Sibyl submits. The waiter assists with the chair till it is out of the intricacies of the approach to the Breakfast Pavilion. Roger draws it through the gay throng. The church bells of all denominations are clanging in carillons, either because it is Sunday or because Peace—this time—has been definitely assured by an exchange of signatures. A few people raise their hats or wave hands to Sibyl, though she is semi-disguised in smoked glasses and a diaphanous veil; and numerous men nod to Colonel Brentham: who, panting, draws the wheeled chair up to the perron of the hotel.
Here there is a pause while Sophie is sent for. Then the disentanglement of the sick woman from the chair and from shawls, and her slow walk, supported by Roger and her maid, to the ground floor rooms where a white-capped nurse receives her.
Roger went to Germany at the end of September, when Sibyl was being taken back to England by her son. He spent six weeks lecturing the Germans on the advisability of joining Britain and France in a world-wide understanding. His lectures were politely forbidden on Prussian territory, which made South Germany all the more eager to hear him. And when he left for England at the beginning of November, it was with the assurance that a German representative deputation would come to England in the spring of 1912 to promote an Anglo-German understanding.
On reaching London, however, he learnt that Sibyl had died two days previously, at Engledene. In the last weeks of her agony she had been much under morphia. Before she reached that stage she had insisted with Maud and Vicky that Roger was not to be bothered by bad reports of her condition, as he was engaged in doing what he believed to be the right thing.
CHAPTER XXIV
ALL ENDS IN THE HAPPY VALLEY
Colonel Brentham's anticipations of the Millennium to be achieved by the adjustment of colonial ambitions were not to be realized. On the 28th of June, 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in the Bosnian capital. Maurice Brentham, meeting his brother the same day outside the Travellers' Club, asked what he thought of this bolt from the blue........
"I think very badly of it," Roger replied. "Whether or not the plot was engineered in Servia, it is clear from the sayings and antics of the Russian minister in Belgrade that Russia is egging on Servia against Austria and using her as a mask under which Russia may place herself athwart German-Austrian ambitions in the Balkan peninsula, and bar the way to Constantinople. She is, in fact, challenging directly the substantial results of our agreements....
"Well and if she does, what will happen then?"
"The Great War we have been striving to avert."