The White Prophet, Volume II (of 2)

CHAPTER XV

Helena was with Gordon the following morning when one of the guard came in hurriedly and announced, amid gusts of breath, that the Consul-General was coming upstairs.

Not without a certain nervousness Gordon rose to receive his father, but he met him at the door with both hands outstretched. The old man took one of them quietly, with the air of a person who was struggling hard to hold himself in check. He took Helena's hand also, and when she would have left the room he prevented her.

"No, no," he said; "sit down, my child – resume your seat."

It seemed to Gordon that his father looked whiter and feebler, yet even firmer of will than ever, like a lion that had been shot and was dying hard. His lips were compressed as he took the chair which Gordon offered him, and when he spoke his voice was hard and a little bitter.

"First, let me give you good news," he said.

"Is it the Pardon?" asked Gordon.

"No, something else – perhaps, in a sense, something better," said the old man.

He had received an unofficial message from the War Office to say that the King, taking no half measures, intended to promote Gordon to the rank of Major-General, and appoint him to the command of the British Forces in Egypt.

Helena could hardly contain her joy at this fresh proof of good fortune, but Gordon made no demonstration. He watched the pained expression in the old man's face, and felt sure that something else was coming.

"It's a remarkable, perhaps unparalleled instance of clemency," continued the Consul-General, "and under the circumstances it may be said to open up as momentous a mission as was ever confided to a military commander."

"And you, father?" asked Gordon, not without an effort.

The old man laughed. A flush overspread his pale face for a moment. Then he said —

"I? Oh, I … I am dismissed."

"Dismissed?"

Gordon had gasped. Helena's lips had parted.

"That's what it comes to – stated in plain words and without diplomatic flourishes. True, I had sent in my resignation, but … the long and the short of it is that after a debate on the Address, and the carrying of an amendment, Downing Street has agreed that the time has come to associate the people of Egypt with the government of the country."

"Well, sir?"

"Well, as that is a policy against which I have always set my face, a policy I have considered premature, perhaps suicidal, the Secretary of State has cabled that, being unable to ask me to carry into effect a change that is repugnant to my principles, he is reluctantly compelled to accept my resignation."

Gordon could not speak, but again the old man tried to laugh.

"Of course the pill is gilded," he continued, clasping his blue-veined hands in front of his breast. "The Foreign Secretary told Parliament that my resignation (on the ground of age and ill health, naturally) was the heaviest blow that had fallen on English public life within living memory. He also said that while other methods might be necessary for the future, none could have been so good as mine in the past. And then the King – "

"Yes, father?"

A hard, half-ironical smile passed over the old man's face.

"The King has been graciously pleased to grant me an Earldom, and even to make me a Knight of the Garter."

There was a moment's painful silence, and then the Consul-General said —

"So I go home immediately."

"Immediately?"

"By to-night's train to take the P. & O. to-morrow,"' said the old man, bowing over his clasped hands.

"To-morrow?"

"Why not? My Secretaries can do without me. Why should I linger on a stage on which I am no longer a leading actor but only a supernumerary? Better make my exit with what grace I can."

Under the semi-cynical tone Gordon could see his father's emotion. He found it impossible to utter a word.

"But I thought I would come up before going away and bring you the good news myself, though it is almost like a father who is deposed congratulating the son who is to take his place."

"Don't say that, sir," said Gordon.

"Why shouldn't I? And why should I gird at my fortune? It's strange, nevertheless, how history repeats itself. I came to Egypt to wipe out the misrule of Ismail Pasha, and now, like Ismail, I leave my son behind me."

There was a moment of strained silence and then —

"I have often wondered what took place at that secret meeting between Ismail and Tewfik, when we made the son Khedive and sent the father back to Constantinople. Now I think I know."

The old man's emotion was cutting deep. Gordon could scarcely bear to look at him.

"I wish you well, Gordon, and only hope these people may be more grateful to you than they have been to me. God grant it!"

Gordon could not speak.

"I confess I have no faith in the proposed change. I think all such concessions are so many sops to sedition. I also think that to have raised the masses of a subject race from abject misery to well-being, and then to allow them to fall back to their former condition, as they surely will, and to become the victims of the worst elements among themselves, is not only foolish but utterly wrong and wicked."

The old man rose, and in the intensity of his feelings, began to pace to and fro.

