Lady Maggie Trent, a stepdaughter of the Earl of Dorminster, was one of
those young women who had baffled description for some years before she
had commenced to take life seriously. She was neither fair nor dark,
petite nor tall. No one could ever have called her nondescript, or have
extolled any particular grace of form or feature. Her complexion had
defied the ravages of sun and wind and that moderate indulgence in
cigarettes and cocktails which the youth of her day affected. Her nose
was inclined to be retroussé, her mouth tender but impudent, her grey
eyes mostly veiled in expression but capable of wonderful changes. She
was curled up in a chair when Nigel entered, immersed in a fashion
paper. She held out her left hand, which he raised to his lips.
"Well, Nigel, dear," she exclaimed, "what do you think of my new
profession?"
"I hate it," he answered frankly.
She sighed and laid down the fashion paper resignedly.
"You always did object to a woman doing anything in the least useful. Do
you realise that if anything in the world can save this stupid old
country, I have done it?"
"I realise that you've been running hideous risks," he replied.
She looked at him petulantly.
"What of it?" she demanded. "We all run risks when we do anything worth
while."
"Not quite the sort that you have been facing."
She smiled thoughtfully.
"Do you know exactly where I have been?" she asked.
"No idea," he confessed. "What my uncle has just told me was a complete
revelation, so far as I was concerned. I believed, with the rest of the
world, what the newspapers announced--that you were visiting Japan and
China, and afterwards the South Sea Islands, with the Wendercombes."
She smiled.
"Dad wanted to tell you," she said, "but it was I who made him promise
not to. I was afraid you would be disagreeable about it. We arranged it
all with the Wendercombes, but as a matter of fact I did not even start
with them. For the last eight months, I have been living part of the
time in Berlin and part of the time in a country house near the Black
Forest."
"Alone?"
"Not a bit of it! I have been governess to the two daughters of Herr
Essendorf."
"Essendorf, the President of the German Republic?"
Lady Maggie nodded.
"He isn't a bit like his pictures. He is a huge fat man and he eats a
great deal too much. Oh, the horror of those meals!" she added, with a
little shudder. "Think of me, dear Nigel, who never eat more than an
omelette and some fruit for luncheon, compelled to sit down every day to
a _mittagessen_! I wonder I have any digestion left at all."
"Do you mean that you were there under your own name?" he asked
incredulously.
She shook her head.
"I secured some perfectly good testimonials before I left," she said.
"They referred to a Miss Brown, the daughter of Prebendary Brown. I was
Miss Brown."
"Great Heavens!" Nigel muttered under his breath. "You heard about
Atcheson?"
She nodded.
"Poor fellow, they got him all right. You talk about thrills, Nigel,"
she went on. "Do you know that the last night before I left for my
vacation, I actually heard that fat old Essendorf chuckling with his
wife about how his clever police had laid an English spy by the heels,
and telling her, also, of the papers which they had discovered and
handed over. All the time the real dispatch, written by Atcheson when
he was dying, was sewn into my corsets. How's that for an exciting
situation?"
"It's a man's job, anyhow," Nigel declared.
She shrugged her shoulders and abandoned the personal side of the
subject.
"Have you been in Germany lately, Nigel?" she enquired.
"Not for many years," he answered.
She stretched herself out upon the couch and lit a cigarette.
"The Germany of before the war of course I can't remember," she said
pensively. "I imagine, however, that there was a sort of instinctive
jealous dislike towards England and everything English, simply because
England had had a long start in colonisation, commerce and all the rest
of it. But the feeling in Germany now, although it is marvellously
hidden, is something perfectly amazing. It absolutely vibrates wherever
you go. The silence makes it all the more menacing. Soon after I got to
Berlin, I bought a copy of the Treaty of Peace and read it. Nigel, was
it necessary to have been so bitterly cruel to a beaten enemy?"
"Logically it would seem not," Nigel admitted. "Actually, we cannot put
ourselves back into the spirit of those days. You must remember that it
was an unprovoked war, a war engineered by Germany for the sheer
purposes of aggression. That is why a punitive spirit entered into our
subsequent negotiations."
