Chapter Four.
“And you think mischief is brewing, eh?”
The speaker was Maurice Farquhar. The man he addressed was Andres Moreno, the black-browed Spaniard who had dined with him on the previous evening at the restaurant where they had met Guy Rossett and his party.
Maurice, a member of the junior bar, with a daily increasing practice, rented a charming suite of rooms in one of the most cloistered courts of the Temple. Certainly, this suite was on the top floor, and it was a stiff climb up those stairs. But Maurice was young and healthy, and the ascent of those few steep stairs did not trouble him in the least.
Apart from his own special legal business, which absorbed his best faculties, he was a man of many interests. During the lean years, when he had waited for briefs, he had supplemented his modest patrimony by journalism. He became a somewhat well-known figure in Fleet Street, specialising more or less upon foreign politics.
Then, when the briefs began to flow in, he had gradually dropped journalism. Now and again, at the earnest request of a persistent editor, he would write an article or a letter on some burning question, in which he could display his particular knowledge of affairs.
In those old journalistic days, happy, careless days, when a dinner at the old “Cheshire Cheese” was accounted something of a luxury, when he never entered the portals of the Ritz or Carlton, save as the guest of some rich friend or relation, he had struck up a great comradeship with Andres Moreno, son of a Spanish father and an English mother, an adroit and clever journalist, who could turn his hand to anything.
Nothing came amiss to Moreno; he was the handy man of journalism. He could write a most flamboyant description of a fashionable bazaar. He could, in a sufficiently well-paid article, penetrate the subtle schemes of European monarchs and statesmen.
His knowledge of London and every other foreign capital was illuminating. He knew every prominent detective, he enjoyed the acquaintance of not a few members of the criminal classes. He was hail-fellow-well-met with staunch monarchists and avowed anarchists. But it was always difficult with this man, who had friends in so many camps, to discover what were his real opinions.
Maurice who, perhaps, knew him better than anybody, on the mental side, always declared that he had no fixed opinions.