Part 6

She turned her face away from him, striving to control her irresistible laughter. In vain; it took her as a sudden gale takes a pennant at the masthead--seized and shook her--as von Herrnung could have shaken her had they been alone. He turned savagely from her; she heard him speak to Brayham, who responded with what-whattings, his fleshy hand to his deafest ear. Von Herrnung repeated his utterance. Brayham goggled in astonishment. Courtley murmured to Franky:

"Hear what the blighter's saying.... No keeping him down, is there? ... Buoyant as one of his own Zeppelins!"

They looked and listened. Brayham's thick bull-neck was shortening as his shoulders climbed to his mottled ears. They caught a sound between a snort and a bellow. Then Lady Wathe's diamonds flashed all the colours of the rainbow as she turned vivaciously to her friend.... Count Tido wanted to propose a toast, the custom in dear, sentimental Germany.... Why shouldn't he? Rather amusing. She begged him to go on. Said von Herrnung:

"To-night the laugh goes much against me. I have been most frightfully rotted. Now, in my country it is the custom when a guest has been made game of that those who have laughed at him must drink a toast with him--to show there is no ill-will."

"Never heard of such a custom--and I've lived in Germany a good deal."

This from Brayham. The German persisted:

"Still, it is a custom, and it may be you will gratify me?" He went on, now addressing the company generally: "Here at the Spitz they have a Tokayer that is very old and very excellent. If I might order some? It would be amusing if you would all join me in drinking to The Day! ..."

The speaker, without waiting consent, beckoned to one of the attendants. Brayham, his cockatoo-crest of stiff grey hair erect, stared, as at a new and surprising type of the human kind.

But the words Brayham might have uttered were taken out of his mouth. A swift glance had passed between the English Naval officer and the rather stupid, titled young Guardsman occupying the seat left of von Herrnung. And while the Commander coolly intimated to the advancing waiter by a sign that his services were not needed, Lord Norwater, lobster-red and rather flurried, turned to von Herrnung and said, not loudly, yet clearly enough to be heard by every guest at the table:

"Stop! Sorry to swipe in, Count, but you'd better not order that wine, I think!"

"You think not?" asked von Herrnung, with coolest insolence.

"I--don't think so. I'm dead-sure!" said Franky, getting redder. "We Britons laugh at brag and bluffing, and the gassy patriotism shown by some foreigners we're apt to call bad form. We abuse our Institutions and rag our Governments--we've done that since the year One--far as I can make out. And when other people do it we generally sit tight and smile. We've no use for heroics. But when the pinch comes--it ain't so much that we're loyal. We're Loyalty. We're IT!"

With all his boggling he was so much in earnest, and with all his earnestness so absurdly, quaintly slangy, that the listeners, men and women of British race, whose blood warmed to something in his face and utterance, were forced to struggle to restrain their mirth. Some inkling of this increased the speaker's confusion. He cast a drowning glance at his bulwark Courtley, and Courtley's eye signalled back to his, "Good egg! ... Drive on, old son!"

"You're a foreigner here, of course ..." Franky pursued before the German could interrupt him. He appeared oblivious to his own analogous case. Perhaps for the moment the Hotel Spitz in the Place Vendome, Paris, and its gorgeous namesake in the London West End, were confused in his not too intellectual mind. He went on: "We're ready to make allowances--too rottenly ready sometimes.... But I read off the iddy-umpties to Full Stop, a minute back.... Count von Herrnung, when you ask English ladies and Englishmen--two of 'em in the Service--to drink that toast with you--you must know you're putting your foot in your hat!"

"Especially," said Courtley, as Franky collapsed, dewy all over and wondering where his breath had gone to--"especially as--a friend of mine happens to have heard that toast proposed rather recently during a Staff banquet at a military headquarters in Germany. And the words, are--not--quite exactly flavoured to suit the British taste."

