CHAPTER IX

The hour was eleven o'clock. Dacent Smith was, as usual, up to his ears in work. Very little of the real work, conducted by him on behalf of the Department, was dispatched at the office. If he possessed a weakness at all, it was a weakness for the luxury of his own suite of rooms and for the benign, competent aid of Grew. Servant and master were each equally devoted to the other, and yet even Grew was only vaguely aware of the greatness, of the importance of the stoutish, bland, keen-eyed gentleman who was his master.

At Dacent Smith's elbow a green-shaded electric lamp cast a bright light on the papers beneath his hand. The chief wrote neatly and carefully, and when the door opened and Grew came softly in he did not lift his head.

"Mr. Treves to report, sir."

"I'll see Mr. Treves immediately."

"Very good, sir."

Dacent Smith raised his head.

"Oh, Grew, please ask the gentleman who is in the other room to wait a little longer."

"Very good, sir."

Two minutes later John found himself alone with the chief.

Dacent Smith motioned him into one of the deep, leathered-covered arm-chairs, opened a silver box of Egyptian cigarettes, and pushed it towards him.

"Well," he questioned, wheeling his chair and looking at John much as an astute physician might look at a patient; "I can see by your expression," he went on quickly, "that you have something of importance to report."

"I think so," said John.

"Well, what is it?"

"In the foyer of the Savoy to-night, sir, Mrs. Beecher Monmouth"--an almost imperceptible change of expression occurred on Dacent Smith's smooth features--"Mrs. Beecher Monmouth," continued John, "passed a slip of paper into my hand. I assumed at once that the paper was meant for either Manners or Cherriton, and, obeying your instructions, I delivered it at once."

"You memorised it first?"

Dacent Smith's tone was almost sharp.

"It was very short, sir. I can remember it exactly."

Dacent Smith pushed a pencil and block of paper towards him.

"Perhaps you had better write it down immediately," he said. "If you visualise it in writing you will be less likely to have forgotten or misplaced a word."

John rose, and bending over the desk wrote the exact words of the message Mrs. Beecher Monmouth had conveyed to him. When he came to the word _Imperator_, Dacent Smith whistled softly.

"You have done very well, Treves," he said. He suddenly looked into John's face. "You must better your acquaintance with Mrs. Beecher Monmouth."

"I have an appointment with her for to-morrow night," answered John.

Dacent Smith glanced at a little gilt clock on the mantelshelf.

"I think we shall be in time!"

"That is exactly what Cherriton said," John answered.

Dacent Smith was silent for a moment.

"Treves," he said, "if the _Imperator_ sails to-morrow at three o'clock by Route 28, which is their code for the North Ireland route, there will be another disaster for us."

He was silent a moment and John put a question that had troubled him somewhat.

"But if she doesn't sail at that hour," he said; "if she is suddenly delayed or dispatched by another route, won't that arouse their suspicions?"

Dacent Smith looked at him for a moment, then smiled quietly.

"Oh," he said, "we shall not be quite so obvious as that, Treves, otherwise they would come to suspect a leakage. What will occur is this: I shall communicate with the Admiralty at once, and some time to-morrow morning an accident will happen--quite a small accident--to the _Imperator's_ boilers. The news of the accident will be well spread throughout the crew and the deck hands. Thus the _Imperator_ will be unavoidably delayed and will not sail at three o'clock to-morrow."

He rose as he finished speaking and went quickly out of the room. When he returned he was obviously much easier in his mind. With slow deliberation he replaced himself in his chair at the desk.

"Now give me details of your interview with Cherriton."

John stated what had occurred.

"Anything else to report?" asked Dacent Smith, looking at him with a penetrating glance. "I see you have a scratch on your forehead."

"Yes," answered John. "It occurred in Hampstead; a young man attacked me and endeavoured to get my pocket-book!"

"Oh, that is rather alarming!"

"It was rather sudden," John confessed, "and he was a particularly energetic person."

"Would you know him again if you saw him?" asked Dacent Smith.

"I think I should," answered John. "He was about my own height, but more slenderly built. Rather a good-looking fellow, well dressed. He was a most energetic and audacious opponent," he continued, becoming unexpectedly expansive.

"Audacity is sometimes a fault!" observed Dacent Smith. "Just sit where you are a minute, Treves; I want to introduce you to some one."

He crossed the room and opened the door. John noticed him beckon to some one, and a moment later a young man in evening clothes stepped into the room.

Dacent Smith led the new-comer towards the hearth.

"Captain," he said, speaking to the young man, "this is Mr. Treves, who is now a member of our service."

John rose to shake hands, and found himself looking into the smiling face of a young man of twenty-eight, a young man with dark brown, daring-looking eyes, a sun-browned skin, and a dark moustache. The stranger's face was humorous, and on the lower part of his left cheek was a contused redness.

As John and he shook hands, John uttered an exclamation of astonishment.

"Why, you're the man who attacked me!"

"Well, I don't know about that!" smiled the Captain, cheerily; "it looks to me as if the attacking was mostly on your side."

