and he went upstairs—through the
great echoing house that was like the bureau of a
department of state now, being so empty and so cheerless,
and past the dark and silent room whereof the door
was always closed—he felt conscious of a firmer and
lighter step than he had known for years.

Fatimah was in his bedroom, for she had constituted
herself his own nurse since his wife's death.  She was
nailing up on the wall the picture of the little boy in
the Arab fez, and, having her own theory about why
he had taken it down in the library, she said—

"There!  It will be company for your lordship, and
nobody will ask questions about it here."

When Fatimah had gone the Consul-General could
not but think of Gordon.  He always thought of him
at that hour of the night, and the picture of his son
that rose in his mind's eye was always the same.  It was
a picture of Gordon's deadly white face with its trembling
lower lip, as he stood bolt upright while his medals
were being torn from his breast, and then said, in that
voice which his father could never forget: "General,
the time may come when it will be even more painful
to you to remember all this than it has been to me to
bear it."

Oh, that Gordon could be here now and see for himself
what a sorry charlatan, what a self-deceived quack
and conspirator, was the man in whose defence he had
allowed his own valuable life to rush down to a
confused welter of wreck and ruin!

As the Consul-General got into bed he was thinking
of Helena.  What a glorious, courageous, resourceful
woman she was!  It carried his mind back to Biblical
days to find anything equal to her daring and her
success.  But what was the price she had paid for
them?  He remembered something the Sirdar had said
of "a marriage, a sort of betrothal," and then he
recalled the words of her first letter: "I know exactly
how far I intend to go, and I shall go no farther.  I
know exactly what I intend to do, and I shall do it
without fear or remorse."

What had happened in the Soudan?  What was
happening there now?  In what battle-whirlwind had
that splendid girl's magnificent victory been won?





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   CHAPTER XIX

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Meantime Helena in Khartoum was feeling like a
miserable traitress.

She had condemned an innocent man to death!
Ishmael had *not* killed her father, yet she had taken
such steps that the moment he entered Cairo he would
be walking to his doom!

One after another sweet and cruel memories crowded
upon her, and in the light of the awful truth as Gordon
had revealed it, she began to see Ishmael with quite
different eyes.  All she had hitherto thought evil in his
character now looked like good; what she had taken
for hypocrisy was sincerity; what she had supposed
to be subtlety was simplicity.  His real nature was a
rebuke to every one of her preconceived ideas.  The
thought of his tenderness, his modesty, his devotion,
and even the unselfishness which had led to their
betrothal, cut her to the heart.  Yet she had doomed
him to destruction.  The letter she had written to the
Consul-General was his death-warrant.

That night she could fix her mind on nothing except
the horror of her position, but next morning she set
herself to think out schemes for stopping the
consequences of her own act.

The black boy was gone; it was not possible to
overtake him; there was no other train to Egypt for four
days, but there was the telegraph—she could make use
of that.

"I'll telegraph to the Consul-General to pay no
attention to my letter," she thought.

Useless!  The Consul-General would ask himself
searching questions and take his precautions just the
same.

"I'll telegraph that my letter is a forgery," she
thought.

Madness!  The Consul-General would ask himself
how, if it was a forgery, she could know anything
about it.

"I'll go across to the Sirdar and tell him everything,
and leave him to act for both of us as he thinks
best!"

Impossible!  How could she explain her position to
the Sirdar without betraying Gordon's identity and
thereby leading to his arrest?

That settled everything.  There was no escape from
the consequences of her conduct, no way to put an
end to the network of dangers by which she had
surrounded Ishmael.  Mosie was now far on his way to
Cairo; he carried to the Consul-General not only her
own letter but also the original of Ishmael's letter to the
Chancellor of El Azhar.  The hideous work was done.

Two days passed, during which her over-excited
feelings seemed to paralyse all her powers of thought.
Then a new idea took possession of her, and she set
herself to undo what she had done with Ishmael himself.
Little by little, in tremulous tones, and with a still
deeper sense of duplicity than before, she began to
express halting doubts of the success of their enterprise.

"I have been thinking about it," she said nervously,
"and now I fear——"

"What do you fear, O Rani?" asked Ishmael.

"I fear," said Helena, trembling visibly, "that the
moment the Government learn from the Sirdar, as they
needs must, that the great body of your people have
left Khartoum, and are travelling north, they will
recall the British army to protect the capital and
thus——"

But Ishmael interrupted her with a laugh.

"If the day of the Redeemer has come," he said,
"will human armies hinder him?  No!"

It was useless!  Ishmael was now more than ever an
enthusiast, a fanatic, a visionary.  His spiritual ecstasy
swept away every obstacle, and made him blind to
every danger.

Helena felt like a witch who was trying to undo the
effects of her charm.  She could not undo them.  She
could not destroy the potency of the spell she herself
had raised, and the effort to do so put her into a fever
of excitement.

Two days more passed like this, and still Helena was
in the toils of her own actions.  From time to time she
saw Gordon as he sat at meals or moved about the
house.  He did not speak to her, and she dropped her
head in shame as often as they came close together.
But at length she caught a look in his face which seemed
to her to say, "Are you really going to let an innocent
man walk into the jaws of death?"

That brought her wavering mind to a quick
conclusion.  Gordon was waiting for her to speak.  She
must speak!  She must confess everything!  She
must tell Ishmael what she had done, and by what
tragic error she had done it.  At any cost, no matter
what, she must put an end to the false situation in
which she lived, and thus redeem herself in Gordon's
eyes and in her own.

At noon that day, being Friday, Ishmael preached in
the mosque, delivering a still more fervent and
passionate message.  The kingdom of heaven which the
Lord Isa had foretold was soon to come!  When it
came God would lend them legions of angels, if need
be, to protect the oppressed and to uphold the
down-trodden!  Therefore let the children of God fear
nothing from the powers and principalities of the world!
Their pilgrimage was safe!  No harm could come to
them, for however their feet might slip the arms of
the Compassionate would bear them up!

As Ishmael's ecstasy had increased so had the
devotion of his people, and when he returned home they
followed him in a dense crowd through the streets
shouting the wildest acclamations.

"Out of the way!  The Master is coming!  The
Messenger is here!  Allah!  El Hamdullillah!"

Helena heard them, but she did not hear Ishmael
reprove them, as in earlier days he had been wont to do.
She was standing in the guest-room, and the noise of
the approaching crowd had brought Gordon from his
bedroom, at the moment when Ishmael, surrounded by
a group of his people, stepped into the house.

Ishmael was in a state of excitement amounting to
exaltation, and after holding out hands both to Helena
and Gordon he turned to his followers to dismiss them.
"Go back now," he said, "and to-night, two hours
after sunset, let the Ulema and the Notables come
to me that we may decide on the details of our pilgrimage."

"Allah!  El Hamdullillah!" cried the people.

More than ever they were like creatures possessed.
Hungry and ragged as many of them were, the new
magnificence that was to be given to their lives
appeared to be already shining in their eyes.

Helena saw this, and her heart was smitten with
remorse at the thought of the cruel confession she had
decided to make.  She could not make it in sight of the
hopes it must destroy.  But neither could she look
into Gordon's searching face and remain silent, and as
soon as the crowd had gone, she made an effort to
speak.

"Ishmael," she said, trembling all over, "there is
something I wish to say—if it will not displease you."

"Nothing the Rani can say will displease me," said
Ishmael.

He was looking at her with the expression of
enthusiastic admiration which she had seen in his eyes
before.  It was hard to go on.

"Your intentions are now known to everybody," she
said.  "You have not hidden them from any of your
own people.  That has been very trustful, very noble,
but still——"

"Still—what, my sister?"

"If somebody ... should betray your scheme to
the Government, and ... and the moment you set
foot in Cairo——"

Again Ishmael interrupted her with a laugh.

"Impossible!" he said, smiling upon her with his
bright and joyous eyes.  "Islam has only one heart,
one soul, one mind."

Then taking her quivering hand and leading her
to the door, he pointed to the camp outside and
said—

"Look!  Ten thousand of our poor unhappy people
are there.  They have come to me from the tyrannies
of cruel taskmasters and have been true to me through
the temptations of hunger and thirst.  Some of them are
from Cairo and are waiting to return home.  All are
the children of Islam, and are looking for the coming
of the Expected who brings peace and joy.  Is there
one of them who will betray me now?  Not one!
Treachery would injure me, but it would hurt the
betrayer more."

Then with the same expression of enthusiastic
admiration, and in a still tenderer and softer voice, he
began to laugh and to rally her, saying he knew well
what was going on in his sweet sister's mind—that
though her brave spirit had devised the plan they had
adopted, yet now that the time was near for carrying
it into execution her womanly heart was failing her,
and affectionate anxiety for his own safety was making
her afraid.

"But have no fear at all," he said, standing behind
her and smoothing her cheek with a light touch of his
tapering fingers.  "If this is God's work will God
forget me?  No!"

With a sense of stifling duplicity Helena made one
more effort and said—

"Still, who knows, there may be some one——"

"None, O Rani!"

"But don't you know——"

"I don't want to know anything except one thing—that
God guides and directs me."

Again he laughed, and asked where was the kufiah
(the Bedouin head-dress) which she had promised to
make for his disguise.

"Get to work at it quick," he said; "it will be wanted
soon, my sister."

And then, clapping his hands for the mid-day meal,
he went into his room to prepare for it, leaving Gordon
and Helena for some moments alone together.

Gordon had been standing aside in the torment of
a hundred mixed emotions, and now he and Helena
spoke in whispers.

"He is determined to go into Cairo," she said.

"Quite determined."

"Oh, is there *no* way to prevent him?"

"None now—unless——"

"Unless—what?" she asked eagerly.

"Let us ... Let us wait and see," said Gordon, and
then Abdullah came in to lay the table.





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   CHAPTER XX

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As soon as the mid-day meal was over Gordon escaped
to his room—the room he shared with Ishmael—and
throwing himself down on the angerib with his hands
clasped across his face, he tried to think out the
situation in which he found himself, to gaze into the depths
of his conscience, and to see where he was and what he
ought to do.

So violent was the state of his soul that he sat there
a long time before he could link together his memories
of what had happened since he arrived in Khartoum.

"Am I dreaming?" he asked himself again and
again, as one by one his thoughts rolled over him like
tempestuous waves.

The first thing he saw clearly was that Ishmael was
not now the same man that he had known at Alexandria;
that the anxieties, responsibilities, and sufferings he had
gone through as a religious leader had dissipated his
strong common sense; and that as a consequence the
caution whereby men guard their conduct had gone.

He also saw that Ishmael's spiritual ecstasy had
reached a point not far removed from madness; that
his faith in divine guidance, divine guardianship, divine
intervention had become an absolute obsession.

Therefore it was hopeless to try to move him from
his purpose by any appeals on the score of danger to
himself or to his people.

"He is determined to go into Cairo," thought Gordon,
"and into Cairo he will go."

The next thing Gordon saw, as he examined the
situation before him, was that Helena was powerless to
undo the work which by the cruel error of fate she had
been led to do; that her act was irrevocable; that
there was no calling it back, and that it would go from
its consequences to the consequences of its consequences.

Helena's face appeared to him, and his heart bled
for her as he thought of how she passed before him—she
who had always been so bold and gay—with her
once proud head bent low.  He remembered her former
strength and self-reliance; her natural force and grace;
her fearless daring and that dash of devilry which had
been for him one of her greatest charms; and then he
thought of her false position in that house, brought
there by her own will, held there by her own act—a
tragic figure of a woman in the meshes of her own net.

"She cannot continue to live like this.  It is impossible.
Yet what can the end be?" he asked himself.

Hours passed like this.  His head under his hot
hands burned and his temples throbbed, yet no ray of
light emerged from the darkness surrounding him.

But at length the man in him, the soldier and the
lover, swept down every obstacle, and he told himself
that he must save Helena from the consequences of her
own conduct whatever the result might be.

"I must!  I must!" he kept on repeating as
Helena's face rose before him; and after a while this
blind resolution brought him at one stride to a new
idea.

Ishmael was determined to go into Cairo, but there
was one way to prevent him doing so—that he, Gordon
himself, should go instead!

When he first thought of that his temples beat so
violently that it seemed as if they would burst, and he
felt as if he had been brought to the very brink of
despair.  Seeing nothing before him but instant arrest
the moment he entered the city, it seemed to be a pitiful
end to his long journey across the desert, a poor sequel
to his fierce struggle with himself, and to the mystic
hopes with which he had buoyed up his heart, that
immediately after he had reached Khartoum he should
turn back to his death.

Work, mission, redemption—all that had so recently
had a meaning for him had disappeared.  But his heart
rose when he remembered that if he did what he had
determined to do he would break the cruel error of fate
whereby Ishmael had been doomed to die for an offence
he did not commit.

What was the first fact of this cruel situation?  That
Helena had believed Ishmael to be guilty of the death
of her father.  But Ishmael was innocent, whereas he,
Gordon, was guilty!  Could he allow an innocent man
to die for his crime?

That brought him to the crisis of his conscience.  It
settled everything.  Destiny, acting under the blind
force of a poor girl's love for her father, was sending
Ishmael to his death.  But destiny should be defeated!
He should pay his own penalty!  Ishmael should be
snatched from the doom that threatened him, and
Helena should be saved from lifelong remorse.

"Yes, yes, I must go into Cairo instead," he told
himself.

It had grown late by this time, and the bedroom had
become dark when Abdullah knocked at the door and
said that the Sheikhs were in the guest-room and
Ishmael was asking for Omar.

Under its roof thatched with stalks of durah, lit
by lamps suspended from its rafters, the Ulema and
Notables of Khartoum—the same that visited the Sirdar—had
gathered soon after sunset, and squatting on the
divans covered by carpets and cushions, had drunk
their coffee and talked in their winding, circuitous
Eastern way of the business before them, and particularly
of the White Lady's part in it, while they waited
for Ishmael, who was still at the mosque.

"Yes," the vivacious old Pasha had said, "no matter
how great a man may be, when he undertakes an
enterprise like this he should always consult ten of his
friends."

"But great ones are not great in friends," said a
younger Sheikh.  "What if he has not got ten?"

"Then let him consult one friend ten times over."

"Nay, but if he stands so high that he has not got
even one friend?"

"Then," said the old man, with a sly look over his
shoulder towards the women's side of the house, "let
him consult his wife, and, whatever she advises, let him
do the contrary."

When Gordon in his Bedouin dress entered the guest-room,
Ishmael was sitting in the midst of his people,
and he called to him to take the seat by his right side.

"But where is the Rani?" he asked, looking round,
whereupon Abdullah answered that she was still in her
room, and the old Pasha hinted that in the emancipation
of the Eastern woman perhaps women themselves
would be the chief impediment.

"I know!  I know!" said Ishmael.  "But all the
same we must turn our backs on the madness of a
bygone age that woman is inferior to man, and her
counsel is not to be trusted.  Bring her, Abdullah."

A few minutes afterwards Helena, wearing her Indian
veil but with her face uncovered, entered the guest-room
with downcast eyes, followed by the Arab woman
and the child.

It cut Gordon to the heart to see her look of shame
and of confusion, but Ishmael saw nothing in Helena's
manner except maidenly modesty under the eyes of so
many men, and making a place for her on his left, he
began without further delay on the business that had
brought them together.

They were about to win a dear victory for God, but
it was to be a white war, a bloodless revolution.  The
heartless festivities that were to be held in honour of
the birthday of the King who lived across the seas
while people perished in Egypt, were to reach their
climax something more than a month hence.  Therefore
the great caravan of God's children who were to
cross the desert by camel and horse and ass, in order
that they might meet the Expected One when he
appeared in Cairo, should start within a week.  But the
messenger of God who had to prepare the path before
them must go by train, and he ought to leave Khartoum
in four days.

Other preliminaries of the pilgrimage there were to
arrange, and after the manner of their kind the Sheikhs
talked long and leisurely, agreeing finally that Ishmael
should go first into Cairo in the disguise of a Bedouin
Sheikh to make sure of the success of their mission, and
that Omar (Gordon) should follow him in command of
the body of the people.

At length there was silence for a moment, and then
Ishmael said—

"Is there anything else, my brothers?"

And at that Gordon, who had not spoken before,
turned to him and answered, in the style as well as the
language of the Arabs—

"Listen, I beg of you, to my words, and forgive me
if what I say is not pleasing to you or yours."

"Speak, Omar Benani, speak," said Ishmael, laying
his right hand, with an affectionate gesture, on Gordon's
left.

There was a moment of silence, in which Gordon could
distinctly hear the sound of Helena's breathing.  Then
lie said—

"Reverse your order, O my brother, and let me go
first into Cairo."

A tingling electrical current seemed to pass through
the air of the room, and again Gordon heard the sound
of Helena's laboured breathing, but no one spoke except
Ishmael, who said in a soft voice—

"But why, Omar, why?"

Gordon braced himself up and answered—

"First, because it best becomes a messenger of God
to enter Cairo in the company of his people, not alone
and in disguise."

"And next?"

"Next, because I know Cairo better than Ishmael,
and all that he can do I can do, and more."

There was another moment of tense silence, and then
Ishmael said—

"I listen to your sincere proposal, O my brother,
but before I answer it I ask for the counsel of my
friends."

Then raising his voice he cried, "Companions, you
have heard what Omar Benani has said—which of us is
it to be?"

At that the tense atmosphere in the room broke
into eager and impetuous speech.  First came, as needs
must in an Eastern conclave, some gusts of questions,
then certain breezes of protest, but finally a strong
and unbroken current of assent.

"Master," said one of the Sheikhs, "I have eaten
bread and salt with you, therefore I will not deceive
you.  Let Omar go first.  He can do all that Ishmael
can do and run no risk."

"Messenger of the Merciful," said another, "neither
will I deceive you.  Omar knows Cairo best.  Therefore
let him go first."

After others had answered in the same way Ishmael
turned to Mahmud, his uncle, whereupon the old man
wiped his rheumy eyes and said—

"Your life is in God's hand, O son of my brother,
and man cannot escape his destiny.  If it is God's will
that you should be the first to go into Cairo you will
go, and God will protect you.  But speaking for myself,
I should think it a shame and a humiliation that the
father of his people should not enter the city with his
children.  If Omar says he can do as much as you,
believe him—the white man does not lie."

No sooner had the old man concluded than the whole
company with one voice shouted that they were all of
the same opinion, whereupon Ishmael cried—

"So be it, then!  Omar it shall be!  And do not
think for one moment that I grudge your choice."

"El Hamdullillah!" shouted the company, as from
a sense of otherwise inexpressible relief.

Meantime Gordon was conscious only of Helena's
violent agitation.  Though he dared not look at her, he
seemed to see her feverish face and the expression of
terror in her lustrous eyes.  At length, when the shouts
of the Sheikhs had subsided, he heard her tremulous
voice saying hurriedly to Ishmael—

"Do not listen to them."

"But why, my Rani?" Ishmael asked in a whisper.

She tried to answer him and could not.  "Because
... because——"

"Because—what?" asked Ishmael again.

"Oh, I don't know—I can't think—but I beg you, I
entreat you not to let Omar go into Cairo."

Her agitated voice caused another moment of silence,
and then Ishmael said in a soft, indulgent tone—

"I understand you, O my Rani.  This may be the task
of greatest danger, but it is the place of highest honour
too, and you would fain see no man except your husband
assigned to it.  But Omar is of me and I am of him,
and there can be no pride nor jealousy between us."

And then, taking Gordon by the right hand, while
with his left he was holding Helena, he said—

"Omar, my friend, my brother!"

"El Hamdullillah!" cried the Sheikhs again, and
then one by one they rose to go.

Helena rose too, and with her face aflame and her
breath coming in gusts she hurried back to her room.
The Arab woman followed her in a moment, and with
a mocking smile in her glinting eyes, she said—

"How happy you must be, O lady, that some one
else than your husband is to go into that place of
danger!"

But Helena could bear no more.

"Go out of the room this moment!  I cannot endure
you!  I hate you!  Go, woman, go!" she cried.

Zenoba fled before the fury in her lady's face, but at
the next moment Helena had dropped to the floor and
burst into a flood of tears.

When she regained possession of herself, the child,
Ayesha, was embracing her and, without knowing why,
was weeping over her wet cheeks.





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   CHAPTER XXI

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Now that Gordon was to take Ishmael's place, Helena
found herself deeper than ever in the toils of her own
plot.  She could see nothing but death before him as
the result of his return to Cairo.  If his identity were
discovered, he would die for his own offences as a soldier.
If it were not discovered, he would be executed for
Ishmael's conspiracies as she had made them known.

"Oh, it cannot be!  It must not be!  It shall not
be!" she continued to say to herself, but without seeing
a way to prevent it.

Never for a moment, in her anxiety to save Gordon
from stepping into the pit she had dug for Ishmael,
did she allow herself to think that, being the real cause
of her father's death, he deserved the penalty she had
prepared for the guilty man.  Her mind had altered
towards that event since the man concerned in it had
changed.  The more she thought of it the more sure
she became that it was a totally different thing, and in
the strict sense hardly a crime at all.

In the first place, she reminded herself that her father
had suffered from an affection of the heart which must
have contributed to his death, even if it had not been
the principal cause of it.  How could she have forgotten
that fact until now?

Remembering her father's excitement and exhaustion
when she saw him last, she could see for the first time,
by the light of Gordon's story, what had afterwards
occurred—the burst of ungovernable passion, the
struggle, the fall, the death.

Then she told herself that Gordon had not intended
to kill her father, and whatever he had done had been
for love of her.  "Helena was mine, and you have taken
her from me, and broken her heart as well as my
own."  Yes, love for her and the torment of losing her had
brought Gordon back to the Citadel after he had been
ordered to return to his quarters.  Love for her, and
the delirium of a broken heart, had wrung out of him the
insults which had led to the quarrel that resulted in
her father's death.

In spite of her lingering tenderness for the memory
of her father, she began to see how much he had been
to blame for what had happened—to think of the gross
indignity, the frightful shame, the unmerciful and even
unlawful degradation to which in his towering rage he
had subjected Gordon.  The scene came back to her
with horrible distinctness now—her father crying in a
half-stifled voice, "You are a traitor!  A traitor who
has consorted with the enemies of his country!" and
then tearing Gordon's sword from its scabbard and
breaking it across his knee.

But seeing this, she also saw her own share in what
had occurred.  At the moment of Gordon's deepest
humiliation she had driven him away from her.  Her
pride had conquered her love, and instead of flinging
herself into his arms as she ought to have done, whether
he was in the right or in the wrong, when everybody
else was trampling upon him, she had insulted him
with reproaches and turned her back upon him in his
disgrace.

That scene came back to her, too—Gordon at the
door of the General's house, with his deadly white face
and trembling lips, stammering out, "I couldn't help
it, Helena—it was impossible for me to act otherwise,"
and then, bareheaded as he was, and with every badge
of rank and honour gone, staggering across the garden
to the gate.

When she thought of all this now it seemed to her
that, if anybody had been to blame for her father's
death, it was not Gordon, but herself.  His had been the
hand, the blind hand only, but the heart that had
wrought the evil had been hers.

"Oh, it cannot be! it shall not be!" she continued
to say to herself, and just as she had tried to undo her
work with Ishmael when he was bent on going into
Cairo, so she determined to do the same with Gordon,
now that he had stepped into Ishmael's place.
Her opportunity came soon.

A little before mid-day of the day following the
meeting of the Sheikhs, she was alone in the guest-room,
sitting at the brass table that served her as a
desk—Ishmael being in the camp, Zenoba and the child in the
town, and old Mahmud still in bed—when Gordon came
out of the men's quarter and walked towards the door
as if intending to pass out of the house.

He had seen her as he came from his bedroom, with
one of her hands pressed to her brow, and a feeling of
inexpressible pity and unutterable longing had so taken
possession of him, with the thought that he was soon
to lose her—the most precious gift life had given
him—that he had tried to steal away.

But instinctively she felt his approach, and with a
trembling voice she called to him, so he returned and
stood by her side.

"Why are you doing this?" she said.  "You know
what I mean.  Why are you doing it?"

"You know quite well why I am doing it, Helena.
Ishmael was determined to go to his death.  There was
only one way to prevent him.  I had to take it."

"But you are going to death yourself—isn't that so?"

He did not answer.  He was trying not to look at her.

"Or perhaps you see some way of escape—do you?"

Still he did not speak—he was even trying not to
hear her.

"If not, why are you going into Cairo instead of
Ishmael?"

"Don't ask me that, Helena.  I would rather not
answer you."

Suddenly the tears came into her eyes, and after a
moment's silence she said—

"I know!  I understand!  But remember your
father.  He loves you.  You may not think it, but he
does—I am sure he does.  Yet if you go into Cairo you
know quite well what he will do."

"My father is a great man, Helena.  He will do his
duty whatever happens—what he believes to be his duty."

"Certainly he will, but all the same, do you think he
will not suffer!  And do you wish to put him into the
position of being compelled to cut off his own son?  Is
that right?  Can anything—anything in the world—
make it necessary?"

Gordon did not answer her, but under the strain of
his emotion he tightened his lips, and his pinched nostrils
began to dilate like the nostrils of a horse.

"Then remember your mother, too," said Helena.
"She is weak and ill.  It breaks my heart to think of
her as I saw her last.  She believes that you have fled
away to some foreign country, but she is living in the
hope that time will justify you, and then you will be
reconciled to your father, and come back to her again.
Is this how you would come back? ... Oh, it will
kill her!  I'm sure it will!"

She saw that Gordon's strong and manly face was
now utterly discomposed, and she could not help but
follow up her advantage.

"Then think a little of me too, Gordon.  This is all
my fault, and if anything is done to you in Cairo it
will be just the same to me as if I had done it.  Do
you wish me to die of remorse?"

She saw that he was struggling to restrain himself,
and turning her beautiful wet eyes upon him and laying
her hand on his arm, she said—

"Don't go back to Cairo, Gordon!  For my sake,
for your own sake, for our love's sake——"

But Gordon could bear no more, and he cried in a low,
hoarse whisper—

"Helena, for heaven's sake, don't speak so.  I knew
it wouldn't be easy to do what I intended to do, and it
isn't easy.  But don't make it harder for me than it is,
I beg, I pray."

She tried to speak again, but he would not listen.

"When you sent the message into Cairo which doomed
Ishmael to death you thought he had killed your father.
If he had really done so he would have deserved all
you did to him.  But he hadn't, whereas I had.  Do
you think I can let an innocent man die for my crime?"

"But, Gordon—" she began, and again he stopped her.

"Don't speak about it, Helena.  For heaven's sake,
don't!  I've fought this battle with myself before, and
I can't fight it over again—with your eyes upon me
too, your voice in my ears, and your presence by my side."

He was trying to move away, and she was still clinging
to his arm.

"Don't speak about our love, either.  All that is
over now.  You must know it is.  There is a barrier
between us that can never——"

His voice was breaking and he was struggling to tear
himself away from her, but she leapt to her feet and
cried—

"Gordon, you *shall* hear me—you *must*!" and then
he stopped short and looked at her.

"You think you were the cause of my father's death,
but you were not," she said.

His mouth opened, his lips trembled, he grew deadly
pale.

"You think, too, that there is a barrier of blood
between us, but there is no such thing."

"Take care of what you are saying, Helena."

"What I am saying is the truth, Gordon—it is God's
truth."

He looked blankly at her for a moment in silence,
then laid hold of her violently by both arms, gazed
closely into her face, and said in a low, trembling voice—

"Helena, if you knew what it is to live for months
under the shadow of a sin—an awful sin—an unpardonable
sin—surely you wouldn't ... But why don't you
speak?  Speak, girl, speak!"

Then Helena looked fearlessly back into his excited
face and said—

"Gordon, do you remember that you came to my
room in the Citadel before you went in to that
... that fatal interview?"

"Yes, yes!  How can I forget it?"

"Do you also remember what I told you then, that
whatever happened that day I could never leave my
father?"

"Yes, certainly, yes."

"Do you remember that you asked me why, and I
said I couldn't tell you because it was a secret—somebody
else's secret?"

"Well?"  His pulses were beating violently; she
could feel them throbbing on her arms.

"Gordon," she said, "do you know what that secret
was?  I can tell you now.  Do you know what it was?"

"What?"

"That my father was suffering from heart-disease,
and had already received his death-warrant."

She waited for Gordon to speak, but he was almost
afraid to breathe.

"He didn't know his condition until we arrived in
Egypt, and then perhaps he ought to have resigned his
commission, but he had been out of the service for two
years, and the temptation to remain was too much for
him, so he asked me to promise to say nothing about it."

Gordon released her arms and she sat down again.
He stood over her, breathing fast and painfully.

"I thought you ought to have been told at the time
when we became engaged, but my father said, 'No!
Why put him in a false position, and burden him with
responsibilities he ought not to bear?'"

Helena's own voice was breaking now, and as Gordon
listened to it he was looking down at her flushed face,
which was thinner than before but more beautiful than
ever in his eyes, and a hundredfold more touching than
when it first won his heart.

"I tried to tell you that day, too, before you went
into the General's office, so that you might see for
yourself, dear, that if you separated yourself from my
father I ... I couldn't possibly follow you, but there
was my promise, and then ... then my pride and ... and
something you said that pained and wounded me——"

"I know, I know, I know," he said.

"But now," she continued, rising to her feet again,
"now," she repeated, in the same trembling voice, but
with a look of joy and triumph, "now that you have
told me what happened after your return to the Citadel,
I see quite clearly—I am sure—perfectly sure—that my
dear father died not by your hand at all, but by the
hand and the will of God."

"Helena!  Helena!" cried Gordon, and in the
tempest of his love and the overwhelming sense of
boundless relief he flung his arms about her and covered
her face with kisses.

One long moment of immeasurable joy they were
permitted to know, and then the hand of fate snatched
at them again.

From their intoxicating happiness they were awakened
by a voice.  It was only the voice of the muezzin
calling to mid-day prayers, but it seemed to be
reproaching them, separating them, tearing them asunder,
reminding them of where they were now, and what
they were, and that God was over them.

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Their lips parted, their arms fell away from each
other, and irresistibly, simultaneously, as if by an
impulse of the same heart, they dropped to their knees
to pray for pardon.

The voice of the muezzin ceased, and in the silence
of the following moment they heard a soft footstep
coming behind.

It was Ishmael.  He did not speak to either of them,
but seeing them on their knees, at the hour of mid-day
prayers, he stepped up and knelt between.





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   CHAPTER XXII

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When Gordon had time to examine the new situation
in which he found himself he saw that he was now in a
worse case than before.

It had been an inexpressible relief to realise that he
was not the first cause of the General's death, and
therefore that conscience did not require him to go into
Cairo in order to protect Ishmael from the consequences
of a crime he did not commit.  But no sooner had he
passed this great crisis than he was brought up against
a great test.  What was it to him that he could save
his life if he had to lose Helena?

Helena was now Ishmael's wife—betrothed to him by
the most sacred pledges of Mohammedan law.  If the
barrier of blood which had kept him from Helena had
been removed, the barrier of marriage which kept
Helena from him remained.

"What can we do?" he asked himself, and for a
long time he saw no answer.

In the fierce struggle that followed, honour and duty
seemed to say, that inasmuch as Helena had entered
into this union of her own free will—however passively
acquiescing in its strange conditions—she must abide
by it, and he must leave her where she was and crush
down his consuming passion, which was an unholy
passion now.  But honour and duty are halting and
timorous guides in the presence of love, and when
Gordon came to think of Helena as the actual wife of
Ishmael he was conscious of nothing but the flame that
was burning at his heart's core.

Remembering what Helena had told him, and what
he had seen since he came to that house, he reminded
himself that after all the marriage was only a marriage
*pro formâ*, a promise made under the mysterious
compulsion of fate, a contract of convenience and perhaps
generosity on the one side, and on the other side of
dark and calculating designs which would not bear to
be thought of any longer, being a result of the blind
leading of awful passions under circumstances of the
most irresistible provocation.

When he came to think of love he was dead to everything
else.  Ishmael did not love Helena, whereas he,
Gordon, loved her with all his heart and soul and
strength.  She was everything in life to him, and
though he might have gone to his death without her, it
was impossible to live and leave her behind him.

Thinking so, he began to conjure up the picture of
a time when Ishmael, under the influence of Helena's
beauty and charm, might perhaps forget the bargain
between them, and claim his rights as a husband, and
then the thought of her beautiful head with its dark
curling locks as it lay in his arms that day lying in
the arms of the Arab, with Ishmael's swarthy face
above her, so tortured him that it swept away every
other consideration.

"It must not, shall not, cannot be!" he told himself.

And that brought him to the final thought that since
he loved Helena, and since Helena loved him and not
her husband, their position in Ishmael's house was
utterly false and wrong, and could not possibly continue.

"It is not fair even to Ishmael himself," he thought.

And when, struggling with his conscience, he asked
himself how he was to put an end to the odious and
miserable situation, he concluded at once that he would
go boldly to Ishmael and tell him the whole story of
Helena's error and temptation, thereby securing his
sympathy and extricating all of them from the position
in which they were placed.

"Anything will be better than the present state of
things," he thought, as he reflected upon the difficult
and delicate task he intended to undertake.

But after a moment he saw that while it would be
hard to explain Helena's impulse of vengeance to the man
who had been the object of it, to tell him of the message
she had sent into Cairo would be utterly impossible.

"I cannot say anything to Ishmael about that," he
thought, and the only logical sequence of ideas was that
he could not say anything to Ishmael at all.

This left him with only one conclusion—that inasmuch
as it was impossible that he and Helena could
remain any longer in that house, and equally impossible
that they could leave it with Ishmael's knowledge and
consent, there was nothing for them to do but to fly
away.

He found it hard to reconcile himself to the idea of
a secret flight.  The very thought of it seemed to put
them into the position of adulterers, deceiving an
unsuspecting husband.  But when he remembered the
scene in the guest-room that day, the moment of
over-powering love, the irresistible kiss, and then the
crushing sense of duplicity, as Ishmael entered and without
a thought of treachery knelt between them, he told
himself that at any cost whatsoever he must put an
end to the false position in which they lived.

"We must do it soon—the sooner the better," he
thought.

Though he had lived so long with the thought of
losing Helena, that kiss had in a moment put his soul
and body into a flame.  He knew that his love was
blinding him to certain serious considerations, and that
some of these would rise up later and perhaps accuse
him of selfishness or disloyalty or worse.  But he could
only think of Helena now, and his longing to possess
her made him dead to everything else.

In a fever of excitement he began to think out plans
for their escape, and reflecting that two days had still
to pass before the train left Khartoum by which it had
been intended that he should travel in his character as
Ishmael's messenger, he decided that it was impossible
for them to wait for that.

They must get away at once by camel if not by rail.
And remembering Osman, his former guide and companion,
he concluded to go over to the Gordon College
and secure his aid.

Having reached this point, he asked himself if he
ought not to obtain Helena's consent before going any
further; but no, he would not wait even for that.  And
then, remembering how utterly crushed she was, a
victim of storm and tempest, a bird with a broken wing,
he assumed the attitude of strength towards her, telling
himself she was a woman after all, and it was his duty
as a man to think and to act for her.

So he set out in haste to see Osman, and when, on
his way through the town, he passed (without being
recognised) a former comrade in khaki, a Colonel of
Lancers, whose life had been darkened by the loss of
his wife through the treachery of a brother officer, he
felt no qualms at all at the thought of taking Helena
from Ishmael.

"Ours is a different case altogether," he said, and
then he told himself that their life would be all the
brighter in the future because it had had this terrible
event in it.

It was late and dark when he returned from the
Gordon College, and then old Mahmud's house was as
busy as a fair, with people coming and going on errands
relating to the impending pilgrimage, but he watched
his opportunity to speak to Helena, and as soon as
Ishmael, who was more than commonly animated and
excited that night, had dismissed his followers and
gone to the door to drive them home, he approached
her and whispered in her ear—

"Helena!"

"Yes?"

"Can you be ready to leave Khartoum at four o'clock
in the morning?"

For a moment she made no reply.  It seemed to her
an incredible happiness that they were really to go
away together.  But quickly collecting her wandering
thoughts she answered—

"Yes, I can be ready."

"Then go down to the Post Landing.  I shall be
there with a launch."

"Yes, yes!"  Her heart was beating furiously.

"Osman, the guide who brought me here, will be
waiting with camels on the other side of the river."

"Yes, yes, yes!"

"We are to ride as far as Atbara, and take train
from there to the Red Sea."

"And what then?"

"God knows what then.  We must wait for the
direction of fate.  America, perhaps, as we always
hoped and intended."

She looked quickly round, then took his face between
her hands and kissed him.

"To-morrow morning at four o'clock," she whispered.

"At four," he repeated.

A thousand thoughts were flashing through her mind,
but she asked no further questions, and at the next
moment she went off to her own quarters.

The door of her room was ajar, and the face of the
Arab woman, who was within, doing something with
the clothes of the child, seemed to wear the same
mocking smile as before; but Helena was neither angry
nor alarmed.  When she asked herself if the woman
had seen or heard what had taken place between Gordon
and herself, no dangers loomed before her in relation to
their flight.

Her confidence in Gordon—his strength, his courage,
his power to protect her—was absolute.  If he intended
to take her away he would do so, and not Ishmael nor
all the Arabs on earth could stop him.





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.. _`CHAPTER XXIII`:

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   CHAPTER XXIII

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Gordon could not allow himself to sleep that night,
lest he should not be awake when the hour came to go.
The room he shared with Ishmael was large, and it had
one window looking to the river and another to
Khartoum.  Through these windows, which were open, he
heard every noise of the desert town by night.

Sometimes there was the dead, measured thud of a
camel's tread on the unpaved streets; sometimes the
light beat of a donkey's hoofs; at intervals there were
the faint and distant cries of the night watchmen from
various parts of the town, intersecting the air like cross
currents of wireless telegraphy, and once an hour there
was the guttural voice of Black Zogal at the door of
their own house, calling the confession of faith.

"There is no god but God—no god but God!"

It had been late when Ishmael came to bed, and even
then, being excited and in high spirits, and finding
Gordon still awake, he had talked for a long time in
the darkness of his preparations for the forthcoming
pilgrimage and his hopes of its progress across the
desert—three and a half miles an hour, fourteen hours
a day, making a month for the journey altogether.
But finding that Gordon did not reply, and thinking
he must be sleepy, he wished him a good night and a
blessed morning, and then, with a few more words that
were trustful, affectionate, warm-hearted and brotherly,
he fell asleep.

It was after twelve by this time, and though Gordon
intended to rise at three it seemed to him that the
few hours between would never end.  He listened to
the measured breathing of the sleeping man and counted
the cries outside, but the time passed as if with feet of
lead.

It was never quite dark, and through the luminous
dark blue of the southern night, fretted with stars,
nearly everything outside could be dimly seen.  Of all
lights that is the one most conducive to thought, and
in spite of himself Gordon could not help thinking.
The obstinate questions which he had been able to
crush down during the day were now rising to torment him.

"What will happen when this household which is
now asleep awakes in the morning?" he asked himself.

He knew quite well what would happen.  He would
soon be missed.  Helena would be missed too, and it
would be concluded that they had gone together.  But
after he had banished the picture which rose to his
mind's eye of the confusion that would ensue on the
discovery of their flight, he set himself to defend it.

It was true that he was breaking the pledge he had
made to the people when he undertook to go into
Cairo, but he had made his promise under a mistake as
to his own position, and therefore it was not incumbent
upon him to keep it, now that he knew the truth.

It was true that Helena was breaking the betrothal
which she had entered into with Ishmael, but she, too,
had acted under an error, and therefore her marriage
was not binding upon her conscience.

But do what he would to justify himself, he could
not shake off a sense of deceit and even of treachery.
He thought of Ishmael, and how he had heaped kindness
and honour upon him since he came to Khartoum.  He
thought of Helena, and of the shame with which her
flight would overwhelm the man who considered
himself her husband.

"Go on!" something seemed to say in a taunting
whisper.  "Fly away!  Seek your own happiness and
think of nothing else!  This is what you came to
Khartoum for!  This is what your great hopes and
aims amount to!  Leave this good man in the midst of
the confusion you have brought upon him!  Let him
go into Cairo, innocent though he is, and die by the
cruel error of fate!  That's good!  That's brave!
That's worthy of a man and a soldier!"

Against thoughts like these he tried to set the memory
of old Mahmud's words at the meeting of the Sheikhs:
"Man cannot resist his destiny.  If God wills that you
should go into Cairo you will go, and God will protect
you!"

But there was really only one way to reconcile
himself to what he intended to do, and that was to think
of Helena and to keep her beautiful face constantly
before him.  She was on the other side of the wall, and
she would be awake now—the only other person in the
house who was not asleep—thinking of him and waiting
for the hour when they were to escape.

The luminous dark blue of the air died into the soft
red of the early dawn, the "Wahhed!" of the night
watchmen became less frequent, and the call of Black
Zogal stopped altogether.  It was now three o'clock,
and Gordon, who had not undressed, rose to a sitting
position on his bed.

This brought him face to face with Ishmael, whose
angerib was on the opposite side of the room.  The
Arab was sleeping peacefully.  He, too, had lain down in
his clothes, having to rise early, but he had unrolled his
turban, leaving nothing on his head but his Mecca
skullcap, which made him look like the picture of a saintly
Pope.  The dim light that was filtering through the
windows rested on him as he lay in his white garments
under a white sheepskin.  There was a look of serenity,
of radiance, almost of divinity, in his tranquil face.

Gordon felt as if he were a thief and a murderer—stealing
from and stabbing the man who loved and
trusted him.  He had an almost irresistible impulse to
waken Ishmael there and then, and tell him plainly
what he was about to do.  But the thought of Helena
came back again, and he remembered that that was
quite impossible.

At length he rose to go.  He was still wearing Hafiz's
slippers, but he found himself stepping on his toes to
deaden the sound of his tread.  When he got to the
door he opened it carefully so as to make no noise;
but just at that moment the sleeping man stirred and
began to speak.

In the toneless voice of sleep, but nevertheless with
an accent of affection which Gordon had never heard
from him before, Ishmael said—

"Rani!  *My* Rani!"

Gordon stood and listened, not daring to move.
After a moment all was quiet again.  There was no
sound in the room but Ishmael's measured breathing as
before.

