"MY DEAKEST HELENA,—El Hamdullillah! Hamid brought me the letter you gave him at Assouan and I nearly fell on his neck and kissed him. He also told me you were looking 'stout and well,' and added, with an expression of astonishment, that you were 'the sweetest and most beautiful woman in the world.' Of course you are—what the deuce did he expect you to be?
"I am not ashamed to say that while I read your letter I was either laughing like a boy or crying like a baby. What wonder? Helena was speaking to me! I could see her very eyes, hear her very voice, feel her very hand. No dream this time, no dear, sweet, murderous make-believe, but Helena herself, actually Helena!
"I am not surprised, dearest, at what you tell me of the development of the masculine side of Ishmael's interest in you. It was what I feared and foresaw, yet how I am to stay here, now that I know it has come to pass, heaven alone can say. I suppose I must, or else everything I have come for, lived for, hoped for, and fought for will be wasted and thrown away. Thank God, I have always hitherto been able, even in my blackest hours, to rely on your love and courage, and I shall continue to do so, and to tell myself that if you are in Ishmael's camp it must be for some good and useful purpose, although I know that in the dead waste of every blessed night I shall have some damnable pricks from the green-eyed monster, not to speak of downright fear and honest conscience.
"Neither am I at all surprised at what you say of the growth of the Mahdist element in and around Ishmael, though that is a pity in itself and a deadly misfortune in relation to the Government. Of course it is the old wretched story over again—the moment a man arises who has anything of the divine in him, an apostle of the soul of humanity, a flame-bearer in a realm of darkness, the world jumps on him, body and soul, and he finds he has brought not peace but a sword. The Governments of the world do not want the divine, for the simple reason that the divine begets divided authority, which begets divided allegiance, which begets riot and insurrection, so down with the divine!—hang it, quarter it, crucify it—which is precisely what they have been doing with it for two thousand years at all events.
"That, too, is a reason why I cannot carry out my first intention of going to my father, and another is that I see only too plainly now that he is playing for a coup. Not that I believe for a moment that like the authorities under arbitrary Governments (Russian, for example) my father would use provocation even if it were the only means by which peaceful work and life seemed possible, but I fear he is becoming a sort of conscientious collaborator with the accursed Grand Cadi, by acquiescing in conspiracy and permitting it to go on until it has reached a head in order to crush it with one blow.
"God forgive me if I am judging my own father, but I cannot help it. There is such a thing as being 'drunk with power,' as the Arabs say, and everything points to the fact that the Consul-General counts on making one surprising and overwhelming effort to suppress this unrest. That he did not take me (in my character of Ishmael) on my arrival in Cairo points to it, and that he has invited me to the dinner in honour of the King's Birthday puts it beyond the shadow of a doubt.
"How do I know that? I'll tell you how. Do you remember that when Ishmael's return was first proposed it was suggested that he should enter the city while the Consul-General and his officials were feasting on the Ghezirah, the bridge of their island being drawn and the key of the Pavilion being turned on them? Well, that was the scheme of the Cadi, and I have reason to believe that having obtained Ishmael's consent to it, he straightway revealed it to my father.
"What is the result? The Consul-General has invited the conspirators to join him at his festivities, so that while they think they are to hold him prisoner on Ghezirah until Ishmael's followers have entered Cairo, he will in fact be holding them, the whole boiling of them, including myself, especially myself, thus arresting his enemies in a bunch at the very moment when their rebellion is being put down on the other side of the Nile.
"There is something tragic in the idea that if I go to that dinner my father may find that there has been one gigantic error in his calculations, and I hate the thought of going, but if I go I go, and (D.V.) I shall not shrink.
"Good-night, dearest! 'Where is she now?' I ask myself for the nine-hundredth time, and for the nine-hundred and first time I answer, 'Wherever she is she is mine and nobody else's.' In-sha-allah!"