Complete works of hall c.., p.446
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 446
“I think he meant that she’s one of the girls who do things when they’re in trouble — drown themselves, take poison or something.”
“My poor Helena! My poor Gordon!”
There was the rustling whisper of a prayer at the pillow, and then, for the weary and careworn old lady, another day slid into another night.
VIII
MEANTIME Gordon, with a heart filled with darkness, sat huddled up on his bed in the little guest-room of the Coptic Cathedral. On a table at his left a small green-shaded lamp was burning, and on a chair at his right sat the saintly old Patriarch, gently patting his bare arm and trying in vain to comfort him.
“Yes, God is merciful, my son, and it is just because we are such guilty creatures that our Lord came to deliver us.”
“But you don’t know, father, you don’t know,” said Gordon.
“Know what, my son?”
“You don’t know what reason I have to reproach myself,” said Gordon; and then, catching by the sure instinct of a pure heart some vague sense of Gordon’s position, the old man began to talk of confession, wherein the soul of man lays down its sins before God and begins to feel as if it had wings.
“On receiving the penitent’s confession,” he said, “it is the duty of the Coptic priest to take his sin upon himself just as if it were his own, and if I, my son—”
“But you can’t! It’s impossible! God forbid it,” said Gordon, and then the saintly old soul, allowing that there were sacred places in the heart of man which only God’s eye should see, spoke of atonement, whereby he that is guilty of any sin may begin his journey toward repentance, and be numbered at last, if his penitence be true, among the living who live in God’s peace.
“Why should any of us, my son, no matter how foul the stain of sin we have contracted, live in the dread of miscarrying for ever while we have energy to atone?” said the good old man in his worn and husky voice, and then the tides of Gordon’s troubled mind, which had ebbed and flowed like the sea on a desolate shore under the blank darkness of a starless night, seemed to be suddenly brightened by a light from the morning.
“Father,” he said, “could you send for somebody?”
“Indeed I could — who is it?” asked the Patriarch.
“Captain Hafiz Ali of the Egyptian Army. He can be found at headquarters. Say that some one he knows well wishes to see him at once.”
“I’ll tell Michael to take the message immediately,” said the Patriarch, and his shuffling old feet went off on his errand.
The new light that had dawned on Gordon’s mind was the same as he had seen before and yet it was now quite different. He would deliver himself up, as he had first intended to do, but in humility, not in pride, in submission to the will of God, not defiance of the power of man. A reclaiming voice seemed to say to him: “Atone for your crime! Confess everything! Die — on the gallows if need be! Better suffer the pains of death than the furies of remorse! Give your own life for the life you have taken, no matter by what impulse of self-defence or devilish accident of fate!”
Hafiz would carry his message to headquarters, or perhaps help him to go there, and the good old Patriarch would explain why he had not gone before.
“It is the only way now, the only hope,” he thought.
Within half an hour Hafiz arrived hot and breathless, as if he had been running. One moment he stood near the door, while his lip lagged low and his cheerful face darkened at sight of Gordon’s white cheeks, and then he gushed out into words which tried their best to be brave but were tragic with tears.
“I knew it,” he said, “I’ve said so all day long. ‘He’s lying ill somewhere or he would show up now whatever the consequences.’ You’re wounded, aren’t you? Let me see.”
“It’s nothing,” said Gordon. “Nothing at all. Sit down, old fellow.”
And then Hafiz sat on the right of the bed, holding Gordon’s hand in his hand, and told him what had happened during the day — how Macdonald and his bloodhounds had been out in pursuit of him, expecting to arrest and court-martial him, and how he also had been searching for him since yesterday, but with the hope of helping him to escape.
“High and low we’ve looked everywhere — everywhere except here — and who would have thought of a place like this?” said Hafiz. “So much the better, though! You’ll stay here until you are well and I can get you safely away. I will, too! You’ll see I will!”
