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CHAPTER XIV

Three weeks longer Ishmael lay in the grip of his fever, and day and night Adila tended him, moistening his parched lips and cooling his hot forehead, while he raged against his enemies in his strong delirium, crying, "Down with the Christians! Drive them away! Kill them!" Then the thunging and roaring in his poor brain ceased, and his body was like a boat that had slid in an instant out of a stormy sea into a quiet harbour. Opening his eyes, with his face to the red wall, in the cool light of a breathless morning, he heard behind him the soft and mellow voice of a woman who seemed to be whispering to herself or to Heaven, and she was saying —

"Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil; for Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Amen."

"What is that?" he asked, closing his eyes again, and at the next moment the mellow voice came from somewhere above his face —

"So you are better? Oh, how good that is! I am Adila. Don't you remember me?"

"What was that you were saying, my girl?"

"That? Oh, that was the prayer of the Lord Isa (Jesus)."

"The Lord Isa?"

"Don't you know? Long ago my father told me about Him, and I've not forgotten it even yet. He was only a poor man, a poor Jewish man, a carpenter, but He was so good that He loved all the world, especially sinful women when they were sorry, and little helpless children. He never did harm to His enemies either, but people were cruel and they crucified Him. And now He is in heaven, sitting at God's right hand, with Mary His mother beside Him."

There was silence for a moment, and then —

"Say His prayer again, Adila."

So Adila, with more constraint than before, but still softly and sweetly, began afresh —

"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven; give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil; for Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Amen."

Thus the little Coptic woman, in her soft and mellow voice, said her Lord's prayer in that mud hut on the edge of the desert, with only the sick man to hear her, and he was a prisoner and in chains; but long before she had finished, Ishmael's face was hidden in his bed-clothes and he was crying like a child.

There were three weeks more of a painless and dreamy convalescence, in which Adila repeated other stories her father had told her, and Ishmael saw Christianity for the first time as it used to be, and wondered to find it a faith so sweet and so true, and above all, save for the character of Jesus, so like his own.

Then a new set of emotions took possession of him, and with returning strength he began to see Adila with fresh eyes. He loved to look at her soft, round form, and he found the air of his gloomy prison full of perfume and light as she walked with her beautiful erect bearing and smiling blue eyes about his bed. Hitherto she had slept on a mattress which she had laid out on the ground by the side of his angerib, but now he wished to change places, and when nothing would avail with her to do so, he would stretch out his arm at night until their hands met and clasped and thus linked together they would fall asleep.

But often he would awake in the darkness, not being able to sleep for thinking of her, and, finding one night that she was awake too, he said in a tremulous voice —

"Will you not come on to the angerib, Adila?"

"Should I?" she whispered, and she did.

Next day the black Soudanese guard that had been set to watch him reported to the Mohammedan Sheikhs that the devotee had been swallowed up in the man, whereupon the Sheikhs, with a chuckle, reported the same to the Government, and then Ishmael, with certain formalities, was set free.

At the expense of his uncle a house was found for him outside the town, for in contempt of his weakness in being tricked, as his people believed, by a Coptic slave girl, his following had gone, and he and Adila were to be left alone. Little they recked of that, though, for in the first sweet joys of husband and wife they were very happy, talking in delicious whispers, and with the frank candour of the East, of the child that was to come. He was sure it would be a girl, so they agreed to call it Ayesha (Mary), she for the sake of the sinful soul who had washed her Master's feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head, and he in memory of the poor Jewish woman, the mother of Isa, whose heart had been torn with grief for the sorrows of her son.

But when at length came their day of days, at the height of their happiness a bolt fell out of a cloudless sky, for though God gave them a child, and it was a girl, He took the mother in place of it.

She made a bravo end, the sweet Coptic woman, only thinking of Ishmael and holding his hand to cheer him. It was noon, the sun was hot outside, and in the cool shade of the courtyard three Moslems chanted the "Islamee la Illaha," for so much they could do even for the infidel, while Ishmael sat within on one side of his wife's angerib, with his uncle, seventy years of age now, on the other. She was too weak to speak to her husband, but she held up her mouth to him like a child to be kissed.

A moment later the old man closed her eyes and said —

"Be comforted, my son – death is a black camel that kneels at the gate of all."

