Her Majesty's Minister

Chapter Twenty One

The Sister Arts

“But it is absolutely impossible that the despatch has been copied!” I cried, addressing His Excellency, when at last I found tongue. “I saw it written myself, and it never left my belt until I took it out here in your presence!”

“Well,” interposed Kaye grimly, turning to Lord Barmouth, “that it has really been copied is quite plain, for you have the copy in your hand. It was telegraphed to the Quai d’Orsay from Calais at half-past one o’clock this morning, and that copy reached my hands at four, half an hour after I had returned from Berlin. Our secret agent in the French Foreign Office happily lost no time in making us acquainted with our loss.”

“Fortunately for us,” remarked the Ambassador, pacing the floor from end to end. “Had we remained in ignorance that the secret of our policy was out, we might have found ourselves in a very awkward predicament. But how could the despatch possibly have been copied, when no other eyes have seen it except those of the Marquess and myself? The thing is incredible!”

“Ah! that’s the question,” observed Kaye. “The French system of espionage has very nearly approached perfection. Even though it be against our grain, as Englishmen, to employ spies ourselves, yet it is daily becoming more necessary. Every nation in the world has its elaborate secret service; therefore, England must not sleep and allow other nations to undermine her prestige.”

“I cannot imagine how it is possible that our enemies could have obtained sight of the despatch, even for an instant,” I said. “The only other person in the Chief’s room at Downing Street while he was writing was Boyd, who helped him seal it. I then took it, drove in a cab to the club, and there placed it in my belt beneath my clothes. It never left my person until, in the smoking-room here, I took it out and handed it to His Excellency.”

“The telegram was despatched from the maritime station at Calais by some person who signed his name as ‘Gaston.’ He is evidently known to our friends at the Quai d’Orsay.”

There was a brief and painful pause. Such a catastrophe staggered belief. Surely the spies of France did not use the Roentgen rays in order to read the letters carried on one’s person! It would almost appear as though they did.

“Fate seems entirely against us, Ingram,” observed Lord Barmouth, breaking the silence at last. “In every effort we are thwarted by these scoundrelly spies. Our most secret instructions leak out in a way that is absolutely unaccountable. Indeed, the position has now become so critical that I dread to contemplate the result. In the matter of Ceuta we had an illustration of the marvellous astuteness of our enemies, while to-day here is an example much more alarming. And further, we must send home a despatch acknowledging ourselves checkmated. Our position is an ignominious one – most ignominious,” he added vehemently.

“If I were at fault I would willingly bear any blame attaching to my actions,” I said in a tone of protest; “but as far as I am aware I am utterly blameless in this matter.”

“I do not seek to fix any culpability upon you, Ingram,” His Lordship hastened to assure me. “While serving under me you have always done your duty with a thoroughness and tact worthy of the British diplomatist. All I can say is that it is excessively unfortunate for us all, and for the nation at large. Those instructions there, as you will see, are of the highest importance at this juncture; but we are now quite unable to act because our secret intentions have become common property. They will probably be in the Figaro to-morrow.”

“The whole affair is at present a complete enigma,” observed Kaye, who, turning to me, added: “If you cannot give us any clue whatever, I can’t see what can be done.”

“I can give you absolutely no clue,” I answered, utterly bewildered by this amazing turn of events. “All I know is what I have just related.”

The chief of the secret service turned his eyes full upon me, and asked slowly:

“You have, for instance, held no further communication with Mademoiselle de Foville?” Mention of that name caused me to start. All came back to me – how that the Ambassador had suspected her, and Kaye himself had declared that she was a spy.

“She left Paris before I went to London. I have no idea of her whereabouts.”

“You do not suspect that she was in London at the same time as yourself?” he asked. “I mean, you saw nothing of her?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“And on the several occasions when you called upon her in the Rue de Courcelles you gave her no idea of the policy which His Excellency was pursuing? I know you visited her several times, for, suspecting her, I had placed a watch upon her movements.”

“I told her absolutely nothing,” I answered, annoyed that this man should think fit to spy upon me.

“Strange,” he said thoughtfully. “Now that is really very strange, because her subsequent actions would appear to give colour to the theory that she learnt from you some secret which she was strenuously endeavouring to obtain.”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

“Well, I have ascertained that the French Ambassador in Berlin has been receiving full reports of the progress of our actions regarding Ceuta.”

“From her?” I asked quickly.

“Not exactly from her, but through her.”

“Then that woman is actually a spy!” cried His Excellency.

“Without the slightest doubt,” responded Kaye. “My inquiries in Berlin and Brussels have substantiated our suspicions. She is one of the smartest secret agents in Europe.”

“I know that she is a friend of Wolf’s, but what proof have you that she has any connection with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs?”

“I have obtained proof – absolute proof,” he answered.

“In what manner?”

