The Minister frowned.
"Draconmeyer"s one man I should be glad to see out of London," he declared. "Under the pretext of fostering good-will, and that sort of thing, between the mercantile cla.s.ses of our two countries, I think that that fellow has done about as much mischief as it is possible for any single man to have accomplished. We"ll meet in an hour, Hunterleys. My man is putting out some things for me and I must have a bath."
Hunterleys walked up to the hospital, and to his surprise met Selingman coming away. The latter saluted him with a wave of the hat and a genial smile.
"Calling to see our poor invalid?" he enquired blandly.
Hunterleys, although he knew his man, was a little taken aback.
"What share in him do you claim?" he asked.
Selingman sighed.
"Alas!" he confessed, "I fear that my claim would sound a little cold-blooded. I think that I was the only man who held his gun straight.
Yet, after all, Roche would be the last to bear me any grudge. He was playing the game, taking his risks. Uncommonly bad marksmen Grex"s private police were, or he"d be in the morgue instead of the hospital."
"I gather that our friend is still alive?" Hunterleys remarked.
"Going on as well as could be expected," Selingman replied.
"Conscious?"
Selingman smiled.
"You see through my little visit of sympathy at once!" he exclaimed.
"Unable to converse, I am a.s.sured, and unable to share with his friends any little information he may have picked up last night. By the way, whom shall you send to report our little conference to-night? You wouldn"t care to come yourself, would you?"
"I should like to exceedingly," Hunterleys a.s.sured him, "if you"d give me a safe conduct."
Selingman withdrew his cigar from his mouth and laid his hand upon the other"s shoulder.
"My dear friend," he said earnestly, "your safe conduct, if ever I signed it, would be to the other world. Frankly, we find you rather a nuisance. We would be better pleased if your Party were in office, and you with your knees tucked under a desk at Downing Street, attending to your official business in your official place. Who gave you this roving commission, eh? Who sent you to talk common sense to the Balkan States, and how the mischief did you get wind of our little meeting here?"
"Ah!" Hunterleys replied, "I expect you really know all these things."
Selingman, with his feet planted firmly upon the pavement, took a fresh cigar from his waistcoat pocket, bit off the end and lit it.
"My friend Hunterleys," he continued, "I am enjoying this brief interchange of confidences. Circ.u.mstances have made me, as you see, a politician, a schemer if you like. Nature meant me to be one of the frankest, the most truthful, the best-hearted of men. I detest the tortuous ways of the old diplomacy. The spoken word pleases me best.
That is why I like a few minutes" conversation with the enemy, why I love to stand here and talk to you with the b.u.t.tons off our foils. We are scheming against you and your country, and you know it, and we shall win. We can"t help but win--if not to-day, to-morrow. Your country has had a marvellously long run of good luck, but it can"t last for ever."
Hunterleys smiled.
"Well," he observed, "there"s nothing like confidence. If you are so sure of success, why couldn"t you choose a cleaner way to it than by tampering with our ally?"
Selingman patted his companion on the shoulder.
"Listen, my friend," he said, "there are no such things as allies. An alliance between two countries is a dead letter so soon as their interests cease to be identical. Now Austria is our ally because she is practically Germany. We are both mid-Continental Powers. We both need the same protection. But England and France! Go back only fifty years, my dear Hunterleys, and ask yourself--would any living person, living now and alive then, believe in the lasting nature of such an unnatural alliance? Wherever you look, in every quarter of the globe, your interests are opposed. You robbed France of Egypt. She can"t have wholly forgotten. You dominate the Mediterranean through Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus. What does she think of that, I wonder? Isn"t a humiliation for her when she does stop to think of it? You"ve a thousand years of quarrels, of fighting and rapine behind you. You can"t call yourselves allies because the thing isn"t natural. It never could be. It was only your mutual, hysterical fear of Germany which drove you into one another"s arms. We fought France once to prove ourselves, and for money.
Just now we don"t want either money or territory from France. Perhaps we don"t even want, my dear Englishman, what you think we want, but all the same, don"t blame us for trying to dissolve an unnatural alliance. Was that Simpson who came by the Luxe this morning?"
