He recalled the promises he had made to himself, of taking up the life of a man when his work was done. His work was done now—in some sort ended, at all events—but the prize he had promised himself had been snatched away. She was gone, she who had been all his joy. An impassable gulf divided them. The infinite radiance of hope and love that was to have crowned his restless and stormy life had disappeared. Henceforth he must walk through the world alone.
"O God, can it be?" he asked himself, with the startled agony of one who awakes from single-pillowed sleep and remembers that he is bereaved.
If anything had been necessary to make his position intolerable, it came with the thought that all this was due to the treachery of the man he had loved and trusted, the man he had believed to be his friend and brother, the one being, besides the woman, who had gone to his heart of hearts. The Rani had confessed to him that she loved "Omar," and notwithstanding that all his life he had struggled to liberate himself from the prejudices of his race, yet now, in the melancholy broodings of his Eastern brain, he could not escape from the conclusion that the only love possible between a man and the wife of another was guilty love.
When he thought of that both body and soul seemed to be afire, and he became conscious of a feeling about "Omar" which he had never experienced before towards any human creature—a feeling of furious and inextinguishable hatred.
He began to be afraid of himself, and just as a dog will shun its kind and hide itself from sight when it feels the poison of madness working in its blood, so Ishmael, under the secret trouble which he dared reveal to none, shut himself up in his sleeping-room in the old Chancellor's house.
It was a small and silent chamber at the back, overlooking a little paved courtyard containing a well, and bounded by a very high wall that shut off sight and sound of the city outside. Once a day an old man in a blue galabeah came into the court to draw water, and twice a day a servant of the Sheikhs came into the room with food. Save for these two, and the old Chancellor himself at intervals, Ishmael saw no one for nine days, and in the solitude and semi-darkness of his self-imposed prison a hundred phantoms were bred in his distempered brain.
On the second day after his retirement the Chancellor came to tell him that his emissary, his missionary, "Omar Benani," had been identified on his arrest, that in his true character as Colonel Lord he was to be tried by his fellow-officers for his supposed offences as a soldier at the time of the assault on El Azhar, and that the only sentence that could possibly be passed upon him would be death. At this news, which the Chancellor delivered with a sad face, Ishmael felt a fierce but secret joy.
"God's arm is long," he told himself. "He allowed the man to escape while his aims were good, but now he is going to punish him for his treachery and deceit."
Three days afterwards the old Chancellor came again to say that Colonel Lord had been tried and condemned to death, as everybody had foreseen and expected, but nevertheless the sympathy of all men was with him, because he was seen to have acted from the noblest motives, withstanding his own father for what he believed to be the right, and exposing himself to the charge of being a bad son and a poor patriot in order to prevent bloodshed; that he had indeed prevented bloodshed by preventing a collision of the British and Native armies; that it had been by his efforts that the pilgrimage had been able to enter Cairo in peace; and that in recognition of the great sacrifice made by the Christian soldier for the love of humanity, the Ulema were joining with others in petitioning his King to pardon him.
At this news a chill came over Ishmael. His heart grew cold as stone, and when the Chancellor was gone, he found himself praying—