Complete works of hall c.., p.443
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 443
“Stop that young devil up there!”
At the next moment there was the crack of a dozen rifles, and then the boy on the parapet swayed aside, lurched forward, and fell into the street. The Colonel was giving orders that he should be taken up and carried away when the woman’s cry was heard again, this time in a frenzied shriek, and at the next instant the soldiers had to make way for the mightiest thing on earth, an outraged mother in the presence of her dead.
The woman, who had torn the black veil from her face, lifted the boy’s head on to her breast and cried: “My God! My good God! My boy! Ali! Ali!” But just then the gate gave way with a crash and the Colonel ordered one of the squadrons to ride into the courtyard of the mosque, where five thousand of the students and their professors could be seen squirming in dense masses like ants on an upturned ant-hill.
The soldiers were forcing their horses through the crowds and beating with the flat of their swords when two or three shots were fired within, and it became certain that some of the students were using firearms. At that the bulldog in the British Colonel got the better of the man and he wanted to shout a command to his men to use the edge of their weapons and clear the place at any cost, but the shrill cry of the mother over her dead boy drowned his thick voice.
“He is dead! They have killed him! My only child! His father died last week. God took him, and now I have nobody. Ali, come back to me! Ali! Ali!”
“Take that yelping b — away,” shouted the Colonel, ripping out an oath of impatience, and that was the moment when Gordon came up.
What he did then he could never afterward remember, but what others saw was that with the spring of a tiger he leaped up to Macdonald, laid hold of him by the collar of his khaki jacket, dragged him from the saddle, flung him headlong on to the ground and stamped on him as if he had been a poisonous snake.
In another moment there would have been no more Macdonald, but just then, while the soldiers, recognising their first staff officer, stood dismayed, not knowing what it was their duty to do, there came over the sibilant hiss of the crowd the loud clangour of the hoofs of galloping horses, and the native people laid hold of Gordon and carried him away.
His great strength was now gone, and he felt himself being dragged out of the hard glare of the light into the shadow of a side street where he was thrust into a carriage, and held down in it by somebody who was saying:
“Lie still, my brother! Lie still! Lie still!”
For one instant longer he heard deafening shouts through the carriage glass, over the rumble of the moving wheels, and then a blank darkness fell on him for a time and he knew no more.
When he recovered consciousness his mind had swung back, with no memory of anything between, to the moment when he was leaving the General’s house, and he was saying to himself again: “I must go hack. She may curse me, but I cannot leave her alone. I cannot — I will not.”
Then he was aware of a voice — it was the quavering voice of an old man and seemed to come out of a toothless mouth — saying:
“Be careful, Michael! His poor hand is injured. We must send for the Surgeon.”
He opened his eyes and saw that he was being carried through a quiet courtyard where he could hear the footsteps of the men who bore him and see by the light of a smoking lantern the façade of a church. Then he heard the same quavering voice say:
“Take him up to the salamlik, my brother,” and then there was a jerk and a jolt and he lost consciousness again.
He was lying on a bed in a dimly lighted room when memory returned and the events of the day unrolled themselves before him. He made an effort to raise himself on his elbows, but in his weakness he fell back, and after a while he dropped into a delirious sleep. In this sleep he saw first his mother and then Helena, and then Helena and again his mother — everything and everybody else being quite blotted out.
III
SOON after sunset Lady Nuneham had taken her last dose of medicine, and had got into bed, when the Consul-General came into her room. He had the worn and jaded look by which she knew that the day had gone heavily with him, and she waited for him to tell her how and why. With a face full of the majesty of suffering he told her what had happened, describing the scene in the General’s office and all the circumstances whereby matters had been brought to such a tragic pass.
“It was pitiful,” he said. “The General went too far — much too far — and the sight of Gordon’s white face and trembling lips was more than I could bear.”
His voice thickened as he spoke, and it seemed to the mother at that moment as if the pride of the father in his son, which he had hidden so many years in the sealed chamber of his iron soul, bad only come up at length that she might see it die.
“It’s all over now, I suppose, and we must make the best of it. He promised so well, though! Always did — ever since he was a boy. If one’s children could only remain children! The pity of it! Good-night! — Good-night, Janet!”
She had listened to him without speaking and without a tear coming into her eyes, and she answered his goodnight in a low but steady voice. Soon afterward the gong sounded in the hall, and as she lay in her bed she knew that he would he dining alone — one of the great men of the world and one of the loneliest.
Meantime Fatimah, tidying up the room for the night and sniffling audibly, was talking as much to herself as to her mistress. At one moment she was excusing the Consul-General, at the next she was excusing Gordon. Lady Nuneham let her talk on and gave no sign until darkness fell and the moment came for the Egyptian woman also to get into her bed. Then the old lady said:
“Open the door of this room, Fatimah,” pointing to a room on her right.
Fatimah did so, without saying a word, and then she lay down, blowing her nose demonstratively as if trying to drown other noises.
