Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 475
“The fox!” thought the Consul-General, but interpreting in his own way the dim purpose of the plot — that it was intended to imprison him on the island, while Ishmael’s followers entered the city — he merely added to his order for his carriage an order for his steam-launch as well.
Daylight had faded by this time, and as soon as darkness fell the Consul-General received a line of other visitors — strange visitors, such as the British Agency had never seen before. They were women, Egyptian women, the harem, shrouded figures in black satin and the yashmak, the wives of the Ministers who had felt compelled to accept their invitations, but were in fear of the consequences of having done so.
Unexampled, unparalleled event, never before known in an Eastern country, the women, disregarding the seclusion of their sex, had come to plead for their husbands, to make tacit admission of a conspiracy, but to say, each trembling woman in her turn, “My husband is not in it,” and to implicate other men who were.
The Consul-General listened with cold, old-fashioned courtesy to everything they had to say, and then bowed them out without many words. Instinctively Ibrahim had darkened the Agency as soon as they began to come, so that veiled they passed in, veiled they passed out, and they were gone before anybody else was aware.
The dinner hour was now near, and leaving the library with the intention of going up to dress, the Consul-General came upon two men who were sitting in an alcove of the hall. They were Reuter’s reporters, who, for the past ten years, had been accustomed to come for official information. Rising as the Consul-General approached, they asked him if he had anything to say.
“Be here at ten o’clock to-morrow night, and I shall have something to give you,” he said. “It will he something important, so keep the wires open to receive it.”
“The wires to London, my lord?”
“To London, Paris, Berlin — everywhere! Good-night!”
Going upstairs with a flat and heavy step, but a light and almost joyous heart, the Consul-General remembered his letter of resignation, and thought of the hubbub in Downing Street the day after to-morrow when news of the conspiracy, and of how he had scotched it, fell like a thunderbolt on the “fossils of Whitehall.”
In the conflagration that would blaze heaven high in England it would be seen at last how necessary a strong authority in Egypt was, and then — what then? He would be asked to use his own discretion, unlimited power be reposed in him, he would hoist the Union Jack over the Citadel, annex the country to the British Crown, cast off all futile obligations to the Sultan, and so end for ever the present ridiculous, paradoxical, suicidal situation.
While Ibrahim helped him to dress for dinner, he was partly conscious that the man was talking about Mosie and repeating some bewildering story which the black boy bad been telling downstairs of Helena’s “marriage to the new Mahdi.”—’
This turned his thoughts in another direction, and for a few short moments the firm and stern, but not fundamentally hard and cruel man, became aware that all his fierce and savage and candid ferocity that day had been no more than the wild ejaculation of a heart that was broken and trembling because it was bereaved.
It was Gordon again — always Gordon! Where was “our boy “ now? What was happening to him? Could it be possible that he was so far away that he would not hear of the weltering downfall, so soon to come, of the “charlatan mummer” whose evil influence had brought his bright young life to ruin?
XIII
THAT night the Sirdar dined with the Consul-General, and as soon as the servants had gone from the dining-room he said:
“Nuneham, I have something to tell you.”
“What is it?” asked the Consul-General.
“Notwithstanding three weeks of the closest observation I have found no trace of insubordination in the Egyptian Army, but nevertheless, in obedience to your warning, I have taken one final precaution. I have given orders that the ammunition with which every soldier is intrusted shall be taken from him to-morrow evening, so that if Ishmael Ameer comes into Cairo at night with any hope of—”
“My dear Mannering,” interrupted the Consul-General, with his cold smile, “would it surprise you to be told that Ishmael Ameer is already in Cairo?”
“Already? Did you say—”
“That he has been here for three weeks, that he came by the same train as yourself, wearing the costume of a Bedouin Sheikh, and that—”
“But, my dear Nuneham, this is incredible,” said the Sirdar, with his buoyant laugh. “It is certainly true that a Bedouin Sheikh travelled in the same train with me from the Soudan, but that he was Ishmael Ameer in disguise is of course utterly unbelievable.”
“Why so?”
“Because a week after I left Khartoum I heard that Ishmael was still living there, and because every other day since then has brought us advices from our Governors saying the man was coming across the desert with his people.”
“My dear friend,” said the Consul-General, “in judging of the East one must use Eastern weights and measures. The race that could for fourteen centuries accept the preposterous tradition that it was not Jesus Christ who was crucified but some one else who took on his likeness and died instead of him, is quite capable of accepting for itself and imposing upon others a substitute for this White Prophet.”
“But you bewilder me,” said the Sirdar. “Isn’t the man Ishmael at this moment lying encamped, with fifty thousand of his demented people, on the desert outside Cairo?”
“No,” said the Consul-General.
And then in his slow, deep, firm voice, grown old and husky, he unburdened himself for the first time — telling of Helena’s departure for Khartoum on her errand of vengeance; of her letter from there announcing Ishmael’s intention of coming into Cairo in advance of his people, in order to draw off the allegiance of the Egyptian Army; of Ishmael’s arrival and his residence at the house of the Chancellor of El Azhar; of the visit of the Princess Nazimah, and her report of the conspiracy of the diplomatic corps, and finally of the Grand Cadi’s disclosure of the Khedive’s plot for the establishment of an Arab Empire.
