England,
with its complications and its policies, became an empty vision
to him; Sir Evelyn Baring, with his cautions and sagacities,
hardly more than a tiresome name. He was Gordon Pasha, he was the
Governor-General, he was the ruler of the Sudan. He was among his
people--his own people, and it was to them only that he was
responsible--to them, and to God. Was he to let them fall without
a blow into the clutches of a sanguinary impostor? Never! He was
there to prevent that. The distant governments might mutter
something about 'evacuation'; his thoughts were elsewhere. He
poured them into his telegrams, and Sir Evelyn Baring sat aghast.
The man who had left London a month before, with instructions to
'report upon the best means of effecting the evacuation of the
Sudan', was now openly talking of 'smashing up the Mahdi' with
the aid of British and Indian troops. Sir Evelyn Baring counted
upon his fingers the various stages of this extraordinary
development in General Gordon's opinions. But he might have saved
himself the trouble, for, in fact, it was less a development than
a reversion. Under the stress of the excitements and the
realities of his situation at Khartoum, the policy which Gordon
was now proposing to carry out had come to tally, in every
particular, with the policy which he had originally advocated
with such vigorous conviction in the pages of the Pall Mall
Gazette.
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