"I have always suspected it, but I discovered it for certain only yesterday. And where did I discover it? In my own salon!"
"What did you discover in your own salon, Princess?" asked the Consul-General in his tired voice.
Trained as was the Consul-General’s face to self-command it betrayed surprise and alarm.
"Yes, conspiracy against you and against England."
[Illustration: "Yes, conspiracy against you and against England"]
"You mean, perhaps, that the man Ishmael Ameer——"
"Rubbish! Ishmael indeed! He is in it, certainly. In a country like Egypt the holy man always is. Religion and politics are twins here—Siamese twins, you may say, for you couldn’t get a slip of paper between them.... What’s that? The Mahdist movement political? Perhaps it was, but politics on the top of religion—the monkey on the donkey’s back, you know. Always so in the East. The only way to move the masses is to make an appeal to their religious passions. _They_ know that, and they’ve not scrupled to use their knowledge, the rascals! Rascals, that’s what I call them. Excuse the word. I say what I think, Nuneham."
"Yes, the _corps dip-lo-ma-tique_!" with a dig on every syllable. "Half-a-dozen of them were at my house yesterday and they were not ashamed to let me know what they are doing."
Then throwing away her cigarette the Princess rose to her feet, and pacing to and fro on the verandah, with a firm tread that had little of the East and not much of the woman, she repeated the story she had heard in her salon—how Ishmael Ameer was to return to Cairo, with twenty, thirty, forty thousand of his followers, and some fantastic dream of establishing a human society that should be greater, nobler, wider, and more God-like than any that had yet dwelt on this planet; how the diplomats laughed at the ridiculous hallucination, but were nevertheless preparing to support it in order to harass the Government and dishonour England.
"By finding arms for the people to fight with if you attempt to keep their Prophet out! Ask your Inspectors! Ask your police! See if rifles bought with foreign money are not coming into Cairo every day."
By this time it was the Consul-General who was pacing up and down the verandah, while the Princess, who sat to smoke another cigarette, repeated the opinions of the foreign representatives one by one—Count This, who was old and should know better if white hairs brought wisdom; Baron That, who was as long as a palm tree but without a date; and the Marquis of So-and-So.