"Impossible! utterly impossible!" he told himself.
A grim vision rose before him of a shameful life, corrupted by hypocrisy and damned by deceit, in which he was married to Helena, having succeeded to her father's rank and occupying his house, his room, his office, with one sight standing before his eyes always—the sight of the General's body lying on the floor where he had flung it.
"O God, save me from that!" he thought.
Gordon dropped back to the bed and sat on the edge of it, doubled up and with his hands covering his face. How long he sat there he never knew, for his mind was deadened to all sense of time, and only at intervals of lucidity was he partly conscious of what was going on outside the little pulseless place in which he was hidden away while the world went on without him.
At one moment he heard the bells of the Coptic Cathedral ringing for evensong; then the light pattering as of rain when the people passed over the pavement into the church; and then suddenly there came a sound that seemed to beat on his very soul.
It was the firing of the guns at the Citadel, and as a soldier he knew what they were—they were the minute guns for the General's funeral. Boom—boom! He could see what was taking place as plainly as if his eyes beheld it; the square of the mosque lined up with troops—two battalions of Infantry, one regiment of Cavalry, and two batteries of Artillery. Boom—boom! The coffin on the gun-carriage covered with the silken Union Jack and with the General's sword and his plumed white helmet on the top of all. Boom—boom! The General's charger immediately behind the body, with his spurred boots in the stirrups reversed. Boom—boom—boom! The officers of the Army of Occupation drawn up by the door of the General's house, every one of them that could be spared from duty except himself, who ought, above all others, to be there. Then the carriages of the Consul-General and of the Egyptian Prime Minister, and then boom—boom—boom—boom, as the cortège moved away to the slow squirling of the funeral march, through the square of the mosque and under the gate of the old fortress.
The firing ceased, and in the dumb emptiness of the air Gordon saw another sight that tore at his heart still more terribly. It was a room in the General's house, dark and blind, with curtains drawn, and Helena sitting there, alone for the first time, and no one to comfort her. Seeing this, and thinking of the barrier that was between them, of the blood that was dividing them, and that they could never again come together, all his manhood went down at last, and he burst into tears like a boy.
"Forgive me, Helena! I am alone too! Forgive me, forgive me!"
Then over the sound of his own voice he heard the innocent voices of the choir-boys singing their evening hymn—"Remove my sin from before Thy sight, O God!"—and at the next moment he was conscious of an old and wrinkled hand being laid on his bare arm and of somebody by his side who was saying huskily—
"Peace, my son! God is merciful!"