Helena heard it, and, with her heart still poisoned against Ishmael, it made her yet more bitter against him, as one who for his own ends was holding the poor, weak people under their cruel fate by the spell of superstitious hopes and fears.
Knowing the Moslem ethics of warfare, that it is only wicked when it is likely to fail, she convinced herself that Ishmael was merely biding his time for the execution of some violent scheme, and remembering his secret (the secret of the crime he thought he had hidden from everybody), the idea took possession of her that he was laying some personal plot against the Consul-General.
One day a lanky fellow, with a short-cut Moslem beard, arrived by train, and, after the usual Arabic salutations, produced a letter. It ran—
"The bearer of this is Abdel Kader, and he is our envoy to you with a solemn message which is too secret to commit to paper. Trust him. He is honest and his word is true.—Your friends, who wait for you in Cairo with outstretched arms——"
And then followed the names not only of many of the Ulema of Cairo but of most of the Notables as well.
Abdel Kader proved to be a sort of Arab Don Quixote, full of fine language and grand sentiments. Much of this he expended upon Ishmael in the secrecy of the carefully guarded guest-room before he came to the substance of his message, which was to say that as a great doctor of Moslem law, Gamal-ed-Deen, had upheld assassination itself as a last means of righting the wrongs of the people, the leaders had reluctantly concluded that the English Lord (Lord Nuneham) must be removed in order that his heavy foot might be lifted from the necks of the oppressed. To this end they had decided that he should be assassinated some day as he passed in his carriage on his afternoon drive over the Kasr-el-Nil bridge, but lacking a person capable of taking the lead in such an affair they appealed to Ishmael to return to Cairo for this purpose.
Having discharged himself of the burden of his message, the Arab Don Quixote was proceeding with many large words, that were intended to show how safely this act of righteous vengeance might be executed by one whom the law dared not touch for fear of the people, when Ishmael, who had listened breathlessly, burst out on him and cried—
"No, no, I tell you, no! Return to them that sent you and say, 'Ishmael Ameer is no murderer.' Say, too, that the world has no use for patriots who would right the people by putting them in the wrong. Away with you! Away!"
At that, he rose up and went out of the guest-room with a flaming face, leaving the envoy to strike his forehead, and to curse the day that had brought him.
Helena, who, with old Mahmud, had been present at this interview, found herself utterly shaken at the end of it by a storm of conflicting feelings, and from that time forward her heart was constantly being surprised by emotions which she had hitherto struggled to suppress.