How Gordon got out at last he never quite knew.
When he recovered his self-possession he was in the
guest-room, drawing aside the curtain that covered the
open doorway, and feeling the cool, fresh, odourless
desert air on his hot face and in his nostrils.

He saw Black Zogal stretched out at the bottom of
the wooden steps, fast asleep and with his staff beside
him.  The insurgent dawn was sweeping up, but all
was silent both within and without.  Save for the
Nubian's heavy snoring there was not a sound about
the house.

Feeling his throat to be parched, he turned back to
the water-niche for a drink, and while he was lifting
the can to his lips his eye fell on a letter which had
been left for him there, having come by the train which
arrived late the night before, and then been specially
delivered after he had gone to bed.

The letter, which was in a black-bordered envelope,
was addressed—

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   "SHEIKH OMAR BENANI,
   "*In the care of* ISHMAEL AMEER."

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At first sight the handwriting struck him like a
familiar face, but before he had time to recognise it
he was conscious of a crushing sense of fatality, a
vague but almost heart-breaking impression that while
he had been spending the long, black hours of the night
in building up hopes of flying away with Helena, this
little packet of sealed paper had all the time been
waiting outside his door to tell him they could not go.

He took it and opened it with trembling fingers, and
read it at a glance as one reads a picture.  It was from
Hafiz, and it told him that his mother was dead.

Then all the pent-up pain and shame of the night
rolled over him like a breaking wave, and he dropped
down on the nearest seat and wept like a child.





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   CHAPTER XXIV

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Contrary to Gordon's surmise, Helena had slept soundly,
with the beautiful calm confidence of one who relied
absolutely upon him and thought her troubles were
over; but she awoke at half-past three as promptly as
if an alarum-clock had wakened her.

The arms of Ayesha were then closely encircling her
neck, and it was with difficulty that she liberated
herself without awakening the child, but as soon as she
had done so she could not resist an impulse to kiss
the little one, so boundless was her happiness and so
entirely at that moment had she conquered the sense
that Ishmael's innocent daughter had been a constant
torture to her.

Then dressing rapidly in her usual mixed Eastern
and Western costume, and throwing a travelling cloak
over her shoulders instead of her Indian veil, but giving
no thought to the other belongings which she must
leave behind, she stepped lightly out of the sleeping
room.

The moment she entered the guest-room she heard
a moan, and before realising where it came from, she
said—

"Who's there?"

Then Gordon lifted his tear-stained face to her face,
and, without speaking, held out the letter which hung
from his helpless hand.

She took it and read it with a sense of overwhelming
disaster, while Gordon, with that access of grief which,
at the first moment of a great sorrow, the presence of a
loved one brings, heaped reproaches upon himself, as
if all that he had done at the hard bidding of his
conscience had been a sin and a crime.

"Poor mother!  My poor, dear mother!  It was I
who made her last days unhappy."

Half-an-hour went by in this way, and the time for
going passed.  Helena dared not tell him that their
opportunity for flight was slipping away—it seemed like
an outrage to think of that now—so she stood by his
side, feeling powerless to comfort him, and dazed by the
blow that had shattered their hopes.

Then Black Zogal, being awakened by the sound of
Gordon's weeping, came in with his wild eyes, and after
him came Abdullah, and then Zenoba, who, gathering
an idea of trouble, went off to awaken Ishmael and old
Mahmud, so that in a little while the whole of the
Arab household were standing round Gordon as he sat
doubled up on the edge of a divan.

When Ishmael heard what had happened he was
deeply moved, and sitting down by Gordon's side he
took one of his hands and smoothed it, while in that
throbbing voice which went to the heart of everybody,
and with a look of suffering in his swarthy face and
luminous black eyes, he spoke some sympathetic
words.

"All life ends in death, my brother.  This world is
a place of going, not of staying.  The mystery of
pain—who can fathom it?  Life would be unbearable but
for one thought—that God is over all.  He rules
everything for the best.  Yes, believe me, everything.  I
have had my hours of sorrow too, but I have always
found it so."

After a while Gordon was able to control his grief,
and then Ishmael asked him if he would not read his
letter aloud.  With some reluctance Gordon did so, but
it required all his self-control to repeat his mother's
message.

Leaving out the usual Arabic salutations he began
where Hafiz said—

"With a heavy heart I have to tell you, my most
dear brother, that your sweet and saintly mother died
this morning.  She had been sinking ever since you
went away, but the end came so quickly that it took
us all by surprise."

Gordon's voice thickened, and Ishmael said—

"Take your time, brother."

"She had the consolations of her religion, and I think
she passed in peace.  There was only one thing clouded
her closing hours.  On her deathbed she was constantly
expressing an earnest hope that you might all
be re-united—you and she and your father and Helena,
who are now so far apart."

"Take time, O my brother," said Ishmael, and seeing
that Helena also was moved, he took her hand too, as
if to strengthen her.

Thus he sat between them, comforting both, while
Gordon in a husky voice struggled on—

"Not long before she died she wished to send you a
message, but the power of life was low in her, and she
could not write, except to sign her name (as you see
below), and then she did not know where you were
to be found.  But my mother promised her that I
should take care that whatever she said should come to
your hands, and these were the words she sent: 'Tell
my boy that my last thoughts were about him.  Though
I am sorry he took the side of the false ... the false
prophet——'"

"Go on, brother, go on," said Ishmael in his soft
voice.

"'Say I am certain he did what he thought was
right.  Be sure you tell him I died happy, because
... because I know I shall see him again.  If I am never
to see him in this world I shall do so in the world to
come.  Say ... say I shall be waiting for him there.
And tell him it will not seem long.'"

It was with difficulty that Gordon came to the end,
for his eyes were full of tears and his throat was parched
and tight, and he would have broken down altogether
but for the sense of Helena's presence by his side.

Ishmael was now more deeply moved than before.

"How she must have loved you!" he said, and then
he began to speak of his own mother, and what she had
done for him.

"She was only a poor, ignorant woman perhaps,
but she died to save me, and I loved her with all my
heart."

At that the two black servants, Abdullah and Zogal,
who had been standing before Gordon in silence, tried
to utter some homely words of comfort, and old
Mahmud, wiping his wet eyes, said—

"May God be merciful to your mother, my son, and
forgive her all her sins."

"She was a saint—she never had any," replied
Gordon, whereupon the Arab nurse, who alone of all
that household had looked on at this scene with dry
and evil eyes, said bitterly—

"Nevertheless she died as a Christian and an
unbeliever, therefore she cannot look for mercy."

Then Helena's eyes flashed like fire into the woman's
face, and Gordon felt the blood rush to his head, but
Ishmael was before them both.

"Zenoba, ask pardon of God," he said, and before
the thunder of his voice and the majesty of his glance
the Arab woman fell back.

"Heed her not, my brother," said Ishmael, turning
back to Gordon; and then he added—

"We all serve under the same General, and though
some of us wear uniform of red, and some of brown,
and some of blue, he who serves best is the best soldier.
In the day of victory will our General ask us the colour
of our garments?  No!"

At that generous word Gordon burst into tears once
more, but Ishmael said—

"Don't weep for one who has entered into the joys
of Paradise."

When Gordon had regained his composure Ishmael
asked him if he would read part of the letter again, but
knowing what part it would be—the part about the
prophet—he tried to excuse himself, saying he was not
fit to read any more.

"Then the Rani will read," said Ishmael, and far as
Helena would have fled from the tragic ordeal she
could not escape from it.  So in her soft and mellow
voice she read on without faltering until she came to
her own name, and then she stopped and tears began
to trickle down her cheeks.

"Go on," said Ishmael; "don't be afraid of what
follows."

And when Helena came to "false prophet," he turned
to Gordon and said—

"Your dear mother didn't know how much I love you.
But she knows now," he added, "for the dead know all."

There was no further interruption until Helena had
finished, and then Ishmael said—

"She didn't know, either, what work the Merciful
had waiting for you in Khartoum.  Perhaps you did
not know yourself.  Something called you to come
here.  Something drew you on.  Which of us has not
felt like that?  But God guides our hearts—the
Merciful makes no mistakes."

Nobody spoke, but Gordon's eyes began to shine
with a light which Helena, who was looking at him, had
never seen in them before.

"All the same," continued Ishmael, "you hear what
your mother says, and it is not for me to keep you
against your will.  If you wish to go back now none
shall reproach you.  Speak, Omar; do you wish to
leave me?"

There was a moment of tense silence, in which Gordon
hesitated and Helena waited breathlessly for his reply.
Then with a great effort Gordon answered—

"No."

"El Hamdullillah!" cried the two black servants;
and then Ishmael sent Zogal into the town and the
camp to say that the faithful would bid farewell to
Omar in the mosque the following night.

That evening after sunset, instead of delivering his
usual lecture to the people squatting on the sand in
front of his house, Ishmael read the prayers for the
dead, while Gordon and Helena and a number of the
Sheikhs sat on the divans in the guest-room.

When the service was over, and the company was
breaking up, the old men pressed Gordon's hand as they
were passing out and said—

"May God give you compensation!"

As soon as they were gone Gordon approached Helena
and whispered hurriedly—

"I must speak to you soon—where can it be?"

"I ought to go to the water-women's well by the
Goods Landing to-morrow morning," said Helena.

"At what hour?"

"Ten."

"I shall be there," said Gordon.

His eyes were still full of the strange wild light.





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   CHAPTER XXV

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At ten o'clock next morning Helena was at the well by
the Goods Landing where the water-women draw water
in their earthen jars to water the gardens and the
streets, and while standing among the gross creatures
who, with their half-naked bodies and stark-naked
souls, were crowding about her for what they could
get, she saw Gordon coming down in his Bedouin dress
with a firm, strong step.

His flickering, steel-blue eyes were as full of light as
when she saw them last, but that vague suggestion of
his mother which she had hitherto seen in his face
was gone, and there was a look of his father which she
had never observed before.

"Let us walk this way," he said, indicating a road
that went down to the empty and unfrequented tongue
of land that leads to the point at which the Blue Nile
and the White Nile meet.

"Helena," he said, stepping closely by her side, and
speaking almost in her ear, "there is something I
wish to say—to ask—and everything depends on your
answer—what we are to do and what is to become
of us."

"What is it?" said she, with trembling voice.

"When our escape from Khartoum was stopped by
the letter telling me of my mother's death, I thought
at first it was only an accident—a sad, strange
accident—that it should arrive at that moment."

"And don't you think so now?" she asked.

"No; I think it was a divine intervention."

She glanced up at him.  "He is going to talk about
the betrothal," she thought.

But he did not do so.  In his intense and poignant
voice he continued—

"When I proposed that we should go away together
I supposed your coming here had been due to a
mistake—that my coming here had been due to a mistake—that
your sending that letter into Cairo and my promising
to take Ishmael's place had been due to a mistake—that
it had all been a mistake—a long, miserable
line of mistakes."

"And wasn't it?" she asked, walking on with her
eyes to the sand.

"So far as we are concerned, yes, but with God
... with God Almighty mistakes do not happen."

They walked some paces in silence, and then in a
still more poignant voice he said—

"Don't you believe that, Helena?  Wasn't it true,
what Ishmael said yesterday?  Can you possibly
believe that we have been allowed to go on as we
have been going—both of us—without anything being
meant by it?—all a cruel, stupid, merciless, Almighty
blunder?"

"Well?"

"Well, think of what would have happened if we had
been allowed to carry out our plan.  Ishmael would
have gone into Cairo as he originally intended, and he
would have been seized and executed for conspiracy.
What then?  The whole country—yes, the whole
country from end to end—would have risen in revolt.
The sleeping terror of religious hatred would have been
awakened.  It would have been the affair of El Azhar
over again—only worse, a thousand-fold worse."

Again a few steps in silence, and then—

"The insurrection would have been suppressed of
course, but think of the bloodshed, the carnage!  On the
other hand——"

She saw what was coming, and with difficulty she
walked steadily.

"On the other hand, if *I* go into Cairo, as I have
promised to do—as I am expected to do—there can be
no such result.  The moment I arrive I shall be arrested,
and the moment I am arrested I shall be identified
and handed over to the military authorities to be tried
for my offences as a soldier.  There will be no religious
significance in my punishment, therefore there will be no
fanatical frenzy provoked by it, and consequently there
can be no bloodshed.  Don't you see that, Helena?"

She could not answer; she felt sick and faint.  After
a moment he went on in the same eager, enthusiastic
voice—

"But that's not all.  There is something better than
that."

"Better—do you say better?"

"Something that comes closer to us at all events.
Do you believe in omens, Helena?  That some mystic
sense tells us things of which we have no proof, no
evidence?"

She bent her head without raising her eyes from the
sand.

"Well, I have a sense of some treachery going on in
Cairo that Ishmael knows nothing about, and I believe
it was just this treachery which led to the idea of his
going there at all."

She looked up into his face, and thinking he read
her thought, he said quickly—

"Oh, I know—I've heard about the letters of the
Ulema—that those suggestions of assassination and so
forth were signed by the simple old Chancellor of El
Azhar.  But isn't it possible that a subtler spirit
inspired them? ... Helena?"

"Yes," she faltered.

"Do you remember that one day in the Citadel I
said it was not really Judas Iscariot who betrayed
Jesus, and that there was somebody in Egypt now
who was doing what the High Priest of the Jews did
in Palestine two thousand years ago?"

"The Grand Cadi?"

"Yes!  Something tells me that that subtle old
scoundrel is playing a double sword game—with the
Ulema and with the Government—and that his object
is not only to destroy Ishmael, but, by awakening the
ancient religious terror, to ruin England as well—tempt
her to ruin her prestige, at all events."

They had reached the margin of the river, and he
stopped.

"Well?" she faltered again.

"Well, I am a British soldier still, Helena, even
though I am a disgraced one, and I want to ... I
want to save the good name of my country."

She could not speak—she felt as if she would choke.

"I want to save the good name of the Consul-General
also.  He is my father, and though he no longer thinks
of me as his son, I want to save him from ... from
himself."

"I can do it too," he added eagerly.  "At this
moment I am perhaps the only man who can.  I am
nobody now—only a runaway and a deserter—but I
can cross the line of fire and so give warning."

"But, Gordon, don't you see——"

"Oh, I know what you are going to say, Helena—I
must die for it.  Yes!  Nobody wants to do that, if he
can help it, but I can't!  Listen!"

She raised her eyes to his—they seemed to be ablaze
with a kind of frenzy.

"Death was the penalty of what I did in Cairo, and
if I did not stay there to be court-martialled and
condemned, was it because I wanted to save my life?  No;
I thought there was nothing left in my life that made
it worth saving.  It was because I wanted to give it
in some better cause.  Something told me I should,
and when I came to Khartoum I didn't know what fate
was before me, or what I had to do, but I know now.
*This* is what I have to do, Helena—to go back to Cairo
instead of Ishmael, and so save England and Egypt and
my father and these poor Moslem people, and prevent a
world of bloodshed."

Then Helena, who in her nervousness had been scraping
her feet on the sand, said in a halting, trembling
voice—

"Was this what you wanted to say to me, Gordon?"

"Yes, but now I want you to say something to me."

"What is that?" she asked, trembling.

"*To tell me to go.*"

It was like a blow.  She felt as if she would fall.

"I cannot go unless you send me, Helena—not as
things stand now—leaving you here—under these
conditions—in a place like this—alone.  Therefore tell me
to go, Helena."

Tears sprang to her eyes.  She thought of all the
hopes she had so lately cherished, all the dreams of
the day before of love and a new life among quite
different scenes—sweet scenes full of the smell of new-cut
grass, the rustling of trees, the swish of the scythe,
the songs of birds, and the ringing of church bells,
instead of this empty and arid wilderness—and then of
the ruin, the utter wreck and ruin, that everything was
falling to.

"Tell me to go, Helena—tell me," he repeated.

It was crushing.  She could not bear it.

"I cannot," she said.  "Don't ask me to do such a
thing.  Just when we were going away, too ... expecting
to escape from all this miserable tangle and to
be happy at last——"

"But should we be happy, Helena?  Say we escaped
to Europe, America, Australia, anywhere far enough
away, and what I speak of were to come to pass, should
we be happy—should we?"

"We should be together at all events, and we should
be able to love each other——"

"But could we love each other with the memory of
all that misery—the misery we might have
prevented—left here behind us?"

"At least we should be alive and safe and well."

"Should we be well if our whole life became abominable
to us, Helena? ... On the other hand——"

"On the other hand, you want us to part—never to
see each other again."

"It's hard—I know it's hard—but isn't that better
than to become odious in each other's eyes?"

A cruel mixture of anger and sorrow and despair took
possession of her, and, choking with emotion, she said—

"I have nobody but you now, yet you want me to
tear my heart out—to sacrifice the love that is my only
happiness, my only refuge....  Oh, I cannot do it!
You are asking me to send you into the jaws of death
itself—that's it—the very jaws of death itself—and I
cannot do it.  I tell you I cannot, I cannot!  There is
no woman in the world who could."

There was silence for a moment after this vehement
cry; then in a low tone he said—

"Every soldier's wife does as much when she sends
her husband into battle, Helena."

"Ah!"

She caught her breath as if a hand from heaven had
smitten her.

"Am I not going into battle now?  And aren't you
a soldier's daughter?"

There was another moment of silence in which he
looked out on the sparkling waters of the Blue Nile
and she gazed through clouded eyes on the sluggish
waves of the White.

Something had suddenly begun to rise in her throat.
This was the real Gordon, the hero who had won battles,
the soldier who had faced death before, and she had
never known him until now!

A whirlwind of sensation and emotion seemed to
race through her soul and body.  She felt hot, she felt
cold, she felt ashamed, and then all at once she felt as
if she were being lifted out of herself by the spirit of
the man beside her.  At length she said, trying to
speak calmly—

"You are right, quite right; you are always right,
Gordon.  If you feel like that about going into Cairo
you must go.  It is your duty.  You have received
your orders."

"Helena!" he cried, in a burst of joy.

"You mustn't think about me, though.  I'm sorry
for what I said a while ago, but I'm better now.  I
have always thought that if the time ever came to me
to see my dearest go into battle, I should not allow
myself to be afraid."

"I was sure of you, Helena, quite sure."

"This doesn't look like going into battle, perhaps,
but it may be something still better—going to save life,
to prevent bloodshed."

"Yes, yes!" he said; and struggling to control
herself, Helena continued—

"You mustn't think about leaving me here, either.
Whatever happens in this place, I shall always remember
that you love me, so ... so nothing else will matter."

"Nothing—nothing!"

"And though it may be hard to think that you have
gone to your death, and that I ... that in a sense I
have been the cause of it——"

"But you haven't, Helena!  Your hand may have
penned that letter, but a higher Power directed it."

She looked at him with shining eyes, and answered
in a firmer voice and with a proud lift of her beautiful
head—

"I don't know about that, Gordon.  I only know
that you want to give your life in a great cause.  And
though they have degraded you and driven you out
and hunted you down like a dog, you are going to die
like a man and an Englishman."

"And you tell me to do it, Helena?"

"Yes, for I'm a soldier's daughter, and in my heart
I'm a soldier's wife as well, and I shouldn't be worthy
to be either if I didn't tell you to do your duty,
whatever the consequences to me."

"My brave girl!" he cried, clutching at her hand.

Then they began to walk back.

As they walked they encouraged each other.

"We are on the right road now, Helena."

"Yes, we are on the right road now, Gordon."

"We are doing better than running away."

"Yes, we are doing better than running away."

"The train leaves Khartoum this evening, and I
suppose they want to say farewell to me in the mosque
at sunset....  You'll be strong to the last and not
break down when the time comes for me to go?"

"No, I'll not break down ... when the time comes
for you to go."

But for all her brave show of courage, her eyes were
filling fast and the tears were threatening to fall.

"Better leave me now," she whispered.  "Let me go
back alone."

He was not sorry to let her go ahead, for at sight of
her emotion his own was mastering him.

"Will she keep up to the end?" he asked himself.





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   CHAPTER XXVI

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As the hours of the day passed on, Helena became
painfully aware that her courage was ebbing away.

Unconsciously Ishmael was adding to her torture.
Soon after the midday meal he called on her to write
to his dictation a letter which Gordon was to take into
Cairo...

"One more letter, O Rani, only one, before our friend
and brother leaves us."

It was to the Ulema, telling them of the change in
his plans and begging them to be good to Gordon.

"Trust him and love him.  Receive him as you
would receive me, and believe that all he does and
says is according to my wish and word."

Helena had to write this letter.  It was like writing
Gordon's death-warrant.

Later in the day, seeing her idle, nibbling the top of
the reed pen which she held in her trembling fingers,
Ishmael called for the kufiah.

"Where is the kufiah, O Rani—the kufiah that was
to disguise the messenger of God from his enemies?"

And when Helena, in an effort to escape from that
further torture, protested that in Gordon's case a new
kufiah was not essential, because he wore the costume
of a Bedouin already, Ishmael replied—

"But the kufiah he wears now is white, and every
official in Khartoum has seen it.  Therefore another is
necessary, and let it be of another colour."

At that, with fiendish alacrity, the Arab woman ran
off for a strip of red silken wool, and Helena had to
shape and stitch it.

It was like stitching Gordon's shroud.

The day seemed to fly on the wings of an eagle, the
sun began to sink, the shadows to lengthen on the
desert sand, and the time to approach for the great
ceremony of the leave-taking in the mosque.  Helena
was for staying at home, but Ishmael would not hear
of it.

"Nay, my Rani," he said.  "In the courtyard after
prayers we must say farewell to Omar, and you must
clothe him in the new kufiah that is to hide him from
his foes.  Did you not promise to do as much for me?
And shall it be said that you grudge the same honour
to my friend and brother?"

Half-an-hour afterwards, Ishmael having gone off
hand in hand with Gordon, and old Mahmud and Zenoba
and Ayesha and the two black servants having followed
him, Helena put on a veil for the first time since coming
to Khartoum, and made her way to the mosque.

The streets of the town, as she passed through them,
seemed to be charged with an atmosphere of excitement
that was little short of frenzy; but the courtyard,
when she had crossed the threshold, was like the scene
of some wild phantasmagoria.

A crowd of men and women, squatting about the
walls of the open space, were strumming on native
drums, playing on native pipes, and uttering the weird,
monotonous ululation that is the expression of the
Soudanese soul in its hours of joy.

A moment later Helena was in the gallery, the people
had made way for her, and she was sitting as before
by the Arab woman and the child.  Overhead was a
brazen, blood-red Southern sky; below were a thousand
men on crimson carpets, some in silks, some in rags,
all moving and moaning like tumultuous waves in a
cavern of the sea.

.. _`Helena was in the gallery`:

.. figure:: images/img-096.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: Helena was in the gallery

   Helena was in the gallery

The Reader, in the middle of the mosque, was chanting
the Koran, the muezzin in the minaret was calling
to prayers, the men on the floor were uttering their
many-throated responses, and the very walls of the
mosque itself seemed to be vibrating with religious
fervour.

A moment after Helena had taken her seat Ishmael
entered, followed by Gordon, and the people gathered
round them to kiss their hands and garments.  Helena
felt her head reel, she wanted to cry out, and it was
with difficulty she controlled herself.

Then the Reader stood up in his desk and recited an
invocation, and the people repeated it after him.

"God is Most Great!"

"God is Most Great!"

"There is no god but God! ...

"Mohammed is His Prophet! ...

"Listen to the preacher! ...

"Amen!"

"Amen!"

After that Ishmael rose from his knees before the
Kibleh, took the wooden sword at the foot of the pulpit,
ascended to the topmost step, and, after a preliminary
prayer, began to preach.

Never had Helena seen him so eager and excited, and
every passage of his sermon seemed to increase both
his own ecstasy and the emotion of his hearers.

Helena hardly heard his words, so far away were
her thoughts and so steadfastly were her eyes fixed on
the other figure in front of the Kibleh, but a general
sense of their import was beating on her brain as on
a drum.

All religions began in poverty and ended in corruption.

It had been so with Islam, which began with the
breaking of idols and went on to the worship of wealth,
the quest of power, the lust of conquest—Caliphs
seeking to establish their claim not by election and the
choice of God but by theft and murder.

It had been so with Christianity, which began in
meekness and humility and went on to pride and
persecution—Holy Fathers exchanging their cells for palaces
and their poverty for pomp, forgetting the principle of
their great Master, whose only place in their midst was
in pictured windows, on vaporous clouds, blessing with
outstretched arms a Church which favoured everything
he fought against and a world which practised
everything he condemned.

"What is the result, O my brothers?  War, wealth,
luxury, sensuality, slavery, robbery, injustice, and
oppression!

"Listen to the word of the Holy Koran: 'And
Pharaoh made proclamation among his people, saying,
Is not this Kingdom of Egypt mine and the rivers
thereof?'

"But not in Egypt only, nor alone under the Government
of the King who lives across the seas, but all the
world over, wheresoever human empires are founded,
wheresoever men claim the earth and the fruits of the
earth and the treasures that lie in the bowels of the
earth—impoverishing the children of men to obtain
them, or destroying their souls that they may deck and
delight their bodies—there the Pharaohs of this world
are saying, 'Is not this Kingdom of Egypt mine and the
rivers thereof?'

"But the earth and the fruits of the earth and the
treasures of the earth are God's, my brothers, and He
is coming to reclaim them, and to right the wrongs of
the oppressed, to raise up the downtrodden, and to
comfort the broken-hearted."

The mosque seemed to rock with the shouts which
followed these words, and as soon as the cries of the
people had subsided, the voice of Ishmael, now louder
and more tremulous than before, rang through its vaults
again.

"Deep in the heart of man, my brothers, is the
expectation of a day when the Almighty will send His
Messenger to purify and pacify the world and to banish
intolerance and wrong.  The Jews look for the Messiah,
the Christians for the divine man of Judæa, and we
that are Moslems for the Mahdi and the Christ.

"In all climes and ages, amid all sorrows and sufferings,
sunk in the depths of ignorance, sold into slavery,
the poorest of the poor, the most miserable among
the most miserable of the world, humanity has yet
cherished that great expectation.  Real as life, real as
death, real as wells of water in a desert land to man on
his earthly pilgrimage is the hope of a Deliverer from
oppression and injustice—and who shall say it is vain
and false?  It is true, my brothers, true as the sky
rolling overhead.  Our Deliverer is coming!  He is
coming soon!  He is coming now!"

Ishmael's tremulous voice had by this time broken
into hysterical sobs, and the responses of his hearers
had risen to delirious cries.

More of the same kind followed which Helena did not
hear, but suddenly she was awakened to full consciousness
of what was going on about her by hearing Ishmael
speak of Gordon and the people answering him with
rapturous shouts.

"He is not of our race, yet no doubt enters into our
hearts of his fidelity."

"El Hamdullillah!"

"He is not of our faith, yet he will be true to God
and His people."

"Allah!  Allah!"

"For us he has left his home, his country, and his
kindred."

"Allah!  Allah!  Allah!"

"For us he is going into the place of danger."

"Allah!  Allah!  Allah!"

"What says the Lord in the Holy Koran?—'They
therefore who had left their country and suffered for
My sake I will surely bring them into gardens watered
by rivers—a reward of God.'"

"Allah!  Allah!  Allah!"

"The Lord bless the white man to whom the black
man is a brother!  Bless him in the morning splendour!
Bless him in the still of night!  Bless him with
children—the eye of the heart of man!  Bless him with
the love of woman—the joy and the crown of life!"

"Allah!  Allah!  Allah!"

"And may the Lord of majesty and might who has
hitherto covered his head in battle protect and
preserve him now!"

At this last word the whole company of men on the
floor below—men in silks and men in rags—rose to
their feet, as if they had been one being animated by
one heart, and raising their arms to heaven, cried—

"Allah!  Allah!  Allah!  Allah!"

Helena felt as if some one had taken her by the
throat.  To see these poor, emotional Eastern children,
with their brown and black faces, streaming with tears
and full of love for Gordon, shouting down God's
blessing upon him, was stifling her.

It was like singing his dirge before he was dead.

During the next few minutes Helena was vaguely
aware that Ishmael had come down from the pulpit;
that the Reader was reciting prayers again; that the
men on the crimson carpets were bowing, kneeling,
prostrating themselves and putting their foreheads to
the floor; and finally that the whole congregation was
rising and surging out of the mosque.

When she came to herself once more, somebody by
her side—it was Zenoba—was touching her shoulder
and saying—

"The Master is in the Courtyard and he is calling for
you—come!"

The scene outside was even more tumultuous.  Instead
of the steady solemnity of the service within the
mosque there were the tum-tumming of the drums, the
screeling of the pipes, and the lu-luing of the women.

The great enclosure was densely crowded, but a space
had been cleared in the centre of the courtyard, where
the Ulema of Khartoum, in their grey farageeyahs, were
ranged in a wide half-circle.  In the mouth of this
half-circle Gordon was standing in his Bedouin dress
with Ishmael by his side.

Silence was called, and then Ishmael gave Gordon his
last instructions and spoke his last words of farewell.

"Tell our brothers, the Ulema of Cairo," he said,
"that we are following close behind you, and when the
time comes to enter the city we shall be lying
somewhere outside their walls.  Let them therefore put a
light on their topmost height—on the minaret of the
mosque of Mohammed Ali—after the call to prayers at
midnight—and we shall take that as a sign that the
Light of the World is with you, that the Expected One
has appeared, and that we may enter in peace, injuring
no man, being injured by none, without malice towards
any, and with charity to all."

Then seeing Helena as she came out of the mosque,
veiled and with her head down, he called on her to
come forward.

"Now do as you have always designed and intended,"
he said.  "Cover our friend and forerunner with the
kufiah you have made for him, that until his work is
done and the time has come to reveal himself, he may,
like the angel of the Lord, be invisible to his foes."

What happened after that Helena never quite knew—only
that a way had been made for her through the
throng of wild-eyed people and that she was standing
by Gordon's side.

Down to that instant she had intended to bear herself
bravely for Gordon's sake if not for her own, but
now a hundred cruel memories came in a flood to sap
away her strength—memories of the beautiful moments
of their love, of the little passages of their life together
that had been so tender and so sweet.  In vain she
tried to recover the spirit with which he had inspired
her in the morning, to think how much better it was
that he should die gloriously than live in disgrace, to
feel the justice, the necessity, the inevitableness of what
he was going to do.

It was impossible.  She could think of nothing but
that she was seeing Gordon for the last time, that he
was leaving her behind him, among these Allah-intoxicated
Arabs, that he was going away, not into battle—with
its chance of victory and its hope of life—but
to death, certain death, perhaps shameful death, and
that, say what he would about Fate and Destiny or
the will of God, she herself was sending him to his
doom.

She felt that the tears were running down her cheeks
under her thin white veil, and that Gordon must see
them, but she could not keep them back; and though
she had promised not to break down, she knew that at
that last moment, in the face of the death that was
about to separate them, the dauntless heroine of the
morning was nothing better than a poor, weak,
heart-broken woman.

Meantime the drums and the pipes and the lu-luing
had begun again, and she was conscious that under the
semi-savage din Gordon was speaking to her and
comforting her.

"Keep up!  Be brave!  Nobody knows what may
happen.  I'll write.  You shall hear from me again."

He had taken off the white kufiah which he had
hitherto worn, and she could see his face.  It was
calm—the calmest face in all that vast assembly.

The sight of his face strengthened her, and suddenly
a new element entered into the half-barbaric scene—an
element that was half human and half divine.  These
poor, half-civilised people thought Gordon was going
to risk his life for them; but he was going to
die—deliberately to die for them—to save them from
themselves, from the consequences of their fanaticism, the
panic of their rulers, and the fruits of the age-long
hatred that had separated the black man from the
white.

Helena felt her bosom heave, her nerves twitch, her
fingers dig trenches in her palms, and her thoughts fly
up to scenes of sacrifice which men talk of with bated
breath.

"If he can do it, why can't I?" she asked herself,
and taking the red kufiah, which the Arab woman was
thrusting into her hands, with a great effort she put
it on Gordon—over his head and under his chin and
across his shoulders and about his waist.

It was like clothing him for the grave.

Every eye had been on her, and when her work
was done, Ishmael, who was now weeping audibly,
demanded silence and called on the Ulema to recite the
first Surah—

"Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures——"

When the weird chanting had come to an end the
hoarse voices of the people broke afresh into loud
shouts of "Allah!  Allah!  El Hamdullillah!"

In the midst of the wild maëlstrom of religious frenzy
which followed—the tum-tumming of the drums, the
screeling of the pipes, and the ululation of the
women—Helena felt her hand grasped, and heard Gordon
speaking to her again.

"Don't faint!  Don't be afraid!  Don't break down
at the last moment."

"I'm not afraid," she answered, but whether with
her voice or only with her lips she never knew.

Still the drums, the pipes, the zaghareet, and the
delirious cries of "Allah!"  And to show Gordon that
she felt no fear, that she was not going to faint or to
break down, Helena also, in the fierce tension of the
moment, cried—

"Allah!  El Hamdullillah!"

"That's right!  That's brave!  God bless you!"
whispered the voice by her side.  And again a moment
later—

"God bless and protect you!"

After that she heard no more.  She saw the broad
gate of the Courtyard thrown open—she saw a long
streak of blood-red sand outside—she saw Gordon turn
away from her—she saw Ishmael embrace and kiss
him—she saw the surging mass of hot and streaming black
and brown faces close about him—and then a loud
wind seemed to roar in her ears, the earth seemed to
give way under her feet, the brazen sky seemed to reel
about her head, and again she felt as if she were falling,
falling, falling into a bottomless abyss.

When she recovered consciousness the half-barbaric
scene was over, and she was being carried into the
silence of her own room in the arms of Ishmael, who
with many words of tender endearment was laying her
gently on her bed.





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   CHAPTER XXVII

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That day, under the two crackling flags, the Crescent
and the Union Jack, Lady Mannering had given a party
in the garden of the Palace of the Sirdar.

The physiognomy of the garden had changed since
"the martyr of the Soudan" walked in it.  Where
scraggy mimosa bushes and long camel grasses had
spurted up through patches of sand and blotches of
baking earth there were the pleasant lawns, the sycamores,
the date-trees, and the blue streams of running
water.  And where the solitary soldier, with his daily
whitening head, had paced to and fro, his face to the
ground, smoking innumerable cigarettes, there were a
little group of officers of the military administration,
with their charming wives and daughters, a Coptic
priest, a Greek priest, a genial old Protestant clergyman,
and a number of European visitors, chiefly English
girls, wearing the lightest of white summer costumes,
and laughing and chattering like birds.

In pith helmets and straw hats, Lady Mannering's
guests strolled about in the sunshine or drank tea at
tables that were set under the cool shadow of spreading
trees, while, at a little distance, the band of a black
regiment, the Tenth Soudanese (sons and grandsons of
the very men who in the grey dawn of a memorable
morning had rushed in a wild horde into those very
grounds for their orgy of British blood), played
selections from the latest comic operas of London and New
York.

The talk was the same all over the gardens—of the
new Mahdi and his doings.

"Married to an Indian Princess, you say!"

"Oh yes!  Quite an emancipated person, too!  A
sort of thirty-second cousin of the Rani of Jhansi.  It
seems she was educated by an English governess, kicked
over the traces, became a sort of semi-religious
suffragette, and followed her holy man to Egypt and the
Soudan."

"How very droll!  It is *too* amusing!"

The Sirdar, who had gone indoors some time before,
returned to the garden dressed for a journey.

"Going away, your Excellency?"

"Yes, for a few weeks—to the lower Nile."

His ruddy, good-natured face was less bright than
usual, and his manner was noticeably less buoyant.  A
few of his principal officials gathered about him, and
he questioned them one by one.

"Any fresh news, Colonel?" he said, addressing the
Governor of the city.

"No, sir.  A sort of sing-song to-day in honour of
the Bedouin Sheikh—that's all I hear about."

But the Financial Secretary spoke of further difficulties
in the gathering of taxes—the land tax, the
animal tax, and the tax on the date-trees not having
yet come in—and then the Inspector-General repeated
an opinion he had previously expressed, that everything
gave evidence of a projected pilgrimage, presumably in
a northerly direction and almost certainly to Cairo.

The Governor of the city corroborated this, and
added that his Zabit, his police officer, had said that
Ishmael Ameer, on passing to the mosque that day,
had been saluted in the streets by a screaming multitude
as the "Messenger" and the "Anointed One."

"It's just as I say," said the Inspector-General.
"These holy men develop by degrees.  This one will
hoist his flag as soon as he finds himself strong
enough—unless we stop him before he goes further—and the
Soudan is lost to civilisation."

"Well, we'll see what Nuneham says," said the Sirdar,
and at that moment his Secretary came to say that
the launch was ready at the boat-landing to take him
across the river to the train.

The Sirdar said good-bye to his guests, to his officers,
and to his wife, and as he left the garden of the palace
the Soudanese band, sons of the Mahdi's men, played
the number which goes to the words—

   |  "They never proceed to follow that light,
   |    But always follow me."
   |

Half-an-hour afterwards, while the Sirdar's black
body-guard were ranged up on the platform of the
railway station, and his black servant was packing his
luggage into his compartment, the Governor-General
was standing by the door of the carriage, with his
Aide-de-camp, giving his last instructions to his General
Secretary.

"Telegraph to the Consul-General and say ... but
please make a note of it."

"Yes, sir," said the Secretary, taking out his
pocketbook and preparing to write.

"Think it best to go down myself to deal personally
with matter of suspected mutiny in native army.  Must
admit increasing gravity of situation.  Man here is
undoubtedly acquiring name and influence of Mahdi, so
time has come to consider carefully what we ought to
do.  Signs of intended pilgrimage, probably in northerly
direction, enormous numbers of camels, horses, and
donkeys having been gathered up from various parts
of country and immense quantities of food-stuffs being
bought for desert journey.  Am leaving to-night, and
hope to arrive in four days."

"Four days," repeated the Secretary, as he came to an end.

At that moment a tall man in the costume of a
Bedouin walked slowly up the platform.  His head and
most of his face were closely covered by the loose
woollen shawl which the sons of the desert wear, leaving
only his eyes, his nose, and part of his mouth visible.
As he passed the Sirdar, he looked sharply at him;
then, pushing forward with long strides until he came
to the third-class compartments, he stepped into the
first of them, which was full of coloured people, strident
with high-pitched voices and pungent with Eastern
odours.

"Who was that?" asked the Sirdar.

"I don't know, sir," replied the Secretary.  "I
thought at first it was their Bedouin Sheikh, but I see
I was mistaken."

Then came the whistle of the locomotive, and its slow,
rhythmic, volcanic throb.  The guard saluted, and the
Sirdar got into his carriage.

"Well, good-bye, Graham!  Don't forget the telegram."

"I'll send it at once....  In cypher, sir?"

"In cypher certainly."

At the next moment the Sirdar and Gordon Lord,
travelling in the same train, were on their way to
Cairo.

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   FOURTH BOOK

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   THE COMING DAY

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   CHAPTER I

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The Consul-General had taken a firm grasp of affairs.
Every morning his Advisers and Under-Secretaries
visited him, and it seemed as if they could not come too
often or say too much.  He who rules the machine of
State becomes himself a machine, and it looked as if
Lord Nuneham were ceasing to be a man.

Within a week after the day on which he received
Helena's letter, he was sitting in his bleak library walled
with Blue-Books, with the Minister of the Interior and
the Adviser to the same department.  The Minister
was the sallow-faced Egyptian Pasha whom he had
made Regent on the departure of the Khedive; the
Adviser was a tall, young Englishman with bright red
hair on which the red tarboosh sat strangely.  They
were discussing the "special weapon" which had been
designed to meet special needs.  The Consul-General's
part of the discussion was to expound, the Adviser's
was to applaud, the Minister's was to acquiesce.

The special weapon was a decree.  It was to be
known as the Law of Public Security, and it was intended
to empower the authorities to establish a Special
Tribunal to deal with all crimes, offences, and
conspiracies committed or conceived by natives against the
State.  The Tribunal was to be set up at any time and
at any place on the request of the Agent and Consul-General
of Great Britain; its sentences, which were to be
pronounced forthwith, were not to be subject to appeal;
and it was to inflict such penalties as it might consider
necessary, including the death penalty, without being
bound by the provisions of the penal code.

"Drastic!" said the Pasha, with a sinister smile.

"Necessary," said the Consul-General, with a frown.

The Pasha became silent again while the virtual ruler
of Egypt went on to say that the state of the country
demanded that the Government should be armed with
special powers to meet widespread fanaticism and secret
conspiracy.

"No one deplores more than I do," he said, "that
the existing law of the land is not sufficient to deal
with the new perils by which we are threatened, but it
is not, and therefore we must make it stronger."

"Certainly, my lord," said the red-headed figure in
the fez, and again the sinister face of the Pasha smiled.

"And now tell me, Pasha," said the Consul-General,
"how long a time will it take to pass this law through
the Legislative Council and the Council of Ministers?"

The Pasha looked up out of his small, shrewd eyes,
and answered—

"Just as long or as short as your lordship desires."

And then the Consul-General, who was wiping his
spectacles, put them deliberately on to his nose, looked
deliberately into the Pasha's face, and deliberately
replied—

"Then let it be done without a day's delay, your
Excellency."

A few minutes afterwards, without too much ceremony,
the Consul-General had dismissed his visitors
and was tearing open a number of English newspapers
which Ibrahim had brought into the room.

The first of them, *The Times*, contained a report of
the Mansion House Dinner, headed "UNREST IN THE
EAST.  Important Speech by Foreign Minister."

The Consul-General found the beginning full of
platitudes.  Egypt had become the great gate between
the Eastern and Western hemispheres.  It was essential
for the industry and enterprise of mankind that that
gate should be kept open, and therefore it was necessary
that Egypt should be under a peaceful, orderly, and
legal Government.

Then, lowering the lights, the Minister had begun
to speak to slow music.  While it was the duty of
Government to preserve order, it was also the duty of
a Christian nation in occupation of a foreign country
to govern it in the interests of the inhabitants, and,
speaking for himself, he thought the executive authority
would be strengthened, not weakened, by associating
the people with the work of government.  However
this might be, the public could at least be sure that as
long as the present Ministry remained in power it
would countenance no policy on the part of its
representatives that would outrage the moral, social,
and, above all, religious sentiments of a Moslem
people.

