CHAPTER XII INTRIGUES AND COUNTER INTRIGUES

sent for M. Sinkiewicz and me this morning and informed us that it had come to his knowledge that the military intended this afternoon to depose him and proclaim Halim Pasha as Khedive of Egypt.... The Khedive said he hardly believed the truth of this information." Yet on such a slender rumour Gladstone, who had declared to me that he never spoke lightly in Parliament and had bidden me wait for his spoken word in the House of Commons as a message of goodwill to the Egyptians, fires off, to give point to his speech, this quite untrue announcement, his first definite utterance since I had seen him on Egypt. It is a curious comment on the ways of Ministers and the processes of the Gladstonian mind. The immediate effect on me of the Prime Minister's speech was a complete and lasting disillusion. Never after this did I place the smallest trust in him, or find reason, even when he came forward as champion of self-government in Ireland and when I gave him my freest support, to look upon him as other than the mere Parliamentarian he in truth was. I do not say that on that wonderful 22nd of March he was not for the moment in earnest when he spoke to me so humanly, but it was clear that his sympathies with the cause of right, however unfeigned, were not the law of his public action, which was dictated, like that of all the rest of them, by motives of expediency. The discovery destroyed for me an illusion about him which I have never regained.