When Gordon Lord, after parting with Helena, had left the Citadel, his mental anguish had been so intense as to deaden all his faculties. His reason was clogged, his ideas were obscure, he could not see or hear properly. Passing the sentry in his lodge by the gate, he did not notice the man's bewildered stare or acknowledge his abbreviated salute. The whole event of the last hour had overwhelmed him as with a terrible darkness, and in this darkness he plodded on, until he came into the streets, dense with people and clamorous with all the noises of an Eastern city—the clapping of water-carriers, the crying of lemonade-sellers, the braying of donkeys, and the ruckling of camels.
"Where am I going?" he asked himself at one moment, and when he remembered that he was going back to his quarters—for that was what he had been ordered to do, that he might be under arrest and in due course tried by court-martial—he told himself that he had been tried and condemned and punished already. At that thought, though clouded and obscure, he bit his lip until it bled, and muttered, "No, I cannot go back to quarters—I will not!"
At the next moment a certain helplessness came over him, and up from the deep place where the strongest man is as a child, by the pathetic instinct that keeps the boy alive in him to the last dark day of his life and in the hour of death, came a desire to go home—to his mother. But when he thought of his mother's pleading voice as she begged him to keep peace with his father, and then, by some juggling twist of torturing memory, of the first evening after his return to Egypt, when he wore his medals and she fingered them on his breast with a pride that no queen ever had in the jewels in her crown, he said to himself, "No, I can never go home again."
His mind was oscillating among these agonising thoughts when he became aware that he was walking in the Esbekiah district, the European quarter of Cairo, where the ooze of the gutter of the city is flung up under the public eye; and there under the open piazza, containing a line of drinking places, in an atmosphere that was thick with tobacco smoke, the reek of alcohol, the babel of many tongues, the striking of matches, and the popping of corks, he sat down at a table and called for a glass of brandy.
The brandy seemed to clear his faculties for a moment, and his aimless and wandering thoughts began to concentrate themselves. Then the scene in the General's office came back to him—the drawing of his sword from its scabbard, the breaking of it across the knee, the throwing of the wretched fragments at his feet, the ripping away of his medals and the trampling of them under foot. The hideous memory of it all, so illegal, so un-English, made his blood to boil, and when his beaten brain swung back to the scenes in which he had won his honours at the risk of his life—Omdurman, Ladysmith, Pretoria—the rank injustice he had suffered almost stifled him with rage, and he swore and struck the table.
All his anger was against the General, not against his father, of whom he had hardly thought at all, but the cruellest agony he passed through came at the moment when his wrath rose against Helena. As he thought of her he became dizzy; his brain reeled with a dance of ideas, in which no picture lasted longer than an instant, and no emotion would stay. At one moment he was seeing her as he saw her first, with her big eyes, black as a sloe, the joyous smile that was one of her greatest charms, the arched brow, the silken lashes, the gleam of celestial fire, the "Don't go yet" that came into her look, and then his quickening pulse, the thrill that passed through him, and the mysterious voice that whispered, "It is She!"
Without knowing it he groaned aloud as he thought of the ruin all this had come to, and at the next moment he was in the midst of another memory—a memory of the future as he had imagined it would be. They were to be married soon, and then, realising one of the dreams of his life, they were to visit America, for his mother's blood called to him to go there, to see the great new world—yes, but above all to stand, with Helena's quivering hand in his, on that rock at Plymouth, where a handful of fearless men and women had landed on a bleak and hungry coast, afraid of no fate, for God was with them, and in two short centuries had peopled a vast continent and created one of the mightiest empires of the earth. Remembering this as a vanished dream, his wretched soul was on the edge of a vortex of madness, and he laughed outright with a laugh that shivered the air around him.
Then he was conscious that somebody was speaking to him. It was a young girl in a gaudy silk dress, with a pasty face, lips painted very red, eyebrows darkened, a flower in her full bosom which was covered with transparent lace, and a little satchel swinging on her wrist.
"Overdoing it a bit, haven't you, dear?" she said in French, and she smiled at him, a poor sidelong smile, out of her crushed and crumpled soul.
At the same moment he became aware that three men at a table behind him were winking at the girl and joking at his expense. One of them, a little fat American Jew with puffy cheeks, chewing the end of a cigar, was saying—
"Guess a man don't have no use for a hat in a climate like this—sun so soft, and only ninety-nine in the shade."
Whereupon an Englishman with a ripped and ragged mouth and a miscellaneous nose, half pug and half Roman, answered—
"Been hanging himself up on a nail by the breast of his coat, too, you bet."
Putting his hand to his hair and looking down at the torn cloth of his tunic, Gordon realised for the first time that he was bareheaded, having left his helmet at the Citadel, and that to the unclean consciousness of the people about him he was drunk.
At that moment he started up suddenly, and coming into collision with the American, who was swinging on the back legs of his chair, he sent him sprawling on the ground, where he yelled—
"Here, I say, you blazing——"
But the third man at the table, a dragoman in a fez, whispered—
"Hush! I know that gentleman. Leave him alone, sirs, please. Let him go."
