She was put into a carriage with the Consul-General and sat by his side without speaking, merely looking through the windows at the crowds that stood in the streets, quietly, silently, but without much grief on their faces, and listening to the slow squirling of the "Dead March" and the roll of the muffled drums over the dull rumbling of the closed coach.
When they reached the cemetery in the desolate quarter of Old Cairo, and the band stopped and the drumming ceased and she stepped out of the carriage, and the breathing silence of the open air was broken by the tremendous words, "I am the Resurrection and the Life," she was sure, as she took the arm of the Consul-General and walked with him over the crackling gravel to the door of the chapel, that the moment she crossed its threshold the first person she would see would be Gordon.
Her heart sank lower than ever when she realised that he was not there, and after she had taken her seat and the chill chapel had filled up behind her, and the service began, she tried in vain, save at moments of poignant memory, to fix her mind on the awful errand that had brought her.
"He will be at the graveside," she thought. No one would arrest him at a place like that. English soldiers were English gentlemen, and if the Arab nobleman in the desert could allow the enemy who had stumbled into his tent at night to get clear away in the morning. Gordon would be allowed to stand by the grave of his friend and General, and no one would know he was there.
When the short service was over and the Consul-General drew her hand through his arm again, and they walked together over the gravel and through the grass to the open grave behind the rose-bushes that grew near to the wall, she thought she knew she had only to raise her eyes from the ground and she would see Gordon standing there, shaken with sobs.
She knew, too, that the moment she saw him she would break down altogether, so she kept her head low as long as she could. But when the troops had formed in a rectangle, and the Chaplain had taken his place and the last words had been spoken, and through a deeper hush the bugle had led the voices of the soldiers with—
"Father, in Thy gracious keeping
Leave we now Thy servant sleeping,"
and she looked up at last and saw that Gordon had not come at all, she felt as if something that had been soft and tender within her had broken, and something that was hard and bitter had taken its place.
While the volleys were being fired over the grave the officers of the army came up to her one by one—brave men all of them, but many of them hardly able at that moment to speak or see. Still she did not weep, and when the Consul-General, with twitching lips, said, "Let us go," she gave him her hand again, though it was limp and nerveless now, and, under her long black glove, as cold as snow.
The blinds were drawn up in her room when she returned to the Citadel, and with eyes that did not see she was staring out on its far view of the city, the Nile, the Pyramids, and the rolling waves of desert beyond, when a knock came to the door and the Consul-General entered. He was clearly much affected. His firm mouth, which often looked as if it had been cast in bronze, seemed now to be blown in foam.