"You think not?" asked von Herrnung, with coolest insolence.
"I—don't think so. I'm dead-sure!" said Franky, getting redder. "We Britons laugh at brag and bluffing, and the gassy patriotism shown by some foreigners we're apt to call bad form. We abuse our Institutions and rag our Governments—we've done that since the year One—far as I can make out. And when other people do it we generally sit tight and smile. We've no use for heroics. But when the pinch comes—it ain't so much that we're loyal. We're Loyalty. We're IT!"
With all his boggling he was so much in earnest, and with all his earnestness so absurdly, quaintly slangy, that the listeners, men and women of British race, whose blood warmed to something in his face and utterance, were forced to struggle to restrain their mirth. Some inkling of this increased the speaker's confusion. He cast a drowning glance at his bulwark Courtley, and Courtley's eye signalled back to his, "Good egg! ... Drive on, old son!"
"You're a foreigner here, of course ..." Franky pursued before the German could interrupt him. He appeared oblivious to his own analogous case. Perhaps for the moment the Hotel Spitz in the Place Vendôme, Paris, and its gorgeous namesake in the London West End, were confused in his not too intellectual mind. He went on: "We're ready to make allowances—too rottenly ready sometimes.... But I read off the iddy-umpties to Full Stop, a minute back.... Count von Herrnung, when you ask English ladies and Englishmen—two of 'em in the Service—to drink that toast with you—you must know you're putting your foot in your hat!"
"Especially," said Courtley, as Franky collapsed, dewy all over and wondering where his breath had gone to—"especially as—a friend of mine happens to have heard that toast proposed rather recently during a Staff banquet at a military headquarters in Germany. And the words, are—not—quite exactly flavoured to suit the British taste."
"'To the Day of Supremacy. On the Land and on the Sea, under the Sea and in the Air, Germany Victorious for ever and ever!'" said von Herrnung, who had got upon his legs, and loomed gigantic over the lace-covered, flower-decked table, now in the after-dinner stage of untidiness, with its silver-gilt and crystal dishes of choice fruit and glittering bonbons disarranged and ravaged, its plates littered, its half-emptied wine-goblets pushed aside to make room for fragrant, steaming coffee-cups in filigree holders, and tiny jewel-hued glasses of Maraschino Cusenier, and Père Kermann. There was a rustle, and a general scraping-back of chairs. Courtley had also risen, and Lord Norwater. A susurration of excitement had passed through the long, lofty, brilliant dining-room. People were getting up from the tables—the pink-and-yellow sheets of Paris Soir, the late edition of the Daily Mail, and another of the Liberté, were fluttering from hand to hand.... And the shrill voice of Lady Wathe was heard.
CHAPTER XII
THE GATHERING OF THE STORM
"Sit down, Tido!" said Lady Wathe. "What is the matter with everybody? What are they talking about? Tell a waiter to get us a paper! What do you say, Sir Thomas? Of course! Stupid of me to forget. To-day was to be the official summing-up of the evidence in the Perdroux Murder Case. A French Jury won't guillotine a woman—you said they wouldn't, Sir Thomas, from the beginning. But of course the verdict's 'Guilty' for Madame! ..."
Brayham, with a King's Bench cough, admitted that he had few misgivings as to the ultimate upshot. Upon the waiter's return without a newspaper, affirming a copy not to be procurable, judicial inquiries elicited from the man that the general furore for news was less due to popular interest in the famous cause célèbre than to popular thirst for details with reference to the Assassinations at Serajevo. Which brought from Lady Wathe the shrill query: