CHAPTER XVI
A MOVEMENT OF THE POWERS
At Mrs. Montrayner's dinner parties a world of silent men is sandwichedbetween a _monde_ of chattering women. The hostess has a taste for busycelebrities who eat their dinner without thought of the cookery, andregard their fair neighbours much as the diners think of the band in arestaurant. She chose her company with care, and if at her table therewas not the busy clack of a fluent conversation, there was always thepossibility of _bons mots_ and the off-chance of a State secret. So tohave dined with the Montrayners became a boast in a small social set,and to the unilluminate the Montrayner banquets seemed scarce lessmomentous than Cabinet meetings.
Wratislaw found himself staring dully at a snowy bank of flowers andlooking listlessly at the faces beyond. He was extremely worried, andhis grey face and sunken eyes showed the labour he had been passingthrough. The country was approaching the throes of a crisis, and as yetthe future was a blind alley to him. There was an autumn session, andhe had been badgered all the afternoon in the Commons; his even temperhad been perilously near its limits, and he had been betrayedunconsciously into certain ineptitudes which he knew would grin in hisface on the morrow from a dozen leading articles. The Continent seemedon the edge of an outbreak; in the East especially, Russia by a score ofpetty acts had seemed to foreshadow an incomprehensible policy. It wasa powder-barrel waiting for the spark; and he felt dismally that thespark might come at any moment from some unlooked-for quarter of theglobe. He ran over in his mind the position of foreign affairs. Allseemed vaguely safe; and yet he was conscious that all was vaguelyunsettled. The world was on the eve of one of its cyclic changes, andunrest seemed to make the air murky.
He tried to be polite and listened attentively to the lady on his right,who was telling him the latest gossip about a certain famous marriage.But his air was so manifestly artificial that she turned to thepresumably more attractive topic of his doings.
"You look ill," she said--she was one who adopted the motherly airtowards young men, which only a pretty woman can use. "Are theyover-working you in the House?"
"Pretty fair," and he smiled grimly. "But really I can't complain. Ihave had eight hours' sleep in the last four days, and I don't thinkBeauregard could say as much. Some day I shall break loose and go to aquiet place and sleep for a week. Brittany would do--or Scotland."
"I was in Scotland last week," she said. "I didn't find it quiet. Itwas at one of those theatrical Highland houses where they pipe you tosleep and pipe you to breakfast. I used to have to sit up all night bythe fire and read Marius the Epicurean, to compose myself. Did you evertry the specific?"
"No," he said, laughing. "I always soothe my nerves with Blue-books."
She made a mouth at the thought. "And do you know I met such a nice manup there, who said you were a great friend of his? His name wasHaystoun."
"Do you remember his Christian name?" he asked.
"Lewis," she said without hesitation.
He laughed. "He is a man who should only have one name and that hisChristian one. I never heard him called 'Haystoun' in my life. How ishe?"
"He seemed well, but he struck me as being at rather a loose end. Whatis wrong with him? You know him well and can tell me. He seems to havenothing to do; to have fallen out of his niche, you know. And he looksso extraordinarily clever."
"He _is_ extraordinarily clever. But if I undertook to tell you whatwas wrong with Lewie Haystoun, I should never get to the House to-night.The vitality of a great family has run to a close in him. He is strongand able, and yet, unless the miracle of miracles happens, he will neverdo anything. Two hundred years ago he might have led some mad Jacobiteplot to success. Three hundred and he might have been another Raleigh.Six hundred, and there would have been a new crusade. But as it is, heis out of harmony with his times; life is too easy and mannered; thefield for a man's courage is in petty and recondite things, and Lewie isnot fitted to understand it. And all this, you see, spells a kind ofcowardice: and if you have a friend who is a hero out of joint, a greatman smothered in the wrong sort of civilization, and all the while onewho is building up for himself with the world and in his own heart thereputation of a coward, you naturally grow hot and bitter."
The lady looked curiously at the speaker. She had never heard thesilent politician speak so earnestly before.
"It seems to me a clear case of _chercher la femme_," said she.
"That," said Wratislaw with emphasis, "is the needle-point of the wholebusiness. He has fallen in love with just the wrong sort of woman.Very pretty, very good, a demure puritanical little Pharisee, cleverenough, too, to see Lewie's merits, too weak to hope to remedy them, andtoo full of prejudice to accept them. There you have the makings of avery pretty tragedy."
"I am so sorry," said the lady. She was touched by this man's anxietyfor his friend, and Mr. Lewis Haystoun, whom she was never likely tomeet again, became a figure of interest in her eyes. She turned to saysomething more, but Wratislaw, having unburdened his soul to some one,and feeling a little relieved, was watching his chief's face furtherdown the table. That nobleman, hopelessly ill at ease, had given up thepretence of amiability and was now making frantic endeavours to sendmute signals across the flowers to his under secretary.
The Montrayner guests seldom linger. Within half an hour after theladies left the table Beauregard and Wratislaw were taking leave andhurrying into their greatcoats.
"You are going down to the House," said the elder man, "and I'll cometoo. I want to have some talk with you. I tried to catch your eye atdinner to get you to come round and deliver me from old Montrayner, forI had to sit on his right hand and couldn't come round to you.Heigho-ho! I wish I was a Trappist."
