I reached Beyrout twenty-four hours before the steamer sailed. When Richard had once received his recall, he never looked behind him, nor packed up anything, but went straight away. It is his rule to be ready in ten minutes to go anywhere. He was now a private individual in misfortune. I passed him in the diligence, walking alone in the town, and looking so sad and serious. Not even a kawwás was sent to attend on him, to see him out with a show of honour and respect. It was a real emblem of the sick lion. But I was there (thank God) in my place, and he was so surprised and glad when he saw me! I was well rewarded for my hard ride, for when he saw me his whole face was illuminated, and he said, "Thank you, bon sang ne peut mentir." We had twenty-four hours to take counsel and comfort together.
Everybody called upon us, and everybody regretted. The French Consul-General made us almost take up our abode with him for those twenty-four hours—our own Consul-General cut us. At four o'clock I went on board with my husband, and on return I found his faithful servant Habíb, who had also followed him, and arrived just ten minutes too late—only in time to see him steam out; he had flung himself down on the quay in a passionate flood of tears.
Any Consul, in any part of the Eastern world, with one drop of gentlemanly feeling, would have gone to meet his comrade in distress, and sent a couple of kawwáses to walk before and behind him. Mr. Eldridge's action was as big a thing as if he had posted handbills all over Beyrout to announce to the world that no notice was to be taken of him. The disgrace was to himself, not to Richard.[3]
The only notice Richard took of this tragedy in his life is one sentence in his journal: "After all my service, ignominiously dismissed, at fifty years of age"—and at whose instance, do you think? (1) A Pasha so corrupt that his own Government was obliged to recall him a month later, threaten him with chains, and throw him into a fortress, and his brains were blown out a short while after by a man he had oppressed. (2) His own Consul-General, whose memory is only known to his once immediate acquaintances by the careful registering of his barometers, and the amount of beer which helped that arduous task, and who exactly suited the Foreign Office by confining himself to so narrow a circle. He was fearfully jealous of his superior subordinate, and asked for his removal through Mr. Kennedy, who was not commissioned for that business. Mr. Eldridge said afterwards, "If Burton had only have walked in my way, he would have lived and died here." Thirdly, an aggressive schoolmistress, who altered, or allowed to be altered, some words in a letter he wrote her, changing "mining" into "missionary," to be shown at Exeter Hall. Fourthly, fifthly, and sixthly, three unscrupulous Jewish usurers. Seventhly, an elastic Greek Bishop, who began a crusade against the Protestants of Nazareth, and prevented them from cultivating their land, and who had snatched away a synagogue and cemetery from British-protected Jews.
When we were in camp there, he caused his people, who were about a hundred and fifty against six, to pick a quarrel with our people, and they stoned us. "Stoning" in the East means a hailstorm the size of melons, which positively seems to darken the air. As an old soldier accustomed to fire, Richard stood perfectly calm, collected, and self-contained, though the stones hit him right and left, and almost broke his sword-arm; he never lost his temper, and never fired, but was simply marking the ringleaders to take them. I ran out to give him his two six-shot revolvers, but when I got within stones' reach, he made a sign to me not to embarrass his movements; so I kept near enough to drag him out if he were wounded, putting his revolvers in my belt. When three of his servants were badly hurt, and one lay for dead on the ground, he drew a pistol from a man's belt, and fired a shot in the air. That was my signal. I flew round to the other camps, and called all the English and Americans with their guns. When they saw a reinforcement of ten armed English and Americans running down upon them, the cowardly crew turned and fled. This was followed by a procès-verbal between Richard and the Bishop, which Richard won.
