“The person who formed the plot and used the ignorant peasant as his cat’s-paw should be there too—or even instead of him,” declared Sir Charles angrily. “The peasant suffers, while the real culprit gets off scot-free and unknown.”
“Then he is still unknown?” exclaimed Rolfe in surprise.
“Save to perhaps three persons, of whom I am one.”
“And also the man who threw the bomb!”
“I have heard that the solitary confinement in a dark cell already worked its effect upon him. He is hopelessly insane.”
Rolfe drew a long breath, and glanced around the cosy room with its long row of well-filled book-cases, its big writing-table, and its smaller tables filled with Japanese bric-à-brac, of which Sir Charles was an ardent collector.
In the silence that fell the footman tapped at the door and presented a card. Then Rolfe, declaring that he must go, rose, gripped the grey-haired Minister’s hand, and extracting from him a promise to tell the truth as soon as he had established it, followed the smart English footman down the stairs.
That night, as he sat amid the clatter and music of the brilliantly lit Grand Café, he reflected deeply on all that had been told him, wondering who was the friend who had been responsible for the outrage, which had induced the Doctor to forsake his native land never to return. Servia was a country of intrigue and unrest, as is every young country. He looked around the tables at the gay crowd of smart officers with their ribbons and crosses upon their breasts and their well-dressed womenkind, and wondered whether any fresh conspiracy was in progress.
The rule of King Peter—maligned though that monarch had been—had brought beneficent reforms to Servia. And yet there was an opposition who never ceased to hurl hard epithets against him, and to charge him with taking part in a plot, of the true meaning of which he certainly had had no knowledge.
Belgrade is a city in which plots against the monarchy are hinted at and whispered in the corners of drawing-rooms, where diplomacy is a mass of intrigue, a city of spies and sycophants, of concession-hunters and political cliques. Gay, pleasant, and easy-going, with its fine boulevard, its pretty Kalamegdan Garden, and its spick-and-span new streets, it is different to any other capital of Europe; more full of tragedy, more full of plot and counter-plot.