“So you see,” said the Consul-General with an indulgent smile, “that all the bad concomitants of an Oriental revolution are present, and that while you, my dear friend, have been holding your hand in the Soudan for fear of repeating the error of two thousand years ago — troubling yourself about Pontius Pilate and moral forces versus physical ones, arid giving me the benefit of all the catchwords of your Christian socialism and Western democracy — a conspiracy of gigantic proportions has been gathering about us.”
The Sirdar’s usually ruddy face whitened, and he listened with a dumb, vague wonder while the Consul-General went on, with bursts of bitter humour, to describe one by one the means he had taken to defeat the enemies by whom they were surrounded.
“So you see, too,” he said at last, lifting unconsciously his tired voice, “that by this time to-morrow we shall have defeated the worst conspiracy that has ever been made even in Egypt — meted out sternly retributive justice to the authors of it; put an end to all forms of resistance, whether passive or active, silenced all chatter about Nationalism and all prattle about representative institutions, destroyed the devilish machinery of this accursed Pan-Islamism, crushed the Khedive, and wiped out his fanatic-hypocrite and charlatan-mummer, Ishmael Ameer.”
The Consul-General had spoken with such intensity, and the Sirdar had listened so eagerly, that down to that moment neither of them had been aware that another person was in the room. It was Fatimah, who was standing with the deathlike rigidity of a ghost near to the door, in the half-light of the shaded electric lamps.
The Sirdar saw her first, and with a motion of his hand he indicated her presence to the Consul-General, who, with a face that was pale and stem, turned angrily round and asked the -woman what she wanted; whereupon, Fatimah, with trembling lips and a quivering voice, as if struggling with the spirit of falsehood, said she had only come to ask if the Sirdar intended to sleep there that night, and whether she was to make up a bed for him.
“No, certainly not! Why should you think so? Go to bed yourself,” said the Consul-General, and with obvious relief the woman turned to go.
“Wait!” said the Consul-General. “How long have you been in the room?”
“Only a little moment, oh, my lord,” replied Fatimah. After that the two men went to the library, but some time passed before the conversation was resumed. The Sirdar lit a cigar and puffed in silence, while the Consul-General, who did not smoke, sat in an arm chair with his wrinkled hands clasped before his breast. At length the Sirdar said: “And all this came of Helena’s letter from Khartoum?”
“Was suggested by it,” said the Consul-General.
“You told me she was there, but I could not imagine what she was doing — what her errand was. Good heavens, what a revenge! It makes one shiver! Carries one back to another age!”
“A better age,” said the Consul-General. “A more natural and less hypocritical age at all events.”
“The age of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, perhaps — the age of a hot and consuming God.”
“Yes, a God of wrath, a God of anger, a God who did something, not the pale, meek, forgiving, anaemic God of our day — a God who does nothing.”
“The God of our day is at least a God of mercy, of pity, and of love,” said the Sirdar.
“He is a lay figure, my friend, who permits wrong without revenging it — in short, no God at all, but an illogical, inconsequential, useless creature.”
The Sirdar made no further resistance, and the Consul-General went on to defend Helena’s impulse of vengeance by assailing the Christian spirit of forgiveness.
“There was at least something natural and logical as well as majestic and magnificent in the old ideal of Jehovah, but your new ideal of Jesus is contrary to nature and opposed to the laws of life. ‘Love your enemies.’
‘Do good to them that hate you.’
‘If a man smite thee on the right cheek turn to him the other also.’
‘Resist not evil!’
‘If any man take away thy coat let him have thy cloak also!’ Impossible! Fatal! If this is Christianity I am no Christian. When I am hit I hit back. When I am injured I demand justice. The only way! Any other would lead to the triumph of the worst elements in humanity. And what I do everybody else does — everybody — though the hypocrisy of the modem world will not permit people to admit it.” The Consul-General had risen and was tramping heavily across the room.
“Is there one man alive who will dare to say that he actually orders his life according to the precepts of Christ? If so, he is either a liar or a fool. As for the nations, look at the facts. Christianity has been two thousand years in the world, yet here we are competing against each other in the building of war-ships, the imposition of tariffs, the union of trades. Why not? I say why not?”
The Consul-General drew up and waited, but getting no answer he continued:
“Civilisation requires it. I say requires it. What holds the world together and preserves peace among the nations is not Christianity but cast-iron and gunpowder. Yet what vexes me and stirs my soul is to hear people praying in their churches for ‘peace and concord,’ while all the time they know that ‘peace and concord’ is an impossible ideal, that Christianity in its first sense is dead, and that Jesus as a practical guide to life — as a practical guide to life, mind you — has failed.”
Then the Sirdar lifted his eyes and said:
“Do you know, my dear Nuneham, I once heard somebody else talk like that, though from the opposite standpoint of sympathy, not contempt.”
“Who was it?”
“Your own son.”
“Humph!”
The Consul-General frowned, and there was silence again for some moments. When the conversation was resumed it concerned the dangers of the Arab Empire, which, according to the Grand Cadi, the Khedive (with the help of Ishmael) expected to found.