"They talk about the despotism of the One-Man rule," he said. "What about the despotism of their Parliaments, their Congresses, their Reichstags – the worst despotisms in the world. Fools! Why can't they see that the difference between the democracy of Europe and America, and the government proper to the ancient, slavish, and slow-moving civilisation of the East is fundamental?"

The old man's lips stiffened and then he said —

"But perhaps I am only an antiquated person, behind the new age and the new ideas. If so, I'm satisfied. I belong to the number of those who have always thought it the duty of great nations to carry the light of civilisation into dark continents, and I am not sorry to be left behind by the cranks who would legislate for all men alike. Pshaw! You might as well tailorise for all men alike, and put clothes of the same pattern on all mankind."

Again the old man laughed.

"It's part and parcel of the preposterous American doctrine that all men are born free and equal – the doctrine that made the United States enfranchise as well as emancipate their blacks. May the results be no worse in this case!"

There was another moment of strained silence and then the Consul-General said —

"I suppose they'll say the man Ishmael has beaten me."

He made a contemptuous but almost inaudible laugh, and then added, "Let them – they're welcome; time will tell. Anyhow I do not lament. When a man is old his useless life must burn itself out. That's only natural. And after all, I've seen too much of power to regret the loss of it."

Still Gordon could not speak. He was feeling how great his father was in his downfall, how brave, how proud, how splendid.

The old man walked to the window and looked out. with fixed eyes. After a moment he turned back and said —

"All the same, Gordon, I am glad of what has happened for your sake – sincerely glad. You've not always been with me, but you've won, and I do not grudge you your victory. Indeed," he added, and here his voice trembled perceptibly, "I am a little proud of it. Yes, proud! An old man cannot be indifferent to the fact that his son has won the hearts of twelve millions of people, even though – even though he himself may have lost them."

Gordon's throat was hurting him and Helena's eyes were full of tears. The old man, too, was struggling to control his voice.

"You thought Nunehamism wasn't synonymous with patriotism. Perhaps you were right. You believed yourself to be the better Englishman of the two. I don't say you were not. And it may be that in her present mind England will think that one secret withheld from me has been revealed to you – namely, that an alien race can only be ruled by … by love. Yes, I'm glad for your sake, Gordon; and as for me – I leave myself to Time and Fate."

The old man's pride in his son's success was fighting hard with his own humiliation. After a while Gordon recovered strength enough to ask his father what he meant to do in England.

"Who can say?" answered the Consul-General, lifting one hand with a gesture of helplessness. "I have spent the best years of my life in Egypt. What is England to me now? Home? No, exile."

He had moved to the window again, and following the direction of his eyes Gordon could see that he was looking towards the cypress trees which shaded the English cemetery of Cairo.

A deep and profound silence ensued, and, feeling as if his mother's spirit were passing through the room, Gordon dropped his head and tears leapt to his eyes.

It was the first time father and son had been together since the tenderest link that had bound them had been broken, but while both were thinking of this, neither of them could trust himself to speak of it.

"Janet, your dream has come true! How happy you would have been!" thought the Consul-General, while Gordon, unable to unravel the intricacies of his emotions, was saying to himself, "Mother! My sweet mother!"

The last moment came, and it was a very moving one. Up from some hidden depths of the old man's oceanic soul there came a certain joy. In spite of all that he in his blindness had done to prevent it, by the operation of the inscrutable powers that had controlled his destiny, the great hope of his life was about to be realised. Gordon and Helena had been brought together, and as he looked at them, standing side by side when they rose to bid farewell to him, the man so brave and fearless, the girl so beautiful and superb, he thought, with a thrill of the heart, that, whatever might happen to himself – old, worn-out, fallen perhaps, his life ended – yet would his line go on in the time to come, pure, clean, and strong, and the name of Nuneham be written high in the history of his country.

Holding out a hand to each, he looked steadily into their faces for a moment, while he bade his silent good-bye. Not a word, not the quiver of an eyelid. It was the English gentleman coming out top in the end, firm, stern, heroic.

Before Gordon and Helena seemed to be aware of it, the old man was gone, and they heard the rumble of the wheels of his carriage as it passed out of the courtyard.

CHAPTER XVI

At nightfall the great Proconsul left Cairo. He knew that all day long the telegraphic agencies had been busy with messages from London about his resignation. He also knew that after the first thunderclap of surprise the Egyptian population had concluded that he had been recalled – recalled in disgrace, and at the petition of the Khedive to the King.

