As soon as the door was closed behind him, he hailed a passing cab.
“I’ll give you a florin if you can get to the Athenæum in three minutes,” he cried to the driver. He looked at his watch. “I think I shall just catch him.”
He knew that Lord Stonehenge was in the habit of passing an hour at the Athenæum after luncheon. He sat always in a certain chair, near the window, which by common consent was invariably left vacant for him. No one ventured to disturb him. He went in and out of the club, indifferent to his fellow-members, as if he did not notice that a soul was there. But Canon Spratte was an audacious man and did not fear to be importunate. He smiled with satisfaction when he saw Lord Stonehenge, heavily seated in his accustomed place. That vast mass of flesh had a ponderous immobility which suggested that it would be difficult for the Prime Minister to escape from his agile hands. He was turning over the pages of a review, but his mind appeared busy with other things.
Canon Spratte walked up jauntily with the Westminster Gazette in his hand. It contained a very amusing cartoon in which Sir John Durant, as a Turkish pasha, was seated on a beer-barrel, while the Prime Minister, in the garb of an odalisque, knelt humbly before him with uplifted hands. In the background were two satellites, one with a bow-string and the other with a scimitar.
“Have you seen this?” said the Canon, sitting down coolly and handing the paper. “Capital, isn’t it?”
The Prime Minister turned his listless eyes on the intruder and for a moment wondered who on earth he was.
“I’ve just been lunching with Durant. He’s rather sore about it. Ticklish situation, isn’t it?”
“Are you Theodore Spratte?” asked Lord Stonehenge.
“I am,” laughed the Canon. “I hope Durant won’t do anything rash. I have a good deal of influence with him, and of course I’m doing my best to persuade him not to kick over the traces.”
A sudden light flashed in the Prime Minister’s eyes, and he saw that Canon Spratte had an object in thus speaking to him. He dived into the abysses of his memory, and recalled that he had offered him a deanery, which the Canon had refused. The man evidently wanted a bishopric or nothing. He remembered also something that his daughter had told him; he wondered what power the suave parson actually had with Sir John.