Complete works of hall c.., p.482
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 482
“Nuneham, the prisoner is your son.”
“All the more reason why I should treat him as I should treat anybody else.”
“Your only son.”
“Humph!”
“If anything happens to him — if he dies before you — your family will come to an end when you are gone.”
The old man trembled. The Sirdar was cutting him in the tenderest place — ploughing deep into his lifelong secret.
“Your name will be wiped out. You will have wiped it out, Nuneham.”
The old man was shaking like a rock which vibrates in an earthquake. To steady his nerves he took a pen and held it firmly in the fingers of both hands.
“If you tell the Commandant to hand him over to the military authorities, it will be the same in the court of your conscience as if you had done it. You will have cut off your own line.”
The old man fought hard with himself. It was a fearful struggle.
“More than that, it will he the same — it will be the same when you come to think of it — as if with that pen in your hands you had signed your own son’s death-warrant.”
The pen dropped, as if it had been red hot, from the old man’s trembling fingers. Still he struggled.
“If my son is a guilty man, let the law deal with him as it would deal with any other,” he said, but his voice shook — it could scarcely sustain itself.
The Sirdar saw that deep under the frozen surface, the heart of the old man was breaking up; he knew that the shot that killed Gordon would kill the Consul-General also, and he felt that he was now pleading for the life of the father as well as of the son.
“It’s not as if the boy were a prodigal, a wastrel,” he said. “He is a gentleman, every inch of him, and if he has gone wrong, if he has acted improperly, it has only been from the highest impulses. He has sincerity and he has courage, and they are the noblest virtues of the soul.”
The old man’s head was down, but he was conscious that the Cadi’s cruel eyes were upon him.
“He’s a soldier, too. In some respects the finest young soldier in the army, whoever the next may be. He saw his first fighting with me, I remember. It was at Omdurman. He had taken the Khalifa’s flag. The dervish who carried it had treacherously stabbed his comrade, and when he came up with fire and tears in his eyes together, he said, ‘I killed him like a dog, sir.’
‘My God,’ I said to myself, ‘here is a soldier born.’”
The old man was silent, but he was still conscious that the Cadi’s cruel eyes were upon him, watching him, interrogating him, saying, “What will you do now, I wonder?”
“God has never given me a son,” continued the Sirdar, “but from that day to this I have always felt as if that boy belonged also to myself.”
The old man was breaking up rapidly, but still he would not yield.
“His mother loved him, too. Perhaps he was the only human thing that came between her and her God. She is dead, and they say the dead see all. Who knows, Nuneham? — she may be waiting now to find out what you are going to do.”
The strain was terrible. The two old friends, one visibly moved and making no effort to conceal his emotion, the other fighting hard with the dark spirits of pride and wrath.
The Sirdar’s mind went back to the days when they were young men themselves, at Sandhurst together, and approaching the Consul-General he put one hand on his shoulder and said:
“Nuneham — John Nuneham — John — Jack — give the boy another chance. Let him go.”
Then with a cry of agony and with an oath, never heard from his lips before, the Consul-General rose from his seat and said:
“No, no, no! You come here asking me to put my honour into the hands of my enemies — to leave myself at the mercy of any scoundrel who cares to say that the measure I mete out to others is not that which I keep for my own. You come, too, excusing my son’s offences against military law, but saying nothing of the other crimes in which you have this very night caught him red-handed.”
After that he smote the desk with his clenched fist and cried:
“No, no, I tell you no! My son is a traitor. He has joined himself to his father’s and his country’s enemies in order to destroy him and to destroy England in Egypt, and if the punishment of a traitor is death, then death it must be to him as to any other, that the same justice may be dealt out to all.”
Then to the Commandant, who was still standing by the door, he said:
“Go, sir! Let your prisoner be handed over to the military authorities without one moment’s further delay.”
It was like the moment of the breaking of an avalanche, and after it there came the same awful stillness. No one spoke. The Commandant bowed and left the room.
The Consul-General returned to his seat at the desk, and, digging his elbows into the blotting-pad, rested his head on his hands. The Sirdar stood sideways with one arm on the chimney-piece. The Cadi sat in his smug silence with his claw-like hands still clasped in front of his breast.
They heard the Commandant’s heavy step and the click of his spurs as he walked across the marble floor of the hall.
They heard the front door close with a hang. Still no one spoke and the silence seemed to be everlasting.
Then they heard the outer hell ringing loudly. They heard the front door opened and then closed again, as if after admitting somebody. At the next moment Ibrahim, looking as if he had just seen a ghost, had come, with his slippered feet, into the library, and was stammering:
“If you please, your Excellency — if you please, your Ex—”
“Speak out, you fool — who is it?” said the Consul-General.
“It is — it is Miss — Miss Helena, your Excellency.”
The Consul-General’s face contracted for an instant, as if he were trying to recover the plain sense of where he was and what was going on. Then he rose and went out of the room, Ibrahim following him.