It did not take him long to prepare for his departure. In the course of an hour Ibrahim was able to pack up the few personal effects – how few! – which during the longest residence gather about the house of a servant of the State.

Perhaps the acutest of his feelings on leaving Egypt came to him as he drove in a closed carriage out of the grounds of the Agency, and looked up for the last time at the windows of the room that used to be occupied by his wife. At that moment he felt something of the dumb desolation which rolls over the strongest souls when, after a lifetime of comradeship, the asundering comes and they long for the voice that is still.

Poor Janet! He must leave all that remained of her behind him under the tall cypress trees on the edge of the Nile. Yet no, not all, for he was carrying away the better part of her – her pure soul and saintly memory – within him. None the less, that moment of parting brought the old man nearer than he had ever been to the sense of tears in mortal things.

The Sirdar had accompanied him, but though the fact of his intended departure had become known, having been announced in all the evening papers, there was nobody at the station to bid adieu to him – not a member of the Khedive's entourage; not one of the Egyptian Ministers, not even any of the Advisers and Under-Secretaries whom he had himself created.

Never had there lived a more self-centred and self-sufficient man, but this fact cut him to the quick. He had done what he believed to be his duty in Egypt, and feeling that he was neglected and forgotten at the end, the ingratitude of those whom he had served went like poison into his soul.

To escape from the sense of it he began to talk with a bitter raillery which in a weaker man would have expressed itself in tears, and seemed indeed to have tears – glittering, frozen tears – behind it.

"Do you know, my dear Reg," he said, "I feel to-night as if I might be another incarnation of your friend Pontius Pilate. Like him, I am being withdrawn, you see, and apparently for the same reason. And – who knows? – perhaps like him too, I am destined to earn the maledictions of mankind."

The Sirdar found the old man's irony intensely affecting, and therefore he made no protest.

"Well, I'm not ashamed of the comparison, if it means that against all forms of anarchy I have belonged to the party of order, though of course there will be some wise heads that will see the finger of Heaven in what has happened."

The strong man, with his fortunes sunk to zero, was defiant to the very end and last hour of calamity. But standing on the platform by the door of the compartment that had been reserved for him, he looked round at length and said – all his irony, all his raillery suddenly gone —

"Reg, I have given forty years of my life to those people and there is not one of them to see me off."

The Sirdar tried his best to cheer him, saying —

"England remembers, though, and if – " but the old man looked into his face and his next words died on his lips.

The engine was getting up steam, and its rhythmic throb was shaking the glass roof overhead when Gordon and Hafiz, wearing their military greatcoats, came up the platform. They had carefully timed it to arrive at the last moment. A gleam of light came into the father's face at the sight of his son. Gordon stepped up, Hafiz fell back, Lord Nuneham entered the carriage.

"Well, good-bye, old friend," said the old man, shaking hands warmly with the Sirdar. "I may see you again – in my exile in England, you know."

Then he turned to Gordon and took his outstretched hand. Father and son stood face to face for the last time. Not a word was spoken. There was a long, firm, quivering hand-clasp – and that was all. At the next moment the train was gone.

The Sirdar stood watching it until it disappeared, and then he turned to Gordon, and, thinking of the England the Consul-General had loved, the England he had held high, he said, speaking of him as if he were already dead —

"After all, my boy, your father was one of the great Englishmen."

Gordon could not answer him, and after a while they shook hands and separated. The two young soldiers walked back to the Citadel, through the native streets. The "Nights of the Prophet" were nearly over, and the illuminations were being put out.

Hafiz talked about the Khedive – he had just arrived at Kubbeh; then about Ishmael – the Prophet had shut himself up in the Chancellor's house and was permitting nobody to see him.

"His Highness has asked Ishmael to be Imam to-morrow morning, but it is thought that he is ill – it is even whispered that he is going mad." said Hafiz.

Gordon did not speak until they reached the foot of the hill. Then he said —

"I must go up and lie down. Good-night, old fellow! God bless you!"

CHAPTER XVII

Half-an-hour earlier, Gordon's guard, now transformed into his soldier servant, had been startled by the appearance of an Egyptian, wearing the flowing white robes of a Sheikh, and asking in almost faultless English for Colonel Lord.

"The Colonel has gone to the station to see his lordship off to England, but I'm expecting him back presently," said the orderly.

"I'll wait," said the Sheikh, and the orderly showed, him into Gordon's room.

"Looks like a bloomin' death's-head! Wonder if he's the bloomin' Prophet they're jawrin' about!"

