"Who's there now?" cried the Consul-General.
It was his First Secretary. The Adviser to the Ministry of Justice had come to say that the Special Tribunal had been summoned and the Judges were waiting for further instructions.
"Tell them there will be no sitting to-night," said the Consul-General.
A little later there was yet another knock at the door. It was the Secretary again. The Adviser to the Ministry of the Interior had called him up on the telephone to say that, according to instructions, the gallows had been set up in the Square in front of the Governorat, and now he wished to know——
"Tell the men to take it down again at once, and don't come up again," said the Consul-General in a voice that was hoarse with wrath and thick with shame.
These interruptions had been like visitations of the spirits of the dead to a tormented murderer, and it was some time before the Consul-General could bring his mind back to the mystery before him. When he was able to do so he asked himself how it had come to pass that if Gordon had been in Khartoum, and if he had been duped into taking Ishmael's place, Helena had not informed him of the change? Where had she been? Where was she now? What had become of her? Could it be possible that she, too, by her love for Gordon, had been won over to the side of his enemies?
Thinking of that as a possible explanation of the devilish tangle of circumstance by which he was surrounded, the Consul-General's wrath against Gordon rose to a frenzy of madness. Fierce and wild imprecations broke from his mouth, such as had never passed his lips before, and then, suddenly remembering that they were directed against his own flesh and blood, his own son, he cried, in the midst of his fury and passion—
"No, no! God forgive me! Not that!"
Ibrahim knocked at the door again. The Grand Cadi had come, and begged the inestimable privilege of approaching his Excellency's honourable person.
"Say I can't see him," said the Consul-General, and then sitting down on a sofa in an alcove of the room he tried his best to compose himself.