"I must say," John continued, "you put up quite a good fight, but I don't quite see the point. If you were acting on behalf of the Department, why did you attack me?"

He glanced at Dacent Smith, and the great man undertook an explanation. "The whole thing was a slight mistake. Your new acquaintance, known to us as Captain X., was under my orders, his avocation to-night. He saw Mrs. Beecher Monmouth shake hands with you. He also observed you--and he says, very neatly--put something in your inner breast pocket. He had never seen you before, but he naturally jumped to the conclusion that you were in league with this particular fashionable lady, whom he had been sent to watch, hence his mistaken attack on you."

John turned again to his late antagonist.

"I am sorry if I hurt you!" he said.

"You did hurt me abominably," retorted Captain X. "I am not much of a pugilist and that half-arm jolt, or whatever you call it, has my sincerest admiration."

"The luck was on my side," returned John politely.

"And the misdirected energy on mine," smiled the Captain.

Dacent Smith moved to the table, took up a sheet of paper, folded it, and handed it to Captain X.

"Now," said he, "we will return to business."

At nine o'clock the following evening John found himself in a lady's boudoir, a room heavy with the odour of Russian cigarettes. The neat, capped foreign maid who had ushered him into the apartment had removed herself, closing the door softly behind her.

The room was not large, and every effort of a somewhat exotic taste had been put forth to create an atmosphere of intimacy. It was a room, as it were, planned and arranged for secret meetings. The carpet was thick; a while polar bear rug extended itself from the hearth, and beyond the hearth, running along the wall, was a divan covered in heavy silk of Chinese blue. A Chinese _kakemono_ of brilliant colours--red, orange, azure, green, and gold--covered the wall behind the divan. The general air of the place was one that did not appeal to John in the least. He did not care a button about exotic boudoirs. Neither did he care for Mrs. Beecher Monmouth, who to-night was wearing a Chinese overgown as brilliant and sumptuous in hue as the _kakemono_ that covered the wall.

She had been seated on the divan when John entered. She rose now and came towards him, with the pink light softening the cold splendour of her beauty. There was no doubt about her beauty--John was prepared to admit that even at this second meeting.

"You bad boy to be so late!" breathed Mrs. Beecher Monmouth, squeezing his fingers in hers. She drew him towards her.

The moment was a delicate one for Manton. What Treves's relations had been with this woman he could not guess. But it was his business to find out. It was indeed his business to find out many things about her. For months the Intelligence Department had held her in suspicion, but Dacent Smith's most brilliant assistants had failed to make headway in her case. She was slippery as an eel--quick-witted, cunning, daring and resourceful. In that moment, as she drew John towards her, she suspected a ruse. But there was no ruse. She looked up, her brilliant eyes searching him.

"Have you nothing for me?" she whispered.

There was only one thing to do, only one safe course to take, and John took it. He, as it were, plunged, and risked the consequences. He put his arms about her shapely shoulders and pressed a kiss upon the upturned lips.

"No, no! I didn't tell you you could kiss me!"

"You said something very like it!" laughed John.

"You are a bad, daring boy."

"Faint heart never won anything worth having," returned John.

Mrs. Beecher Monmouth returned to her divan and disposed herself comfortably. "You bad Bernard, you must sit in that low chair at once, and tell me all you have been doing lately!"

She lifted a cigarette case from a low, ivory-topped table. John took one, noticing that they were the excellent cigarettes Treves had been in the habit of smoking.

"Tell me what you have been doing."

John mused, and the woman went on:

"Do you know, you looked rather handsome last night at the Savoy." She paused and became coyly and softly wistful. "I dislike handsome boys; they are so conceited as a rule."

"If I can keep her talking like this for a while," thought John, "I shall not get into deep water!"

There was a silence, during which the lady luxuriantly smoked her Russian cigarette. Then she looked at John with her slow, low-lidded smile.

"Talk," she commanded.

"I prefer to hear you talk," said John. "Tell me what you have been doing lately--to-day, for instance."

The lady pondered.

"Oh, to-day the Ogre gave a luncheon party."

John guessed that the Ogre was her unprepossessing husband.

"The Ogre gave a luncheon party, and among others we had Lady Rachel Marlin, a delightful chatterbox. Her husband's in the Navy, you know. I could listen to her talk for hours."

"I don't doubt it," thought John.

"After tea," resumed she, "I went to my Red Cross work."

John was wary. The fact that she did Red Cross work surprised him, but possibly Treves had been aware of the fact, and it would be unsafe for him to express his surprise.

There was silence for a moment until John hit on a safe question.

"Do you go to the same place?" he inquired.

"Oh, yes, the Officers' Hospital, you know. They are such dear, delightful fellows."

She told him no more about the Officers' Hospital, and he put another question.

"What have you done this evening?"

"I have been boring myself to death until you came. And now you make poor me talk and don't entertain me in the least!"

Suddenly she lifted her head.

"I hope you aren't in one of your moods?"

