"So?"
"So I concluded that the marks about the throat must have been made by somebody who had lost the third finger of his left hand."
Helena gazed a long time blankly into the surgeon's face, until at length, frozen by fear, having said all, he tried to convey the impression that he had said nothing.
"Miss Graves, I have given you pain—I feel I have. And mind, I do not say certainly that the hand at your father's throat was the cause of his death. It may have been used merely to push him off. But if the person seen last in the General's company was apparently quarrelling with him ... please understand, I make no accusations. I have never met Ishmael Ameer. And even if it should be found that he had this peculiarity ... of the third finger, I mean ... In any case, the Consul-General will not hear of an indictment, so I'm sure ... I'm sure I can rely on your discretion. But hearing you were going home, I felt I could not allow you to think that I had permitted your dear father——"
The surgeon went stammering on for some time longer, but Helena did not listen, and when at last the man backed himself out of her room, hugging his shallow soul with the flattering thought that in following his selfish impulse he had done well, she did not hear him go.
She was now sure of that which she had hitherto only half suspected. The Egyptian had killed her father! Killed him! there was no other word for it; not merely by the excitement his presence engendered but by actual violence. The authorities knew it, too, they knew it perfectly, but they were afraid—afraid in the absence of conclusive evidence—to risk the breakdown of a charge against one whom the people in their blindness worshipped.
The sky had grown blue and luminous by this time, the stars had come out in the distant depths of the heavens, and from the market-place below the ramparts of the Citadel there came up into the clear air the thick murmuring of the vast multitude that had gathered there, with ten thousand smoking torches, to follow the new prophet to the Arab cemetery beyond the town.
When Helena thought of the Egyptian again it was with an intensity of hatred she had never felt before. He had not only killed her father but he had been the first cause of the devilish entanglement which had led to Gordon's disgrace. Yet he was to escape punishment for these offences; he was to go on until some sin against the State had brought him into the meshes of its Ministers, while her father was in his grave and Gordon was in banishment and she ... she was sent home in her womanish helplessness and shame!
"O God, is there to be no one to punish this man?" she thought, in the dark searching of her soul, while her finger-nails were digging trenches in her palms and from the hard clenching of her teeth her lips were bleeding.
Then suddenly, in the delirium of her hatred of the Egyptian and the tragic tangle of her error, while she was standing alone in her desolate room, with the "Allah! Allah!" of Ishmael's followers surging up from below, a new feeling—a feeling she had never felt before—stirred in the depths of her abased and outraged soul.