The Consul-General flung down the paper in disgust.

"Fossils of Whitehall!  Dunces of Downing Street!"

For some minutes he tramped about the room, telling
himself again that he didn't care a straw what any
Government and any Foreign Minister might say
because he had a power stronger than either at his
back—the public.

This composed his irritated nerves, and presently
he took up the other newspapers.  Then came a shock.
Without an exception the journals accepted the
Minister's speech as a remonstrance addressed to him,
and reading it so they sympathised with it.

One of them saw that Lord Nuneham, however pure
and beneficent his intentions might be, had no right
to force his ideals upon an alien race.  Another hinted
that he was destroying England's prestige in her
Mohammedan dominions, and, if permitted to go on, he
would not only endanger the peace of Egypt, but also
the safety of our Indian Empire.  And a third,
advocating the establishment of representative
institutions, said that the recent arbitrary action of the
Consul-General showed in glaringly dangerous colours
the faults of the One-Man Rule which we granted to
the King's representative while we denied it to the
King himself.

The great Proconsul was, for some moments, utterly
shaken—the sheet-anchor of his public life was gone.
But within half-an-hour he had called for his First
Secretary and was dictating a letter to the Premier,
who was also the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

"Having read the report of your lordship's speech
at the Mansion House," he said, "I find myself
compelled to tell you that so great a difference between
your lordship's views and mine makes it difficult for
me to remain in Egypt.

"I take the view that nine-tenths of these people
are still in swaddling-clothes, and that any attempt to
associate them with the work of government would do
a grave injustice to the inarticulate masses for whom
we rule the country.

"I also take the view that Egypt is honeycombed
with agitators, who, masquerading as religious
reformers, are sowing sedition against British rule, and
that the only way to deal with such extremists is by
stern repression.

"Taking these views and finding them at variance
with those of your lordship, I respectfully beg to tender
my resignation of the post of H.M.'s Agent, Consul-General
and Minister Plenipotentiary, which I have
held through so many long and laborious years, and
at the same time to express the hope that my successor
may be a man qualified by knowledge and experience
of the East to deal with these millions of Orientals
who, accustomed for seventy centuries to the dictation
of imperial autocrats, are so easily inflamed by fanatics
and yield so readily to the wily arts of spies and secret
conspirators."

Having finished the dictating of his letter, the
Consul-General asked when the next mail left for England,
whereupon the Secretary, whose voice was now as
tremulous as his hand had been, replied that there
would be no direct post for nearly a week.

"That will do.  Copy out the letter and let me
have it to sign."

With a frightened look the Secretary turned to go.

"Wait!  Of course you will observe absolute secrecy
about the contents of it?"

With a tremulous promise to do so the Secretary
left the room.

Then the Consul-General took up a calendar that had
been standing on his desk and began to count the days.

"Five—ten—fifteen, and five days more before I
can receive a reply—it's enough," he thought.

England's eyes would be opened by that time and
the public would see how much the Government knew
about Egypt.  Accept his resignation?  They dare
not!  It would do them good, though—serve as a
rebuke, and strengthen his own hands for the work
he had now to do.

What was that work?  To destroy the man who
had robbed him of his son.





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   CHAPTER II

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Early the next morning the Consul-General received
a letter from the Princess Nazimah, saying she had
something to communicate, and proposed to come to
tea with him.  At five o'clock she came, attended by
sais, footmen, and even eunuch, but wearing the latest
of Paris hats and the lightest of chiffon veils.

Tea was laid on the shady verandah overlooking
the fresh verdure of the garden, with its wall of purple
bougainvillea, and thinking to set the lady at ease
the Consul-General had told Fatimah, instead of
Ibrahim, to serve it.  But hardly had they sat down
when the Princess said in French—

"Send that woman away.  I don't trust women.
I'm a woman myself, and I know too much of them."

A few minutes afterwards she said, "Now you can
give me a cigarette.  Light it.  That will do.  Thank
you!"  Then squaring her plump person in a large
cane chair, she prepared to speak, while the
Consul-General, who was in his most silent mood, composed
himself to listen.

"I suppose you were surprised when this woman who
blossomed out of a harem wrote to say that she was
coming to take tea with you?  Here she is, though,
and now she has something to say to you."

Then puff, puff, puff from the scarlet lips, while the
powdered face grew hard, and the eyes, heavily shaded
with kohl, looked steadfastly forward.

"I have always suspected it, but I discovered it for
certain only yesterday.  And where did I discover it?
In my own salon!"

"What did you discover in your own salon, Princess?"
asked the Consul-General in his tired voice.

"Conspiracy!"

Trained as was the Consul-General's face to
self-command it betrayed surprise and alarm.

"Yes, conspiracy against you and against England."

.. _`"Yes; conspiracy against you and against England"`:

.. figure:: images/img-128.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "Yes, conspiracy against you and against England"

   "Yes, conspiracy against you and against England"

"You mean, perhaps, that the man Ishmael Ameer——"

"Rubbish!  Ishmael indeed!  He is in it, certainly.
In a country like Egypt the holy man always is.
Religion and politics are twins here—Siamese twins, you
may say, for you couldn't get a slip of paper between
them....  What's that?  The Mahdist movement
political?  Perhaps it was, but politics on the top of
religion—the monkey on the donkey's back, you know.
Always so in the East.  The only way to move the
masses is to make an appeal to their religious passions.
*They* know that, and they've not scrupled to use their
knowledge, the rascals!  Rascals, that's what I call
them.  Excuse the word.  I say what I think, Nuneham."

"*They*?  Who are *they*, Princess?"

"The *corps diplomatique*."

Again the stern face expressed surprise.

"Yes, the *corps dip-lo-ma-tique*!" with a dig on
every syllable.  "Half-a-dozen of them were at my
house yesterday and they were not ashamed to let me
know what they are doing."

"And what *are* they doing, Princess?"

"Helping the people to rebel!"

Then throwing away her cigarette the Princess rose
to her feet, and pacing to and fro on the verandah,
with a firm tread that had little of the East and not
much of the woman, she repeated the story she had
heard in her salon—how Ishmael Ameer was to return
to Cairo, with twenty, thirty, forty thousand of his
followers, and some fantastic dream of establishing a
human society that should be greater, nobler, wider,
and more God-like than any that had yet dwelt on this
planet; how the diplomats laughed at the ridiculous
hallucination, but were nevertheless preparing to support
it in order to harass the Government and dishonour
England.

"But how?"

"By finding arms for the people to fight with if you
attempt to keep their Prophet out!  Ask your Inspectors!
Ask your police!  See if rifles bought with
foreign money are not coming into Cairo every day."

By this time it was the Consul-General who was
pacing up and down the verandah, while the Princess,
who sat to smoke another cigarette, repeated the
opinions of the foreign representatives one by
one—Count This, who was old and should know better if
white hairs brought wisdom; Baron That, who was
as long as a palm tree but without a date; and the
Marquis of So-and-So.

"They tell *me* because I'm a Turk; but a Turk need
not be a traitor, so I'm telling you."

The iron face of the Consul-General grew white and
rigid, but, saying nothing, he continued to pace to
and fro.

"Why don't you turn them all out?  They are
making nothing but mischief.  The head of the idle
man is the house of the devil, and the best way is
to pull it down.  Why not?  Capitulations!  Pooh!
While the meat hangs above, the dogs will quarrel
below.  Dogs, that's what I call them.  Excuse the
word.  I speak what I think."

"And the Egyptians—what are they doing?"

"What are they always doing?  Conspiring with
your enemies to turn you out of the country on the
ground that you are trampling on their religious liberty."

"Which of them?"

"All of them—pashas, people, effendis, officials, your
own Ministers—everybody."

"Everybody?"

"Everybody!  The stupids!  They can't see farther
than the ends of their noses, or realise that they would
only be exchanging one master for fourteen.  What
would Egypt be then?  A menagerie with all the gates
of the cages open.  Oh, I know!  I say what I think!
I'm their Princess, but they can take my rank to-morrow
if they wish to."

The second cigarette was thrown away, and a powder-puff
and small mirror were taken from a silver bag that
hung from the lady's wrist.

"But serve you right, you English!  You make the
same mistake everywhere.  Education!  Civilisation!
Judicial reform!  Rubbish!  The Koran tells the
Moslem what to believe and what to do, so what does
he want with your progress?"

The powder-puff made dabs at the white cheeks, but
the lady continued to talk.

"Your Western institutions are thrown away on
him.  It's like a beautiful wife married to a blind
husband—a waste!"

The sun began to set behind the wall of purple creeper
and the lady rose to go.

"No news of your Gourdan yet?  No?  He was the
best of the bunch, and I simply lost my heart to him.
You should have kept him more in hand though....
You couldn't?  You, the greatest man in....  Well,
there's something to say for the Eastern way of bringing
up boys, it seems."

Passing through the drawing-room the Princess came
upon the portrait of Helena, which used to stand by
Lady Nuneham's bed.

"Ah, the moon!  The beauty!  Bismillah!  What
did Allah give her such big black eyes for?  Back in
England, isn't she?  My goodness, there was red blood
in that girl's veins, Nuneham!  God have mercy upon
me, yes!  You should have heard her talk of your
Ishmael!"

The Princess put the portrait to her lips and kissed
it, then closed her eyes and said with a voluptuous
laugh—

"Ah, *mon Dieu*, if this had only been a Muslemah,
you wouldn't have had much trouble with your Mahdi!"

Hardly had the Consul-General returned to his
library after the departure of the Princess when his
Secretary brought him a telegram from the Sirdar—the
same that he had dictated at Khartoum, telling of the
intended visit to Cairo, of the preparations for Ishmael's
projected pilgrimage, and of the danger that was likely
to arise from the growing belief in the Prophet's "divine"
inspiration.

"So our friend is beginning to understand the man
at last," he said, with an expression of bitter joy.
"Meet him on his arrival.  Tell him I have much to say."

That night when the Consul-General went up to his
bedroom—the room in which alone the machine became
the man—he was thinking, as usual, of Gordon.

"Such power, such fire, such insight, such resource!
My own son too, and worth all the weaklings put
together!  Oh, that he could be here now—now, when
every hand seems to be raised against his father!  But
where is he?  What is he doing?  Only God can say."

Then the Consul-General remembered what the
Princess had said about Helena.  Ah, if those two
could have carried on his line—what a race!  So pure,
so clean, so strong!  But that was past praying for
now, and woe to the day when they had said to him,
"A man child is born to you."

After that the Consul-General thought of Ishmael, and
then the bitterness of his soul almost banished sleep.
He had known from the first that the man could not
be working alone; he had known, too, that some of
England's "allies" were her secret enemies, but a
combination of Eastern mummery with Western treachery
was more than he had reckoned upon.

"No matter!  I'll master both of them!" he thought.

A great historical tragedy should be played before
the startled audience of disunited Europe, whose
international jealousies were conspiring with religious
quackeries to make the government of Egypt impossible, and
when the curtain fell on that drama England would be
triumphant, he would himself be vindicated, and the
"fossils of Whitehall" would be ashamed.

Last of all he thought of the Egyptian Ministers.
These were the ingrates he had made and worked with,
but they were no fools, and it was difficult to
understand why they were throwing in their lot with a
visionary mummer who was looking for a millennium.

"I am at a loss to know what to think of a world in
which such empty quackery can be supported by sane
people," he thought.

There was one sweeter thought left, though, and as
the Consul-General dropped off to sleep he told himself
that, thanks to Helena, he would soon have Ishmael in
his hands, and then he would kill him as he would kill
a dangerous and demented dog.





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   CHAPTER III

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During the next few days the Consul-General was
closely occupied.  The Law of Public Security being
promulgated, he called upon the Minister of the Interior
to call upon the Commandant of Police to issue a
warrant for the arrest of Ishmael Ameer.

"But where *is* Ishmael Ameer?" asked the Minister.

When this was reported to the Consul-General his
stern face smiled, and he said—

"Let him wait and see."

Early one morning his Secretary came to his room to
say that the Sirdar had arrived from Khartoum, and
had gone on to headquarters, but would give himself the
pleasure of calling upon his lordship before long.

"Tell him it must be soon—there is much to do,"
said the Consul-General.

Later the same day the Commandant of Police came,
with a knowing smile on his ruddy face, to say that the
Bedouin had reached Cairo, and that he had been
followed to the Serai Fum el Khalig, the palace of the
Chancellor of El Azhar, where he had already been
visited by the Grand Mufti, some of the Ministers,
certain of the Diplomatic Corps and nearly the whole
of the Ulema.

"Was he alone?" asked the Consul-General.

"Quite alone, your lordship, and now he is as safely
in our hands as if he were already under lock and key."

"Good!  What did you say his address was?"

"Serai Fum el Khalig."

"Palace Fum el Khalig," repeated the Consul-General,
making a note on a marble tablet which stood on his
desk.

Later still, very late, the Grand Cadi came with the
same news.  The suave old Moslem judge was visibly
excited.  His pale, lymphatic, pock-marked cheeks, his
earth-coloured lips, his base eyes, and his nose as sharp
as a beak, gave him more than ever the appearance of
a fierce and sagacious bird of prey.  After exaggerated
bows, he began to speak in the oily, half-smothered
voice of one who lives in constant fear of being overheard.

"Your Excellency will remember that when on former
occasions I have had the inestimable privilege of
approaching your honourable person in order to warn you
that if you did not put down a certain Arab innovator
the result would be death to the rule of England in
Egypt, your Excellency has demanded proofs."

"Well?"

"I am now in a position to provide them."

"State the case precisely," said the Consul-General.

"Your Excellency will be interested to hear that a
person of some consequence has arrived in Cairo."

Trained to self-control, the Consul-General conquered
an impulse to say, "I know," and merely said, "Who
is he?"

"He calls himself Sheikh Omar Benani, and is
understood to be the wise and wealthy head of the great
tribe of the Ababdah Bedouins who inhabit the country
that lies east of Assouan to the Red Sea."

"Well?"

"The man who calls himself Omar Benani is—Ishmael
Ameer."

At that the base eyes glanced up with a look of
triumph, but the Consul-General's face remained
immovable.

"Well?"

"No doubt your Excellency is asking yourself why
he comes in this disguise, and if your Excellency will
deign to give me your attention I will tell you."

"I am listening."

"Ishmael Ameer pretends to be a reformer intent
upon the moral and intellectual regeneration of Islam,
and he preaches the coming of a golden age in which
unity, peace and brotherhood are to reign throughout
the earth.

"Well?"

"With this ridiculous and impracticable propaganda
he has appealed to many wild and ardent minds, so that
a vast following of half-civilised people whom he has
gathered up in the Soudan are to start soon—may have
started already—for this city, which they believe to be
the Mecca of the new world."

"Well?"

"Ishmael Ameer pretends to have come to Cairo in
advance of his followers to prepare for that millennium."

"And what has he really come for?"

"To establish a political State."

Down to that moment the Consul-General had been
leaning back in his chair in the attitude of one who
was listening to something he already knew, but now
he sat up sharply.

"Is this a fact?"

"It is a fact, your Excellency.  And if your
Excellency will once more deign to grant me your
attention, I will put you in possession of a secret."

"Go on," said the Consul-General.

Instinctively the suave old judge drew his legs up
on his chair and fingered his amber beads.

"Your Excellency will perhaps remember that owing
to differences of opinion with the Khedive—may Allah
bless him!—you were compelled to require that for a
while he should leave the country."

"Well?"

"He went to Constantinople with the intention of laying
his grievances against England before His Serenity
the Sultan—may the Merciful give him long life!"

"Well?"

"The Sultan is a friend of England, your Excellency—the
Khedive was turned away."

"And then?"

"Then he went to Paris, as your Excellency is probably aware."

"Well?"

"Perhaps your Excellency supposes that he occupied
himself with the frivolities of the gay capital of
France—dinners, theatres, dances, races?  But no!  He had
two enemies now, England and Turkey, and he presumed
to think he could punish both."

"How?  In what way?"

"By founding a secret society for the conquest of
Syria, Palestine and Arabia, and the establishment of
a great Arab Empire with himself as its Caliph and
Cairo as its capital."

"Well?  What happened?"

"Need I say what happened, your Excellency?  By
means of his great wealth he was able to send out
hundreds of paid emissaries to every part of the Arabic
world, and Ishmael Ameer was the first of them."

The Consul-General was at length startled out of all
his composure.

"Can you prove this?" he said.

"Your Excellency, if I say anything I can always
prove it."

The Consul-General's brow grew more and more severe.

"And his name—his assumed name—what did you
say it was?"

"Sheikh Omar Benani."

"Sheikh Omar Benani," repeated the Consul-General,
making another note on his marble tablet.

"That is enough for the present," he said.  "I have
something to do to-night.  I must ask your Eminence
to excuse me."

After the Grand Cadi had gone, with many sweeping
salaams, various oily compliments, and that cruel
gleam in his base eyes which proceeds only from base
souls, the Consul-General rang sharply for his Secretary.

"We have not yet made out our invitations for the
King's dinner—let us do so now," he said.

He threw a sheet of paper across the table to his
Secretary, who prepared to make notes.

"First, the Diplomatic Corps—every one of them."

"Yes, my lord."

"Next, our Egyptian Ministers and the leading
members of the Legislative Council."

"Yes, my lord."

"Next, the more prominent Pashas and Notables."

"Yes!"

"Of course our own people as usual, and finally——"

"Yes?"

"Finally, the Ulema of El Azhar."

The Secretary looked up in astonishment.

"Oh, I know," said the Consul-General.  "They
have never been invited before, but this is a special
occasion."

"Quite so, my lord."

The Consul-General fixed his eyeglass and took up
his marble tablet.

"In writing to the Chancellor of El Azhar at the
Palace Fum el Khalig," he said, "enclose a card for
the Sheikh Omar Benani."

"Sheikh Omar Benani."

"Say that hearing that one so highly esteemed
among his own people is at present on a visit to Cairo,
I shall be honoured by his company."

"Yes, my lord."

"That will do.  Good-night!"

"Good-night, my lord."

It was early morning before the Consul-General went
to bed.  The Grand Cadi's story, being so exactly what
he wanted to believe, had thrown him entirely off his
guard.  It appeared to illuminate everything that had
looked dark and mysterious—the sudden advent of
Ishmael, the growth of his influence, the sending out
of his emissaries, his projected pilgrimage, and the
gathering up of camels and horses in such enormous
quantities as even the Government could not have
commanded in time of war.

It accounted for Ishmael's presence in Cairo, and
his mission (as described by Helena) of drawing off the
allegiance of the Egyptian army.  It accounted, too,
for the treachery of the Ministers, Pashas and Notables,
who were too shrewd and too selfish (whatever the riff-raff
of the Soudan might be) to risk their comfortable
incomes for a religious chimera.

Yes, the Khedive's money and the substantial prospect
of establishing a vast Arab Empire, not the vague
hope of a spiritual millennium, had been the power
that worked these wonders.

It vexed him to think that his old enemy whom he
had banished had been more powerful in exile than at
home, and it tortured him to reflect that Ishmael had
developed, with the religious malady of the Mahdi, his
political mania as well.

But no matter!  He would be more than a match for
all these forces, and when his great historical drama
came to be played before the eyes of astonished humanity,
it would be seen that he had saved, not England only
but Europe, and perhaps civilisation itself.

Thus, for three triumphant hours, the Consul-General
saw himself as a patriot trampling on the enemies of
his country; but hardly had he left the library and
begun to climb the stairs of his great, empty, echoing
house, switching off the lights as he ascended, and
leaving darkness behind him, than the statesman sank
back on the man—the broken, bereaved human being—and
he recognised his motives for what they were.

A few minutes after he had reached his bedroom
Fatimah entered it with a jug of hot water, and found
him sitting with his head in his hands, looking fixedly
at the portrait in the black-and-gilt frame of the little
lad in an Arab fez.

"Ah, everybody loved that boy," she said, whereupon
the old man raised his head and dismissed her brusquely.

"You ought to be in bed by this time—go at once,"
he said.

"Dear heart, so ought your lordship," said the
Egyptian woman.

The Consul-General could dismiss Fatimah, but there
was some one he could not get rid of, the manly, magnificent,
heart-breaking young figure that always lived in
his mind's eye, with its deadly white face, its trembling
lower lip, and its quivering voice, which said, "General,
the time may come when it will be even more painful
to you to remember all this than it has been to me to
bear it."

Where was he now?  What was he doing?  His son,
his only son, all that was left to him!

There was only one way to lay that ghost, and the
Consul-General did so by telling himself with a sort
of fierce joy that wherever Gordon might be he must
soon hear that Ishmael, in a pitiful and tricky disguise,
had been discovered in Cairo, and then he would see
for himself what an arrant schemer and unscrupulous
charlatan was the person for whom he had sacrificed
his life.

With that bitter-sweet thought the lonely old man
forced back the tears that had been gathering in his
eyes and went to bed.





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   CHAPTER IV

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   \I

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   "SERAI FUM EL KHALIG,
       "CAIRO.

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"MY DEAREST HELENA,—Here I am, you see, and I am
not arrested, although I travelled in the same train with
the Sirdar, met him face to face on the platform at
Khartoum, again on the platform at Atbara, again on
the landing place at Shelal, and finally in the station
at Cairo, where he was received on his arrival by his
officers of the Egyptian army, by my father's first
Secretary, and by the Commandant of Police.

"I was asking myself what this could mean, whether
your black boy had reached his destination, and if your
letter had been delivered, when suddenly I became aware
that I was being observed, watched and followed to this
house, and by that I knew that in this land of mystery
my liberty was to be allowed to me a little longer for
reasons I have still to fathom.

"This is the home of the Chancellor of El Azhar, and
I have delivered Ishmael's letter announcing the change
of plan whereby I have come into Cairo instead of him,
but I have pledged the good old man to secrecy
on that subject, for the present at all events, giving
him my confident assurance that in common with the
best of the Ulema he is being wickedly deceived and
made an innocent instrument for the destruction of
his own cause.

"My dear Helena, I was right.  My vague suspicions
of that damnable intriguer the Grand Cadi were justified.
Already I realise that after fruitless efforts to inveigle
Ishmael into schemes of anarchical rebellion it was he
who conceived the conspiracy, which has taken our
friend by storm, in the form of a passive mutiny of the
Egyptian army.  The accursed scoundrel knows well
it cannot be passive, that somewhere and somehow it
will break into active resistance, but that is precisely
what he desires.  As I told you, it is the old trick of
Caiaphas over again, and that is the lowest, meanest,
dirtiest thing in history.

"Query, is he playing the same game with the
Consul-General?  I am sure he is, and when I think that
England and my father may be in as much danger as
Egypt and Ishmael from the man's devilish machinations,
I am more than ever certain that Providence had
a purpose in bringing me to Cairo, and I feel reconciled
to the necessity of living here in this threefold disguise,
being one thing to Ishmael, another to the Grand Cadi
and Co., and a third to the Government and police.
I feel reconciled too, or almost reconciled, to the
necessity of leaving you where you are, for the present at
all events, although it rips me like a sword-cut as often
as I think of it.

"I have sent for Hafiz and expect to hear through
him what is happening at the Agency, but I am hoping
he will not come until morning, for to-night I can think
of nothing but ourselves.  When I left you at Khartoum
I felt that higher powers were constraining and
controlling me, and that I was only yielding at last to an
overwhelming sense of fatality.  I thought I had made
every possible effort, had exhausted every means and
had nothing to reproach myself with, but hardly had I
got away into the desert when a hand seemed to grasp
me at the back of my neck and to say, 'Why did you
leave her behind?'

"In Ishmael's house and in that atmosphere of
delirious ecstasy in the mosque it was easy to think it
necessary for you to remain, otherwise my purpose in
going away must from the first be frustrated, but
awakening in the morning in my native compartment, with
men and boys lying about on sacks, the sandy daylight
filtering through the closed shutters of the carriage
and the train full of the fetid atmosphere of exhausted
sleep, I could not help but protest to myself that at
any cost whatever I should have found a way to bring
you with me.

"Thank God, if I have left you behind in that trying
and false position it is with no Khalifa, no corrupt
and concupiscent fanatic, but a man of the finest
and purest instincts, who is too much occupied with
his spiritual mission, praise the Lord, to think of the
beautiful woman by his side, so I tell myself it was the
will of Providence, and there is nothing to do now
but to leave ourselves in the hands of fate.

"Good-night, dearest!  *D.V.* I'll write again to-morrow."

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   \II

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"Have just seen Hafiz.  The dear old fellow came
racing up here at six o'clock this morning, with his big
round face like the aurora borealis, shining in smiles
and tears.  Heavens, how he laughed and cried and
swore and sweated!

"He thought his letter about my mother's death
had brought me back, and when I gave him a hint of
my real errand he nearly dropped with terror.  It seems
that among my old colleagues in Cairo my reputation
is now of the lowest, being that of a person who was
bribed—God knows by whom—to do what I did.  As
a consequence it will go ill with me, according to Hafiz,
if I should be discovered, but as that is pretty certain
to happen in any case I am not too much troubled,
and find more interest in the fact that your boy Mosie
is staying at the Agency and that consequently my
father must have received your letter.

"My dear Helena, my 'mystic sense' has been right
again.  The Grand Cadi continues to pay secret visits
to the Consul-General.  That much Hafiz could say
from his intercourse with his mother, and it is
sufficient to tell me that, by keeping a running sore open
with my father, the scoundrel counts on destroying not
only Ishmael but England, by leading her to such
resistance as will result in bloodshed, and thus dishonour
her in the eyes of the civilised world and leave Egypt
a cockpit in which half the foreign Powers will fight
for themselves, no matter who may suffer.

"What should I do?  God knows!  I have an almost
unconquerable impulse to go straight to my father and
open his eyes to what is going on.  He is enveloped by
intrigues and surrounded by enemies in high places—his
Egyptian Ministers, the creatures of his own
creation; some of the foreign diplomats, the European
leeches who suck his blood while they pretend to be
his friends, and above all this rascally Cadi, with his
sleek face and double-sword game.

"But what can I say?  What positive fact can I
yet point to?  Will my father believe me if I tell him
that Ishmael's following which is coming up to Cairo
is not, as he thinks, an armed force?  That the Grand
Cadi & Co. are a pack of lying intriguers, each one
playing for his own hand?

"My father is a great man who probably does not
need and would certainly resent my compassion, but,
Lord God, how I pity him!  Alone, in his old age,
after all he has done for Egypt!  As for his Secretaries
and Advisers, he has not brought them up to help him,
and I would enlarge the Biblical warning about not
putting one's trust in princes to include parvenus as
well.

"My dear Helena, where are you now, I wonder?
What is happening to you?  What occurred after I
left Khartoum?  These are the questions which during
half the day and nearly the whole of the night are
hammering, hammering, hammering on my brain.
Ishmael was to follow me in a few days, so I suppose
you are on the desert by this time.  The desert!  In
the midst of that vast horde!  The scourings of a
whole continent!  Poor old Hafiz had something like
a fit when I told him you were not in England but in
the Soudan, yet as a fatalist he feels bound to believe
that everything will work out for the best and he asks
me to send his high regard to you.

"It gives one a strange sensation, and is almost like
seeing things from another state of existence, to be
here in Cairo walking about unrecognised amid the
familiar sights, and hearing the gun fired from the
Citadel every day; but the sharpest twinge comes of
the hacking thought of where *you* are and what
circumstances surround you.  In fact, memory is always
playing some devilish trick with me and raking up
thoughts of the condition in which I found you in
Khartoum.

"Helena, my dear Helena, I have an immense faith
in your strength and your courage.  You are mine,
mine, mine—remember that!  *I* do—I have to—all
the time.  That is what sets me at ease in my dark
hours and gives sleep, as the Arabs say, to my eyelids.
For the rest, we must resign ourselves and continue to
wait for the direction of fate.  The fact that I was
not arrested in the character of Ishmael immediately
on my arrival in Cairo makes me think Hafiz may be
right—that, *D.V.* one way or another, God knows
how, everything is working out for the best.  It's
damned easy to say that, I know, but, upon my soul,
dearest, I believe it.  So keep up heart, my poor old
girl, and God bless you!  GORDON.

"*P.S.*—I'll hold this letter back until I think you
must be nearing Assouan, and then send it *D.V.* by
safe hands to be delivered to you there.

"*P.P.S.*—I open my envelope to tell you of a new
development!  I am invited with the Chancellor of
El Azhar to the Consul-General's dinner in honour of
the King's Birthday.  This, in the character of Sheikh
Omar Benani, who is, it seems, the chief of the tribe
of the Ababdah, inhabiting the wild country between
Assouan and the Red Sea, a person with a great
reputation for wealth and wisdom, and a man whose word
is truth.

"What does it mean?  One thing certainly—that
acting on the information contained in your letter the
authorities are mistaking me for Ishmael Ameer, and
proposing some scheme to capture me.  But why don't
they take me without further ado?  What unfathomable
reason can there be for the delay in doing so?
Intrigue on intrigue!  I must wait and see.

"Meantime I am asking myself where the real Ishmael
is and what he is doing now?  Is the belief in his
'divine' guidance increasing?  Is he acquiring the
influence of a Mahdi?  If so, God help him!  God
help his people!  God help my father!  God help
everybody!

"But sit tight, my girl!  Something good is going
to happen to us!  I feel it, I know it!  All my love to
you, Helena!  Maa-es-salamah!"





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   CHAPTER V

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   \I

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"KHARTOUM.

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"MY DEAR, DEAR GORDON,—Gone!  You are actually
gone!  I can hardly believe it.  It must be like this to
awaken from chloroform after losing one's right hand,
only it must be something out of my heart in this
instance, for though I have not shed a tear since you
went away and do not intend to shed one, I have a wild
sense of weeping in the desolate chambers of my soul.

"Writing to you?  Certainly I am.  Gordon, do you
know what you have done for me?  You have given
me faith in your 'mystic senses,' and by virtue of
certain of my own I am now sure that you are not dead,
and that you are not going to die, so I am writing to
you out of the chaos that envelops me, having no one
here to speak to, literally no one, and being at present
indifferent to the mystery of what is to become of my
letter.

"It seems I fainted in the mosque after that wild
riot of barbaric sounds, and did not come back to full
consciousness until next morning, and then I found the
Arab woman and the child attending on me in my
room.  Naturally I thought I might have been delirious
and I was in terror lest I had betrayed myself, so I
asked what I had been saying in my sleep, whereupon
Zenoba protested that I had said nothing at all, but
Ayesha, the sweet little darling, said I had been calling
upon the great White Pasha (meaning General Gordon)
whose picture (his statue) was by the Palace gates.
What an escape!

"Of course my first impulse was to run away, but at
the next moment I saw that to do so would be to defeat
your own scheme in going, and that as surely as it had
been your duty to go into Cairo, it was mine to remain
in Khartoum.  But all the same I felt myself to be a
captive—as surely a captive as any white woman who
was ever held in the Mahdi's camp—and it did not
sweeten my captivity to remember that I had first
become a prisoner of my own free will.

"If I am a captive I am under no cruel tyrant, though,
and Ishmael's kindness is killing me.  I was certainly
wrong about him in Cairo, and his character is
precisely the reverse of what I expected.  Little Ayesha
tells me that during the night I lay unconscious her
father did not sleep at all, but kept coming into the
guest-room every hour to ask for news of me, and now
he knocks at my door a dozen times a day, asking if I
am better, and saying 'To morrow, please God, you will
be well.'  It makes me wretched, and brings me dreadfully
near to the edge of tears, remembering what I have done
to him and how certainty his hopes will be destroyed.

"Naturally his people have taken his cue, and last
night Black Zogal gathered up a crowd of half-crazy
creatures like himself to say a prayer for me at the
Saint's house which is just outside my window.

"'Thou knowest our White Lady, O Father Gabreel,
that she is betrothed to our Master, and that his heart
is low and his bread is bitter because she is sick.  Make
her well if it please God, O Father Gabreel!'  Thus
the simple-hearted children of the desert called down
God's spirit to their circle of fire for me, and after loud
cries of 'Allah!  Allah!' going on for nearly an hour,
they seemed to be content, for Zogal said—

"'Abu Gabreel hears, O my brothers, and to-morrow,
please God, our sister will be well.'

"I had been reaching up in bed to look and listen,
and when all was over I wanted to lay down my head
and howl.

"The time has come for the people to start on their
pilgrimage, but Ishmael insists upon postponing the
journey until I have quite recovered.  Meantime Zenoba
is trying to make mischief, and to-day when the door
of my room was ajar, I heard her hinting to Ishmael
that the White Lady was not really ill but only
pretending to be—a bit of treachery for which she got no
thanks, being as sharply reproved as she was on the
morning of your mother's letter.

"That woman makes a wild cat of me.  I can't help
it—I hate her!  Of course I see through her, too.  She
is in love with Ishmael, and though I ought to pity
her pangs of jealousy there are moments when I want
to curse her religion and the dawn of the day of her
birth and her mother and her grandmother.

"There!  You see I have caught the contagion of
the country; but I am really a little weak and out of
heart to-night, dear, so perhaps I had better say
good-night!  Good-night, my dearest!"

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   \II

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"Oh dear!  Oh dear!  I could not bear to play the
hypocrite any longer, so I got up to-day and told
Ishmael I was well, and therefore he must not keep
back his pilgrimage any longer.  Such joy!  Such
rejoicing!  It would break my heart, if I had any here,
but having sent all I possess to Cairo I could do nothing
but sit in the guest-room and look on at the last of the
people's preparations for the desert journey—tents and
beds being packed, and camels and horses and donkeys
brought in to a continuous din of braying and grunting
and neighing.

"We are to start away to-morrow morning, and this
afternoon when that fact was announced to me I was
so terrified by the idea of being dragged over the desert
like a slave that I asked Ishmael to leave me behind.
His face fell, but—would you believe it?—he agreed,
saying I was not strong enough to travel and Zenoba
should stay to nurse me.  At that I speedily repented
of my request and asked him to allow me to go, whereupon
his face lightened like a child's, and with joy he
agreed again, saying the Arab woman should go to
take care of me, for Ayesha was a big girl now and
needed a nurse no longer.  This was jumping out of
the frying-pan into the fire, and I protested that I was
quite able to look after myself; but, out of his anxiety
for my health, Ishmael would not be gainsaid, and the
Arab woman said, 'I'll watch over you like my eyes,
my sister.'  I am sure she will, the vixen!"

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   \III

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"We have left Khartoum and are now on the desert.
The day had not yet dawned when we were awakened
by a tattoo of pipes and native drums—surely the
weirdest sound in the darkness that ever fell on mortal
ear, creeping into the pores and getting under the very
skin.  Then came a din, a roar, a clamour—the grunting
and gurgling and braying of five thousand animals
and as much shouting and bellowing of human tongues
as went to the building of the tower of Babel.

"The sun was rising, and there was a golden belt of
cloud in the Eastern sky by the time we were ready to
go.  They had brought a litter on a dromedary for me,
and I was almost the last to start.  It was hard to part
from the child, for though her sweet innocence had
given me many a stab and I felt sometimes as if she had
been created to torture me, I had grown to love her,
and I think she loved me.  She stood as we rode away,
with a big tear ready to drop on to her golden cheek
and looked after me with her gazelle-like eyes.  Sweet
little Ayesha, creature of the air and the desert, I
shall see her no more!

"Crossing the Mahdi's open-air mosque at Omdurman,
where we said morning prayers, we set our faces
northward over the wild halfa grass and clumps of mimosa
scrub, and as soon as we were out in the open desert
with its vast sky I saw how gigantic was our caravan.
The great mass of men and animals seemed to stretch
for miles across the yellow sand, and looked like an
enormous tortoise creeping slowly along.

"We camped at sunset in the Wadi Bishara, the signal
for the bivouac being the blowing of a great elephant-horn
which had a thrilling effect in that lonesome
place.  But more thrilling still was the effect of evening
prayers, which began as soon as the camels and horses
and donkeys had been unsaddled, and their gruntings
and brayings and gurglings, as well as the various noises
of humanity, had ceased.

"The afterglow was flaming along the flat sand,
giving its yellow the look of bronze, when all knelt
with their faces to the East—Ishmael in front with
sixty or seventy rows of men behind him.  It was
really very moving and stately to see, and made me
understand what was meant by somebody who said he
could never look upon Mohammedans at prayers, and
think of the millions of hearts which at the same hour
were sending their great chorus of praise to God,
without wishing to be a Moslem.  I did not wish to be that,
but with the odious Arab woman always watching me,
I found myself fingering my rosary and pretending to
be a good Muslemah, though in reality I was repeating
the Lord's Prayer.

"It is dark night now, the fires at which the people
baked their durah and cooked their asida are dying
down, and half the camp is already asleep in this huge
wild wilderness, under its big white stars.

"I must try to sleep too, so good-night, dearest,
and God bless you!  I don't know what is to be the
end of all this, or where I am to dispatch my letter,
or when you are to receive it, but I am sure you are
alive and listening to me—and what should I do if I
could not talk to you?  HELENA."





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   CHAPTER VI

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   \I

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"SOUDAN DESERT (*somewhere*).

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"It is ten days, my dear Gordon, since I wrote my
last letter, and there has never been an hour between
when I dared pretend to this abomination of Egypt
(she is now snoring on the angerib by my side,
sweetheart) that I must while away an hour by writing in
my 'Journal.'

"Such a time!  Boil and bubble, toil and trouble!
Every morning before daybreak the wild peal of the
elephant-horn, then the whole camp at prayers with
the rising sun in our faces, then the striking of tents
and the ruckling, roaring, gurgling and grunting of
camels which resembles nothing so much as a styful of
pigs *in extremis*; then twelve hours of trudging through
a forlorn and lifeless solitude with only a rest for
the midday meal; then the elephant-horn again and
evening prayers, with the savage sun behind us, and
then settling down to sleep in some blank and numb
and soundless wilderness—such is our daily story.

"My goodness, Ishmael is a wonderful person!  But
all the same the 'divine' atmosphere that is gathering
about him is positively frightening.  I suspect Black
Zogal of being the author and 'only begetter' of a good
deal of this idolatry.  He gallops on a horse in front
of us, crying, 'There is no god but God,' and 'The
Messenger of God is coming,' with the result that crowds
of people are waiting for Ishmael at every village, with
their houses swept, their straw mats laid down, and
their carpets spread on the divans, all eager to
entertain him, to open their secret granaries to feed his
followers, or at least to kiss the hem of his caftan.

"Every day our numbers increase, and we go off
from the greater towns to the beating of copper
war-drums, the blowing of antelope horns, and sometimes
to the cracking of rifles.  It is all very crude in its
half-savage magnificence, but it is almost terrifying,
too, and the sight of this emotional creature, so liable
to spasms of religious ecstasy, riding on his milk-white
camel through these fiercely fanatical people like a
god, makes one tremble to think of the time that will
surely come when they find out, and *he* finds out, that
after all he is nothing but a man.

"What sights, what scenes!  The other day there
was a fearful sand-storm, in which a fierce cloud came
sweeping out of the horizon, big with flame and wrath,
and fell on us like a mountain of hell.  As long as it
lasted the people lay flat on the sand or crouched under
their kneeling camels, and when it was over they rose
in the dead blankness with the red sand on their faces
and sent up, as with one voice, a cry of lamentation
and despair.  But Ishmael only smiled and said, 'Let
us thank God for this day, O my brothers,' and when
the people asked him why, he answered, 'Because we
can never know anything so bad again.'

"That simple word set every face shining, and as
soon as we reached the next village—Black Zogal as
usual having gone before us—lo, we heard a story of
how Ishmael had commanded a sand-storm to pass
over our heads without touching us—and it had!

"Another day we had stifling heat, in which the glare
of the sand made our eyes to ache and the air to burn
like the breath of a furnace.  The water in the
water-bottles became so hot that we dared not pour it on to
the back of our hands, and even some of the camels
dropped dead under the blazing eye of the sun.

"And when at length the sun sank beneath the
horizon and left us in the cool dark night, the people
could not sleep for want of water to bathe their swelling
eyelids and to moisten their cracking throats, but
Ishmael walked through their tents and comforted
them, telling them it was never intended that man
should always live well and comfortably, yet God, if
He willed it, would bring them safely to their journey's
end.

"After that the people lay down on the scorching
sand as if their thirst had suddenly been quenched;
and next day, on coming to the first village, we heard
that in the middle of a valley of black and blistered
hills, Ishmael smote with his staff a metallic rock that
was twisted into the semblance of a knotted snake, and
a well of ice-cold water sprung out of it, and everybody
drank of it and then 'shook his fist at the sun.'

"Nearly all last week our people were in poor heart
by reason of the mirages which mocked and misled
them, showing an enchanted land on the margin of the
sky, with beautiful blue lakes and rivers and green
islands and shady groves of palm, and sweet long
emerald grasses that quivered beneath a refreshing
breeze; but when, from their monotonous track on the
parched and naked desert, the poor souls would go
in search of these phantoms, they would find nothing
but a great lone land, in the fulness of a still deeper
desolation.

"Then they would fling themselves down in despair
and ask why they had been brought out into the wilderness
to die, but Ishmael, with the same calm smile as
before, would tell them that the life of this world was
all a mirage, a troubled dream, a dream in a sleep,
that the life to come was the awakening, and that he
whose dream was most disturbed was nearest the gates
of Paradise.

"Result—at the next town we came to, we were told
that when we were in the middle of the wilderness
Ishmael had made an oasis to spring up around us,
with waving trees and rippling water and the air full
of the songs of birds, the humming of bees, and the
perfume of flowers, and we all fell asleep in it, and when
we awoke in the morning we believed we had been in
Heaven!

"Good-night, my dear—dear!  Oh, to think that
all this wilderness divides us!  But ma'aleysh!  In
another hour I shall be asleep, and then—then I shall
be in your arms."

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   \II

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"Oh my!  Oh my!  Two incidents have happened
to-day, dearest, that can hardly fail of great results.
Early in the morning we came upon the new convict
settlement, a rough bastioned place built of sun-dried
bricks in the middle of the Soudan desert.  It contains
the hundred and fifty Notables who were imprisoned
by the Special Tribunal for assaults on the Army of
Occupation when they were defending the house of
your friend the Grand Cadi.  How Ishmael discovered
this I do not know, but what he did was like another
manifestation of the 'mystic sense.'