From her place on her pillow the old lady could now see into the adjoining chamber and through its two windows on to the Nile. A bright moon had risen, and she lay a long time looking into the silvery night.
Somewhere in the dead waste of the early morning the Egyptian woman thought she heard somebody calling her, and rising in alarm she found that her mistress had left her bed and was speaking in a toneless voice in the next room.
“Fatimah! Are you awake? Isn’t the boy very restless to-night? He throws his arms out in his sleep and uncovers little Hafiz, too.”
She was standing in her night dress and lace night-cap with the moon shining in her face by the side of one of the two beds the room contained, tugging at its eiderdown coverlet. Her eyes had the look of eyes that did not see, but she stood up firmly and seemed to have become younger and stronger — so swiftly had her spirit carried her back in sleep to the woman she used to be.
“Oh, my heart, no,” said Fatimah. “Gordon hasn’t slept in this room for nearly twenty years — nor Hafiz neither.”
At the sound of Fatimah’s husky voice and the touch of her moist fingers the old lady awoke.
“Oh, yes, of course,” she said, and after a moment, in a sadder tone, “Yes, yes.”
“Come, my heart, come,” said Fatimah, and taking her cold and nerveless hand, she led her, now a weak old woman once more, back to her bed, for the years had rolled up like a tidal wave and the spell of her sweet dream was broken.
On a little table by the side of her bed stood a portrait of Helena in a silver frame, and she took it up and looked at it for a moment, and then the light which Fatimah had switched on was put out again. After a little while there was a sigh in the darkness, and after a little while longer a soft, tremulous:
“Ah, well!”
IV
HELENA was still in her room when the Consul-General, who had been telephoned for, held an inquiry into the circumstances of the General’s death. She was sitting with her hands clasped in her lap and her eyes looking fixedly before her, hardly listening, hardly hearing, while the black boy darted in and out with broken and breathless messages which contained the substance of what was said.
The household servants could say nothing except that, following in the wake of the new prophet when he left the Citadel, they had left the house by the side gate of the garden without being aware of anything that had happened in the General’s office. The Surgeon testified to the finding of the General’s body and the aide-de-camp explained that the last time he saw his chief alive was when he was ordered to call Colonel Macdonald.
“Who was with him at that moment?” asked the Consul-General.
“The Egyptian, Ishmael Ameer.”
“Was there anything noticeable in their appearance and demeanour?”
“The General looked hot and indignant.”
“Did you think there had been angry words between them?”
“I certainly thought so, my lord.”
Other witnesses there were, such as the soldier servant at the door, who made a lame excuse for leaving his post for a few minutes while the Egyptian was in the General’s office, and the sentry at the gate of the Citadel, who said no one had come in after Colonel Macdonald and the cavalry had passed out. Then some question of calling Helena herself was promptly quashed by the Consul-General, and the inquiry closed.
Hardly had the black boy delivered the last of his messages when there was a timid knock at Helena’s door, and the Army Surgeon came into the room. He was a small man with an uneasy manner, married, and having a family of grown-up girls who were understood to be a cause of anxiety to him.
“I regret — I deeply regret to tell you, Miss Graves, that your father’s death has been due to heart-failure, the result of undue excitement. You will do me the justice — I am sure you will do me the justice to remember that I repeatedly warned the General of the danger of over-exciting himself, but unfortunately his temperament was such—”
The Consul-General’s deep voice in the adjoining room seemed to interrupt the Surgeon, and making a visible call on his resolution he came closer to Helena and said:
“I have not mentioned my previous knowledge of organic trouble. Lord Nuneham asked some searching questions, but the promise I made to your father—”
Again the Consul-General’s voice interrupted him, and with a flicker of fear on his face he said:
“Now that things have turned out so unhappily it might perhaps be awkward for me if — In short, my dear Miss Graves, I think I may rely on you not to — Thank you, thank you!” he said, as Helena, understanding his anxiety, shook her head.
“I thought it would relieve you to receive my assurance that death was due to natural causes only — purely natural. It’s true I thought for a moment that perhaps there had also been violence—”
“Violence?” said Helena.
“Don’t let me alarm you. It was only a passing impression and I should be sorry, very sorry—”
But just at that moment, when a new thought was passing through the stormy night of Helena’s mind like a shaft of deadly lightning, the Chaplain of the Forces came into the room and the Surgeon left it.
The Chaplain was a well-nurtured person who talked comfort out of a full stomach with the expansiveness which sometimes comes to clergy who live long amongst soldiers.
“I have come to say, my dear young lady, that I place myself entirely at your service. With your permission I will charge myself with all the sad and necessary duties. So sudden! So unexpected! How true that in the midst of life we are in death!”
There was more coin from the same mint, and then the shaft of deadly lightning as before.
“It is perhaps the saddest fact of death in this Eastern climate that burial follows so closely after it. As there seems to be no sufficient reason to believe that the General’s death has been due to any but natural causes, it will probably be to-morrow. I say it will probably—”
“Sufficient?” said Helena, and with a new poison at her heart she hurried away to her father’s room.