There were no women to wail outside the house that night, and next day, when Adila had to be buried, it was neither in the Mohammedan cemetery with those who had "received direction," nor in the Christian one with English soldiers who had fallen in fight, that the slave-wife of a prisoner could be laid, but out in the open desert, where there was nothing save the sand and the sky.

They laid her with her face to Jerusalem, wrapped in a cocoa-nut mat, and put a few thorns over her to keep off the eagles, and when this was done they would have left her, saying she would sleep cool in her soft bed, for a warm wind was blowing and the sun was beginning to set; but Ishmael would not go.

In his sorrow and misery, his doubt and darkness, he was asking himself whether, if his poor Coptic wife was doomed to hell as an unbeliever, he could ever be happy in heaven. The moon had risen when at length they drew him away, and even then in the stillness of the lonely desert he looked back again and again at the dark patch on the white waste of the wilderness in which he was leaving her behind him.

Next morning he took the child from the midwife's arms and, carrying it across to his uncle, he asked him to take care of it and bring it up, for he was leaving Khartoum and did not know how long he might be away. Where was he going to? He could not say. Had he any money? None, but God would provide for him.

"Better stay in the Soudan and marry another woman, a believer," said his uncle; and then Ishmael answered in a quivering voice —

"No, no, by Allah! One wife I had, and if she was a Christian and was once a slave, I loved her, and never – never – shall another woman take her place."

He was ten years away, and only at long intervals did anybody hear of him, and it was sometimes from Mecca, sometimes from Jerusalem, sometimes from Rome and finally from the depths of the Libyan desert. Then he reappeared at Alexandria, and entering a little mosque he exercised his right as Alim and went up into the pulpit to preach.

His teaching was like fire, and men were like fuel before it. Day by day the crowds increased that came to hear him, until Alexandria seemed to be aflame, and he had to remove to the large mosque of Abou Abbas in the square of the same name.

Such was the man whom Gordon Lord was sent to arrest.

CHAPTER XV

"HEADQUARTERS, CARACOL ATTARIN,

"ALEXANDRIA.

"MY DEAREST HELENA, – I have seen my man and it is all a mistake! I can have no hesitation in saying so – a mistake! Wallahi! Ishmael Ameer is not the cause of the riots which are taking place here – never has been, never can be. And if his preaching should ever lead by any indirect means to sporadic outbursts of fanaticism the fault will be ours – ours, and nobody else's.

"Colonel Jenkinson and the Commandant of Police met me on my arrival. It seems my coming had somehow got wind, but the only effect of the rumour had been to increase the panic, for even the conservative elements among the Europeans had made a run on the gunsmiths' shops for firearms and – could you believe it? – on the chemists' for prussic acid to be used by their women in case of the worst.

"Next morning I saw my man for the first time. It was outside Abou Abbas on the toe of the East port, where the native population, with quiet Eastern greeting, of hands to the lips and forehead, were following him from his lodging to the mosque.

"My dear girl, he is not a bit like the man you imagined. Young – as young as I am, at all events – tall, very tall (his head showing above others in a crowd) with clean-cut face, brown complexion, skin soft and clear, hands like a woman's, and large, beaming black eyes as frank as a child's. His dress is purely Oriental, being white throughout save for the red slippers under the caftan and the tip of the tarboosh above the turban. No mealy-mouthed person, though, but a spontaneous, passionate man, careless alike of the frowns of men and the smiles of women, a real type of the Arab out of the desert, uncorrupted by the cities, a man of peace perhaps, but full of deadly fire and dauntless energy.

"My dear Helena, I liked my first sight of Ishmael Ameer, and thinking I saw in him some of the barbarous virtues we have civilised away, some of the fine old stuff of the Arab nobleman who would light his beacon to guide you to his tent even if you were his worst enemy, I could not help but say to myself, 'By – , here's a man I want to fight!'

"As soon as he had gone into the mosque I sent Hafiz and the two Egyptians after him by different doors with strict injunctions against collusion of any kind, and then went off to the police headquarters in the Governorat to await their report. Hafiz himself was the first to come to me, and he brought a circumstantial story. Not a word of sedition, not a syllable about the Christians, good, bad, or indifferent! Did the man flatter the Moslems? Exactly the reverse! Never had Hafiz heard such a rating of a congregation even from a Mohammedan preacher.