"Stopping the caravan with an unexpected blast of
the elephant-horn, he caused ten rows of men to be
ranged around the prison, and after silence had been
proclaimed, he called on them to say the first Surah:
'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures.'

"It had a weird effect in that lonesome place, as of
a great monotonous wave breaking on a bar far out
at sea, but what followed was still more eerie.  After a
breathless moment, in which everybody seemed to listen
and hold his breath, there came the deadened and
muffled sound of the same words repeated by the
prisoners within the walls: 'Praise be to God, the Lord
of all creatures.'

"When this was over Ishmael cried, 'Peace, brothers!
Patience!  The day of your deliverance is near!  The
Redeemer is coming!  All your wrongs will be righted,
all your bruises will be healed!  Peace!'

"And then there came from within the prison walls
the muffled answer, 'Peace!'

"The second of the incidents occurred about midday.
When crossing a lifeless waste of gloomy volcanic sand,
we came upon a desert graveyard, with those rounded
hillocks of clay which make one think that the dead
beneath must be struggling in their sleep.

"At a word from Ishmael all the men of our company
who belong to that country stepped out from the
caravan and riding round and round the cemetery,
shouted the names of their kindred who were buried
there: 'Ali!' 'Abdul!' 'Mohammed!' 'Mahmud!'
'Said!'

"After that Ishmael himself rode forward, and addressing
the dead as if they could hear, he cried, 'Peace
to you, O people of the graves!  Wait!  Lie still!
The night is passing!  The daylight dawns!'

"It was thrilling!  Strange, simple, primitive, crude
in its faith perhaps, but such love and reverence for the
dead contrasted only too painfully with the vandalism
of our 'Christian' vultures (yclept Egyptologists), who
rifle the graves of the old Egyptians for their jewels
and mummy beads, and then leave their bones in tons
to bleach on the bare sand—a condition that is sufficient
of itself to account for Jacob's prayer, 'Bury me not,
I pray thee, in the land of Egypt.'

"And so say all of us!  But seriously, my dear
Gordon, I quite expect to hear at the next stopping-place
a story of how Ishmael recited the Fatihah and
the walls of a prison fell down before him, and how
he spoke to the dead and they replied."

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   \III

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"It has happened!  I knew it would!  I have seen
it coming, and it has come—without any help from
Black Zogal's crazy imagination, either.  There was
only one thing wanted to complete the faith of these
people in Ishmael's 'divinity'—a miracle, and it has
been performed!

"I suppose it really belongs to the order of things
that happen according to natural law—magnetism,
suggestion, God knows what—but my pen positively
jibs at recording it, so surely will it seem as if I had
copied it out of a Book I need not name.

"This afternoon our vast human tortoise was trudging
along, and a halt was being called to enable stragglers
to come up, when a funeral procession crossed our track
on its way to a graveyard on the stony hillside opposite.

"The Sheikh of a neighbouring village had lost his
only child, a girl twelve years of age, and behind the
blind men chanting the Koran, the hired mourners
with their plaintive wail and the body on a bare board,
the old father walked in his trouble, rending his
garments and tearing off his turban.

"It was a pitiful sight; and when the mourners came
up to Ishmael and told him the Sheikh was a God-fearing
man who had not deserved this sorrow, I could
see that he was deeply moved, for he called on the
procession to stop, and making his camel kneel, he got
down and tried to comfort the old man, saying, 'May
the name of God be upon thee!'

"Then thinking, as it seemed to me, to show sympathy
with the poor father, he stepped up to the bier
and took the little brown hand which, with its silver
ring and bracelet, hung over the board, and held it
for a few moments while he asked when the child had
died and what she had died of, and he was told she had
died this morning, and the sun had killed her.

"All at once I saw Ishmael's hand tremble and a
strange contraction pass over his face, and at the next
moment, in a quivering voice, he called on the bearers
to put down the bier.  They did so, and at his bidding
they uncovered the body, and I saw the face.  It was
the face of the dead!  Yes, the dead, as lifeless and
as beautiful as a face of bronze.

"At the next instant Ishmael was on his knees beside
the body of the girl, and asking the father for her
name.  It was Helimah.

"'Helimah!  Your father is waiting for you!
Come,' said Ishmael, touching the child's eyes and
smoothing her forehead, and speaking in a soft,
caressing voice.

"Gordon, as I am a truthful woman, I saw it happen.
A slight fluttering of the eyelids, a faint heaving of the
bosom, and then the eyes were open, and at the next
moment the girl was standing on her feet!

"God! what a scene it was that followed.  The
Sheikh on his knees kissing the hem of Ishmael's
caftan, the men prostrating themselves before him,
and the women tearing away the black veils that
covered their faces, and crying, 'Blessed be the woman
that bore thee!'

"It has been what the Arabs call a red day, and at
that moment the setting sun catching the clouds of
dust raised by the camels made the whole world one
brilliant, fiery red.  What wonder if these poor,
benighted people thought the Lord of Heaven Himself
had just come down!

"We left the village loaded with blessings (Black
Zogal galloping frantically in front), and when we came
to the next town—Berber, with its miles of roofless
mud-huts, telling of Dervish destruction—crowds came out to
salute Ishmael as the 'Guided One,' 'The true Mahdi,'
and 'The Deliverer,' bringing their sick and lame and
blind for him to heal them, and praying of him to remain.

"Oh, my dear Gordon, it is terrifying!  Ishmael is
no longer the messenger, the forerunner; he is now
the Redeemer he foretold!  I really believe *he* is
beginning to believe it!  This is the pillar of fire that
is henceforth to guide us on our way.  Already our
numbers are three times what they were when we left
Khartoum.  What is to happen when thirty thousand
persons, following a leader they believe to be divine,
arrive in Cairo and are confronted by five thousand
British soldiers?

"No!  It is not bloodshed I am afraid of—I know
you will prevent that.  But what of the awful
undeceiving, the utter degradation, the crushing collapse?

"And I?  Don't think me a coward, Gordon—it
isn't everybody who was born brave like you—but
when I think of what I have done to this man, and
how surely it will be found out that I have betrayed
him, I tell myself that the moment I touch the skirts
of civilisation I must run away.

"But meanwhile our pilgrimage is moving on—to
its death, as it seems to me—and I am moving on with
it as a slave—the slave of my own actions.  If this
is Destiny, it is wickedly cruel, I will say that for it;
and if it is God, I think He might be a jealous God
without making the blundering impulse of one poor
girl the means of wrecking the hopes of a whole race
of helpless people.  Of course it acts as a sop to my
conscience to remember what you said about God
never making mistakes, but I cannot help wishing
that in His inscrutable wisdom He could have left me
out.

"Oh, my dear-dear!  Where are you now, I
wonder?  What are you doing?  What is being done
to you?  Have you seen your father, the Princess, and
the Grand Cadi?  I suppose I must not expect news
until we reach Assouan.  You promised to write to me,
and you will—I know you will.  Good-night, dearest!
My love, my love, my only love!  But I must stop.
We are to make a night journey.  The camp is in
movement, and my camel is waiting.  Adieu!

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"HELENA."





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   CHAPTER VII

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   "SERAI FUM EL KHALIG,
       "CAIRO.

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"Salaam aleykoum!  Ten days have passed, my dear
Helena, since I wrote my last letter, and during that
time I have learned all that is going on here, having
in my assumed character of Ishmael in disguise interviewed
nearly the whole of the Ulema, including that
double-dyed dastard, the Grand Cadi.

"Under the wing—the rather fluttered one—of the
good old Chancellor of El Azhar I saw the oily
reprobate in his own house, and in his honeyed voice he
made pretence of receiving me with boundless courtesy.
I was his 'beloved friend in God,' 'the reformer of
Islam,' called to the task of bringing men back to the
Holy Koran, to the Prophet, and to eternal happiness.
On the other hand, my father was 'the slave
of power,' the 'evil-doer,' the 'adventurer,' and the
'great assassin,' who was led away by worldly things,
and warring against God.

"More than once my hands itched to take the
hypocrite from behind by the ample folds of his Turkish
garments and fling him like vermin down the stairs,
but I was there to hear what he was doing, so I
smothered a few strong expressions which only the
recording angel knows anything about, and was
compelled to sit and listen.

"My dear Helena, it is even worse than I expected.
Some of the double-dealing Egyptian Ministers, backed
by certain of the diplomatic corps, but inspired by this
Chief Judge in Islam, have armed a considerable part
of the native populace, in the hope that the night when
England, in the persons of her chief officials, is
merry-making on the island of Ghezirah, and the greater part
of the British force is away in the provinces quelling
disturbances and keeping peace, the people may rise,
the Egyptian army may mutiny, and Ishmael's followers
may take possession of the city.

"All this and more, with many suave words about
the 'enlightening help of God,' and the certainty of
'a bloodless victory,' in which the Almighty would
make me glorious and the English would be driven
out of Egypt, the crafty scoundrel did not hesitate to
propound as a means whereby the 'true faith might be
established all over Europe, *Rome and London*!'

"Since my interview with the Grand Cadi I have
learned of a certainty, what I had already surmised,
that the Consul-General has been made aware of the
whole plot, and is taking his own measures to defeat it.
Undoubtedly the first duty of a Government is to preserve
order and to establish authority, and I know my
father well enough to be sure that at any cost he will
set himself to do both.  But what will happen?

"Mark my word, the British army will be ordered
back to the Capital—perhaps on the eve of the festival—and
as surely as it enters the city on the night of the
King's Birthday there will be massacre in the streets,
for the Egyptian soldiers will rebel, and the people
who have been provided with arms from the Secret
Service money of England's enemies will rise, thinking
the object of the Government is to prevent the entrance
of Ishmael and his followers.

"Result—a holy war; and as that is the only kind of
war that was ever yet worth waging, it will put Egypt
in the right and England in the wrong.

"Does Ishmael expect this?  No; he thinks he is to
make a peaceful entry into Cairo when he comes to
establish his World State, his millennium of universal
faith and empire.  Do the Ulema expect it?  No; they
think the Army of Occupation will be far away when
their crazy scheme is carried into effect.  Does my
father expect it?  Not for one moment, so sure is he—I
know it perfectly, I have heard him say it a score of
times—that the Egyptian soldier will not fight alone,
and that Egyptian civilians can be scattered by a
water-hose.

"Heaven help him!  If ever a man was preparing
to draw a sword from its scabbard it is my father at
this moment, but it is only because he is played upon
and deceived by this son and successor of Caiaphas
the damned.  I'll go and open his eyes to the Grand
Cadi's duplicity.  I'll say, 'Bring your oily scoundrel
face to face with me, and see what I will say.  If he
denies it, you must choose for yourself which of us you
will believe—your own son, who has nothing to gain
by coming back to warn you, or this reptile who is
fighting for the life of his rotten old class.'

"The thing is hateful to me, and if there were any
other possible way of stopping the wretched slaughter
I should not go, for I know it will end in the
Consul-General handing me over to the military authorities
to be court-martialled for my former offences, and, as
you may say, it is horrible to put a father, with a high
sense of duty, into the position of being compelled to
cut off his own son.

"Meanwhile I am conscious that the police continue
to watch me, and I am just as much a prisoner as if I
were already within the walls of a jail.  For their own
purposes they are leaving me at liberty, and I believe
they will go on doing so until after the night of the
King's Birthday.  After that, God knows what will
happen.

"I am writing late, and I must turn in soon, so good-night,
and God bless and preserve you, my own darling—mine,
mine, mine, and nobody else's, remember that!
Hafiz continues to protest that the Prophet has a love
for you, and will bring out everything for the best.  I
think so too—I really do, so you must not be frightened
about anything I have said in this letter.

"There is only one thing frightens me, and that is
the damnable trick memory plays me when it rakes
up all you told me of the terms of your betrothal to
Ishmael.  I can bear it pretty well during the day,
but in that dead grey hour of the early morning, when
the moonlight slinks into the dawn, before the sparrows
begin to chop the air and the Arabs to rend it, I find
myself thinking that though Ishmael, when he proposed
marriage to you, may have been thinking of nothing
but how to protect your good name, being a
pure-minded man who had consecrated his life to a spiritual
mission, yet the constant presence of a beautiful
woman by his side must sooner or later sweep away
his pledge.

"He wouldn't be a man if it didn't, and, the prophet
notwithstanding, Ishmael is that to his finger-tips.
But heaven help me!  I daren't let my mind dwell on
this subject, or I should have to fly back to you and
leave my task here unfulfilled.  So as often as I shut
my eyes and see you trudging through the desert in
Ishmael's caravan, I tell myself that Providence has
something for you to do there—must have—though
what the deuce it is, I don't yet see.

"No matter!  *D.V.* I'll know some day, and meantime
I'll nail my colours to the mast of your strength
and courage, knowing that the bravest girl in the world
belongs to me, and wherever she is, she is *mine*, and
always will be.  GORDON.

"*P.S.*—I am now dispatching my two letters to
Assouan by Hamid Ibrahim—the second of the two
Sheikhs who went with me to Alexandria—and if you
find you can send me an answer, for God's sake, do!
I am hungering and thirsting and starving and perishing
for a letter from you—a line, a word, a syllable, the
scratch of your pen on a piece of paper.  Send it, for
heaven's sake!

"I hear that hundreds of native boats are going up to
Assouan to bring you down the Nile, so look out for my
next letter when you get to Luxor—I may have something
to tell you by that time."





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   CHAPTER VIII

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   \I

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"NUBIAN DESERT (*anywhere*).

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"O MY GORDON,—Such startling developments!
Ishmael's character has made a new manifestation.  It
concerns me, and I hardly know whether I ought to
speak of it.  Yet I must—I cannot help myself.

"I find there is something distinctly masculine in
his interest in me!  In Khartoum (in spite of certain
evidences to the contrary) I was always fool enough
to suppose that it was without sex—what milksops
call Platonic—as if any such relation between a man
and a woman ever was or ever will be!

"Oh, I know what you are saying!  'That foolish
young woman thinks Ishmael is falling in love with
her.'  But wait, sir, only wait and listen.

"We left Berber at night, and rode for four hours in
the moonlight.  Goodness!  What ghosts the desert is
full of—ghosts of pyramids that loom large and then fade
away.  Such mysterious lights!  Such spectral watch-towers
standing on spectral heights!  It was what the
Arabs call 'a white night,' and besides the moon in its
splendour there was a vast star-strewn sky.  Sometimes
we heard the hyena's cry, sometimes the jackal's
ululation, and through the silver shimmering haze we
could see the wild creatures scuttling away from us.

"Thus on and on went our weary caravan—the
camels like great swans with their steady upturned
heads, slithering as if in slippers along the noiseless
sand, and many of the tired people asleep on them.
But I could not sleep, and Ishmael, who was very much
awake, rode by my side and talked to me.

"It was about love, and included one pretty story of
a daughter of the Bedawee who married a Sultan—how
she scorned the silken clothes he gave her and would
not live in his palace—saying she was no fellaha to
sleep in houses—and made him come out into the
desert with her and dwell in a tent.  I thought there
was a certain self-reference in the story, but that was
not all by any means.

"At midnight we halted by a group of wells, and
while our vast army of animals was being watered my
tent was set up outside the camp, so that I might rest
without noise.  I suppose I had been looking faint and
pale, for just as I was listening to the monotonous
voice of a boy who, at a fire not far away, was singing
both himself and me to sleep, Ishmael came with a dish
of medida, saying, 'Drink this, it will do you good.'

"Then he sat down, and, with that paralysing
plainness of speech which the Easterns have, began to
talk of love again, especially in relation to the duty
of renunciation, quoting in that connection 'the lord
of the Christians,' who had said, 'There be eunuchs
which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom
of heaven's sake.'

"It was more than embarrassing from the beginning,
but it became startling and almost shocking when he
went on to talk about Jesus in relation to Mary
Magdalene (whom he supposed to be the sister of
Martha), and of the home at Bethany as the only place
in which He found the solace of female society, and
how He had to turn His back on the love of woman
for His work's sake.

"We are so accustomed to think of Jesus's inaccessibility
to human affection as if it were a merit in Him
to be superior to love, that it made my skin creep to
hear this person of another faith talk like that.  But
I shivered a good deal more when he came to closer
quarters, and said that renunciation was the duty of
every one on whom God had laid a great mission *until
his task was finished*, and then ... *then* it was just as
much his duty *to live as a man*!

"He went away quite calmly, commending me to
God, but he left me in a state of terror; and though I
was nearly worn to death by the double journey, I did
not sleep a wink that night for thinking of that accursed
day of the betrothal, and what would happen if he ever
broke his promise and came to me to claim the rights
of a husband.

"The next day or two passed without any serious
incident except that Ishmael, who had developed a pair
of haunting, imploring eyes, was always riding his camel
by its halter and nose-rein at the side of my litter, and
talking constantly on the same subject.  But then came
an event of thrilling interest.  Can I—shall I—must I
tell you about it?  Yes, I can, I shall, I must!

"Out here on the desert I always feel as if I were
travelling in Bible lands, and if our caravan were to
come upon 'Abram the Hebrew,' and Rachel and
Rebecca flying away with some Bedouin Jacob, I should
not be the least surprised, so it seemed natural enough
that yesterday, in the country of the Bisharin Arabs, we
lit upon Laban, living as a patriarch among his people.

"There were his sons and his sons' sons, big, brawny
boys, strong and clean of limb, and with their loins well
girt but hardly anything else covered, and there were
'the souls born of his house' in their felt skull-caps
and blue galabeahs.  But what most concerned me
were his two splendid daughters.  No corsetted women
out of Bond Street, sir, but superbly fine and majestic
young females, tall and straight, with big bosoms like
pomegranates, ringletted black hair, clear oval faces,
the olive skin of the purest Arab blood, and large black
eyes that shone like gems.

"Such a woman, I thought, must Ruth have been
when she lay at the feet of Boaz; but lo, it never
occurred to me that the people's faith in Ishmael's
'divinity' did not forbid their ascribing to him the
attributes of a man.  Shall I go on?  Yes, I will, for
already you know that your Helena, your lady-love, is
no mealy-mouthed miss—never was, and never can be.

"Well, last night, late, while I was looking at the
shadowy forms of the camels coming and going in the
light of the dying fires, I saw Laban, who had been
pouring hospitalities upon us, leading one of his
daughters, whose head was low, to Ishmael's tent.  It
was like something horrible out of the Old Testament,
but I had to watch—I simply could not help it—and
after a while I saw Laban and Rachel going away
together, and then the old man's head as well as the
girl's was down.

"Act One being finished last night, Act Two began
to-day.  We are in the middle of the Nubian desert
now, and as the heat is great under the red wrath of
the fiery mountains on either side, we have to rest for
three hours in the middle of every day.  Well, at noon
to-day Ishmael came to my tent and talked of love
again.  It was a heavenly passion.  Surely God had
created it.  Yet the Christians had made 'monkery,'
and were thus rebuking the Almighty and claiming to
be wiser than He.  The union of man and woman without
love was sin.  That was what made so many Moslem
marriages sinful.  Marriage was not betrothal, not the
joining of hands under a handkerchief, not the repeating
of words after a Cadi; marriage was the sacrament
of love, and love being present and nothing else intervening,
*renunciation was wrong*, it was against the spirit
of Islam, and no matter who he might be, *a man should
live as a man*.

"I don't know what I said, or whether I said anything,
but I do know that the blood left my heart and
seemed long in making its way back again.  My skin
was creeping, and I had a feeling which I had never
known before—a feeling of repulsion—the feeling of the
white woman about the black man.  Ishmael is not
black by any means, but I felt exactly as if he were,
for I could see quite well what was going on in his
mind.  He was thinking of his journey's end, of the
day when his work would be finished, and he was
promising himself the realisation of his love.

"That shall never, never be!  No, not under any
circumstances!  My God, no, not for worlds of worlds!
Good-night, Gordon!  I may be betrothed to this man,
but there is no law of nature that binds me to him.
I belong to you, just as Rachel belonged to Jacob, and
whatever I may be in my religion, I am no Trinitarian
in my love at all events.

"Good-bye, dearest!  Don't let what I have said
alarm you.  Oh, I know what you are *now*:
'That foolish young woman expects me to hear her
when I am in Cairo and she is in the middle of the
Nubian desert.'  But you do, I am sure you do.  And
I hear you also.  I hear your voice at this moment as
clearly as I hear it when I awake in the middle of the
night and it rings through my miserable tent and
makes me wildly hysterical.  So don't be alarmed; I
can take care of myself, I tell you!  My love, my love,
my love!

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   \II

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"Mercy!  I don't know who did it, or by whose
orders it was done, but last night Ishmael's tent, which
has hitherto been set up at a distance, was placed
mouth to mouth with mine.  More than that, the odious
Arab woman, who has always afflicted me with her
abominable presence, was nowhere to be seen.  I was
feeling by one of your 'mystic senses' that something
was going to happen when late, very late, the last of
the fires having died down and the camp being asleep,
I heard Ishmael calling to me in a whisper—

"'Rani!'

"I did not answer—I could not have done so if I
had tried, for my heart was thumping like an anvil.

"'Rani!' he whispered again, and again I did not
reply.  I knew *he* knew I was awake, and after a
moment of silence that seemed eternal, he said—

"'By-and-by, then!  When we come to Cairo and
my mission is at an end.

"O God, what tears of anger and despair I shed
when he was gone and all was quiet!  And now I ask
myself if I can bear this strain any longer.  After all,
Ishmael is only an Oriental, and perhaps in spite of
himself and the pledge he gave to me, the natural man
is coming to the top.  Then I am his *wife*, and he has
*rights* in me, according to his own view and the laws
of his religion!  I am in his camp too, and we are in
the middle of the desert!

"How did it happen—that betrothal?  Are these
things ordained?  Gordon, you talk about Destiny, but
why don't you see that what took me to Khartoum
was not really the desire to avenge my father (though
I thought it was) but to avenge myself for the loss of
you.  So *you—you—you* were the real cause of my
hideous error, and if you had loved me as I loved you
I could never have been put to that compulsion.

"... Forgive me, dear!  I am feeling wicked, but
I shall soon get over it.  I have not been sleeping well
lately, and there are dark rims under my eyes and I
am a fright in every way....  I feel calm already, so
good-night, dearest!  We cannot be far from civilisation
now, therefore there can be no need to run away
from here."

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   III

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"Hurrah!  Hurrah!  Hurrah!  We camped last
night on the top of a stony granite hill, and this morning
we can see the silver streak of the Nile with the sweet
green verdure along its banks, and the great dam at
Assouan with its cascades of falling water.  Such joy!
Such a frenzy of gladness!  The people are capering
about like demented children.  Just so must the
children of Israel have felt when God brought them out of
the wilderness and they saw the promised land before
them.

"Black Zogal galloped into the town at daybreak
and has just galloped back, bringing a great company
of Sheikhs and Notables—Egyptians, chiefly—who have
come up the Nile to meet us, but many are Bedouins
from the wild East country running to the Red Sea.
Such fine faces and stately figures!  Most of them living
in tents, but all dressed like princes.  They are saluting
Ishmael as the 'Deliverer,' the 'Guided One,' the 'Redeemer,'
and even the 'Lord Isa,' and *he is not reproving
them*!

"But I cannot think of Ishmael now.  I feel as if I
were coming out of chaos and entering into the world.
If anything has happened to you I shall know it soon.
Shall I be able to control myself?  I shall!  I must!

"Oh, how my heart beats and swells!  I can scarcely
breathe.  But you are alive, I am sure you are, and I
shall hear from you presently.  I shall also escape from
this false position and sleep at last, as the Arabs say,
with both eyes shut.  I must stop.  My tent has to be
struck.  The camp is already in movement.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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"One word.  We were plunging into Assouan, through
the cool bazaars with their blazing patches of sunlight
and sudden blots of shadow when I saw your Sheikh
sidling up to me.  He slipped your letter into my hand
and is to come back in a moment for mine.  I am
staying at a khan.  Oh, God bless and love you!  El
Hamdullillah!  My dear, my dear, my dear!

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"HELENA."





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   CHAPTER IX

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   \I

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   "THE NILE
       "(*between Assouan and Luxor*).

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"OH, MY DEAR, DEAREST GORDON,—Mohammed's rapture
when he received from the angel the 'holy Koran'
was a mild emotion compared to mine when I read your
letter.  Perhaps I ought to be concerned about the
contents of it, but I am not—not a bit of me!  Having
found out what the Grand Cadi is doing, you will
confound his 'knavish tricks.'

"Never mind, my dear old boy, what the officials
are saying.  They'll soon see whether you have been a
bad Englishman, and in any case you cannot compete
with the descendants of *all* the creeping things that
came out of the Ark.

"Don't worry about me either.  Unparalleled as my
position is, I am quite capable of taking care of myself,
for I find that in the decalogue you delivered to your
devoted slave on the day she saw you first, there was
one firm and plain commandment, 'Thou shalt have no
other love but me.'  I dare say, being a woman, I am
faithless to the first instinct of my sex in telling you
this, but I have no time for 'female' fooleries,
however delicious, and be bothered to them anyway!

"As you see, I did not run away from Ishmael's
camp on reaching the railway terminus, and the reason
was that you said you were writing to me again at
Luxor.  Hence, I was compelled to come on, for of
course I would not have lost that letter, or let it go
astray, for all the value of the British Empire.

"I was delighted with my day at Assouan though,
with its glimpses of a green, riotous, prodigal, ungovernable
Nature after the white nakedness of the wilderness:
with its flashlight peep at civilised frivolities, its
hotels for European visitors, its orchestras playing
'When we are mar-ried,' its Egyptian dragomans with
companies of tourists tailing behind them, its dahabeahs
and steam launches, and, above all, its groups of English
girls, maddeningly pretty and full of the intoxication of
life, yet pretending to be consumed by a fever of
self-culture and devoured by curiosity about mummies and
tombs.

"It's no use—these pink-white faces after the brown
and black are a joy to behold, and when I came upon
a bunch of them chattering and laughing like linnets
('Frocks up, children!' as they crossed a puddle made
by the watermen) I could hardly help kissing them all
round, they looked so sweet and so homelike.

"You were right about the boats.  A whole fleet was
waiting for us, which was a mercy, for the animals were
utterly done up after the desert journey, and next
morning we embarked under the strenuous supervision
of a British Bimbashi who looked as large as if he had
just won the battle of Waterloo.

"Of course the people were following Ishmael like a
swarm of bees, and, much to my discomfiture, I came
in for a share of reflected glory from a crowd of visitors
who were evidently wondering whether I was a reincarnation
of Lady Hester Stanhope or the last Circassian
slave-wife of the Ameer of Afghanistan.  One horrible
young woman cocked her camera and snapped me—American,
of course, a sort of half-countrywoman of
yours, sir, shockingly stylish, good-looking and
attractive, with frills and furbelows that gave a far view of
Regent Street and the Rue de la Paix, and made me
feel so dreadfully shabby in my Eastern dress and veil
that I wanted to slap her.

"We are now two days down the river, five hundred to
a thousand boat-loads of us, our peaked white sails looking
like a vast flight of seagulls and our slanting bamboo
masts like an immense field of ripe corn swaying in the
wind.  It is a wonderful sight, this flotilla of 'feluccas'
going slowly down the immemorial stream, and when
one thinks of it in relation to its object it is almost
magnificent—a nation going up to its millennium!

"They have rigged up a sort of cabin for me in the
bow of one of the high-prowed boats, with shelter and
shade included, so that I still have some seclusion in
which to write my 'Journal,' in spite of this pestilent
Arab woman who is always watching me.  In the hold
outside there must be a hundred men at least, and at
the stern there are a few women who bake durali cakes
on a charcoal stove, making it a marvel to me that they
do not set fire to the boat a dozen times a day.

"The wind being fair and the river in full flood—seven
men's height above the usual level, and boiling
and bubbling and tearing down like a torrent—we sail
from daylight to dark, but at night we are hauled up
and moored to the bank, so that the people may go
ashore to sleep if they are so minded.

"Oh, these delicious mornings!  Oh, these white,
enchanting nights!  The wide, smooth, flowing water,
reflecting the tall palms, the banks, the boats
themselves; in the morning a soft brown, at noon a cool
green, at sunset a glowing rose, at night a pearly grey!
Then the broad blue sky with its blaze of lemon and
yellow and burnished gold as the sun goes down; the
rolling back of the darkness as the dawn appears and
the sweeping up of the crimson wings of day!  If I
dared only give myself up to the delight of it!  But I
daren't, I daren't, having something to do here, so my
dear one says, though what the deuce and the dickens
it is (except to stay until I receive that letter) I cannot
conceive."

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   \II

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"The people are in great spirits now, all their moaning
and murmuring being turned to gladness, and as we
glide along they squat in the boats and sing.  Strangely
enough, in a country where religion counts for so much,
there is hardly anything answering to sacred music,
but there are war-songs in abundance, full of references
to the 'filly foal' and of invocations to the God of
Victory.  These songs the men sing to something like
three notes, accompanied by the beat of their tiny
drums, and if the natives who stand on the banks to
listen convey the warlike words to their Moudirs it
cannot be a matter for much surprise that the Government
thinks an army is coming down the Nile and that
your father finds it necessary to prepare to 'establish
authority.'

"As for Ishmael, he is in a state of ecstasy that is
bordering on frenzy.  He passes from boat to boat,
teaching and preaching early and late.  Of course it is
always the same message—the great Hope, the Deliverer,
the Redeemer, the Christ, the Kingdom or Empire that
is to come, but just as he drew his lessons from the
desert before so now he draws them from the Nile.

"The mighty river, mother of Egypt, numbered
among the deities in olden days, born in the heights
and flowing down to the ocean, rising and falling and
bringing fertility, suckling the land, sustaining it, the
great waterway from North to South, the highway for
humanity—what is it but a symbol of the golden age
so soon to begin, when all men will be gathered together
as the children of one Mother, with one God one Law
one Faith!

"It becomes more and more terrifying.  I am sure
the people are taking their teaching literally, for they
are like children in their delirious joy; and when I
think how surely their hopes are doomed to be crushed,
I ask myself what is to happen to Ishmael when the
day of their disappointment comes.  They will kill
him—I am sure they will!

"Gordon, I go through hell at certain moments.  It
was good of you to tell me I need not charge myself
with everything that is happening, but I am hysterical
when I think that although this hope may be only a
dream, a vain dream, and I had nothing to do with
creating it, it is through me that it is to be so ruthlessly
destroyed.

"Then there is that masculine development in Ishmael's
relation to me, and the promise he has made
himself that as soon as his task is finished he will live
the life of a man!

"Thank God, we are close to Luxor now, and when I
get that letter I shall be free to escape.  Have you seen
your father, I wonder?  If so, what has happened?
Oh, my dear-dear!  It is four years—days, I mean—since
I heard from you—what an age in a time like this!
My love—all, all my love!  HELENA."





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   CHAPTER X

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   \I

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"CAIRO.

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"MY DEAKEST HELENA,—El Hamdullillah!  Hamid
brought me the letter you gave him at Assouan and I
nearly fell on his neck and kissed him.  He also told
me you were looking 'stout and well,' and added, with
an expression of astonishment, that you were 'the
sweetest and most beautiful woman in the world.'  Of
course you are—what the deuce did he expect you to be?

"I am not ashamed to say that while I read your letter
I was either laughing like a boy or crying like a baby.
What wonder?  Helena was speaking to me!  I could
see her very eyes, hear her very voice, feel her very
hand.  No dream this time, no dear, sweet, murderous
make-believe, but Helena herself, actually Helena!

"I am not surprised, dearest, at what you tell me of
the development of the masculine side of Ishmael's
interest in you.  It was what I feared and foresaw, yet
how I am to stay here, now that I know it has come to
pass, heaven alone can say.  I suppose I must, or else
everything I have come for, lived for, hoped for, and
fought for will be wasted and thrown away.  Thank
God, I have always hitherto been able, even in my
blackest hours, to rely on your love and courage, and I
shall continue to do so, and to tell myself that if you
are in Ishmael's camp it must be for some good and
useful purpose, although I know that in the dead waste
of every blessed night I shall have some damnable
pricks from the green-eyed monster, not to speak of
downright fear and honest conscience.

"Neither am I at all surprised at what you say of the
growth of the Mahdist element in and around Ishmael,
though that is a pity in itself and a deadly misfortune
in relation to the Government.  Of course it is the old
wretched story over again—the moment a man arises
who has anything of the divine in him, an apostle of
the soul of humanity, a flame-bearer in a realm of
darkness, the world jumps on him, body and soul, and he
finds he has brought not peace but a sword.  The
Governments of the world do not want the divine,
for the simple reason that the divine begets divided
authority, which begets divided allegiance, which begets
riot and insurrection, so down with the divine!—hang it,
quarter it, crucify it—which is precisely what they have
been doing with it for two thousand years at all events.

"That, too, is a reason why I cannot carry out my
first intention of going to my father, and another is that
I see only too plainly now that he is playing for a *coup*.
Not that I believe for a moment that like the authorities
under arbitrary Governments (Russian, for example) my
father would use provocation even if it were the only
means by which peaceful work and life seemed possible,
but I fear he is becoming a sort of conscientious
collaborator with the accursed Grand Cadi, by acquiescing in
conspiracy and permitting it to go on until it has reached
a head in order to crush it with one blow.

"God forgive me if I am judging my own father, but
I cannot help it.  There is such a thing as being 'drunk
with power,' as the Arabs say, and everything points
to the fact that the Consul-General counts on making
one surprising and overwhelming effort to suppress this
unrest.  That he did not take me (in my character of
Ishmael) on my arrival in Cairo points to it, and that
he has invited me to the dinner in honour of the King's
Birthday puts it beyond the shadow of a doubt.

"How do I know that?  I'll tell you how.  Do you
remember that when Ishmael's return was first proposed
it was suggested that he should enter the city while the
Consul-General and his officials were feasting on the
Ghezirah, the bridge of their island being drawn and
the key of the Pavilion being turned on them?  Well,
that was the scheme of the Cadi, and I have reason to
believe that having obtained Ishmael's consent to it,
he straightway revealed it to my father.

"What is the result?  The Consul-General has invited
the conspirators to join him at his festivities, so
that while they think they are to hold him prisoner
on Ghezirah until Ishmael's followers have entered
Cairo, he will in fact be holding them, the whole boiling
of them, including myself, especially myself, thus
arresting his enemies in a bunch at the very moment when
their rebellion is being put down on the other side of
the Nile.

"There is something tragic in the idea that if I go
to that dinner my father may find that there has been
one gigantic error in his calculations, and I hate the
thought of going, but if I go I go, and (*D.V.*) I shall
not shrink.

"Good-night, dearest!  'Where is she now?' I ask
myself for the nine-hundredth time, and for the
nine-hundred and first time I answer, 'Wherever she is she
is mine and nobody else's.'  In-sha-allah!"

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   \II

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"Whew!  It's comic, and if I were not such a
ridiculously tragic person I should like to scream with
laughter.  The Ulema are at a loss to know what to
do about the invitation to the King's Dinner, and
have been putting their turbaned heads together like
frightened chickens in a storm.  Never having been
invited to such functions before, they suspect treachery,
think their conspiracy has got wind, and are for excusing
themselves on the ground of a general epidemic among
grandmothers, which will require them to be present
at funerals in various parts of the country.

"On the other hand, Caiaphas, who is giving himself
the airs of a hero—a hero, mind you—counsels courage,
saying that if there is any suspicion of conspiracy the
only way to put it out of countenance is to accept the
Consul-General's invitation, which is of the nature of
a command, and that this argument applies especially
to me (that is to say, Ishmael), who might otherwise
expose myself to the inference that I am not the wise
and wealthy chief of the Ababdah, but another person
who dare not permit himself to be seen.  The fox!
All the same I may find that it suits my book to go to
the King's Dinner."

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   \III

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"The day of the festivities is approaching, and
already the preparations have begun.  Placards on the
walls announcing a military tattoo, officials flying about
the town, workmen hanging up lanterns for the illumination
of the public gardens, and police bands in the
squares playing 'God save' and 'The Girl I left,' and
meantime Ishmael with his vast following coming up
the Nile, full of the great Hope, the great Expectation!

"Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome burned! that
was an act of no particular callousness compared to
the infectious merriment of the European population,
though many of them know nothing about the tidal
wave that is sweeping down, the English press having
been forbidden to mention it, and the one strong man
in Egypt waiting calmly at the Agency until the moment
comes to dam it.

"Of course the official classes are aware of what is
happening, and their attitude towards the mighty flood
that is coming on is a wonderful example of our British
pluck and our crass stupidity.  Not a man will budge,
that much I can say for my countrymen who are ready
to face death any day under a vertical sun, amid deadly
swamps and human beings almost as dangerous.  But
they will not see that while the fanaticism of one
hallucinated individual (Ishmael, for example) may
be a little thing, the soul of a whole nation is a big
thing, and God help the Government that attempts to
crush it.

"In order to realise the situation here at this moment
one has to make a daring, audacious, almost impious
comparison—to think of the day when Christ entered
Jerusalem through a dense, delirious crowd that shouted
'Hosanna to the Son of David!' and (forgetting that
soon afterwards they deserted Him when His divinity
appeared to fail) ask oneself what would have happened
*then* if the Roman Consul, prompted by the Chief
Priests, had met that frenzied multitude with a charge
of Roman steel!

"God keep us from such consequences in Cairo; but
meantime, though the Arabic newspapers are suppressed,
the natives know that Ishmael's host is coming on, and
the effect of the rumour that has gone through the air
like a breath of wind seems to be frantically intoxicating.
I confess that the sense of that mighty human wave,
sweeping down the red waters of the high Nile, coming
on and on, as they think to the millennium, but as I
know to death, sits on me, too, like a nightmare.  It
has the effect of the supernatural, and I ask myself
what in the name of God I can do to prevent the collision
that will occur between two forces that seem bent on
destroying each other.

"Something I must do, that is certain, and seeing
that I am now the only one who knows what is being
done on both sides, and that it is useless to appeal
either to my father or to Ishmael, what I do must be
done by me alone.  Alone is a terrible word, Helena; but
what I do I do, and the devil take the consequences.

"I expect to get further information from Hafiz
to-morrow, so (*D.V.*) I'll write my last letter to
Bedrasheen, where, as I hear, you are to encamp.  Look out
for it there—I see something I may want you to do for
me with Ishmael.  Meantime don't be afraid of him.
Remember that you belong to *me*, to me *only*, and that
I'm thinking of you every hour and minute, and then
nothing can go seriously astray.  Good-bye, my beloved,
my dear, my darling!  GORDON.

"*P.S.*—Is it not extraordinary, my dear Helena, that
notwithstanding the torment I suffer at the thought of
your position in Ishmael's camp I continue to ask you
to remain in it?  But wait—only wait!  Something
good is going to happen!  In-sha-allah!"





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   CHAPTER XI

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   \I

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   "THE NILE
   "(*between Luxor and Bedrasheen*).

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"MY DEAR, DEAR GORDON—I saw your Hamid Ibrahim
the moment I set foot in Luxor, and the way he passed
your letter to me and I passed mine to him would have
done credit to Charlie Bates and the Artful Dodger in
the art of passing 'a wipe.'

"I really think we escaped the eyes of this odious
Arab woman, but I am bound to add that almost as soon
as I got back to the boat, and began to read your letter
and to weep tears of joy over it, I was conscious of a
shadow at the mouth of my cabin, and it was she, the
daughter of a dog!

"No matter!  Who the dickens cares!  I shall be
gone from here before the woman can do me any mischief,
and if I am still in Ishmael's camp it is only because
you said you were sending your last letter to
Bedrasheen, so, you see, I had no choice but to come on.

"What you tell me of the course of affairs in Cairo
only fills me with hatred of the Grand Cadi ('whom
Allah damn'), and I find that I exhaust my
Christianity in finding names that seem suitable to 'his
Serenity'—beginning, of course, with the fourth letter
of the English alphabet.

"I see already what you are going to do, and when I
think of it I feel like a shocking coward.  If you cannot
work with the Consul-General I suppose you will work
without him, perhaps against him, and a conflict
between you and your father is the tragedy I always
foresaw.  It will be the end of one or both of you, and
I am trembling at the bare thought.

"Oh, I know you are the bravest thing God ever
made and at the same time the most unselfish, but I
sometimes wish to heaven you were not—though I
suppose in that event you would fall from your god-like
pedestal, and I should not love you so much if I
admired you less.

"We left Luxor immediately, for although there were
still three days to spare before the day of the
"festivities" and the river was racing down fast enough to
carry a fleet of war, the people were in a fever to reach
the end of their journey, so Ishmael consented to go on
without a rest.

"I find the whole thing more frightening than ever
now that we are so near to the end, for I suppose it is
certain that whatever else happens, this vast horde of
Ishmael's fanatical followers will never be allowed to
enter Cairo, and it will be impossible to convince the
Consul-General and the Government that they are not
coming as an armed force.  Then what will the people
do?  What will they say to Ishmael?  And if Ishmael
suspects treachery, what will he say?  What will he
say to *me*?  But no matter—I shall be gone before that
can occur.

"It is now eleven o'clock at night, yet I cannot
sleep, so I shall sit up all night and see the rising of
the Southern Cross.  A silver slip of a moon has just
appeared, and by its shimmering light our vast fleet
seems to be floating down the rive like ships in
a dream.  Such calm, such silence!  Phantoms of
houses, of villages, of funereal palms gliding in ghostly
muteness past us.  Sometimes an obelisk goes like a
dark skeleton down the bank—vestige of a vanished
civilisation as full, perhaps, of delusive faith as ours.
What is God doing with us all, I wonder?  Why does
He——

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   \II

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"Another thrilling moment!  I *must* tell you—I
cannot help myself.

"You may have gathered that since the scene in the
tent on the desert Ishmael has left me alone, but last
night he came again.

"That grim woman had gone to her crib somewhere
outside, and I was writing to you as you see above,
when suddenly in the silence, broken by nothing but
the snores of the men in the hold, the lapping of the
water against the side of the boat and the occasional
voice of the Reis at the rudder, I heard a soft step
which I have learned to know.

"'Rani!' said a voice without, and in a moment the
canvas of my cabin was drawn, and Ishmael was sitting
by my side.