The Sirdar and the Grand Cadi were left together. They did not speak or exchange a sign. The Sirdar felt that the Cadi’s presence had contributed to the late painful scene — that it had been a silent, subtle devilish influence against Gordon — and he was conscious of an almost unconquerable desire to take the man by the throat and wring his neck as he would wring the neck of a bird of prey.
Quarter of an hour passed. Half an hour. Still the two men did not speak. And the Consul-General did not return.
VIII
MEANTIME Helena, in another room, still wearing her mixed Eastern and Western dress, was sitting by a table in an attitude of supplication, with her arms outstretched and her hands clasped across a corner of it, speaking earnestly and rapidly to the Consul-General, who was standing with head down in front of her.
Pale, in spite of the heat of the South and the sun of the desert, very nervous, flurried, and a little ashamed, yet with a sense of urgent necessity, she was telling him all that had happened since she left Cairo — how she had gone to Khartoum under an impulse of revenge that was inspired by a mistaken idea of the cause of her father’s death; how, being there, she had been compelled to accept the position of Ishmael’s nominal wife or go back with her errand unfulfilled; how she had come to know of the base proposals of certain of the Ulema; and how, at length, when Ishmael had succumbed to the last of them, she had written and despatched her letter saying he was coming into Cairo in disguise.
Then in her soft voice, with its deep note, she told of Gordon’s arrival in Khartoum, of his own tragic mistake and awful sufferings, of his confession to her, of her confession to him, and of how she realised her error, but found herself powerless to overtake or undo it.
Finally she told the Consul-General of Gordon’s determination to take Ishmael’s place, being impelled to do so by the firmest conviction that his father was being deceived by some one in Cairo, by the certainty that Ishmael could not otherwise be moved from his fanatical purpose, and that while the consequences of his own arrest must be merely personal to himself, the result of Ishmael’s death at the hands of the authorities might he a holy war, which would put Egypt in the right and England in the wrong and cover his father’s honoured name with infamy.
The old man listened eagerly, standing as long as he could on the same spot, then walking to and from with nervous and irregular steps, but stopping at intervals as if breathless from an overpowering sense of the presence of the hand of fate.
Having finished her story, Helena produced Gordon’s letters from the little handbag which hung from one of her arms, and having kissed them, as if the Consul-General had not been present, she began with panting affection to read passages from them in proof of what she had said.
Being a woman, she knew by instinct what to read first, and one by one came the passionate words which told of Gordon’s affection for the father whom he felt hound to resist.
“My father,” she read, “is a great man who probably does not need and would certainly resent my compassion, but Lord God, how I pity him! Deceived by false friends, alone in his old age, after all he has done for Egypt!”
The old man stopped her and said:
“But how did he know that — that I was being deceived? What right had he to say so?”
“Listen,” said Helena, and she read Gordon’s account of his visit to the Grand Cadi, when the “oily scoundrel” had called his father “the slave of power,”
“the evil-doer,”
“the adventurer,” and “the great assassin.”
“Then why didn’t he come like a man and tell me himself?” asked the Consul-General.
“Listen again, sir,” said Helena, and she read what Gordon had said of his impulse to go to his father, in order to disclose the Grand Cadi’s duplicity, and then of the reasons restraining him, being sure that his father was aiming at a coup and that acting from a high sense of duty the Consul-General would hand him over to the military authorities before the work he had come to do had been done.
“But didn’t he see what he was doing himself — aiding and abetting a conspiracy?”
“Listen once more, please,” said Helena, and she read what Gordon had said of Ishmael’s pilgrimage — that while his father thought the Prophet was bringing up an armed force, he was merely leading a vast multitude of religious visionaries, who were expecting to establish in Cairo a millennium of universal faith and empire.
“But, even so, was it necessary to do what he did?” demanded the Consul-General.
“Listen for the last time, sir,” said Helena, and then in her soft, earnest, pleading voice, she read:
“It is necessary to prevent the massacre which I know (and my father does not) would inevitably ensue; necessary to save my father himself from the execration of the civilised world; necessary to save Ishmael from the tragic consequences of his determined fanaticism; necessary to save England—”
“Give them to me,” said the Consul-General, taking — almost snatching — the letters out of Helena’s hands in the fierce nervous tension which left him no time to think of courtesies.
Then drawing a chair up to the table, and fixing his eyeglasses over his spectacles, he turned the pages one by One and read passages here and there. Helena watched him while he did so, and in the changing expression of the hitherto hard, immobile, implacable face, she saw the effect that was being produced.
“I cannot say how hard it is to me to be engaged in a secret means to frustrate my father’s plans — it is like fighting one’s own flesh and blood and is not fair warfare...
“Neither can I say what a struggle it has been to me as an English soldier to make up my mind to intercept an order of the British Army — it is like playing traitor and I can scarcely bear to think of it...
“But all the same I know it is necessary. I also know God knows it is necessary, and when I think of that my heart beats wildly...
“I am willing to give my life for England, whatever name she may know me by... and I am willing to die for these poor Egyptians, because...
“This may be the last letter I shall write to you...
“May the great God of Heaven bless and protect you..
The Consul-General was overwhelmed. The Grand Cadi’s duplicity stifled him, Ishmael’s innocence of conspiracy humiliated him, but his son’s heroism crushed him and made him feel like a little man.
