Complete works of hall c.., p.445
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 445
As Helena tore up her letter and dropped it bit by bit into the waste-paper basket, she felt as if the last of her hopes dropped with it. But they rose again with the thought that though Gordon might be in danger he could not be afraid, and that his love for her was so great, so unconquerable, that it would bring him back to her now, in her time of trouble, in the teeth of death itself.
“He’ll come — I’m sure he’ll come,” she thought.
In this confidence she sat in the semi-darkness of her room during the preparations for the military funeral, hearing all that was being done outside with that supernatural acuteness which comes to the bereaved — the marching of troops, the rolling of the gun-carriage, and the arrival of friends, as well as the soul-crushing booming of the minute-gun. She was waiting to be told that Gordon was there, and was listening for his name as her black boy darted in and out with whispered news of Egyptian Ministers, English Advisers, inspectors and judges, and finally the Consul-General himself.
When the last moment came, and the band of the Guards had begun to play “Toll for the Brave,” and it was certain that Gordon had not come, her heart sank low; but then she told herself that if he ran the risk of arrest, that was reason enough why he should not show himself at the fortress.
“He will be at the chapel instead,” she thought, and though she had not intended to be present at the funeral she now determined that she would do so.
She was put into a carriage with the Consul-General, and sat by his side without speaking, merely looking through the windows at the crowds that stood in the streets, quietly, silently, but without much grief on their faces, and listening to the slow squirling of the “Dead March” and the roll of the muffled drums over the dull rumbling of the closed coach.
When they reached the cemetery in the desolate quarter of old Cairo, and the band stopped and the drumming ceased, and she stepped out of the carriage, and the breathing silence of the open air was broken by the tremendous words, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” she was sure, as she took the arm of the Consul-General and walked with him over the crackling gravel to the door of the chapel, that the moment she crossed its threshold the first person she would see would be Gordon.
Her heart sank lower than ever when she realised that he was not there, and after she had taken her seat and the chill chapel had filled up behind her and the service began, she tried in vain, save at moments of poignant memory, to fix her mind on the awful errand that had brought her.
“He will be at the graveside,” she thought. No one would arrest him at a place like that. English soldiers were English gentlemen, and if the Arab nobleman in the desert could allow the enemy who had stumbled into his tent at night to get clear away in the morning, Gordon won allowed to stand by the grave of his friend and Genera an no one would know he was there.
When the short service was over and the Consul-General drew her hand through his arm again, and they walked together over the gravel and through the grass to the open grave behind the rosebushes that grew near to the wall, she thought she knew she had only to raise her eyes from the ground and she would see Gordon standing there, shaken with sobs.
She knew, too, that the moment she saw him she would break down altogether, so she kept her head low as long as she could. But when the troops had formed in a rectangle, and the Chaplain had taken his place and the last words had been spoken, and through a deeper hush the bugle had led the voices of the soldiers with:
“Father, in thy sacred keeping
Leave me now thy servant sleeping,”
and she looked up at last and saw that Gordon had not come at all, she felt as if something that was soft and tender within her had broken and something that was hard and bitter had taken its place.
While the volleys were being fired over the grave the officers of the army came up to her one by one — brave men all of them, but many of them hardly able at that moment to speak or see. Still she did not weep, and when the Consul-General with twitching lips said, “Let us go,” she gave him her hand again, though it was limp and nerveless now, and, under her long black glove, as cold as snow.
The blinds were drawn up in her room when she returned to the Citadel, and with eyes that did not see she was staring out on its far view of the city, the Nile, the pyramids and the rolling waves of the desert beyond, when a knock came to the door and the Consul-General entered. He was clearly much affected. His firm mouth, which often looked as if it had been cast in bronze, seemed now to be blown in foam.
“Helena,” he said, “the time has come to speak plainly. I am sorry. It is quite unavoidable.”
After the first salutation she continued to stand by a chair and to stare out of the window.
“Gordon has gone. I can no longer have any doubt about that. Others, with other motives, have been trying to find him and have failed. I have been trying, with better purposes perhaps, but no better results.”
His voice was hoarse; he was struggling to control it. “I am now satisfied that when he left this house after the scene — the painful, perhaps unsoldierly scene of his — his degradation, he took the advice your father gave him — to fly from Egypt and hide his shame in some other country.”
He paused for a moment and then said:
“It was scarcely proper advice, perhaps; but who can be hot and cold, wise and angry in a moment? Whatever the merits of your father’s counsel, I think Gordon made up his mind to follow it. Only as the conduct of a despairing man who knew that all was over can I explain his last appearance at El Azhar.”
Again he paused for a moment, and then, after clearing his throat, he said:
“I do not think we shall see him again. I do not think I wish to see him. A military court would probably hold him responsible for the blood that has been shed during the past twenty-four hours, thinking the encouragement he gave the populace had led them to rebel. Therefore its judgment upon his offences as a soldier could hardly be less than — than the most severe.”
