Page:Eminent Victorians.djvu/323

 He had now, definitely and finally, made his decision. Colonel Stewart and his companions had gone, with every prospect of returning unharmed to civilisation. Mr. Gladstone's belief was justified; so far as Gordon's personal safety was concerned, he might still, at this late hour, have secured it. But he had chosen; he stayed at Khartoum.

No sooner were the steamers out of sight than he sat down at his writing-table and began that daily record of his circumstances, his reflections, and his feelings, which reveals to us, with such an authentic exactitude, the final period of his extraordinary destiny. His "Journals," sent down the river in batches to await the coming of the relief expedition, and addressed, first to Colonel Stewart, and later to the "Chief of Staff, Sudan Expeditionary Force," were official documents, intended for publication, though, as Gordon himself was careful to note on the outer covers, they would "want pruning out" before they were printed. He also wrote, on the envelope of the first section, "No secrets as far as I am concerned." A more singular set of state papers was never compiled. Sitting there, in the solitude of his palace, with ruin closing round him, with anxieties on every hand, with doom hanging above his head, he let his pen rush on for hour after hour in an ecstasy of communication, a tireless unburdening of the spirit, where the most trivial incidents of the passing day were mingled pell-mell with philosophical disquisitions, where jests and anger, hopes and terrors, elaborate justifications and cynical confessions, jostled one another in reckless confusion. The impulsive, demonstrative man had nobody to talk to any more, and so he talked instead to the pile of telegraph-forms, which, useless now for perplexing Sir Evelyn Baring, served very well—for they were large and blank—as the repositories of his conversation. His tone was not the intimate and religious tone which he would have used with the Rev. Mr. Barnes or his sister Augusta; it was such as must have been habitual with him in his intercourse with old friends or fellow officers, whose religious views were of a more ordinary caste than his