“What would it mean?” said the Consul-General. “The utter annihilation of the unbeliever. Does not the word ‘Ghazi’ signify a hero who slays the infidel? Does not every Mollah, when he recites the Khuttab in the mosque, invoke divine wrath on the non-Moslem? What then? The establishment of an Arab Empire would mean the revolt of the whole Eastern world against the Western world, and a return to all the brutality, all the intolerance of the farrago of moribund nonsense known as the Sacred Law.”
The Sirdar made no reply and after a moment the Consul-General said:
“Then think of the spectacle of a conquering Mohammedan army-in Cairo! If the Citadel and the Arsenal of the capital could be occupied by that horde outside, it would not be merely England’s power in Egypt that would he ended, or the English Empire as a world-force that would he injured — it would be Western civilisation itself that would in the end he destroyed. The Mohammedans in India would think that what their brethren in Cairo had done they might do. The result would be incalculable chaos, unlimited anarchy, the turning back of the clock ten centuries.
The Consul-General returned to his seat, saying:
“No, no, my friend, a catastrophe so appalling as that cannot be left to chance, and if it is necessary to blow these fifty thousand fanatics out of the mouths of guns rather than lay the fate of the world open to irretrievable ruin I — I will do it.”
“But all this depends on the truthfulness of the Grand Cadi’s story — isn’t it so?” asked the Sirdar.
The Consul-General bent his head.
“And the first test of its truthfulness is whether or not these thousands of Ishmael’s followers are an armed force?”
Again the Consul-General bent his head.
“Well,” said the Sirdar, rising and throwing away his cigar, “I am bound to tell you that I see no reason to think they are. More than that, I will not believe that when our boy took his serious step he would have sided with this White Prophet if he had suspected that the man’s aims included an attack upon England’s power in Egypt, and I cannot imagine for a moment that he could be fool enough not to know.”
Again the Consul-General frowned, but the Sirdar went on firmly:
“I believe he thought and knew that Ishmael Ameer’s propaganda was purely spiritual, the establishment of an era of universal peace and brotherhood, and that is a world-question having nothing to do with England or Egypt or Arab Empires, except so far as—”
But the Consul-General, who was cut to the quick by the Sirdar’s praise of Gordon, could bear no more.
“Only old women of both sexes look for an era of universal peace,” he said testily.
“In that case,” replied the Sirdar, “the old women are among the greatest of mankind — the Hebrew prophets, the prophets of Buddhism, of Islam, and of Christianity. And if that is going too far, then Abraham Lincoln and John Bright, and, to come closer home, your own son, as brave a man as ever drew a sword, a soldier, too, the finest young soldier in the King’s service, one who might have risen to any height, if he had been properly handled, instead of being—”
But the old man, whose nostrils were swelling and dilating like the nostrils of a broken-winded horse, leaped to his feet and stopped him.
“Why will you continue to talk about my son?” he cried. “Do you wish to torture me? He allowed himself to become a tool in the hands of my enemies, yet you are accusing me of destroying his career and driving him away. You are — you know you are!”
“Ah, well! God grant everything may go right to-morrow,” said the Sirdar after a while, and with that he rose to go.
It was now very late, and when Ibrahim in the hall, with two sleepy eyes, hardly able to keep himself from yawning, opened the outer door, the horses of the Sirdar’s carriage, which had been waiting for nearly an hour, were heard stamping impatiently on the gravel of the drive.
At the last moment the old man relented.
“Reg,” he said, and his voice trembled, “forgive me if I have been rude to you. I have been hard hit and I must make a fight. I need not explain. Good-night!” And he had gone back to the library before the Sirdar could reply.
But after a while the unconquerable spirit and force of the man enabled him to regain his composure, and before going to bed he went up on to the roof to take a last look at the enemy he was about to destroy. There it lay in the distance, more than ever like a great serpent encircling the city on the south, for there was no moon, the night was very dark, and the dying fires of the sinuous camp at Sakkara made patches of white and black like the markings of a mighty cobra.
Fatimah was at his bedroom door, waiting to bring his hot water and to ask if he wanted anything else.
“Yes, I want you to go to bed,” he replied, but the Egyptian woman, still dallying about the room and speaking with difficulty, wished to know if it was true, as the black boy had said, that Miss Helena was in Khartoum and that she had betrothed herself to the White Prophet.
“I don’t know and I don’t care — go to bed,” said the Consul-General.
“Poor Gordon! My poor boy! Wah! Wah! Everything goes wrong with him. Yet he hadn’t an evil thought in his heart.”
“Go to bed, I tell you!”
It was even longer than usual before the Consul-General slept.
He thought of Helena. Where was she now? He had been telling himself all along that to save appearances she might find it necessary to remain for a while in Ishmael’s camp, but surely she might have escaped by this time.
Could it be possible that she was kept as a prisoner? Was there anything he ought to do for her?
Then he thought of the speech he was to make in proposing the King’s health to-morrow, and framed some of the stinging ironical sentences with which he meant to lash his enemies to the bone.