His voice was scarcely audible as he added:
“That would be harder for me to bear than to think of him as dead. Therefore, whatever others may be doing — his mother or — or yourself, I am cherishing no illusions. My son is gone. His career is at an end. Let us — please let us say no more on the subject.”
Helena did not reply. Her bosom was stirred by her rapid breathing, but she continued to stare out of the window. After a moment the Consul-General said more calmly:
“Have you any plans for the future?”
Helena shook her head.
“No desire to remain in Egypt?
“No.”
“Any relatives or friends in England?
“None.”
“Hm! All the same, I think it will be best for you to return home.”
Helena bowed without speaking.
“The sooner the better, perhaps.”
“Very well.”
“This is Sunday. There is a steamship from Alexandria on Saturday — will it suit you to sail by that?”
“Yes.”
“One of my secretaries shall make arrangements and see you safely aboard. Meantime, have no anxieties. England will take care of your father’s daughter.”
Then he rose, and taking her ice-cold hand, he said:
“I think that is all. I’ll come up on Saturday morning to see you off. Good-bye for the present.” And then, in the same hoarse voice as before, looking steadfastly into her face for a moment, “God bless you, my girl!”
For some minutes Helena did not move from the spot on which Lord Nuneham left her. A sense of double bereavement had fallen on her for the first time with a crushing blow. That some day she would lose her father was an idea to which her mind had long been accustomed, but never for one moment until then — not even in the bitter hour in which they had parted at the door — had she allowed herself to believe that a time would come when she would have to live on without Gordon. It was here now. The past and the future alike were closed to her. A black curtain had fallen about her life. If Gordon could not return without the risk of arrest what right had she to expect him to come back to her at all? He was gone. He was lost to her. She was alone.
The city, which had been lying hot in the quivering sun, began to grow red and hazy, and in the gathering twilight Helena became conscious of criers in the streets below.
The black boy, who was always bustling about her, interpreted their cries. They were crying the funeral of the students who had fallen at El Azhar. It was to take place that night. Ishmael Ameer called on the people to gather in the great market-place of Mohammed Ali and walk up by torchlight to the Arab cemetery outside the town.
“Would lady like Mosie go and see? Then Mosie come back and tell lady everything,” said the black boy, and in the hope of being alone Helena allowed him to go.
But hardly had the boy gone when a timid knock came to her door and the Army Surgeon entered the room. The man’s thin lips were twitching and he was clearly ill at ease.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but hearing you were soon to leave for home — I thought it only fair to myself — In fact, I have come to make an explanation.”
“What is it?” asked Helena, without a trace of interest in her tone.
The Surgeon gnawed the ends of his moustache for an instant, and then, looking uneasily at Helena, he said:
“When you come to turn things over in your mind you may perhaps think I was to blame in keeping your dear father’s secret. His condition, however, was not so serious but that under ordinary circumstances — I say ordinary circumstances — he might have lived five years, ten years, even fifteen. The truth is, though—”
“Well?”
“I want to prove the sincerity of my friendship, Miss Graves. I am sure you prefer that I should speak plainly.”
“The truth is — what?” asked Helena, who was now listening with strained attention.
“That — that your dear father’s death — I am now fully convinced of it — was due — partly due at all events to circumstances that — that were not ordinary.”
Helena’s pale face turned white, but she made no answer, and after a moment the Surgeon said:
“It would have been cruel to tell you this last night, immediately after the shock of your bereavement, but — but now that you are going away — Besides, I spoke to Lord Nuneham. I mentioned my surmises. But you know what he is — a great man, undoubtedly a great man, but incapable of taking counsel. Always has been, always will be; we all of us find it so.”
Helena, seized with an undefinable fear, was speechless, but the Surgeon’s blundering tongue went on:
“‘Better not speak of it,’ said Lord Nuneham. ‘Drop it! Don’t let us weaken our case against the man and rouse popular fury by an accusation we cannot possibly bring home. Wait! We’ll get hold of him to better purpose by and by.’”
Helena’s heart was beating violently, but she only said, with laboured breathing:
“Can’t we dispense with all this? You have come to tell me that my father did not die from natural causes — isn’t that it?”
“Yes — that is to say — pardon me — we are alone?”
Helena bowed impatiently.
“Then, to tell you the truth — I am satisfied that violence — as a contributing cause at all events — I looked at him again this morning when — at the last moment in fact — and the marks were even plainer than before.”
“Marks?”
“Marks of a man’s hand about the throat.”
“A man’s hand?” said Helena, with her lips rather than with her voice.
“I thought at first it might have been the General’s own hand, but there was one peculiarity which forbade that inference.”
“Tell me.”
“It was the left hand, and while the thumb and the first, second, and fourth fingers were plainly indicated, there was no impression made by the third.”
“So?”
