What the business might be on which Muzaffir wanted me I neither knew nor greatly cared. I took my seat in the train that was to bear me towards the Balkan Peninsula, firmly resolved that his business should give way to mine.
On my way across Central Europe I found the papers already full of the touching story of the benevolent young despot and his triumph over the worldly wisdom of his counsellors. I could not blame the journalists for being taken in by a story which had imposed on one of the most hard-headed diplomatists in Paris; I could only marvel at the astuteness and daring of the Muscovite statesmen who had contrived to turn the personal idiosyncrasies of their sovereign to use in their Machiavellian politics.
On reaching the shores of the Bosphorus I found, as I had anticipated, that I was wanted to disentangle a miserable intrigue of the harem, the kind of work more suited to a private detective than to a man in my unique position. Under any other circumstances I should have declined the task without more ado; as it was, I turned Muzaffir’s difficulty into my opportunity.
‘Listen to me,’ I said to the trembling eunuch, as soon as he had finished confiding his tale to me, ‘I can save you, and I will save you, but only on one condition. And that is, that you procure me a private and confidential audience of the Sultan, and that you use your influence with him to make him grant the request I have to make.’
Muzaffir, who, like all his tribe, was a miser, seemed overjoyed at this cheap method of rewarding me. Of course, he wished to know the object I had in view.
‘I am going to ask the Sultan to employ me on a secret political mission outside the Turkish Empire, a mission from which you have nothing to fear. Your business is to persuade the Sultan to trust me—let that be enough.’
Twist and wriggle as he would, the eunuch found he could get nothing more out of me. He gave in, and his influence over the mind of Abdul Hamid being unbounded, I quickly found myself face to face with the lean, dark, gaunt-eyed Asiatic who styles himself Commander of the Faithful and Shadow of God on earth.
Abdul Hamid proved to be in a more suspicious mood than my friend in Paris. As soon as I mentioned the Peace Rescript he interrupted me.
‘I am not going to disarm. I know what the Christian Powers are by this time. They always begin to talk about peace when they are secretly preparing to attack somebody.’
‘I am afraid your Majesty is right. The question is, what is the real design underlying this particular piece of hypocrisy?’