Complete works of hall c.., p.481
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 481
Then as a just man, if a stem 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 leaped 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? Nevermind! She would share them with one who was flesh of Gordon’s flesh, for his heart must he 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 leaped 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 Boulaq Dacrour 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 somnambulant moan that comes up 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 heartbroken 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 harking of dogs.
There was no moon, but the stars were thick and one was falling.
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 of, 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 screw, 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 burned 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 stem 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 toward 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 despatched, the “fanatic-hypocrite” had probably discovered that his intrigue had become known in Cairo. That 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 onto 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 afterward 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 murderer who had killed them, 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 in 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.”
VII
BESIDES the Grand Cadi with his pockmarked checks 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, 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 subject.”
“Does it concern my son?” asked the Consul-General sharply.
“I do not say it concerns your soc,” 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 bitternesss:
“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 go to 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 Ihrahim, 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 and 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, but his clawlike hands clasped before his breast, and then, as if taking a last chance, he said:
