It was not quite clear to him why he was the centre of so much attention. His mind did not run to the comprehension of the fact that he was the wearer of borrowed plumes—the sable plumes of King Death.
He had always wanted to get on to the kitchen table—there was much there that interested him, and supplied him with food for thought. He had risked his life on more than one occasion in attempts to scale that height with the assistance of a saucepan that turned over and poured culinary delicacies on his toes, or perhaps a sleeping cat that got up and walked away much annoyed. And now that he was at last at this dizzy height he was sorry to find that he was too tired to crawl about and explore the vast possibilities of it. He was rather too tired to convey his forefinger to his mouth, and was forced to work out mental problems without that aid to thought.
Presently his eyes fell on Guy Oscard’s face, and again his own small features expanded into a smile.
“Bad case!” he said, and, turning over, he nestled down into the pillow, and he had the answer to the many questions that puzzled his small brain.
XL
Sir John’s Last Card
’Tis better playing with a lion’s whelp
Than with an old one dying.
As through an opera runs the rhythm of one dominant air, so through men’s lives there rings a dominant note, soft in youth, strong in manhood, and soft again in old age. But it is always there, and whether soft in the gentler periods, or strong amidst the noise and clang of the perihelion, it dominates always and gives its tone to the whole life.
The dominant tone of Sir John Meredith’s existence had been the high clear note of battle. He had always found something or someone to fight from the very beginning, and now, in his old age, he was fighting still. His had never been the din and crash of warfare by sword and cannon, but the subtler, deeper combat of the pen. In his active days he had got through a vast amount of work—that unchronicled work of the Foreign Office which never comes, through the cheap newspapers, to the voracious maw of a chattering public. His name was better known on the banks of the Neva, the Seine, the Bosphorus, or the swift-rolling Iser than by the Thames; and grim Sir John was content to have it so.
His face had never been public property, the comic papers had never used his personality as a peg upon which to hang their ever-changing political principles. But he had always been “there,” as he himself vaguely put it. That is to say, he had always been at the back—one of those invisible powers of the stage by whose command the scene is shifted, the lights are lowered for the tragedy, or the gay music plays on the buffoon. Sir John had no sympathy with a generation of men and women who would rather be laughed at and despised than unnoticed. He belonged to an age wherein it was held better to be a gentleman than the object of a cheap and evanescent notoriety—and he was at once the despair and the dread of newspaper interviewers, enterprising publishers, and tuft-hunters.
He was so little known out of his own select circle that the porters in Euston Station asked each other in vain who the old swell waiting for the four o’clock “up” from Liverpool could be. The four o’clock was, moreover, not the first express which Sir John had met that day. His stately carriage-and-pair had pushed its way into the crowd of smaller and humbler vehicular fry earlier in the afternoon, and on that occasion also the old gentleman had indulged in a grave promenade upon the platform.
He was walking up and down there now, with his hand in the small of his back, where of late he had been aware of a constant aching pain. He was very upright, however, and supremely unconscious of the curiosity aroused by his presence in the mind of the station “canaille.” His lips were rather more troublesome than usual, and his keen eyes twinkled with a suppressed excitement.
In former days there had been no one equal to him in certain diplomatic crises where it was a question of browbeating suavely the uppish representative of some foreign State. No man could then rival him in the insolently aristocratic school of diplomacy which England has made her own. But in his most dangerous crisis he had never been restless, apprehensive, pessimistic, as he was at this moment. And after all it was a very simple matter that had brought him there. It was merely the question of meeting a man as if by accident, and then afterwards making that man do certain things required of him. Moreover, the man was only Guy Oscard—learned if you will in forest craft, but a mere child in the hand of so old a diplomatist as Sir John Meredith.
That which made Sir John so uneasy was the abiding knowledge that Jack’s wedding-day would dawn in twelve hours. The margin was much too small, through, however, no fault of Sir John’s. The West African steamer had been delayed—unaccountably—two days. A third day lost in the Atlantic would have overthrown Sir John Meredith’s plan. He had often cut things fine before, but somehow now—not that he was getting old, oh no!—but somehow the suspense was too much for his nerves. He soon became irritated and distrustful. Besides the pain in his back wearied him and interfered with the clear sequence of his thoughts.
The owners of the West African steamer had telegraphed that the passengers had left for London in two separate trains. Guy Oscard was not in the first—there was no positive reason why he should be in the second. More depended
