“You must be brave, my dear child, and thankful—thankful that you are able to see Charlie once more, when it was just a chance that they didn’t succeed in keeping you from him.”
“Lady Haigh!” Cecil almost screamed, “they haven’t put him in prison?”
“No, my dear, no. Your imagination certainly dwells on horrors. Wait a little, and I will tell you it all. You know that for some time Charlie has been very unpopular in the city, and that the budmashes, as we should call them in India, have been shouting bad names after him in the streets? Well, it has been a great mystery why this should be, for he got on so very well with the Baghdadis in his first two years here, but now it seems that they have come to regard him in some way as a spy. Of course there has been mischief at work, somebody has been slandering him, but that doesn’t make it any better. Naturally I knew all this, but nothing more, and what has happened to-day has been a tremendous shock. Very early this morning Sir Dugald received a letter from the Pasha, brought by Ovannes Effendi. I don’t know what was in it, but Denarien Bey called just about the same time, and they were all three closeted together. Then Denarien Bey and the other man went away, and Sir Dugald sent for Charlie. I had no idea that there was anything wrong, or even out of the common, and you may conceive my astonishment when Charlie came rushing to me in a fearful state and told me that Sir Dugald had ordered him to proceed at once to Bandr Abbas, right away down the Gulf, and remain there until further orders. They have an outbreak of cholera there, and their doctor is overworked and has telegraphed for help. Of course Charlie didn’t mind the cholera, but he was to start to-day, by the steamer leaving this very morning.”
“Oh, Lady Haigh, he isn’t gone?” cried Cecil.
“You may well be astonished, dear. I assure you I laughed at the notion of such a thing. ‘My dear boy,’ I said to Charlie, ‘you have made some mistake. Wait here, and I will go and speak to Sir Dugald.’ And I went, Cecil, and it was true. Sir Dugald was very busy, getting ready to go to this wretched investiture, and I couldn’t make him tell me all I wanted to know, or else my brain was in such a whirl that it didn’t penetrate properly. All that I could make out was that the Pasha had sent to say that Charlie was a spy, and that he couldn’t have him in the city any longer—which, of course, is utter nonsense—and that he had better leave as soon as possible, for that the budmashes were crying out for his blood. That was true enough, my dear; there was a mob of them in front of the gate howling out the most dreadful things. I never felt so thunderstruck and so much at a loss in my life. It was as if the world’s foundations were shaking, or we were in a transformation scene at a pantomime. There has been absolutely nothing to account for all these extraordinary events, but yet they have happened, and Charlie must go. I begged and entreated Sir Dugald to let him wait for the next steamer, but he asked me whether I wanted to have his blood upon my head, and said he should see him safely on board before he started for this thing. Well, my dear, I saw that there was no doing anything with Sir Dugald, so I went back to poor Charlie. He was nearly wild, and I can tell you I was not much better, what with getting all his things packed in such a hurry, and everything. He wanted to force his way into the Palace and insist on seeing you, but it would have been throwing his life away to venture into the town, and Sir Dugald absolutely forbade it, and told him he would have him put under arrest if he tried it. Then the poor fellow and I managed to devise a plan. I wasn’t going to let him be driven away without saying good-bye to you.”
“Oh, thank you, Lady Haigh,” murmured Cecil, her eyes wet.
“So I made up my mind what to do,” continued Lady Haigh; “I just took the law into my hands, for I knew it was no use speaking to Sir Dugald, and if he is angry I don’t mind.”
“But he couldn’t help all this,” Cecil’s sense of justice impelled her to say. “What could he have done?”
“My dear,” responded Lady Haigh, in the true Jingo spirit, “he could have torn up the Pasha’s letter and sent him back the pieces. He could have said to those two poor wretched Armenians, ‘Go and tell your master, if he wants to get rid of Dr Egerton, to come and turn him out.’ And he could have called out the guard and armed the servants, and defended the Residency as long as there were two stones left on one another, and he ought to have done it, rather than get rid of Charlie at the beck of an upstart like Ahmed Khémi.”
And Lady Haigh paused for breath after this tremendous burst of eloquence.