Nigel was just arriving at Dorminster House when Maggie returned from
her ride. He assisted her to dismount and entered the house with her.
"There is something here I should like to show you, Maggie," he said, as
he drew a dispatch from his pocket. "It was sent round to me half an
hour ago by Chalmers, from the American Embassy."
"It's about Gilbert Jesson!" Maggie exclaimed, holding out her hand for
it.
Nigel nodded.
"There's a note inside, and an enclosure," he said. "You had better read
both."
Maggie opened out the former:
MY DEAR DORMINSTER,
I am afraid there is rather bad news about Jesson. One of our
regular line of airships, running from San Francisco to
Vladivostok, has picked up a wireless which must have come from
somewhere in the South of China. They kept it for a few days, worse
luck, thinking it was only nonsense, as it was in code. Washington
got hold of it, however, and cabled it to us last night. I enclose
a copy, decoded.
Sincerely yours,
JERE CHALMERS.
The copy was brief enough. Maggie felt her heart sink as she glanced
through the few lines:
Report dispatched London. Fear escape impossible. Good-by.
JESSON.
"Horrible!" Maggie exclaimed, with a shiver. "I thought he was in
Russia."
"So did we all," Nigel replied. "He must have come to the conclusion
that the key to the riddle he was trying to solve was in China, and gone
on there. Look here, Maggie," he continued, after a moment's hesitation,
"do you think anything could be done for Jesson with Prince Shan?"
Maggie was silent. They were standing in a shaded corner of the hall,
but a fleck of sunshine shone in her hair. She was still a little out of
breath with the exercise, her cheeks full of healthy colour, her eyes
bright. She tapped her skirt with her riding whip. Nigel watched her a
little uneasily.
"Prince Shan is calling here this afternoon," Maggie announced. "I hope
you don't mind."
"What are you going to say to him?" Nigel asked bluntly.
There was a short, tense silence. Even at the thought of the crisis
which she knew to be so close at hand, Maggie felt herself unnerved and
in dubious straits.
"I do not know," she said at last. "For one thing, I do not know what he
wants."
"What he wants seems perfectly plain to me," Nigel replied gravely. "He
wants you."
Maggie made a desperate effort to regain the lightheartedness of a few
weeks ago.
"If you believe that," she said, "your composure is most unflattering."
There was a ring at the front doorbell, and a familiar voice was heard
outside. Maggie turned away to the staircase with a little sigh of
relief.
"Naida!" she exclaimed. "I remember now I asked her for a quarter past
one instead of half-past. You must entertain her, Nigel. I'll change
into something quickly. And of course I'll speak to Prince Shan. We
mustn't lose a minute about that. I'll telephone from my room in a few
minutes, Naida. Nigel will look after you."
Naida came down the hall, cool and exquisitely gowned in a creation of
shimmering white. Nigel led her into the rarely used drawing-room and
found a chair for her between the open window and the conservatory. At
first they exchanged but few words. The sense of her near presence
affected Nigel as nothing of the sort had ever done before. She for her
part seemed quite content with a silence which had in it many of the
essentials of eloquence.
"If the history of these days is ever written by an irascible German
historian," Naida remarked at length, "he will probably declare that the
destinies of the world have been affected during this last month by an
outburst of primitivism. Do you know that I have written quite nice
things to Paul about you English people? Honest things, of course, but
still things which you helped me to discover. And Prince Shan, too. I
think that when he rode here through the clouds, he believed in his
heart that he was coming as a harbinger of woe."
"You really think, then, that the crisis is past?" Nigel asked.
She nodded.
"I am almost sure of it. Prince Shan returns to China within the course
of the next few days."
"We have lived so long," Nigel observed, "in dread of the unknown. I
wonder whether we shall ever understand the exact nature of the danger
with which we were faced."
"It depends upon Prince Shan," she replied. "The terms were Immelan's,
but the method was his."
"Do you believe," he asked a little abruptly, "that the attempt on
Prince Shan's life last night was made by Immelan?"
There was a touch, perhaps, of her Muscovite ancestry in the cool
indifference with which she considered the matter.
"I should think it most likely," she decided. "Prince Shan never changes
his mind, and I believe that he has decided against Immelan's scheme.
Immelan's only chance would be in Prince Shan's successor."
"Why is China so necessary?" Nigel asked.
She turned and smiled at her companion.
"Alas!" she sighed, "we have reached an _impasse_. The great English
diplomat asks too many questions of the simple Russian girl."
"It is unfortunate," he replied, in the same vein, "because I feel like
asking more."
"As, for example?"
"Whether you would be content to live for the rest of your life in any
other country except Russia."
"A woman is content to live anywhere, under certain circumstances," she
murmured.
Karschoff, discreetly announced, entered the room with flamboyant ease.
"It is well to be young!" he exclaimed, as he bent over Naida's fingers.
"You look, my far-away but much beloved cousin, as though you had slept
peacefully through the night and spent the morning in this soft, sunlit
air, with perhaps, if one might suggest such a thing, an hour at a Bond
Street beauty parlour. Here am I with crow's-feet under my eyes and
ghosts walking by my side. Yet none the less," he added, as the door
opened and Maggie appeared, "looking forward to my luncheon and to hear
all the news."
