It vexed him to think that his old enemy whom he had banished had been more powerful in exile than at home, and it tortured him to reflect that Ishmael had developed, with the religious malady of the Mahdi, his political mania as well.
But no matter! He would be more than a match for all these forces, and when his great historical drama came to be played before the eyes of astonished humanity, it would be seen that he had saved, not England only but Europe, and perhaps civilisation itself.
Thus, for three triumphant hours, the Consul-General saw himself as a patriot trampling on the enemies of his country; but hardly had he left the library and begun to climb the stairs of his great, empty, echoing house, switching off the lights as he ascended, and leaving darkness behind him, than the statesman sank back on the man—the broken, bereaved human being—and he recognised his motives for what they were.
A few minutes after he had reached his bedroom Fatimah entered it with a jug of hot water, and found him sitting with his head in his hands, looking fixedly at the portrait in the black-and-gilt frame of the little lad in an Arab fez.
"Ah, everybody loved that boy," she said, whereupon the old man raised his head and dismissed her brusquely.
"You ought to be in bed by this time—go at once," he said.
"Dear heart, so ought your lordship," said the Egyptian woman.
The Consul-General could dismiss Fatimah, but there was some one he could not get rid of, the manly, magnificent, heart-breaking young figure that always lived in his mind's eye, with its deadly white face, its trembling lower lip, and its quivering voice, which said, "General, the time may come when it will be even more painful to you to remember all this than it has been to me to bear it."
Where was he now? What was he doing? His son, his only son, all that was left to him!
There was only one way to lay that ghost, and the Consul-General did so by telling himself with a sort of fierce joy that wherever Gordon might be he must soon hear that Ishmael, in a pitiful and tricky disguise, had been discovered in Cairo, and then he would see for himself what an arrant schemer and unscrupulous charlatan was the person for whom he had sacrificed his life.