CHAPTER X
After that she sat down, for her heart was beating violently and she could scarcely breathe. At the same moment she caught sight of her face in a hand-glass that stood on the table at which she wrote, and the features looked so strange that they scarcely seemed to be her own.
If anybody with the eye of the spirit could have gazed at that moment into the deepest recesses of her soul—harder to look into than the obscurity of the sea—he would have seen a battlefield of contending passions. She was reflecting for the first time on the whole meaning of what she had done. She had condemned Ishmael Ameer to death! Or at least, at the very least, to lifelong imprisonment in Damietta or Torah!
When she put it so the furnace of her conscience seemed to consume her, and in order to live with herself she had to oppose that thought with thoughts of Gordon—Gordon gone, she knew not where, an exile, an outcast, his brilliant young life wasted, never to be seen again.
This relieved the riot in her brain, and to ease her heart still further she made herself believe that what she had done had not been to revenge herself but to avenge Gordon, whom Ishmael's evil influence had destroyed.
"Serve him right," she thought. "Let him go to Damietta! What better does he deserve?"
At that moment Ayesha, Ishmael's little daughter, came running with bare feet into the house, and seeing Helena she leapt into her arms and kissed her. The kiss of the child seemed like a blow—it made her dizzy.
At the next moment, while Ayesha was mumbling affectionate play-words which Helena did not hear, and Zenoba, the Arab nurse, stood beating her impatient foot upon the floor, there came from outside the murmur of a crowd. It was the crowd of Ishmael's followers, bringing him home from the mosque.
They were calling upon God and His Prophet to bless him, touching his white caftan as if it were divine and virtue were coming out of him.
He dismissed them with words of rebuke—gentler and more indulgent than before, perhaps—and, entering the house, he called for food.