Complete works of hall c.., p.459
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 459
When she put it so the furnace of her conscience seemed to consume her, and in order to live with herself she had to oppose that thought with thoughts of Gordon — Gordon gone, she knew not where, an exile, an outcast, his brilliant young life wasted, never to be seen again.
This relieved the riot in her brain, and to ease her heart still further she made herself believe that what she had done had not been to revenge herself, but to avenge Gordon, whom Ishmael’s evil influence had destroyed.
“Serves him right,” she thought. “Let him go to Damietta! What better does he deserve?”
At that moment Ayesha, Ishmael’s little daughter, came running with bare feet into the house, and seeing Helena she leaped into her arms and kissed her. The kiss of the child seemed like a blow — it made her dizzy.
At the next moment, while Ayesha was mumbling affectionate play-words which Helena did not hear, and Zenoba, the Arab nurse, stood beating her impatient foot upon the floor, there came from outside the murmur of a crowd. It was the crowd of Ishmael’s followers bringing him home from the mosque.
They were calling upon God and His Prophet to bless him, touching his white caftan as if it were divine and “virtue were coming out of him.
He dismissed them with words of rebuke — gentler and more indulgent than before, perhaps — and entering the house he called for food.
A few minutes afterward Ishmael and Helena and old Mahmud were sitting in the guest-room together, drinking new milk and eating soft bread.
“But where is your boy, O Rani?” asked Ishmael, who missed the great fan of ostrich feathers.
Helena made a halting excuse. Mosie had been troublesome — she had sent him back to where he came from — Cairo.
“Cairo?” asked the Arab woman, with a glance of suspicion.
Helena looked confused, but Ishmael saw nothing. He was more than usually excited, enthusiastic, and full of great hopes. After a while he talked of the Bedouin who was coming.
“Our brother is not, in fact, a Bedouin,” he said.
“Not a Bedouin?”
“Neither is he a Moslem. He is a Christian, and indeed an Englishman.”
“An Englishman?”
“Ah, yes; but he is one who loves the Moslems and has gone through shame and degradation rather than do them a wrong.”
Helena was afraid to ask further questions. She could only listen, terrified by a vague apprehension.
“Truly, O lady, he who loveth all the children of God, him God loveth,” said Ishmael. “This brave man was a soldier, and if he has suffered rather than do an evil act, will God forget him? No!”
Helena shuddered. - The idea that was taking shape in her mind seemed incredible. Ishmael was speaking in the softest tones, yet his voice seemed like the subterranean sounds that precede great shocks of earthquake.
“He is coming. Be good to him, my Rani. If we could take his heart out and weigh it we should find it gold.” Helena was struck with a sort of stupor. “Am I dreaming?” she asked herself. “What am I thinking about?” It was one of those mysterious moments on the eve of the great events of life when murmurs come from we know not where.
The long hours of that day passed in a sort of dark confusion. At last the sun set, and the moon rose over the desert, the golden southern moon, in the purple of the Eastern sky, and lit up the wilderness of sand as with a softer sun.
It grew late and Helena rose to go to her room. As she did so she almost fell from dizziness, and Ishmael helped her to the door of the women’s quarters. She had seen his lustrous eyes upon her with the expression that had made her tremble on the night of the betrothal; but again, in the same scarcely audible voice, he said: —
“God give you a good morning!” and putting, for the first time, his lips to her hand, he went away.
When she was alone a long hour passed in silence. The bedroom was in a state of perfect calm, yet a frightful tumult was going on in her brain. Could it he possible that he who was coming was —
No! The wild irony of that thought was too terrible. That at the very moment when she thought she was avenging Gordon for the injury he had suffered at the hands of Ishmael — that at that moment, by some sinister eccentricity of destiny, he — he himself —
In the midst of her hideous pain a sweet and joyous sound fell upon her ear. It was the voice of the child, who had awakened for a moment from her peaceful sleep:
“Will you not come into bed, Rani?”
“Yes, yes, dear, presently,” she answered, and at the next moment the child’s equal and tranquil breathing, so gentle, so calm, fell on her ear again.
Innocence is the most formidable of all spectacles that can confront an uneasy conscience, and when at length Helena got into bed, and the child, in the blind mists of sleep, put her arms about her neck, she had to justify herself by thinking that in everything she had done, everything she had tried to do, she had been moved by the incidents of the most irresistible provocation.
“After all, he hilled my father!” she thought.
But nevertheless she felt again, as she was dropping off to sleep, that she was falling, falling, falling over the edge of a yawning precipice.
XI
WHEN Helena awoke next morning she was immediately conscious of a great commotion both within and without the house. After a moment Zenoba came into the bedroom and began to tell her what had happened.
“Have you not heard, O Rani?” said the Arab woman in her oily voice. “No? You sleep so late, do you? When everybody is up and doing, too! Well, the Master has news that the great Bedouin is at Omdurman, and he is sending the people down to the river to bring him up. The stranger is to be received in the mosque, I may tell you. Yes, indeed, in the mosque, although he is English and a Christian.”
Then Ayesha came skipping into the room in wild excitement.