"There was a look in his eyes that told of depths
of tenderness, not to speak of consuming emotion, but
at first he talked calmly.  He began by speaking of
you.  It seems he had had news of you at Assouan,
that you were staying at the Chancellor of El Azhar's
house, and that the old Chancellor had no words warm
enough for your wisdom and courage.  Neither had
Ishmael, who said the whole Mohammedan world was
praising you.

I really believe he loves you, and I was beginning
to melt towards him, thinking how much more he
would worship you if he only knew what you had really
done for him, when—heigho!—he began to speak of
me and to return to his old subject.  Love was a
God-given passion, and he was looking forward to the
end of his work when he might give himself up to it.
His vow of chastity and consecration would then be
annulled and he could live the life of a man!

Very tender, very delicate, but very warm and
dreadfully Oriental!  My nerves were tingling all over,
and I was feeling shockingly weak and womanish while
the great powerful man sat beside me, and when he
talked about children, saying a woman without them
was like a tree without fruit, I found myself for the
first time in my life in actual physical terror.

"At last he rose to go, and before I knew what he
was doing he had flung his arms around me and kissed
me, and when I recovered myself he was gone.

"Then all the physical repulsion I spoke of before
arose in me again, and at the same moment, as if by
a whirlwind of emotion, I remembered you, and my
strength came back.

"I have often wondered what sort of horror it must
be to the woman who is married to an unfaithful
husband or to a drunkard, to have him come in his
uncleanness to claim her, and now (though Ishmael is
neither of these, but merely a man who has 'rights'
in me) I think I know.

"No matter!  I am not afraid of Ishmael any
longer, so *you* need not be afraid for me.  It is not for
nothing that I have Jewish blood in me, and if Ishmael
attempts to *force* me, as surely as I am a daughter of
Zion I will ... well, never mind!  Dreadful?  Perhaps
so.  Jezebel?  I cannot help it.  My husband?
No, no, no; and if destiny has put me into the
position of his wife, I despise and intend to defy it.

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"Of course I did not sleep a wink last night, but I
crept out of my hiding-place under the high prow of the
boat when the dawn came up like a bride robed in pearly
grey and blushing rosy red.  By that time we were
nearing Bedrasheen, and now we are moored alongside
of it, and the people are beginning to land, for it seems
they are to camp at Sakkara, in order to be in a position
to see the light which is to shine from the minaret of
Mohammed Ali.

"Such joy, such rapture!  Men with the madra
pole sounding the depths of the water, men with sculls
pushing the boats ashore; all shouting in strident
voices, or singing in guttural tones.

"Soon, very soon, their hopes will be blighted.  Will
they never know by whom?  I wonder if anybody
will tell them about that letter!  Where is Mosie?  I
trust the Consul-General may keep him in Cairo.  The
boy is as true as steel, but with this woman to question
him...!  My God, make her meet a fate as black as
her heart, the hussy!

"But why do I trouble about this?  It matters
nothing to me what becomes of the Arab woman, or of
the Egyptians, or of the Soudanese, or even of Ishmael
himself—the whole boiling of them, as you say.  I
know I'm heartless, but I can't help it.  The only
question of any consequence is what is happening to
you.  After all, it was I who put you where you are,
and it is quite enough for me to reproach myself with
that.

"What is the Government doing to you?  What has
your father done?  What is going on among the descendants
of the creeping things that came out of the Ark?

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"I cannot see Hamid among the crowd on the land,
but I hope to find him as soon as I go ashore.  If I
miss him in the fearful chaos, I suppose I shall have to
go on to the camp, for, besides my anxiety to receive
your letter, I am living under the strongest conviction
that there is something for me to do for you, and that
it has not been for nothing that I have gone through the
bog and slush of this semi-barbaric life.

"There!  You see what you've done for me!
You've given me as strong a belief in the 'mystic sense'
as you have yourself, and as firm a faith in fatality.

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"No sign of Hamid yet!  Never mind!  Don't be
afraid for me—I am all right.

"Gordon, my dear, my dear-dear, good-bye!

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"HELENA."





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   CHAPTER XII

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For more than three weeks the Consul-General had
kept his own counsel, and not even to the Sirdar, whom
he saw daily, did he reveal the whole meaning of his
doings.

When the Sirdar had come to say that through the
Soudan Intelligence Department in Cairo he had heard
that Ishmael and his vast company had left Khartoum,
and that the Inspector-General was of opinion that the
pilgrimage must be stopped or it would cause trouble,
the Consul-General had said—

"No!  Let the man come on.  We shall be ready to
receive him."

Again, when the Governor at Assouan, hearing of
the approach of the ever-increasing horde of Soudanese,
had telegraphed for troops to keep them out of Egypt,
the Consul-General had replied—

"Leave them alone, and mind your own business."

Finally when the Commandant of Police at Cairo
had come with looks of alarm to say that a thousand
open boats, all packed with people, were sailing down
the river like an invading army, and that if the pilgrims
attempted to enter the city the native police could not
be relied upon to resist them, the Consul-General had
said—

"Don't be afraid.  I have made other arrangements."

Meantime the great man who seemed to be so calm
on the outside was white hot within.  Every day, while
Ishmael was in the Soudan, and every hour after the
Prophet had entered Egypt, he had received telegrams
from his Inspectors saying where the pilgrimage was
and what was happening to it.  So great indeed had
been the fever of his anxiety that he had caused a
telegraphic tape to be fixed up in his bedroom that
in the middle of the night, if need be, he might rise
and read the long white slips.

A few days before the date fixed for the festivities
one of the Inspectors of the Ministry of the Interior
came to tell him that there were whispers of a
conspiracy that had been blown upon, with hushed rumours
of some bitter punishment which the Consul-General
was preparing for those who had participated in it.
As a consequence a number of the Notables and certain
of the diplomats were rapidly leaving the country,
nearly every train containing some of them.  A sombre
fire shone in the great man's eyes while he listened to
this, but he only answered with a sinister smile—

"The air of Egypt doesn't agree with them perhaps.
Let them go.  They'll be lucky if they live to come back."

As soon as the Inspector was gone the Consul-General
sent for his Secretary and asked what acceptances
had been received of the invitations to the King's
Dinner, whereupon the Secretary's face fell, and he
replied that there had been many excuses.

Half the diplomats had pleaded calls from their
own countries, and half the Pashas had protested with
apologetic prayers that influenza or funerals in their
families would compel them to decline.  The Ministers
had accepted as they needs must, but, with a few
exceptions, the Ulema, after endless invocations to
God and the Prophet, had, on various grounds, begged
to be excused.

"And the exceptions, who are they?" asked the
Consul-General.

"The Chancellor of El Azhar, his guest the Sheikh
Omar Benani, the Grand Mufti, and——"

"Good!  All goes well," said the Consul-General.
"Make a list of the refusals and let me have it on the
day of the dinner."

Before that day there was much to do, and on the
day immediately preceding it the British Agency
received a stream of visitors.  The first to come by
appointment was the English Adviser to the Ministry
of Justice.

"I wish you," said the Consul-General, "to summon
the new Special Tribunal to hold a court in Cairo at
ten o'clock to-morrow night."

"Ten o'clock to-morrow night?  Did your lordship
say ten?" asked the Adviser.

"Don't I speak plainly?" replied the Consul-General,
whereupon the look of bewilderment on the
Adviser's face broke up into an expression of embarrassment,
and his desire to ask further questions was crushed.

The next visitor to come by appointment was the
British Adviser to the Minister of the Interior, the tall
young Englishman on whose red hair the red fez sat
so strangely.

"I wish you," said the Consul-General, "to arrange
that the gallows be got out and set up after dark
to-morrow night in the square in front of the Governorat."

"The square in front of the Governorat?" repeated
the Adviser in tones of astonishment.  "Does your
lordship forget that public execution within the city is
no longer legal?"

"Damn it, I'll make it legal," replied the
Consul-General, whereupon the red head under the red fez
bowed itself out of the library without waiting to ask
who was to be hanged.

The next visitor to come to the Agency by appointment
was the burly Commandant of Police.

"You still hold your warrant for the arrest of Ishmael
Ameer?" asked the Consul-General.

"I do, my lord."

"Then come to Ghezirah to-morrow night, and be
ready to receive my orders."

Then came the Colonel who, since the death of
General Graves, had been placed in temporary
command of the Army of Occupation.

"Is everything in order?"

"Everything, my lord."

"All your regiments now in the country can arrive
at Calioub by the last train to-morrow night?"

"All of them."

"Then wait there yourself until you hear from me.
I shall speak to you over the telephone from Ghezirah.
On receiving my message you will cause fifty rounds
of ammunition to be issued to your men, and then
march them into the city and line them up in the
principal thoroughfares.  Let them stay there as long as
they may be required to do so—all night if necessary;
and if there is unrest or armed resistance on the part of
the populace, of the native army, or of people coming
into the town, you will promptly put it down.  You
understand?"

"I understand, my lord."

"But wait for my telephone call.  Don't let one man
stir out of barracks until you receive it.  Mind that.
Good-bye!"

The better part of the day was now gone, yet so
great had been the Consul-General's impatience that he
had not even yet broken his fast, although Fatimah,
who alone was permitted to do so, had repeatedly
entered his room to remind him that his meals were
ready.

At sunset he went up to the roof of his house.  Every
day for nearly a week he had done this, taking a
telescope in his hand that he might look down the river
for the mighty octopus of demented people who were
soon to come.  Yesterday he had seen them for the
first time—a vast flotilla of innumerable native boats
with white, three-cornered sails, stretching far down the
Nile, as a flight of birds of passage might stretch along
the sky.

Now the people were encamped on the desert
between Bedrasheen and Sakkara, a sinuous line of
speckled white and black on the golden yellow of the
sand, looking like a great serpent encircling the city on
the south.  As a serpent they fascinated the
Consul-General when he looked at them, but not with fear, so
sure was he that, by the machinery he had set to work,
the vermin would soon be trampled into the earth.

There they were, he thought, an armed force, the
scourings of the Soudan, under the hypnotic sway of
a fanatic-hypocrite, waiting to fall on the city and to
destroy its civilisation.  In every saddle-bag a rifle;
in every gebah a copy of the Koran; in every heart a
spirit of hatred and revenge.

Since the Grand Cadi had told him of the conspiracy
to establish an Arab Empire the Consul-General's mind
had evolved developments of the devilish scheme.  The
practical heart of the matter was Pan-Islamism, a
combination of all the Moslem peoples to resist the Christian
nations.  Therefore in the great historical drama which
he was soon to play he would be seen to be the saviour
not only of England and of Europe and of civilisation,
but even of Christianity itself!

It would be a life and death struggle, in which cruel
things could not fail to be done, but the issues were
world-great, and therefore he would not shrink.  He who wanted
the end must not think too much about the means.

Ishmael?  The gallows in the square of the
Governorat?  Why not?  The man might have begun as
a mere paid emissary of the Khedive, but having
developed the Mahdist malady, a belief in his own divinity,
he meant to throw off his allegiance to his master and
proclaim himself Caliph.  Therefore they must hang
him—hang him before the eyes of his followers, and
fling his "divine" body into the Nile!

As the Consul-General stepped down from the roof
Ibrahim met him with a letter from the Grand Cadi
saying he found himself suspected by his own people,
and therefore begged to be excused from attendance at
the King's Dinner, but sent this secret message to warn
his Excellency that by the plotting of his enemies the
Kasr-el-Nil bridge which connected Ghezirah with Cairo
would be opened immediately after the beginning of
the festival.

"The fox!" thought the Consul-General, but interpreting
in his own way the dim purpose of the plot—that
it was intended to imprison him on the island
while Ishmael's followers entered the city—he merely
added to his order for his carriage an order for his
steam-launch as well.

Daylight had faded by this time, and as soon as
darkness fell the Consul-General received a line of other
visitors—strange visitors such as the British Agency
had never seen before.  They were women, Egyptian
women, the harem, shrouded figures in black satin and
the yashmak, the wives of the Ministers who had felt
compelled to accept their invitations, but were in fear
of the consequences of having done so.

Unexampled, unparalleled event, never before known
in an Eastern country, the women, disregarding the
seclusion of their sex, had come to plead for their
husbands, to make tacit admission of a conspiracy, but
to say, each trembling woman in her turn, "My husband
is not in it," and to implicate other men who were.

The Consul-General listened with cold, old-fashioned
courtesy to everything they had to say, and then
bowed them out without many words.  Instinctively
Ibrahim had darkened the Agency as soon as they
began to come, so that veiled they passed in, veiled
they passed out, and they were gone before anybody
else was aware.

The dinner-hour was now near, and leaving the
library with the intention of going up to dress, the
Consul-General came upon two men who were sitting
in an alcove of the hall.  They were Reuter's reporters,
who for the past ten years had been accustomed to
come for official information.  Rising as the Consul-General
approached, they asked him if he had anything
to say.

"Be here at ten o'clock to-morrow night and I
shall have something to give you," he said.  "It will
be something important, so keep the wires open to
receive it."

"The wires to London, my lord?"

"To London, Paris, Berlin—everywhere!  Good-night!"

Going upstairs with a flat and heavy step but a light
and almost joyous heart, the Consul-General remembered
his letter of resignation, and thought of the hubbub
in Downing Street the day after to-morrow when
news of the conspiracy, and of how he had scotched it,
fell like a thunderbolt on the "fossils of Whitehall."

In the conflagration that would blaze heaven-high
in England it would be seen at last how necessary a
strong authority in Egypt was, and then—what then?
He would be asked to use his own discretion, unlimited
power be reposed in him; he would hoist the Union
Jack over the Citadel, annex the country to the British
Crown, cast off all futile obligations to the Sultan, and
so end for ever the present ridiculous, paradoxical,
suicidal situation.

While Ibrahim helped him to dress for dinner, he
was partly conscious that the man was talking about
Mosie and repeating some bewildering story which the
black boy had been telling downstairs of Helena's
"marriage to the new Mahdi."

This turned his thoughts in another direction, and for
a few short moments the firm and stern, but not
fundamentally hard and cruel man, became aware that all
his fierce and savage and candid ferocity that day had
been no more than the wild ejaculation of a heart that
was broken and trembling because it was bereaved.

It was Gordon again—always Gordon!  Where was
"our boy" now?  What was happening to him?
Could it be possible that he was so far away that he
would not hear of the weltering downfall, so soon to
come, of the "charlatan mummer" whose evil influence
had brought his bright young life to ruin?





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   CHAPTER XIII

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That night the Sirdar dined with the Consul-General,
and as soon as the servants had gone from the
dining-room he said—

"Nuneham, I have something to tell you."

"What is it?" asked the Consul-General.

"Notwithstanding three weeks of the closest observation,
I have found no trace of insubordination in the
Egyptian army, but nevertheless, in obedience to your
warning, I have taken one final precaution.  I have
given orders that the ammunition with which every
soldier is entrusted shall be taken from him to-morrow
evening, so that if Ishmael Ameer comes into Cairo at
night with any hope of——"

"My dear Mannering," interrupted the
Consul-General with his cold smile, "would it surprise you to
be told that Ishmael Ameer is already in Cairo?"

"Already?  Did you say——"

"That he has been here for three weeks, that he came
by the same train as yourself, wearing the costume of a
Bedouin Sheikh, and that——"

"But, my dear Nuneham, this is incredible," said
the Sirdar, with his buoyant laugh.  "It is certainly
true that a Bedouin Sheikh travelled in the same train
with me from the Soudan, but that he was Ishmael
Ameer in disguise is of course utterly unbelievable."

"Why so?"

"Because a week after I left Khartoum I heard
that Ishmael was still living there, and because every
other day since then has brought us advices from our
Governors saying the man was coming across the desert
with his people."

"My dear friend," said the Consul-General, "in
judging of the East one must use Eastern weights and
measures.  The race that could for fourteen centuries
accept the preposterous tradition that it was not Jesus
Christ who was crucified but some one else who took
on His likeness and died instead of Him, is capable of
accepting for itself and imposing upon others a
substitute for this White Prophet."

"But you bewilder me," said the Sirdar.  "Isn't the
man Ishmael at this moment lying encamped, with fifty
thousand of his demented people, on the desert outside
Cairo?"

"No," said the Consul-General.

And then in his slow, deep, firm voice, grown old and
husky, he unburdened himself for the first time—telling
of Helena's departure for Khartoum on her errand of
vengeance; of her letter from there announcing Ishmael's
intention of coming into Cairo in advance of his people
in order to draw off the allegiance of the Egyptian
army; of Ishmael's arrival and his residence at the
house of the Chancellor of El Azhar; of the visit of
the Princess Nazimah and her report of the conspiracy
of the diplomatic corps, and finally of the Grand Cadi's
disclosure of the Khedive's plot for the establishment
of an Arab Empire.

"So you see," said the Consul-General, with an
indulgent smile, "that all the bad concomitants of an
Oriental revolution are present, and that while you,
my dear friend, have been holding your hand in the
Soudan for fear of repeating the error of two thousand
years ago—troubling yourself about Pontius Pilate and
moral forces versus physical ones, and giving me the
benefit of all the catchwords of your Christian socialism
and Western democracy—a conspiracy of gigantic
proportions has been gathering about us."

The Sirdar's usually ruddy face whitened, and he
listened with a dumb, vague wonder while the
Consul-General went on, with bursts of bitter humour, to
describe one by one the means he had taken to defeat the
enemies by whom they were surrounded.

"So you see, too," he said at last, lifting unconsciously
his tired voice, "that by this time to-morrow
we shall have defeated the worst conspiracy that has
ever been made even in Egypt—meted out sternly
retributive justice to the authors of it; put an end
to all forms of resistance, whether passive or active,
silenced all chatter about Nationalism and all prattle
about representative institutions, destroyed the devilish
machinery of this accursed Pan-Islamism, crushed the
Khedive, and wiped out his fanatic-hypocrite and
charlatan-mummer, Ishmael Ameer."

The Consul-General had spoken with such intensity,
and the Sirdar had listened so eagerly, that down to
that moment neither of them had been aware that
another person was in the room.  It was Fatimah, who
was standing, with the death-like rigidity of a ghost,
near to the door, in the half-light of the shaded electric
lamps.

The Sirdar saw her first, and with a motion of his
hand he indicated her presence to the Consul-General,
who, with a face that was pale and stern, turned angrily
round and asked the woman what she wanted, whereupon
Fatimah, with trembling lips and a quivering
voice, as if struggling with the spirit of falsehood, said
she had only come to ask if the Sirdar intended to sleep
there that night and whether she was to make up a
bed for him.

"No, certainly not!  Why should you think so?
Go to bed yourself," said the Consul-General, and with
obvious relief the woman turned to go.

"Wait!" he cried.  "How long have you been in
the room?"

"Only a little moment, oh my lord," replied Fatimah.

After that the two men went to the library, but some
time passed before the conversation was resumed.  The
Sirdar lit a cigar and puffed in silence, while the
Consul-General, who did not smoke, sat in an arm-chair with
his wrinkled hands clasped before his breast.  At length
the Sirdar said—

"And all this came of Helena's letter from Khartoum?"

"Was suggested by it," said the Consul-General.

"You told me she was there, but I could not imagine
what she was doing—what her errand was.  Good
heavens, what a revenge!  It makes one shiver!
Carries one back to another age!"

"A better age," said the Consul-General.  "A more
natural and less hypocritical age at all events."

"The age of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
perhaps—the age of a hot and consuming God."

"Yes, a God of wrath, a God of anger, a God who *did*
something, not the pale, meek, forgiving, anæmic God
of our day—a God who does nothing."

"The God of our day is at least a God of mercy, of
pity, and of love," said the Sirdar.

"He is a lay figure, my friend, who permits wrong
without avenging it—in short, no God at all, but an
illogical, inconsequential, useless creature."

The Sirdar made no further resistance, and the
Consul-General went on to defend Helena's impulse
of vengeance by assailing the Christian spirit of
forgiveness.

"There was at least something natural and logical
as well as majestic and magnificent in the old ideal
of Jehovah, but your new ideal of Jesus is contrary
to nature and opposed to the laws of life.  'Love
your enemies.'  'Do good to them that hate you.'  'If
a man smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the
other also.'  'Resist not evil!'  'If any man take
away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also!'  Impossible!
Fatal!  If this is Christianity, I am no Christian.
When I am hit, I hit back.  When I am injured,
I demand justice.  The only way!  Any other would
lead to the triumph of the worst elements in humanity.
And what I do everybody else does—everybody—though
the hypocrisy of the modern world will not
permit people to admit it."

The Consul-General had risen and was tramping
heavily across the room.

"Is there one man alive who will dare to say that he
actually orders his life according to the precepts of
Christ?  If so, he is either a liar or a fool.  As for
the nations, look at the facts.  Christianity has been
two thousand years in the world, yet here we are
competing against each other in the building of warships,
the imposition of tariffs, the union of trades.  Why
not?  I say, why not?"

The Consul-General drew up and waited, but getting
no answer he continued—

"Civilisation requires it—I say requires it.  What
holds the world together and preserves peace among
the nations is not Christianity but cast-iron and
gunpowder.  Yet what vexes me and stirs my soul is to
hear people praying in their churches for peace and
concord, while all the time they know that 'peace and
concord' is an impossible ideal, that Christianity in its
first sense is dead, and that Jesus as a practical guide to
life—as a practical guide to life, mind you—has *failed*."

Then the Sirdar lifted his eyes and said—

"Do you know, my dear Nuneham, I once heard
somebody else talk like that, though from the opposite
standpoint—of sympathy, not contempt."

"Who was it?"

"Your own son."

"Humph!"

The Consul-General frowned and there was silence
again for some moments.  When the conversation was
resumed it concerned the dangers of the Arab Empire,
which, according to the Grand Cadi, the Khedive (with
the help of Ishmael) expected to found.

"What would it mean?" said the Consul-General.
"The utter annihilation of the unbeliever.  Does not
the word 'Ghazi' signify a hero who slays the infidel?
Does not every Mollah, when he recites the Khuttab
in the mosque, invoke divine wrath on the non-Moslem?
What then?  The establishment of an Arab Empire
would mean the revolt of the whole Eastern world
against the Western world, and a return to all the
brutality, all the intolerance of the farrago of moribund
nonsense known as the Sacred Law."

The Sirdar made no reply, and after a moment the
Consul-General said—

"Then think of the spectacle of a conquering Mohammedan
army in Cairo!  If the Citadel and the Arsenal
of the capital could be occupied by that horde outside,
it would not be merely England's power in Egypt that
would be ended, or the English Empire as a world force
that would be injured—it would be Western civilisation
itself that would in the end be destroyed.  The
Mohammedans in India would think that what their brethren
in Cairo had done they might do.  The result would be
incalculable chaos, unlimited anarchy, the turning back
of the clock ten centuries."

The Consul-General returned to his seat, saying—

"No, no, my friend, a catastrophe so appalling as
that cannot be left to chance, and if it is necessary to
blow these fifty thousand fanatics out of the mouths
of guns rather than lay the fate of the world open to
irretrievable ruin, I ... *I will do it*."

"But all this depends on the truthfulness of the
Grand Cadi's story—isn't it so?" asked the Sirdar.

The Consul-General bent his head.

"And the first test of its truthfulness is whether or
not these thousands of Ishmael's followers are an armed
force?"

Again the Consul-General bent his head.

"Well," said the Sirdar, rising and throwing away his
cigar, "I am bound to tell you that I see no reason to
think they are.  More than that, I will not believe that
when our boy took his serious step he would have sided
with this White Prophet if he had suspected that the
man's aims included an attack upon England's power
in Egypt, and I cannot imagine for a moment that he
could be fool enough not to know."

Again the Consul-General frowned, but the Sirdar
went on firmly.

"I believe he thought and knew that Ishmael Ameer's
propaganda was purely spiritual, the establishment of
an era of universal peace and brotherhood, and that
is a world-question having nothing to do with England
or Egypt, or Arab Empires, except so far as——"

But the Consul-General, who was cut to the quick
by the Sirdar's praise of Gordon, could bear no more.

"Only old women of both sexes look for an era of
universal peace," he said testily.

"In that case," replied the Sirdar, "the old women
are among the greatest of mankind—the Hebrew
prophets, the prophets of Buddhism, of Islam, and of
Christianity.  And if that is going too far, then Abraham
Lincoln and John Bright, and, to come closer home,
your own son, as brave a man as ever drew a sword, a
soldier too, the finest young soldier in the King's service,
one who might have risen to any height if he had been
properly handled, instead of being——"

But the old man, whose nostrils were swelling and
dilating like the nostrils of a broken-winded horse, leapt
to his feet and stopped him.

"Why will you continue to talk about my son?"
he cried.  "Do you wish to torture me?  He allowed
himself to become a tool in the hands of my enemies,
yet you are accusing me of destroying his career and
driving him away.  You are—you know you are!"

"Ah, well!  God grant everything may go right
to-morrow," said the Sirdar after a while, and with that
he rose to go.

It was now very late, and when Ibrahim, in the hall,
with sleepy eyes, hardly able to keep himself from
yawning, opened the outer door, the horses of the Sirdar's
carriage, which had been waiting for nearly an hour,
were heard stamping impatiently on the gravel of the
drive.

At the last moment the old man relented.

"Reg," he said, and his voice trembled, "forgive
me if I have been rude to you.  I have been hard hit
and I must make a fight.  I need not explain.
Good-night!"  And he had gone back to the library before
the Sirdar could reply.

But after a while the unconquerable spirit and force
of the man enabled him to regain his composure, and
before going to bed he went up on to the roof to take
a last look at the enemy he was about to destroy.  There
it lay in the distance, more than ever like a great serpent
encircling the city on the south, for there was no moon,
the night was very dark, and the dying fires of the
sinuous camp at Sakkara made patches of white and
black like the markings of a mighty cobra.

Fatimah was at his bedroom door, waiting to bring
his hot water and to ask if he wanted anything else.

"Yes, I want you to go to bed," he replied, but the
Egyptian woman, still dallying about the room and
speaking with difficulty, wished to know if it was true,
as the black boy had said, that Miss Helena was in
Khartoum and that she had betrothed herself to the
White Prophet.

"I don't know and I don't care—go to bed," said
the Consul-General.

"Poor Gordon!  My poor boy!  *Wah*!  *Wah*!  Everything
goes wrong with him.  Yet he hadn't an evil
thought in his heart."

"Go to bed, I tell you!"

It was even longer than usual before the Consul-General
slept.

He thought of Helena.  Where was she now?  He
had been telling himself all along that to save appearances
she might find it necessary to remain for a while
in Ishmael's camp, but surely she might have escaped
by this time.  Could it be possible that she was kept as
a prisoner?  Was there anything he ought to do for her?

Then he thought of the speech he was to make in
proposing the King's health the following day, and
framed some of the stinging, ironical sentences with
which he meant to lash his enemies to the bone.

Last of all he thought of Gordon, as he always did
when he was dropping off to sleep, and the only regret
that mingled with his tingling sense of imminent triumph
was that his son could not be present at the King's
Dinner to see—what he would see!

"Oh, if I could have him there to-morrow night—what
I would give for it!" he thought.

At length the Consul-General slept and his big
desolate house was silent.  If any human eye could have
looked upon him as he lay on his bed that night, the old
man with his lips sternly set, breathing fitfully, only
the tired body overcome, the troubled brain still working,
it would have been a pitiful thing to think that he
who was the virtual master of millions appeared to be
himself the sport of those inscrutable demons of destiny
which seem to toss us about like toys.

His power, his pride, his life-success—what had he
gained by them?  His wife dead; his son in revolt
against him; alone, enfeebled, duped, and self-deluded.

God, what a little thing is man!  He who for forty
years had guided the ship of State, before whose word
Ministers and even Khedives had trembled, could not
see into the dark glass of the first few hours before him.

Peace to him—until to-morrow!





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   CHAPTER XIV

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   "SERAI FUM EL KHALIG,
       "CAIRO.

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"MY DEAREST HELENA,—I am going to that dinner!
Yes, as Ishmael Ameer in the disguise of the Sheikh
Omar Benani, chief of the Ababdah, I am to be one of
my father's guests.

"This is the morning of the day of the festivities, and
from Hafiz, by the instrumentality of one who would
live or die or give her immortal soul for me, I have at
length learned all the facts of my father's *coup*.

"Did you ever hear of the incident of the Opera
House?  Well, this incident is to be a replica of that,
though the parts to be played in the drama are in danger
of being differently cast.

"As this is the last letter I shall be able to send to
you before an event which may decide one way or other
the fate of England in Egypt, my father's fate, Ishmael's,
and perhaps yours and mine, I must tell you as much
as I dare commit to paper.

"The British army, as I foresaw from the first, is
being brought back to Cairo.  It is to come in to-night
as quietly as possible by the last trains arriving at
Calioub.  The Consul-General is to go to Ghezirah as if
nothing were about to happen, but at the last moment,
when his enemies have been gathered under one
roof—Ministers, Diplomats, Notables, Ulema—when the
operation of their plot has begun, and the bridge is drawn
and the island is isolated, and Ishmael and his vast
following are making ready to enter the city, my father
is to speak over the telephone to the officer commanding
at Abbassiah, and then the soldiers, with fifty rounds
of ammunition, are to march into Cairo and line up in
the streets.

"Such is my father's *coup*, and to make sure of the
complete success of it—that Ishmael's following is on
the move, and that no conspirator (myself above all)
escapes—he has given orders to the Colonel not to stir
one man out of the barracks until he receives his signal.
Well, my work to-night is to see that he never receives it.

"Already you will guess what I am going to do.  I
must go to the dinner in order to do it, for both the
central office of the telephone and the office of the
telegraph are now under the roofs of the Ghezirah
Palace and Pavilion.

"I hate to do the damnable thing, but it must be
done.  It must, it must!  There is no help for it.

"I cannot tell you 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.

"It is necessary to prevent the massacre which I
know (and my father does not) would inevitably ensue;
necessary to save my father himself from the execration
of the civilised world; necessary to save Ishmael from
the tragic consequences of his determined fanaticism;
necessary to save England from the possible loss of her
Mohammedan dominions, from being faithless to her
duty as a Christian nation, and from the divine judgment
which will overtake her if she wantonly destroys her
great fame as the one Western power that seems designed
by Providence to rule and to guide the Eastern peoples;
and necessary above all to save the white man and the
black man from a legacy of hatred that would divide
them for another hundred years and put back the
union of races and faiths for countless centuries.

"If I am not a vain fool this is what I (*D.V.*) have
got to do, so why in the name of God need I trouble
myself about the means by which I do it?  And if I
am the only man who can, I must, or I shall be a coward
skulking out of his plain responsibility, and a traitor
not only to England but to humanity itself.

"God does not promise me success, but I believe I
shall succeed.  Indeed I am so sure of success that I
feel as if all the recent events of my life have been
leading up to this one.  What I felt when I left Cairo
for Khartoum, and again when I left Khartoum for
Cairo—that everything had been governed by higher
powers which could not err—I feel now more than ever.

"If I had delivered myself up to the authorities after
your father's death my life would have been wasted
and thrown away.  Nay, if I had obeyed orders over
the blunder of El Azhar I should not have been where
I am now—between two high-spirited men who are
blindly making for each other's ruin, and the
destruction of all they stand for.

"This reconciles me to everything that has
happened, and if I have to pay the penalty of playing
buffer I am ready to do so.  I have great trust that
God will bring me out all right, but if that is not His
plan, then so be it.  I am willing to give my life for
England, whatever name she may know me by when
she comes to see what I have done, and I am willing
to die for these poor Egyptians, because I was born
and brought up among them, and I cannot help loving
them.

"Death has no terrors for me anyway.  I think the
experiences of the past months have taught me all that
death has to teach.  In fact I feel at this moment
exactly as I have felt at the last charge in battle, when,
fighting against frightful odds, it has not been a case of
every man for himself, but of God for us all.

"Besides I feel that on the day of your father's
death I died to myself—to my selfish hopes of life, I
mean—and if God intends to crush me in order that I
may save my country and these people whom I love
and who love me I really wish and long for Him to
do so.

"But *In-sha-allah*!  It will be as God pleases, and
I believe from the bottom of my heart that He is
working out His wonderful embroidery of events to a
triumphant issue.  So don't be afraid, my dear Helena,
whatever occurs to-night.  I may be taken, but (*D.V.*)
I shall not be taken in disgrace.  In any case I feel that
my hour has come—the great hour that I have been
waiting for so long.

"This may be the last letter I shall write to you, so
I am sending it by Mosie, lest Hamid should find a
difficulty in getting into your camp.  I hope to God
you may get it, for I want you to know that my last
thoughts are about yourself.

"Upon my soul, dear, I believe the end will be all
right, but if it is to be otherwise, and we are to be
separated, and our lives in this world are to be wasted,
remember that deep love bridges death.

"Remember, too, what you said to me at Khartoum.
'I am a soldier's daughter,' you said, 'and in my heart
I am a soldier's wife as well, and I shouldn't be worthy
to be either if I didn't tell you to do your duty,
whatever the consequences to me.'

"Good-bye, my dear, my dear!  If anything happens
you will know what to do.  I trust you without fear.
I have always trusted you.  I can say it now, at this
last moment—never, dearest, never for one instant has
the shadow of a doubt of you entered into my heart.
My brave girl, my love, my life, my Helena!

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

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"GORDON.

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"*P.S.*—Oh, how the deuce did I forget?  There is
something for you to do—something important—and I
had almost sent off my letter without saying anything
about it.

"Do you remember that on the day I left Khartoum
it was ordered by Ishmael that after the call of the
muezzin to midnight prayers, a light was to be set up
in the minaret of the mosque of Mohammed Ali as a
sign that he might enter the city in peace?

"Well, if I fail and the British army comes into
Cairo Ishmael must be kept out of it.  He may be
stubborn—a man who thinks God guides and protects
him and makes a special dispensation for him is not
easy to dissuade—but if the light does not appear he
*must* be restrained.

"That is your work with Ishmael—why you are with
him still.  I knew it would be revealed to us some day.
Once more, my dear, my dear, God bless and protect
you!"





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   CHAPTER XV

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"UNDER THE PYKAMIDS.

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"MY DEAR GORDON,—Your letter has not yet reached
me.  What has happened?  Has your messenger been
caught?  Who was it?  Was it Hamid?

"Not having heard from you, I was of course
compelled to come on with the camp and therefore I am
with it still.  We are under the shadow of the pyramids,
with the mud-built village of Sakkara by our side and
Cairo in front of us, beyond the ruins of old Memphis
and across a stretch of golden sand.

"This is, it seems, the day of 'the King's Dinner,'
and at sunset when the elephant-horn was blown for
the last time we gathered for prayers under a sea-blue
sky on the blood-red side of the Step Pyramid.

"It was a splendid, horrible, inspiring, depressing,
devilish, divine spectacle.  First, Ishmael recited from
the Koran the chapter about the Prophet's great vision
(the Surat er Russoul, I think), while the people on their
knees in the shadow, with the sun slanting over their
heads, shouted their responses.  Then in rapturous tones
he spoke, and though I was on the farthest verge of
the vast crowd I heard nearly all he said.

"They had reached their journey's end, and had to
thank God who had brought them so far without the
loss of a single life.  Soon they were to go into Cairo,
the Mecca of the new world, but they were to enter it
in the spirit of love, not hate, of peace, not war, doing
violence to none and raising no rebellion.  What said
the Holy Koran?  'Whosoever among Moslems, Christians
or Jews believe in God and in another life shall be
rewarded.'

"Therefore let no man think they were come to turn
the Christians out of Egypt.  They were there on a far
higher errand—to turn the devil out of the world!
The intolerance and bitterness of past ages had been
the product of hatred and darkness.  The grinding
poverty and misery of the present age was the result
of a false faith and civilisation.  But they were come
to bring universal peace, universal brotherhood, and
universal religion to all nations and races and
creeds—one State, one Faith, one Law, one God!

"Cairo was the gate to the East.  It was also the
gate to the West.  He who held the keys of that gate
was master of the world.  Who, then, should hold
them but God's own, His Guided One, His Expected
One, His Christ?

"More and yet more of this kind Ishmael said in
his thrilling, throbbing voice, and of course the people
greeted every sentence with shouts of joy.  And then
finally, pointing to the minarets of the mosque of
Mohammed Ali, far off on the Mokattam hills, he told
them that at midnight, after the call to prayers, a light
was to shine there, and they were to take it for a sign
that they might enter Cairo without injury to any and
with goodwill towards all.

"'Watch for that light, O my brothers!  It will
come!  As surely as the sun will rise on you to-morrow,
that light will shine on you to-night!'

"It is now quite dark and the camp is in a delirious
state of excitement.  The scene about my tent is simply
terrifying.  At one side there is an immense Zikr, with
fifty frantic creatures crying 'Allah!' to a leader
who in wild guttural tones is reciting the ninety-nine
attributes of God.  At the other side there is a huge
fire at which a group of men, having slaughtered a
sheep, are boiling it in a cauldron, with many pungent
herbs, that they may feast and rejoice together in
honour of the coming day.  People are sitting in circles
and singing hymns of victory; tambourines, kettle-drums,
and one-stringed lutes are being played everywhere,
and strolling singers are going about from fire
to fire making up songs that describe Ishmael's good
looks, and good deeds, and his 'divinity'—the wildest
ditty being the most applauded.

"Where Ishmael himself is I do not know, but he
must indeed be carried away by religious ecstasy if he
is not trembling at the mere thought of to-morrow
morning.  What is to happen if these 'Allah-intoxicated
Arabs' have to meet five thousand British
bayonets?  Or, supposing you can obviate that, what
is to occur when they are compelled to realise that all
their high-built hopes are in the dust?  O God!  O God!

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   \II

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"El Hamdullillah!  Your letter has come at last!
Perhaps I wish it hadn't been Mosie who brought it, but
the boy was clever in riding into the camp unobserved,
and now I have sent him outside to hide in the darkness
while I scribble a few lines in reply.  He is to
come back presently, and meantime, please God, he will
keep out of the sight of that she-cat of an Arab woman.

"You are doing right, darling—I am sure you are!
Naturally you must be troubled with thoughts about
England and your father, but both will yet see what
motives inspired you, and whatever they do now they
will eventually make amends.

"Bravo, my boy, bravo!  Perhaps we shall all become
Quakers some day, but let the peace-people croak
as they please, it is war that brings out the truly heroic
virtues, and though you are trying to prevent bloodshed
you are really going into battle.  Go, then, and
God bless you!

"What wretched ink this is—it must have got mixed
with water.

"Oh yes, certainly!  I will stay here to the end, and
if occasion arises I will do what you desire, though I
have not the faintest hope of succeeding.  The fact is
that even if I could persuade Ishmael not to enter
Cairo the people would not under any circumstances be
restrained.

"To tell you the truth, I cannot help feeling sorry for
him.  He really began with the highest aims and the
strongest common sense, but he has become the victim
of his people's idolatry, and, being made an idol, he
may no longer be a man.

"I cannot help feeling sorry for the people also, for
I suppose they have only tried in their blind way to
realise the dream of humanity in all ages, the dream
of all the holy books and all the great prophets—the
dream of a millennium.

"It seems, too, as if God, who puts beautiful ideals
in people's hearts, always calls for a scapegoat to pay
the price of them.  That is what you are to be, dear,
and when I think of what you are going to do to save
these poor people I begin to see for the first time what
is meant by the sacrificial blood of Christ.

"I suppose this is shocking, but I don't care a pin
about that.  Every heroic man who risks his life for
his fellow-man is doing what Christ did.  You are doing
it, and I don't believe the good God will ask any
question about ways and means.

"There!  That's something out of my eyes splash on
to the very point of my pen.  Don't take it as a mark
of weakness, though, but as the sign-manual of Helena's
heart telling you to go on without thinking about her.

"Forget what I said about my Jewish blood and
Jezebel and all that nonsense.  Ishmael's 'work' will
not be 'finished' until he enters into Cairo, so I run no
risk while I am here, you see.

"Of course I am in a fever of impatience to know
what is happening on Ghezirah to-night, but you must
not suppose that I am afraid.  In any case, I shall stay
here, having no longer the faintest thought of running
away, and if there is anything to do I'll do it.

"This *may* be the last letter I am to write to you, so
good-bye, my Gordon, and God bless you again!  My
dear, my dear, my dear!  HELENA.

"*P.S.*—I suppose you are in the thick of it by this
time, for I see that the illuminations on Ghezirah have
already begun.  My dear, my dear, my ... my——"





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   CHAPTER XVI

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At eight o'clock that night the Pavilion of the Ghezirah
Palace was brilliantly lit up for the "King's Dinner."  A
troop of British cavalry was mounted in front of it
under the sparkling lights that swung from the tall
palms of the garden, and a crowd of eager spectators
were waiting to see the arrival of the guests.

The Consul-General came early, driving in his open
carriage with two gorgeously clad saises running before
him.  When he stepped down at the door, in his cocked
hat, laced coat, and gold-braided trousers, he was
saluted like a sovereign.  The band of a British
regiment under the trees played some bars of the National
Anthem, and the English onlookers cheered.

In the open court of the Pavilion, which was walled
about by Oriental hangings, the Consul-General's own
people were waiting to receive him.  His old and
weakened but still massive and even menacing personality
showed out strongly against the shadowy forms
of some of the Advisers and Under-Secretaries who
stood behind him.

It was quickly seen that his manner was less brusque
and masterful than usual, but that his tone was cynical
and almost bitter.  When his First Secretary stepped
up to him and whispered that a Reuter's telegram,
which had just come, announced that the Khedive had
left Paris for Marseilles intending to take steamer for
Egypt, he was heard to say—

"I don't care a —— what the Khedive does or what
he intends to do.  Let him wait until to-morrow."

The Sirdar was one of the first of the guests to arrive,
and after saying in a low tone that he had just taken
the necessary steps to withdraw the ammunition from
the native troops, he whispered—

"The great thing is to keep calm—not to allow
yourself to lose your temper."

"I *am* calm, perfectly calm," said the Consul-General.

Then the other guests came in quick succession,
Envoys Extraordinary, Ministers-Plenipotentiary,
Chancellors and Counsellors of Legation and Attachés,
wearing all their orders; Barons, Counts, and
Marquises—attired magnificently in a prodigious quantity of
pad and tailor-work, silk stockings, white, blue, and red,
coats with frogs and fur collars, stars, ribbons, silver
shoe-buckles, tight breeches, and every conceivable kind
of uniform and court-dress.

