Helena turned and fled from the room in agony at the harrowing scene, and the Consul-General, unable to bear the sight of it, rose and walked to the window, his face broken up with pain as no one had ever seen it before.
Then the General, who had been worked up to a towering rage by his own words and acts, lost himself utterly, and saying—
"You are unfit to wear the decorations of an English soldier. Take them off, take them off!" he laid hold of Gordon's medals—the Distinguished Service Order, the South African Medal with its four clasps, the British Soudan Medal, the Medjidieh, and the Khedive's star—and tore them from his tunic, ripping pieces of the cloth away with them, and threw them on the ground.
Then in a voice like the scream of a wild bird, he cried—
"Now go! Go back to your quarters and consider yourself under arrest. Or take my advice and be off altogether. Quit the army you have dishonoured and the friends you have disgraced and hide your infamous conduct in some foreign land. Leave the room at once!"
Gordon had stood through this gross indignity bolt upright and without speaking. His face had become deadly white and his colourless lower lip had trembled. At the end, while the old General was taking gusts of breath, he tried to say something, but his tongue refused to speak. At length he staggered rather than walked to the door, and with his hand on the handle he turned and said quietly, but in a voice which his father never forgot—
"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."
Then he stumbled out of the room.
CHAPTER XXIV
Out in the hall he had an impulse to turn towards Helena's room on the right, but through his half-blind eyes he saw Helena herself on the left, standing by the open entrance to the garden, with her handkerchief at her mouth.