That he had at last found Maud again was to both a source of immense gratification. At last the truth of the doctor’s strange disappearance would now be known. But what connection could old Statham have with the affair?
Charlie recollected what Sir Charles Harrison had told him in Belgrade—that the bomb outrage by which a poor innocent child had lost her life had been planned by one of his friends.
He had suspected Max. But in the light of Maud’s secret visit to Statham, he now held the last-named in distinct suspicion. Was it part of the millionaire’s cunning policy in Servia to rid the country of its greatest statesman?
No. That was impossible. The Doctor and Statham had been friends. When Petrovitch was in power they had worked hand-in-glove, with the result that the millionaire had lent money to the Servian Government upon very second-class security. Unrest in Servia would, Charlie was well aware, mean loss to Statham Brothers of perhaps a million sterling. It was therefore to the interest of the firm that the present Government should remain in power, and that the country should be allowed to develop and progress peacefully.
He tried to put behind him that increasing suspicion that Old Sam was the “friend” to whom the diplomat had so mysteriously referred.
And yet as he watched every movement, every gesture of the pair within that long room where the lights were so artistically shaded—the room wherein deals involving the loss or gain of hundreds of thousands of pounds were decided—he saw that the girl remained still defiant, and that the man stood vanquished by her slow, deliberate accusation.
Old Sam’s bony fingers were twitching—a sign of suppressed wrath which his secretary knew well. He held his thin lower lip between his yellow teeth, and standing with his back to the fireplace, he now and then cast a supercilious smile upon the pretty girl who had come there in defiance of the convenances—in defiance, evidently, of his own imperious commands.
Samuel Statham at that moment was not the hard-faced old benefactor who haunted the seats in the park and gave so much money anonymously to the deserving among the “submerged tenth.” He was a man fighting for his honour, his reputation, his gold—nay, his very life. He was a man whose keen wit was now pitted against that of a clear, level-headed girl—one who had right and justice on her side.
Was it possible, Charlie thought, that his well-beloved knew the old man’s secret—that secret which, before he would face its exposure, he would prefer the grave itself?
He watched Maud and noted how balanced was her beautiful countenance, and yet how calm and how determined she was. When the old man spoke she listened with attention, but her replies, brief and pointed, were always made with a gesture and expression of triumph, as of one who knew the naked and astounding truth.