Part 4

"Pardon, Monsieur l'Anglais--I know what you would say to me! There is much force in the argument.... It is _tres sensee_--and there is truth in it, and yet it is false--to be guilty of a paradox. The aristocracy of Great Britain, like her plutocracy, set high value upon much that comes from France. British gold is poured into my country in return for the newest and most fanciful modes in costume, millinery, and jewellery. And not only do your beautiful women adorn themselves with the inventions of our bold and original genius for ornament, but for your _menus_, your pleasures, the novels and plays that paint in intoxicating colours the joys of unchaste love and illicit passion, for the sensuous poetry that is garlanded with the flame-hued flowers of Evil, you are ready to praise and pay us lavishly, as though no nobler growth than this rank luxuriance sprang from the intellectual soil of France. Our vices--alas!--with the appalling diseases that spring from them, and the combinations of drugs that alleviate these--all find with you a ready market. And you attend our race-meetings at Longchamps and Auteuil, where English jockeys ride French and Irish horses--and you believe, you!--that you know the social life of France. No!--but you are ignorant--profoundly ignorant! May GOD be thanked that you misjudge us thus cruelly. For if my country were no better than Great Britain and other foreign nations believe her to be, it were time indeed for a rain of fire from Heaven!"

Hardly raising his voice above a clear whisper, the emotion and vehemence with which he spoke, and the swift and fiery gesticulations with which he illustrated utterance, made the sweat start out in beads upon his wrinkled forehead and cheeks. He wiped these off with the blue checked handkerchief, saying:

"Pardon! I grow warm when I speak of these things. I recognise that if in the judgment of other nations France is a courtesan drunk with lechery, or at the best _un esprit follet_, she has brought this judgment upon herself. Flippancy, the desire to _faire de l'esprit_ under any circumstances--the bold and brilliant gaiety that is her exclusive and most beautiful characteristic--these have caused her to be misunderstood. But whatever else she be, she is not Pagan nor Agnostic. To believe that is to wrong her cruelly, Monsieur!"

Franky, by now hopelessly at sea, endured the hailstorm of swift, vehement sentences with an expression of amiable vacuity, his stiffly pendent hands plainly yearning for the refuge of his trousers pockets, his mind rocking on the waves of the stranger's passionate eloquence like a toy yacht adrift on the bosom of the Atlantic. And the resonant Gallic voice went on:

*CHAPTER VIII*

*MONSEIGNEUR*

"The masters of France to-day are hostile to Christianity. They are Freemasons (Freemasonry in England is not Freemasonry as it is understood here); they are Freethinkers, Socialists, Internationalists, and Hedonists, the avowed enemies of the Catholic Faith. Hence, churches, seminaries, and schools have been closed by Government, communities of religious men and women have been uprooted and exiled. Priests have been banished, ecclesiastical and private property has been appropriated and confiscated, churches have been desecrated, the symbols of Christianity and religion everywhere torn down. In France upon Good Friday the standard of the Republic waves proudly, while the flag of every other Christian nation hangs at half-mast high. And yet--the great mass of the French people are--Catholic and nothing but Catholic! The light may be hidden, but the fire of devotion still burns in millions of faithful hearts gathered about the Church's altars, beating beside the hearths of innumerable homes in France. Blood--torrents of blood--would not quench that sacred fire. When the Day of Expiation comes, as it will come, most surely, the Catholicism of France will prove her salvation yet!"

With the final sentence, the hand that had been lifted in gesture dropped to the side of the speaker. The flashing glance took in Franky from the top of his sleek bewildered head to the tips of his beautiful patent-leathers. He said with a smile of irresistible amusement:

"Monsieur, I fear I have fatigued you. Let me thank you for your admirable patience. _Au revoir_, or if you prefer it--_Adieu_!"

Another of the quick little bows, and he had covered himself and passed on rapidly. Franky reflected, staring after the short black figure in the caped soutane with the worn purple sash and shabby beaver shovel-hat, as it receded from his view.

"Fruity old wordster, 'pon my natural! Toppin' fine talker! Wonder who he is? Head of a Public School, swottin' an address for the beginning of the Midsummer Half term--a Professor of Divinity gettin' up a lecture--the Archbishop of Paris rehearsin' a sermon. Whichever they call him, why don't he pitch his language at a man of his own size?"

