CHAPTER III
During the next few days the Consul-General was closely occupied. The Law of Public Security being promulgated, he called upon the Minister of the Interior to call upon the Commandant of Police to issue a warrant for the arrest of Ishmael Ameer.
"But where is Ishmael Ameer?" asked the Minister.
When this was reported to the Consul-General his stern face smiled, and he said —
"Let him wait and see."
Early one morning his Secretary came to his room to say that the Sirdar had arrived from Khartoum, and had gone on to headquarters, but would give himself the pleasure of calling upon his lordship before long.
"Tell him it must be soon – there is much to do," said the Consul-General.
Later the same day the Commandant of Police came, with a knowing smile on his ruddy face, to say that the Bedouin had reached Cairo, and that he had been followed to the Serai Fum el Khalig, the palace of the Chancellor of El Azhar, where he had already been visited by the Grand Mufti, some of the Ministers, certain of the Diplomatic Corps and nearly the whole of the Ulema.
"Was he alone?" asked the Consul-General.
"Quite alone, your lordship, and now he is as safely in our hands as if he were already under lock and key."
"Good! What did you say his address was?"
"Serai Fum el Khalig."
"Palace Fum el Khalig," repeated the Consul-General, making a note on a marble tablet which stood on his desk.
Later still, very late, the Grand Cadi came with the same news. The suave old Moslem judge was visibly excited. His pale, lymphatic, pock-marked cheeks, his earth-coloured lips, his base eyes, and his nose as sharp as a beak, gave him more than ever the appearance of a fierce and sagacious bird of prey. After exaggerated bows, he began to speak in the oily, half-smothered voice of one who lives in constant fear of being overheard.
"Your Excellency will remember that when on former occasions I have had the inestimable privilege of approaching your honourable person in order to warn you that if you did not put down a certain Arab innovator the result would be death to the rule of England in Egypt, your Excellency has demanded proofs."
"Well?"
"I am now in a position to provide them."
"State the case precisely," said the Consul-General.
"Your Excellency will be interested to hear that a person of some consequence has arrived in Cairo."
Trained to self-control, the Consul-General conquered an impulse to say, "I know," and merely said, "Who is he?"
"He calls himself Sheikh Omar Benani, and is understood to be the wise and wealthy head of the great tribe of the Ababdah Bedouins who inhabit the country that lies east of Assouan to the Red Sea."
"Well?"
"The man who calls himself Omar Benani is – Ishmael Ameer."
At that the base eyes glanced up with a look of triumph, but the Consul-General's face remained immovable.
"Well?"
"No doubt your Excellency is asking yourself why he comes in this disguise, and if your Excellency will deign to give me your attention I will tell you."
"I am listening."
"Ishmael Ameer pretends to be a reformer intent upon the moral and intellectual regeneration of Islam, and he preaches the coming of a golden age in which unity, peace and brotherhood are to reign throughout the earth.
"Well?"
"With this ridiculous and impracticable propaganda he has appealed to many wild and ardent minds, so that a vast following of half-civilised people whom he has gathered up in the Soudan are to start soon – may have started already – for this city, which they believe to be the Mecca of the new world."
"Well?"
"Ishmael Ameer pretends to have come to Cairo in advance of his followers to prepare for that millennium."
"And what has he really come for?"
"To establish a political State."
Down to that moment the Consul-General had been leaning back in his chair in the attitude of one who was listening to something he already knew, but now he sat up sharply.
"Is this a fact?"
"It is a fact, your Excellency. And if your Excellency will once more deign to grant me your attention, I will put you in possession of a secret."
"Go on," said the Consul-General.
Instinctively the suave old judge drew his legs up on his chair and fingered his amber beads.
"Your Excellency will perhaps remember that owing to differences of opinion with the Khedive – may Allah bless him! – you were compelled to require that for a while he should leave the country."
"Well?"
"He went to Constantinople with the intention of laying his grievances against England before His Serenity the Sultan – may the Merciful give him long life!"
"Well?"
"The Sultan is a friend of England, your Excellency – the Khedive was turned away."
"And then?"
"Then he went to Paris, as your Excellency is probably aware."
"Well?"
"Perhaps your Excellency supposes that he occupied himself with the frivolities of the gay capital of France – dinners, theatres, dances, races? But no! He had two enemies now, England and Turkey, and he presumed to think he could punish both."
"How? In what way?"
