“Thank you, General,” said Mansfield warmly; “I accept the reproof. Count Mortimer’s secrets are safe with me. Not even to you will I reveal them.”
M. Stefanovics had been speechless and almost black in the face with rage, but his delight on hearing his colleague thus hoist with his own petard relieved his mind, and he broke into a shout of laughter.
“Aha, General, the Englishman is too clever for us! Come, monsieur, what is it you ask?”
“All I want you to do is to let me wait in the anteroom while you carry the message to the Queen, so that I may be at hand if her Majesty is pleased to wish to ask me anything.”
“Excellent!” said M. Stefanovics, his good-humour quite restored. “Your demands are commendably moderate, monsieur. You will join us at lunch first?”
The meal passed off peacefully, although General Banics preserved a persistent silence and an expression of cold contempt towards both Mansfield and M. Stefanovics, and when it became his duty to conduct the uninvited guest to the Institution in the afternoon, he relieved the monotony of the climb by a single remark only.
“Understand, monsieur,” he burst out, standing still in the middle of the pathway, and glaring down at Mansfield, who was following him, “if your master succeeds in adding so much as a finger’s weight to her Majesty’s sorrows, I will kill him in her very presence!”
“There would be two people to reckon with in such a case, General—her Majesty and Count Mortimer himself,” said Mansfield, with great calmness. “It will be time enough, surely, to avenge the Queen when she asks for your help?”
The cool reasonableness of this speech stung the General to the quick, and uttering an inarticulate grunt, he turned to resume the march up the hill. Arrived at the Institution, he left Mansfield in the deaconesses’ guest-chamber, while he went to inquire the Queen’s pleasure, returning shortly, with a very bad grace, to say that her Majesty desired his attendance. The Queen was sitting in a marble verandah, which looked upon a small enclosed garden, warm and bright in spite of the advanced season of the year, and musical with fountains. Madame Stefanovics, a lady almost as stout and comfortable-looking as her husband, was with her, but when General Banics had presented Mansfield and retired to the door, she also retreated out of earshot, and Ernestine gave her visitor a significant smile.
“We must not shock Banics,” she said. “He does not know that I have ever seen you before. But tell me, is the Count’s illness serious?” her voice shook with anxiety.