"I'm glad you came so promptly," said Sibyl, "because I'm turning out of this gloomy mansion and surrendering it to Clithy. I simply can't afford to keep it up and Engledene too, and although he says of course he will pay for everything and I can have my own suite of rooms, I somehow fancy a cosy little flat which I could share with Maud, or Vicky Masham when she comes back from the States.... Yes, I left her at Washington, going to stay at the White House. I came back alone from there, but I had sulky Sophie to look after me. One thing that makes me think, Roger, that I am really ill, really doomed, is that Sophie no longer gives me notice whenever any whim of mine displeases her. I am sure she is saying to herself now, 'The poor old gal won't be with us much longer: better hang on with her and then she may leave me something.' But about Vicky, for it really is a good story.... Only first I'm going to—or you might—ring for tea. Of course you'll stay? You couldn't in decency refuse.—Do you know, we haven't set eyes on one another for ... for ... three years? We are both swallowing pungent things we might say about one another's appearance, and both resolving to bite our tongues off rather than say them." ... (To servant: "Tea please; and ask Miss Mills to make the sandwiches, my sandwiches, I mean.") ... "I have to take these frame-foods in the form of sandwiches, and Sophie has learnt the art of making them so seductive that I get them down without any difficulty....
"About Vicky.—Do draw up your chair; you needn't be so frigid with a moribund friend. Directly it became known in California that Vicky had been a maid of honour to the late Queen Victoria, my dear, the Americans nearly killed us with kindness! Our roles were reversed. She was the lady of distinction and I was her travelling companion. You know the Americans, especially in the west and east, have a culte for Queen Victoria, and Vicky's stories of her home life held them spell-bound. She felt in her position it wouldn't be right to lecture publicly on her late mistress, but the difficulty was got over.—D'you still drink tea without sugar? I'm told I ought to take it—got over by drawing-room meetings, tickets subscribed for, and no charge at the door, a sumptuous tea—supposed to be modelled on the kind of tea the Queen took at Osborne—served in the middle of Vicky's talk. She refused to take any direct payment, so they sent her thumping cheques for her travelling expenses. And now she's going to put her talks on Queen Victoria as Mother, Wife and Queen into a book.—One way and another, she'll make five or six thousand pounds out of the whole business. And I'm jolly glad. It'll be some provision for her real old age, after I'm gone—for I shan't have much to leave, and most of that I must give to my sisters in the Colonies and to your Sibyl, and some of my servants....
"Now: you've got endless things to tell me. Indeed I really can't see why we should be separated, now, except when we are put to bed. You must be a mental wreck, and I am a physical one.... I got frightfully tired in the States—it spoilt much of the good I derived from the long steamer voyages.... We are simply two imprisoned souls in very battered cages. All the gilding is off mine."
Roger saw as much of Lady Silchester as he could during the last months of 1910. He and Maud assisted her to find just the right sort of flat, where she would have no household worries, where, in fact, she need only keep Sophie to look after her. They all spent a reasonably merry Christmas at Engledene, where Lord Silchester joined them, and where Fatima—Maud junior—expressed and perhaps felt such an intense interest in his Keltic operas and reforms in stage scenery that a glint of the match-maker's eagerness came into Sibyl's tired eyes; she pressed Roger's hand and murmured, "Wouldn't it be too delightful...?"
During the first half of 1911 the Intelligence Division of the War Office discovered Major Brentham as a really great authority on African geography and African campaigns, and he worked there over maps, and gave them in addition much other information. As some return he was gazetted Colonel, and again there was talk of utilizing such an administrative capacity in our own dominions.
In June, 1911, Sibyl's physician and surgeon were not altogether satisfied as to her progress towards recovery, and suggested she might derive great benefit from the waters of Villette, a thermal station in the east of France near the Vosges. So she said to Roger: "You look quite as ill as I feel. It's malaria. You never quite got rid of that blackwater fever. Come to Villette later on. Maud and the girls and Clithy could join us too. I'll have a month first of all, alone except for Vicky. I'll give the closest attention to the cure, and then perhaps when you arrive I may be able to sit up and take notice and even do a little motoring...."
Accordingly the scene of this dwindling story changes in Villette-ès-Vosges, a Ville d'eaux in eastern France, in the month of August and September, 1911. Germany has spoilt the summer for all statesmen, soldiers and sailors by challenging the French protectorate of Morocco at Agadir. It is supposed by the middle of August, after Mr. Lloyd George's speech in the City, and after a succession of "kraches" in German banking firms, that the Kaiser's Government is hesitating to go the full length of War: but Germany is growling horribly because she is realizing that her financial arrangements for a war of great dimensions are imperfect, and that she is unprepared with aircraft to cope with the French aeroplanes.
So she is consenting to pourparlers for the purpose of ascertaining the terms on which she may be bought off, persuaded to leave Agadir, and withdraw a portion of the army she is crowding into Alsace-Lorraine.
Villette-ès-Vosges is well suited for the work of the old diplomacy. It is, to begin with, a Ville d'eaux; and in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, statesmen who were negotiating treaties and alliances or resolving problems which threatened war, usually met at some gay place near their frontiers where they could, under the guise of "taking the waters," carry on their conversations with one another and draft protocols of conspiracy or of agreement. Consequently, in late August and early September, 1911, Villette was unusually thronged: not only by its accustomed clientèle of middle-aged invalids trying to combat all manner of diseases for which its springs were efficacious, but also by their demoiselles-à-marier, their gawky boys and bread-and-butter, pigtailed girls, playing tennis, croquet, and crowding into the cinemas while their parents sip and bathe and undergo massage sous l'eau; by wicked gamblers, obvious adventurers, demure cocottes (needing a month's repose and a reduction of their figures); and by European statesmen trying to look like tourists. The German diplomatists have dressed and hatted themselves to resemble the Frenchman of caricature; the French ministers and ex-ministers are out-doing the average English gentleman in bluff "sports" costumes; and there are Russians and Austrians too quaint for words, à pouffer de rire, as Sibyl says; with such weeping whiskers, such forked beards, such frock-coats in the early morning and such tall hats as you never saw, except in pictures of Society in Paris under the Second Empire.
These diplomatists foregather in the theatrically beautiful park with its swan-pools, its canalized river, its groves and bosquets, pavilions, tea-houses, summer-houses, chalets, kiosques of newspapers and salacious novels, open-air orchestras, croquet-lawns, and tennis-courts. Or if the problem is very grave, and excited speech should not be audible nor gesticulations visible to prowling journalists, they stroll away to the race-course, to the golf links.