"By founding a secret society for the conquest of Syria, Palestine and Arabia, and the establishment of a great Arab Empire with himself as its Caliph and Cairo as its capital."
"Well? What happened?"
"Need I say what happened, your Excellency? By means of his great wealth he was able to send out hundreds of paid emissaries to every part of the Arabic world, and Ishmael Ameer was the first of them."
The Consul-General was at length startled out of all his composure.
"Can you prove this?" he said.
"Your Excellency, if I say anything I can always prove it."
The Consul-General's brow grew more and more severe.
"And his name – his assumed name – what did you say it was?"
"Sheikh Omar Benani."
"Sheikh Omar Benani," repeated the Consul-General, making another note on his marble tablet.
"That is enough for the present," he said. "I have something to do to-night. I must ask your Eminence to excuse me."
After the Grand Cadi had gone, with many sweeping salaams, various oily compliments, and that cruel gleam in his base eyes which proceeds only from base souls, the Consul-General rang sharply for his Secretary.
"We have not yet made out our invitations for the King's dinner – let us do so now," he said.
He threw a sheet of paper across the table to his Secretary, who prepared to make notes.
"First, the Diplomatic Corps – every one of them."
"Yes, my lord."
"Next, our Egyptian Ministers and the leading members of the Legislative Council."
"Yes, my lord."
"Next, the more prominent Pashas and Notables."
"Yes!"
"Of course our own people as usual, and finally – "
"Yes?"
"Finally, the Ulema of El Azhar."
The Secretary looked up in astonishment.
"Oh, I know," said the Consul-General. "They have never been invited before, but this is a special occasion."
"Quite so, my lord."
The Consul-General fixed his eyeglass and took up his marble tablet.
"In writing to the Chancellor of El Azhar at the Palace Fum el Khalig," he said, "enclose a card for the Sheikh Omar Benani."
"Sheikh Omar Benani."
"Say that hearing that one so highly esteemed among his own people is at present on a visit to Cairo, I shall be honoured by his company."
"Yes, my lord."
"That will do. Good-night!"
"Good-night, my lord."
It was early morning before the Consul-General went to bed. The Grand Cadi's story, being so exactly what he wanted to believe, had thrown him entirely off his guard. It appeared to illuminate everything that had looked dark and mysterious – the sudden advent of Ishmael, the growth of his influence, the sending out of his emissaries, his projected pilgrimage, and the gathering up of camels and horses in such enormous quantities as even the Government could not have commanded in time of war.
It accounted for Ishmael's presence in Cairo, and his mission (as described by Helena) of drawing off the allegiance of the Egyptian army. It accounted, too, for the treachery of the Ministers, Pashas and Notables, who were too shrewd and too selfish (whatever the riff-raff of the Soudan might be) to risk their comfortable incomes for a religious chimera.
Yes, the Khedive's money and the substantial prospect of establishing a vast Arab Empire, not the vague hope of a spiritual millennium, had been the power that worked these wonders.
It vexed him to think that his old enemy whom he had banished had been more powerful in exile than at home, and it tortured him to reflect that Ishmael had developed, with the religious malady of the Mahdi, his political mania as well.
But no matter! He would be more than a match for all these forces, and when his great historical drama came to be played before the eyes of astonished humanity, it would be seen that he had saved, not England only but Europe, and perhaps civilisation itself.
Thus, for three triumphant hours, the Consul-General saw himself as a patriot trampling on the enemies of his country; but hardly had he left the library and begun to climb the stairs of his great, empty, echoing house, switching off the lights as he ascended, and leaving darkness behind him, than the statesman sank back on the man – the broken, bereaved human being – and he recognised his motives for what they were.
A few minutes after he had reached his bedroom Fatimah entered it with a jug of hot water, and found him sitting with his head in his hands, looking fixedly at the portrait in the black-and-gilt frame of the little lad in an Arab fez.
"Ah, everybody loved that boy," she said, whereupon the old man raised his head and dismissed her brusquely.
"You ought to be in bed by this time – go at once," he said.
"Dear heart, so ought your lordship," said the Egyptian woman.
The Consul-General could dismiss Fatimah, but there was some one he could not get rid of, the manly, magnificent, heart-breaking young figure that always lived in his mind's eye, with its deadly white face, its trembling lower lip, and its quivering voice, which said, "General, the time may come when it will be even more painful to you to remember all this than it has been to me to bear it."