She found the General where they had placed him, on his own bed and in his uniform. His eyes were now closed, his features were composed, and everything about him was suggestive of a peaceful end.
While she was standing by the bed in the gloomy, echoless chamber, the Consul-General came in and stood beside her. Though he faintly simulated his natural composure he was deeply shaken. For a moment he looked down at his dead friend in silence, while his eyelids blinked and his lips trembled. Then he took Helena’s hand, and drawing her aside he said:
“This is a blow to all of us, my child, but to you it is a great and terrible one.”
She did not reply, but stood with her dry eyes looking straight before her.
“I have made strict inquiry and I am satisfied — entirely satisfied — that your father died by the visitation of God.”
Still she did not speak and after a moment he spoke again.
“It is true that the man Ishmael Ameer was the last to be with him, but what happened at their interview it would be useless to ask — dangerous, perhaps, in the present state of public feeling.”
She listened with complete self-possession and strong hold of her feelings, though her bosom heaved and her breathing was audible.
“So let us put away painful thoughts, Helena. After all, your father’s end was an enviable one, and harder for us than for him, you know.”
He looked steadily for a moment at her averted face and then said, in a husky voice:
“I’m sorry Lady Nuneham is so much of an invalid that she cannot come to see you. This is the moment when a mother—”
He stopped without finishing what he had intended to say, and then he said:
“I’m still more sorry that one who—”
Again he stopped, and then in a low, smothered, scarcely audible voice, he said, hurriedly:
“But that is all over now. Good-night, my child! God help you!”
Helena was standing where the Consul-General had left her, fighting hard against a fearful thought which had only vaguely taken shape in her mind, when the black boy came back with his mouth full of news.
The bell of the telephone had rung furiously for the English lord and he had gone away hurriedly, his horses galloping through the gate; there had been a riot at El Azhar; a boy had been shot; a hundred students had been killed with swords; the cavalry were clearing the streets, and the people were trooping in thousands into the great mosque of the Sultan Hâkim, where the new prophet was preaching to them.
Helena listened to the terrible story as to some far-off event which in the tempest of her own trouble did not concern her, and then she sent the boy away. Gordon had been right — plainly right — from the first, but what did it matter now?
Some hours passed, and again and again the black boy came back to the room with fresh news and messages, first to say that her supper was served, next that her bedroom was ready, and finally, with shamefaced looks and a face blubbered over with tears, to explain the cause of his absence from the house when the tragic incident happened. He had followed the crowd out of the Citadel, and only when he found himself at the foot of the hill had he thought, “Who is to take care of lady while Mosie is away?” Then he had run back fast, very fast, but he was too late — it was all over.
“Will lady ever forgive Mosie? Will lady like Mosie any more?”
Helena comforted the little twisted and tortured soul with some words of cheer and then sent him to bed. But with a sad longing in his big eyes and the look of a dumb creature that wanted to lick her hand, he came back to say he could not sleep in his own room because death was in the house, and might he sit on the floor where lady was and keep her company?
Touched by the tender bit of human nature that was tearing the big little soul of the black boy who worshipped her, Helena went back to her own bedroom, and then a grin of delight passed over Mosie’s ugly face, and he said:
“Never mind! It’s nothing! Lady will forget all about it to-morrow. Now lady will lie down and sleep.”
Helena put out the light in her room, and sitting by the open window she looked long into the moonlight that lay over the city. At one moment she heard the clatter of horses’ hoofs — Macdonald’s cavalry were returning to the Citadel after their efforts in the interests of peace and order. At intervals she heard the ghafirs (watchmen) who cried “Wahhed!” (God is One) in the silent streets below. Constantly she looked across to the barracks that stood at the edge of the glistening Nile, and at every moment the cruel core in her heart grew yet more hard.
Why had not Gordon come to her? He must know of her father’s death by this time — why was he not there? Why had he not written to her at all events? It was true they had parted in anger, but what of that? He had never loved her or he would be with her now. She had done well to drive him away from her, and thank God she would never see him again!
The moon died out, a cold breath passed through the air, the city seemed to yawn in its sleep, the dawn came with its pale pink streamers and with its joyous birds — the happy, heart-breaking children of the air — twittering in the eaves, and then the pride and hatred of her wounded heart broke down utterly.
She wanted Gordon now as she had never wanted him before. She wanted the sound of his voice, she wanted the touch of his hand, she wanted to lay her head on his breast like a child and hear him tell her that it would all be well.
She found a hundred excuses for him in as many minutes. He was a prisoner — how could he leave his quarters? They might be keeping him under close arrest — how could he get away? Perhaps they had never even told him of her father’s death — how could he write to her about it?
In the fever of her fresh thought she decided that she herself would tell him, and in the tumult of her confused brain she never doubted that he would come to her. Regulations? They would count for nothing. He was brave, he was fearless, he would find a way. Already she could see him flinging open the door of her room, and she could feel herself flying into his arms.
