‘Eight hundred weak, you mean. No, as Raphael Tafna was saying, when Mehemet. Ali was master, the tribes were quiet enough. But the Turks could never manage the Arabs, even in their best days. If the Pasha of Damascus were to go himself, the Bedouins would unveil his harem while he was smoking his nargileh.’
‘Then England will call upon the Egyptians,’ said the Consul.
‘Hah!’ said Barizy of the Tower, ‘have I got you at last? Now comes your crisis, I grant you. The English will send a ship of war with a protocol, and one of their lords who is a sailor: that is the way. They will call upon the pasha to exterminate the tribe who have murdered the brother of their queen; the pasha will reply, that when he was in Syria the brothers of queens were never murdered, and put the protocol in his turban. This will never satisfy Palmerston; he will order——’
‘Palmerston has nothing to do with it,’ screamed out Pasqualigo; ‘he is no longer Reis Effendi; he is in exile; he is governor of the Isle of Wight.’
‘Do you think I do not know that?’ said Barizy of the Tower; ‘but he will be recalled for this purpose. The English will not go to war in Syria without Palmerston. Palmerston will have the command of the fleet as well as of the army, that no one shall say “No” when he says “Yes.” The English will not do the business of the Turks again for nothing. They will take this city; they will keep it. They want a new market for their cottons. Mark me: England will never be satisfied till the people of Jerusalem wear calico turbans.’
Let us inquire also with Barizy of the Tower, where was Besso? Alone in his private chamber, agitated and troubled, awaiting the return of his daughter from the bath; and even now, the arrival may be heard of herself and her attendants in the inner court.
‘You want me, my father?’ said Eva, as she entered. ‘Ah! you are disturbed. What has happened?’
‘The tenth plague of Pharaoh, my child,’ replied Besso, in a tone of great vexation. ‘Since the expulsion of Ibrahim, there has been nothing which has crossed me so much.’
‘Fakredeen?’
‘No, no; ‘tis nothing to do with him, poor boy; but of one as young, and whose interests, though I know him not, scarcely less concern me.’