I was left to pack, pay, and follow; so I took the night diligence back, and had, in spite of the August weather, a cold, hard seven hours over the Lebanon, for I had brought nothing with me; my clothes were dry and stiff, and I was very tired. On the road I passed our honorary dragoman, Hanna Misk. I called out to him, but I had no official position now, so he turned his head the other way, and passed me by. I sent a peasant after him, but he shook his head and rode on. "There," I said, "goes the man who has lived with us, travelled with us, and shared everything we had, and for whose rights concerning a village my husband has always contended, because his claims were just." The law of "Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!" extends, I suppose, everywhere; but probably the king's widow always feels it.[4] I wonder how old one has to grow before learning the common rules of life, instead of allowing every shock the world gives one to disturb one, as if one were newly born? It is innate in cool natures, and never learnt by the others, who take useless "headers" against the dead wall of circumstances, until they grow old and cold and selfish. Disraeli told us that "no affections and a great brain form the men that command the world; that no affections and a little brain make petty villains;" but a great brain and a great heart he has no description for. Here he stops short; but I can tell him those are the men for whom there is no place. The nineteenth century will have none of them.
Richard was a general favourite, but he was too powerful to suit the Turkish Wali, or Governor-General, who for once found a man he could not corrupt. To give some idea of how incorruptible, he was once offered £10,000 on the table, which the man in question brought with him, to give an opinion which would have swayed a public transaction, which would have been no very great harm, but yet it would not have been quite "square" for such a man as Richard, and a promise of £10,000 when the thing was done—"for," said the man, "I can get plenty of money when I like, and this will pay me well." My husband let him finish, and then he said, "If you were a gentleman of my own standing, and an Englishman, I would just pitch you out of the window; but as you are not, you may pick up your £10,000 and you may walk down the stairs. But don't come here again, because if the thing is right, I shall do it without your paying me; and if it is not, there is not enough money in the world to buy me." He then called me, and he told me about it, and said, "This man's harem will be offering you diamonds; mind you don't take them." "There is not the slightest chance," I said; "I don't want them." Now, it is a perfect fact that, although I am a woman, jewellery is no temptation to me; I therefore take no credit to myself that I have refused enough to enable me to wear as many as any woman in London; but when they brought me horses, it was quite another sensation, and I had to screw up my courage hard—and bolt.
It is perfectly true that Richard is the only man not born a Moslem and an Oriental who, having performed the Hajj to Mecca and Medinah, could live with the Moslems in perfect friendship after. They considered him a personâ grata—something more civilized than the common run of Franks; they called him Haji Abdullah, and treated him as one of themselves. During Richard's time in Syria he raised the English name, which was going down rapidly, to its old prestige in the time of Sir Richard Wood and Lord Strathnairn, and the old days of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. He explored all the unknown parts of Syria, Palestine, Holy Land, Haurán, the 'Aláh and Nejd; he stood between the poor peasantry and the usurers; he advanced and protected the just claims of British subjects. When a massacre appeared imminent he kept the peace. The fanatical persecution of the Christians was stopped; he stood between them and his friends the Mohammedans; he said, "They are mine, and you must not touch them;" he saved innumerable villages from slavery. In fact, he was just the man whom Rashíd Pasha, the corrupt Turkish Governor-General, could not stand; he was an avenging angel in his way. His own Consul-General was jealous of him. The Beyrout missionaries, or rather the British Syrian schools missionaries—for we were friends with several Beyrout missionaries, notably Dr. Thomson and Dr. Bliss—poisoned Exeter Hall against him, although they got more help from him than from any one, simply because neither he nor I were, what I believe the technical term is, "practical Protestants." The three foremost Jews set Sir Moses Montefiore and the illustrious Jewish families of London against him, because he could not stand by and see the poor plundered twice and thrice over, never getting a receipt for their money, never being allowed a paper to show what they had paid, till (when England is paying millions to suppress Slave-trade in various parts of the world) she was unconsciously abetting it, and aiding it, and protecting it, all over the Syrian villages, by the power of complaisant Consuls. The Greek Bishop abetted our being stoned at Nazareth, because he had advanced and protected the Protestant missionaries' just claim in his jurisdiction. These seven hornets were sufficient to kill and break the heart of St. Michael the archangel. They say three hornets kill a man, and six will kill a horse.
General Information.[5]