Gordon’s voice thickened, and Ishmael said—
"She had the consolations of her religion, and I think she passed in peace. There was only one thing clouded her closing hours. On her deathbed she was constantly expressing an earnest hope that you might all be re-united—you and she and your father and Helena, who are now so far apart."
"Take time, O my brother," said Ishmael, and seeing that Helena also was moved, he took her hand too, as if to strengthen her.
Thus he sat between them, comforting both, while Gordon in a husky voice struggled on—
"Not long before she died she wished to send you a message, but the power of life was low in her, and she could not write, except to sign her name (as you see below), and then she did not know where you were to be found. But my mother promised her that I should take care that whatever she said should come to your hands, and these were the words she sent: ’Tell my boy that my last thoughts were about him. Though I am sorry he took the side of the false ... the false prophet——’"
"Go on, brother, go on," said Ishmael in his soft voice.
"’Say I am certain he did what he thought was right. Be sure you tell him I died happy, because ... because I know I shall see him again. If I am never to see him in this world I shall do so in the world to come. Say ... say I shall be waiting for him there. And tell him it will not seem long.’"
It was with difficulty that Gordon came to the end, for his eyes were full of tears and his throat was parched and tight, and he would have broken down altogether but for the sense of Helena’s presence by his side.
Ishmael was now more deeply moved than before.
"How she must have loved you!" he said, and then he began to speak of his own mother, and what she had done for him.
"She was only a poor, ignorant woman perhaps, but she died to save me, and I loved her with all my heart."
At that the two black servants, Abdullah and Zogal, who had been standing before Gordon in silence, tried to utter some homely words of comfort, and old Mahmud, wiping his wet eyes, said—
"May God be merciful to your mother, my son, and forgive her all her sins."
"She was a saint—she never had any," replied Gordon, whereupon the Arab nurse, who alone of all that household had looked on at this scene with dry and evil eyes, said bitterly—