Perhaps the acutest of his feelings on leaving Egypt came to him as he drove in a closed carriage out of the grounds of the Agency, and looked up for the last time at the windows of the room that used to be occupied by his wife. At that moment he felt something of the dumb desolation which rolls over the strongest souls when, after a lifetime of comradeship, the asundering comes and they long for the voice that is still.
Poor Janet! He must leave all that remained of her behind him under the tall cypress trees on the edge of the Nile. Yet no, not all, for he was carrying away the better part of her—her pure soul and saintly memory—within him. None the less, that moment of parting brought the old man nearer than he had ever been to the sense of tears in mortal things.
The Sirdar had accompanied him, but though the fact of his intended departure had become known, having been announced in all the evening papers, there was nobody at the station to bid adieu to him—not a member of the Khedive's entourage; not one of the Egyptian Ministers, not even any of the Advisers and Under-Secretaries whom he had himself created.
Never had there lived a more self-centred and self-sufficient man, but this fact cut him to the quick. He had done what he believed to be his duty in Egypt, and feeling that he was neglected and forgotten at the end, the ingratitude of those whom he had served went like poison into his soul.
To escape from the sense of it he began to talk with a bitter raillery which in a weaker man would have expressed itself in tears, and seemed indeed to have tears—glittering, frozen tears—behind it.
"Do you know, my dear Reg," he said, "I feel to-night as if I might be another incarnation of your friend Pontius Pilate. Like him, I am being withdrawn, you see, and apparently for the same reason. And—who knows?—perhaps like him too, I am destined to earn the maledictions of mankind."
The Sirdar found the old man's irony intensely affecting, and therefore he made no protest.
"Well, I'm not ashamed of the comparison, if it means that against all forms of anarchy I have belonged to the party of order, though of course there will be some wise heads that will see the finger of Heaven in what has happened."
The strong man, with his fortunes sunk to zero, was defiant to the very end and last hour of calamity. But standing on the platform by the door of the compartment that had been reserved for him, he looked round at length and said—all his irony, all his raillery suddenly gone—
"Reg, I have given forty years of my life to those people and there is not one of them to see me off."