"Oh, no," said John, quickly. "What makes you think that?"

She looked at him long and steadily. He sustained her gaze; her brilliant, hard beauty smote his consciousness again.

"Do you remember how awful you were at first, Bernard?"

"I suppose I was pretty awful," answered John, wondering what Treves had done to earn himself that character.

Suddenly Mrs. Beecher Monmouth ceased her scrutiny and broke into a laugh, a long tinkle of laughter that showed all her fine teeth.

"What a boy you are," she said. "Do you remember that night when you swore and tore about this room like a madman?" She laughed again, as though in memory of a scene that had been grotesquely ridiculous. Somehow, in that moment John felt his instinctive dislike of her intensify. He saw her as an utterly cold-blooded traitor to her country. Only forty-eight hours earlier she had slipped into his hand information that had been intended to doom a great ship to disaster. The slip of paper that had so astoundingly come into his possession had in itself constituted a vile blow at the safety of England. And here was the woman who had safely engineered that atrocity, who had acted as an intermediary in Germany's pay. And this same woman was smiling at him in her Grosvenor Place boudoir, surrounded by all the luxuries of life, the wife of a politician of some eminence, who had only recently been in the running for an under-secretaryship.

The thought flashed into John's mind--was Beecher Monmouth, M.P., also a traitor? He did not know. But he was prepared to risk a good deal to find out.

Once more he turned his attention to the woman before him.

"It was rather weak of me," he said, "to act the way I did."

"It was as good as a melodrama," replied she. "You said you were ruined, and swore you'd end everything! I forget whether it was to be the river or in some less pleasant manner. Called yourself a traitor----"

"Traitor!" repeated John--he wanted to know more of this.

"Melodrama again," responded Mrs. Beecher Monmouth. "However, you calmed yourself in the end. You became your own delightful, foolish self again."

"Thanks," said John, and for the life of him he could not help saying aloud, "and you were able to twist me round your pretty fingers!"

She looked at him with one of her quick looks.

"Now, that is delightful of you to say pretty things to me. Do you know," she continued, leaning towards him, "you have improved immensely--you are quite changed! Before you really came to us," she adopted a note of seriousness, "you were really too dreadful for words. You raved against the army, that had treated you so abominably, and yet would not throw in your lot with us. Oh, you were very difficult, _mon ami_!"

"And now?" inquired John.

"Oh, now, you are quite another man."

"I'm glad you think that," said John aloud, and to himself he added, "my clever lady, you never spoke a truer word in your iniquitous life."

"The change in you is so marked," went on Mrs. Beecher Monmouth, "that Captain Cherriton actually doubted your loyalty to us. He regarded your escape from Scotland Yard authorities as so sudden."

"Ah," protested John, "but I was mistaken for another man."

"Of course, I know that, you silly boy! But Cherriton could not rest satisfied until he had discovered that there actually existed a person called John Manton, and that you had really been mistaken for this personage."

John made a mental note that in Cherriton he had an adversary of no mean order.

"I hope," said he, "now that Captain Cherriton has discovered my story to be true, he won't suspect me again."

"As for that," responded the lady, "he suspects his own shadow. But you are very high in favour just at the moment."

"His favour is worth having?" probed John.

"We shall discover that," said Mrs. Beecher Monmouth. Her tone suddenly became fervent, almost exalted. "After the war there will be great things for us all. Now is the time to sow; then will be the time to reap the harvest!"

The expression of her face had changed. A dark, fierce light seemed to illumine her features.

"We shall win yet! We are winning now, but the end will be swift!"

"The end of some people," thought John, "will be devilishly swift!" He was thinking of Manners, of Cherriton, and of the lady before him.

"What do you think will happen?" he inquired.

"They will come here, of course," she retorted, suddenly standing erect beside the divan and speaking with fiery and passionate intensity, "they will come here--my people!"

"Your people?" interjected John, quickly.

"My people," droned she, with a lift of her head. "You didn't know that before? But you are one of us, and I can trust you now."

"But everybody thinks you are an American," observed John, recalling what Dacent Smith had told him.

"Quite true--they do think that, and for convenience sake I am an American--a rich American who married"--she lifted a scornful lip and pointed towards the door--"who married the Ogre."

"Were you working for the--the cause when you married him?" inquired John.

But the sudden flame that had animated her appeared to die away; she became once more her beautiful exotic self.

"I have worked for the cause since----" she stopped.

She, as it were, returned to earth.

"Bernard," she said, when she had smoked a few minutes in silence, "I have something to show you."

She rose, crossed the room, and unlocked a buhl cabinet. A moment later she returned to John, and handed him an envelope. Within was a closely written letter beginning: "Dearest Alice."

As John glanced at the writing Mrs. Beecher Monmouth came behind him, and laid her manicured finger-nail on the bottom four lines of the first sheet.

"That is all you need read," she said.

The four lines at which she pointed ran:

"If you think Treves has the courage for the task I will take your word for it--he shall be the man!"