"'_To the Day of Supremacy. On the Land and on the Sea, under the Sea and in the Air, Germany Victorious for ever and ever!_'" said von Herrnung, who had got upon his legs, and loomed gigantic over the lace-covered, flower-decked table, now in the after-dinner stage of untidiness, with its silver-gilt and crystal dishes of choice fruit and glittering bonbons disarranged and ravaged, its plates littered, its half-emptied wine-goblets pushed aside to make room for fragrant, steaming coffee-cups in filigree holders, and tiny jewel-hued glasses of Maraschino Cusenier, and Pere Kermann. There was a rustle, and a general scraping-back of chairs. Courtley had also risen, and Lord Norwater. A susurration of excitement had passed through the long, lofty, brilliant dining-room. People were getting up from the tables--the pink-and-yellow sheets of _Paris Soir_, the late edition of the _Daily Mail_, and another of the _Liberte_, were fluttering from hand to hand.... And the shrill voice of Lady Wathe was heard.

*CHAPTER XII*

*THE GATHERING OF THE STORM*

"Sit down, Tido!" said Lady Wathe. "What is the matter with everybody? What are they talking about? Tell a waiter to get us a paper! What do you say, Sir Thomas? Of course! Stupid of me to forget. To-day was to be the official summing-up of the evidence in the Perdroux Murder Case. A French Jury won't guillotine a woman--you said they wouldn't, Sir Thomas, from the beginning. But of course the verdict's 'Guilty' for Madame! ..."

Brayham, with a King's Bench cough, admitted that he had few misgivings as to the ultimate upshot. Upon the waiter's return without a newspaper, affirming a copy not to be procurable, judicial inquiries elicited from the man that the general _furore_ for news was less due to popular interest in the famous _cause celebre_ than to popular thirst for details with reference to the Assassinations at Serajevo. Which brought from Lady Wathe the shrill query:

"Sarajevo--where's Sarajevo? Ask him about the Verdict--I simply must know!"

The Verdict had been "Not Guilty," according to the waiter.... The Goblin screamed:

"But she is!--she is! Good heavens, my dear Sir Thomas! Isn't it murder to riddle an editor to death in his own office, before his subordinates, with bullets from a revolver you've hidden in your muff?"

Brayham summoned up his best King's Bench manner to answer:

"If he dies--and a jury don't happen to decide that you're innocent--the evidence is against you, my dear ma'am!"

Lady Wathe's vivacious gestures provoked astounding coruscations from her panoply of jewels. She had been certain from the first that there would be no capital sentence. But "Not Guilty." ... Surely it should have been Mazas for life. Or New Caledonia--didn't they send murderesses to New Caledonia?

Brayham, with a tone and manner even more deeply tinged with the King's Bench, begged leave to correct--arah!--his very dear friend's impression that the blameless and much-tried lady, now probably--aha--arah!--supping in the company of her husband and her advocate in her own luxurious dining-room, might, without libel, be called a murderess. Like--aha!--many other highly-strung women, Madame Perdroux had had recourse to the revolver as the _ultima ratio_. But the Verdict pronounced by the President of the Paris Court of Assize that afternoon had--arah!--purged----

"Bother the Verdict!" snapped the Goblin.

Brayham, incensed at this irreverence, replied with acrimony. The pair wrangled as Paris had wrangled since March 16th, while the great, crowded restaurant buzzed with the name of an obscure town in Eastern Europe--"_Sarajevo, Sarajevo_"--tossed and bandied from mouth to mouth.

We have learned to our bitter cost the appalling significance of this crime of Sarajevo, which had dwarfed in the estimation of the keen-witted Parisians the most sensational _cause celebre_ ever tried before a French Criminal Court.

The Perdroux trial and its probable result had split Paris into hostile factions. The Press had attacked or defended, lauded or vilified the chief personages of the drama with tireless energy for weeks. The Verdict of "Not Guilty" would have caused fierce rioting upon the boulevards this sultry night of July. Blood would have been spilt between the partisans of Madame Perdroux and her opponents, but for this unexpected bolt from the blue.

Berlin had had the story of the assassinations with its breakfast-rolls and hot creamed coffee. Now, in the blue-white glare of the great electric arc-lamps of the Paris boulevards, men and women leaned over one another's shoulders to get a whiff of the big black letters on the displayed contents-bills; at every kiosk and bookstall the newspaper-vendors were sold out; much-thumbed copies of the papers were bought by knowing speculators, to be sold and bought and sold again.

The Kaiser at Kiel was racing his own clipper when the operator of the Imperial private wireless read a story from the notes of the singing spark that smote him pale and sick. When his anointed master heard the gory news, his chief regret seems to have concerned the untimely decease of the partner of his "life-work." "It will have," he said with bitterness, "to be begun all over again!"

