‘Will you let me ask your lordship one question?’ I said. ‘Do you offer me this commission as a private citizen solely, or am I at liberty to infer, from your position in the Royal Household, that you have no concealments from the exalted personage you serve, and that by accepting your offer I shall, in effect, be serving his Majesty?’
The Marquis studied my face carefully before answering.
‘It seems to me that such an inference is right and natural, and one that you are bound to make,’ he said slowly.
‘Then I shall feel highly honoured by accepting,’ I returned, bowing.
The question of terms was disposed of to our mutual satisfaction. I came away from the Palace filled with reverence for the monarch who, unless I were completely deceived, had decided to contribute out of his private purse to the defence of the great Empire whose politicians were so neglectful of its safety.
On my return to Paris I set to work to organise a special department for the purpose of collecting intelligence likely to be of importance to the British Empire.
I was amused to find that several of the secret agents in the service of the British Foreign Office were receiving much larger salaries from the Russian Government than from the one they were supposed to act for. Among other similar discoveries my agents reported to me that a certain British Vice-Consul in the Euphrates Valley, a Greek by extraction, had secretly taken out letters of naturalisation as a German subject. It was on this man’s recommendation chiefly that the British Government had been induced to give its countenance to the project for a German railway to Baghdad.
I duly forwarded this and other items to Lord Bedale, but I could not perceive that any notice was taken of them by the Foreign Office. Probably the permanent staff resented the idea that they were being checked and inspected, and determined to show that they were not going to let even their monarch interfere with them.
But all this was merely preliminary. I was on the eve of a discovery of so much moment that I have often asked myself since whether, but for me, the British Empire would be in existence to-day.
Newspaper readers may recollect that not very long ago a sharp passage of words took place between a German Minister and an English statesman whom I will not indicate more closely in the present excited state of party politics. Although in appearance but a quarrel of Ministers, it was perfectly well understood on the Continent that the Count von Bülow was only the mouthpiece of his Imperial master on this occasion. Europe gasped at the spectacle of this political thunderstorm, in which the lurking hatred of Germany towards England was for the first time brought to the surface, and exposed.