“Undoubtedly; and as Gregory has his own little threatened rows to amuse him, I suppose they think at Capetown that it’s safe to let him use his own discretion as to who he sends. Otherwise I should be afraid of his going himself and setting the country in a blaze, if I were the man above him.”
“I don’t think he would do that while the natives here seem still so unsettled. But what a disappointment for Mr. Halton! He told me he was longing to get home.”
“Oh, my dear, it’s awful! The town is not only the Naboth’s vineyard of our coast and Germany’s, but it is unhealthy. They say the white soldiers can hardly live there. Do you know that Wray thinks they will send up the 28th from Natal?”
“Ally’s regiment! But I thought there was to be no fighting?”
“No; but they must have soldiers in case of accidents, and they want to treat Port Cecil as separate from the rest of the Protectorate. It was not included in the treaty of 1895, or some such bungle, and so there is always being a row about it. Wray tried to explain it to me, but I never can understand. Anyhow, it is a diplomatic mission, and enough to turn Mr. Halton’s hair grey, unless he knows something about the place. Has he ever been in that part?”
“I don’t think so; but Mr. Gregory spoke one day of a friend of his—a man he seems to think very able—who has been consul, or something of that sort, there for years. I wonder that the Government did not leave him to settle matters.”
“My dear Chum, don’t you know that our Government never does use the man on the spot who has gained experience and really could manage? The instant there is trouble they send some one who has never heard of the place, and is bound to blunder at first, and they ‘commission him to inquire,’ etc. We are mad on commissions. It’s a national disease. I think sometimes that it’s a farce we play to gain them.”
“Here comes Captain Gilderoy,” said Mrs. Lewin absently. She was wondering if this new billet would keep Halton longer in Key Island, for she felt that the sooner he went the safer she should be. Yet he was emphatically the only man at hand whom Gregory had to send to Port Cecil, for Arthur White was no diplomatist, and Major Churton’s position so strictly military as to make his presence a menace. Captain Gilderoy handed her two letters—one from her home, far off in the hunting county of Leicestershire, and one in the handwriting of an old school friend, who had since married a man high in authority, and had a dangerous desire to dabble in state-craft. She knew of appointments and the pulling of strings before the Gazette had ratified them, and her wisdom was a thing that even her husband sometimes feared. It chanced that Leoline Lewin opened this letter before her father’s, read the first few sentences, which were merely a heading, and suddenly became immersed, to the exclusion even of the smell of fessikh and the ever-recurring faces around her.
“But my real news,” wrote Chum’s school-mate, “refers to you, or, I hope, will do so if you have only gained the good-will of your Administrator. Cyril Ernest has come into the Rignold title, and that means resigning his commission and going into Parliament—he was always a politician rather than a soldier. He was A.D.C. to old Sir Geoffrey Vaughan, who is a great crony of mine. I met the old fellow at Victoria House the other night, and buttonholed him in a corner. Don’t tell me I am not a good friend, Chum, for I thought of you at once, and tried to impress Ally’s virtues on him. He hummed and hawed a little, but he remembered Ally; he said there were two nice boys to whom he gave the preference—your husband and Brissy Nugent, who, I think, was at Sandhurst with him. I am afraid I belittled Brissy in your interest. It is so unfortunate that they are stationed at the same place, for I could gain no absolute promise from Sir Geoffrey. All he would say was that he would leave it to Evelyn Gregory to give the casting vote, and he has written to him unofficially. Weaker men are fond of leaving the decision with Gregory. Now, my dear girl, it all depends on you. You must manage your man in office so that he shall recommend Ally, and not Captain Nugent. It is a settled thing that Sir Geoffrey will go to Malta, unless he has something even better—a home command, it might be. Don’t believe any one who talks about the African generals; I know better. Even my husband is not in my confidence about the appointment yet, but you may take my word for it, and I am telling you because it gives you a start over Mrs. Nugent—I never did like that woman—and you are on the spot, too, and she is not. I have only just time to catch the mail,” etc.
Mrs. Lewin turned the pages breathlessly, and the lines danced before her eyes. Here were two appointments confidentially placed in the hands of the man Government hardly professed to trust; but she was not thinking of the unofficial way in which the Empire was really worked, or the incalculable value of the force which is politely termed “Influence.” Her personal stake in the matter drove even the question of the trouble in East Africa out of her head, though before her friend’s letter she was keenly interested in it as in some sort concerning Gregory. She saw only that here was the escape for which she had prayed, and the old French saying, that “What a woman wishes, God wishes,” recurred to her mind like a blessing. Malta or England—the words spelt rescue, however one read them. Her eyes followed every line of the great quiescent liner hungrily, while, in her fevered fancy, she saw it carrying her out of danger—her and Ally together—beyond the rat-trap where the rats were already beginning to menace each other because they could not get out.