She nodded.
"I expect history will tell us some day," she continued, "that we needed
a great statesman of the Beaconsfield type at the Peace table. However,
that is all ended. They sowed the seed at Versailles, and I think we are
going to reap the harvest."
"After all," Nigel observed thoughtfully, "it is very difficult to see
what practical interference there could be with the peace of the world.
I can very well believe that the spirit is there, but when it comes to
hard facts--well, what can they do? England can never be invaded. The
war of 1914 proved that. Besides, Germany now has a representative on
the League of Nations. She is bound to toe the line with the rest."
"It is not in Germany alone that we are disliked," Maggie reminded him.
"We seem somehow or other to have found our way into the bad books of
every country in Europe. Clumsy statesmanship is it, or what?"
"I should attribute it," Nigel replied, "to the passing of our old
school of ambassadors. After all, ambassadors are born, not made, and
they should be--they very often were--men of rare tact and perceptions.
We have no one now to inform us of the prejudices and humours of the
nations. We often offend quite unwittingly, and we miss many
opportunities of a _rapprochement_. It is trade, trade, trade and
nothing else, the whole of the time, and the men whom we sent to the
different Courts to further our commercial interests are not the type to
keep us informed of the more subtle and intricate matters which
sometimes need adjustment between two countries."
"That may be the explanation of all the bad feeling," Maggie admitted,
"and you may be right when you say that any practical move against us is
almost impossible. Dad doesn't think so, you know. He is terribly
exercised about the coming of Prince Shan."
"I must get him to talk to me," Nigel said. "As a matter of fact, I
don't think that we need fear Asiatic intervention over here. Prince
Shan is too great a diplomatist to risk his country's new prosperity."
"Prince Shan," Maggie declared, "is the one man in the world I am
longing to meet. He was at Oxford with you, wasn't he, Nigel?"
"For one year only. He went from there to Harvard."
"Tell me what he was like," she begged.
"I have only a hazy recollection of him," Nigel confessed. "He was a
most brilliant scholar and a fine horseman. I can't remember whether he
did anything at games."
"Good-looking?"
"Extraordinarily so. He was very reserved, though, and even in those
days he was far more exclusive than our own royal princes. We all
thought him clever, but no one dreamed that he would become Asia's great
man. I'll tell you all that I can remember about him another time,
Maggie. I'm rather curious about that report of Atcheson's. Have you any
idea what it is about?"
She shook her head.
"None at all. It is in the old Foreign Office cipher and it looks like
gibberish. I only know that the first few lines he transcribed gave dad
the jumps."
"I wonder if he has finished it by now."
"He'll send for you when he has. How do you think I am looking, Nigel?"
"Wonderful," he answered, rising to his feet and standing with his elbow
upon the mantelpiece, gazing down at her. "But then you _are_ wonderful,
aren't you, Maggie? You know I always thought so."
She picked up a mirror from the little bag by her side and scrutinized
her features.
"It can't be my face," she decided, turning towards him with a smile. "I
must have charm."
"Your face is adorable," he declared.
"Are you going to flirt with me?" she asked, with a faint smile at the
corners of her lips. "You always do it so well and so convincingly. And
I hate foreigners. They are terribly in earnest but there is no finesse
about them. You may kiss me just once, please, Nigel, the way I like."
He held her for a moment in his arms, tenderly, but with a reserve to
which she was accustomed from him. Presently she thrust him away. Her
own colour had risen a little.
"Delightful," she murmured. "Think of the wasted months! No one has
kissed me, Nigel, since we said good-bye."
"Have you made up your mind to marry me yet?" he asked.
"My dear," she answered, patting his hand, "do restrain your ardour. Do
you really want to marry me?"
"Of course I do!"
"You don't love me."
"I am awfully fond of you," he assured her, "and I don't love any one
else."
She shook her head.
"It isn't enough, Nigel," she declared, "and, strange to say, it's
exactly how I feel about you."
