Kitabı oku: «The White Prophet, Volume II (of 2)», sayfa 18

CHAPTER VII

Besides the Grand Cadi with his pock-marked cheeks 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, he 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 matter."

"Does it concern my son?" asked the Consul-General sharply.

"I do not say it concerns your son," 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 bitterness —

"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 fall into 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 Ibrahim, 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 of 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, with his claw-like hands clasped before his breast, and then, as if taking a last chance, he said —

"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 be 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 and 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 to destroy his father 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 breaking away of an avalanche, and after it thsre 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 bang. Still no one spoke, and the silence seemed to be everlasting.

Then they heard the outer bell ringing loudly. They heard the front door opened and then closed again, as if somebody had been admitted. 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 nor 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.

A quarter of an hour passed. Half-an-hour. Still the two men did not speak. And the Consul-General did not return.

CHAPTER 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 dispatched 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 be 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 fro with nervous and irregular steps, but stopping at intervals as if breathless from an overpowering sense 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 bound 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 execrations 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 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 me to take these letters away for a few minutes."

And rising unsteadily, he left the room.

CHAPTER 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 orders 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 the 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-Gencral 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."

Tho look of alarm on 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, Reg. She's in the drawing-room. Give her back her letters, and tell her what has happened. Then take her to the Princess Nazimah. Poor girl! Poor Gordon!"

The Sirdar made some effort to comfort him, but it was hard to say anything now to the man who in the days of his strength had hated all forms of sentimentality. Yet the shadow of supernatural powers seemed to be over him, for he muttered some simple, almost child-like words about the Almighty permitting him to fall because he had wandered away from Him.

"Janet! My poor Janet!" the old man murmured, and his humbled head hung low.

The Sirdar could bear no more, and he quietly left the library.

As he approached the drawing-room he heard voices within. Fatimah was with Helena. All the mother-heart in the Egyptian woman had warmed to the girl in her trouble, and, forgetful of the difference of class, they were clasped in each other's arms.

The Sirdar could see by the tears that were trickling down Helena's cheeks that already she knew everything, but, all the same, he told her that Gordon had been handed over to the military authorities. She stood the fire of the sad news without flinching, and a few minutes afterwards they were in the Sirdar's carriage on their way to the Princess Nazimah's, the black boy on his donkey trotting proudly behind.

"We must not lose heart, though," said the Sirdar. "Now that I come to think of it, to be court-martialled may be the beat thing that can happen to him. He'll have a good deal to say for himself. And whatever the sentence may be, there's the Army Council, and there's the Secretary of State, and there's the King himself, you know."

"Then you think there's some hope still?" she said faintly, but sweetly.

"I'm certain there is," said the Sirdar; and as the carriage passed under the electric arc-lamps in the streets he could see that Helena's wet eyes were shining.

After a while she asked where Gordon was imprisoned, and was told that he was at the Citadel, but that he was in officer's quarters, and that his Egyptian foster-brother, Hafiz Ahmed, was permitted to be with him.

Then she asked if Ishmael and his people would be permitted to come into Cairo, and was told that they would, and that they might encamp in El Azhar if they cared to, Ishmael being nothing to the Sirdar but an inoffensive dreamer with a disordered brain.

Helena's lovely face looked almost happy. She was thinking of the light that was expected to shine at midnight from the minaret of the mosque of Mohammed Ali, and was telling herself that as soon as she reached the house of the Princess she would call up Hafiz at the Citadel and see what could be done.

Meantime Fatimah, who had gone to the Consul-General's bedroom to see that everything was in order, had felt something crunching under her feet, and picking it up, she found that it was the portrait of Gordon as a boy in his Arab fez. With many sighs she was putting the pieces aside when the old man entered the room. He did not seem to see her, and though she lingered some little while, he did not speak.

Sitting on the sofa, he rested his head on his hands mid looked fixedly at the carpet between his feet. Half-an-hour passed – an hour – two hours – but he did not move. At intervals the telegraphic machine, which stood in an alcove of the room, ticked for a time and then stopped. The debate on the Amendment to the Address was still going on, but that did not matter now. Nothing mattered except one thing – that he, he himself, had sent his own son to his death, thus cutting off his line, ending his family, and destroying the one hope and lodestar of his life.

"All well! It's all over!" he thought, and at length, switching off the lights, he went to bed.

While the great Proconsul slept his restless, troubled sleep the telegraphic machine ticked out in the darkness on the long slip of white paper that rolled on to the floor the future history of Egypt, and, in some sense, of the world.

Far away in London the Foreign Minister was speaking.

"I am one of those who think," he was saying, "that just as religious leaders, Popes as well as Mahdis, may go to wreck under the mental malady which permits them to believe they are the mouthpieces of the Almighty, so statesmen may be destroyed by the seeds of dissolution which power, especially absolute power, carries within itself.

"Holding this opinion, I also hold that to place one person in sole charge of millions of people of a different race, creed, and mode of thought, is to put a load on one man's shoulders which no man, whatever his power and influence, his integrity and the nobility of his principles, ought to be called upon to bear."

But the heavy-lidded house on the Nile was asleep. The Consul-General did not hear.