The car was round promptly enough. It was stopped within five miles for the great man to telephone back—from a local box—to Paulings for something he had forgotten to leave word of. But he did not telephone to Paulings. He telephoned to the Home Office, of which he was the chief. To such abasement do modern contrivances drive us. He called up the invaluable Morden and discovered to his enormous relief that the invaluable Morden, though it was a Saturday and already a quarter to four, was working away.
Within twenty minutes more the great statesman was in his official palace of Whitehall. Morden was there all right, as the telephone had told him. Morden was there! Oh invaluable Morden! have you not earned those directorships and that sinecure in the Engrossing Department? By God! you have.
"Morden," said the Home Secretary.
"Aye, aye," answered Mr. Morden wittily.
"You know Scotland Yard?"
Morden did not turn a hair. Did he know Scotland Yard? Did he? He, Morden of the Home Office! The man who laid the traps for the scapegoats ... the man who worked the parks.
So young—not forty—he had already seen pass before him a long troop of politicians, and he was ready to take any folly from them, short of physical violence. So when he was asked whether he, the junior brain of the Home Office, knew the place and institution called Scotland Yard, he said that he did; and he said it as naturally as though he had been asked for some information on Thibet.
"Now who do you think," said the Home Secretary musingly, as he rose from his chair and paced up and down the enormous room, his brows tortured with deep thought—"who do you think there would be—connected with Scotland Yard, mind you!—who would undertake a private inquiry, and be rigidly secret?"
"They are all rigidly secret," said Morden simply.
The Home Secretary wagged his long head with a weary simulation of cunning, and a would-be sly smile illuminated—or at least undimmed—his eye.