One wonders, in the blood-red light of four years of dreadful carnage, seeing Hell and its dark Powers still unchained, and raging on this War-torn earth of ours--what would have been the nature of the edifice reared by these two Imperial craftsmen, had the younger not been removed by a violent and sudden death?

Did the prospect of unlocking--with one touch on an electric button and the scrawl of a wet pen--the brazen gates of Death and Terror ever strike cold to the heart of the rufous Hapsburg Archduke? Madness, we know, is in the blood of his evil-fated House. But, when the shots from a Bosnian High School student's revolver pierced Franz Ferdinand's brain and body, was he sane enough to realise that the crime of the Anarchist had saved his own name from foul, indelible, and hideous infamy? We shall know when the trumpet of the Archangel sounds the Last Reveille, and the grave gives up its dead, and the Sea spews forth its victims, and the secrets of that deeper abyss, the human heart, are revealed in the sheer, awful Light that streams from the Throne of God.

*CHAPTER XIII*

*THE SUPERMAN*

People had for some time been rising, passing out through the oxidised silver-framed glass doors of Spitz's big brilliant dining-room; beyond these the vestibule was now full to the walls, so that its palms and tree-ferns rocked amidst the billows of a heaving human sea. Many guests lingered in conversation, standing in groups near the vacated tables. The glitter and blaze of jewels, adorning bizarre coiffures, bare and powdered throats, bosoms, arms, and backs,--the dazzling display of brilliantly-hued toilettes, made an _ensemble_ marvellously gay. And now, returning as they had arrived, but unattended by M. Spitz, came the party of notables from the German Embassy, talking together in loud, harsh, Teutonic accents. Von Herrnung, erect, stiffening to the salute as previously, remained in the rigid attitude until the Ambassador had passed. But this time the official finger beckoned. He turned, pushed back his chair, and in a stride, joined the squat, elderly figure. The yellow-white, heavily-featured face with its stiff brush of white hair above the square brain-box turned to him, the deeply-pouched, shrewd grey eyes looked past _him_ to the table he had left. The coarse mouth under the white moustache with the brushed-up points, uttered a few emphatic words. Then, with a slight nod, the representative of the All Highest at Berlin passed on. The swing-doors opened and shut behind him and his following. And von Herrnung rejoined his party, saying with a queer, excited breathlessness:

"The ladies will pardon.... His Excellency had something to say!"

The ladies were rising, looking for their theatre-wraps. He deftly lifted the barbaric garment of green velvet and sable-edged ermines from the back of Miss Saxham's chair, and, opening it, held it to receive her tall, luxuriant person, mentally commenting:

"With such hips, such a bosom, and such shoulders, the jade must be twenty-eight or nine." And remembering how boldly she had said to him that she liked red men, he thought: "Amusement here.... Nothing needed but time and opportunity--which this Bosnian affair reduces to a minimum." "_Gnaediges Fraulein_ will you not put on your _mantel_?"

She told him that she was too hot. He insisted, with all the Teuton's dread of chill:

"But it will be cooler in the vestibule, and cooler still when we are driving. Do we not go on to a theatre? I think Lady Wathe has told me so?"

She shrugged her splendid shoulders.

"Nothing so proper. The _Jardin des Milles Plaisirs_, on the Champs Elysees. We're all dead nuts on seeing the new dance from Sao Paulo. The thing that has exploded Tango and Maxixe, you know. Look!--the others are moving. Don't let's lose them! No! I won't take your arm. Please carry my wrap with your coat."

"I will put my coat on. Then I shall better carry your _mantel_."

An attendant deftly hung von Herrnung's thin black, sleeveless garment over his broad shoulders, and gave him his white silk wrap and soft crush felt. He slipped a coin into the man's palm, its small value being instantly reflected in the features of the receiver, and moved towards the swing-doors with Patrine. She said, as a slight block momentarily arrested their progress:

"What are they all jabbering about? Who has been assassinated? What has happened at this place with the crack jaw name? ..."

"Sarajevo..." came in von Herrnung's guttural accent.

