It must refer to something else.

Perhaps the old merchant's stalwart headman had died of his wounds, and his father wished to send him--Orion--across the Nile to the Arab viceroy to obtain forgiveness for the murder of a Moslem, actually within the precincts of the governor's house.

This fatal blow might indeed entail serious consequences; however, the matter might very likely be quite other than this.
When he left his room the brooding heat that filled the house struck him as peculiarly oppressive, and a painful feeling, closely resembling shame, stole over him as he crossed the viridarium, and glanced at the grass from which--thanks to Paula's ill-meant warning--he had carefully brushed away his foot-marks before daybreak.

How cowardly, how base, it all was The best of all in life: honor, self-respect, the proud consciousness of being an honest man--all staked and all lost for nothing at all! He could have slapped his own face or cried aloud like a child that has broken its most treasured toy.

But of what use was all this?
What was done could not be undone; and now he must keep his wits about him so as to remain, in the eyes of others at least, what he had always been, low as he had fallen in his own.
It was scorchingly hot in the enclosed garden-plot, surrounded by buildings, and open to the sun; not a human creature was in sight; the house seemed dead.