G.A. Henty - With Kitchener in the Soudan - a story of Atbara and Omdurman

"'You are heartily welcome, sir,' he said; 'but I fear that you have come into an even greater danger than you have left, for our position here is well-nigh desperate. For months I have been praying for aid from England, and my last news was that it was just setting out, so I fear there is no hope that it will reach me in time. The government of England will have to answer before God for their desertion of me, and of the poor people here whom they sent me to protect from the Mahdi. For myself I am content. I have done my duty as far as lay in my power, but I had a right to rely upon receiving support from those who sent me. I am in the hands of God. But for the many thousands who trusted in me and remained here I feel very deeply. Now the first thing is to provide you with clothes. I am expecting Colonel Stewart here every minute, and he will see that you are made comfortable.'

"' I shall be glad to place myself at your disposal, sir,' I said. 'I speak Arabic fluently, and shall be ready to perform any service of which I may be capable.'

"I thank you,' he said,and will avail myself of your offer if I see any occasion; but at present we have rather to suffer than to do. We have occasional fights, but of late the attacks have been feeble, and I think that the Mahdi depends upon hunger rather than force to obtain possession of this town. This evening I will ask you to tell me your stoty. Colonel Stewart will show you a room. There is only one other white man—Mr. Power—here. We live together as one family, of which you will now be a member.'

" I felt strange when I came to put on my European clothes. Mr. Power, who tells me he has been here for some years as correspondent of the Times, has this afternoon taken me round the defences and into the workshops. I think the place can resist any attacks if the troops remain faithful, but of this there is a doubt. A good many of the Soudanese have already been sent away. As Gordon said at dinner this evening, if he had but a score of English officers he would be perfectly confident that he could resist any enemy save starvation.

"September 12th. —It has been settled that Colonel Stewart and Mr. Power are to go down the river in the Abbas, and I am to go with them. The General proposed it to me. I said that I could not think of leaving him here by himself, so he said kindly:I thank you, Mr. Hilliard, but you could do no good here, and would only be throwing away your life. We can hold on to the end of the year, though the pinch will be very severe; but I think we can make the stores last till then. But by the end of December our last crust will have been eaten, and the end will have come. It will be a satisfaction to me to know that I have done my best, and fail only because of the miserable delays and hesitation of government.' So it is settled that I am going. The gun-boats are to escort us for some distance. Were it not for Gordon I should feel delighted at the prospect. It is horrible to leave him—one of the noblest Englishmen!—alone to his fate. My only consolation is, that if I remained I could not avert it, but should only be a sharer in it.

"September 18th. —We left Khartoum on the 14th and came down without any serious trouble until this morning, when the boat struck on a rock in the cataract opposite a village called Hebbeh. A hole has been knocked in her bottom, and there is not a shadow of hope of getting her off. Numbers of the natives have gathered on the shore. I have advised that we should disregard their invitations to land, but that, as there would be no animosity against the black crew, they would be safe; and that we three whites should take the ship's boat and four of the crew, put provisions for a week on board, and make our way down the river. Colonel Stewart, however, feels convinced that the people can be trusted, and that we had better land and place ourselves under the protection of the sheik. He does not know the Arabs as well as I do. However, as he has determined to go ashore, I can do nothing. I consider it unlikely in the extreme that there will be any additions to this journal. If at any time in the future this should fall into the hands of any of my countrymen, I pray that they will send it down to my dear wife, Mrs. Hilliard, whom, I pray, God may bless and comfort, care of the Manager of the Bank, Cairo."

CHAPTEE XX

A MOMENTOUS COMMUNICATION

GREGORY had, after finishing the record, sat without moving until the dinner-hour. It was a relief to him to know that his father had not spent the last years of his life as he had feared, as a miserable slave—ill-treated, reviled, insulted, perhaps chained and beaten by some brutal taskmaster; but had been in a position where, save that he was an exile, kept from his home and wife, his lot had not been unbearable. He knew more of him than he had ever known before. It was* as a husband that his mother had always spoken of him; but here he saw that he was daring, full of resource, quick to grasp any opportunity, hopeful and yet patient, longing eagerly to rejoin his wife, and yet content to wait until the chances should be all in his favour. He was unaffectedly glad thus to know him, to be able in future to think of him as one of whom he would have been proud, who would assuredly have won his way to distinction.

It was not so that he had before thought of him. His mother had said that he was of good family, and that it was on account of his marriage with her that he had quarrelled with his relations. It had always seemed strange to him that he should have been content to take, as she had told him, an altogether subordinate position in a mercantile house in Alexandria. She had accounted for his knowledge of Arabic by the fact that he had been for two years exploring the temples and tombs of Egypt with a learned professor; but surely, as a man of good family, he could have found something to do in England instead of coming out to take so humble a post in Egypt. Gregory knew nothing of the difficulty that a young man in England has in obtaining an appointment of any kind or of fighting his way single-handed. Influence went for much in Egypt, and it seemed to him that even if his father had quarrelled with his own people there must have been many ways open to him of maintaining himself honourably. Therefore he had always thought that although he might have been all that his mother described him—the tenderest and most loving of husbands, a gentleman, and estimable in all respects—his father must have been wanting in energy and ambition, deficient in the qualities that would fit him to fight his own battle, and content to gain a mere competence instead of struggling hard to make his way up the ladder.

He had accounted for his going up as interpreter with Hicks Pasha by the fact that his work with the contractor was at an end, and that he saw no other opening for himself. He now understood how mistaken he had been in his estimate of his father's character, and wondered even more than before why he should have taken that humble post at Alexandria. His mother had certainly told him again and again that he had done so simply because the doctors had said that she could not live in England; but surely in all the wide empire of England there must be innumerable posts that a gentleman could obtain. Perhaps he should understand it better some day; at present it seemed unaccountable to him. He felt sure that, had he lived, his father would have made a name for himself, and that it was in that hope, and not of the pay that he would receive as an interpreter, that he had gone up with Hicks, and that had he not died at that little village by the Nile he would assuredly have done so, for the narrative he had left behind him would in itself, if published, have shown what stuff there was in him. It was hard that fate should have snatched him away just when it had seemed that his trials were over, that he was on the point of being reunited to his wife. Still, it was a consolation to know he had died suddenly, as one falls in battle, not as a slave worn out by grief and suffering.