"There is no news," Naida declared, as the butler announced the service
of the meal. "We have reached the far end of the ways. The next
disclosures, if ever they are made, will come from others. At luncheon
we are going to talk of the English country, the seaside, the meadows,
and the quiet places. The time arrives when I weary, weary, of the
brazen ticking of the clock of fate."
"I shall tell you," Nigel declared, "of a small country house I have in
Devonshire. There are rough grounds stretching down to the sea and
crawling up to the moors behind. My grandfather built it when he was
Chancellor of England, or rather he added to an old farmhouse. He called
it the House of Peace."
"My father built a house very much in the same spirit," Naida told them.
"He called it after an old Turkish inscription, engraven on the front of
a villa in Stamboul--'The House of Thought and Flowers.'"
Maggie smiled across the table approvingly.
"I like the conversation," she said. "Naida and I are, after all, women
and sentimentalists. We claim a respite, an armistice--call it what you
will. Prince Karschoff, won't you tell me of the most beautiful house
you ever dwelt in?"
"Always the house I am hoping to end my days in," he answered. "But let
me tell you about a villa I had in Cannes, fifteen years ago. People
used to speak of it as one of the world's treasures."
When the two men were seated alone over their coffee, Nigel passed
Chalmers' note and the enclosure across to his companion.
"You remember I told you about Chalmers' friend, Jesson, the secret
service man who came over to us?" he said. "Chalmers has just sent me
round this."
Karschoff nodded and studied the message through his great horn-rimmed
eyeglass.
"I thought that he was going to Russia for you," he said.
"So he did. He must have gone on from there."
"And the message comes from Southern China," Prince Karschoff reflected.
Nigel was deep in thought. China, Russia, Germany! Prince Shan in
England, negotiating with Immelan! And behind, sinister, menacing,
mysterious--Japan!
"Supposing," he propounded at last, "there really does exist a secret
treaty between China and Japan?"
"If there is," Prince Karschoff observed, "one can easily understand
what Immelan has been at. Prince Shan can command the whole of Asia. I
know they are afraid of something of the sort in the States. An American
who was in the club yesterday told us they had spent over a hundred
millions on their west coast fortifications in the last two years."
"One can understand, too, in that case," Nigel continued, "why Japan
left the League of Nations. That stunt of hers about being outside the
sphere of possible misunderstandings never sounded honest."
"It was unfortunate," Prince Karschoff said, "that America was dominated
for those few months by an honest but impractical idealist. He had the
germ of an idea, but he thrust it on the world before even his own
country was ready for it. In time the nations would certainly have
elaborated something more workable."
"You cannot keep a full-blooded man from clenching his fist if he's
insulted," Nigel pointed out, "and nations march along the same lines as
individuals. Its existence has never for a single moment weakened
Germany's hatred of England, and the stronger she grows, the more she
flaunts its conditions. France guards her frontiers, night and day, with
an army ten times larger than she is allowed. Russia has become the
country of mysteries, with something up her sleeve, beyond a doubt, and
there are cities in modern China into which no European dare penetrate.
Japan quite frankly maintains an immense army, the United States is
silently following suit--and God help us all if a war does come!"
"You are right," Karschoff assented gloomily. "The last glamour of
romance has gone from fighting. There were remnants of it in the last
war, especially in Palestine and Egypt and when we first overran
Austria. To-day, science would settle the whole affair. The war would be
won in the laboratory, the engine room and the workshop. I doubt
whether any battleship could keep afloat for a week, and as to the
fighting in the air, if a hundred airships were in action, I do not
suppose that one of them would escape. Then they say that France has a
gun which could carry a shell from Amiens to London, and more mysterious
than all, China has something up her sleeve which no one has even a
glimmering of."
"Except Jesson," Nigel muttered.
"And Jesson's gleam of knowledge, or suspicion," Prince Karschoff
remarked, "seems to have brought him to the end of his days. Can
anything be done with Prince Shan about him, do you think?"
"Only indirectly, I am afraid," Nigel replied. "Maggie is seeing him
this afternoon. As a matter of fact, I believe she telephoned to him
before luncheon, but I haven't heard anything yet. When a man goes out
on that sort of a job, he burns his boats. And Jesson isn't the first
who has turned eastwards, during the last few months. I heard only
yesterday that France has lost three of her best men in China--one who
went as a missionary and two as merchants. They've just disappeared
without a word of explanation."
The telephone extension bell rang. Nigel walked over to the sideboard
and took down the receiver.
"Is that Lord Dorminster?" a man's voice asked.
"Speaking," Nigel replied.
"I am David Franklin, private secretary to Mr. Mervin Brown," the voice
continued. "Mr. Mervin Brown would be exceedingly obliged if you would
come round to Downing Street to see him at once."
"I will be there in ten minutes," Nigel promised.
He laid down the receiver and turned to Karschoff.
"The Prime Minister," he explained.
"What does he want you for?"
"I think," Nigel replied, "that the trouble cloud is about to burst."