But now his high-built hope was in the dust. By robbing him of his son—his only son—"this madman, this fanatic, this false prophet" had turned his one aim to ashes. When he was old, too, and his best powers were spent, and his life was behind him, and there was nothing before him but a few short years of failing strength and then—the end.
"Damn him! Damn him!" he cried again in the darkness as he rolled about in his bed.
But when he tried to think out some means, some swift and secret tribunal, perhaps, by which he could suppress and destroy the man Ishmael, who had laid waste his life and was joining with the worst elements in Egypt to make the government of the country impossible, he had to tell himself how powerless after all was the machinery of Western civilisation against the hypocritical machinations of Eastern fanaticism.
On the one side the clogs and impediments of representative government, and on the other the subtlety, secrecy, duplicity, and deceit of men like Ishmael Ameer. If he could only scotch these troubles once for all by a short and sharp military struggle—how different the results would be!
But with every act of his life watched from Whitehall, and with operations of frightful urgency kept back by cable; dogged by foreign diplomats who, professing to be England's friends, were yet waiting to find their opportunity in the hour of England's need; vilified by boobies in Parliament who did not know the difference between the East and the West, between the Mousky and the Mile End Road, and were constantly sending the echo of their parrot-like prattle down the Mediterranean to add to the difficulties of his position in Cairo; scolded by Secretaries of State who were appointed to their places for no better reason than their power to command votes; gibed at by journalists at home who could not see that a free press and a foreign occupation were things that could never exist together; and preached at by religious milksops in the pulpit who were so simple as to suppose that the black man and the white man were one flesh, that all men were born free and equal, and that it was possible to govern great nations according to the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount—what could he do against the religious delirium of an ignorant Eastern populace, who were capable of mistaking a manifest impostor, practising his spiritual legerdemain, for a Prophet, a Redeemer, a Mahdi, a Messiah, a Christ? Nothing!
He had found that out to his bitter disappointment during the past few days, when, working with Western machinery, he had tried in vain to catch the man Ishmael in some seditious expression that would enable the Government to lay him openly by the heels.
"Fools! Fools! Fools!"
Why could not people see that all this vapouring unrest in Eastern dominions was a religious question from first to last; that it was Islamism against Christianity, slavery against liberty, corruption against purity, the backwash of retrogression against the flowing tide of progress; and that to fight the secret methods of the mosque and the insidious crimes of a vicious superstition with any weapons less swift and sure than the rifle and the rope was to be weak and wicked.
"If I could only permit myself to meet Eastern needs by Eastern means," he thought, "intrigue by intrigue, subtlety by subtlety, secrecy by secrecy, duplicity by duplicity, treachery by treachery, deceit by deceit!"
"And why not?" he asked himself suddenly. "In a desperate case like this, why not? In the face of anarchical conspiracy and menace to public safety, why not? Before the catastrophe comes, why not?" he asked himself again and again during the long hours in which he lay awake.