With heart and soul aflame, Gordon walked away, intending to take the first cab that came along and then forgetting to do so. One wild thought now took possession of him and expelled all other thoughts. He must go back to the Citadel and accuse the General of his gross injustice. He must say what he meant to say when he stood by the door as he was going out.
The General should hear it—he should, and by —— he must!
The brandy was working in his brain by this time, and in the blind leading of passion everything that happened on the way seemed to fortify his resolve. The streets of the native city were now surging with people, as a submerged mine surges with the water that runs through it. He knew where they were going—they were going to El Azhar—and when he came to the great mosque he had to fight his way through a crowd that was coming from the opposite direction, with the turbaned head of a very tall man showing conspicuously in the midst of the multitude, who were chanting verses from the Koran and crying in chorus, "La ilaha illa-llah."
At sight of this procession, knowing what it meant—that the Moslems were going to the doomed place, to defend it or to die—a thousand confused forms danced before Gordon's eyes. His impatience to reach the Citadel became feverish, and he began to run, but again at the foot of the hill on which the fortress stands he was kept back. This time it was by a troop of cavalry who were trotting hard towards El Azhar. He saw his deputy, Macdonald, with his blotchy face and his monocle, but he was himself seen by no one, and in the crush he was almost ridden down.
The Citadel, when he reached it, seemed to be deserted, even the sentry standing with his back to him in the sentry-box as he hurried through. There was nobody in the square of the mosque or yet at the gate to the General's garden, which was open, and the door of the house, when he came to it, was open too. With the hot blood in his head, his teeth compressed, and his nostrils quivering, he burst into the General's office and came face to face with the old soldier as he was rising from the sofa. Thus in the blind swirl of circumstance the two men met at the moment when the heart of each was full of hatred for the other.
They were brave men both of them, and never for one instant had either of them known what it was to feel afraid. They were not afraid now, but they had loved each other once, and up from what deep place in their souls God alone can say, there came a wave of feeling that fought with their hate. The General no longer wanted to punish Gordon, but only that Gordon should go away, while Gordon's rage, which was to have thundered at the General, broke into an agonising cry.
"What are you doing here? Didn't I order you to your quarters? Do you wish me to put you under close arrest? Get off!"
"Not yet. You and I have to settle accounts first. You have behaved like a tyrant. A tyrant—that's the only word for it! If I was guilty of insubordination, you were guilty of outrage. You had a right to arrest me, and to order that I should be court-martialled, but what right had you to condemn me before I was tried and punish me before I was sentenced? Before or after, what right had you to break my sword and tear off my medals? Degradation is obsolete in the British Army—what right had you to degrade me? Before my father, too, and before Helena—what right had you?"
"Leave my house instantly; leave it, leave it!" said the General, his voice coming thick and hoarse.
"Not till you hear what I've come to tell you," said Gordon, and then he repeated the threat—who knows on what inherited cell of his brain imprinted—which his father had made forty years before.
"I've come to tell you that I'll go back to my quarters and you shall court-martial me to-morrow if you dare. Before that, England may know by what is done to-night that I refused to obey your order because I'm a soldier, not a murderer. But if she never knows," he cried, in his breaking voice, "and you try me and condemn me and degrade me even to the ranks, I'll get up again—do you hear me?—I'll get up again, and win back all I've lost and more—until I'm your own master and you'll have to obey me."
The General's face became scarlet, and lifting his hand as if to strike Gordon, he cried, in a choking voice—
"Go, before I do something——"
But Gordon in the delirium of his rage heard nothing except the sound of his own quivering voice.
"More than that," he said, "I'll win back Helena. She was mine, and you have separated her from me and broken her heart as well as my own. Was that the act of a father, or of a robber and a tyrant? But she will come back to me, and when you are dead and in your grave we shall be together, because ... Stop that! Stop it, I say!"
The General, unable to command himself any longer, had snatched up the broken sword from the floor and was making for Gordon as if to smite him.
"Stand away! You are an old man and I am not a coward. Drop that, or by God you——"
But the General, losing himself utterly, flung himself on Gordon with the broken sword, his voice gone in a husky growl and his breath coming in hoarse gusts.
The struggle was short but terrible. Gordon in the strength of his young manhood first laid hold of the General by the upper part of the breast to keep him off, and then, feeling that his hand was wounded, he gripped at the old man's throat with fingers that clung like claws. At the next moment he snatched the sword from the General, and at the same instant, with a delirious laugh, he flung the man himself away.
The General fell heavily with a deep groan and a gurgling cry. Gordon, with a contemptuous gesture, threw the broken sword on the floor, and then with the growl of a wild creature he turned to go.
"Fight me—would you, eh! Kill me, perhaps! We've settled accounts at last—haven't we?"
But hearing no answer he turned at the door to look back and saw the General lying where he had fallen, outstretched and still. At that sight the breath seemed to go out of his body at one gasp. His head turned giddy, and the red gleams of the sunset which were deflected into the room appeared to his half-blind eyes to cover everything with blood.