"Sarajevo.... Not that I know where it is," said the deep warm voice, that was more like a young man's baritone than a young woman's contralto. And von Herrnung answered, with a renewal of that tingling thrill:

"Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia in Eastern Europe. When Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1909, she made her seat of Government at Sarajevo. The Slavs grumbled. They wished for union with Servia--that little nation of pig-breeders! ... They themselves--the Bosnians--are stupid peasants, _duemmer Teufels!--Schafskopfs_! They cultivate their land with the wooden ploughs that were used at the date of the Trojan War.... But this does not interest you at all, I think?"

"How do you know it doesn't interest me?"

"Because dress and jewellery and amusement are the chief things in your life, _gnaediges Fraeulein_. You are not even interested in _der Politik_, or in the higher _Kultur_. The social progress of your own country is nothing to you. You are too----"

"Too frightfully stupid.... Thanks!"

"I did not say too stupid," von Herrnung contradicted. "But if you were stupid, you are too hellishly handsome for that to matter in the least."

To be called hellishly handsome pleased her. Her eyes gave him a flashing side-glance. As a surge in the crowd pressed her curving hip against his tall, muscular body, she took his offered arm with a rough, brusque grace. They were near the swing-doors when she spoke:

"Tell me about the Sarajevo business.... Who is the official swell the Trojan ploughmen have hoisted--as Lady Beau would say?"

"I will tell you. It has happened only this morning----"

She felt the man's powerful muscles thrill and become rigid with suppressed excitement under the hand that rested on his arm.

"Two personages of the highest rank have been horribly assassinated. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, _Kronprinz_ of the Imperial House of Austria, and his wife; you have heard of the _Graefin_ Sophie Chotek, created Duchess of Hohenberg? Virtually she was _Erzherzogin_--Archduchess--but the wife of the Archduke by a _mariage de la main gauche_. A morganatic marriage--such unions have been heard of in your virtuous England."

They had passed the swing-doors now, and mingled, with the crush in the vestibule. Patrine said, signalling with a pair of long black suede gloves and a vanity-bag of gilded metal chain-mail:

"There's Lady Beau. Behind the second column right of the entrance. And here's Captain Courtley coming to hurry us up!"

Courtley, smiling and unruffled as ever, dodged under the huge roseate elbow of an immense lady in Oriental kincob tissues. He gave his message, turned and dived back again. The rich, womanly baritone of Miss Saxham said, addressing von Herrnung:

"Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas Brayham have gone on in Lady Wathe's auto-brougham. Lord Norwater has done a bunk. Pretended he had an appointment; he's been frightfully fed up with all of us this evening. Lady Beauvayse says her chauffeur is on the string all right, but about a million cars are ahead of him. Why did your Austrian Archduke and his wife go to that place in Bosnia if it wasn't healthy for Royalties? Fancy!--they went to their deaths this Sunday morning! Why does one always forget it's Sunday in Paris?"

"That English Sunday of yours," exclaimed von Herrnung, "is very good to forget, I think!"

She gave her deep, soft laugh. He went on rapidly:

"Of the Archduke and the Duchess I tell you, since you have asked me.... They inspected the troops--regiments of the Austrian garrison. Then they drove in their automobile along the Appel Quay, towards the Sarajevo Town Hall. They are passing beneath the shade of an avenue of tamarind and oak trees when a bomb is thrown at them by a man hidden among the branches.... The Archduke is very prompt--he wards off the bomb with his arm. He is not then hurt, nor is the Duchess. But his _Adjutant_--in the car behind them--is wounded in the neck. When they arrive at the Town Hall the Mayor commences the address of welcome. To him Franz Ferdinand says angrily: '_Halt den Mund!_ ... Shut up, you silly fellow! What the big devil is the use of your speeches? I came to Sarajevo on a visit, and I get bombs thrown at me.... It is too damned rotten for anything! ..."

"Yes, yes! ... Go on!" She bit her lips, fighting a nervous impulse to laugh.

"So the Imperial cortege drove away, and a student threw at the Archduke another bomb. It did not explode, so he shot him with an automatic revolver, an American Browning. The Duchess tried to cover him with her body, and the assassin shot her also. The Archduke begged her to live for their children, but both victims died as they were being taken to the Governor's house.... They have arrested the assassins, he who tried to kill, and the fellow who succeeded.... They are both young, and men of Serb race. They are rebels all--they hate their Austrian rulers. Sarajevo is swarming with fellows of the same breed...."

