“When you are with the good old-fashioned Tory,” he had said once to him laughingly, “you are all for King and Church and State and good Government. When you are with the anarchist, your sympathies go with the poor devils who have got nothing, and want to blow up everybody, in the hopes of getting a bit out of the wreck.”
And Moreno, in the same jocular spirit, had admitted there was a certain element of truth in the description.
“I am so infernally sympathetic, you know, Farquhar. I am like a straw blown by the wind. Any man who can talk to me earnestly for five minutes makes me see eye to eye with him. When I have left him, when the magnetism of his presence is removed, the cold fit succeeds, and I see with the eye of Andres Moreno. On the whole, I think I may say I am on the side of law and order.”
And Farquhar had replied in the same half-jocular vein. “Better stick on that side, old man. Otherwise they will end by taking from you even that little which you have.”
Since those days of early friendship, the two men had prospered exceedingly. Moreno was a very highly paid journalist. Farquhar was one of the rising members of the junior bar.
The young barrister repeated his question.
“And you think mischief is brewing, eh?” Moreno raised himself from what appeared to be a deep reverie. It was a peculiarity of the man that suddenly he would relapse into deep meditation, and for the moment seem oblivious of what was going on around him. Then, in a flash, his keen intellect would assert itself, and he would pick up, in a very easy fashion the dropped threads of the previous conversation.
“Very serious mischief, old man,” he said, in his deep, rather husky tones. He spoke English perfectly, by the way, without the slightest trace of foreign accent. As a matter of fact, he had been born and bred in the country of his mother.
“Is it a great secret?” questioned Farquhar.
Moreno looked at him kindly. He was very greatly attached to this quiet Englishman, who had taken him by the hand in those early days when some of the brethren of the pen had regarded him as an outsider, and shown their dislike very plainly.