It was hard to listen to the good fellow’s schemes for his escape and tell him at once of his intention to give himself up, so Gordon asked one by one the questions that were uppermost in his mind, little thinking that Hafiz’s answers would break up his purpose and stifle for ever the cry of the voice of his tortured heart.
“The General is buried, isn’t he?” he said, turning his face away as he spoke, and when Hafiz answered “Yes,” that he had died by the hand of God and been buried that afternoon, and that everybody was saying that he had been a good man and a great soldier and Egypt would never again see his equal, Gordon asked himself what after all would be the worth of an atonement which offered as an equivalent for a life like the General’s a life such as his own, which was no longer of any use to him or to any one.
And again, when he asked, in a voice that was breathless with fear, how his father was, and Hafiz answered that the iron man whose name had been a terror in Egypt for so many years, though calm on the outside still, was breaking up like a frozen lake from below; that he had been calling him over the telephone all day long, and entreating him to find his son that he might tell him to deliver himself up immediately, in spite of everything, lest he should be charged with desertion and be liable to death, Gordon sickened with a sense of the shame into which he was about to plunge his father in his last days by the confession he intended to make and the fate he meant to meet.
And again, when with deepening emotion he asked about his mother — was she worse for the disgrace that had overtaken himself? — and Hafiz told him “No,” that though sitting in a sort of bewilderment, waiting for God’s light in the darkness that had fallen on her life, she was yet living in a beautiful, blind hope that he would come back to justify himself, and meantime sending messages to him saying, “Tell him his mother is sure he only did what he believed to be right, because her boy could not do what was wrong,” Gordon’s heart knocked hard at his breast with the thought that the brave atonement to which he had set his face would surely kill his mother before it had time to kill him.
And when, last of all, in the sore pain of a wounded tenderness, he asked about Helena — was she well and was she asking after him? — and Hafiz again answered “No,” but that he had seen her at the General’s funeral (where he could not trust himself to speak to her for pity of the dumb trouble in her pale face), and that, leaning on the arm of the Consul-General, she had lifted her tearless eyes as if looking for somebody she could not see, and that she was to go back to England soon, very soon, on Saturday, without any one for company, being alone in the world now, then Gordon broke down altogether, for he saw himself following her on her lonely journey home with a cruel and needless blow that would ruin the little that was left of her peace.
“On Saturday, you say?”
“Yes, by the English steamer from Alexandria,” said Hafiz, and then, eagerly, as if by a sudden thought, “Gordon?”
“Well?”
“Why shouldn’t you go with her?”
Gordon shook his head.
“But why? You’ll be better by that time, and even if you’re not — You can’t stay here for ever, and if you should fall into Macdonald’s hands — Besides, it’s better in any case to let the War Office deal with you. They’ll know everything before you reach London and they’ll see you’ve been in the right. You’ll get justice there, Gordon, whereas here — Then there’s Helena, too — she’s expecting you to join her — I’m sure she is — why shouldn’t she, being friendless in Egypt now and without any one to go to even at home? And if the worst comes to the worst, and you have to leave the Army, which God forbid, you’ll be together at all events — she’ll be with you, anyway—”
“No, no, my boy, no,” cried Gordon, but Hafiz, full of his new hope, was not to be denied.
“You think it’s impossible, but it isn’t. Wallahi! Leave it to me. I’ll arrange everything. Trust me,” he said, and in the warmth of his new resolve and the urgency of another errand, he got up to go.
The hundred and fifty Notables who had been arrested that morning before the Grand Cadi’s house had been tried in the afternoon by a Special Tribunal, and despatched in the evening as dangerous rebels to the penal settlement in the Soudan. In protest against this injustice as well as in lamentation for the loss of the students who had fallen at El Azhar, Ishmael Ameer had called upon the people of Cairo to follow him in procession to the Arabic cemetery outside the city, that there, without violence or offence, they might appeal from the barbarity of man to the judgment seat of God.