“By inquiries I made in Berlin. She is well known in the Wilhelmstrasse. She was compelled to fly from Germany because it leaked out that she was a French spy.”

“Cannot you give me any further explanation?” I urged. “I am much interested, as she was once my intimate friend.”

“Yes,” interposed the Ambassador, “unfortunately so. It was once rumoured, Ingram, that you actually intended to marry her.”

“Or rather,” observed Kaye, “she intended, for her own purposes, to marry Mr Ingram, I think.”

I pursed my lips, but made no response. My reflections at that moment were bitter enough without these observations from my friends.

“But do you suspect that she has had a hand in our latest betrayal?” I inquired a few minutes later. “You have just alleged that she is in the French service. If so, it hardly seems credible that she would give her information to the French Ambassador in Berlin.”

“On that point I am not yet absolutely certain,” Kaye responded. “I am, however, quite convinced that the exposure of our plans regarding Ceuta filtered to the French through their Embassy in Berlin.”

“Then, contrary to supposition, de Hindenburg, the German Ambassador here, may be assisting France against us?” I said in surprise.

“It seems much like it. Our inquiries all tend towards that theory. The German Ambassador has of late had almost daily interviews with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. These are generally believed to be in connection with the Samoan difficulty or the Transvaal; but without doubt the chief subject of discussion has been the formation of a plan whereby to checkmate our policy towards Spain in the matter of Ceuta.”

“Well, up to the present they have done so,” the Ambassador admitted, turning sharply upon his heel from the window, out of which he had been gazing moodily. “We appear to be arriving at a most critical stage, for what with the constant Anglophobe feeling here, the vile attacks of the Paris Press, the disgusting caricatures of Her Majesty and her subjects, and the army of spies surrounding us on every side, honest, straightforward diplomacy – the diplomacy which should preserve the peace of Europe – is well-nigh impossible. In all my career in the service I never knew a blacker outlook than at this moment – never, never!”

“The complications that have arisen are due entirely to spies,” I remarked.

“They are due, it appears, mainly to your friend, Yolande de Foville,” he said in a harsh voice. “We have to thank that interesting young lady for rendering all our diplomacy in that direction abortive.”

“You had suspicion of her the other day?” I exclaimed. “What caused you to suspect her?”

“Drummond knew her in Brussels, and mentioned her.”

“As a secret agent?”

“Yes, as a secret agent. He warned me to be wary of her.”

“Well,” I said, “I, who knew her most intimately years ago, never suspected it for one single instant.”

“Ah, Ingram,” the Ambassador answered, a smile crossing his serious, hard-set face, “you were in love with her. A man in love never believes that his idol is of mere clay.”

A sigh escaped me. His words were indeed true. A thought of Edith flashed across my mind. The face of that woman who was false to me rose before my vision, but I swept it aside. All was over between us. Diplomacy and flirtation are sister arts, but diplomacy and love never run hand-in-hand. I had quaffed the cup of life, with all its infinite joys and agonies, in one intoxicating draught.

Kaye rose at last and departed, promising to leave no stone unturned in his efforts to discover how the contents of the secret despatch had been obtained by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and then, at the Ambassador’s dictation, I wrote a despatch to London explaining to the Marquess the reason why his instructions could not be acted upon. Thus were we compelled to acknowledge our defeat.

Below, in the hall, I met Sibyl dressed smartly, ready to go out.

“What!” she exclaimed, laughing, “you are back again! Why, I thought you would be at least a week in London. Did you bring that lace for me?”

“Yes,” I answered, “I have it round at my rooms. I’ll send it you this afternoon.”

“Why are you back so soon?” she inquired, holding out her hand, so that I might button her glove. “Was London too hot?”

“The heat was insufferable. Besides, we have much to attend to just now.”

“Poor father!” she exclaimed, looking up at me. “He seems terribly worried. Tell me, Mr Ingram, what has happened? I feel sure that some catastrophe has taken place.”

“Oh, nothing,” I reassured her. “Your father is a little anxious regarding some negotiations, that is all.”

“But you will go to the Elysée to-night, won’t you?”

“To-night! What is it to-night?”

“Why, the grand ball,” she answered.

“Which means a new frock for you – eh?” I laughed.

“Of course,” she replied. “You will come, won’t you?”

“I fear I’m ever so much too tired for dancing,” I responded, feeling in no humour for the crowded gaiety of the President’s ball.

“But you must,” she declared – “to please me. I want you to dance with me.”

“Well,” I said with reluctance, “I suppose I dare not be so ungallant as to refuse you.”

“That’s good,” she laughed. “Now, as a reward, I’ll drive you down to the boulevard. The victoria is outside. Where will you go?”

I reflected a moment, then told her I was on my way to my chambers.

“Very well,” she replied, “I’ll drop you there. I have to go down to the Rue de la Paix.”

“To the couturière, of course?”

