THE WHITE PROPHET, VOLUME II (continued 5)

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.

CHAPTER II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Be careful! Look!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"My Rani! My wife!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well?"

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

"And you do not?"

"No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who is he?" asked Ishmael.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, O Master, yes."

"You went there from Khartoum?"

"Yes, yes, O Master, yes."

"You took a letter to the English lord?"

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

"From some one in Khartoum?"

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

"What treacherous man sent you with that letter?"

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

"Was it a woman?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, no, I will never tell you," said the boy.

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

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

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

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

"Wait!" he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.

CHAPTER V

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.

CHAPTER VI

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."

CHAPTER VII

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.

CHAPTER VIII

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.

CHAPTER IX

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

"What has happened?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No."

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

The Consul-General bent his head.

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

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

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

Whereupon the Sirdar turned sharply upon the man and answered—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Far away in London the Foreign Minister was speaking.

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

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

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

CHAPTER X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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