Meantime Helena, in another room, still wearing her mixed Eastern and Western dress, was sitting by a table in an attitude of supplication, with her arms outstretched and her hands clasped across a corner of it, speaking earnestly and rapidly to the Consul-General, who was standing with head down in front of her.
Pale, in spite of the heat of the South and the sun of the desert, very nervous, flurried, and a little ashamed, yet with a sense of urgent necessity, she was telling him all that had happened since she left Cairo—how she had gone to Khartoum under an impulse of revenge that was inspired by a mistaken idea of the cause of her father's death; how, being there, she had been compelled to accept the position of Ishmael's nominal wife or go back with her errand unfulfilled; how she had come to know of the base proposals of certain of the Ulema, and how, at length, when Ishmael had succumbed to the last of them, she had written and dispatched her letter saying he was coming into Cairo in disguise.
Then in her soft voice, with its deep note, she told of Gordon's arrival in Khartoum; of his own tragic mistake and awful sufferings; of his confession to her; of her confession to him; and of how she realised her error, but found herself powerless to overtake or undo it.
Finally she told the Consul-General of Gordon's determination to take Ishmael's place, being impelled to do so by the firmest conviction that his father was being deceived by some one in Cairo, by the certainty that Ishmael could not otherwise be moved from his fanatical purpose, and that while the consequences of his own arrest must be merely personal to himself, the result of Ishmael's death at the hands of the authorities might be a holy war, which would put Egypt in the right and England in the wrong, and cover his father's honoured name with infamy.
The old man listened eagerly, standing as long as he could on the same spot, then walking to and fro with nervous and irregular steps, but stopping at intervals as if breathless from an overpowering sense of the hand of fate.
Having finished her story, Helena produced Gordon's letters from the little handbag which hung from one of her arms, and having kissed them, as if the Consul-General had not been present, she began with panting affection to read passages from them in proof of what she had said.
Being a woman, she knew by instinct what to read first, and one by one came the passionate words which told of Gordon's affection for the father whom he felt bound to resist.
"'My father,'" she read, "'is a great man who probably does not need and would certainly resent my compassion, but, Lord God, how I pity him! Deceived by false friends, alone in his old age, after all he has done for Egypt!'"
The old man stopped her and said—
"But how did he know that—that I was being deceived? What right had he to say so?"