“To John Cooper-Nassington, Esq, MP, St. Stephen’s, Westminster, SW.”
“The Bearer waits.”
On the other, to my astonishment, I discovered no less an address than this:
Urgent. Private.
“To the Most Hon. Lord Cyril Cuthbertson, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.”
“Only to be delivered by Mr Hugh Glynn in case Mr Cooper-Nassington should decline.”
For a second, I confess, I felt too astonished to say, or to do, or even to think of anything at all. I sat, with these big legal-looking letters in front of me, gazing into space, trying vainly to interpret the meaning of all these extraordinary manoeuvres on the part of a youthful Spaniard who might, it was true, be really a most important envoy of some far-off foreign state, but equally might be also, and with more apparent reason it seemed to me, absolutely nobody at all.
For Lord Cyril Cuthbertson, as all England was aware (in common with our foreign enemies, no matter how big they might be or bullying in tone or aggressive), was the very last man to be trifled with. He it was who, when Lord Garthdown fell, told Germany so sharply to keep out of an African negotiation we had on hand just then or he would apply an English form of the Monroe doctrine to the entire continent of Africa and never allow them to acquire there another foot of space. He had also, when the United States raised some futile question about boundaries that ought to have been fixed up a century ago, told America that he had settled the matter in his own mind; their claim was preposterous; and that, if they wished to enforce it, they had the remedy common to all nations; but he should advise them to remember that once they put foot into European complications they couldn’t lift it out. And they, too, I recollect very well, promptly busied themselves about troubles elsewhere.
Not a nice man, perhaps—not even a courteous man—but, at all events, a man whom the House and the country feared, and on whom nobody dared play any game or trick.
Yet here was evidently an urgent private communication to him from Don José Casteno. What was at the bottom of it?—a secret of State or of life?