"What will the Austrian Government do to them, now they've caught them?"

"To the regicides," von Herrnung returned harshly, "Austria will do--nothing that very much matters. It is not an important thing to destroy two trapped rats. But I think there will be an ultimatum from Vienna to the Servian Government; and if the terms of that are not complied with, then the Emperor of Austria may give the signal for his monitors upon the Donau to open fire upon the capital of Belgrade."

Patrine asked negligently, as a new surge of the crowd thrust her tall, lithe figure away from her companion's, forcing her to tighten her hold upon his arm:

"'Monitors?' ... I used to think monitors were big schoolboys and schoolgirls. Senior pupils told off to keep order. I was one myself once.... Chosen because I was bigger, and noisier, and naughtier than any other girl in my class...."

"Ha, ha, ha! ... Praechtig! ... That is capital!" She could feel the laughter shaking his big ribs. "That is just what they are--those monitors of the Donau. Each is a big girl who keeps order _von anderen Sorte_. But they have turned-up noses, not Egyptian and beautiful like yours!"

He added, with the calculated roughness that had previously pleased her:

"You shall now put on your _mantel_. For the car, I see, is open." He shrugged his broad square shoulders closer into his overcoat and pulled up the collar about his throat, saying ill-temperedly: "Always does one find it with the English. It is _laecherlich_--that passion for the air."

"Lovely, did you say? ..."

Ignorant or careless that he had said "ridiculous," Patrine suffered him to wrap her mock ermines about her, seeing above the frieze of waiting figures that filled in the lower part of the picture framed by the portico, the emerald-green bird-of-Paradise plume of Lady Beauvayse whisk into the big white Rolls-Royce, past the neat black-haired head of Courtley, and the peaked cap and pale Cockney profile of Morris, the chauffeur. She threw back a jest as she passed out:

"I'm glad you think it lovely. It's one of the nicest things about us--that we're keen on soap and water and can't do without lots of fresh air."

She was in the car before his outstretched hand could touch her. He followed, letting Courtley precede him because he wished to sit opposite, and the great Rolls-Royce purred out of the jam beneath the illuminated glass archway, and in a moment was out of the Place Vendome and moving with the stream of vehicles down the Avenue of the Champs Elysees. In the mingling of moonlight and electric light the tawdry paste jewels of Patrine's preposterous diadem rivalled the costly splendours of the jewelled fillets adorning Lady Beauvayse's coiffure, her _panache_ of white osprey flared above her broad, dark brows as insolently as though they crowned a Nitocris or a Cleopatra. But--and here was a titillating discovery--the strange face with its broad brows, wide, generously-curving cheeks, and little rounded chin, did not belong to a woman of thirty, or even twenty-five. She was much younger than the German, who plumed himself upon his _flair_ for the accurate dating of women, had at first credited. It would be amusing--he told himself again--hellishly amusing, to cultivate this curious hybrid, half hoyden, half _femme-du-monde_.

Sarajevo--still Sarajevo. You caught echoes of the crime of that morning in the tongues of twenty nationalities upon the Paris boulevards that night. People in automobiles and open carriages, people in the little red and blue flagged taxis, people crowding the auto-buses and Cook's big open brakes, the army of people on foot, endlessly streaming east and west along the great splendid thoroughfares, tossed the name of the Bosnian capital backwards and forwards, as though it had been a blood-stained ball.

A gay masculine voice called from a knot of chatterers standing near the wide illuminated archway of electric stars and crowns and flowers under which streamed a variegated crowd of pleasure-seekers as the big Rolls-Royce deposited its load:

"_Nom d'un chien_! What a pack of assassins these Serbians! ... And yet--what if the whole show were got up by Rataplan at Berlin? ... His bosom friend, you say--the big Franz Ferdinand? _Zut!_ what of that? ... Sometimes one finds inconvenient the continued existence of even a bosom friend."

*CHAPTER XIV*

*A PARIS DANCE-GARDEN*

By "Rataplan" was meant the Kaiser, Patrine comprehended, as her companion glanced over his shoulder at the candid speaker, muttering something that sounded like a German oath. But Lady Beauvayse was twittering through a filmy screen of verd-blue chiffon, now discreetly enveloping her lovely Romney head: