Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 487
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, and even none 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 Like him, I am being withdrawn, you see, and apparently for the same reason.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 edge 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:
“Beg, I have given forty years of my life to these 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 great-coats, 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, who had stood watching it until it disappeared, then 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 Khubbah. 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!”
XVII
HALF an hour before, 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.
How 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 he about him. That all this was lost to him forever, 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 a 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 toward 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 Sheikh’s 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 semidarkness 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 afterward, 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 bad 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 bad 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 hands!”
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, baffled 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 he his revenge!
“Yes, that shall be my revenge,” he thought.
This, in the wild fire of his 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 hoots, 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 odor 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.
XVIII
WITH all his heart occupied by thoughts of his father, Gordon had hardly listened to what Hafiz had been saying about Ishmael, but walking up the hill to the Citadel he began to think of him and of Helena and of the bond of the betrothal which still bound them together.
“Until that is broken there can be nothing between her and me,” he told himself, and this was the thought in his mind at the moment when he reached his quarters and his servant told him who was waiting within.
“Ishmael Ameer! Is it you?” he cried as he burst the door open, and stepping eagerly, cheerfully, almost joyfully forward, he stretched out his hand.
But Ishmael drew back, and then Gordon saw that his eyes were swollen as if by sleeplessness, that his lips were white, that his cheeks were terribly pale, and that the expression of his face was shocking.
“Why, what is this? Are you ill?” he asked.
Omar Benani,” said Ishmael, “you and I are alone, and only God is our witness. I have something to say to you. Let us sit.”
He spoke in a low, tremulous tone, rather with his breath than with his voice, and Gordon, after looking at him for an instant, and seeing the smouldering fire of madness that was in the man’s face, threw off his great-coat and sat down.
There was a moment in which neither spoke, and then Ishmael, still speaking in a scarcely audible voice, said:
“Omar Benani, I am a son of the Beni Azra. Honour is our watchword. When a traveller in the Libyan Desert, tired and weary, seeks the tent of one of my people, the Master takes him in. He makes him free of all that he possesses. Sometimes he sends the stranger into the harem itself that the women may wash his feet. He leaves him there to rest and to sleep. He puts his faith, his honour, the most precious thing God has given him, into his hands. But,” said Ishmael, with suppressed fire flashing in his eyes, “if the stranger should ever wrong that harem, if he should ever betray the trust reposed in him, no matter who he is or where he flies to, the Master will follow him and hill him!”
Involuntarily, seeing the error that Ishmael had fallen into, Gordon rose to his feet, whereupon Ishmael, mistaking the gesture, held up his hand.
“No,” he said, “not that! I have not come to do that.
I put my honour in your hands, Omar Benani, I made you free of my family. Could I have done more? You were my brother, yet you outraged the sacred rights of brotherhood. You tore open the secret chamber of my heart. You deceived me and robbed me and betrayed me and you are a traitor. But I am not here to avenge myself. Sit, sit.
I will tell you what I have come for.”
Breathless and bewildered, Gordon sat again, and after another moment of silence Ishmael said:
“Omar Benani, there is one who has sacrificed everything for you. She has broken her vows for you, sinned for you, suffered for you. That woman is my wife and by all the rights of a husband I could hold her. But her heart is yours and therefore — therefore I intend to give her up.” Involuntarily Gordon rose to his feet again, and again Ishmael held up his hand.
