Gordon did not speak until they reached the foot of the hill. Then he said—
"I must go up and lie down. Good-night, old fellow! God bless you!"
CHAPTER XVII
Half-an-hour earlier, Gordon's guard, now transformed into his soldier servant, had been startled by the appearance of an Egyptian, wearing the flowing white robes of a Sheikh, and asking in almost faultless English for Colonel Lord.
"The Colonel has gone to the station to see his lordship off to England, but I'm expecting him back presently," said the orderly.
"I'll wait," said the Sheikh, and the orderly showed, him into Gordon's room.
"Looks like a bloomin' death's-head! Wonder if he's the bloomin' Prophet they're jawrin' about!"
Since coming into Cairo Ishmael had been a prey to thoughts that were indeed akin to madness. Perhaps he was seized by one of those nervous maladies in which a man no longer belongs to himself. Certainly he suffered the pangs of heart and brain which come only to the purest and most spiritual souls in their darkest hours, and seem to make it literally true that their tortured spirits descend into hell.
Now that his anxiety for his followers was relaxed and their hopes had in some measure been realised, his mind swung back to the sorrowful decay and ruin that had fallen upon himself. It was no longer the shame of the prophet but the bereavement of the man that tormented him. His lacerated heart left him no power of thinking or feeling anything but the loss of Helena.
Again he saw her beaming eyes, her long black lashes, and her smiling mouth. Again he heard her voice, and again the sweet perfume of her presence seemed to be about him. That all this was lost to him for ever, that henceforth he had to put away from him all the sweetness, all the beauty, all the tenderness of a woman's life linked with his, brought him a paroxysm of pain in which it seemed as if his heart would break and die.