Where was he now? What was he doing? His son, his only son, all that was left to him!
There was only one way to lay that ghost, and the Consul-General did so by telling himself with a sort of fierce joy that wherever Gordon might be he must soon hear that Ishmael, in a pitiful and tricky disguise, had been discovered in Cairo, and then he would see for himself what an arrant schemer and unscrupulous charlatan was the person for whom he had sacrificed his life.
With that bitter-sweet thought the lonely old man forced back the tears that had been gathering in his eyes and went to bed.
CHAPTER IV
I
"SERAI FUM EL KHALIG,
"CAIRO.
"MY DEAREST HELENA, – Here I am, you see, and I am not arrested, although I travelled in the same train with the Sirdar, met him face to face on the platform at Khartoum, again on the platform at Atbara, again on the landing place at Shelal, and finally in the station at Cairo, where he was received on his arrival by his officers of the Egyptian army, by my father's first Secretary, and by the Commandant of Police.
"I was asking myself what this could mean, whether your black boy had reached his destination, and if your letter had been delivered, when suddenly I became aware that I was being observed, watched and followed to this house, and by that I knew that in this land of mystery my liberty was to be allowed to me a little longer for reasons I have still to fathom.
"This is the home of the Chancellor of El Azhar, and I have delivered Ishmael's letter announcing the change of plan whereby I have come into Cairo instead of him, but I have pledged the good old man to secrecy on that subject, for the present at all events, giving him my confident assurance that in common with the best of the Ulema he is being wickedly deceived and made an innocent instrument for the destruction of his own cause.
"My dear Helena, I was right. My vague suspicions of that damnable intriguer the Grand Cadi were justified. Already I realise that after fruitless efforts to inveigle Ishmael into schemes of anarchical rebellion it was he who conceived the conspiracy, which has taken our friend by storm, in the form of a passive mutiny of the Egyptian army. The accursed scoundrel knows well it cannot be passive, that somewhere and somehow it will break into active resistance, but that is precisely what he desires. As I told you, it is the old trick of Caiaphas over again, and that is the lowest, meanest, dirtiest thing in history.
"Query, is he playing the same game with the Consul-General? I am sure he is, and when I think that England and my father may be in as much danger as Egypt and Ishmael from the man's devilish machinations, I am more than ever certain that Providence had a purpose in bringing me to Cairo, and I feel reconciled to the necessity of living here in this threefold disguise, being one thing to Ishmael, another to the Grand Cadi and Co., and a third to the Government and police. I feel reconciled too, or almost reconciled, to the necessity of leaving you where you are, for the present at all events, although it rips me like a sword-cut as often as I think of it.
"I have sent for Hafiz and expect to hear through him what is happening at the Agency, but I am hoping he will not come until morning, for to-night I can think of nothing but ourselves. When I left you at Khartoum I felt that higher powers were constraining and controlling me, and that I was only yielding at last to an overwhelming sense of fatality. I thought I had made every possible effort, had exhausted every means and had nothing to reproach myself with, but hardly had I got away into the desert when a hand seemed to grasp me at the back of my neck and to say, 'Why did you leave her behind?'
"In Ishmael's house and in that atmosphere of delirious ecstasy in the mosque it was easy to think it necessary for you to remain, otherwise my purpose in going away must from the first be frustrated, but awakening in the morning in my native compartment, with men and boys lying about on sacks, the sandy daylight filtering through the closed shutters of the carriage and the train full of the fetid atmosphere of exhausted sleep, I could not help but protest to myself that at any cost whatever I should have found a way to bring you with me.
"Thank God, if I have left you behind in that trying and false position it is with no Khalifa, no corrupt and concupiscent fanatic, but a man of the finest and purest instincts, who is too much occupied with his spiritual mission, praise the Lord, to think of the beautiful woman by his side, so I tell myself it was the will of Providence, and there is nothing to do now but to leave ourselves in the hands of fate.
"Good-night, dearest! D.V. I'll write again to-morrow."
II
"Have just seen Hafiz. The dear old fellow came racing up here at six o'clock this morning, with his big round face like the aurora borealis, shining in smiles and tears. Heavens, how he laughed and cried and swore and sweated!