Yet he had just now denounced his son as a traitor, handed him over to the military authorities, and, in effect, condemned him to death!
As the old man read Gordon’s letters his iron face seemed to decompose. Helena could not bear to look at him any longer, and she had to turn her own face away. At length she became conscious that he had ceased to read, and that his great, sad, humid eyes were looking at her.
“So you came here to plead with me for the life of my boy?” he said, and, as well as she could for the tears that were choking her she answered:
“Yes.”
He hesitated for a moment, as if trying to summon courage to tell her something, and then, in a voice that was quite unlike his own, he said:
“Permit to take these letters away for a few minutes.” And rising unsteadily he left the room.
IX
WHEN the Consul-General returned to the library he looked like a feeble old man of ninety. It was just as if twenty years of his life had been struck out of him in half an hour. The Sirdar stepped up to him in alarm, saying:
“What has happened?”
“Read these,” he answered, handing to the Sirdar the letters he carried in his hand.
The Sirdar took the letters aside, and standing by the chimney-piece he looked at them. While he did so his face, which had hitherto been grave and pale, became bright and ruddy, and he uttered little sharp cries of joy.
“I knew it!” he said. “Although I was at a loss to read the riddle of Gordon’s presence at Ghezirah I knew there must be some explanation. If he had acted with a sense of conscience in the one case he must have done so in the other.... Thank God! Splendid! Bravo!... Of course, you will stop the Commandant?”
The Consul-General, who had returned to his seat at the desk, did not reply, and the Sirdar, thinking to anticipate his objection, said eagerly:
“Why not? The Commandant will act as for himself and nobody will know that you have been consulted.... That is to say,” he added, with another oblique glance in the direction of the Grand Cadi, “nobody outside this room, and if anybody here should ever whisper a word about it I’ll — I’ll — well, never mind; nobody will, nobody dare.”
Then in the fever of his impatience the Sirdar proposed to call up the Commandant of Police on the telephone and tell him to consider his order cancelled.
“Don’t stir,” he said. “I’ll do it. Your Secretary will show me the box.”
When, with a light step and a hopeful face, the Sirdar had gone out of the room on this errand the Cadi began for the first time to show signs of life. He coughed, cleared his throat, and made other noises indicative of a desire to speak, but the Consul-General, still sitting at the desk with the look of a shattered man, seemed to be unconscious of his presence. At length he said, in that hushed voice of one who was habitually afraid of being overheard:
“I regret — sincerely regret — that I have been again compelled to approach your Excellency’s honourable person — especially at a time like this — but a certain danger — personal danger — made me think that perhaps your Excellency would deign—”
Before he could say any more the Sirdar had returned to the library with a long face and a slow step.
“Too late!” he said. “I called up the Commandant at his office and they said he had gone to the Citadel. Then I called him up there, thinking I might still be in time. But no, the thing was over. Gordon was under arrest.”
After that there was silence for some moments while the Sirdar looked again at the letters which he was still holding in his hands. At one moment he raised his eyes, and turning to the Consul-General he said:
“You’ll not call down the troops from Abbassiah?”
“No.”
“And you’ll allow this man Ishmael and his visionary followers to come into Cairo if they’ve a mind to?”
The Consul-General bent his head.
“Good!” said the Sirdar. “At all events, that will shut the mouths of the fine birds who must be getting ready to crow.”
But a look of alarm came into the Grand Cadi’s eyes, such as comes into the eyes of a hawk when an eagle is about to pounce upon it.
“Surely,” he said, “his Excellency does not intend to allow this horde of fifty thousand fanatics to pour themselves into the Capital?”
Whereupon the Sirdar turned sharply upon the man and answered:
“That is exactly what his Excellency does intend to do.”
“But what is to become of me?” asked the Cadi. “This is exactly the errand I came upon. Already the people are threatening me, and I came to ask for protection. I am suspected of giving information to his Excellency. Will his Excellency desert me — leave me to the mercy of this man Ishmael, this corrupter and destroyer of the faith?”
Then the Consul-General, who had sat with head down, the picture of despair, rose to his full height and faced the Grand Cadi.
“Listen,” he said, with a flash of his old fire. “I give your Eminence twenty-four hours to leave Egypt. If the people do not dispose of you after that time, as sure as there is a British Minister in Constantinople, I will.”
The look of alarm in the Cadi’s cunning face was smitten into an expression of terror. Not a word more did he say. One glance he gave at the letters in the Sirdar’s hands, and then rising, with a low bow and touching his breast and forehead, he turned to leave the room. Meantime the Sirdar had rung the bell for Ibrahim, and then stepping to the door he had opened it. The ample folds of the Cadi’s sleeves swelled as he walked and he passed out like a human bat.
Being alone with the Sirdar the Consul-General’s mind went back to Helena.
“Poor child!” he said. “I hadn’t the heart to tell her what I had done. Go to her, Keg. She’s in the drawingroom. Give her back her letters and tell her what has happened. Then take her to the Princess Nazimah. Poor girl! Poor Gordon!”