And he went back to the Spitz through the boulevards that were surging with the afternoon life of Paris, and heard from Pauline that Miladi had retired to bed. She had already dispatched a billet of excuses to Sir Brayham, with whom Miladi and Milord were engaged to dine downstairs that evening, explaining that a headache prevented her from accompanying Milord. He--Milord--must be sure to make no noise in changing for dinner, as Miladi, after a crisis of the nerves of the most alarming, was now sleeping like an angel, having taken a _potion calmante_ of orange-flower syrup with water, not the veronal so heartily detested of Milord....

"Sleepin' like an angel, is she? ... Good egg!--though I thought angels never went to bed--flew about singing all the giddy time. Righto, though! I won't disturb her ladyship.... When she wakes, give her my love...."

And Franky entered his dressing-room on cautious tiptoe, lighted a cigarette, rang the bell for his valet, and began to reflect.

It was to have been a dinner of eight people--Brayham the host, with Lady Wathe, skinny little vitriol-tongued woman!--a man unknown who was to have sat next Margot; Commander Courtley--ripping good fellow old Courtley! no better sailor walked the quarter-deck of a First-Class Cruiser--damn shame those Admiralty bigwigs denied such a fellow post-rank; and Lady Beauvayse, formerly Miss Sadie Sculpin of New York--pretty American with pots of boodle, married to that ghastly little bounder who'd stepped into the shoes a better man would be wearing if his elder brother (handsome fellow who married an actress, Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity--good old Jollity!) hadn't got pipped in that scrum with the Boers in 1900-1901.

Lessie, Lady Beauvayse, the widder called herself on the posters and programmes. Come down to second-rate parts in Music Hall Revue--gettin' elderly and stout. Must see red when she happened to spy the present Lord Beauvayse's pretty peeress in the stalls or boxes.... Wonder why the P.P. made such a pal of Patrine Saxham? Niece of Saxham of Harley Street--handsome as paint, proud as the devil, and an Advanced Thinker--according to Margot. Remembering the gift of the jade tree-frog, Franky involuntarily wrinkled his nose.

With Lady Beau and the Saxham girl, there would be a party of seven, counting the man unknown.... Might go on afterwards to the Folies Bergere or the Theatre Marigny--or perhaps the Jardin de Paris. Why hadn't Jobling answered his master's bell? Why had he deputised a waiter to enquire whether his lordship wished his valet? Did he think waiters were paid to do his, Jobling's, work for him? Or did he, Jobling, suppose he was kept for show?

The strenuous stage-whisper in which Franky addressed the recalcitrant Jobling penetrated the door-panels of the adjoining bower, as such whispers usually do. But Margot was really sleeping--the orange-flower water had had a few drops of chloral mingled with it. Milord had never prohibited chloral, as Pauline had pointed out. But unsuspicious Franky, unrigging (as he termed the process), while the tardy Jobling prepared his master's bath and laid out his master's "glad rags," plumed himself upon having made a notable advance in the science of wife-government. Even the blameless potion of orange-flower testified to his masculine strength of will.

*CHAPTER IX*

*SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS*

You are invited to follow Franky, and sit with him at his friend Tom Brayham's circular board, decorated with great silver bowls of marvellous Rayon d'Or roses, that seemed to exhale the harvested sunshine of summer from their fiery golden hearts.

You remember the famous dining-room of the big Paris caravanserai, with its archways supported by slender pillars of creamy pink Carrara marble, wreathed with inlaid fillets of green malachite and lapis lazuli, and its electric illuminants concealed behind an oxidised silver frieze. And possibly you need no introduction to the deity--plain and middle-aged--in whose honour Brayham--the Hon. Sir Thomas Brayham, an ex-Justice of the King's Bench Division--in the remote mid-Victorian era a famous Q.C.--made oblation of luscious meats and special wines. The clever, sharp-tongued, penniless niece of a famous Minister for Foreign Affairs, she had made a love-match at twenty with Lord Watho Wathe, a handsome and equally impecunious subaltern in a famous Highland regiment, who was killed upon Active Service twenty years later, while travelling upon a special mission to the Front Headquarters during the South African War of 1900.