"The sermon had been on the degradation of woman in the East, which the preacher had denounced as a disgrace to their humanity. Christians believed it to be due to their faith, but what had degraded woman in Mohammedan countries was not the Mohammedan religion but the people's own degradation.

"'I dreamt last night,' he said, 'that in punishment of your offences against woman God lifted the passion of love out of the heart of man. What a chaos! A cockpit of selfishness and sin! Woman is meant to sweeten life, to bind its parts together – will you continue to degrade her? Fools! are you wiser than God, trying to undo what He has done?'

"Such was Ishmael's sermon as Hafiz reported it, and when the Egyptians came their account was essentially the same, but just at the moment when I was asking myself what there could be in teaching like this to set Moslem against Christian, tinkle-tinkle went the bell of the telephone, and the Commandant of Police, who had been listening with a supercilious smile, seemed to take a certain joy in telling me that his inspector in the quarter of Abou Abbas was calling for reinforcements because a fresh disturbance had broken out there.

"In three minutes I was on the spot, and the first thing I saw was the white figure of Ishmael Ameer lashing his way through a turbulent crowd, whereupon the Commandant, who was riding by my side, said, 'See that! Are you satisfied now, sir?' to which I answered, 'Don't be a fool,' with a stronger word to drive it home, and then made for the middle of the throng.

"It was all over before I got there, for Christians and Moslems alike were flying before Ishmael's face, and without waiting for a word of thanks he was gone too, and in another moment the square was clear, save for a dozen men, native and European, whom the police had put under arrest.

"With these rascals I returned to the Governorat and investigated the riot, which turned out to be a very petty affair, originating in an effort on the part of a couple of low-class Greeks to attend to the scriptural injunction to spoil the Egyptians by robbing a shop (covered only by a net) while its native owner was in the mosque.

"Next morning came a letter from Ishmael Ameer beginning, 'In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,' but otherwise written without preamble or circumlocution, saying he was aware that certain incidents in connection with his services had assumed an anti-Christian aspect, and begging to be permitted in the interests of peace, and in order to give a feeling of security to Europeans, to preach openly at noon the next day in the Square of Mohammed Ali.

"I need not tell you, my dear Helena, that everybody at the Governorat thought the letter a piece of appalling effrontery, and of course the Commandant, who is one of the good Christians with a rooted contempt for anything in a turban (forgetting that Jesus Christ probably wore one) made himself big with phrases out of Blue Books about the only way to suppress disorder being to refuse to let sedition show its head. But I have never been afraid of a mob, and thinking the situation justified the experiment I advised the Governor to let the man come.

"One thing I did, though, my dear Helena, and that was to dictate a pretty stiff reply saying I should be present myself with a battalion of soldiers, and if instead of pacifying the people he aggravated their hostility, I should make it my personal business to see that he would be the first to suffer.

"That night all the world and his wife declared that I was fishing in troubled waters, and I hear that some brave souls fled panic-stricken by the last train to Cairo, where they are now, I presume, preferring their petitions at the Agency, but next morning (that is to say, this morning) the air was calmer, and the great square, when I reached it, was as quiet as an inland sea.

"It was a wonderful sight, however, with the First Suffolk lining the east walls and the Second Berkshire lining the west, and the overflowing Egyptian and European populace between, standing together yet apart, like the hosts of Pharaoh and of Israel with the Red Sea dividing them.

"I rode up with Jenkinson a little before twelve, and I think the people saw that though we had permitted this unusual experiment in the interests of peace we meant business. A space had been kept clear for Ishmael at the foot of the statue of the great Khedive, and hardly had the last notes of the midday call to prayers died away when our man arrived. He was afoot, quite unattended, walking with an active step and that assured nobility of bearing which belongs to the Arab blood alone. He bowed to me, with a simple dignity that had not a particle either of fear or defiance, and again, Heaven knows why, I said to myself, 'By – , I want to fight that man!'

"Then he stepped on to the angerib that had been placed for him as a platform and began to speak. His first words were a surprise, being in English and faultlessly spoken.

