“First,” said Cooper-Nassington, who by unanimous request had taken the head of the table, with Doris and I on his right hand and Casteno on his left and the colonel to the front of him, “you are both, no doubt, literally dying to know how Lord Cyril came to tumble from his pinnacle as Foreign Secretary in a day as it were. Well, don’t trouble to look at the papers. They are full of lies, as usual. They pretend it is failing health, that the strain of European complications has been too much for him, that he’s threatened with softening of the brain; but all that is really nonsense. I got at the great man myself, and I made him resign!” And, swelling with pride and importance, the Member of Parliament rose and gazed delightedly upon us.
“You actually did!” we cried in a breath; but he waved our dissent aside.
“Yes; I contrived it all,” he went on. “As a matter of fact, I did it by bluff, sheer bluff; but I knew my man, and I knew where to hit him. He had tried to crush us, and I recognised that the time had come when, if we didn’t wish to be totally exterminated, we must fall upon him and demolish him.”
And we both nodded, recalling that cruel letter of his to José.
The Member of Parliament paused for a moment theatrically, and then went on in a more grave and earnest tone. At the bottom we could see he was really profoundly touched by the turn events had taken and by our own good fortune, but, British like, he sought to hide it by a jocularity and levity he was very far, indeed, from feeling.
“I got a private interview with him at the Foreign Office this afternoon,” he said, “just after he had announced to a delighted House all about the wonderful discovery he had made of documents that proved that the sacred lake belonged to England, and that a mission would be despatched forthwith to take possession of it. This he did on the strength of the forged manuscripts which Naylor found in the safe when he searched St. Bruno’s from top to bottom. ‘Cuthbertson,’ I began very firmly, ‘you’ve been fooled, fooled completely. Those are not the documents you want at all. They are forgeries, as your experts will rapidly discover; forgeries made by the hunchback’s good-for-nothing second son.’ He stormed and he raved, and he sent for old Peter Zouche and his son Paul, who, of course, had to admit the truth of what I said, and then he lost nerve completely, begged my pardon, and tried to come to terms with me. ‘Let me have the real things,’ he pleaded, ‘and I’ll release your friends. I’ll give you a share of the credit of the discovery, and at the first opportunity I have I’ll find you a snug place in the Government.’
“Now,” proceeded the Member of Parliament, “tempting as those terms were, I refused them. For one thing, I knew my man, and I knew he was but a pinchbeck, unstable, untruthful kind of genius. For another, I realised that, as Foreign Secretary, he was a terrible danger to England, so I stuck to the line I had marked out for myself, without any thought or hope of my own advancement. ‘You’ve got to resign,’ I returned—‘nothing else will satisfy me or save you from the ridicule I have arranged to pour upon you. I have prepared a careful account of the whole business as we know it from the inside, ay, even of the way you must have helped Fotheringay to send those sham nurses, and to-morrow I shall telegraph it to every newspaper of importance. I will swear an affidavit of its truth, and join the opposition, and between us we will contrive to literally laugh you out of power.’ A terrible scene, of course, followed. He grew abusive, he tried more bribes, he threatened to have me flung into prison like yourselves—there wasn’t, in fact, a trick or a dodge which a man in his powerful position could resort to that he didn’t in turn practise on me.
“Luckily, I am pretty obstinate,” he went on, “and I won, hands down. Straight away he got two or three doctor friends together, and they cooked up a certificate about the state of his health; he rushed off to Buckingham Palace and handed over his resignation to the king, who, fortunately, happened to be in town; and, after various audiences, the Premier about an hour ago appointed the Marquis of Penarth in his place. In the Cabinet it is pretty well known how I managed it, but nobody regrets Cuthbertson’s downfall. He was too proud, too overbearing, too insolent for the position, and all the members of the House whom I have spoken to seem to be relieved at his resignation and hurried departure to that old castle of his up in Galloway.”
“And what,” asked José, “has become of my father and brother?” And his face was pale and his eyes full of tears.
“I am sorry to say they have both bolted. The Home Secretary sent after them regarding the loss of certain plans from the Woolwich Arsenal, but they took fright over the forgeries and Cuthbertson’s threats and slipped off to Greenwich, from which they got a tramp steamer to take them to some foreign port, whence they can flee up country and gain a quasi kind of protection, which it won’t pay England to fight—probably in Portugal or Spain, or even in Greece, with which country, I understand, we have no extradition treaty whatever.”