“They’ve gone with him, too,” said Hafiz, “tens of thousands of them, so that the streets are deserted and half the shops shut up. Oh, they’ve not done with Ishmael yet — you’ll see they have not! I must find out what he’s doing, though, and come back and tell you what’s going on. Meantime I’ll say nothing about you — about knowing where you are, I mean — nothing to the Consul-General, nothing to my mother, nothing to anybody. Good-bye, old fellow! Leave yourself to me. I’ll see you through.”
When Hafiz went off with a rush of spirits, Gordon, being left alone, sank to a still deeper depression than before. He felt as if he were thrown back again on that desolate shore where the tides of his mind ebbed and flowed under the blank darkness of a starless sky.
The proud atonement whereby he had expected to wipe out his crime had fallen utterly to ashes. It looked like nothing better now than a selfish impulse to escape from a life that had become a burden to him by killing his father’s honour, his mother’s trust, and the last hope of Helena’s happiness.
“No, I cannot deliver myself up. It is impossible,” he thought.
But if death itself was denied to him what was there left to him in life? His career as a soldier was clearly at an end, his father’s house was for ever closed to him, and his days with Helena were over. Without work, without home, without love, what could he do, where could he go?
“Then, what can I do? Where can I go?” he asked himself.
Suddenly he remembered what the General had said in that delirious moment when with bitter taunts he had told him to fly to some foreign country where men would know nothing of his disgrace. Cruel and unjust as that sentence had seemed to him then, it appeared to be all that was left to him now, when work and home and love alike were gone from him.
“Yes, I’ll go away,” he thought, with a choking sob. “I’ll bury myself as far from humanity as possible.”
Yet at the next moment the hand of iron was on his heart again, and he told himself that though he might fly from the sight of man he could not escape from the eye of God, and to he alone with that was more than a guilty man could bear and live.
“But why can’t I go to America?” he asked himself.
It was his mother’s home and a country to which something in his blood had always been calling him. But no!
That refuge also was denied to him, for though he might hide in New York or Boston or Philadelphia or Chicago or San Francisco, better than in the trackless desert itself, yet in the very pulse of life he would still he alone, with a mind that must always he rambling through the ways of the past, seeing nothing in the happiness of other men but cruel visions of what might have come to him also, but for one blind moment of headstrong passion.
“Is life, then, to be utterly closed to me?” he thought.
Was he neither to die for his crime nor live for his repentance? Had God Almighty set His face against both?
He thought of Helena as she would be in England, alone like himself, cut off for the rest of her life from every happiness except the hitter one of her memory of their few short days together, thinking ill of him as she needs must for leaving her in her sore need, while all the time his heart was yearning for love of her, and he would have given his soul to he by her side, but for the barrier of blood which seemed to separate them for ever now.
And then in the bitterness of his remorse and the depths of his abased penitence, thinking the Almighty Himself must he against him, he began to pray — never having prayed since the days when his mother held him at her knee.
“O God, have pity upon me!” he cried, as he sat huddled up on his bed. “I only intended to do what was right, yet I have plunged everybody I love into trouble. What can I do? Where can I go? Let it be anything and anywhere! O Lord, speak to me, lead me, deliver me, tell me what I ought to do, tell me, tell me!”
The green-shaded lamp on the table had gone out by this time, the darkness of the night had gone and a dim gleam of saffron-tinted light from the dawn had begun to filter through the yellow window curtains of the room.
Then suddenly the silence of the little pulseless place was broken by the sound of eager footsteps running over the gravel path of the courtyard and leaping up the stone staircase of the house.
It was Hafiz returning from the cemetery.
IX
THE Mohammedan cemetery of Cairo lies to the northeast of the city, outside the Bab en-Nasr (the Gate of Victory), on the fringe of the desert and down a dusty road that leads to a group of tomb-mosques of the Caliphs, now old and falling into decay.