Among the diplomatic corps came Egyptian Ministers
wearing the tarboosh and many decorations; the
Turkish High Commissioner, a gorgeous and expansive
person; a Prince of the Khedivial house, a long
miscellaneous line of Pashas and Beys, and finally a few
of the Ulema in their turbans and flowing Eastern
robes.

The Consul-General received them all with smiles,
and it was said afterwards that never before had he
seemed to be so ceremoniously polite.

There was a delay in announcing dinner, and people
were beginning to ask who else was expected, when the
First Secretary was seen to approach the host and to
say something which only he could hear.  A moment
later the venerable Chancellor of El Azhar entered the
hall in his simple grey farageeyah, accompanied by a
tall, strong, upright man in the ample folds of a Bedouin
Sheikh, and almost immediately afterwards the guests
went into the dining-hall.

Dinner was served by Arab waiters in white, and
while the band in the gardens outside played selections
from the latest French operas, some of the European
guests consumed a prodigious deal of fermented liquor,
and buzzed and twittered and fribbled in the manner
of their kind.  The Egyptian Ministers and Pashas
were less at ease and the Ulema were obviously
constrained, but the Consul-General himself, though he
continued to smile and to bow, was the most
preoccupied person in the room.

He passed dish after dish, eating little and drinking
nothing, though his tongue wras dry and his throat was
parched.  From time to time he looked about him
with keen eyes, as if counting up the number of those
among his guests who had conspired against him.  There
they were, nearly all of them, his secret enemies, his
unceasing revilers, his heartless and treacherous foes.  But
wait!  Only wait!  He would soon see their confusion!

The Sirdar, who sat on the left of the host, seemed
to be conscious of the Consul-General's impatience, and
he whispered again—

"The great thing is to be calm—perfectly calm."

"I *am* calm," said the Consul-General, but in a tone
of anger which belied his words.

Towards the end of the dinner his Secretary stepped
up to the back of his chair and whispered to him that
the bridge had been opened, and after that his
impatience increased visibly, until the last dish had been
served, the waiters had left the room, the band outside
had ceased playing, and the toast-master had called
silence for the first toast.  Then in an instant all
impatience, all nervousness, all anxiety disappeared, and
the Consul-General rose to propose "The King."

Never had any one heard such a bitter, ironical,
biting speech.  Every word stung, every sentence cut
to the bone.

He began by telling his guests how happy he was
to welcome them in that historic hall, "sacred to the
memory of the glories of Ismail Pasha, whose princely
prodigality brought Egypt to bankruptcy."  Then he
assured them that he took their presence there that
night as a cordial recognition of what Great Britain had
done through forty hard and sleepless years to rescue
the Valley of the Nile from financial ruin and moral
corruption.  Next, he reminded them that England was
now reaping the results of the education it had given
the country, and among these results were certain
immature efforts to found Western institutions on Eastern
soil, not to speak of secret conspiracies to embarrass,
disturb, and even destroy her rule in Egypt altogether.

"But I am glad to realise," he said in a withering
tone, "that all such attempts to carry the country
back from civilisation to barbarism have been repelled
by the best elements in the community, European and
Egyptian alike, and especially by the illustrious leaders
by whom I am now surrounded."

Then his eyes flashed like the eyes of an old eagle,
while, amid breathless silence, in the husky voice that
came from his dry throat, turning from side to side, he
thanked his guests, class by class, for the help they
had given to the representative of the King in putting
down political and religious fanaticism.

"Gentlemen of the diplomatic corps," he said, "you
are satisfied with what England has done for Egypt,
and you do not wish to see her rule disturbed.
Between you and ourselves there are no animosities, no
selfish interests to serve, no hostile groupings, no rival
combinations.  Knowing that we are the joint trustees
of civilisation in a backward Eastern country, nothing
could induce you so to act as if you wanted Egypt for
yourselves.  Gentlemen, in the name of the King, I
thank you!"

Turning then to the Egyptian Ministers, he said in
tones of blistering irony—

"Your Excellencies, it seems idle to thank you for
your loyalty to the nation by whose power you live.
You are far too intelligent not to see that a man cannot
set fire to his house and yet hope to preserve it from
being burnt to the ground, far too sensible of your
own interests to listen to the extremists who would
tear to pieces the country you govern and give it back
to bankruptcy and ruin.  Gentlemen, in the name of the
King, I thank you."

Then facing the Notables he said, with a curl of his
firm lip—

"It might perhaps be thought that you, of all others,
had least reason to be grateful to the Power that took
the *courbash* out of your hands, and deprived you of
the advantages of forced labour; but you do not want
to regain the powers you once held over the great
unmoving masses of the people; you are willing to see
all false ledgers showing unjust debts burnt in the
public squares with your whips and instruments of the
bastinado.  Therefore, gentlemen, in the name of the
King, I thank you."

Finally, looking down the middle table to where the
Chancellor of El Azhar sat with his Bedouin friend
beside him, he said—

"And your Eminences of the Ulema, I thank you
also.  Your enemies sometimes say that you continue
to live in the Middle Ages, but you are much too keenly
alive to your interests in the present hour not to realise
how necessary it is to you to be assured for the future
against the possible recurrence of Mahdist raids and
revolutions.  You know that the hydra-headed monster
called fanaticism would destroy you and your class,
and therefore you support with all the loyalty of your
eager hearts the Power which in the interests of true
religion would crush and quell it.  Gentlemen, in the
name of the King, I thank you."

The effect of the speech was paralysing.  As, one by
one, the Consul-General spoke to the classes represented
by his guests, there was not a response, not a
sound, nothing but silence in the room, with white faces
and quivering lips on every side.

At length the Consul-General raised his glass and, in
a last passage of withering sarcasm, called on the
company to drink to the great sovereign of the great nation
which, with the cordial sympathy and united help of
the whole community, as represented by those who
were there present, had done so much for civilisation
and progress in the East—"The King!"

They could not help themselves—they rose, a lame,
halting, half-terrified company, getting up irregularly,
with trembling hands and pallid cheeks, and repeated
after the toast-master in nervous, faltering, broken
voices, "The King!"

After the speaker sat down there was a subdued
murmur which rose by degrees to a sort of muffled growl.
The Consul-General heard it, and his keen eyes flashed
around the company.  Down to this moment he had
done no more than he intended to do, but now, carried
away by the excitement created within himself by his
own speech, he wished to throw off all disguise, and
fling out at everybody.

"Better be calm, though," he thought, remembering
the Sirdar's advice, and at the next moment the Sirdar
himself, whom he had missed from his side, returned
and said, in a whisper—

"Afraid I must go.  Just heard that some of the
Egyptian soldiers have been knocking down the officers
who were sent to remove their ammunition."

At that news, which appeared to confirm predictions
and to be the beginning of everything he had been
led to expect, the Consul-General lost all control of
himself.

"Wait!  Wait a little and we'll go together," he
whispered back, and then, calling for silence, he rose
to his feet again and faced full upon his guests.

"Your Highness, your Eminences, your Excellencies,
and Gentlemen," he said in a loud voice, "I have one
more toast.  I have given you the health of the King,
and now I give you 'Confusion to his Enemies.'"

If a bomb had fallen in the dining-hall it could
scarcely have made more commotion.  The
Consul-General saw this and smiled.

"Yes, gentlemen, I say his enemies, and when I speak
of the King's enemies, I refer to his enemies in Egypt,
his enemies in this room."

The sensation produced by these words was
compounded of many emotions.  To such of the guests
as were entirely innocent of conspiracy it seemed
plainly evident that a kind of mental vertigo had
seized the Consul-General.  One of them looked round
for a doctor, another rose from his seat with the
intention of stepping up to the speaker, while a third
took out his gold pencil-case and began to scribble a
note to the Sirdar, asking him, as the best friend of
their host, to remove the Consul-General from the room.

On the other hand, the persons who were actually
participating in conspiracy had, by operation of that
inscrutable instinct which compels guilty men to expose
themselves, risen to their feet, and were loudly shouting
their protests.

"Untrue!"  "Disgraceful!"  "False!"  "Utterly false!"

"False, is it?" said the Consul-General.  "We
shall see."

Then glancing over them one by one as they stood
about him, his eye fixed itself first upon a foreign
representative whose breast was covered with decorations,
and he said—

"Baron, did you not say in the Salon of a certain
Princess that out of your Secret Service money you were
providing arms for the Egyptian populace?"

The Baron gave a start of surprise, made some movement
of the lips as if trying to reply, and sank back to
his seat.  Then the Consul-General turned to one of
two Egyptian Ministers who, with faces as red as their
tarbooshes, were standing side by side, and said—

"Pasha, will you deny that as recently as yesterday
you sent somebody to me in secret to say that while you
were innocent of conspiracy against British rule, your
colleague, who stands at your right, was deeply guilty?"

The Pasha stammered out some confused words and
collapsed.

Then the Consul-General faced down to one of the
Ulema, the Grand Mufti, who, in his white turban and
graceful robes, was trying his best to smile, and said—

"Your Eminence, can it be possible that you were
not present at the house of the Chancellor of El Azhar
when a letter was sent to a certain visionary mummer
then in the Soudan, asking him to return to Cairo in
order to draw off the allegiance of the Egyptian army?"

The smile passed in a flash from the Grand Mufti's
face, and he, too, dropped back to his seat.  Then one
by one the others who had been standing, slithered
down to their places, as if each of them was in fear
that some secret he had whispered in the salon, the
harem or the mosque, would in like manner be blurted
from the housetops.

The Consul-General swept the whole company with
a look of triumph and said—

"You see, gentlemen, I know everything, and it is
useless to deny.  In order to overthrow the authority
of England in Egypt you have condescended to the
arts of anarchists—you have joined together to provoke
rebellion against law and order."

All this time the Sirdar's face had been stamped
with an expression of sadness, and now he was seen to
be addressing the Consul-General in a few low-toned
words, but his warning, if such it were, seemed to be
quite unheeded.  With increasing excitement and
intense bitterness the Consul-General turned hotly upon
the foreign representatives and said—

"Gentlemen of the diplomatic corps, joint trustees
with me of peace and civilisation in a backward country,
you thought you were using the unrest of the Egyptians
to serve your own ends, but listen, and I will tell you
what you were really doing."

Then, more fiercely than ever, his face aflame, his
hoarse voice breaking into harsh cries, he disclosed his
knowledge of the Egyptian plot as he understood it
to be—how the final aim, the vast and luminous fact
to which all Moslem energies were directed, was the
establishment of an Arab Empire which should have
for its first purpose to resist the Christian nations;
how this Empire had originated in the mind of the
Khedive, who wished to put himself at the head of it;
and how, since it was necessary in an Eastern country
to give a religious colour to political intriguing, Ishmael
Ameer, the mock Mahdi, the fanatic-hypocrite, had
been employed to intimidate the British authorities by
bringing up the scourings of the Soudan to their very
doors.

This fell on the whole company, innocent and guilty,
like a thunderclap.

The great Proconsul, the strong and practical
intellect which had governed the State so long, had been
deceived on the main issue, had been fooled, and was
fighting a gigantic phantom!

"Is this news to you, gentlemen of the diplomatic
corps?  Ask your friends, the Ulema!  Is it news to
you, too, gentlemen of El Azhar?  Ask your Grand
Cadi!  But that is not all.  You have had no scruples,
no shame!  In hitting at England you have not
hesitated to hit at England's servant—myself.  You have
hit me where I could least bear the blow.  By lies, by
hypocrisies, by false pretences you have got hold of my
son, my only son, my only relative, all that was left to
me ... the one in whom my hopes in life were centred
and——"

Here the old man's voice faltered, and it was
afterwards remembered that at this moment the Bedouin
Sheikh rose in obvious agitation, made some steps
forward, and then stopped.

At the next instant the Consul-General had recovered
himself, and, with increasing strength and still greater
ferocity, was hurling his last reproaches upon his
enemies.

.. _`The Consul-General . . . was hurling his last reproaches upon his enemies`:

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   :alt: The Consul-General was hurling his last reproaches upon his enemies

   The Consul-General was hurling his last reproaches upon his enemies

"But you are mistaken, gentlemen.  I may be old
but I am not yet helpless.  In the interests not only of
England but of Europe I have made all necessary
preparations to defeat your intrigues, and now—now I am
about to put them into execution."

Saying this he left his seat and directed his steps
towards the door.  Nearly the whole of the company
rose at the same moment, and all stood aside to let
him pass.  Nobody spoke, nobody made a gesture.  In
that room there were now no longer conspirators and
non-conspirators.  There were only silent spectators
of a great tragedy.  Everybody felt that an immense
figure was passing from the world's stage, and none
would have been more surprised if the Pyramid of
Gizeh had crumbled before their eyes.

On reaching the door the Consul-General stopped and
spoke again, but with something of his old courageous
calm.

"I understand," he said, "that it was part of the
plan that to-night at midnight, while the British army
was expected to be on the Delta, and I and my colleagues
were to be held prisoners on Ghezirah, the horde of
armed fanatics now lying outside on the desert were to
enter and occupy the city.  That was a foolish scheme,
gentlemen, such as could only have been conceived in the
cobwebbed brains of El Azhar.  But whatever it was
I must ask you to abide by its consequences.  In the
interests of peace and of your own safety you will remain
on this island until to-morrow, and in the morning you
shall see ... what you shall see!"

Then saying something in a low voice to the
Commandant of Police who was standing near, he passed
out of the dining-hall and the door was closed behind him.





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   CHAPTER XVII

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A few minutes afterwards the military band in the
garden was playing again, red and white rockets were
shooting into the dark sky from the grounds of the
Khedivial Sports Club, and the Consul-General was
entering the little insular telephone office of Ghezirah,
which was under the same roof as the Pavilion.

"Call me up the Colonel commanding at Abbassiah
and ask him to hold the line."

"Yes, my lord."

While the attendant put in the plug of his machine
and waited for a reply, the Consul-General walked
nervously to and fro between the counter and the door.
He was expecting the Commandant of Police to come to
him in a moment with news of the arrest of Ishmael
Ameer.  Without this certainty (though he had never
had an instant's doubt of it) he could not allow
himself to proceed to the last and most serious
extremity.

"Not got him yet?"

"Not yet, my lord," said the attendant, and he
plugged his machine afresh.

The Consul-General resumed his restless perambulation.
He was by no means at ease about the unpremeditated
developments of the scene in the dining-hall,
but he had always intended to make sure that his
enemies were safely housed on the island, and thereby
cut off from the power of making further mischief,
before he ordered the army into the city.  The plugging
of the machine was repeated.

"Not got him even yet, boy?"

"Cannot get an answer from the Central in Cairo,
my lord."

"Try yet another line.  Quick!"

The Consul-General thought the Commandant was
long in coming, but no doubt the police staff had
removed the supposed "Bedouin" to a private room, so
that in making his arrest, and in stripping off his
disguise to secure evidence of his identity, there might be
no unnecessary commotion, no vulgar sensation.  The
plugging of the machine ceased.

"Got him at last?"

"No, my lord.  Think there must be something
wrong with the wires."

"The wires?"

"They seem to have been tampered with."

"You mean—cut?"

"Afraid they are, my lord."

"Then the island—so far as the telephone goes—the
island is isolated?"

"Yes, my lord."

The old man's face, which had been flushed, became
deadly pale, and his stubborn lower lip began to tremble.

"Who can have done this?  Who?  Who?"

The attendant, terrified by the fierce eye that looked
into his face, was answering with a vacant stare and a
shake of the head when the Sirdar entered the office,
accompanied by the Commandant of Police, and both
were as white as if they had seen a ghost.

"Well, what is it now?" demanded the Consul-General,
whereupon the Sirdar answered—

"The Commandant's men have got him, but——"

"But—what?"

"It is not Ishmael Ameer."

"Not Ishma ... you say it is not Ish——"

The Consul-General stopped, and for a long moment
he stared in silence into the blanched faces before him.
Then he said sharply, "Who is it?"

The Commandant dropped his head and the Sirdar
seemed unwilling to reply.

"Who is it, then?"

"It is ... it is a British officer."

"A British ... you say a British——"

"A Colonel."

The old man's lips moved as if he were repeating
the word without uttering it.

"His tunic was torn where his decorations had been.
He looked like ... like a man who might have been
degraded."

The Consul-General's face twitched, but in a fierce,
almost ferocious voice he said, "Speak!  Who is it?"

There was another moment of silence, which seemed
to be eternal, and then the Sirdar replied—

"Nuneham, it is your own son."





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.. _`CHAPTER XVIII`:

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   CHAPTER XVIII

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"*From the Slave of the Most High, Abdul Ali, Chancellor of
El Azhar, to Ishmael Ameer, the Messenger of
God—Praise be to Him, the Exalted One!*

.. vspace:: 1

"A word in haste to say that he who came here as
your missionary and representative has within the hour
been arrested by the officials of the Government, having,
so far as we can yet learn and surmise, been most
treacherously and maliciously betrayed into their hands
by means of a letter to the English lord from one who
stands near to you in your camp.

"In sadness and tears, with faces bowed to the earth
and ashes on our heads, we send our sympathy to you
and to your stricken followers, entreating you on our
knees, in the name of the Compassionate, not to attempt
to carry out your design of coming into Cairo, lest
further and more fearful calamities should occur.

"This by swift and trusty messenger to your hands
at Sakkara.—The Slave of your Virtues,

.. vspace:: 1

"ABDUL ALI."

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   END OF FOURTH BOOK

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   FIFTH BOOK

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   THE DAWN

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER I

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The day that Ishmael had looked for, longed for,
prayed for—the day that was to see the fulfilment not
only of his spiritual hopes but of his rapturous dream
of bliss, the day of his return to Cairo—had come at
last.

But the Ishmael Ameer who was returning to Cairo
was by no means the same man as the Ishmael who
had gone away.  In a few short months he had become
a totally different person.  Two forces had changed
him—two forces which in their effect were one.

By the operation of the first of these forces he had
become more of a mystic; by the operation of the
second he had become more of a man; by the operation
of both together he had become a creature who
was controlled by his emotions alone.

When he left Cairo he had been a man of elevated
spirit but of commanding common sense.  He had
looked upon himself as one whose sole work was to
call men back to God and to righteousness.  But little
by little the tyranny of outward events, the pressure of
responsibility, and, above all, the heartfelt and
prostrate but dim and perverted adulation of his followers,
had led him to believe that he was a being apart,
specially directed by the Almighty and even permitted
to be His mouthpiece.

Insensibly Ishmael had come to look upon himself as
a "Son of God."  When he first saw that the crowds
who came to him from east and west were beginning
to believe that he was the Redeemer, the Deliverer,
the Expected One whom he foretold, he was shocked,
and he protested.  But when he perceived that this
belief helped him to comfort and console and direct
them, he ceased to deny; and when he realised that it
was necessary to his people's confidence that they should
think that he who guided them was himself guided by
God, he permitted himself, by his silence, to acquiesce.

From allowing others to believe in his divinity, he
had come to believe in it himself.  His burning,
boundless influence over his people had seemed to his deep
heart to be only intelligible as a thing given to him from
Heaven, and then the "miracle" in the desert, the
raising of the Sheikh's daughter from the dead, had
swept down the last of his scruples.  God had given
him supernatural powers and made him the mouthpiece
of His will.

And now, at the end of his pilgrimage, if he did not
accept the idea that he was in very fact the Redeemer
who was to bring in the golden age, the Kingdom of
God, he succumbed to a delusion that was nearly akin
to it—that just as the lord of the Christians, being
condemned by the Roman Governor, had permitted
another to take his form and face and bodily presence
and to die on the cross instead of him, so the Messiah,
the Mahdi, the Christ who was to come, was now using
him as His substitute to lead and control His poor,
oppressed, and helpless people until the time came for
Him to appear in His own person.

Such was the operation of the force that had made
Ishmael more of a mystic; and the force that had made
him more of a man had been playing in the same way
upon his heart.

It had played upon him through Helena.

When Helena entered into his life and he betrothed
himself to her, he honestly believed that he was doing
no more than protecting her good name.  For some time
afterwards he continued to deceive himself, but the
constant presence of a beautiful woman by his side
produced its effect, and little by little he came to know
that his heart was touched.

As soon as he became conscious of this he remembered
the vow he had made when his Coptic slave-wife died,
that no other woman should take her place, and he also
reminded himself of his mission, his consecration to the
welfare of humanity.  But the more he tried to crush
his affection for Helena, the more it grew.

He was like a boy in the first beautiful morning light
of love.  The moment he was alone, after parting from
Helena at the door of her sleeping-room, he would kiss
the hand that had touched her hand, and find a tingling
joy in stepping afresh over the places on which her feet
had trod.  A glance from her beaming eyes made his
pulse beat rapidly, and when, one day, he saw her
combing out her hair, with her round white arm bare
to the elbow, his breathing came quick and loud.

His passion was like a flower which had sprung up in
the parched place of the desert of his desolate soul, and
everything that Helena did seemed to water it.  Reading
her conduct by the only light he had, he thought
she loved him.  Had she not followed him from India,
breaking from her own people to live by his side?
Had she not betrothed herself to him without a thought
of any other than spiritual joys?

Her pride in him, too, was no less than her affection.
Had she not proposed that he should go into Cairo in
advance, because that being the place of the greatest
danger was the place of highest honour also?  In her
womanly jealousy for her husband's rank, had she not
resisted and resented the substitution of another when
it was decided by the Sheikhs that "Omar" should go
instead?  And, notwithstanding her illness at Khartoum,
had she not insisted on following him across the
desert and, weak as she was, enduring the pains of his
pilgrimage in order to continue by his side?

Allah bless and cherish her!  Was there anything
in the world so good as a sweet, unselfish, devoted
woman?

During the journey Ishmael's love for Helena grew
hour by hour until it filled his whole being, and made
his wild heart a globe of infinite radiance and hope.
Her beauty, her gifts of mind as well as of body, took
complete possession of him.  Whenever he saw her,
everything brightened up.  Whenever he turned on
his camel, and caught sight of her dromedary at the
tail of the caravan, he became excited.  Whenever
evil things befell, he had only to think of the Rani and
his troubles died away.  All that was good and beautiful
in the world seemed to centre in the litter that
held her by day and in the tent that covered her by
night.

Then, in spite of his mission and the burden of his
work, he began to remember that all this loveliness,
all this sweetness, belonged *to him*.  The Rani was *his
wife*, and he could not help but think of the possibility
of nearer relations between them.

When this thought first came to him he repelled it
as a species of treachery.  Had he not pledged himself
to a spiritual union?  Would it not be wrong to break
that pledge—wrong to the Rani, wrong to his own
higher nature, wrong to God?

But, nevertheless, the temptation to claim the rights
of a husband became stronger day by day, and he
struggled to reconcile his faith with his affection.  He
reminded himself that renunciation was no part of
Islam, that it was a Christian error, that "monkery"
had been condemned by the Prophet, that it was
contrary to the clear law of nature, and that as soon as
his task was finished it was his duty to live a human
life, with woman and with children.

This seemed to solve the Sphinx-like problem of
existence, but when he tried to talk of it to the Rani,
in order to break the ground with her, his tongue
would not utter the words that were in his heart, and
something made him stop in confusion and hasten away.

Yet his self-denial only intensified his desire.
Keeping away from Helena by day, he was with her in his
dreams by night.  One rapturous, incredible, almost
impossible and even terrible dream of bliss was always
stirring within him.  A little longer, only a little longer.
The hour in which he would lay down his task as
leader, as prophet, would be the hour in which he
would take up his new life as a man.

That hour was now near.  He was outside the gates
of Cairo.  Nothing would, nothing could, intervene at
this last stage to prevent him from entering the city,
and once within, his work would be at an end.  O
God, how good it was to live!

All that day at Sakkara, Ishmael had been in the
highest state of religious exaltation, and when night
came he walked about the camp as if demented both
in heart and brain.

The camp stretched from the hanks of the Nile at
Bedrasheen over the black ruins of Memphis to the
broad sands before the Step Pyramid, and everywhere
the people sat in groups about their fires, eating,
drinking, playing their pipes, tambourines and drums,
and singing, to tunes that were like wild dance music,
their songs of rejoicing.

They were singing about himself, his wise words, his
miracles, his miraculous birth (born of a virgin), his
good looks, which made all women love him, and his
divinity, which would save him from death.  Ishmael
heard this, yet he had no misgivings, no fear of what
the coming day would bring forth.  A sort of spiritual
lightning blinded him to possible danger, and his heart
swelled with love for his people.  God bless them!
God bless everybody!  Bless East and West, white
man and black man, sons of one Father, soon to be
united in one hope, one love, one faith!

Ishmael felt as if he wanted to take the whole world
in his arms.  Above all, he wanted to take the Rani
in his arms.  It was not that the lower man, the
animal man, was conquering the higher man, the
spiritual man, but that both body and soul were aflame,
that a sense of fierce joy filled his whole being at the
thought of entering into a new life, and that he wished
to find physical expression for it.

Before he was aware of what he was doing, he was
walking in the direction of Helena's tent.  Striding
along in the darkness, which was slashed here and there
with shafts of light from the camp fires, he approached
the tent from the back, the mouth being towards the
city.  Close behind it, he stumbled upon some one who
was crouching there.  It was a boy, and he rose hastily
and hurried away without speaking, being followed
immediately by a woman who seemed to have been
watching him.

Ishmael's heart was beating so violently by this
time that he had only a confused impression of
having seen this, and at the next instant, treading
softly on the silent sand, he was in front of the tent,
looking at Helena, who was within.

She was sitting on her camp-bed, her angerib, writing
on a pad that rested upon her lap, by the light of a
lamp which hung from the pole that upheld the
canvas.  Though her face was down, Ishmael could
see that it was suffused by a rosy blush, and when
at one moment she raised her head, her bright and
shining eyes seemed to him to be wet with tears, but
full, nevertheless, of joy and love.

Ishmael thought he knew what she was doing.  She
was thinking of him, and writing, as she loved to do,
the immortal story of his pilgrimage, happy in the
near approach of his great triumph.

Standing in the darkness to look at her, he could
hardly restrain himself any longer.  He wanted to
burst in upon her and to be alone with her.

Behind and about him were the lights of the camp
and its many sounds of rejoicing, but he did not see
or hear them now.  His heart was afire.  He was
intoxicated with love.  What had been for so long his
almost unconquerable dream of bliss was about to be
fulfilled.

"Rani!" he whispered, in a quivering voice, and
then, plunging into the tent, he caught her up in his
arms.





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   CHAPTER II

.. vspace:: 2

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?





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   CHAPTER III

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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.





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   CHAPTER IV

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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—

"I see how it has been, O my Rani.  You did not
intend to betray my people—my poor people whose
sufferings you have seen, whose faith and hopes and
dreams you have shared and witnessed.  It was Omar
you were thinking of.  Your heart has never forgiven
him for taking the place you meant for your husband.
You were jealous of him for my sake, and your jealousy
got the better of your judgment.  'I will punish him,'
you thought.  'I will make his mission of no effect.'  And
so you sent that letter.  But you did not reflect
that in destroying Omar you would be destroying my
people also.  It was wrong, it was cruel, but it was a
woman's fault, and you have seen it and suffered for it
ever since.  Jealousy of Omar, perhaps hatred of
Omar—that was it, was it not, O my Rani?"

His voice was breaking as he spoke, for the pitiful
explanation he had lighted upon was failing to bring
conviction to his own mind, yet he fixed his sad eyes
eagerly on Helena's face and repeated—

"Jealousy of Omar, perhaps hatred of Omar—that
was what caused you to send that letter?"

Helena could not speak.  The pathos of his error
was choking her.  But she replied to him with a look
which it required no words to interpret.

"No?" he said.  "Not of Omar?  Of whom, then?"

Helena could not lie.  "He must know some day,"
she thought.

"Of whom, then?" he repeated, in his helpless confusion.

"Yourself," she replied.

"Allah!  Allah!  Myself!  Myself!" he said, in a
breathless whisper, rising to his feet again and striding
across the tent.

At the first moment after Helena's confession it
seemed to Ishmael that both sun and moon had
suffered eclipse and the world was in total darkness.
Why had the Rani betrayed him?  From what motive?
For what object?  He tried to follow her thoughts,
and found it impossible to do so.

There was a short period of frightful silence, and
then, feeling as if he wanted to cry, he drew up before
Helena again, and said in a husky voice, his swarthy
face trembling and twitching—

"But why, O Rani?  I had done you no wrong.
From the day you came to me I did all I could for
you—all I could to make your nights peaceful and
your mornings happy.  Why has your heart been so
far away from me?"

Helena felt that the time had come to tell him everything.
Yet in order to do so she must begin with the
death of her father, and she could not speak of that
without involving Gordon.  "But that is impossible,"
she thought, "absolutely impossible."

"Speak," said Ishmael.  "When you sent your letter
to the English lord, you must have known that you were
dooming me to death—what had I done to deserve it?"

"I cannot tell you—I cannot, I cannot," she
answered.

"It is unnecessary," said Ishmael.

In the moment of Helena's silence a terrible
explanation of her conduct had come to him, and he thought
he saw, as by flashes of lightning, into the dark abyss
that was at his feet.

His manner, which had been gentle down to that
moment, suddenly became harsh, and his voice, which
had been soft, became hard.

"When did you send that letter?" he demanded.

She saw the stern closing of his lips, and for an
instant she felt afraid.

"Was it before the meeting of the Sheikhs at which
Omar was chosen?"

"Yes," she replied.  If Gordon was to be condemned
to death, it was of no consequence what became of her.

"You told the English lord that Ishmael was coming
to Cairo?"

"Yes."  His deep, impenetrable eyes seemed to be
looking through and through her.

"With what object and in—in what disguise?"

"Yes."  She knew she was dashing herself to destruction,
but no matter.

"When you sent your letter you said to yourself,
'Ishmael will go into Cairo, but my letter shall go
before him.'  Yes?"

"Yes."  In the lowest depths of her soul she felt
that if he killed her now she did not care.

"And when Omar stepped into the place you had
meant for me you thought, 'The letter I wrote to
destroy Ishmael will destroy Omar instead'?"

"Yes."

"Was that why you tried to prevent Omar from going?"

"Yes."  Tears were choking her utterance.

"Why you were unwilling to make the kufiah?"

"Yes."

"Why you fainted in the mosque?"

She bowed her head, being unable to utter another
word.

"Then," said Ishmael, and his voice rose to a husky
cry—"then it was love of Omar, not hatred of him, that
inspired your letter?"

She made no reply.  Filled as she was with shame
for what she had done to Ishmael, the image of Gordon
was still in her mind.  Even at that moment, when
terrible consequences threatened her, she could not help
thinking of him.  If he were tried by Field General
Court-Martial to-night he might be executed in the
morning!

That thought carried her back to the Citadel.  She
was on the drilling-ground in the dead grey light of
dawn.  A regiment of soldiers was drawn up in line.
Six of them stood out from the rest with rifles to their
shoulders.  And before them, standing alone, with his
back to the ramparts, was one condemned but dauntless
man.  "My last thoughts are about you," he was
saying to her, and living in that cruel dream she burst
into tears.

Again Ishmael misunderstood her weeping, and again
a wave of compassion passed over him.

"It is possible I am wrong," he said.  "I may be
judging you unjustly.  In that case tell me so, and I
will kiss your feet.  I will ask your pardon."

Sho could not speak.  "This will end in some way,"
she thought.

"In the name of Heaven, speak!  Tell me you do
not love this man.  Tell me I am wrong," he cried.

"No, you are not wrong," she said.  "I do love
him, and I am in despair.  All you have said is
true, but I cannot help it.  I am a wicked woman,
and my life by your side has been a deception from
the first."

With that she burst into another flood of tears, and
falling face downward on the angerib, she buried her
head in the pillow.

"Allah!  Allah!" said Ishmael, and all the blood in
his body seemed to flush his heart.  He was passing
through the supreme phase of his agony—perhaps the
cruellest that man can suffer—the agony of knowing
that the woman he loved, the woman he worshipped,
loved and worshipped another man.

In the cloud of maddening thoughts which sprang to
his brain he imagined he read the mystery of Helena's
conduct from the first.  Remembering that she had
called him a black man, the wild deep heart in him
rose to a fever of jealous wrath.

"I see how it has been," he said.  "The white man
came to my tent.  I welcomed him.  I loved him.  I
trusted him.  He was my brother, and he slept by my
side.  I made him free of my harem.  I put my honour
in his hands.  And how did he repay me?  By robbing
me of the love that was my love, the heart that was
my heart."

She tried to speak, to protest, but in a torrent of
wrath he bore her down.

"Your white man has over-reached himself, though.
'I will outdo Ishmael in her eyes,' he thought.  But he
has only fallen into the pit that was dug for me.  Let
him perish there, and the curse of God be upon him!"

Again she tried to protest, and again in the blind
hurricane of his anger he silenced her.

"And you—it was nothing to you that in betraying
me you were betraying my people also—my poor
people, who have suffered so much and followed me so
faithfully."

His face was terrible—it had the sullen glow of the
Western sky before a storm.

"You have wrecked my hopes in the hour of their
fulfilment.  You have made dust and ashes of the
expectations of my people.  You have uncovered my
nakedness, and made me a thing to point the finger at
and to scorn.  You have turned my heart to stone."

Then the wild anguish of the jealous man became
united to the fierce wrath of the fanatic, and going
nearer to Helena, and leaning over her, he said—

"Worse than that—a hundredfold worse—you have
made the plans and promises of God of no avail.  You
have allowed the Evil One to enter into your heart, and
to use your guilty passions to defeat the schemes of the
Most High.  Therefore," he said, raising his quivering
voice until it rang through the tent like a tortured
cry—"therefore, as the instrument of Satan you have no
right to live.  I say you have no right even to live.
And I ... I, who have loved you ... I, whose
heart has been wrapped about you like the rope
about the wheel of the well ... I, whom you have
betrayed and destroyed, and ... and my people with
me ... it is I ... yes, it is I who must ... who
must——"

Helena heard him stammering and sobbing over her.
At the same time she felt that his trembling, ferocious
hands were laying hold of her.  She felt that the long
Eastern veil that had hung down her back was being
wrapped around her throat.  She felt that its folds
were growing tighter and yet tighter, and that she was
being strangled and was losing consciousness.

Then suddenly she became aware that Ishmael's
formidable grasp had slackened, that he had stepped
back from the angerib on which she lay, and was saying
to himself in a tremulous whisper—

"Allah!  Allah! what is this I am doing?  Allah!
Allah!  Allah!"

And at the next moment she realised that in horror
of his own impulse he had turned and fled out of the tent.





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   CHAPTER V

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Being left alone, Helena's emotions were so strange,
so bewildering, so overpowering that she could not
immediately make out clearly what she felt.  The most
contradictory thoughts and feelings crowded upon her.

First came a sense of suffocating shame, due to
Ishmael's hideous misconception of her relation to
Gordon, which put her into the position of an
unfaithful wife.  But would the truth have been any
better—that she was not an Indian Rani, not a Muslemah, that
she and Gordon had known and loved each other before
Ishmael came into their lives, and that a desire to
punish him for coming between them had been the
impulse that had taken her to Khartoum?

Next came a sense of her utter degradation during
the recent scene, in which her lips had been sealed and
she had been compelled to submit to Ishmael's just and
natural wrath.

Then came a sense of abject humiliation with the
thought that Ishmael had been right from the beginning
and she had been wrong, and therefore she had
merited all that had come to her.  "If he had killed
me I could have forgiven him," she told herself.

Finally (perhaps from, some deep place in her Jewish
blood) came the feeling that after all it was not so much
Ishmael who had been shaming her for her treachery as
the Almighty who had been punishing her for attempting
to take His vengeance out of His hand.  "Vengeance
is Mine," saith the Lord, and her impious act had
deserved the penalty that had overtaken it.

But against all this, opposing it, fighting it,
conquering it, triumphing over it, was the memory of her
love for Gordon.  "I loved him, and I could not have
acted otherwise," she thought.

More plainly than ever, she now saw that her love for
Gordon had been the first cause and origin of all she
had done.  This single-hearted devotion left her nothing
else to think about.  It wiped out Ishmael and his
troubles,and all the troubles of his people.  "I may be
selfish and cruel, but I cannot help it," she told herself
again and again, as she continued to lie, where Ishmael
had left her, face down on the angerib, shaken with sobs.

After a while she heard a step approaching.  The
Arab woman had entered the tent.

"So you are there, oh my beauty," said Zenoba, with
a bitter ring in her voice.

Without raising her head to look, Helena knew that
the usual obsequious smiles had gone from the woman's
face, and that her eyes were full of undisguised
contempt.  In another moment all the impulses of hatred
which had scoured through her jealous soul for months
fell on Helena in bitter reproaches.

"I knew it would come to this.  I always told him so,
but he would not listen.  'Ask pardon of God, Zenoba,'
he said.  Now he will have to ask pardon of me."

Helena could hardly control herself, but with an
effort she submitted in silence, and let the woman have
her way.

"Anybody might have seen what was going on from
the moment the white Christian came to Khartoum.
But no, it was no use talking.  When a man looks at
a woman he sees her eyes, not her heart, and is blind
to those that love and serve him."

Helena's own heart was beating violently and paintully,
but she compelled herself to lie still.  "It's no
more than I deserve," she thought.

And then the Arab woman lashed her to the bone
with reports of what the people in the camp were
saying.  All that had happened might have been
foreseen.  He who had tried to emancipate women had
been the first to suffer for it.  Good women did not
wish to be emancipated, and the bad women who let
their veils fall, and meddled with the affairs of men,
only wanted to imitate the evil ways of the women of
the West.  "Our mothers did not do it, and neither
shall our wives," said some, while others declared that
it was better to have a thousand enemies outside your
house than one within.

The camp was utterly disorganised, utterly demoralised.
Instead of the singing and rejoicing of an hour
ago there was now wailing and lamentation; instead
of prayer and praise there was cursing and swearing.
Some of the people, in a state of panic, were saying
that the soldiers of the Christian government would
soon be upon them; that they would be shot dead
with bullets; that they would be carried into Cairo as
prisoners and crucified in the public streets; that the
Christians would eat their flesh and suck their blood;
that those who were not slain would be walking
skeletons and talking images, and made to worship
the wooden cross instead of their own God, their Allah.
As a consequence many were packing their baggage
hurriedly and turning the heads of their camels to the
south.  Boats were being unmoored at Bedrasheen, and
boat-loads were preparing to push off.

Desolation was over the whole camp.  The hopes
of the people were in the dust.  Some of the women
were kneeling on the ground and throwing the sand
over their heads and faces.  Some of the men were
heaping insults on Ishmael's name—their former love
and reverence being already gone.  "Where are the
promises he made us?" they were asking.  "Is it for
this that he brought us from our homes?"

Others were calling and searching for the Master.
His tent was empty.  He was nowhere to be seen.
Had he deserted them in their hour of trouble?

"Where is he?" they were crying.  "What has
become of him?"  No one knew.  Even Black Zogal
could not say.  And then some were crying, "Ela'an
abu, abu, abu!" (Cursed be his father, and his father's
father, and his father's father's father!)

But worse, far worse, because more fierce and
terrible than the people's anger against Ishmael, was
their wrath against the "White Woman." It was
she who had betrayed them.  But for her evil influence
and secret schemes, they might have inherited Egypt
and all the rich lands and treasures of the Valley
of the Nile.  Listen! They were gathering about the
tent, and murmuring and shouting excitedly.  Hark!
That was Zogal's voice—he was persuading them to
go away.

"But they'll come back, oh my beauty," said
Zenoba.  "Better get away before they return and
tear you to pieces as a hungry jackal tears a dog."

With that merciless word the bitter-hearted woman
took herself off, leaving Helena still lying face down on
the angerib in her agony of mingled anger and shame.

Being once more left alone in the tent, Helena
continued to know what was going on in the camp.  The
wailing of the women, who were throwing sand over
their heads, seemed as if it would never cease.  At
length some of them began to sing.  They sang songs
of sorrow which contrasted strangely with the songs
of victory which the men had sung before.  The
weird and monotonous but moving notes that are
peculiar to Arab music sounded like dirges in the
depth of night.

The people were in despair.  Their consoling and
inspiring idea of divine guidance was gone, and the
hope that had sustained their souls through the toils
of the desert march was dead.  The myth of Ishmael's
divinity had already disappeared; the Master was no
longer the Redeemer, the Mahdi, the Christ.  All that
had been a hideous illusion, a mirage of the soul,
without reason or reality.

It was terrible; it was horrible; it was almost as
if the whole people had died an hour ago in "the
sure and certain hope," and then suddenly awakened
in the other world to find that there was no God,
no heaven, no reward for the pains of this life, and
all they had looked for and expected had been the
shadow of a dream.

Listening to this as she lay on the angerib, and
thinking she was partly to blame for it, Helena
asked herself if there was anything she could do to
save Ishmael and his people.

"O God, is there *nothing* I can do?" she thought.

At first there came no answer to this question.  Do
what she would to fix her mind on the people's
sufferings and Ishmael's downfall, her mind swung back
to its old subject, and once again she thought of
Gordon and his arrest.

Things in that regard were plainer to her now.
The idea of a Field General Court-Martial, which had
made her chill with fear, had been the figment of
an over-excited brain.  Whatever had happened to
Gordon's efforts in the interests of peace—whether
they had failed or succeeded—his own trial would
take the ordinary course.  A military court of the
usual kind would have to be summoned, its sentence
would have to be confirmed, and only the King could
confirm it.

All this would take time, and therefore there was
no need for panic.  But meantime what was Gordon's
position?  He had been arrested in mistake for
Ishmael, and consequently he would, one way or
another, be liable to punishment for Ishmael's offence.
That was to say, for the offence she had attributed
to Ishmael.  Yet Gordon had done no wrong, he had
intended no evil.

"Is there nothing I can do?—nothing at ail?" she
asked herself again.

Suddenly a light dawned on her.  If the Consul-General
could be made to see what Gordon's motives
had really been—to save England, to save Egypt, to
save the good name of his own father—and if he
could be made to realise that Ishmael's aim was not
rebellion, and his followers not an armed force, but
merely a vast concourse of religious visionaries—what
then?

Then as a just man, if a stern and hard one, he
would be compelled to see that his own son was not
punished, and perhaps—who could say?—he might
even permit Ishmael's people to enter Cairo.

