'Can't I help?'
'Well, I think if I were you I'd just keep awake,' Sarrasin said. 'Odd sorts of things may happen. One never knows. Hush! I think I hear our friends. Will you stay and talk with them?'
'No,' said Rivers emphatically; and he left the room straightway, going in the opposite direction from the Dictator's room, and turning into the other corridor before he could have been seen by anyone coming into the corridor where the Dictator and Hamilton and Sarrasin were lodged.
Soame Rivers went back to his room, and sat there and waited and watched. His thoughts were far from enviable. He was in the mood of a man who, from being an utter sceptic, or at least Agnostic, is suddenly shaken up into a recognition of something supernatural, and does not as yet know how to make the other fashions of his life fit in with this new revelation. Selfish as he was, he would not have put off taking action on the warning he had received from the Foreign Office if he had at the time believed in the least that there was any possibility of a plot for political assassination being carried on in an English country-house. Soame Rivers reasoned, like a realistic novelist, from his own experiences only. He regarded the notion of such things taking place in an English country-house as no less an anachronism than the moving helmet in the 'Castle of Otranto' or the robber-castle in the 'Mysteries of Udolpho.' Not that we mean to convey the idea that Rivers had read either of these elaborate masterpieces of old-fashioned fiction—for he most certainly had not read either of them, and very likely had not even heard of either. But if he had studied them he would probably have considered them as quite as much an appurtenance of real life as any story of a plot for political assassination carried on in an English country-house. Now, however, it was plain that a warning had been given which did not come from the fossilised officials of the Foreign Office, and which impressed so cool an old soldier as Captain Sarrasin with a sense of serious danger. As far as regarded all the ordinary affairs of life, Rivers looked down on Sarrasin with a quite unutterable contempt. Sarrasin was not a man to get in the ordinary way into Soame Rivers's set; and Rivers despised alike anyone who was not in his set, and anyone who was pushed, or who pushed himself, into it. He detested eccentricities of all sorts. He would have instinctively disliked and dreaded any man whose wife occasionally wore man's clothes and rode astride. He considered all that sort of thing bad form. He chafed and groaned and found his pain sometimes almost more than he could bear under the audacious unconventionalities of Helena Langley. But he knew that he had to put up with Helena Langley; he knew that she would consider herself in no way responsible to him for anything she said or did; and he only dreaded the chance of some hinted, hardly repressible remonstrance from him provoking her to tell him bluntly that she cared nothing about his opinion of her conduct. Now, however, as he thought of Sarrasin, he found that he could not deny Sarrasin's coolness and courage and judgment, and it comforted him to think that Sarrasin must always say he had a warning from him, Soame Rivers, before anything had occurred—if anything was to occur. If anything should occur, the actual hour of the warning given would hardly be recalled amid so many circumstances more important. Soame sat in his room and watched with heavy heart. He felt that he had been playing the part of a traitor, and, more than that, that he was likely to be found out. Could he retrieve himself even yet? He knew he was not a coward.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE EXPLOSION
Meanwhile Hamilton came back to his room with the Dictator. The Dictator looked fresh, bright, wide-awake, and ready for anything. He had grumbled a little on being roused, and was at first inclined rather peevishly to 'pooh-pooh' all suggestion of conspiracies and personal danger.
He even went so far as to say that, on the whole, he would rather prefer to be allowed to have his sleep out, even though it were to be concisely rounded off by his death. But he soon pulled himself together and got out of that perverse and sleepy mood, and by the time he and Hamilton had found Sarrasin, the Dictator was well up to all the duties of a commander-in-chief. He had a rapid review of the situation with Sarrasin.
'What I don't see,' he quietly said—he knew too well to try whispering—'is why I should not keep to my own room. If anything is going to happen I am well forewarned, and shall be well fore-armed, and I shall be pretty well able to take care of myself; and why should anyone else run any risk on my account?'