“Yes,” she said, with that merry twinkle in her dark eyes, “you’ve guessed it the first time. It’s a charming gown; but I know father will pull a wry face when he finds the bill on his table.”

“But you can stand any amount of wry faces as long as you get pretty dresses, can’t you?” I laughed, handing her into the carriage and taking a seat beside her.

Then she opened her sunshade and lolled back with an air of indolence and luxury as we drove along together.

Chapter Twenty Two

Perfume and Politics

Upon my table a letter was lying. The handwriting I recognised instantly as Edith’s, and not without a feeling of anger and impatience I tore it open in expectation. Long and rambling, it upbraided me for leaving her without a single reassuring word, and declared that my refusal to kiss her at parting had filled her heart with a bitter and uncontrollable grief. As I read, memories of those midnight hours, of my walk to that distant village, and of my meeting with that shabby lover crowded upon me, and the impassioned words she had written made no impression upon me. I had steeled my heart against her. She had played me false, and I could never forgive.

“I know I have been foolish, Gerald,” she wrote, “but you misjudge me because of an indiscretion. You believe that the man with whom you saw me last night was my lover; yet you left me without allowing me to make any explanation. Is this right? Is it just? You know how well I love you, and that without you my life is but a hopeless blank. Can you, knowing that I love you thus, believe me capable of such duplicity as you suspect? I feel that you cannot. I feel that when you come to consider calmly all the circumstances you will find in your own honest heart one grain of pity and sympathy for the one woman who loves you so dearly. Write to me, for I cannot live without a word from you, because I love no other man but you?”

I crushed the letter in my hand, then slowly tore it into fragments. I had no confidence in her protestations – none. My dream of love was over.

We often hear it remarked that those who are themselves perfectly true and artless are in this world the more easily and frequently deceived. I have always held this to be a commonplace fallacy, for we shall ever find that truth is as undeceived as it is undeceiving, and that those who are true to themselves and others may now and then be mistaken, or, in particular instances, duped by the intervention of some other affection or quality of the mind; but that they are generally free from illusion, and are seldom imposed upon in the long run by the show of things and by the superficies of any character.

There was a curious contradiction in Edith’s character, arising from the contrast between her natural disposition and the situation in which she was placed, which corroborated my doubts. Her simplicity of language, her admission of an “indiscretion,” the inflexible resolution with which she asserted her right, her soft resignation to unkindness and wrong, and her warmth of temper breaking through the meekness of a spirit subdued by a deep sense of religion, – all these qualities, opposed yet harmonising, helped to increase my distrust of her. To me that letter seemed full of a dexterous sophistry exerted in order to ward off my accusations. Her remorse was without repentance; it arose from the pang of a wounded conscience, the recoil of the violated feelings of nature, the torture of self-condemnation.

The fragments of the letter I tossed into the waste-paper basket, and, putting on my hat, went down to the Grand Café to idle away an hour among friends accustomed to make the place a rendezvous in the afternoon.

On entering, I found Deane sitting at a table alone, his carriage awaiting him at the door. He was having a hasty drink during his round of visits, and hailed me lustily.

“Sit down a moment, Ingram,” he cried. “I want to see you.”

“What about?” I inquired, lighting the cigarette he handed me.

“About that curious incident in the Rue de Courcelles – Mademoiselle de Foville’s strange attack.”

“Well, what of it?” I asked eagerly.

“Strangely enough a man, who proved to be an Englishman giving himself the name of Payne, was brought to the Hôtel Dieu three nights ago in what appeared to be a cataleptic state. He had, it seemed, been found by the police lying on the pavement in the Boulevard St. Germain, and was at first believed to be dead. Some letters in English being found upon him, I was called, and upon examination discovered exactly the same symptoms as those which mademoiselle your friend had displayed. I was enabled, therefore, to administer an antidote, and within twelve hours the man had sufficiently recovered to take his discharge. The case has excited the greatest possible interest at the hospital, for I had previously submitted a portion of the solution obtained from the envelope which mademoiselle had used to Professor Ferrari, of Florence, the greatest authority on toxicology in the world, and he had declared it to be an entirely unknown, but most potent, poison.”

“Who was the Englishman? Did he tell you nothing?”

“No. Unfortunately the hospital authorities allowed him to leave before I deemed it wise to question him. I read the letters found upon him, however; but they conveyed nothing, except that he had been recently living somewhere in the neighbourhood of Hackney.”

“Then you have no idea of the manner in which the poison was administered?” I said, disappointed.

“His right hand was rather swollen, from which I concluded that he had accidentally touched some object impregnated with the fatal compound.”

“You don’t know its composition yet?”

“No. Ferrari is trying to discover it, but at present has failed. The fact of a second person suffering from it is in itself very mysterious. I intended to call upon you this evening and tell you all about it.”

