"My dear George, she's still a child," he answered, with some warmth.
"There are children and children." I had neither forgiven nor forgotten her behaviour to O'Rane for a year or two.
"I don't think the man who marries Sonia is at all to be pitied," Loring said rather aggressively.
The words may have meant that such a man was to be envied—or equally that he took the risk with his eyes open. But we were at the corner of Half Moon Street, and Loring had waved good-night and was walking towards Curzon Street before I was ready to ask him.
II
I look back on my life between 1907 and 1910 as three years' hard labour. The sentence began to run about a week after Summertown's return from the Continent, and it was only when he had been coaxed and pushed into a commission in the Third Grenadier Guards and I was dining with the King's Guard in St. James's Palace, six months later, that I heard news of O'Rane's strangely devious progress to the New World.
Devious, and yet perhaps not strange. He went by way of British East Africa, though what he did and how long he remained there, no man has discovered. The documentary evidence ended with a two-line postcard from Mombasa, and anyone could interpret it as he pleased. Summertown's explanations grew more and more picturesque as dinner went on. O'Rane, he assured me, was a Great White Rajah holding sway from the Lakes to the Sudan and from the Desert to the now empty throne of Zanzibar; later, he had "gone black" and was living patriarchally in a kraal with scores of natives wives and one immaculate silk hat between himself and unashamed nudity; later still, he had proclaimed himself Mahdi, and was leading frenzied hordes of Dervishes to the recapture of Khartoum. Raney himself told me afterwards that he was at one time bar-tender in the Nairobi Club and the rest of the while turning his hand, not altogether without success, to anything in heaven above or the waters beneath that had money in it. When he left Africa I have no idea, but the next time I heard of him he had unquestionably reached Mexico.
In the meantime I was wearily serving my sentence in London. I have mentioned the guerilla warfare carried on by Bertrand against the Foreign Office from the time of the Franco-British entente. Secret treaties or understandings were new and amazingly distasteful to the Radical wing, the Lobby rumours only increased the general uneasiness, and something of a crisis was reached when the undefined alliance was joined by Russia. We fire-eaters had lavished invective on the Czar's Government at the time of "Red Sunday," and a fainéant Duma hardly availed to drive Father Gapon and the litter of dead in the Petersburg streets from our memory. If, of course, one country after another was to be drawn into the entente, well and good; there could be no need for so much bated breath and mystery. If, on the other hand, we were dividing Europe into two groups,—at best for a competition in armaments, at worse for a trial of strength,—then the men and women whose lives were handed out as stakes had the right to know the gamble their rulers were meditating.
In this connexion I make free recantation of one heresy: I no longer desire open diplomacy. Had it obtained for the last generation, war might have been postponed; but, if war was as consistently intended by Germany as I am assured on all hands, it would only have been postponed till a less formidable alliance opposed her. To the other half of my creed I remain loyal, though my loyalty be tinged with despair. Now, as then, I look forward to an era of universal arbitration, a pro rata reduction of armaments leading in time to the abolition of national armies and navies and the establishment of a United States of the world with federal control of the world's constabulary. The ideal will not materialize to-day or to-morrow, but—as O'Rane was fond of saying—slavery and torture died hard, the rule of law between individuals did not come in a night.