“If he had time, yes. If anyone wrote such a letter to your Emperor, he would be boiled in oil.”
Von Stromberg roared with delight. “Boiled in oil!” he repeated.
“Yes—or perhaps some more exquisite cruelty that your ingenious people have devised,” she said coolly. “To prosaic minds like mine, Excellenz, you Germans are the wonders of the age. You are both godlike and Saturnian; a nation of military fanatics, a nation of silly sentimentalists; a nation trained to scientific brutality, which shares the sorrows of the dying rose. Which is it that you want us to think you, the god or the satyr?”
“We know that we are the god,” he said, showing his teeth, “but we want you to think us the satyr.”
“You have succeeded, Excellenz,” she replied calmly. “It is very pleasant to be sitting here drinking chocolate with a Geheimrath—a councilor of the Empire—but you’ll pardon me if I say that the peculiarly social pleasure of the occasion is somewhat marred by the fact that if the whim happened to strike you you could have me strung up by the thumbs.”
“You think that I am cruel? Ach, no, Fräulein. You are mistaken,” in his blandest tones. “I have a daughter in East Prussia of just your age. For that reason I would like to have you think of me a little as the sentimentalist rather than as the—the brute—as you have been pleased to suggest. I am not cruel and I shall prove it to you.”
“In America, Excellenz, we do not make war upon women.”
“Nor do I make war upon you,” he put in quickly. “I did not bring you to Germany, Fräulein. Herr Rizzio acted upon his own responsibility. Even yet, if he is an English agent, I cannot understand his purpose in bringing such an incriminating document.”
He smiled as he spoke, but she felt the question and its threat. For a moment the directness of his attack bewildered her and so she sipped her chocolate to gain a moment of time.
“General von Stromberg,” she said at last, as the idea came to her, “I am told that you have one of the keenest intellects in the Empire of Germany. I feel much like a child before you, who should see matters much more clearly than I. There were two reasons why he brought me, one of which bears upon our personal relations, the other upon his relation to England. I knew that he possessed your confidence, otherwise he would not have been in possession of a document which empowered Mr. Hammersley to give up the secret message of Captain Byfield. I knew too much. If I had told my friends in England what I knew, his utility to England would have been gone.”