Two years later his widow conferred her hand upon Mr. Reuben Munts, of Kimberley and South Carfordshire, a diamond-mining magnate who had made his colossal pile before the War. She had never borne her second husband's name, and when he died, leaving her sole mistress of his millions, Lady Wathe resumed her place in Society, thenceforwards to sparkle as never before.

"The '_Chronique Scandaleuse_' in a diamond setting" some phrase-maker clever as herself had aptly termed her. Without her riches, stripped of her wonderful diamonds, Society might have found her to be merely a little chattering woman, avid of the reputation of a humorist and _raconteuse_, unflagging in her relish for stories, not seldom of the broadest, related at her own expense or at the cost of other people, and over-liberally garnished with nods and becks, darting glances, and wreathed smiles.

Upon this night of the Grand Prix--won, you will remember, by Baron M. de Rothschild's "Sardanapole"--the little lady's jests fizzled and coruscated like Japanese fireworks. Her gibes buzzed and stung like wasps about a lawn-set tea-table, when new-made jam and fragrant honey tempt the yellow-and-black marauders to the board. And yet from the soup to the _entremets_, Franky listened in dour and smileless silence, unable to conjure up a grin at the sharpest of the Goblin's witticisms, or swell the guffaw that invariably followed the naughtiest of her _double-entendres_.

"Off colour, what? ..." his crony Courtley queried in a sympathetic undertone, catching a glimpse of Franky's cheerless countenance behind the bare, convulsed back and snowy heaving shoulders of Lady Beauvayse, who occupied the intervening chair.

"Putridly off colour.... Walked in the Bois, and got a touch of the sun, I fancy!" Franky whispered back too loudly, drawing upon himself the Goblin's _equivoque_:

"The sun or the daughter, did you say, Lord Norwater? Dear me!" the Goblin shrilled; "you're actually blushing! You've revived a long-lost Early Victorian art."

"Was blushing really an art with the ladies of that dim and distant era?" asked the friendly Brayham, not in the least comprehending Franky's discomfiture, yet desirous of diverting the Goblin's glittering scrutiny from her victim's scarlet face.

"It was the art that concealed Heart--or assumed it!" Lady Wathe retorted, with a peal of elfish laughter, turning her tight-skinned, large-eyed, wide-mouthed ugliness upon the speaker, and nodding her little round head until the huge and perfectly matched diamonds of the triple-rayed tiara that crowned her scanty henna-dyed tresses flashed blinding sparks of violet and red and emerald splendour in the mellow-toned radiance of the electric lights.

The Goblin had meant nothing, Franky assured himself, as the angry blood stopped humming in his ears, and his complexion regained its normal shade. The bad pun that had bowled him over had possibly been uttered without malicious intent.... Yet Lady Wathe rented a gorgeous suite upon the floor below the Norwater apartments, and one of her three lady's-maids might have been pumping Pauline.... What was she saying? ... Why was everybody cackling? ...

The Goblin was launched upon a characteristic story. Its _denouement_--worked up with skill and related with point--evoked peal upon peal of laughter from the guests at Brayham's table, with the sole exception of Franky, whom the anecdote found sulky and left glum. He said to himself that if Lady Beauvayse, _nee_ Miss Sadie J. Sculpin of New York, sole child and heiress of a Yankee who had made millions out of Chewing Gum, chose to forget her position as the wife of a British Peer, and mother of his children, by Jove! and scream at such nastiness, it was her look-out. If the big red-blond man who sat on Franky's right shook with amusement, as he recapitulated the chief points of the story for the benefit of the girl who sat next him, it was his affair. But that the Saxham, an unmarried girl, who oughtn't to see the bearings of such a tale, should openly revel in its saltness, made Franky feel sick--on this particular night.

He realised that he detested the Saxham girl, one of Margot's chosen Club intimates, more fervently than even Tota Stannus or Joan Delabrand; more thoroughly than Rhona Helvellyn; only little less heartily than he hated Cynthia Charterhouse. Big, bold, galumphing, provocative--in fact, so much IT that you couldn't overlook her--he found her more unpleasantly attractive than usual, in a bodice that was no more than a fold of shimmering orange stuff above the waist--tossing the _panache_ of ospreys that startlingly crowned her, offering up her _persistant_ illusion perfumes for the delectation of the appreciative male.

