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—