"But have no fear at all," he said, standing behind her and smoothing her cheek with a light touch of his tapering fingers. "If this is God’s work will God forget me? No!"
With a sense of stifling duplicity Helena made one more effort and said—
"Still, who knows, there may be some one——"
"I don’t want to know anything except one thing—that God guides and directs me."
Again he laughed, and asked where was the kufiah (the Bedouin head-dress) which she had promised to make for his disguise.
"Get to work at it quick," he said; "it will be wanted soon, my sister."
And then, clapping his hands for the mid-day meal, he went into his room to prepare for it, leaving Gordon and Helena for some moments alone together.
Gordon had been standing aside in the torment of a hundred mixed emotions, and now he and Helena spoke in whispers.
"He is determined to go into Cairo," she said.
"Let us ... Let us wait and see," said Gordon, and then Abdullah came in to lay the table.
As soon as the mid-day meal was over Gordon escaped to his room—the room he shared with Ishmael—and throwing himself down on the angerib with his hands clasped across his face, he tried to think out the situation in which he found himself, to gaze into the depths of his conscience, and to see where he was and what he ought to do.
So violent was the state of his soul that he sat there a long time before he could link together his memories of what had happened since he arrived in Khartoum.
"Am I dreaming?" he asked himself again and again, as one by one his thoughts rolled over him like tempestuous waves.
The first thing he saw clearly was that Ishmael was not now the same man that he had known at Alexandria; that the anxieties, responsibilities, and sufferings he had gone through as a religious leader had dissipated his strong common sense; and that as a consequence the caution whereby men guard their conduct had gone.
He also saw that Ishmael’s spiritual ecstasy had reached a point not far removed from madness; that his faith in divine guidance, divine guardianship, divine intervention had become an absolute obsession.
Therefore it was hopeless to try to move him from his purpose by any appeals on the score of danger to himself or to his people.