"I am one of those who think," he was saying, "that just as religious leaders, Popes as well as Mahdis, may go to wreck under the mental malady which permits them to believe they are the mouthpieces of the Almighty, so statesmen may be destroyed by the seeds of dissolution which power, especially absolute power, carries within itself.
"Holding this opinion, I also hold that to place one person in sole charge of millions of people of a different race, creed, and mode of thought, is to put a load on one man's shoulders which no man, whatever his power and influence, his integrity and the nobility of his principles, ought to be called upon to bear."
But the heavy-lidded house on the Nile was asleep. The Consul-General did not hear.
CHAPTER X
When Ishmael left Helena's tent he did not return to his own. In the torment of his soul he sought the solitude of the desert. For two hours he walked on the sand without knowing where he was going. The night was dark, save for an innumerable army of stars, an eastern night, still and fragrant, but the unhappy man was wandering in it like a creature accursed, a prey to the most terrible upheaval of the soul, the most bitter and sorrowful reflections.
His first thoughts were about Helena—that all the sweetness, all the loveliness which had been his joy by day and his dream by night belonged not to him, but to another.
"I am nothing to her," he told himself, and greater grief than he felt at that thought seemed to surpass the bounds of possibility.
But there was worse behind. At the next moment of his anguish he remembered that not only did Helena not love him, but he was repulsive to her. "Don't you see you are hateful and odious to me—that you are a black man, and I am a white woman?"
This was more than heartrending—it was physically excruciating, like poison creeping under the skin. But it had its spiritual torture also. He who had built his life on the belief that the sons and daughters of men were all children of one Father, had found out in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, within his own camp, in his own tent, that Nature gave the lie to his faith, and that he—he himself—was only as a black man to the white woman whom he called his wife.
"I thought that where love was there could be neither race nor colour, but I was wrong, quite wrong," he told himself again, and it seemed as if everything that had built up his soul was crumbling away.