“So I concluded that the marks about the throat must have been made by somebody who had lost the third finger of his left hand.”
Helena gazed a long time blankly into the Surgeon’s face, until at length, frozen by fear, having said all, he tried to convey the impression that he had said nothing.
“Miss Graves, I have given you pain. I feel I have. And mind, I do not say certainly that the hand at your father’s throat was the cause of his death. It may have been used merely to push him off. But if the person seen last in the General’s company was apparently quarrelling with him — please understand; I make no accusations. I have never met Ishmael Ameer. And even if it should be found that he had this peculiarity — of the third finger, I mean — In any case, the Consul-General will not hear of an indictment, so I’m sure — I’m sure I can rely on your discretion. But hearing you were going home, I felt I could not allow you to think that I had permitted your dear father—”
The Surgeon went stammering on for some time longer, but Helena did not listen, and when at last the man backed himself out of her room, hugging his shallow soul with the flattering thought that in following his selfish impulse he had done well, she did not hear him go.
She was now sure of a fact which she had hitherto only half suspected. The Egyptian had killed her father! Killed him, there was no other word for it, not merely by the excitement his presence engendered, but by actual violence. The authorities knew it, too, they knew it perfectly, but they were afraid — afraid in the absence of conclusive evidence to risk the breakdown of a charge against one whom the people in their blindness worshipped.
The sky had grown blue and luminous by this time, the stars had come out in the distant depths of the heavens, and from the market-place below the ramparts of the Citadel there came up into the clear air the thick murmuring of the vast multitude that had gathered there, with ten thousand smoking torches, to follow the new prophet to the Arab cemetery beyond the town.
When Helena thought of the Egyptian again it was with an intensity of hatred she had never felt before. He had not only killed her father but he had been the first cause of the devilish entanglement which had led to Gordon’s disgrace. Yet he was to escape punishment for these offences, he was to go on until some sin against the State had brought him into the meshes of its Ministers, while her father was in his grave and Gordon was in banishment and she — she was sent home in her womanish helplessness and shame!
“O God! is there no one to punish this man?” she thought, in the dark searching of her soul, while her fingernails were digging trenches in her palms and from the hard clenching of her teeth her lips were bleeding.
Then suddenly, in the delirium of her hatred of the Egyptian and the tragic tangle of her error, while she was standing alone in her desolate room, with the “Allah!”
“Allah!” of Ishmael’s followers surging up from below, a new feeling — a feeling she had never felt before — stirred in the depths of her abased and outraged soul.
“Shall I go back to England?” she asked herself. “Shall I?”
VII
As soon as Lord Nuneham reached the Agency, he went up to his wife’s room. The sweet old lady was sitting in her dressing-gown with her face to the windows on the west, while the Egyptian woman was combing out her thin white hair and binding it up for the night. The sun was gone, but the river and the sky were shining like molten gold, and a faint reflected glow shone on her soft, pale cheeks.
“Ah, is it you, John?” she said in a nervous voice, and while he was taking a seat she looked at him with her deep, slow, weary eyes as if waiting for an answer to a question she was afraid to ask.
“Helena is going home, Janet,” said the old man after a moment.
“Poor girl!”
“There is a steamship on Saturday. I thought it better she should sail by that.”
“Poor thing! Poor darling!”
“Her will seems to be quite gone — she agrees to everything.”
“Poor Helena!”
“I don’t think she has shed a tear since her father died. It is extraordinary. She startles me, almost frightens me.
Either she is a girl of astonishing character or else—”
She has had a great shock, poor child! Only yesterday at this time her father was with her, and now—”
“True — quite true!”
A hush fell upon all. Even Fatimah’s comb was quiet. It was almost as if a spirit were passing through the room. At length the old lady said:
“Any news of—”
“None.”
“Would you tell me if there were?”
“If you asked me — yes.”
“My poor boy!”
“Hafiz has inquired everywhere. Nobody knows anything about him.”
“He will come back, though, I am sure he will,” said Lady Nuneham with a nervous trill, and then a strange contraction passed over the Consul-General’s face, and he rose to go.
“We’ll not speak about that again, Janet,” he said, but full of the sweetest and bitterest emotion that comes to the human heart — the emotion of a mother when she thinks of the son that is lost to her — the old lady did not hear.
“I remember that his grandfather — it was in the early days of the civil war, I think — He had done something against his General, I suppose—”
She had been speaking for some moments when Fatimah, who was standing behind, reached round to her ear and said:
“His lordship has gone, my lady,” and then there was a sudden and deep silence.
The molten gold died out of the river and the sky, and in the luminous blue twilight the old lady got into bed.
“Fatimah,” she said, “do you think Doctor would allow me to go up to the Citadel one day this week?”
“Why not, if the carriage were closed and the blinds down?”
“And, Fatimah?”
“What is it, oh, my heart?”
“What do you think the Consul-General meant when he said Helena frightened him?”