“Rani! Rani!” she cried. “Get up and come with us. We are going now — this minute — everybody!”
Helena excused herself — she felt unwell and would stay in bed that day; so the child and the nurse went off without her.
Yet left alone she could not rest. The feverish uncertainty of the night before returned with redoubled force, and after a while she felt compelled to rise.
Going into the guest-room she found the house empty and the camp in front of it deserted. She was standing by the door, hardly knowing what to do, when the strange sound which she had heard on the night of the betrothal came from a distance:
“Lu-lu-lu-u-u!”
It was the zaghareet, the women’s cry of joy, and it was mingled with the louder shouts of men. The stranger was coming, the people were bringing him on. Who would he be? Helena’s anxiety was almost more than her brain and nerves could bear. She strained her eyes in the direction of the jetty, past the Abbas Barracks and the Mongers Fort.
The moments passed like hours, but at length the crowd appeared. At first sight it looked like a forest of small trees approaching. The forest seemed to sway and to send out monotonous sounds, as if moved by a moaning wind. But looking again, Helena saw what was happening — the people were carrying green palm branches and strewing them on the yellow sand in front of the great stranger.
He was riding on a white camel, Ishmael’s camel, and Ishmael was riding beside him. Long before he came near to her Helena saw him, straining her sight to do so. He was wearing the ample robes of a Bedouin and his face was almost hidden by the sweeping shawl (the kufiah) which covered his head and neck.
But it was he! It was Gordon! Helena could not mistake him. One glance was enough. Without looking a second time she ran back to her bedroom and covered her eyes and ears.
For a time the voices of the people followed her through the deadening walls.
“Lu-lu-u-u!” cried the women.
“La ilaha illa-llah! La ilaha illa-llah!” shouted the men.
But after a while the muffled sounds died away, and Helena knew that the great company had passed on to the mosque. It was like a dream, a mirage of the mind. It had come, and it was gone, and in the dazed condition of her senses she could almost persuade herself that she had imagined everything.
Her impatience would not permit her to remain in the house. She, too, must go to the mosque, although she had never been there before. So, putting on her Indian veil, she set out hurriedly. When she came to herself again she was in the gallery, people were making way for her, and she was dropping into a place. Then she realised that she was sitting between Zenoba and little Ayesha.
The mosque was a large, four-square edifice, full of columns and arches, and with a kind of inner court that was open to the sky and had minarets at every corner. The gallery looked down on this court, and Helena saw below her, half in shadow, half in sunshine, the heads of a great concourse of men in turbans, tarbooshes, and brown felt skullcaps, all kneeling in rows on bright red carpets. In the front row, with his face toward the Kibleh (the niche toward Mecca), Ishmael knelt in his white caftan, and by his side, with all eyes upon him, as if every interest centred on that spot, knelt the stranger in Bedouin dress.
It was Friday and prayers were proceeding, now surging like the sea, now silent like the desert, sometimes started, as it seemed, by the voice of the unseen muezzin on the minarets above, then echoed by the men on the carpets below, but Helena hardly heard them. Of one thing only was she conscious — that by the tragic play of destiny he was there while she was here.
After a while she became aware that Ishmael had risen and was beginning to speak, and she tried to regain composure enough to listen to what he said.
“My brothers,” he said, “it is according to the precepts of the Prophet — peace to his name! — to receive the Christian in our temples if he comes with the good-will of good Moslems and with a heart that is true to them. You know, oh, my brothers, whether I am a Moslem or not, and I pray to the Most Merciful to bless all such Christians as the one who is here to-day.”
More of the same kind Ishmael said, but Helena found it hard, in the tumult of her brain, to follow him. She saw that both the women about her and the men below were seized with that religious fervour which comes to the human soul when it feels that something grand is being done. It was as though the memory of a thousand years of hatred between Moslem and Christian, with all its legacy of cruelty and barbarity, had been wiped out of their hearts by the stranger on whom their eyes were fixed — as though by some great act of self-sacrifice and brotherhood he had united East and West — and this fact of his presence at their prayers was the sign and symbol of an eternal truce.
The sublime spectacle seemed to capture all their souls, and when Ishmael turned toward the stranger at last and laid his hand on his head and said, “May God and His prophet bless you for what you have done for us and ours,” the emotions of the people were raised to the highest pitch, and they rose to their feet as one man, and holding up their hands they cried, the whole congregation together, in a voice that was like the breaking of a great wave:
“You are now one of us, and we are of you, and we are brothers!”
By this time the women in the gallery were weeping audibly, and Helena, from quite other causes, was scarcely able to control her feelings. “Why did I come here?” she asked herself, and then, seeing that the Arab woman was watching her through the slits of her jealous eyes, she got up and pushed her way out of the mosque.
Back in her room, lying face down upon the bed, she sought in vain to collect her faculties sufficiently to follow and comprehend the course of events. Yes, it was Gordon. He had come to join Ishmael. Why had she never thought of that as a probable sequel to what had occurred in Cairo? Had he not been turned out by his own? — in effect, cashiered from the Army? Forbidden his father’s house? And had she not herself driven him away from her? What sequel was more natural? More plainly inevitable?