“The affair is extraordinary,” I admitted. “I wonder whether the same person who made the attempt upon Yolande’s life is responsible for the attempt upon the Englishman? What can be the motive?”

“Ah! that’s impossible to tell. All we know is that some unknown person in Paris has in his or her possession a deadly compound capable of producing catalepsy and subsequent death in a manner most swift and secret. In order to ascertain whether any other person is attacked in the same manner, I have sent letters to the Direction of all the hospitals in Paris explaining the case, and asking that if any similar cases are brought to them for treatment, I may be at once communicated with.”

“An excellent precaution,” I said. “By that means we shall be able to watch the progress of the mysterious criminal.”

“You have heard nothing from Mademoiselle Yolande?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Hers was a curious case,” he remarked. “But the man Payne’s was equally strange. It appears that he made no statement to either police or hospital authorities before he left. He only said that he was walking along the boulevard and suddenly fell to the ground insensible.”

“You think he had some motive in preserving silence?” I inquired quickly.

“Yes, I feel sure of it. I only wish I could rediscover him. They were foolish to allow him to take his discharge before giving me an opportunity of concluding my investigations. It was simply owing to professional jealousy. English medical men are not liked in Paris hospitals. But I must be off,” he said, rising. “Good-bye.”

Then he went out, and, entering his carriage, drove away.

Volkouski, the Russian attaché, was sitting close by, and I crossed to him, greeting him merrily. He was a good fellow – a thorough cosmopolitan, who had been trained in the smartest school of diplomacy – namely, the Embassy in London, which is presided over by that prince among diplomatists, Monsieur de Staal. Whatever may be said regarding the relations between Russia and England as nations, it cannot be denied that in the European capitals the staffs of the embassies of both Powers are always on terms of real friendship. I make no excuse for repeating this. The mutual courtesy of the representatives of the two nations is not, as in the case of those of France, Germany, and Austria, mere diplomatic manoeuvring, but in most instances a sound understanding and a deep personal regard. England, Russia, and Italy have interests in common, hence their representatives fraternise, even though certain journals may create all sorts of absurd scares regarding what they are pleased to term the “aggressive policy of Russia.” This is a stock journalistic expression, as meaningless as it is absurd. We who are “in the know” at the embassies smile when we read those alarmist articles, purporting to give all sorts of wild plans, which exist only in the imagination of the leader-writer. There is, indeed, one London journal known in the Russian Embassies on the Continent as The Daily Abuser, because of its intensely Russophobe tone. Fortunately nobody takes it seriously.

I chatted with Volkouski, sipping a mazagran the while. He was, I found, full of projects for his leave. His chief had already left Paris, and he himself was going home to Moscow for a month. Every diplomatist on service abroad gets homesick after a time, and looks forward to his leave with the same pleasurable anticipation of the schoolboy going for his summer holidays. To escape from the shadow of a throne or the ceaseless chatter of an over-democratic Republic is always a happy moment for the wearied attaché or worried secretary of embassy. One longs for a respite from the glare and glitter of the official world of uniforms and Court etiquette, and looks forward to rambles in the country in flannels and without a collar, to lazy afternoons upon the river, or after-luncheon naps in a hammock beneath a tree. To the tired diplomatist, sick of formalities, and with the stifling dust of the ballroom over his heart, the expression “en campagne” conveys so very much.

Shortly before midnight I stepped from a fiacre and ascended the broad steps of the Elysée. Tired as I was of the ceaseless whirl of the City of Pleasure, it nevertheless amused me to fix the physiognomy of the great official fêtes. They are inevitably banales, of course; but there is always a piquancy of detail and of contrast that is interesting.

If one wishes to see what a mixed crowd is like, there is no better illustration than the flocks of guests at the Elysée balls. Ah! what a crowd it was that night! What dresses! What a public! I know, of course, that it can never be otherwise under the present democratic régime. One man, who came on foot and whose boots were muddy, forgot to turn down the tucked-up ends of his trousers. People were walking about with their hands in their pockets, jostling each other without a word of excuse. Many were touching the furniture, and feeling the curtains and tapestry with that sans-gêne which so disgusted Gambetta with his former friends. You could see that they were determined not to appear astonished at anything, and that, after all, they were at home in the Elysée. They were of the detestable breed of café politicians, of loud-voiced orators at party meetings, of successful carpet-baggers, who render the ideas of equality and fraternity at times insufferable.

Before the buffet these fellows displayed themselves as goujats – cads – plain and simple. They grabbed for sandwiches, for biscuits, for glasses of champagne across the shoulders of ladies in front of them, or even elbowed them aside to get to the front row – and stop there. In the smoking-room the boxes of cigars were gone in the twinkling of an eye. One man struck his match on the wall. With these odd guests about it is not surprising that the Budget writes off a certain sum every year for articles that have disappeared from the buffets.