"He thought his letter about my mother's death had brought me back, and when I gave him a hint of my real errand he nearly dropped with terror. It seems that among my old colleagues in Cairo my reputation is now of the lowest, being that of a person who was bribed – God knows by whom – to do what I did. As a consequence it will go ill with me, according to Hafiz, if I should be discovered, but as that is pretty certain to happen in any case I am not too much troubled, and find more interest in the fact that your boy Mosie is staying at the Agency and that consequently my father must have received your letter.
"My dear Helena, my 'mystic sense' has been right again. The Grand Cadi continues to pay secret visits to the Consul-General. That much Hafiz could say from his intercourse with his mother, and it is sufficient to tell me that, by keeping a running sore open with my father, the scoundrel counts on destroying not only Ishmael but England, by leading her to such resistance as will result in bloodshed, and thus dishonour her in the eyes of the civilised world and leave Egypt a cockpit in which half the foreign Powers will fight for themselves, no matter who may suffer.
"What should I do? God knows! I have an almost unconquerable impulse to go straight to my father and open his eyes to what is going on. He is enveloped by intrigues and surrounded by enemies in high places – his Egyptian Ministers, the creatures of his own creation; some of the foreign diplomats, the European leeches who suck his blood while they pretend to be his friends, and above all this rascally Cadi, with his sleek face and double-sword game.
"But what can I say? What positive fact can I yet point to? Will my father believe me if I tell him that Ishmael's following which is coming up to Cairo is not, as he thinks, an armed force? That the Grand Cadi & Co. are a pack of lying intriguers, each one playing for his own hand?
"My father is a great man who probably does not need and would certainly resent my compassion, but, Lord God, how I pity him! Alone, in his old age, after all he has done for Egypt! As for his Secretaries and Advisers, he has not brought them up to help him, and I would enlarge the Biblical warning about not putting one's trust in princes to include parvenus as well.
"My dear Helena, where are you now, I wonder? What is happening to you? What occurred after I left Khartoum? These are the questions which during half the day and nearly the whole of the night are hammering, hammering, hammering on my brain. Ishmael was to follow me in a few days, so I suppose you are on the desert by this time. The desert! In the midst of that vast horde! The scourings of a whole continent! Poor old Hafiz had something like a fit when I told him you were not in England but in the Soudan, yet as a fatalist he feels bound to believe that everything will work out for the best and he asks me to send his high regard to you.
"It gives one a strange sensation, and is almost like seeing things from another state of existence, to be here in Cairo walking about unrecognised amid the familiar sights, and hearing the gun fired from the Citadel every day; but the sharpest twinge comes of the hacking thought of where you are and what circumstances surround you. In fact, memory is always playing some devilish trick with me and raking up thoughts of the condition in which I found you in Khartoum.
"Helena, my dear Helena, I have an immense faith in your strength and your courage. You are mine, mine, mine – remember that! I do – I have to – all the time. That is what sets me at ease in my dark hours and gives sleep, as the Arabs say, to my eyelids. For the rest, we must resign ourselves and continue to wait for the direction of fate. The fact that I was not arrested in the character of Ishmael immediately on my arrival in Cairo makes me think Hafiz may be right – that, D.V. one way or another, God knows how, everything is working out for the best. It's damned easy to say that, I know, but, upon my soul, dearest, I believe it. So keep up heart, my poor old girl, and God bless you! GORDON.
"P.S.– I'll hold this letter back until I think you must be nearing Assouan, and then send it D.V. by safe hands to be delivered to you there.
"P.P.S.– I open my envelope to tell you of a new development! I am invited with the Chancellor of El Azhar to the Consul-General's dinner in honour of the King's Birthday. This, in the character of Sheikh Omar Benani, who is, it seems, the chief of the tribe of the Ababdah, inhabiting the wild country between Assouan and the Red Sea, a person with a great reputation for wealth and wisdom, and a man whose word is truth.
"What does it mean? One thing certainly – that acting on the information contained in your letter the authorities are mistaking me for Ishmael Ameer, and proposing some scheme to capture me. But why don't they take me without further ado? What unfathomable reason can there be for the delay in doing so? Intrigue on intrigue! I must wait and see.
"Meantime I am asking myself where the real Ishmael is and what he is doing now? Is the belief in his 'divine' guidance increasing? Is he acquiring the influence of a Mahdi? If so, God help him! God help his people! God help my father! God help everybody!
"But sit tight, my girl! Something good is going to happen to us! I feel it, I know it! All my love to you, Helena! Maa-es-salamah!"