It
was easy to see that they were the crowning years of her life--the years
in which her nature had full play, when in the truest sense of the term
she may be said to have lived. From the time they left Damascus, though
there were many years of happiness and usefulness in store for her
husband and herself, things were never quite the same again. The
recall seems to mark a turning-point in her life. Many of the dreams
and enthusiasms of her youth were gone, though her life's unfinished
work and stern reality remained. To use her own words, "Our career
was broken."
Isabel felt the slur on her husband which the recall involved more
acutely than he. Burton, though stung to the quick at the treatment the
Foreign Office meted out to him for doing what he conceived to be his
duty (and certainly the manner of his recall was ungracious almost to
the point of brutality), was not a man given to show his feelings to the
world, and he possessed a philosophy which enabled him to present a calm
and unmoved front to the reverses of fortune. With his wife it was
different. She was not of a nature to suffer in silence, nor to sit
down quietly under a wrong. As she put it, "Since Richard would not
fight his own battles, I fought them for him," and she never ceased
fighting till she had cleared away as much as possible of the cloud
that shadowed her husband's official career.
On arriving in London, she set to work with characteristic energy.
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