"I don't see why it shouldn't be enough," he argued. "Perhaps we have
too much common sense for these violent feelings."
"It may be that," she admitted doubtfully. "On the other hand, don't
let's run any risk. I should hate to find an affinity, and all that sort
of thing, after marriage--divorce in these days is such shocking bad
form. Besides, honestly, Nigel, I don't feel frivolous enough to think
about marriage just now. I have the feeling that even while the clock is
ticking we are moving on to terrible things. I can't tell you quite what
it is. I carried my life in my hands during those last few days abroad.
I dare say this is the reaction."
He smiled reassuringly.
"After all, you are safe at home now, dear," he reminded her, "and I
really am very fond of you, Maggie."
"And I'm quite absurdly fond of you, Nigel," she acknowledged. "It makes
me feel quite uncomfortable when I reflect that I shall probably have to
order you to make love to some one else before the week is out."
"I shall do nothing of the sort," he declared firmly. "I am not good at
that sort of thing. And who is she, anyhow?"
They were interrupted by a sudden knock at the door--not the discreet
tap of a well-bred domestic, but a flurried, almost an imperative
summons. Before either of them could reply, the door was opened and
Brookes, the elderly butler, presented himself upon the threshold. Even
before he spoke, it was clear that he brought alarming news.
"Will you step down to the library at once, sir?" he begged, addressing
Nigel.
"What is the matter, Brookes?" Maggie demanded anxiously.
"I fear that his lordship is not well," the man replied.
They all hurried out together. Brookes was evidently terribly perturbed
and went on talking half to himself without heeding their questions.
"I thought at first that his lordship must have fainted," he said. "I
heard a queer noise, and when I went in, he had fallen forward across
the table. Parkins has rung for Doctor Wilcox."
"What sort of a noise?" Nigel asked.
"It sounded like a shot," the man faltered.
They entered the library, Nigel leading the way. Lord Dorminster was
lying very much as Brookes had described him, but there was something
altogether unnatural in the collapse of his head and shoulders and his
motionless body. Nigel spoke to him, touched him gently, raised him at
last into a sitting position. Something on which his right hand seemed
to have been resting clattered on to the carpet. Nigel turned around and
waved Maggie back.
"Don't come," he begged.
"Is it a stroke?" she faltered.
"I am afraid that he is dead," Nigel answered simply.
They went out into the hall and waited there in shocked silence until
the doctor arrived. The latter's examination lasted only a few seconds.
Then he pointed to the telephone.
"This is very terrible," he said. "I am afraid you had better ring up
Scotland Yard, Mr. Kingley. Lord Dorminster appears either to have shot
himself, as seems most probable," he added, glancing at the revolver
upon the carpet, "or to have been murdered."
"It is incredible!" Nigel exclaimed. "He was the sanest possible man,
and the happiest, and he hadn't an enemy in the world."
The physician pointed downwards to the revolver. Then he unfastened once
more the dead man's waistcoat, opened his shirt and indicated a small
blue mark just over his heart.
"That is how he died," he said. "It must have been instantaneous."
Time seemed to beat out its course in leaden seconds whilst they waited
for the superintendent from Scotland Yard. Nigel at first stood still
for some moments. From outside came the cheerful but muffled roar of the
London streets, the hooting of motor horns, the rumbling of wheels, the
measured footfall of the passing multitude. A boy went by, whistling;
another passed, calling hoarsely the news from the afternoon papers. A
muffin man rang his bell, a small boy clattered his stick against the
area bailing. The whole world marched on, unmoved and unnoticing. In
this sombre apartment alone tragedy reigned in sinister silence. On the
sofa, Lord Dorminster, who only half an hour ago had seemed to be in
the prime of life and health, lay dead.
Nigel moved towards the writing-table and stood looking at it in wonder.
The code book still remained, but there was not the slightest sign of
any manuscript or paper of any sort. He even searched the drawers of the
desk without result. Every trace of Atcheson's dispatch and Lord
Dorminster's transcription of it had disappeared!