Then she grew hot and cold at a new and still more terrifying thought — Gordon would come there! How could she meet him? How look into his face? A momentary impulse to deny her own identity was put aside immediately. Impossible! Useless! Then how could she account to Gordon for her presence in that house? Ishmael’s wife! According to Mohammedan law and custom not only betrothed but married to him!
When she put her position to herself so, the thread of her thoughts seemed to snap in her brain. She could not disentangle the knot of them. A sense of infidelity to Gordon, to the very spirit of love itself, brought her for a moment the self-reproach and the despair of a woman who has sinned.
In the midst of her pain she heard the light voices of people returning to the house, and at the next moment Ayesha and Zenoba came into her room. The child was skipping about, full of high spirits, and the Arab woman was almost bitterly merry.
“Rani will be happy to hear that the Master is bringing the stranger home,” said Zenoba.
Helena turned and gazed at the woman with a stupefied expression. What she had foreseen as a terrifying possibility was about to come to pass! She opened her mouth as if to speak, but said nothing.
Meantime the Arab woman, in a significant tone that was meant to cut to the quick, went on to say that this was the highest honour the Moslem could show the unbeliever, as well as the greatest trust he could repose in him.
“Have you never heard of that in your country, O Rani? No? It is true, though. Quite true!”
People supposed that every Moslem guarded his house so jealously that no strange man might look upon his wife, but among the Arabs of the desert, when a traveller, tired and weary, sought food and rest, the Sheikh would sometimes send him into his harem and leave him there for three days, with full permission to do as he thought well.
“But he must never wrong that harem, O lady! If he does the Arab husband will kill him! Yes, and the faithless wife as well!”
So violent was the conflict going on within her that Helena hardly heard the woman’s words, though the jealous spirit behind them was piercing her heart like needles. She became conscious of the great crowd returning, and it was making the same ululation as before, mingled with the same shouts. At the next moment there came a knock at the bedroom door, and Abdullah’s voice, crying:
“Lady! Lady!”
Helena reeled a little in rising to reply, and it was with difficulty that she reached the door.
“Master has brought Sheikh Omar Benani back and is calling for the lady. What shall I say?”
Helena fumbled the hem of her handkerchief in her fingers as she was wont to do in moments of great agitation. She was asking herself what would happen if she obeyed Ishmael’s summons. Would Gordon see through her motive in being there? If so, would he betray her to Ishmael?
Already she could hear a confused murmur in the guestroom, and out of that murmur her memory seemed to grasp back, as from a vanishing dream, the sound of a voice that had been lost to her.
She felt as if she were suffocating. Her breathing was coming rapidly from the depth of her throat. Yet the Arab woman was watching her, and while a whirlwind was going on within she had to preserve a complete tranquillity without.
“Say I am coming,” she said.
The supreme moment had arrived. With a great effort she gathered up all her strength, drew her Indian shawl over her head in such a way that it partly concealed her face, and then, pallid, trembling, and with downcast eyes, she walked out of the room.
XII
GORDON had that day experienced emotions only less poignant than those of Helena. In the early morning, after parting with Osman, the devoted comrade of his desert journey, he had encountered the British Sub-Governor of Omdurman, a young captain of cavalry who had once served under himself, and now spoke to him, in his assumed character as a Bedouin, with a certain air of command.
This brought him some twinges of wounded pride, which were complicated by qualms of conscience, as he rode through the streets, past the silversmiths’ shops, where grave-looking Arabs sold bracelets and necklets; past the weaving quarter, where men and hoys were industriously driving the shuttle through the strings of their flimsy looms; past the potter’s bazaar and the grain market, all so sweet and so free from their former smell of sun-dried filth and warm humanity packed close together.
“Am I coming here to oppose the power that in so few years has turned order into chaos?” he asked himself; but more personal emotions came later.
They came in full flood when the ferry steamer by which he crossed the river approached the bank on the other side, and he saw standing there, near to the spot on which the dervishes landed on the black night of the fall of Khartoum, a vast crowd of their sons and their sons’ sons who were waiting to receive him.
Again came qualms of conscience, when out of this crowd stepped Ishmael Ameer, who kissed him on both cheeks and led him forward to his own camel amid the people’s shouts of welcome. Was he, as a British soldier, throwing in his lot with the enemies of his country? As an Englishman and a Christian, was he siding with the adversaries of religion and civilisation?
The journey through the town to the mosque, with the lu-luing and the throwing of palm branches before his camel’s feet, was less of a triumphant progress than an abject penance. He could hardly hold up his head. The sight of the bronze and black faces about him, shouting for him — for him of another race and creed — making that act his glory which had led to his crime — this was almost more than he could bear.
But when he reached the mosque; when he found himself, unbeliever though he was, kneeling in front of the Kibleh; when Ishmael laid his hand on his head and called on God to bless him, and the people cried with one voice, “You are one of us and we are brothers,” the sense of human sympathy swept down every other emotion and he felt as if at any moment he might burst into tears.