No more forlorn and desolate spot ever lay under the zealous blue of the sky. Not a tree, not a blade of grass, not a rill of water, not a bird singing in the empty air. Only an arid waste, dotted over by an irregular encampment of the narrow mansions of the dead, the round hummocks of blistered clay, each with its upright stone, its shaded capped with turban or tarboosh. The barren nakedness and savage aridity of the place make it a melancholy spectacle by day, but in the silence of night, under the moon’s quiet eye, or with the darkness flushed by the white light of the stars, the wild desolation of the city of the dead is an awesome sight to see. Such was the spot in which the people of Cairo had concluded to pass their Night of Lamentation — such was their Gethsemane.
When tidings of their intention passed through the town there were rumblings of thunder in the ever-lowering diplomatic atmosphere. The Consul-General heard it and sent for the Commandant of Police.
“This gathering of great numbers of natives outside the walls,” he said, “looks like a ruse for an organised attack on the European inhabitants. Therefore let your plans for their protection be put into operation without delay. As the ostensible object of the demonstration is a funeral, you cannot stop it, but see that a sufficient body of police goes with it and that your entire force is in readiness.”
After that he called up the officer who was now in command of the Army of Occupation, and advised that troops at Kasr el Nil, at the Citadel, and particularly at the barracks of Abbassiah should be strictly confined and kept in readiness for all emergencies.
“If all goes well to-night,” he said, “give your men an airing in the streets in the morning. Let their hands go with them, so that when the turbulent gentlemen who are organising all this hubbub take their walks abroad they may meet one of your companies coming along. If they turn aside to avoid it let them meet another and another. — And wait!” said the old man, while his brow contracted and his lip stiffened. “The man Ishmael Ameer has escaped us thus far. He has been lying low and allowing others to get into trouble. But he seems to he putting his head into the noose this time. Follow him, watch him; don’t be afraid.”
The bodies of the students who were to be buried that night had been lying in the mosque of the Sultan Hasan at the foot of the Citadel, and as soon as word came that the Imams had recited the prayer for the dead, asking, “Give your testimony respecting them — were they faithful?” and being answered, “Aye, faithful unto death,” the cortège started.
First a group of blind men at slow pace chanting the first Surah of the Koran; then the biers, a melancholy line of them, covered with red and green cloths and borne head foremost; then schoolboys singing, in shrill voices, passages from a poem describing the last judgment; then companies of Fikees, reciting the profession of faith; then the female relatives of the dead, shrouded black forms with dishevelled hair, sitting in carriages or squatting on carts, wailing in their woe, and finally, Ishmael Ameer himself and his vast and various following.
Never had any one seen so great a concourse, not even on the day when the sacred carpet came from Mecca. There were men and women, rich and poor, great and small, religious fraternities with half-furled banners and dervishes with wrapped-up flags, Sheikhs in robes and beggars in rags. Boys carried lamps, women carried candles, and young men carried torches and open flares which sent coils of smoke into the windless air.
Their way lay down the broad boulevard of Mohammed Ali, across the wide square of the Bab-el-Khalk, past the Governorat and the Police Headquarters. As they walked at slow pace they chanted the Surah which says: “O Allah! There is no strength nor power but in God! To God we belong and to him we must return!” The shops were shut, and the muezzin called from the minarets as the procession went by the mosques.
Thus like a long sinuous stream, sometimes flowing deep and still, sometimes rumbling in low tones, sometimes breaking into sharp sounds, they passed through the narrow streets of the city and out by the Bab en-Nasr to the Mohammedan cemetery beyond the walls.
As Hafiz approached this place the deep multitudinous hum of many tongues that came up from it was like the loud sighing of the wind. Calm as the night was it was the same as if a storm had broken over that spot, while the desert around lay sleeping under the unclouded moon. Through a thick haze that floated over the ground there were bubbles and flashes of light, the red and white flames of the lamps and torches spurting and steaming like electrical apparitions from a cauldron.
