"Listen," said Helena, and she read Gordon's account of his visit to the Grand Cadi, when the "oily scoundrel" had called his father "the slave of power," "the evil-doer," "the adventurer," and "the great assassin."
"Then why didn't he come like a man and tell me himself?" asked the Consul-General.
"Listen again, sir," said Helena, and she read what Gordon had said of his impulse to go to his father, in order to disclose the Grand Cadi's duplicity, and then of the reasons restraining him, being sure that his father was aiming at a coup, and that, acting from a high sense of duty, the Consul-General would hand him over to the military authorities before the work he had come to do had been done.
"But didn't he see what he was doing himself—aiding and abetting a conspiracy?"
"Listen once more, please," said Helena, and she read what Gordon had said of Ishmael's pilgrimage—that while his father thought the Prophet was bringing up an armed force, he was merely leading a vast multitude of religious visionaries, who were expecting to establish in Cairo a millennium of universal faith and empire.
"But, even so, was it necessary to do what he did?" demanded the Consul-General.
"Listen for the last time, sir," said Helena, and then in her soft, earnest, pleading voice, she read—
"'It is necessary to prevent the massacre which I know (and my father does not) would inevitably ensue; necessary to save my father himself from the execrations of the civilised world; necessary to save Ishmael from the tragic consequences of his determined fanaticism; necessary to save England——'"
"Give them to me," said the Consul-General, taking—almost snatching—the letters out of Helena's hands in the fierce nervous tension which left him no time to think of courtesies.
Then drawing a chair up to the table, and fixing his eyeglasses over his spectacles, he turned the pages one by one and read passages here and there. Helena watched him while he did so, and in the changing expression of the hitherto hard, immobile, implacable face she saw the effect that was being produced.