I was then the engineer charged with the defences of the coast. We were expecting an attack from Sir Charles Napier, and I had been to Rosetta to inspect the batteries. It was on a tempestuous night that I returned to Alexandria, and went to the palace on the shore of the former Island of Pharos, to make my report to Mehemet Ali.
The halls and passages, which I used to find full of Mamelukes and officers strutting about in the fullness of their contempt for a Christian, were empty. Without encountering a single attendant, I reached his room overlooking the sea; it was dimly lighted by a few candles of bad Egyptian wax, with enormous untrimmed wicks. Here, at the end of his divan, I found him rolled up in a sort of ball,—solitary, motionless, apparently absorbed in thought. The waves were breaking heavily on the mole, and I expected every instant the casements to be blown in. The roar of wind and sea was almost awful, but he did not seem conscious of it.
I stood before him silent. Suddenly he said, as if speaking to himself, "I think I can trust Ibrahim." Again he was silent for some time, and then desired me to fetch Motus Bey, his admiral. I found him, and brought him to the Viceroy. Neither of them spoke, until the Viceroy, after looking at him steadily for some minutes, said to me, "He is drunk; take him away." I did so, and so ended my visit without making any report.
That heart-cry of the deserted tyrant, "I think I can trust
Ibrahim"—his own son, in all probability, though called his stepson
(Ibrahim's mother was a widow)—is comparable to the cry of Augustus:
"Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!"
Wonderfully Tacitean is a later comment of the Pasha—an Armenian by birth. He told Senior that the Pasha could never forget or forgive that he had seen his master in the day of his humiliation. So intolerable was the thought that Mehemet Ali made two secret attempts to kill his faithful servant. "He wished me to die, but he did not wish to be suspected of having killed me." In my recollections of Lord Cromer, in an earlier chapter, I have told a story of one of Mehemet Ali's removals of inconvenient servants which is well worth recalling in this context.
If I say much more about Mr. Nassau-Senior I shall fill a book. I admit that it would be a very curious and attractive work, for he was in the truest sense a man of note, but I cannot put a book inside a book. Therefore this must be, not merely one of my unwritten chapters, but one of my unwritten books.
In the same way, I cannot dwell upon dozens of delightful men and women with whom I became acquainted through my wife and her people, and who remained fast and good friends, though, alas! many of them have long since joined the majority,—for example, Lecky, Leslie Stephen, and Mr. Justice Stephen, and Mr. Henry Reeve of the Edinburgh. The last- named, very soon after our acquaintanceship, invited me to write for him, and thus I was able to add the Edinburgh as well as the Quarterly to the trophies of my pen. My wife and I used often to dine at his house—always a place of good company even if the aura was markedly Victorian. Reeve was full of stories of how Wordsworth used to stop with him when he came up to London in his later years. He lent his Court suit to Wordsworth in order that the Poet-Laureate should present himself at a Levee in proper form. But again these remembrances must be repressed for reasons of space.
Just as I have taken the Arthur Russell group as a type of the people with whom my marriage made me friends, so I shall take as typical two men of high distinction who were friends of my mother-in-law, and whom I saw either at her house or at houses of friends to whom we were bidden through the kindly, old-fashioned institution of wedding-parties. These were Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning. I met Matthew Arnold at a dinner at Mrs. Simpson's, given largely, I think, because I expressed my desire to see a man for whose poetry and prose I had come to have an intense admiration. When quite young I was a little inclined to turn up my nose at Matthew Arnold's verse, though I admit I had a good deal of it by heart. By the time, however, that I had got to my twenty-seventh year, I bent my knee in reverent adoration at the shrine, and realised what the two Obermann poems and The Grande Chartreuse stanzas meant, not only to the world but to me.
I was captivated in advance by Matthew Arnold's literary charm. I delighted also in the stories about him of which London and Oxford were full. I had only to watch him and listen to his talk across the dinner- table to realise the truth of his own witty self-criticism. When he married, he is said to have described his wife thus: "Ah! you must see my Fanny. You are sure to like her. She has all my graces and none of my airs." The said airs and graces were, of course, only a gentle and pleasant pose. They winged with humour Matthew Arnold's essential, I had almost said sublime, seriousness. Truly he was like one of the men for whom he longed:
Who without sadness shall be sage,
And gay without frivolity.