Vague, undefined, and unconsidered as this idea was,
Helena leapt at it as a solution of all their difficulties,
and when she asked herself how she was to bring
conviction to the Consul-General's mind, she
remembered Gordon's letters.

Nothing could be better.  Being written before the
event, and intended for her eyes only, they must
be convincing to anybody whatever, and absolutely
irresistible to a father.  Private?  No matter!
Intimate and affectionate and full of the closest secrets
of the soul?  Never mind!  Sho would share them
with one who was flesh of Gordon's flesh, for his
heart must be with her, and the issue was life or
death.

Yes, she would go into Cairo, see the Consul-General,
show him Gordon's letters, and prove and explain
everything.  Thus she who had been the first cause
of the people's sufferings, of Ishmael's downfall, and
of Gordon's arrest, would be Gordon's, Ishmael's, and
the people's deliverer!  Yes, she, she, she!

But wait!  Had she not promised Gordon that she
would remain in the camp, whatever happened?  She
had; but that promise was annulled by this time,
while this great errand must be precisely what she
had been sent there for, and by flying away now she
would be fulfilling her destiny in a wider and deeper
sense than even Gordon himself could have conceived.

"I'll go at once," she thought, and she sprang up
from the angerib to carry out her purpose.

As she did so she saw a little ugly black face, all
blubbered over with tears, on the ground beside her.
It was Mosie, and he was kissing the hem of her
skirt and saying—

"Mosie very sorry.  He not know.  Will lady ever
forgive Mosie?"

Helena's heart leapt up at sight of the boy.  She
wanted his help immediately, and his unexpected
appearance at that moment was like an assurance
from heaven that what she intended to do ought to
be done.

Comforting the lad and drying his eyes, she asked
him in breathless whispers a number of questions.
Where was the donkey on which he had ridden
into the camp?  it was near by, tethered.  Did he
know the way to the railway-station at Bedrasheen?
He did.  Could he lead her there through the
darkness?  He could.  It was now half-past nine—would
there be a train to Cairo soon?  Yes, for the Alim
had just gone to catch one that was to go to Boukq
Daorour at ten o'clock.

"The very thing," said Helena.  "Bring your
donkey to the back of the tent and wait there until
I come."

"Yes, yes," said the boy, now ablaze with eagerness,
and kissing both her hands alternately, he shot
out on his errand.

Then Helena picked up a little locked handbag
which contained Gordon's precious letters, added her
own letter to them, and after extinguishing the lamp
that hung from the pole, stepped out of the tent.

A few minutes later, mounted on a donkey that
was led by a boy, a woman, looking like an Egyptian
with her black skirt drawn over the back of her
head and closely clipped under her nose, was picking
her way through the darkness.

All was quiet by this time.  The weeping and
wailing had at last come to an end, and from the
vast encampment there rose nothing but the deep,
somnambulent moan that ascends from a great city
when it is falling asleep.  The fires were smouldering
out, and the people, such of them as remained,
were lying, some in their tents, others outstretched
on the sand, all weary and heart-broken in the
misery of their dead hope, their dead dream, their
dead faith.

A kind of soulless silence hung in the air.  Even
the call of the Night-watchman ("God is One!")
was no more to be heard.  Only the braying of
donkeys at intervals, the ruckling of camels, and the
barking of dogs.

There was no moon, but the stars were thick, and
one of them was falling.





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   CHAPTER VI

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Taking his steam-launch, which had been moored to
the boat-landing of the Ghezirah Palace, the
Consul-General returned home immediately after Gordon's
arrest.  He did not wait to say what was to be
done with the prisoner, or to tell his officials what
further steps, if any, were to be taken to prevent
the expected insurrection.  One overwhelming event
had wiped everything else out of his mind.  His
plans had been frustrated; he had been degraded,
made a laughing-stock, and by Gordon—his own son.

As his launch skimmed across the river in the darkness
he could hear in the back-wash of the propeller
the guffaws of the diplomatic corps, and in the
throbbing of the engine the choking laughter of the
whole world.

His mind was going like a weaver's shuttle, and
he was asking himself by what sinister development
of fate this devilish surprise had been brought about.
He could find no answer.  In the baffling mystery
of events only one thing seemed clear—that Gordon,
when he disappeared from Cairo after the affair of
El Azhar, had not gone to America or India or
Australia, as everybody had supposed, but straight
to the man Ishmael's camp, and that he had allowed
himself to be used by that charlatan mummer to
further his intrigues.  Against his own father, too!
His father, who had been thinking of him every day,
every night, and nearly all night, and was now, by
his instrumentality, made an object of derision and
contempt.

"Fool!  Fool!  Fool!" thought the Consul-General,
and his anger against Gordon burnt in his heart like
a fierce and consuming fire.

On reaching the Agency he went upstairs to his
room and rang violently for Fatimah.  Somebody
within his own household had become aware of his
plans and revealed them to his enemies.  He had
little doubt of the identity of the traitor, for he
remembered Fatimah's unexpected appearance in the
dining-room the night before, and her confusion and
lame excuse when the Sirdar observed her presence.

Fatimah answered her bell cheerfully as one who
had nothing to fear, but the moment she saw the
Consul-General's face, with the deep folds in his
forehead and the hard and implacable lines about his
mouth, she dropped on her knees before he had
uttered a word.

"What is this you have been doing, woman?" he
demanded, in a stern voice, whereupon Fatimah made
no attempt at disguise.

"I couldn't help it, O Master," she said, breaking
into tears.  "I would have given him my eyes.  He
was the same as my own son, and I had suckled him
at my breast.  Can a woman deny anything to her own?"

The Consul-General looked down at her for a moment
in silence, and his drooping lower lip trembled.  Then,
with a gesture of impatience, he said—

"Get away to your room at once," and opening the
door for her he closed and locked it when she was gone.

But the momentary spasm of tenderness towards
Gordon which had come to the Consul-General at sight
of the foster-mother's love disappeared at the next
instant.  The only excuse he could find for his son's
conduct in duping his ignorant Egyptian nurse was
that perhaps he had himself been duped.

After the first plans had been formed in Khartoum
and Helena's letter had been dispatched, the
"fanatic-hypocrite" had probably discovered that his intrigue
had become known in Cairo.  Then he had put Gordon
into the gap, and Gordon had been so simple, so
innocent, so stupid as to be deceived!  There was
small comfort in this reading of the riddle, and the
Consul-General's fury and shame increased tenfold.

"Fool!  Fool!  Fool," he thought, and taking from
the mantelpiece the portrait of the boy in the Arab
fez, he looked at it for a moment and then flung it
back impatiently.  It fell to the floor.

Some minutes passed in which the infuriated man
was unconscious of his surroundings, for great anger
wipes out time and place, and then he became aware
that there was a knock at the door of his room.

"Who's there?" he cried.

It was Ibrahim.  He had come to tell his Excellency
that two reporters from Reuter's Agency were below
by appointment and wished to hear what his Excellency
had to give them.

"Nothing.  Send them away," said the Consul-General.

A moment afterwards there was another knock at
the door.

"Who's there now?" cried the Consul-General.

It was his First Secretary.  The Adviser to the
Ministry of Justice had come to say that the Special
Tribunal had been summoned and the Judges were
waiting for further instructions.

"Tell them there will be no sitting to-night," said
the Consul-General.

A little later there was yet another knock at the
door.  It was the Secretary again.  The Adviser to
the Ministry of the Interior had called him up on the
telephone to say that, according to instructions, the
gallows had been set up in the Square in front of the
Governorat, and now he wished to know——

"Tell the men to take it down again at once, and
don't come up again," said the Consul-General in a
voice that was hoarse with wrath and thick with
shame.

These interruptions had been like visitations of the
spirits of the dead to a tormented murderer, and it
was some time before the Consul-General could bring
his mind back to the mystery before him.  When he
was able to do so he asked himself how it had come
to pass that if Gordon had been in Khartoum, and if
he had been duped into taking Ishmael's place, Helena
had not informed him of the change?  Where had she
been?  Where was she now?  What had become of
her?  Could it be possible that she, too, by her love
for Gordon, had been won over to the side of his
enemies?

Thinking of that as a possible explanation of the
devilish tangle of circumstance by which he was
surrounded, the Consul-General's wrath against Gordon
rose to a frenzy of madness.  Fierce and wild imprecations
broke from his mouth, such as had never passed
his lips before, and then, suddenly remembering that
they were directed against his own flesh and blood,
his own son, he cried, in the midst of his fury and
passion—

"No, no!  God forgive me!  Not that!"

Ibrahim knocked at the door again.  The Grand
Cadi had come, and begged the inestimable privilege of
approaching his Excellency's honourable person.

"Say I can't see him," said the Consul-General, and
then sitting down on a sofa in an alcove of the room
he tried his best to compose himself.

In the silence of the next few minutes he was
conscious of the ticking of the telegraph tape that was
unrolling itself by his side, and to relieve his mind of
the burden that oppressed it, he stretched out his
hand for the long white slip.

It reported a debate on the Address to the Crown
at the opening of a new session of Parliament.
Somebody, a rabid, irresponsible Radical, had proposed as
an Amendment that the time had come to associate
the people of Egypt with the government of the country
and the Foreign Minister was making his reply.

"This much I am willing to admit," said the Minister,
"that there are two cardinal errors in the governing of
alien races—to rule them as if they were Englishmen,
and to repress their aspirations by blowing them out
of the mouth of a gun."

The Consul-General rose to his feet in a new flood
of anger.  But for Gordon he would have silenced all
such babbling.  To-morrow morning was to have seen
Downing Street in confusion, and in the conflagration
that was to have blazed heaven-high on the report
of the Egyptian conspiracy and how he had crushed it,
he was to have found himself the saviour of civilisation.

But now—what now?  Duped by his own son, who
had taken sides against him, he was about to become
the laughing-stock of all Europe.

"Fool!  Fool!  Fool!" he cried, and in the cruel
riot of anger and love that was going on within him
he felt for the first time in his life as if he wanted to
burst into tears.

Another knock came to the door.  It was Ibrahim
again, to say that the Grand Cadi, who sent his humble
salaams, had said he would wait, and now the Sirdar
had come and he wished to see his Excellency immediately.

"Tell the Sirdar I can see no one to-night," said the
Consul-General.

"But his Excellency says his business is urgent and
he must come upstairs if your Excellency will not come
down."

The Consul-General reflected for a moment and then
replied—

"Tell the Sirdar I will be down presently."





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   CHAPTER VII

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Besides the Grand Cadi with his pock-marked cheeks
and base eyes, and the Sirdar with his ruddy face
(suddenly grown sallow), the plump person of the
Commandant of Police was waiting in the library.

The Grand Cadi in his turban and silk robes sat in
the extreme corner of the room, opposite to the desk;
the Sirdar, in his full-dress uniform, stood squarely on
the hearth-rug with his back to the empty fireplace,
and the Commandant, in his gold-braided blue, stood
near to the door.

No one spoke.  There was a tense silence such as
pervades a surgeon's consulting-room immediately
before a serious operation.

When the Consul-General came in, still wearing his
court-dress, it was plainly apparent to those who had
seen him as recently as half-an-hour before that he was
a changed man.  Although perfectly self-possessed and
as firm and implacable as ever, there was an indefinable
something about his eyes, his mouth, and his square
jaw which seemed to say that he had gone through a
great struggle with his own heart and conquered
it—perhaps killed it—and that henceforth his affections
were to be counted as dead.

The Sirdar saw this at a glance, and thereby realised
the measure of what he had come to do.  He had come
to fight this father for his own son.

Answering the salute of the Commandant, the salutation
of the Sirdar, and the salaam of the Cadi with
the curtest bow, the old man stepped forward to his
desk, and seating himself in the revolving chair behind
it, he said brusquely—

"Well, what is the matter now?"

"Nuneham," said the Sirdar, with an oblique glance
in the direction of the Cadi, "the Commandant and I
wish to speak to you in private on a personal and
urgent matter."

"Does it concern my son?" asked the Consul-General
sharply.

"I do not say it concerns your son," said the Sirdar,
with another oblique glance at the Cadi.  "I only say
it is personal and urgent and therefore ought to be
discussed in private."

"Humph!  We'll discuss it here.  I'll have no secrets
on that subject."

"In that case," said the Sirdar, "you must take the
consequences."

"Go on, please."

"In the first place, the Commandant finds himself in
a predicament."

"What is it?"

"The warrant he holds is for the arrest of Ishmael
Ameer, but the prisoner he has taken to-night is
... another person."

"Well?"

"The Commandant wishes to know what he is to do."

"What is it his duty to do?"

"That depends on circumstances, and the circumstances
in the present case are peculiar."

"State them precisely, please."

The Sirdar hesitated, glanced again at the Cadi, this
time with an expression of obvious repugnance, and
then said—

"The peculiar circumstances in this case are, my
dear Nuneham, that though the prisoner cannot
possibly be held under the warrant by which he was
arrested, he is wanted by the military courts for other
offences."

"Therefore——"

"Therefore the Commandant has come with me to
ask you whether the man he has taken to-night is to
be handed over to the military authorities or——"

"Or what?"

"Or allowed to go free."

The Consul-General swung his chair round until
he came face to face with the Sirdar, and said, with
withering bitterness—

"So you have come to me—British Agent and
Consul-General—to ask if I will connive at your
prisoner's escape!  Is that it?"

The Sirdar flinched, bit the ends of his moustache
for a moment, and then said, with a faint tremor in
his voice—

"Nuneham, if the prisoner is handed over to the
authorities he will be court-martialled."

"Let it be so," said the Consul-General.

"As surely as he is court-martialled his sentence
will be death."

The old man swung his chair back and answered
huskily: "If his offences deserve it, what matter is
that to me?"

"His offences," said the Sirdar, "were insubordination,
refusal to obey the orders of his General, and——"

"Isn't that enough?" asked the Consul-General,
whereupon the Sirdar drew himself up and said—

"I plead no excuses for insubordination.  I am
myself a soldier.  I think discipline is the backbone
of the army.  Without that everything must fall into
chaos.  But the General who exacts stern compliance
with military discipline on the part of his officers has
it for his sacred duty to see that his commands are
just and that he does not provoke disobedience by
outrageous and illegal insults."

The old man's face twitched visibly, but still he
stood firm.

"Provoked or not provoked, your prisoner disobeyed
the orders of his recognised superior—what more is
there to say?"

"Only that he acted from a sense of right, and that
he was right——"

"What?"

"I say he *was* right, as subsequent events proved,
and if his conscience——"

"Conscience!  What has a soldier to do with
conscience?  My servant Ibrahim, perhaps, any fellah,
may have a right to exercise what he is pleased to
call his conscience, but the first and only duty of an
English soldier is to obey."

"Then God help England!  If an English soldier is
only a machine, a human gun-waggon, with no right to
think about anything but his rations and his pay, and
how to use his rifle, he is a butcher and a hireling, not
a hero.  No, no, some of the greatest soldiers and
sailors have resisted authority when authority has
been in the wrong.  Nelson did it, and General Gordon
did it, and if this one——"

But the old man burst out again in a quivering voice—

"Why do you come to tell me this?  What has it
got to do with me?  The case before us is perfectly
clear.  By some tangle of devilish circumstances the
wrong man has been arrested to-night.  But your
prisoner is wanted by the military authorities for
other offences.  Very well, let him be handed over to
them."

The Sirdar now saw that he had not only to fight
the father for his own flesh and blood, but the man
for himself.  He looked across the room to where the
Grand Cadi sat in smug silence, with his claw-like
hands clasped before his breast, and then, as if taking
a last chance, he said—

"Nuneham, the prisoner is your son."

"All the more reason why I should treat him as I
should treat anybody else."

"Your only son."

"Humph!"

"If anything happens to him—if he dies before you—your
family will come to an end when you are gone."

The old man trembled.  The Sirdar was cutting
him in the tenderest place—ploughing deep into his
lifelong secret.

"Your name will be wiped out.  *You* will have
wiped it out, Nuneham."

The old man was shaking like a rock which vibrates
in an earthquake.  To steady his nerves he took a
pen and held it firmly in the fingers of both hands.

"If you tell the Commandant to hand him over to
the military authorities, it will be the same in the
court of your conscience as if you had done it.  *You
will have cut off your own line*."

The old man fought hard with himself.  It was a
fearful struggle.

"More than that, it will be the same—it will be
the same when you come to think of it—as if with
that pen in your hands you had signed your own son's
death-warrant."

The pen dropped, as if it had been red-hot, from
the old man's trembling fingers.  Still he struggled.

"If my son is a guilty man, let the law deal with
him as it would deal with any other," he said, but his
voice shook—it could scarcely sustain itself.

The Sirdar saw that, deep under the frozen surface.
the heart of the old man was breaking up; he knew
that the shot that killed Gordon would kill the
Consul-General also; and he felt that he was now pleading for
the life of the father as well as of the son.

"It's not as if the boy were a prodigal, a wastrel,"
he said.  "He is a gentleman, every inch of him, and
if he has gone wrong, if he has acted improperly,
it has only been from the highest impulses.  He has
sincerity and he has courage, and they are the noblest
virtues of the soul."

The old man's head was down, but he was conscious
that the Cadi's cruel eyes were upon him.

"He's a soldier, too.  In some respects the finest
young soldier in the army, whoever the next may be.
He saw his first fighting with me, I remember.
It was at Omdurman.  He had taken the Khalifa's
flag.  The Dervish who carried it had treacherously
stabbed his comrade, and when he came up with fire
and tears in his eyes and said, 'I killed him like a
dog, sir,' 'My God,' I said to myself, 'here is a soldier
born.'"

The old man was silent, but he was still conscious
that the Cadi's cruel eyes were upon him, watching
him, interrogating him, saying, "What will you do
now, I wonder?"

"God has never given me a son," continued the
Sirdar, "but from that day to this I have always felt
as if that boy belonged also to myself."

The old man was breaking up rapidly; but still he
would not yield.

"His mother loved him, too.  Perhaps he was the
only human thing that came between her and her
God.  She is dead, and they say the dead see all.
Who knows, Nuneham?—she may be waiting now to
find out what you are going to do."

The strain was terrible.  The two old friends, one
visibly moved and making no effort to conceal his
emotion, the other fighting hard with the dark spirits
of pride and wrath!

The Sirdar's mind went back to the days when they
were young men themselves, at Sandhurst together,
and approaching the Consul-General, he put one hand
on his shoulder and said—

"Nuneham—John Nuneham—John—Jack—give the
boy another chance.  Let him go."

Then with a cry of agony and with an oath, never
heard from his lips before, the Consul-General rose
from his seat and said—

"No, no, no!  You come here asking me to put my
honour into the hands of my enemies—to leave myself
at the mercy of any scoundrel who cares to say that
the measure I mete out to others is not that which I
keep for my own.  You come, too, excusing my son's
offences against military law, but saying nothing of
the other crimes in which you have this very night
caught him red-handed."

After that he smote the desk with his clenched fist
and cried—

"No, no, I tell you no!  My son is a traitor.  He
has joined himself to his father's and his country's
enemies to destroy his father and to destroy England
in Egypt, and if the punishment of a traitor is death,
then death it must be to him as to any other, that
the same justice may be dealt out to all."

Then to the Commandant who was still standing by
the door he said—

"Go, sir!  Let your prisoner be handed over to the
military authorities without one moment's further delay."

It was like the breaking away of an avalanche,
and after it thsre came the same awful stillness.
No one spoke.  The Commandant bowed and left
the room.

The Consul-General returned to his seat at the desk,
and, digging his elbows into the blotting-pad, rested
his head on his hands.  The Sirdar stood sideways
with one arm on the chimney-piece.  The Cadi sat in
his smug silence with his claw-like hands still clasped
in front of his breast.

They heard the Commandant's heavy step and
the click of his spurs as he walked across the marble
floor of the hall.  They heard the front door close
with a bang.  Still no one spoke, and the silence seemed
to be everlasting.

Then they heard the outer bell ringing loudly.
They heard the front door opened and then closed
again, as if somebody had been admitted.  At the next
moment, Ibrahim, looking as if he had just seen a
ghost, had come, with his slippered feet, into the
library, and was stammering—

"If you please, your Excellency ... if you please,
your Ex——"

"Speak out, you fool—who is it?" said the Consul-General.

"It is ... it is Miss ... Miss Helena, your
Excellency."

The Consul-General's face contracted for an instant
as if he were trying to recover the plain sense of where
he was and what was going on.  Then he rose and
went out of the room, Ibrahim following him.

The Sirdar and the Grand Cadi were left together.
They did not speak nor exchange a sign.  The Sirdar
felt that the Cadi's presence had contributed to the
late painful scene—that it had been a silent, subtle
devilish influence against Gordon—and he was
conscious of an almost unconquerable desire to take the
man by the throat and wring his neck as he would
wring the neck of a bird of prey.

A quarter of an hour passed.  Half-an-hour.  Still
the two men did not speak.  And the Consul-General
did not return.





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.. _`CHAPTER VIII`:

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   CHAPTER VIII

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Meantime Helena, in another room, still wearing her
mixed Eastern and Western dress, was sitting by a table
in an attitude of supplication, with her arms
outstretched and her hands clasped across a corner of it,
speaking earnestly and rapidly to the Consul-General,
who was standing with head down in front of her.

Pale, in spite of the heat of the South and the
sun of the desert, very nervous, flurried, and a little
ashamed, yet with a sense of urgent necessity, she was
telling him all that had happened since she left
Cairo—how she had gone to Khartoum under an impulse of
revenge that was inspired by a mistaken idea of the
cause of her father's death; how, being there, she had
been compelled to accept the position of Ishmael's
nominal wife or go back with her errand unfulfilled;
how she had come to know of the base proposals of
certain of the Ulema, and how, at length, when Ishmael
had succumbed to the last of them, she had written
and dispatched her letter saying he was coming into
Cairo in disguise.

Then in her soft voice, with its deep note, she told
of Gordon's arrival in Khartoum; of his own tragic
mistake and awful sufferings; of his confession to her;
of her confession to him; and of how she realised her
error, but found herself powerless to overtake or undo it.

Finally she told the Consul-General of Gordon's
determination to take Ishmael's place, being impelled
to do so by the firmest conviction that his father was
being deceived by some one in Cairo, by the certainty
that Ishmael could not otherwise be moved from his
fanatical purpose, and that while the consequences of
his own arrest must be merely personal to himself, the
result of Ishmael's death at the hands of the authorities
might be a holy war, which would put Egypt in
the right and England in the wrong, and cover his
father's honoured name with infamy.

The old man listened eagerly, standing as long as he
could on the same spot, then walking to and fro with
nervous and irregular steps, but stopping at intervals
as if breathless from an overpowering sense of the
hand of fate.

Having finished her story, Helena produced Gordon's
letters from the little handbag which hung from one
of her arms, and having kissed them, as if the
Consul-General had not been present, she began with panting
affection to read passages from them in proof of what
she had said.

Being a woman, she knew by instinct what to read
first, and one by one came the passionate words which
told of Gordon's affection for the father whom he felt
bound to resist.

"'My father,'" she read, "'is a great man who
probably does not need and would certainly resent my
compassion, but, Lord God, how I pity him!  Deceived by
false friends, alone in his old age, after all he has done
for Egypt!'"

The old man stopped her and said—

"But how did he know that—that I was being
deceived?  What right had he to say so?"

"Listen," said Helena, and she read Gordon's
account of his visit to the Grand Cadi, when the
"oily scoundrel" had called his father "the slave of
power," "the evil-doer," "the adventurer," and "the
great assassin."

"Then why didn't he come like a man and tell me
himself?" asked the Consul-General.

"Listen again, sir," said Helena, and she read what
Gordon had said of his impulse to go to his father, in
order to disclose the Grand Cadi's duplicity, and then
of the reasons restraining him, being sure that his
father was aiming at a *coup*, and that, acting from a
high sense of duty, the Consul-General would hand him
over to the military authorities before the work he had
come to do had been done.

"But didn't he see what he was doing himself—aiding
and abetting a conspiracy?"

"Listen once more, please," said Helena, and she
read what Gordon had said of Ishmael's pilgrimage—that
while his father thought the Prophet was bringing up
an armed force, he was merely leading a vast multitude
of religious visionaries, who were expecting to establish
in Cairo a millennium of universal faith and empire.

"But, even so, was it necessary to do what he did?"
demanded the Consul-General.

"Listen for the last time, sir," said Helena, and then
in her soft, earnest, pleading voice, she read—

"'It is necessary to prevent the massacre which I
know (and my father does not) would inevitably ensue;
necessary to save my father himself from the execrations
of the civilised world; necessary to save Ishmael
from the tragic consequences of his determined
fanaticism; necessary to save England——'"

"Give them to me," said the Consul-General, taking—almost
snatching—the letters out of Helena's hands
in the fierce nervous tension which left him no time to
think of courtesies.

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.





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   CHAPTER IX

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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.





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   CHAPTER X

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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.





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   CHAPTER XI

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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.'"

The anguish of the people swelled into sobs, and some
of them, full of zeal, swore that they would never return
to their homes without the Master, but would follow
him to prison and to death.

"If you go into Cairo, so will I!" cried one.

"And I too!" cried another.

"And I!"  "And I!"  "And I!" cried others, each
holding up his hand and stepping out as he spoke, until
the square in which Ishmael sat on his camel was full
of excited men.

At that moment of deep emotion, while great tears
were rolling down Ishmael's cheeks and the women on
the outskirts of the crowd were uttering piercing cries,
a loud, delirious shout was heard, and a man was seen
to be crushing his way through the people.

It was Zogal, and his wild eyes were ablaze with frenzy.

"Wait!  Wait!" he cried.  "Has the Master
forgotten his own message?  He says the soldiers of the
Franks and Turks are waiting in Cairo to destroy us.
But isn't God greater than armies?  We are weak and
defenceless, but does He always give His victory to the
armed and the strong?  What!" he cried again, "are
you afraid that the Christians will kill us with bullets?
That they will eat our flesh and drink our blood?
That they will make us worship the wooden cross?  If
God is with us what can our enemies do?  It is not
they who throw the javelin—it is God!  Therefore,"
he cried, in a voice that had risen to a scream, "if the
Master is to go into Cairo we will *all* go with him."

In vain Ishmael tried to stop the man.  His protests
were drowned in the rapturous responses of the crowd.
People are as easily swayed to as fro; they regain
confidence as rapidly as they lose it.  In a moment the
Master was forgotten, and only the wild-eyed Dervish
seemed to be heard.

"Did not God promise us, through the mouth of His
messenger, that we should go into Cairo—and will He
break His word?"

"Allah!  Allah!" shouted the crowd.

"Did he not tell us God would send us a sign?"

"Allah!  Allah!"

"Shall we say it will not come, and call God a liar?"

"Allah!  Allah!"

"'At the hour of midnight prayers,' he said, 'the
light will shine.'"

"Allah!  Allah!  Allah!"

"Pray for it, my brothers, pray for it," cried Zogal,
and in another moment, with the delirious strength of
one possessed, he had cleared a long passage through
the people, and begun to lead a wild, barbaric Zikr,
such as he had seen in the depths of the desert.

"The light!  The light!  Send the light, O Allah!"
cried Zogal, striding up and down the long alley of
bowing and swaying people, and tossing his sweating
and foaming face up to the dark sky.

It has been truly said that everything favours those
who have a special destiny—that they may become
glorious against their own will and as if by the
command of fate.  It was so with Ishmael.  At the very
moment when Zogal on the desert was calling for the
light which he believed God had promised, Hafiz, at the
Citadel, having received the message which Helena had
sent over the telephone from the house of the Princess
Nazimah, was running with a powerful lantern up the
winding stairway of one of the minarets of the mosque
of Mohammed Ali.

"The light!  The light!  Send the light, O Allah!"
cried the dervish, and at the next moment, while the
breathless crowd about him were looking through the
darkness towards the heights above Cairo, expecting to
see the manifestation of God's sign in the sky, the light
appeared!

In an instant the whole camp was a scene of frantic
rejoicing.  Men were shouting, women were lu-lu-ing,
camels and asses were being saddled, tents were being
struck, and everybody and everything was astir.

Oh, mysterious and divine power of destiny, that
could make the fate of an entire nation hang on the
accident of time and the unreasoning impulses of one
poor demented man!





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   CHAPTER XII

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Next day Ishmael entered Cairo.  News of his coming
had been noised abroad, and the police at their various
stations had been told that beyond the necessary efforts
to preserve order they were not in any way to interfere
with his procession.  Neither Ishmael nor any of his
people were to be allowed to pose as martyrs.  There
was to be no resistance and no bloodshed.  If possible
there was to be no scene.

The guests at the King's Dinner had left the
Ghezirah long before midnight.  Such of them as were
innocent of all participation in conspiracy (they were
the majority) attributed the Consul-General's strange
outbreak to an attack of mental vertigo in an old man
whose health had long been failing from the pressure
of public work.  Nothing was allowed to occur which
would give the incident a more serious significance.
The bridge which had been opened was closed, and the
guests had returned to their homes as usual.

In the early hours of morning they were awakened
by loud shoutings in the streets.  Two hundred men
from Ishmael's company had galloped ahead as heralds,
and, flying down every thoroughfare to reassure the
population of the nature of the vast procession that
was coming, they were crying—

"Peace!  Peace!  It is Peace!"

After that the general body of the native people, who
had been on the tiptoe of expectation, were speeding
along the streets.  They found mounted and foot police
stationed at various points, but no military and no guns.

It was a triumphant entry.  The procession came in
by the Gizeh Bridge, and passing down the Kasr-el-Aini
into the Place Ismailyah, it turned down the broad
Boulevard Abul Aziz towards the heart of the city.

The sun was rising, and the scene was a blaze of
colour.  Banners were swinging from the houses like
ships' pendants in stormy seas.  The streets seemed to
be carpeted with the tarbooshes and turbans of the
great, moving, surging masses of humanity that were
slowly passing through them.  There were brown faces
that were almost white from the fatigue of the long
desert march, and white faces that were burnt brown
by the tropical sun.  It was a swarming, shifting,
variegated throng, and over all was the dazzling
splendour of the Eastern sunrise.

Before the procession had gone far, it seemed as if
the whole population of Cairo had come out to it.
Eternal children!  There is nothing they love more
than to look at a great spectacle except to take part
in it, and they hastened to take part in this one.
Every window and balcony was soon full of faces;
every housetop was alive with movement and aflame
with colour.  People were thronging the footpaths on
either side as the pilgrims passed between.

The wives and children of the hundred emissaries
who left Cairo on Ishmael's errand had come out to
look for their husbands and fathers returning home.
Eagerly they were scanning the faces of the pilgrims,
and loud and wild were their cries of joy when they
recognised their own.

Many of those who had no personal interest in
the procession fell into line with it.  A company of
Dervishes walked by its side playing pipes and drums.
Other musicians joined them with strange-looking
wooden and brass instruments.  Bursts of wild Arab
music broke out from time to time and then stopped,
leaving a sort of confused and tumultuous silence.

Carts filled with women and children, who were
laughing and lu-lu-ing by turns, jolted along by the
pilgrims like trundling bundles of joy.  And then
there were the pilgrims themselves, the vast
concourse of fully forty thousand from the Soudan, from
Assouan, from the long valley of the Nile, some on
horses, some on camels, some on donkeys, some
wearing their simple felt skull-caps and galabeahs,
others in flowing robes and crimson head-dresses.
The barbaric splendour and intoxicating arrogance
of it all was such as the people of Cairo had never
seen before.

To the great body of the Cairenes the entrance of
Ishmael Ameer denoted victory.  That the Government
permitted it indicated their defeat.  The great English
lord, who had closed El Azhar, thereby damming up
the chief fountain of the Islamic faith, had been
beaten.  Either the Powers, or God Himself, had
suppressed him and rebuked England.  Pharaoh had
fallen.  The children of Allah were crossing their Red
Sea.  Even as Mohammed, after being expelled from
Mecca as a rebel, had returned to it as a conqueror,
so Ishmael, after being cast out of Cairo as the enemy
of England, was coming back as England's master
and king.  So louder and louder became their wild
acclamations.

"Victory to Islam!"

"El Hamdullillah!"

"God has willed it!"

When Ishmael himself appeared the shouts of
welcome were deafening.  He had been long in coming,
and the people had been waiting for him all along the
line.  He came at the end of the procession, and if he
could have escaped from it altogether he would have
done so.

In spite of all this glory, all this grandeur, a deep
melancholy filled the soul of Ishmael.  He was not
carried away by what had happened.  Nothing that
had occurred since the night before had touched his
pride.  When the light appeared on the minaret he
had not been deceived.  He knew that by some
unknown turn of the wheel of chance his people were
to be allowed to enter Cairo, but all the same his heart
was low.

The only interpretation he put upon the change in
events was a mystic one.  God had refused his atonement!
God had taken the leadership of His people out
of his hands!  As punishment of his weakness in
permitting himself to be betrayed, God had made him a
mere follower of his own black servant!  Therefore his
glory was his shame!  His hour of triumph was his hour
of sorrow and disgrace!  He was entering Cairo under
the frown of the face of God!

When the camp had been ready to move he had
mounted his white camel and ridden last, beset by
melancholy pre-occupations.  But when he came to the
Gizeh Bridge and saw the crowds that were coming
out to greet him, and met Zogal, who had galloped
into the city and was galloping back to say that the
people of Cairo were preparing a triumph for him, he
made his camel kneel, and in the deep abasement of his
soul he got down to walk.

He walked down the whole length of the Kasr-el-Aini
with head down, like a man who was ashamed,
shuddering visibly when the onlookers cheered, trembling
when they commended him to God, and almost falling
when they saluted him as the Deliverer and Redeemer
of Islam and its people.

Although of large frame and strong muscle, he was
a man of delicate organisation, and the strain his soul
was going through was tearing his body to pieces.  At
length, as he approached the Place Ismailyah, where the
crowd was dense, he stumbled and fell on one knee.

Zogal, who was behind, leapt from the ass he was
riding and lifted the Master in his arms, but it was
seen that he could not stand.  There was a moment's
hesitation, in which the black man seemed to ask
himself what he ought to do, and at the next instant he
had thrown his white cloak over the donkey's back
and lifted Ishmael into the saddle.

Meantime the people in the streets, in the balconies,
on the housetops, were waiting for the new prophet.
They expected to see him coming into Cairo as a
conqueror—in a litter, perhaps, covered with gold and
fringed with jingling coins and cowries—the central
figure of a great procession such as would remind
them of the grandeur of the Mahmal, the holy carpet
returning from Mecca.

When at length he came his appearance gave a
shock.  His face was pale, his head was down, and he
was riding on an ass!

But truly everything favours him who has the great
destiny.  After the spectators had recovered from their
first shock at the sight of Ishmael, his humility touched
their imagination.  Remembering how he had left Cairo,
and seeing how meekly he was returning to it, their
acclamations became deafening.

"Praise be to God!"

"May God preserve thee!"

"May God give thee long life!"

And then some one who thought he saw in the
entrance of Ishmael into Cairo a reproduction of the
most triumphant if the most tragic incident in the
life of the Lord of the Christians, shouted—

"Seyidna Isa!  Seyidna Isa!" (Our Lord Jesus!)

In a moment the name was taken up on every side,
and resounded in joyous accents down the streets.  The
belief of a crowd is created not by slow processes of
reason but by quick flashes of emotion, and instantly
the surging mass of Eastern children had accepted the
idea that Ishmael Ameer was a reincarnation of that
"divine man of Judæa" whom he had taught them to
reverence, that "son of Mary" whom the Prophet
himself had placed high among the children of men.

To make the parallel complete, people rushed out of
the houses and spread their coats on the ground in
front of him, and some, pushing their adoration to
yet greater lengths, climbed the trees that lined the
Boulevard and tearing away branches and boughs flung
them before his feet.

The Dervishes ran ahead crying the new name in
frantic tones, while a company of grave-looking men
walked on either side of Ishmael, chanting the first
Surah: "Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures,"
and the muezzins in the minarets of the mosques (blind
men nearly all, who could see nothing of the boiling,
bubbling, gorgeous scene below) chanted the profession
of faith: "There is no god but God!  God is Most
Great!  God is Most Great!"  Men shouted with
delight, women lu-lu-ed with joy, and the thousands of
voices that clashed through the air sounded like bells
ringing a joyful peal.

Nothing could have exceeded the savage grandeur
of Ishmael's return to Cairo; but Ishmael himself, the
white figure sitting sideways on an ass, continued
to move along with a humbled and chastened soul.
He was a sad man, with his own secret sorrow; a
bereaved man, a betrayed man, with a heart that was
torn and bleeding.

When he remembered that in spite of his betrayal,
his predictions were being fulfilled, he told himself that
that was by God's doing only, not by his in any way.
When he heard the divine name by which the people
greeted him he felt as if he were being burned to the
very marrow.  He was crushed by their mistaken
worship.  He knew himself now for a poor, weak, blind,
deceived, and self-deluded man, whom the Almighty
had smitten and brought low.  Therefore he made no
response to the frantic acclamations.  Every step of
the road as he passed along was like a purgatorial
procession, and his suffering was written in lines of fire
on his downcast face.

"O Father, spare me, spare me," he prayed as the
people shouted by his side.

Once he made an effort to dismount, but Zogal,
thinking the Master's strength was failing, put an arm
about him and held him in his seat.

It took the whole morning for the procession to pass
through the city.  Unconsciously, as the blood flows back
to the heart, it went up through the Mousky to El Azhar.
All the gates of the University, which had been so long
closed, were standing open.  Who had opened them no
one seemed to know.  The people crowded into the
courtyard, and in a little while the vast place was full.
A platform had been raised at the further side, and on
this Ishmael was placed with the chief of the Ulema
beside him.

By one of those accidents which always attach themselves
to great events it chanced that the day of Ishmael's
return to Cairo was also the first of the Mouled-en-Naby—the
nine days of rejoicing for the birthday of the
Prophet.  This fact was quickly seized upon as a means
for uniting to the beautiful Moslem custom for "attaining
the holy satisfaction" the opportunity of celebrating
the victory for Islam which Ishmael was thought to
have attained.  Therefore the Sheikh Seyid-el-Bakri,
descendant of the Prophet, and head of the Moslem
confraternities, determined to receive his congregations
in El Azhar, where Ishmael might share in their homage.
They came in thousands, carrying their gilded banners
which were written over with lines from the Koran,
ranged themselves, company after company, in half-circles
before the dais, salaamed to those who sat on
it, chanted words to the glory of God and His Prophet,
and then stepped up to kiss the hands and sometimes
the feet of their chief and his companions.

Ishmael tried to avoid their homage, but could not
do so.  Mechanically he uttered the usual response,
"May God repeat upon you this feast in happiness
and benediction," and then fell back upon his own
reflections.

Notwithstanding the blaze and blare of the scene
about him, his mind was returning to Helena.  Where
was she?  What fate had befallen her?  At length,
unable to bear any longer the burden of his thoughts,
and the purgatory of his position, he got up and stole
away through the corridors at the back of the mosque.

When darkness fell, the native quarters of Cairo were
illuminated.  Lamps were hung from the poles which
project from the minarets of the mosques.  Ropes were
swung from minaret to minaret, and from these, also,
lamps were suspended.  In the poorer streets people
were going about with open flares in iron grills, and in
the better avenues rich men were walking behind their
lantern-bearers.  Blind beggars in the cafés were reciting
the genealogy of the Prophet, and at the end of every
passage other blind beggars were crying, "La ilaha
illa-llah!"

Late at night, when the vast following which Ishmael
had brought into the city had to be housed, messengers
ran through the streets asking for lodgings for the
pilgrims, and people answered from their windows and
balconies, "I'll take one," "I'll take two."  Twenty
thousand slept in the courtyard and en the roofs of
El Azhar; the rest in the houses round about.

The trust in God, which had seemed to be slain the
night before, awoke to a new life, and when at length
the delirious city lay down to sleep, the watchmen
walked through the deserted thoroughfares crying,
"Wahhed!  Wahhed!" (God is One!)

In the dead, hollow, echoing hours of early morning
a solitary coach passed through the streets in the
direction of the outlying stations of the railway to
Port Said.  Its blinds were down.  It was empty.  But
on the box seat beside the coachman sat a nervous,
watchful person with an evil face, wearing the costume
of a footman.

It was the Grand Cadi.  He had been the supreme
orthodox authority of the Moslem faith, sent from
Constantinople as representative and exponent of the
spiritual authority vested in the Sultan of Turkey as
the Caliph of Islam, but he was stealing out of Cairo
like a thief.





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   CHAPTER XIII

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A general Court-Martial was fixed for the following
morning, and Helena was for going to it just as she
was, in the mixed Eastern and Western costume which
she had worn on the desert, but the Princess would not
hear of that.  She must wear the finest gown and the
smartest Paris hat that could be obtained in Cairo, in
order that Gordon might see her at her best.

"He may be a hero," said the Princess, "but he is
a man, too, God bless him, and he'll want to see the
woman he loves look lovely."

So the milliners and dressmakers were set to work
immediately, and bound by endless pledges.

"Of course they'll promise you the stars at noonday,"
said the Princess, "but if they don't come up to the
scratch they get no money.  Keep your cat hungry
and she'll catch the rat, you know."

In due time the costume was ready, and when Helena
had put it on—a close-fitting silver-grey robe and a large
black hat—the Princess stood off from her and said—

"Well, my moon, my sweet, my beauty, if he doesn't
want to live a little longer after he has seen you in
that, he's not fit to be alive!"

But at the last moment Helena called for a thick
dark veil.

"I've no right to sap away his courage," she said;
and the Princess, who had heard everything that Helena
had to tell, and had swung round to Gordon's side
entirely, could say no more.

Hafiz came to take the ladies to the Citadel, and as
he was leaving them at the gate to go to Gordon in his
quarters, Helena gave him the letter she had written
at Sakkara.

"Tell him I mean all I say—every word of it," she
whispered.

The Court-Martial was held in one of the rooms of the
palace of Mohammed Ali—up a wide stone staircase
across a bare court, through a groined archway,
beyond a great hall which in former days had seen vast
assemblies, and past a door labelled "Minister of War,"
into a gorgeously decorated chamber, overlooking a
garden with its patch of green shut in by high stone
walls.  It had once been the harem of the great Pasha.

