The Captain rose to his feet.
"If you give your orders, General, they shall be obeyed," he said, in a voice that bespoke suppressed emotion.
The General yawned slightly, and then contemplated his companion with an ingratiating smile.
"My dear young man," he remarked blandly, "for the moment I'm not a general, and I am giving no orders. I am the judge of the skating competition which is to be held to-morrow, and in order that I shall be able to do full justice to your merits it is necessary that I should sleep well to-night. Do I make my meaning clear?"
"Diabolically so," the words slipped out almost involuntarily.
"I beg your pardon," said the Commander-in-Chief stiffly.
But Von Hügelweiler's temper was roused. He had been prepared, if necessary, to compromise with his conscience. He had argued,—with the easy morality of the egotist,—that he probably desired the King's prize more than any of his competitors, and probably deserved it more. Had Meyer demanded a little thing he might have granted it. But the thing asked was not little to a sensitive man with certain honourable instincts.
"I am a soldier, General," he declared, "and I am accustomed to accepting orders, not suggestions. If you order me to arrest this man I will take him dead or alive. If you suggest that I should murder him as a bribe to the judge of this skating competition, I refuse."
Von Hügelweiler's words rang high, and it was plain that his indignation was perilously near mastering his sense of discipline. But General Meyer's cynical smile never varied a hair's breadth, his pose never lost a particle of its recumbent indolence.
"Very well, Captain," he said at length. "Then I must take other means. Only do me the justice of confessing that I asked a favour when I might have commanded a service. Remember that all Grimlanders are not so dainty as yourself, and remember that murder is an ugly word and hardly applicable to the destruction of vermin. If this cursed priest is brought to trial there will be trouble in the city, street-fighting perhaps, in the narrow lanes round the cattle-market; any way, more bloodshed and misery than would be caused by an infantry sword through a renegade's breast-bone."