The Archduke put down his glass and regarded him in exasperated surprise.
“Damn it, man, you too?” he exclaimed. “If I were given to nerves I would be seeing daggers and bullets all around me—Bernheim croaks death; and so does Moore; and now you join the chorus—pretty soon the boys will be whistling it on the Avenue.”
Courtney picked up an Embassy official envelope that lay before him, and tossed it across to the Archduke.
“I’ve done a little work on my own account, lately,” he said, “and here is what I got this evening. I have always found this—agent, reliable.”
It was only a few words, scratched hastily in pencil on a sheet torn from a small note-book:—
“Danger very imminent—under no circumstance go out at night without an escort.”
“Nice sort of country this, you brought me to,” said Armand.
“It’s not the country, my dear boy,” Courtney observed; “it is beyond reproach. The trouble is that one of your own family still is a barbarian; and you insist upon treating him as though he were civilized. For my part, I have no patience with your altruism; you’ve had quite sufficient warning—he tried twice to kill you at the Vierle Masque; and he has told you to your face that you would never be king. Yet you persist in regarding him as fighting square and in the open. Bernheim and Moore are wise—they know your dear cousin—and you,—well, you’re a fool if you don’t know him, too.”
It was a very long speech for Courtney, and Armand had listened in surprise—it was most unusual for his imperturbable friend to grow emphatic, either in voice or gesture, and it impressed him as Bernheim and Moore never had. In truth, he had no particular scruples against meeting Lotzen in the good, old-fashioned, cloak-and-dagger way; but what irked him was the necessity of being always on the qui vive to resist assault or to avoid a trap; and the seeming absurdity of it in Dornlitz of the twentieth century. It made him feel such a simpleton, to be looking for bravos in dark alleys, or to wear steel vests, or to be eternally watchful and suspicious of every one and everything.
“What do you want me to do,” he asked; “go down to Lotzen’s palace and stick my sword through him?”