"It was," Hunterleys admitted.
"The Right Honourable John William Meredith Simpson!" Selingman recited, waving his cigar. "Well, well, we certainly have made a stir with our little meetings here. An inspired English Cabinet Minister, travel-stained and dusty, arrives with his valet and a black dispatch-box, to foil our schemes. Send him along, my friend. We are not at all afraid of Mr. Simpson. Perhaps we may even ask him to join us this evening."
"I fancy," Hunterleys remarked grimly, "that the Englishman who joins you this evening will find a home up on the hill here."
"Or down in the morgue there," Selingman grunted, pointing down to Monaco. "Take care, Hunterleys--take care, man. One of us hates you. It isn"t I. You are fighting a brave fight and a losing fight, but you are good metal. Try and remember, when you find that you are beaten, that life has many consolations for the philosopher."
He pa.s.sed on and Hunterleys entered the hospital. Whilst he was waiting in the little reception-room, Felicia came in. Her face showed signs of her night"s anxiety.
"Sidney is still unconscious," she announced, her voice shaking a little. "The doctors seem hopeful--but oh! Sir Henry, it is terrible to see him lying there just as though he were dead!"
"Sidney will pull through all right," Hunterleys declared, encouragingly. "He has a wonderful const.i.tution and he is the luckiest fellow born. He always gets out of trouble, somehow or other."
She came slowly up to him.
"Sir Henry," she said piteously, "I know quite well that Sidney was willing to take his risks. He went into this thing, knowing it was dangerous. I want to be brave. What happens must be. But listen. You won"t--you won"t rob me of everything in life, will you? You won"t send David after him?"
Hunterleys smiled rea.s.suringly.
"I can promise you that," he told her. "This isn"t David"s job at all.
He has to stick to his post and help out the bluff as a press correspondent. Don"t be afraid, Felicia. You shall have your David."
She seized his hand and kissed it.
"You have been so kind to me always, Sir Henry," she sighed. "I can"t tell you how thankful I am to think that you don"t want David to go and run these horrible risks."
"No fear of that, I promise you," he a.s.sured her once more. "David will be busy enough pulling the strings another way."
The doctor entered the room and shook hands with Hunterleys. There was no news, he declared, nothing to be done. The patient must continue in his present condition for several more hours at least. The symptoms were, in their way, favourable. Beyond that, nothing could be said.
Felicia and Hunterleys left the hospital together.
"I wonder," she began, as they turned out of the white gates, "whether you would mind very much if I told you something?"
"Of course not!"
"Yesterday," she continued slowly, "I met Lady Hunterleys. You know, I have seen her twice when I have been to your house to sing for your guests. She recognised me, I feel sure, but she didn"t seem to want to see me. She looked surprised when I bowed. I worried about it at first and then I wondered. You are so very, very secretive just now. Whatever this affair may be in which you three are all concerned, you never open your lips about it. Lady Hunterleys probably doesn"t know that you have had to come up to the villa at all hours of the night just to see Sidney. You don"t suppose that by any chance she imagined--that you came to see me?"
Hunterleys was struck by the thought. He remembered several chance remarks of his wife. He remembered, too, the coincidence of his recent visits to the villa having prevented him in each case from acceding to some request of Violet"s.
"I am glad you"ve mentioned this, child," he said frankly. "Now I come to think of it, my wife certainly did know that I came up to the villa very late one night, and she seemed upset about it. Of course, she hasn"t the faintest idea about your brother."
"Well," Felicia declared, with a sigh of relief, "I felt that I had to tell you. It sounded horribly conceited, in a way, but then she wouldn"t know that you came to see Sidney, or that I was engaged to David.
Misunderstandings do come about so easily, you know, sometimes."
"This one shall be put right, at any rate," he promised her. "Now, if you will take my advice, you will go home and lie down until the evening. You are going to sing again, aren"t you?"
"If there is no change," she replied. "I know that he would like me to.
You haven"t minded--what I"ve said?"