The room was already full when Helena and the
Princess arrived, but places were found for them near
the door.  This position suited Helena perfectly, but
to the Princess it was a deep disappointment, and as a
consequence nothing pleased her.

"All English and all soldiers!  Not an Egyptian
among them," she said.  "After what he has done for
them, too!  Ingrates!  Excuse the word.  That's what
I call them."

At that moment Hafiz entered, and the Princess,
touching him on the arm, said—

"Here, you come and sit on the other side of her
and keep up her heart, the sweet one."

Hafiz did as he was told, and as soon as he was seated
beside Helena he whispered—

"I've just left him."

"How is he?"

"Firm as a rock.  He sent you a message."

"What is it?"

"'Tell her,' he said, 'that great love conquers
death.'"

"Ah!"

At the next moment Helena's hand and Hafiz's found
each other in a fervent clasp, and sweetheart and
foster-brother sat together so until the end of the inquiry.

Presently the Judges of the Court entered and took
their places at the table that had been prepared for
them—one full Colonel and four Lieutenant-Colonels of
mature age, from different British regiments.

"They look all right, but white hairs are no proof of
wisdom," muttered the Princess.

Then the accused was called, and amid breathless
silence Gordon entered with a firm step, attended by
the officer who had him in charge.  His manner was
calm, and though his face was pale almost to pallor, his
expression betrayed neither fear nor bravado.  His
appearance made a deep impression, and the President
told him to sit.  At the same moment it was observed
that the Sirdar came in by a door at the farther end of
the room and took a seat immediately in front of him.

The Court was then sworn and the charge was read.
It accused the prisoner of three offences under the
Army Act; first, that being a person subject to military
law he had disobeyed the lawful command of a superior
in such a way as to show a wilful disregard of authority
(A.A. 9, 1); second, that he had been guilty of acts and
conduct to the prejudice of good order and military
discipline (A.A. 40); third, that he had deserted his
Majesty's service while on active service (A.A. 12, 13).

"He heard it all yesterday morning," whispered Hafiz
to Helena, whose nervous fingers were tightening about
his own.

The charges having been read out to the accused, he
was called upon to plead.

"Are you guilty or not guilty?" asked the President.

There was a moment of breathless silence, and then,
in a measured voice without a break or a tremor,
Gordon said—

"I do not wish to plead at all."

A subdued murmur passed through the room, and
Hafiz whispered again—

"He wanted to plead Guilty, and the Sirdar had all
he could do to prevent him."

"Enter a plea of 'Not guilty' on the record," said
the President.

Then addressing Gordon, the President asked if
he was represented by counsel.  Gordon shook his
head.  Did he desire to conduct his own defence?
Again Gordon shook his head.  The President
conferred for a moment with the other members of the
Court and then said—

"It is within the power of the Court to appoint a
properly qualified person to act as counsel for the
accused, and in this case the Court desires to do
so.  Is there any officer here who wishes to undertake
the task of Defender?"

In a moment it was plainly evident that the
sympathies of Gordon's brother-officers were with him.
Twenty men in uniform had leapt to their feet and
were holding up their hands.

"Lord God, how they love him!" whispered Hafiz,
and Helena had to hold down her head lest she should
be seen to cry.

The Defender selected was a young Captain of
Cavalry who had brought a brilliant reputation from
the Staff College, and in a moment he was in the
midst of his duties.

"Does the accused desire a short adjournment of
the Court in order to instruct his Defender?" asked
the President.

Once more Gordon, who had stood passively during
these proceedings, shook his head, and then, without
further preliminaries, the trial began.  The Prosecutor
rose to make his opening address.  He was an Artillery
Officer of high reputation.

"He'll make it no worse than he can help," whispered
Hafiz.

In simple words the Prosecutor stated his case,
confining himself to the briefest explanation of the
facts he was about to prove, and then he called the
first of his witnesses.  This was the Military
Secretary, Captain Graham, who had been present at the
prisoner's interview with the late General Graves.

"Not a bad chap—he'll do no more than he must,"
whispered Hafiz.

Replying to the Prosecutor's questions, the Military
Secretary said that Gordon had refused to obey the
order of his superior given personally by that officer
in the execution of his office, and that his refusal
had been deliberate and distinct, and such as showed
an intention to defy and resist authority.

"I object," said the officer who filled the post of
Judge Advocate, and after he had shown that the
latter part of the witness's answer was not evidence
but inference which the Court alone could draw, the
objection was allowed.

The Defender then rose to cross-examine the first
witness, and in a few minutes the Military Secretary
was made to prove, first, that the prisoner had tried
to show his superior that the order he was giving
him was contrary to humanity and likely to lead to
an irreparable result; next, that when executed by
another officer, it *had* led to an irreparable result,
including bloodshed and loss of life; and, finally, that
after the order had been disobeyed by the accused
the most inexcusable and disgraceful and even illegal
and unsoldierly insults had been inflicted upon him
by his General.

"That's true!  My God, that's true!  Illegal and
unsoldierly!" whispered Hafiz, forgetting to whom
he was talking; and Helena, in the riot of her dual
love, for her father and for Gordon, could do nothing
but hold down her head.

Then the Prosecutor called Colonel Macdonald.

"A brute—he'll do his dam'dest," whispered Hafiz.

Amid scarcely suppressed murmurs Colonel Macdonald,
speaking with manifest bitterness, proved the
assault upon himself, and then went on to say that
it was unprovoked, it was brutal, and it was conduct
unbecoming the character of an officer and a gentleman.

"A lie like that has no legs to walk on," whispered
Hafiz.

"No, but it has wings to fly with, though," said
the Princess.

"Hush!" said Helena.

Again, like a flash of light, the Judge Advocate
had leapt up to protest against an inference which
the Court alone was entitled to draw, and again
the objection was upheld and the inference was expunged.

Amid obvious excitement among the soldiers in
Court, the Defender then rose to cross-examine the
second witness, and in a moment Macdonald's freckled
face had become scarlet, as he was compelled to
admit that, at the instant before he was assaulted,
he had ordered the shooting of a boy (who fell dead
from the walls of El Azhar) and was then swearing
at the boy's mother who was weeping over her son.

"Ah, his rage will be at the end of his nose now,"
whispered the Princess.

Finally, the Prosecutor called the officer who was
temporarily commanding the Army of Occupation to
show that the accused, after disobeying the order of his
late General, had disappeared from Cairo and had not
been seen since the riot at El Azhar until his capture
two days before.

The evidence for the prosecution being now finished,
the Court prepared itself for the defence.  There was
a certain appearance of anxious curiosity on the faces
of the Judges, and a tingling atmosphere of expectancy
among the spectators.

Then came a surprise.  The young Defender, who
had been holding a whispered conference with Gordon,
turned to the President and said—

"I regret to say that the accused has decided not to
call any witnesses in defence."

"But perhaps," said the President, turning to Gordon,
"you wish to give evidence for yourself.  Do you?"

There was another moment of breathless silence, and
then Gordon, after looking slowly round the room, in
the direction of the place in which Helena sat with her
head down, said calmly—

"No."

At that the murmuring among the spectators could
hardly be suppressed.  It was now plainly evident that
Gordon's brother officers were with him to a man.
They had been counting on an explanation that would
at least palliate his conduct if it could not excuse
his offences.  The disappointment was deep, but the
sympathy was still deeper.  Could it be possible that
Gordon *meant* to die?

"Lift up your veil, child," whispered the Princess,
but Helena shook her head.

After the Prosecutor had summed up his evidence,
the Defender addressed the Court for the defence.  He
pleaded extenuating circumstances, first on the ground
that the order given to the accused, though not in
opposition to the established customs of the army or
the laws of England, was calculated to do irreparable
injury and had done such injury, and next on the
ground of outrageous provocation.

When the Defender had finished, the President
announced that his Excellency the Sirdar had volunteered
to give evidence in proof of the prisoner's
honourable record, and that the Court had decided to
hear him.

The Sirdar was then sworn, and in strong, affecting,
soldierly words, he said the accused had rendered great
services to his country; that he had received many
medals and distinctions; that he was as brave a man
as ever stood under arms, and one of the young officers
who made an old soldier proud to belong to the British
army.

There is no company more easily moved to tears
than a company of soldiers, and when the Sirdar sat
down there was not a dry eye in that assembly of
brave men.

After a pause the President announced that the
Court would be closed to consider the finding, but in
order to assist the Judges in doing so it would be
desirable that they should know more of the conditions
under which the accused was arrested.  Therefore the
following persons would be asked to remain:—

His Excellency the Sirdar.

The Commandant of Police.

Captain Hafiz Ahmed of the Egyptian Army.

Helena, with the other spectators, was passing out of
the room when the Sirdar touched her on the shoulder
and said, haltingly—

"Have you perhaps got ... can you trust me with
those letters for a little while?"

By some impulse, hardly intelligible to herself,
Helena had brought Gordon's letters with her, and
after a moment's hesitation she took them out of her
pocket and gave them to the Sirdar, saying, very
faintly, but very sweetly—

"Yes, I can trust them to *you*."

Then with the Princess she went out into the great
hall and sat there on a window-seat, while the Court
was closed.  There was a sad and solemn expression
in her face, and seeing this, even through her dark
veil, the officers, who were pacing to and fro, moved
by that delicacy which is the nobler part of an English
gentleman's reserve—respect for the intimacies that
are sacred to another person—merely bowed to her as
they passed.

The strain was great, for she knew what was going on
behind the closed door of the Court-room.  The Judges
were trying to find in the circumstances of Gordon's
arrest some excuse for his desertion.  She could see
the Sirdar and Hafiz struggling to show that, however
irregular and reprehensible from a disciplinary
standpoint, Gordon's had been the higher patriotism; that,
coming back under those strange conditions and in that
strange disguise, he had deliberately returned to die.
And she could see the Court powerfully moved by that
plea, yet helpless to take account of it.

Half-an-hour passed; an hour; nearly two hours,
and then a young officer came up to tell Helena that
the Court was about to re-open.

"I think—I hope they intend to recommend him to
mercy," he said, blunderingly, and at the next moment
he felt as if he would like to cut his tongue out.  But
Helena was unhurt.  She held up her head for the first
time that day, and, to the Princess's surprise, when
they re-entered the room, and the officers made way
for her, she pushed through to the front and took a
seat, back to the wall, immediately before the Sirdar
and almost face to face with Gordon.

There was that tense atmosphere in the Court which
always precedes a sentence, but there was also a sort
of humid air, as if the Angel of Pity had passed through
the place and softened it to tears.

Gordon was told to rise, and then the President,
obviously affected, proceeded to address him.  He
might say at once that the Judges regretted to find
themselves unable to take account of the moral aspects
of the case.  Nothing but its military aspects came
within their cognisance.  That being so, the Court,
notwithstanding the able and ingenious defence, could
find no excuse for insubordination—the first duty of a
soldier was to obey.  In like manner they could find no
excuse for a savage personal attack by an officer in
uniform upon another officer in the exercise of his
office—it was conduct to the prejudice of good order and
military discipline.  Finally, the Court could find no
excuse for desertion—it was an act of great offence to
the flag which a soldier was sworn to serve.

"Under these circumstances," continued the President,
"the Court have no alternative but to find you
guilty of the crimes with which you have been charged,
and though it is within the Court's discretion to mitigate
the penalty of your offences, they have decided, after
anxious deliberation, remembering the grave fact that
the force in Egypt is on active service, not to exercise
that right, but, out of regard to your high record as a
soldier and the great provocation which you certainly
suffered, to content themselves with recommending you
to mercy, thus leaving the issue to a higher authority.
Therefore, whatever the result of that recommendation,
it is now my duty, my very painful duty, to pronounce
upon you, Charles George Gordon Lord, the full sentence
prescribed by military law—death."

There was a solemn silence until the President's last
word was spoken, when all eyes were turned towards.
Gordon.

He bore himself with absolute self-possession.  There
was a slight quivering of the eyelids, and a quick glint
of the steel-grey eyes in the direction of the opposite
side of the Court—nothing more.

Then a thrilling incident occurred.  Helena, whose
head had been down, was seen to rise in her seat, and to
raise her thick dark veil.  One moment she stood there,
back to the wall, with her magnificent pale face all strength
and courage, looking steadily across at the prisoner as if
nobody else were present in the room.  Then, as quietly
as she had risen, she sank back to her place.

Oh, sublime power of love!  Oh, pitiful impotence
of words!  Everybody felt the thousand inexpressible
things which that simple act was meant to convey.

Gordon was the first to feel them, and when his
guard touched him on the arm he turned and went out
with a step that rang on the marble floor—firm as a rock.

As the Court broke up, one of the officers was heard
to whisper hoarsely—

"She's worthy of him—what more is there to say?"

At the last moment the Sirdar turned to her and
whispered—

"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."





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   CHAPTER XIV

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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!"





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   CHAPTER XV

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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."

There was a moment's painful silence, and then the
Consul-General said—

"So I go home immediately."

"Immediately?"

"By to-night's train to take the P. & O. to-morrow,"'
said the old man, bowing over his clasped hands.

"To-morrow?"

"Why not?  My Secretaries can do without me.
Why should I linger on a stage on which I am no longer
a leading actor but only a supernumerary?  Better
make my exit with what grace I can."

Under the semi-cynical tone Gordon could see his
father's emotion.  He found it impossible to utter a
word.

"But I thought I would come up before going away
and bring you the good news myself, though it is almost
like a father who is deposed congratulating the son who
is to take his place."

"Don't say that, sir," said Gordon.

"Why shouldn't I?  And why should I gird at my
fortune?  It's strange, nevertheless, how history
repeats itself.  I came to Egypt to wipe out the misrule
of Ismail Pasha, and now, like Ismail, I leave my son
behind me."

There was a moment of strained silence and then—

"I have often wondered what took place at that secret
meeting between Ismail and Tewfik, when we made
the son Khedive and sent the father back to Constantinople.
Now I think I know."

The old man's emotion was cutting deep.  Gordon
could scarcely bear to look at him.

"I wish you well, Gordon, and only hope these
people may be more grateful to you than they have
been to me.  God grant it!"

Gordon could not speak.

"I confess I have no faith in the proposed change.
I think all such concessions are so many sops to
sedition.  I also think that to have raised the masses of
a subject race from abject misery to well-being, and
then to allow them to fall back to their former condition,
as they surely will, and to become the victims
of the worst elements among themselves, is not only
foolish but utterly wrong and wicked."

The old man rose, and in the intensity of his feelings,
began to pace to and fro.

"They talk about the despotism of the One-Man
rule," he said.  "What about the despotism of their
Parliaments, their Congresses, their Reichstags—the
worst despotisms in the world.  Fools!  Why can't
they see that the difference between the democracy of
Europe and America, and the government proper to
the ancient, slavish, and slow-moving civilisation of the
East is fundamental?"

The old man's lips stiffened and then he said—

"But perhaps I am only an antiquated person, behind
the new age and the new ideas.  If so, I'm satisfied.
I belong to the number of those who have always
thought it the duty of great nations to carry the light
of civilisation into dark continents, and I am not sorry
to be left behind by the cranks who would legislate
for all men alike.  Pshaw!  You might as well tailorise
for all men alike, and put clothes of the same pattern
on all mankind."

Again the old man laughed.

"It's part and parcel of the preposterous American
doctrine that all men are born free and equal—the
doctrine that made the United States enfranchise as
well as emancipate their blacks.  May the results be
no worse in this case!"

There was another moment of strained silence and
then the Consul-General said—

"I suppose they'll say the man Ishmael has beaten me."

He made a contemptuous but almost inaudible laugh,
and then added, "Let them—they're welcome; time
will tell.  Anyhow I do not lament.  When a man is
old his useless life must burn itself out.  That's only
natural.  And after all, I've seen too much of power
to regret the loss of it."

Still Gordon could not speak.  He was feeling how
great his father was in his downfall, how brave, how
proud, how splendid.

The old man walked to the window and looked out.
with fixed eyes.  After a moment he turned back and
said—

"All the same, Gordon, I am glad of what has
happened for your sake—sincerely glad.  You've not
always been with me, but you've won, and I do not
grudge you your victory.  Indeed," he added, and
here his voice trembled perceptibly, "I am a little
proud of it.  Yes, proud!  An old man cannot be
indifferent to the fact that his son has won the hearts
of twelve millions of people, even though—even though
*he* himself may have lost them."

Gordon's throat was hurting him and Helena's eyes
were full of tears.  The old man, too, was struggling
to control his voice.

"You thought Nunehamism wasn't synonymous with
patriotism.  Perhaps you were right.  You believed
yourself to be the better Englishman of the two.  I don't
say you were not.  And it may be that in her present
mind England will think that one secret withheld from
me has been revealed to you—namely, that an alien
race can only be ruled by ... by love.  Yes, I'm glad
for your sake, Gordon; and as for me—I leave myself
to Time and Fate."

The old man's pride in his son's success was fighting
hard with his own humiliation.  After a while Gordon
recovered strength enough to ask his father what he
meant to do in England.

"Who can say?" answered the Consul-General,
lifting one hand with a gesture of helplessness.  "I
have spent the best years of my life in Egypt.  What
is England to me now?  Home?  No, exile."

He had moved to the window again, and following
the direction of his eyes Gordon could see that he was
looking towards the cypress trees which shaded the
English cemetery of Cairo.

A deep and profound silence ensued, and, feeling as
if his mother's spirit were passing through the room,
Gordon dropped his head and tears leapt to his eyes.

It was the first time father and son had been together
since the tenderest link that had bound them had been
broken, but while both were thinking of this, neither of
them could trust himself to speak of it.

"Janet, your dream has come true!  How happy
you would have been!" thought the Consul-General,
while Gordon, unable to unravel the intricacies of his
emotions, was saying to himself, "Mother!  My sweet
mother!"

The last moment came, and it was a very moving one.
Up from some hidden depths of the old man's oceanic
soul there came a certain joy.  In spite of all that he
in his blindness had done to prevent it, by the operation
of the inscrutable powers that had controlled his destiny,
the great hope of his life was about to be realised.
Gordon and Helena had been brought together, and as
he looked at them, standing side by side when they rose
to bid farewell to him, the man so brave and fearless,
the girl so beautiful and superb, he thought, with a thrill
of the heart, that, whatever might happen to himself—old,
worn-out, fallen perhaps, his life ended—yet would
his line go on in the time to come, pure, clean, and
strong, and the name of Nuneham be written high in
the history of his country.

Holding out a hand to each, he looked steadily into
their faces for a moment, while he bade his silent
good-bye.  Not a word, not the quiver of an eyelid.  It was
the English gentleman coming out top in the end, firm,
stern, heroic.

Before Gordon and Helena seemed to be aware of it,
the old man was gone, and they heard the rumble of
the wheels of his carriage as it passed out of the courtyard.





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   CHAPTER XVI

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At nightfall the great Proconsul left Cairo.  He knew
that all day long the telegraphic agencies had been busy
with messages from London about his resignation.  He
also knew that after the first thunderclap of surprise
the Egyptian population had concluded that he had
been recalled—recalled in disgrace, and at the petition
of the Khedive to the King.

It did not take him long to prepare for his departure.
In the course of an hour Ibrahim was able to pack up
the few personal effects—how few!—which during the
longest residence gather about the house of a servant of
the State.

Perhaps the acutest of his feelings on leaving Egypt
came to him as he drove in a closed carriage out of the
grounds of the Agency, and looked up for the last time
at the windows of the room that used to be occupied
by his wife.  At that moment he felt something of the
dumb desolation which rolls over the strongest souls
when, after a lifetime of comradeship, the asundering
comes and they long for the voice that is still.

Poor Janet!  He must leave all that remained of her
behind him under the tall cypress trees on the edge of
the Nile.  Yet no, not all, for he was carrying away
the better part of her—her pure soul and saintly
memory—within him.  None the less, that moment of parting
brought the old man nearer than he had ever been to
the sense of tears in mortal things.

The Sirdar had accompanied him, but though the
fact of his intended departure had become known,
having been announced in all the evening papers, there
was nobody at the station to bid adieu to him—not a
member of the Khedive's *entourage*; not one of the
Egyptian Ministers, not even any of the Advisers and
Under-Secretaries whom he had himself created.

Never had there lived a more self-centred and
self-sufficient man, but this fact cut him to the quick.  He
had done what he believed to be his duty in Egypt, and
feeling that he was neglected and forgotten at the end,
the ingratitude of those whom he had served went like
poison into his soul.

To escape from the sense of it he began to talk with
a bitter raillery which in a weaker man would have
expressed itself in tears, and seemed indeed to have
tears—glittering, frozen tears—behind it.

"Do you know, my dear Reg," he said, "I feel
to-night as if I might be another incarnation of your
friend Pontius Pilate.  Like him, I am being withdrawn,
you see, and apparently for the same reason.  And—who
knows?—perhaps like him too, I am destined to
earn the maledictions of mankind."

The Sirdar found the old man's irony intensely
affecting, and therefore he made no protest.

"Well, I'm not ashamed of the comparison, if it
means that against all forms of anarchy I have belonged
to the party of order, though of course there will be
some wise heads that will see the finger of Heaven in
what has happened."

The strong man, with his fortunes sunk to zero,
was defiant to the very end and last hour of calamity.
But standing on the platform by the door of the
compartment that had been reserved for him, he looked
round at length and said—all his irony, all his raillery
suddenly gone—

"Reg, I have given forty years of my life to those
people and there is not one of them to see me off."

The Sirdar tried his best to cheer him, saying—

"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!"





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   CHAPTER XVII

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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.





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   CHAPTER XVIII

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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.

Ishmael was deeply moved.  With an effort, he said—

"Then ... then she was yours from the first, and
while I hated you because I thought you had come
between us, it was really I ... I who ... Allah!
Allah!"

Gordon having finished, a silence ensued, and then
Ishmael, looking at the photograph which was still in
his trembling hands, said, in a pitiful voice—

"God sees all, and when He tears the scales from
our eyes—what are we?  The children of one Father
fighting in the dark!"

Then he rose to his feet, a broken man, and approaching
Gordon, he tried to kneel to him; but in a moment
Gordon had prevented him, and was holding out his
hand.

Nervously, timidly, reluctantly, he took it, and said,
in a voice that had almost gone—

"God will reward thee for this, my brother—for kissing
the hand of him who came to smite thy face."

With that he turned and staggered towards the door.
Gordon opened it, and at the same moment called to
his servant—

"Orderly, show the Sheikh to the gate, please."

"Yes, Colonel."

"No, I beg of you, no," said Ishmael, and, while
Gordon stood watching him, he went heavily down the
stairs.





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   CHAPTER XIX

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That night at the house of the Chancellor of El Azhar
Ishmael was missing.  Owing to the state of his health
the greatest anxiety was experienced, and half the
professors and teachers of the University were sent out
to search.  They scoured the city until morning without
finding the slightest trace of him.  Then the servant
who had attended upon him remembered that shortly
before his disappearance he had asked if the English
Colonel who had lately been pardoned by his King still
lived on the Citadel.

This led to the discovery of his whereabouts, and to
some knowledge of his movements.  On leaving Gordon's
quarters he had crossed the courtyard of the fortress
to the mosque of Mohammed Ali.  It was then dark,
and only the Sheikh in charge had seen him when, after
making his ablutions, he entered by the holy door.

It was certain that he had spent the entire night in
the mosque.  The muezzin, going up to the minaret at
midnight, had seen a white figure kneeling before the
kibleh.  Afterwards, when traditions began to gather
about Ishmael's name, the man declared that he saw
a celestial light descending upon the White Prophet
as of an angel hovering over him.  There was a new
moon that night, and perhaps its rays came down from
the little window that looks towards Mecca.

The muezzin also said that at sunrise, when he went
up to the minaret again, the Prophet was still there,
and that an infinite radiance was then around him as
of a multitude of angels in red and blue and gold.
There are many stained glass windows in the mosque
of Mohammed Ali, and perhaps the rising sun was
shining through them.

Certainly Ishmael was kneeling before the kibleh at
eleven o'clock in the morning when the people began
to gather for prayers.  It was Friday, and the last of
the days kept in honour of the birthday of the Prophet,
therefore there was a great congregation.

The Khedive was present.  He had come early, with
his customary bodyguard, and had taken his usual
place in the front row close under the pulpit.  The
carpeted floor of the mosque was densely crowded.
Rows and rows of men, wearing tarbooshes and turbans
and sitting on their haunches, extended to the great
door.  The gallery was full of women, most of them
veiled, but some of them with uncovered faces.

The sun, which was hot, shone through the jewelled
windows and cast a glory like that of rubies and
sapphires on the alabaster pillars and glistening marble
walls.  Three muezzins chanted the call to prayers,
two from the minarets facing towards the city, the
other from the minaret overlooking the inner square
of the Citadel where a British sentinel in khaki paced
to and fro.

While the congregation assembled, one of the Readers
of the mosque, seated in a reading-desk in the middle,
read prayers from the Koran in a slow, sonorous voice,
and was answered by rather drowsy cries of "Allah!
Allah!"  But there was a moment of keen expectancy
and the men on the floor rose to their feet, when the
voice of the muezzin ceased and the Reader cried—

"God is Most Great!  God is Most Great!  There is
no god but God.  Mohammed is His Prophet.  Listen
to the preacher."

Then it was seen that the white figure that had
been prostrate before the kibleh had risen, and was
approaching the pulpit.  People tried to kiss his hand
as he passed, and it was noticed that the Khedive put
his lips to the fringe of the Imam's caftan.

Taking the wooden sword from the attendant, Ishmael
ascended the pulpit steps.  When he had reached the
top of them he was in the full stream of the sunlight,
and for the first time his face was clearly seen.

His cheeks were hollow and very pale; his lips were
bloodless; his black eyes were heavy and sunken, and
his whole appearance was that of a man who had passed
through a night of sleepless suffering.  Even at sight of
him, and before he had spoken, the congregation were
deeply moved.

"Peace be upon you, O children of the Compassionate,"
he began, and the people answered according
to custom—

"On you be peace, too, O servant of Allah."

Then the people sat, and, sitting himself, Ishmael
began to preach.

It was said afterwards that he had never before
spoken with so much emotion or so deeply moved
his hearers; that he was like one who was speaking
out of the night-long travail of his soul; and that his
words, which were often tumultuous and incoherent,
were not like sentences spoken to listeners, but like
the secrets of a suffering heart uttering themselves
aloud.

Beginning in a low, tired voice, that would barely
have reached the limits of the mosque but for the
breathlessness of the people, he said that God had
brought them to a new stage in the progress of
humanity.  Islam was rising out of the corruption
of ages.  Egypt was having a new birth of freedom.
God had whitened their faces before the world, and
in His wisdom He had willed it that the oldest of
the nations should not perish from the earth.

"Ameen!  Ameen!" replied a hundred vehement
voices, whereupon Ishmael rose from his seat and
raised his arm.

It was an hour of glory, but let them not be
vainglorious.  Let them not think that with their puny
hands they had won these triumphs.  Allah alone
did all.

"Beware of boasting," he cried, "it is the strong
drink of ignorance.  Beware of them that would tell
you that by any act of yours you have humbled the
pride or lowered the strength of the great nation
under whose arm we live.  Only God has changed
its heart.  He has given it to see that the true
welfare of a people is moral, not material.  And now,
steadily, calmly, out of the spirit that has always
inspired its laws, its traditions and its faith, it shows
us mercy and justice."

"Ameen!  Ameen!" came again, but less vehemently
than before.

Then speaking of Gordon without naming him,
Ishmael reminded his people that some of the great
nation's own sons had helped them.

"One there is who has been our warmest friend,"
he cried.  "To him, the pure of heart, the high of
soul, although he is a soldier and a great one, may
Peace herself award the crown of life!  Christian he
may be, but may God place His benediction upon
him to all eternity!  May the God of the East bless
him!  May the God of the West bless him!  May
his name be inscribed with blessings from the Koran
on the walls of every mosque!"

This reference, plainly understood by all, was
received with loud and ringing shouts of "Allah!
Allah!"

Then Ishmael's sermon took a new direction.  For
thirteen centuries the children of men, forgetting their
prophets, Mohammed and Jesus and Moses, had been
given over to idolatry.  They had worshipped a god
of their own fashioning.  That god was gold.  Its
temples were great cities given up to material pursuits,
and under them were the dead souls of millions of
human beings.  Its altars were vast armies which
spilled the rivers of blood which had to be sacrificed
to its lust.  As men had become rich they had
become barbarous, as nations had become great they
had become pagan.  Islam and Christianity alike
had had to fight against some of the powers of darkness
which called themselves civilisation and progress.
But a new era had begun, and the human heart was
raising its face to God.

"Once again a voice has gone out from Mecca,
from Nazareth, from Jerusalem, saying, 'There is no
god but God.'  Once again a voice has gone out
from the desert, crying, 'Thou shalt have no other
god but Me!'"

At this the people were carried out of themselves
with excitement, and loud shouts again rang through
the mosque.

Then Ishmael spoke of the future.  The world had
been in labour, in the throes of a new birth, but the
end was not yet.  Had he promised them that the
Kingdom of Heaven would come when they entered
Cairo?  Let him bend his knee in humility and ask
pardon of the Merciful.  Had he said the Redeemer
would appear?  Let him fall on his face before God.
Not yet!  Not yet!

"But," he cried, leaning out of the pulpit, with a
look of inspiration in his upturned eyes, "I see a time
coming when the worship of wealth will cease, when the
governments of the nations will realise that man does
not live by bread alone; when the children of men
will see that the things of the spirit are the only
true realities, worth more than much gold and many
diamonds, and not to be bartered away for the shows
of life; when the scourge of war will pass away; when,
divisions of faith will be no more known; when all
men, whether black or white, will be brothers, and in
the larger destiny of the human race the world will
be One.

"That time is near, O brothers," cried Ishmael,
"and many who are with us to-day will live to
witness it."

"You, Master, you!" cried a voice from below,
whereupon Ishmael paused for a perceptible moment,
and then said, in a sadder voice—

"No; with the eyes of the body I shall not see that
time."

Loud shouts of affectionate protest came from the
people.

"God forbid it!" they cried.

"God *has* forbidden it," said Ishmael.  "I pass out
of your lives from this day forward.  Our paths part.
You will see me no more."

Again came loud shouts of protest—not unusual in a
mosque—with voices calling on Ishmael to remain and
lead the people.

"My work here is done," he answered.  "The little
that God gave me to do is finished.  And now He calls
me away."

"No, no!" cried the people.

"Yes, yes," replied Ishmael; and then in simple,
touching words he told them the story of the Prophet
Moses—how, by reason of his sin, he was forbidden to
enter the Promised Land.

"Many of us have our promised land which we may
never enter," he said.  "This is mine, and here I may
not stay."

The protests of the people ceased; they listened
without breathing.

"Yet Moses was taken up into a high mountain, and
from there he saw what lay before his people; and from
a high mountain of my soul I see the Promised Land
which lies before you.  But to me a voice has come
which says, 'Enter thou not!'"

The people were now deeply moved.

"We are all sinners," Ishmael continued.

"Not thou, O Master," cried several voices at once.

"Yes, I more than any other, for I have sinned
against you and against the Merciful."

Then, raising his arms as if in blessing, he cried—

"O slaves of God, be brothers one to another!  If
you think of me when I am gone, think of me as of one
who saw the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven on
earth as plainly as his eyes behold you now.  If I leave
you I leave this hope, this comforter, behind me.
Think that Azrael, the angel of death, has spread his
wings over the desert track that hides me from your
eyes.  And pray for me—pray for me with the sinner's
prayer, the sinner's cry."

Then, in deep, tremulous tones which seemed to be
the inner voice of the whole of his being, he cried—

"O Thou who knowest every heart and hearest every
cry, look down and hearken to me now!  One sole plea
I make—my need of Thee!  One only hope I have—to
stand at Thy mercy-gate and knock!  Penitent, I kneel
at Thy feet!  Suppliant, I stretch forth my hands!
Save me, O God, from every ill!"

The words of the prayer were familiar to everybody
in the mosque, but so deep was their effect as Ishmael
repeated them in his trembling, throbbing voice, that
it seemed as if nobody present had ever heard them
before.

The emotion of the people wras now very great.
"Allah!  Allah!  Allah!" they cried, and they
prostrated themselves with their faces to the floor.

When the cold, slow, sonorous voice of the Reader
began again, and the vast congregation raised their
heads, the pulpit was empty and Ishmael was gone.





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   CHAPTER XX

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Meantime the General's house on the edge of the
ramparts was being made ready for its new tenant.
Fatimah, Ibrahim and Mosie, with a small army of
Arab servants, had been there since early morning,
washing, dusting, and altering the position of furniture.
Towards noon the Princess had arrived in her carriage,
which, with her customary retinue of gorgeously
apparelled black attendants, was now standing by the
garden gate.  Helena had come with her, but for the
first time in her life she was utterly weak and helpless.
Just as a nervous collapse may follow upon nervous
strain so a collapse of character may come after
prolonged exercise of will.  Something of this kind was
happening to Helena, who stood by the window in the
General's office, looking down at the city and running
her fingers along the hem of her handkerchief, while the
Princess, bustling about, laughed at her and rallied her.

"Goodness me, girl, you used to have some blood
in your veins, but now—*Mon Dieu*!  To think of you
who went down *there*, and did *that*, and used to drive
a motor-car through the traffic as calmly as if it had
been a go-cart, trembling and jerking as if you had got
the jumps!"

Meantime the Princess herself, full of energy, was
ordering the servants about, and, by a hundred little
changes, was giving to the General's office a look that
almost obliterated its former appearance.

"We'll have the desk here and the sofa there
... what do you say to the sofa there, my sweet?"

"Hadn't you better ask Gordon himself, Princess?"
asked Helena.

"But the man isn't here, and how can I....  Never
mind, leave them where they are, Ibrahim.  And now
for the pictures—nothing makes a room look so fresh
as a lot of pictures."

Ibrahim had brought up from the Agency a number
of pictures which had belonged to Gordon's mother,
and the Princess, using her lorgnette, proceeded to
examine them.

"What's this?  'Charles George Gordon.'  I know!
The White Pasha.  Put him over the General's desk.
'Ecce Homo.'  Humph!  A man couldn't wish to have
a thing like this in his office, and a natural woman can't
want it over her bed.  Mosie!  Take 'Ecce Homo' to
a nice dark corner of the servants' hall."

At that moment Fatimah came from the kitchen,
which had been shut up since the day after Helena's
departure for the Soudan, to say that half the
cooking-tins had disappeared.

"Just what I expected!  Stolen by those rascally
Egyptian cooks, no doubt.  Rascally Egyptians!  That's
what I call them.  Excuse the word, my dear.  I speak
my mind.  They'd steal the kohl from your eyes—if
you had any.  And these are the people who are to
govern the country!  But I say nothing—not I, indeed!
The virtue of a woman is in holding her tongue....
Fatimah, now that you are here, you might make
yourself useful.  Dust that big picture of the naked
babies.  What's it called?  'Suffer little
children.'  Goodness!  He looks as if he were giving away
clothes.  Helena, my moon, my beauty, you really
must tell me where to put this one."

"But hadn't you better ask Gordon himself,
Princess?  It's to be his house, you know," repeated
Helena, whereupon the Princess, wheeling round on
her, said—

"Gracious me, what's come over you, girl?  Here
you are to be mistress of the whole place within a
month, I suppose, and yet——"

"Hush, Princess!"

There were footsteps in the hall, and at the next
moment, Gordon, in his frock-coat uniform, looking
flushed and excited, and accompanied by Hafiz,
whose chubby face was wreathed in smiles, had entered
the room.

After he had shaken hands with the Princess the
servants rushed upon him—Mosie, who had come behind
kissing his sword, Ibrahim his hand, and Fatimah
struggling with an impulse to throw her arms about
his neck.

"So you've come at last, have you?" said the
Princess.  "Time enough, too, for here's Helena of no
use to anybody.  Your father has gone back to England,
hasn't he?  He might have come up to see me, I think.  He
wrote a little letter to say good-bye, though.  It
was just like him.  I could hear him speaking.  'My
goodness,' I said, 'that's Nuneham!'  Well, we shall
never see his equal again.  No, never!  He might have
left Egypt with twenty millions in his pocket, and he
has gone with nothing but his wages.  I suppose they're
slandering him all the same.  Ingrates!  But no
matter!  The dogs bark, but the camel goes along.
And now that I've time, let me take a look at you.
What a colour!  But what are you trembling about?
Goodness me, has *everybody* got the jumps?"

Helena was the only one in the room who had not
come forward to greet Gordon, and seeing his sidelong
look in her direction, the Princess began to lay plans
for leaving them together.

"Ibrahim," she cried, "hang up these naked babies
in the bathroom—the only place for them, it seems to
me.  Fatimah, go back and look if the cooking-tins are
not in the kitchen cupboard."

"They're not—I've looked already," said Fatimah.

"Then go and look again.  Mosie, you want to
inspect my horses—I can see you do."

"No, lady, I *have* i'spected them."

"Then i'spect them a second time.  Off you go! ... where's
my lorgnette?  Oh, dear me.  I fancy I must
have left it in the boudoir."

"Let me go for it, Princess," said Helena.

"Certainly not!  Why should you?  Do you think
I'm a cripple that I can't go myself?  Hafiz Effendi,
where are your manners that you don't open this door
for me?  That's better.  Now, the inner one."

At the next moment Gordon and Helena were left
together.  Helena was still standing by the window
looking down at the city which seemed to lie dazed
under the midday sun.  Gordon stepped up and stood
by her side.  It was hard to realise that they were
there again.  But in spite of their happiness there was
a little cloud over both.  They knew what caused it.

While they stood together in silence they could hear
the low reverberation of the voices of the people who
were praying within the mosque.

"They are chanting the first Surah," said Gordon.

"Yes, the first Surah," said Helena.

Their hands found each other as they stood side by
side.

"I saw Ishmael last night.  He came to my quarters,"
said Gordon in a low tone.

"Well?" asked Helena faintly.

"It was most extraordinary.  He came to tell me
that ... to compel me to——"

"Hush!"

There was a soft footstep behind them.  It was the
step of some one walking in Oriental slippers.
Without turning round they knew who it was.

It was Ishmael.  Notwithstanding his dusky complexion,
his face was very pale—almost as white as his
turban.  His eyes looked weary, their light was almost
extinct.  Perhaps his sermon had exhausted him.  It
was almost as if there was no life left in him except
the life of the soul.  But he smiled—it was the smile of
a spectre—as he stepped forward and held out his hand

Gordon's heart shuddered for pity.  "Are you well?"
he asked.

"Oh yes."

"But you look tired."

"It's nothing," said Ishmael; and then, with a touching
simplicity, he added, "I have been troubled in my
heart, but now I am at peace and all is well."

They sat, Ishmael on the sofa, Helena on a chair at
his right, Gordon on a chair at his left, the window
open before them, the city slumbering below.

Ishmael's face, though full of lines of pain, continued
to smile, and his voice, though hoarse and faint, was
cheerful.  He had come to tell them that he was going
away.

"Going away?" said Gordon.

"Yes, my work here is done, and when a man's work
is done he stands outside of life.  So I am going back."

"Back?  You mean back to Khartoum?" asked
Helena timidly.

"Perhaps there, too.  But back to the desert.  I am
a son of the desert.  Therefore what other place can
be so good for me?"

"Are you going alone?"

"Yes!  Or rather, no!  When a man has lived, has
laboured, he has always one thing—memory.  And he
who has memory can never be quite alone."

"Still you will be very lone——"

Ishmael turned to her with an almost imperceptible
smile.

"Perhaps, yes, at first, a little lonely, and all the
more so for the sweet glimpse I have had of human
company."

"But this is not what you intended to ... what
you hoped to——"

"No!  It's true I nourished other dreams for a
while—dreams of living a human life after my work
was done.  It would have been very sweet, very
beautiful.  And now to go away, to give it up, never more
to have part and lot in ... never again to see those
who ... Yes, it's hard, a little hard."

Helena turned her head aside and looked out at the
window.

"But that is all over now," said Ishmael.  "Love is
the crown of life, but it is not for all of us.  Your great
Master knew that as He knew everything.  Some men
have to be eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake.
How true!  How right!"

His pallid face struggled to smile as he said this.

"And then what does our Prophet say (to him be
prayer and peace)?  'The man who loves and never
attains to the joy of his love, but renounces it for
another who has more right to it, is as one who dies
a martyr.'"

Still looking out at the window, Helena tried to say
she would always remember him, and hoped he would
be very happy.

"Thank you!  That also will be a sweet memory,"
he said.  "But happy moments are rare in the lives of
those who are called to a work for humanity."

Then, coming gently to closer quarters, he told them
he was there to say good-bye to them.  "I had intended
to write to you," he said, turning again to Helena,
"but it is better so."

Then, facing towards Gordon, he said—

"I must confess that I have not always loved you.
But I have been in the wrong, and I ask your pardon.
It is God who governs the heart.  And what does your
divine Master say about that, too?  'Whom God hath
joined together let not man put asunder.'  That is the
true word about love and marriage—the first, and the
last, and the only one."

Then he rose, and both Helena and Gordon rose with
him.  One moment he stood between them without
speaking, and then, stooping over Helena's hand and
kissing it, he said, in a scarcely audible whisper—

"I divorce thee!  I divorce thee!  I divorce thee!"

It was the Mohammedan form of divorcement, and
all that was necessary to set Helena free.  When he
raised his head his face was still smiling—a pitiful,
heart-breaking smile.

Then, still holding Helena's hand, he reached out for
Gordon's also, and said—

"I give her back to thee, my brother.  And do not
think I give what I would not keep.  Perhaps—who
knows?—perhaps I loved her too."

Helena was deeply affected.  Gordon found it impossible
to look into Ishmael's face.  They felt his wearied
eyes resting upon them; they felt their hands being
brought together; they felt Ishmael's hand resting for a
moment on their hands; and then they heard him say—

"Maa-es-salamah!  Be happy!  Keep together as
long as you can.  And never forget we shall meet
some day."

Then, in a voice so low that they could scarcely hear
it, he said—

"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—

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   Music fragment

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   EPILOGUE

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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.

.. vspace:: 2

*And what of Ishmael's influence in the West?*

.. vspace:: 2

*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.*

.. vspace:: 3

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