Only look at her, ready to climb into her neighbour's pocket. Leaning her round white elbows on the guipure table-cloth, half-shutting those long greeny-brown Egyptian eyes of her, wreathing her long thick white neck to send a daring challenge into the face of the laughing man. A big man, bright red-haired, blue-eyed, and broad-chested, showing every shining tooth in his handsome grinning head....

"She's _screaming_, isn't she, dear Lady Beau?" Thus the Saxham to her employer, friend, and ally, across the silver bowls of Rayon d'Or roses, her naked shoulder brushing the coat-sleeve of her neighbour, the big rufous man. And Lady Beau gushed back:

"In marvellous form to-night.... Don't you think so, Count? Do agree with us!" and the big man agreed, with the accent of the German Fatherland:

"She is _kolossal_.... _Wunderlich_! ..."

"Who's the German next me--big beggar Lady Beau and Miss Saxham are gushing over?" Franky presently telegraphed to Courtley behind the charming American's accommodating back. And Courtley signalled in reply:

"Von Herrnung. German Count of sorts--Engineer and Flieger officer. Son of an Imperial Councillor, and cousin to Princess Willy of Kiekower Oestern--really rather an interestin' beast in his way. Made a one-stop flight to Paris from Hanover in April, with an Albatros biplane. Previously won an event in the Prinz Heinrich Circuit Competition." He added: "We can't decently blink their progress in military aviation. It's one o' them there fax which the brass-hats at the War Office pretend to regard as all my eye. Yet they know the Fatherland--or if they don't they oughter! Good-lookin' chap this. Not over thirty, I should guess him. Always dodging in and out of the German Embassy. The Goblin frightful nuts on him.... Goin' to steer him through the next London Season--suppose he's lookin' out for a moneyed wife!"

"Hope he gets her!" Franky mentally commented. But he looked with new interest at his big blond German neighbour, mentally calculating that with all that bone, brawn, and muscle, von Herrnung couldn't tip the scale at less than sixteen stone.

Small-boned himself and of stature not above the medium, Franky appreciated height and size in other men. And von Herrnung was undeniably a son of Anak. The noiseless, demure waiters who paused beside his chair to refill his glass or offer him dishes were dwarfed by his seated presence to the proportions of little boys.

Once, when there was a momentary bustle at the principal entrance to the now crowded restaurant, and a party of men, ceremoniously ushered by M. Spitz in person, passed up the central gangway between the rows of glittering tables, shielded by glass-panelled screens framed in oxidised silver, and crowded now with gossiping, laughing, gobbling patrons--men and women of varied nationalities, representing the elite of the fashionable world, von Herrnung rose and remained imperturbably standing at the salute, his eyes set and fixed, his head turned rigidly towards the personage, semi-bald, stout, with a prominent under jaw and a hard official stare rendered glassier by a frameless square monocle, and showing beneath the open front of a loose military mantle a star upon the left side of his evening dress-coat, and the glitter of an Order suspended from a yellow riband about his thick bull-neck.

"The German Ambassador, Baron von Giesnau," Lady Wathe returned to a question from Lady Beauvayse, as the portly official figure creaked by, leaving a whiff of choice cigars and a taint of _parfum tres persistant_, lifting three fingers of a white-gloved hand in acknowledgment of his countryman's salute, and von Herrnung unstiffened and dropped back into his chair. "No! ... I'm not sure where the Emperor is...." She added, with one of her laughs and a shrug of her thin vivacious shoulders: "Ask Count von Herrnung--he's sure to know!"

"_Gnaedige Graefin_," von Herrnung returned when interrogated, "I am not able to answer your question." He shrugged his broad shoulders and showed his white teeth. "_Unser Kaiser_ is--who shall say where? At the Hof ... possibly at Homburg.... Stop! ... Now I remember! _Seine Majestaet_ is at Kiel...." He continued, arranging with a big white hand displaying a preposterously long thumb-nail a corner of his glittering, tightly rolled moustache: "At Kiel ... _ach_, yes! he has been there since the 25th of June. Entertaining the British and American Ambassadors, visiting the Commander-in-Chief of your British Squadron, superintending the armament of one of our own new battle-cruisers,--seeing put into her those great big Krupp guns that are to sink your super-Dreadnoughts by-and-by!"