The cab had turned out of Piccadilly into St. James's Street beforeeither man spoke again. The tossing lights of a windy autumn eveningwere shimmering on the wet pavement, and faces looked spectral white inthe morris-dance of shine and shadow. Wratislaw, whose soul was sickfor high, clean winds and the great spaces of the moors, was thinking ofGlenavelin and Lewis and the strong, quickening north. His companionwas furrowing his brow over some knotty problem in his duties.
In Pall Mall there was a lull in the noise, but neither seemed disposedto talk.
"We had better wait till we get to the House," said Beauregard. "Wemust have peace, for I have got the most vexatious business to speakabout." And again he wrinkled his anxious brows and stared in front ofhim.
They entered a private room where the fire had burned itself out, andthe lights fell on heavy furniture and cheerless solitude. Beauregardspread himself out in an arm-chair, and stared at the ceiling.Wratislaw, knowing his chief's manners, stood before the blackened grateand waited.
"Fetch me an atlas--that big one, and find the map of the Indianfrontier." Wratislaw obeyed and stretched the huge folio on the table.
The elder man ran his forefinger in a circle.
"There--that wretched radius is the plague of my life. Our reports stopshort at that line, and reliable information begins again some hundredsof miles north. Meanwhile--between?" And he shrugged his shoulders.
"I got news to-day in a roundabout way from Taghati. That's the townjust within the Russian frontier there. It seems that the whole countryis in a ferment. The hill tribes are out and the Russian frontier lineis threatened. So they say. I have the actual names of the people whoare making the row. Russian troops are being massed along the linethere. The whole place, you know, has been for long a military beehiveand absurdly over-garrisoned, so there is no difficulty about themassing. The difficulty lies in the reason. Three thousand squaremiles or so of mountain cannot be so dangerous. One would think thatthe whole Afghan nation was meditating a descent on the Amu Daria." Heglanced up at his companion, and the two men saw the same anxiety ineach other's eyes.
"Anything more of Marka?" asked Wratislaw.
"Nothing definite. He is somewhere in the Pamirs, up to some devilry orother. Oh, by the by, there is something I have forgotten. I found ou
tthe other day that our gentleman had been down quite recently insouth-west Kashmir. He was Arthur Marker at the time, the son of aGerman count and a Scotch mother, you understand. Immensely popular,too, among natives and Europeans alike. He went south from Bardur, andapparently returned north by the Punjab. At Bardur, Logan and Thwaitewere immensely fascinated, Gribton remained doubtful. Now the goodGribton is coming home, and so he will have the place for a happyhunting-ground."
Wratislaw was puffing his under-lip in deep thought. "It is a sweetbusiness," he said. "But what can we do? Only wait?"
"Yes, one could wait if Marka were the only disquieting feature. Butwhat about Taghati and the Russian activity? What on earth is going onor about to go on in this square inch of mountain land to make all thepother? If it is a tribal war on a first-class scale then we must knowabout it, for it is in the highest degree our concern too. If it isanything else, things look more than doubtful. All the rest I don'tmind. It's open and obvious, and we are on the alert. But that littlebit of frontier there is so little known and apparently so remote that Ibegin to be afraid of trouble in that direction. What do you think?"
Wratislaw shook his head. He had no opinion to offer.
"At any rate, you need fear no awkward questions in the House, for thissort of thing cannot be public for months."
"I am wondering whether somebody should not go out. Somebody quiteunofficial and sufficiently clever."
"My thought too," said Beauregard. "The pinch is where to get our manfrom. I have been casting up possibilities all day, and this one is tooclever, another too dull, another too timid, and another toohare-brained."
Wratislaw seemed sunk in a brown study.
"Do you remember my telling you once about my friend Lewis Haystoun?" heasked.
"I remember perfectly. What made him get so badly beaten? He ought tohave won."
"That's part of my point," said the other. "If I knew him less wellthan I do I should say he was the man cut out by Providence for thework. He has been to the place, he knows the ropes of travelling, he isexceedingly well-informed, and he is uncommonly clever. But he is badlyoff colour. The thing might be the saving of him, or the ruin--in whichcase, of course, he would also be the ruin of the thing."
"As risky as that?" Beauregard asked. "I have heard something of him,but I thought it merely his youth. What's wrong with him?"
"Oh, I can't tell. A thousand things, but all might be done away withby a single chance like this. I tell you what I'll do. After to-nightI can be spared for a couple of days. I feel rather hipped myself, so Ishall get up to the north and see my man. I know the circumstances andI know Lewis. If the two are likely to suit each other I have yourauthority to give him your message?"
"Certainly, my dear Wratislaw. I have all the confidence in the worldin your judgment. You will be back the day after to-morrow?"
"I shall only be out of the House one night, and I think the game worthit. I need not tell you that I am infernally anxious both about thebusiness and my friend. It is just on the cards that one might be thesolution of the other."
"You understand everything?"
"Everything. I promise you I shall be exacting enough. And now I hadbetter be looking after my own work."
Beauregard stared after him as he went out of the room and remained fora few minutes in deep thought. Then he deliberately wrote out a foreigntelegram form and rang the bell.
"I fancy I know the man," he said to himself. "He will go. Meantime Ican prepare things for his passage." The telegram was to the fugitiveGribton at Florence, asking him to meet a certain Mr. Haystoun at theEmbassy in Paris within a week for the discussion of a particularquestion.