“I had my suspicions, and I therefore returned to England and found him in London. I did not approach him myself, of course, but from information I gathered I know that he must be aware of the whole truth. That being so, we must not risk any revelations.”
“But even if he really does know, what motive could he ever have in bringing any distinct charge?” queried Morini, facing the man who, he knew, intended to himself occupy the post of Minister of War.
“You forget that he is secretary to that overbearing parvenu Morgan-Mason, and that the latter was Sazarac’s most intimate friend.”
Camillo Morini bit his lip. He had never thought of that. The affair of General Sazarac was to the public a mystery—one which the English Member of Parliament had actively endeavoured to solve. The young Englishman Macbean, if he really knew the truth, might be induced by his employer to speak! In an instant he recognised a further peril in a quarter hitherto entirely unexpected.
“You are quite certain he knows?”
“Absolutely.”
“By what means did he learn the truth?”
“Ah, that is not clear!” responded the thin-faced man. “He knows; but how, is more than we can tell. The merchant of provisions, his employer, was the general’s friend. Therefore the general probably knew the secretary, and may have taken him into his confidence! Cannot you therefore see that the fellow must be given an appointment in our Ministry? We cannot afford to allow him to remain the secretary of this parvenu, treated worse than a dog, ill-paid and sneered at on account of his superior birth and education. We must run no risk.”
“Then the English Member of Parliament is not a very good employer—eh?”
“The reverse; a very bad one. He is a man who rose from being an assistant in a grocer’s shop in a London suburb to be what he is, the greatest dealer in provisions in all the world—a man who is worshipped in London society because of his millions, and upon whose smile even an English duchess will hang. Ah, my dear Camillo! You, although you have a house in England, do not know those English. They are a people of millions; and in society they count their virtues by the millions they possess. I know a man who was a waiter in an hotel in South Africa a few years ago who now has the proud English nobility—their milords and their miladies—around his table. They eat his dinners, they shoot his birds, they use his yacht, they beg of him for loans—and yet they jeer and laugh at him behind his back. It is so with this member of the English Parliament to whom our young friend now acts as secretary.”