Since coming into Cairo Ishmael had been a prey to thoughts that were indeed akin to madness. Perhaps he was seized by one of those nervous maladies in which a man no longer belongs to himself. Certainly he suffered the pangs of heart and brain which come only to the purest and most spiritual souls in their darkest hours, and seem to make it literally true that their tortured spirits descend into hell.

Now that his anxiety for his followers was relaxed and their hopes had in some measure been realised, his mind swung back to the sorrowful decay and ruin that had fallen upon himself. It was no longer the shame of the prophet but the bereavement of the man that tormented him. His lacerated heart left him no power of thinking or feeling anything but the loss of Helena.

Again he saw her beaming eyes, her long black lashes, and her smiling mouth. Again he heard her voice, and again the sweet perfume of her presence seemed to be about him. That all this was lost to him for ever, that henceforth he had to put away from him all the sweetness, all the beauty, all the tenderness of a woman's life linked with his, brought him a paroxysm of pain in which it seemed as if his heart would break and die.

He recalled the promises he had made to himself, of taking up the life of a man when his work was done. His work was done now – in some sort ended, at all events – but the prize he had promised himself had been snatched away. She was gone, she who had been all his joy. An impassable gulf divided them. The infinite radiance of hope and love that was to have crowned his restless and stormy life had disappeared. Henceforth he must walk through the world alone.

"O God, can it be?" he asked himself, with the startled agony of one who awakes from single-pillowed sleep and remembers that he is bereaved.

If anything had been necessary to make his position intolerable, it came with the thought that all this was due to the treachery of the man he had loved and trusted, the man he had believed to be his friend and brother, the one being, besides the woman, who had gone to his heart of hearts. The Rani had confessed to him that she loved "Omar," and notwithstanding that all his life he had struggled to liberate himself from the prejudices of his race, yet now, in the melancholy broodings of his Eastern brain, he could not escape from the conclusion that the only love possible between a man and the wife of another was guilty love.

When he thought of that both body and soul seemed to be afire, and he became conscious of a feeling about "Omar" which he had never experienced before towards any human creature – a feeling of furious and inextinguishable hatred.

He began to be afraid of himself, and just as a dog will shun its kind and hide itself from sight when it feels the poison of madness working in its blood, so Ishmael, under the secret trouble which he dared reveal to none, shut himself up in his sleeping-room in the old Chancellor's house.

It was a small and silent chamber at the back, overlooking a little paved courtyard containing a well, and bounded by a very high wall that shut off sight and sound of the city outside. Once a day an old man in a blue galabeah came into the court to draw water, and twice a day a servant of the Sheikhs came into the room with food. Save for these two, and the old Chancellor himself at intervals, Ishmael saw no one for nine days, and in the solitude and semi-darkness of his self-imposed prison a hundred phantoms were bred in his distempered brain.

On the second day after his retirement the Chancellor came to tell him that his emissary, his missionary, "Omar Benani," had been identified on his arrest, that in his true character as Colonel Lord he was to be tried by his fellow-officers for his supposed offences as a soldier at the time of the assault on El Azhar, and that the only sentence that could possibly be passed upon him would be death. At this news, which the Chancellor delivered with a sad face, Ishmael felt a fierce but secret joy.

"God's arm is long," he told himself. "He allowed the man to escape while his aims were good, but now he is going to punish him for his treachery and deceit."

Three days afterwards the old Chancellor came again to say that Colonel Lord had been tried and condemned to death, as everybody had foreseen and expected, but nevertheless the sympathy of all men was with him, because he was seen to have acted from the noblest motives, withstanding his own father for what he believed to be the right, and exposing himself to the charge of being a bad son and a poor patriot in order to prevent bloodshed; that he had indeed prevented bloodshed by preventing a collision of the British and Native armies; that it had been by his efforts that the pilgrimage had been able to enter Cairo in peace; and that in recognition of the great sacrifice made by the Christian soldier for the love of humanity, the Ulema were joining with others in petitioning his King to pardon him.

At this news a chill came over Ishmael. His heart grew cold as stone, and when the Chancellor was gone, he found himself praying —

"Forbid it, O God, forbid it! Let not Thy justice be taken out of Thine awful hand."

Four days later the old Chancellor came yet again to say that the King's Pardon had been granted; that Colonel Lord was free; that the people were rejoicing; that everybody attributed the happy issue of the Christian's case mainly to zealous efforts on his behalf of the woman who loved him, the daughter of the dead General whose unwise command had been the cause of all his trouble; and finally that it was expected that these two would soon heal their family feud by marriage.

