"May God guide you, O my son," said the Chancellor, and a moment afterwards his soft voice was saying farewell to the two young soldiers at the door.
"Let us walk back to barracks, Hafiz," said Gordon. "My head aches a little, somehow."
CHAPTER VIII
It was night by this time; the courts and corridors of El Azhar were empty, and even the tangled streets outside were less loud than before with the guttural cries of a swarming population, but a rumbling murmur came from the mosque of the University, and the young soldiers stood a moment at the door to look in. There, under a multitude of tiny lanterns, stood long rows of men in stockinged feet and Eastern costume, rising and kneeling in unison, at one moment erect and at the next with foreheads to the floor, while the voice of the Imam echoed in the arches of the mosque and the voices of the people answered him.
Then through narrow alleys, full of life, lit only by the faint gleam of uncovered candles, with native women, black-robed and veiled, passing like shadows through a moving crowd of men, the young soldiers came to the quarter of Cairo that is nick-named the "Fish Market," where the streets are brilliantly lighted up, where the names over the shops are English and French, Greek, and Italian, and where girls with painted faces wave their hands from barred windows and call to men who sit at tables in front of the cafés opposite, drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, and playing dominoes. The sound of music and dancing came from the open windows behind the girls who glittered with gold brocade and diamonds; and among the men were young Egyptians in the tarboosh and British soldiers in khaki, who looked across at the women in the flare of the coarse light and laughed.
At the gate of the Kasr-el-Nil barracks the young men parted.
"Tell me, Hafiz," said Gordon, "if a soldier is ordered to act in a way he believes to be wrong, what is he to do?"
"His duty, I suppose," said Hafiz.
"His duty to what – his Commander or his conscience?"
"If a soldier is under orders I suppose he has no conscience?"
"I wonder!" said Gordon, and promising to write to Hafiz in the morning, he went up to his quarters.
The room was in darkness, save for the moonlight with its gleam of mellow gold, which seemed to vibrate from the river outside, and Gordon stood by the window, with a dull sense of headache, looking at the old Nile that had seen so many acts in the drama of humanity and still flowed so silently, until he became conscious of a perfume he knew, and then, switching on the light, he found a letter in a scented envelope lying on his desk. It was from Helena, and it was written in her bold, upright hand, with the gay raillery, the passionate tenderness, and the fierce earnestness which he recognised as her chief characteristics: —
"MISTER, most glorious and respected, the illustrious Colonel Lord, owner of Serenity and Virtue, otherwise dear old Gordon —
"It was wrong of you not to come to dinner, for though Father over-excited himself at Ghezirah to-day and I have had to pack him off to bed, I made every preparation to receive you, and here I am in my best bib and tucker, wearing the crown of pink blossom which my own particular Sultan says suits my gipsy hair, and nobody to admire it but my poor little black boy Mosie – who is falling in love with me, I may tell you, and is looking at me now with his scrubby face all blubbered up like a sentimental hippopotamus.
"I am not surprised that the Consul-General talked about the new 'holy man,' and I do not wonder that he ordered you to arrest him, but I am at a loss to know why you should take counsel with that old fossil at El Azhar, and you can tell Master Hafiz I mean to dust his jacket for suggesting it, knowing your silly old heart is like wax, and they have only to recite something out of the 'noble Koran' and you'll be as weak as – well, as a woman.
"As for holy men generally, I agree with the Princess that they are holy humbugs, which is the title I would give to a good many of the genus at home as well as here, so I say with your namesake of glorious memory (who wasn't an ogre, goodness knows!), Smash the Mahdi!
"A thousand to one he is some ugly, cross-eyed old fanatic, who would destroy every germ of civilisation in Egypt and carry the country back to barbarity and ruin, so I say again, Smash the Mahdi!
"As for your 'conscience,' I cry 'Marry-come-up!' by what right does it push its nose where it isn't wanted, seeing it is the conscience of the Consul-General that will be damned if the work is wrong and wicked and there won't be so much as a plum of Paradise for yours if it is right and good, so once again I say, Smash the Mahdi!
"Moreover, and furthermore, and by these presents, I rede ye beware of resisting the will of your father, for if you do, as sure as I'm a 'witch' and 'know things without learning them,' I have a 'mystic sense' there will be trouble, and nobody can say where it will end or how many of us may be involved in it, so again and yet again I say, Smash the Mahdi!
"The Consul-General's letter has come, but I shall not read it to Father until morning, and meantime, if I ever pass through your imagination, think of me as poor Ruth sitting on the threshing-floor with Boaz, and dreaming of Zion – that is to say, of stuffy old El Azhar, where somebody who ought to know better is now talking to an old frump in petticoats instead of to me.
"Inshallah! The slave of your Virtues. – HELENA.
"P.S.– Dying for to-morrow afternoon, dear.
"P.P.S.– IMPORTANT —Smash the Mahdi!"
CHAPTER IX
Helena Graves was everything to her father, for the General's marriage had been unhappy, and it had come to a tragic end. His wife, the daughter of a Jewish merchant in Madras, had been a woman of strong character and great beauty but of little principle, and they had been married while he was serving as senior Major with a battalion of his regiment in India, and there, Helena, their only child, had been born.
Things had gone tolerably between them until the Major returned to England as Lieutenant-Colonel commanding the battalion of his regiment at home, and then, in their little military town, they had met and become intimate with the Lord-Lieutenant of the county, a nobleman, a bachelor, a sportsman, a breeder of racehorses, and a member of the Government.
The end of that intimacy had been a violent scene, in which the husband, in his ungovernable rage, had flung the nobleman on the ground and trampled on him, torn the jewels out of his wife's breast and crushed them under his heel, and then, realising the bankruptcy his life had come to, had gone home and had brain fever.
Helena, like her father, was passionate and impetuous, and her mother had neglected and never really loved her. With the keen eyes of a child who is supposed to see nothing, she had observed from the first what was going on at home, and all her soul had risen against her mother and her mother's lover with a hatred which no presents could appease. Being now a girl of eighteen, well grown and developed, and seeing with what treachery and cruelty her father had been stricken down, her heart went out to him, and she became a woman in one day.
When the brain fever was gone, the General, weak both in body and mind, was ordered rest and change. Somebody suggested the Lake Country, as his native air, so Helena, who did everything for him, took him to a furnished cottage in Grasmere, a sweet place bowered in roses, with its face to the sedgy lake, and with the beautiful river, the Rotha, laughing and babbling by the garden at the back.
There he recovered bodily strength, but it was long before his mind returned to him, and meantime he had strange delusions. Something, perhaps, in the place of their retreat brought ghosts of the past out of a world of shadows, for he thought he was a boy again and Helena was his mother, who was thirty years dead and buried in the little churchyard lower down the stream, where the Rotha was deep and flowed with a solemn hush.
Helena played up to his pathetic delusion, took the tender endearments that were meant for the grandmother she had never known, and as his young days came to the surface with the beautiful persistence of old memories ha the human mind, she fell in with them as if they had been her own. Thus on Sunday morning, when the bells rang, she would walk with him to church, holding