e delegated
the task of arranging the matter to his brother, Sir Henry Gordon, who
negotiated with the late Sir William Mackinnon as representing the
King. They agreed that the value of Gordon's pension if commuted would
be L7288, and the King of the Belgians was to provide that sum, which
was to be paid into a trust fund. In this and every other matter the
King behaved towards Gordon in the most generous and cordial manner,
furnishing a marked contrast with the grudging and parsimonious spirit
of the British Government towards Gordon in China, at the Cape, and
now again when destined for the Congo.

All the arrangements connected with this subject were made in three
days, and while Gordon gave instructions for his will to be prepared
for the disposal of the trust fund after his death, he wrote the same
day (6th January) to Mr H. M. Stanley, then acting for the King on the
Congo, announcing his own appointment, offering to "serve willingly
with or under him," and fixing his own departure from Lisbon for 5th
of February. _Dis aliter visum._ For the moment he worked up some
enthusiasm in his task. "We will kill the slave-traders in their
haunts"; and again, "No such efficacious means of cutting at root of
slave trade ever was presented as that which God has, I trust, opened
out to us through the kind disinterestedness of His Majesty," are
passages in the same letter, yet all the time there is no doubt his
heart and his thoughts were elsewhere. They were in the Soudan, not on
the Congo.

The night of this letter he crossed from Brussels, and went straight
to his sister's house, long the residence, and, practically speaking,
the home of his family, 5 Rockstone Place, Southampton. On the 7th of
the month--that is, the same day as he arrived--he wrote the formal
letter requesting leave to resign his commission in the Queen's army,
and also stating, with his usual candour, that King Leopold II. had
guaranteed him against any pecuniary loss. To that letter it may at
once be stated that no reply was ever sent. Even the least sympathetic
official could not feel altogether callous to a voluntary proposition
to remove the name of "Chinese" Gordon from the British army list, and
the sudden awakening of the public to the extraordinary claims of
General Gordon on national gratitude, and his special fitness to deal
with the Soudan difficulty warned the authorities that a too rigid
application of office rules would not in his case be