At this news Ishmael's tortured heart was aflame and his brain was reeling. The thought that "Omar" was not to be punished, that he was to be honoured, that he was to be made happy, filled him with passions never felt before. Behind the strongest and most spiritual soul there lurks a wild beast that seems to be ever waiting to destroy it, and in the torment of Ishmael's heart the thought came to him that, as his earthly judges were permitting the guilty one to escape, God called on him to punish the man.

Irresistible as the thought was, it brought a feeling of indescribable dread. "I must be going mad," he told himself, remembering how he had spent his life in the cause of peace. All day long he fought against a hatred that was now so fierce that it seemed as if death alone could satisfy it. His soul wrestled with it, battled for life against it, and at length conquered it, and he rose from his knees saying to himself —

"No, vengeance belongs to God! When did He ask for my hand to execute it?"

But the compulsion of great passion was driving him on, and after dismissing the thought of his own wrongs he began to think of the Rani's. Where was she now? What had become of her? He dared not ask. Ashamed, humiliated, abased, he had become so sensitive to pain on the subject of the woman whom he had betrothed, the woman who had betrayed him, the woman he still loved in spite of everything, that he was even afraid that some one might speak of her.

But in the light of what the Chancellor had said about the daughter of the General, he pictured the Rani as a rejected and abandoned woman. This thought was at first so painful that it deprived him of the free use of his faculties. He could not see anything plainly. His mind was a battlefield of confused sights, half hidden in clouds of smoke. That, after all the Rani had sacrificed for "Omar" – her husband, her happiness, and her honour – she should be cast aside for another – this was maddening.

He asked himself what he was to do. Find her and take her back? Impossible! Her heart was gone from him. She would continue to love the other man, whatever he might do to her. That was the way of all women – Allah pity and bless them!

Then a flash of illumination came to him in the long interval of his darkness. He would liberate the Rani, and the man she loved should marry her! No matter if she belonged to another race – he should marry her! No matter if she belonged to another faith – he should marry her! And as for himself —his sacrifice should be his revenge!

"Yes, that shall be my revenge," he thought.

This, in the wild fire of heart and brain, was the thought with which Ishmael had come to Gordon's door, and being shown into the soldier's room he sat for some time without looking about him. Then raising his eyes and gazing round the bare apartment, with its simple bed, its table, its shelves of military boots, its stirrups and swords and rifles, he saw on the desk under the lamp a large photograph in a frame.

It was the photograph of a woman in Western costume, and he told himself in an instant who the woman was – she was the daughter of the General who was dead.

He remembered that he had heard of her before, and that he had even spoken about her to her father when he came to warn the General that the order he was giving to Colonel Lord would lead to the injury of England in Egypt and the ruin of his own happiness. From that day to this he had never once thought of the girl, but now, recalling what the old Chancellor had said of her devotion, her fidelity, her loyalty to the man she loved, he turned his eyes from her picture lest the sight of it should touch him with tenderness and make harder the duty he had come to do.

"No, I will not look at it," he told himself, with the simplicity of a sick child.

Trying to avoid the softening effects of the photograph under the lamp, he saw another on the table by his side and yet another on the wall. They were all pictures of the same woman, and hastily as he glanced at them, there was something in the face of each that kindled a light in his memory. Was it only a part of his haunting torment that, in spite of the Western costume that obscured the woman in the photographs, her brilliant, beaming eyes were the eyes of the Rani?

A wave of indescribable tenderness broke over him for a moment, an odour of perfume, an atmosphere of sweetness and delicacy and charm, and then, telling himself that all this was gone from him for ever, and that every woman's face would henceforth remind him of her whom he had lost, the hatred in his heart against Gordon gave him the pain of an open wound.

"O God, let me forget, let me forget!" he prayed.

Then suddenly, while he was in the tempest of these contrary emotions which were whirling like hot sand in a sandstorm about his brain, he heard a footstep on the stairs, followed by a voice outside the door. It was the voice of Colonel Lord's soldier servant, and he was telling his master who was within – an Arab, a Sheikh, in white robes and a turban.

"He's coming! He's here," thought Ishmael.

With choking throat and throbbing heart he rose to his feet and stood waiting. At the next moment the door was thrown open and the man he had come to meet was in the room.