"You have not forgotten him! He used you somewhat roughly at the Foreign Office in the Wilhelm Strasse. Nor, as it happens, has he forgotten you. Come!—what have you admitted to that Witch of Endor, la veuve Bayard? You are no friend to her daughter if you have told the woman that Mademoiselle is here, under this roof."
"So you—know?..."
P. C. Breagh had gasped the words out before he could stop himself. The Minister's flashing blue eyes lightened in laughter as they met the appalled stare of the young man with the cropped head and the green baize apron. He said, lisping a little as was his wont:
"I know, and I have known almost from the beginning. Everything must be known in this house. Did you suppose I had left my Prussian Secret Service at home in Berlin? Here! This belongs to you!"
He was standing on the hearth, his great back to the wood fire that blazed on the steel dogs. One of a brace of letters that he pulled from his breeches pocket, and tossed to the culprit under examination, fell at that wretch's feet.
"Pick it up, Mr. Patrick Carolan Breagh," he said. "You will find it a more-than-ordinarily interesting epistle. It was brought me something over an hour ago. Your legal friend, Mr. Chown, of Furnival's Inn, Holborn, London, advises you to go back there without procrastination. Your absconding trustee, Mr. William Mustey, Junior, has been found in Bloomsbury lodgings, the War having apparently frightened him out of France. Odd, because the scent of battlefields proves attractive to birds and animals of the predatory order. Mustey is dead, but luckily for you he has left nearly all of your property behind him. Some £500 of your inheritance of £7,000 seems to be missing. I daresay you will be willing to let the deficit go. What are you saying?"
His victim, with lips screwed into the shape of a whistle, had murmured:
"The Post Office.... Gee-whillikins!... they've given me away!..."
"Given you away!... You are a pretty conspirator!" The masterful eyes flickered with humor. There was amusement, suppressed, but evident, in the lines about the grim mouth hidden by the martial mustache. "Where should my blue Prussian bees gather intelligence, if not at the Post Office? Did you not give yourself away, as you term it, when you employed the time not occupied in smearing silver plate with whitening, and bedaubing polished boards most execrably with beeswax,—in acting as a voluntary assistant dresser at the auxiliary Military Hospital that has been established under the Red Cross at the Convent of the Sisters of the Poor? When a young Swiss—who is supposed to be ignorant of any language save his own extraordinary gibberish—betrays a more than superficial knowledge of French and German surgical terminology, and evinces a degree of skill in bandaging and so forth, such as you have permitted yourself to display, the German authorities, while they avail themselves of the young gentleman's service, are to be pardoned for supposing him to be other than he appears! Come, it is time this farce of yours and Mademoiselle's ended. I am going to ring the bell, and send for her, and tell her so now!..." The imperious hand went out to the bell-rope of faded red, and he stayed his summons to add: "Then you and she must pack up and betake yourselves to England.... I will furnish you with a permit to travel by railway and a laissez-passer. You will return to me a certain half-sheet of Chancellery notepaper which I gave you in the Wilhelm Strasse last July! Further—I have no advice to give you except that you would be wise not to select the theatrical profession for your next venture. You have not a gift for the stage, unlike Mademoiselle.... As for her, the vixen! you would do well to marry her promptly. Nothing else will cure a young man of the stupidity of being in love!"
There was something horrible in the mere fact of being taken so lightly, when one had waited in tense agony for the ominous flurry in the daytime—expecting in sleepless anguish the cry in the night.... The relief that mingled with the horror caused the muscles of the mouth to relax in a smile of imbecility, made one stutter and gulp because of the choking in one's throat....