"'The earth and the sky are full of trouble – God has afflicted us, praise to His name,' he began, and then, pointing to the warships that were just visible in the bay, he cried —

"'Men who are watching the heavens and who speak with authority tell us that great conflicts are coming among the nations of the world. Why is it so? What is dividing us? Is it race? We are the sons of one Father. Is it faith? It is the work of religion not only to set men free but to bind them together. Our Prophet says, 'Thou shalt love thy brother as thyself, and never act towards him but as thou wouldst that he should act towards thee.' The Gospel of Jesus Christ and the law of Moses say the same. The true Christian is the true Moslem – the true Moslem is the true Jew. All that is right in religion is included in one commandment – Love one another! Then why warfare between brethren so near akin?'

"His voice, my dear Helena, was such as I had never in my life heard before. It throbbed with the throb that is peculiar to the voice of the Arab singer, and seems to go through you like an electric current. His sermon, too, which was sometimes in English, sometimes in Arabic, the two languages so intermingled that the whole vast congregation of the cosmopolitan seaport seemed to follow him at once, was not like preaching at all, but vehement, enthusiastic, extempore prayer.

"I have sent a long account of it to the Consul-General, so I dare say you will see what it contained. It was the only preaching I ever heard that seemed to me to deserve the name of inspiration. Sedition! In one passage alone did it seem so much as to skirt the problem of England in Egypt, and then there was a spirit in the man's fiery words that was above the finest patriotism. Speaking of the universal hope of all religions, the hope of a time to come when the Almighty will make all the faiths of the world one faith, and all the peoples of the world one people, he said —

"'In visions of the night I see that promised day, and what is our Egypt then? She, the oldest of the nations, who has seen so many centuries of persecution and shame, trodden under the heel of hard task-masters, and buried in the sands of her deserts, what is she? She is the meeting-place of nations, the hand-clasp of two worlds, the interpreter and the peace-maker between East and West. We can never be a great nation – let us be a good one. Is it not enough? Look around! We stand amid ruins half as old as the earth itself – is it not worth waiting for?'

"Then in his last word, speaking first in Arabic, and afterwards in English, he cried —

"'Oh, men of many races, be brothers one to another. God is Most Great! God is Most Great! Take hands, O sons of one Father, believers in one God! Pray to Him who changes all things but Himself changeth not! God is Most Great! God is Most Great! Let Allahu-Akbar sound for ever through your souls!'

"The effect was overwhelming. Even some of the low-class Greeks and Italians were sobbing aloud, and our poor Egyptian children were like people possessed. Hungry, out of work, many of them wearing a single garment and that a ragged one, yet a new magnificence seemed to be given to their lives. Something radiant and glorious seemed to glimmer in the distance, making their present sufferings look small and mean.

"And I? I don't know, my dear Helena, how I can better tell you what I felt than by telling you what I did. I was looking down from the saddle at my First Suffolk and my Second Berkshire, standing in line with their poor little rifles, when something gripped me by the throat and I signed to the officers, shouted 'Back to your quarters!' and rode off, without waiting to see what would happen, because I knew.

"I have written both to the General and to my father, telling them I have not arrested Ishmael Ameer and don't intend to do so. If this is quackery and spiritual legerdemain to cover sedition and conspiracy I throw up the sponge and count myself among the fools. But Ishmael Ameer is one of the flame-bearers of the world. Let who will put him down – I will not.

"My dearest Helena, I've written all this about the new prophet and not a word about yourself, though I've been feeling the quivering grip of your hand in mine every moment of the time. The memory of that delicious quarter of an hour in the garden has sweetened the sulphurous air of Alexandria for me, and I'm in a fever to get back. Smash the Mahdi, you said, thinking if I didn't obey my father and yours I should offend both, and so lead to trouble between you and me. But the Consul-General is a just man if he is a hard one, and I should not deserve to be his son if I did not dare to warn him when he was going to do wrong. Neither should I deserve to be loved by the bravest girl alive if I hadn't the pluck to stand up for the right.

"Good-night, sweetheart! It's two in the morning, the town is as quiet as a desert village, and I'm going to turn in. GORDON.

"P.S.– Forgot to say Ishmael Ameer is to go up to Cairo shortly, so you'll soon see him for yourself. But Heaven help me! what is to become of Gordon Lord when you've once looked on this son of the wilderness?

"P.P.S.– Not an arrest since yesterday!"