"Mr. Ziegler is expecting you," Benzon replied, scrutinizing the visitor's face narrowly. "Unfortunately he is not so well as usual this morning, and is not yet dressed. I must ask you to wait a little till he is ready to receive you."
Forsyth bowed and took the chair offered him, not without an inward chuckle at the discrepancy between the haste of the bell-boy's summons to the suite and the delay in receiving him. To his mind the position was clear. Mrs. Talmage Eglinton desired to keep up the polite fiction of her innocence to the end, yet Ziegler was apparently not prepared to go forward with the business without an opportunity of consulting her. She had come up to town for the express purpose of advising, perhaps supervising, her colleagues at an important crisis, and was doubtless on her way to the hotel after the diversion he had created, so that it was necessary to get him out of the entrance-hall before she passed up to her suite.
"I shouldn't wonder if she isn't the boss of the show, with Ziegler, who is probably her husband, as figure-head," Forsyth told himself.
Benzon, with a polite excuse, had retired into an inner room; but his place had immediately been taken by a well-dressed but cadaverous individual whom Forsyth recognized as the man in clerical attire whom he had seen descending the stairs in John Street after the forcible entry into his chambers, the miscreant who later on the same eventful night had called at Beaumanoir House in the character of a disguised police-officer.
There was evidently no disposition to leave him alone in the ante-room, and so give him a chance to open the outer door and witness Mrs. Talmage Eglinton's arrival in the next suite. So twenty minutes passed, and Forsyth was speculating as to how communication would be carried on with the female partner during the forthcoming interview, when Benzon returned and announced that Mr. Ziegler was awaiting him. He could not help observing how much better suited was this bowing and smirking American swindler to the rôle of a superior flunkey than to that of a British cavalry officer.
The next moment he found himself in the principal reception-room of the suite, face to face with a frail old man of unpleasant appearance, who, Forsyth noticed with quick intuition, was reclining on a couch that had been drawn across a closed door. There was another—open—door leading into the bedroom, but the closed one must be the same which from the other side of it had confirmed the General's suspicions of the occupant of the adjoining suite. Forsyth could picture to himself Mrs. Talmage Eglinton's shell-like ear glued to that door, its fair owner prepared to tap gentle signals by the Morse code on the panels if things did not go to her liking in the audience-chamber.
His conjectures were brought down to the bed-rock of fact by the croaking voice of the invalid on the couch. Mr. Ziegler's repulsive aspect, his purple cheeks, and green-shaded eyes suggested some horrible cutaneous affection, though Forsyth was not so ingenuous as to accept the disfigurements as genuine.
"I am sorry to have detained you, sir," Ziegler began, and then paused abruptly. Forsyth wondered if he had been brought up with a round turn by a tap on the door close to his ear. There seemed something tentative, as though the speaker were trying his ground, in that first disjointed utterance.
"It does not matter," Forsyth replied, and then in his turn came to a sudden stop. His diplomatic training at the Foreign Office had taught him the advantage of allowing the other side to open the proceedings. He who has the first word is seldom the one to have the last.
But it appeared that Mr. Ziegler was also alive to the value of reserving his fire. "I presume that the Duke of Beaumanoir instructed you on the nature of the business you were to transact with me?" he said, and there was a firmer ring in the curious metallic voice than when he made his first brief apology.