The deliberately-uttered words of the last sentence dropped into a little pool of chilly silence. He had spoken with perfect gravity, and the Englishmen who heard him stared before they grinned. Then the women shrieked in ecstasies of amusement--the Goblin's laugh overtopping all.

"For he hates us! ... You can't think how he hates us! ..." she crowed, writhing her lean little throat, clasped by seven rows of shimmering stones, wagging her Kobold's head, crowned by its diadem of multi-coloured fire. "Tell us how you hate us, Tido! ... Do--pray do!"

"I hate you, _ach_ yes! ... All German officers are like that--particularly the officers of our Field Flying Service," gravely corroborated von Herrnung. "We have many pleasant acquaintanceships with men and women of British nationality, but your race--the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teutonic oak-tree, it is natural that we should hate! For that Germany must expand upon the west and north-west as well as south and east, or suffocate, is certain. She must wield the trident of Sea Power; she must transform the map of Europe. She must exploit and disseminate German trade and German Kultur; therefore, as the British, more than any other nation, stands in the way of German development, we look forward to the Day when we shall exterminate you and take our right position as masters of the world!"

The women screamed anew at this. The men were now laughing in good earnest. Franky found it impossible to restrain the convulsions that shook him in his chair. Purple-faced Brayham tried to speak, but broke down wheezing and spluttering. The Goblin shrilled:

"Tell them, Tido.... Please tell them! ... Do--ha! ha! tell them how you're spoiling for a scrimmage with us! Show them your thumb-nail, pray do!"

Thus adjured, the big German solemnly extended his left hand for general inspection. The pointed, carefully-manicured thumb-nail was at least two inches long. Its owner said with perfect gravity:

"This is the badge of a Society of England-haters, chiefly Prussian military officers, young men of noble birth, bound by an oath of blood. This mark we carry to distinguish us. It is a sign of our dedication, to remind us of the purpose for which we are set apart." He added: "Count Zeppelin himself set the fashion of the uncut thumb-nail. It will be cut when the Day comes, and it has been dipped in blood!"

"In blood--how beastly!" said the Saxham girl, curling the corners of her wide red mouth contemptuously. "What a horrid crowd your noble young Prussian officers must be! And when is the dipping to come off?" Her voice was deep and resonant as a masculine baritone, and of so carrying a quality that Franky started as though the words had been spoken at his ear.

"_Gnaedige Fraeulein_," von Herrnung answered, "I have already told you. When the Day comes for which we are preparing. When the great German nation shall abandon Christianity--cast off the rusty fetters of Morality and Virtue--call on the Ancient God of Battles--and beat out the iron sceptre of World Power with sword-blows upon the anvil of War."

"When we're all to be exterminated, he means!" Lady Wathe gasped behind her filmy handkerchief. "Tido, you're too absolutely screaming! Do say why your noble young Prussians keep us waiting? ..." And von Herrnung answered composedly:

"Because we are not yet ready. We shall not be perfectly ready before the spring of 1916."

His hard, bright glance encountered Franky's, and he lifted his full glass of champagne and drank to him, smiling pleasantly.

Of course the German was rotting, reflected Franky. If he wasn't, the combined insolence and brutality of such a menace, uttered at the table of one of the Britons in whose gore von Herrnung and his comrades yearned to dip their preposterous two-inch thumb-nails, took the bun, by the Great Brass Hat! He was perfectly cool, as his muscular white hands--for the dinner had arrived at the dessert stage--manipulated the silver knife that peeled a blood-red nectarine. What a splendid ring, a black-and-white pearl, large as a starling's egg, and set in platinum, the fellow sported on the little finger of that clawed left hand. What was he asking, in the suave voice with the guttural Teutonic accent?

"You were in the Bois, I believe, Lord Norwater, early in the midday. Did you see any _avions_ of the _Service Aeronautique_? Did the invention they were testing come up to expectations? .... Did the English aerial stabiliser answer well? ..."

Franky knew, as he encountered the compelling stare of the hard blue eyes, that he objected to their owner. He returned, in a tone more huffy and less dignified than he would have liked it to be:

"Can't say.... I was merely walking in the Bois with a lady. Wasn't on the ground as--an investigator of the professional sort."