Home > Authors Index > E. Phillips Oppenheim > Great Prince Shan > This page
The Great Prince Shan, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
||
Chapter 26 |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER XXVI Nigel was just arriving at Dorminster House when Maggie returned from her ride. He assisted her to dismount and entered the house with her. "There is something here I should like to show you, Maggie," he said, as he drew a dispatch from his pocket. "It was sent round to me half an hour ago by Chalmers, from the American Embassy." "It's about Gilbert Jesson!" Maggie exclaimed, holding out her hand for it. Nigel nodded. "There's a note inside, and an enclosure," he said. "You had better read both." Maggie opened out the former: MY DEAR DORMINSTER, I am afraid there is rather bad news about Jesson. One of our regular line of airships, running from San Francisco to Vladivostok, has picked up a wireless which must have come from somewhere in the South of China. They kept it for a few days, worse luck, thinking it was only nonsense, as it was in code. Washington got hold of it, however, and cabled it to us last night. I enclose a copy, decoded. Sincerely yours, JERE CHALMERS. The copy was brief enough. Maggie felt her heart sink as she glanced through the few lines: Report dispatched London. Fear escape impossible. Good-by. JESSON. "Horrible!" Maggie exclaimed, with a shiver. "I thought he was in Russia." "So did we all," Nigel replied. "He must have come to the conclusion that the key to the riddle he was trying to solve was in China, and gone on there. Look here, Maggie," he continued, after a moment's hesitation, "do you think anything could be done for Jesson with Prince Shan?" Maggie was silent. They were standing in a shaded corner of the hall, but a fleck of sunshine shone in her hair. She was still a little out of breath with the exercise, her cheeks full of healthy colour, her eyes bright. She tapped her skirt with her riding whip. Nigel watched her a little uneasily. "Prince Shan is calling here this afternoon," Maggie announced. "I hope you don't mind." "What are you going to say to him?" Nigel asked bluntly. There was a short, tense silence. Even at the thought of the crisis which she knew to be so close at hand, Maggie felt herself unnerved and in dubious straits. "I do not know," she said at last. "For one thing, I do not know what he wants." "What he wants seems perfectly plain to me," Nigel replied gravely. "He wants you." Maggie made a desperate effort to regain the lightheartedness of a few weeks ago. "If you believe that," she said, "your composure is most unflattering." There was a ring at the front doorbell, and a familiar voice was heard outside. Maggie turned away to the staircase with a little sigh of relief. "Naida!" she exclaimed. "I remember now I asked her for a quarter past one instead of half-past. You must entertain her, Nigel. I'll change into something quickly. And of course I'll speak to Prince Shan. We mustn't lose a minute about that. I'll telephone from my room in a few minutes, Naida. Nigel will look after you." Naida came down the hall, cool and exquisitely gowned in a creation of shimmering white. Nigel led her into the rarely used drawing-room and found a chair for her between the open window and the conservatory. At first they exchanged but few words. The sense of her near presence affected Nigel as nothing of the sort had ever done before. She for her part seemed quite content with a silence which had in it many of the essentials of eloquence. "If the history of these days is ever written by an irascible German historian," Naida remarked at length, "he will probably declare that the destinies of the world have been affected during this last month by an outburst of primitivism. Do you know that I have written quite nice things to Paul about you English people? Honest things, of course, but still things which you helped me to discover. And Prince Shan, too. I think that when he rode here through the clouds, he believed in his heart that he was coming as a harbinger of woe." "You really think, then, that the crisis is past?" Nigel asked. She nodded. "I am almost sure of it. Prince Shan returns to China within the course of the next few days." "We have lived so long," Nigel observed, "in dread of the unknown. I wonder whether we shall ever understand the exact nature of the danger with which we were faced." "It depends upon Prince Shan," she replied. "The terms were Immelan's, but the method was his." "Do you believe," he asked a little abruptly, "that the attempt on Prince Shan's life last night was made by Immelan?" There was a touch, perhaps, of her Muscovite ancestry in the cool indifference with which she considered the matter. "I should think it most likely," she decided. "Prince Shan never changes his mind, and I believe that he has decided against Immelan's scheme. Immelan's only chance would be in Prince Shan's successor." "Why is China so necessary?" Nigel asked. She turned and smiled at her companion. "Alas!" she sighed, "we have reached an _impasse_. The great English diplomat asks too many questions of the simple Russian girl." "It is unfortunate," he replied, in the same vein, "because I feel like asking more." "As, for example?" "Whether you would be content to live for the rest of your life in any other country except Russia." "A woman is content to live anywhere, under certain circumstances," she murmured. Karschoff, discreetly announced, entered the room with flamboyant ease. "It is well to be young!" he exclaimed, as he bent over Naida's fingers. "You look, my far-away but much beloved cousin, as though you had slept peacefully through the night and spent the morning in this soft, sunlit air, with perhaps, if one might suggest such a thing, an hour at a Bond Street beauty parlour. Here am I with crow's-feet under my eyes and ghosts walking by my side. Yet none the less," he added, as the door opened and Maggie appeared, "looking forward to my luncheon and to hear all the news." "There is no news," Naida declared, as the butler announced the service of the meal. "We have reached the far end of the ways. The next disclosures, if ever they are made, will come from others. At luncheon we are going to talk of the English country, the seaside, the meadows, and the quiet places. The time arrives when I weary, weary, of the brazen ticking of the clock of fate." "I shall tell you," Nigel declared, "of a small country house I have in Devonshire. There are rough grounds stretching down to the sea and crawling up to the moors behind. My grandfather built it when he was Chancellor of England, or rather he added to an old farmhouse. He called it the House of Peace." "My father built a house very much in the same spirit," Naida told them. "He called it after an old Turkish inscription, engraven on the front of a villa in Stamboul--'The House of Thought and Flowers.'" Maggie smiled across the table approvingly. "I like the conversation," she said. "Naida and I are, after all, women and sentimentalists. We claim a respite, an armistice--call it what you will. Prince Karschoff, won't you tell me of the most beautiful house you ever dwelt in?" "Always the house I am hoping to end my days in," he answered. "But let me tell you about a villa I had in Cannes, fifteen years ago. People used to speak of it as one of the world's treasures." When the two men were seated alone over their coffee, Nigel passed Chalmers' note and the enclosure across to his companion. "You remember I told you about Chalmers' friend, Jesson, the secret service man who came over to us?" he said. "Chalmers has just sent me round this." Karschoff nodded and studied the message through his great horn-rimmed eyeglass. "I thought that he was going to Russia for you," he said. "So he did. He must have gone on from there." "And the message comes from Southern China," Prince Karschoff reflected. Nigel was deep in thought. China, Russia, Germany! Prince Shan in England, negotiating with Immelan! And behind, sinister, menacing, mysterious--Japan! "Supposing," he propounded at last, "there really does exist a secret treaty between China and Japan?" "If there is," Prince Karschoff observed, "one can easily understand what Immelan has been at. Prince Shan can command the whole of Asia. I know they are afraid of something of the sort in the States. An American who was in the club yesterday told us they had spent over a hundred millions on their west coast fortifications in the last two years." "One can understand, too, in that case," Nigel continued, "why Japan left the League of Nations. That stunt of hers about being outside the sphere of possible misunderstandings never sounded honest." "It was unfortunate," Prince Karschoff said, "that America was dominated for those few months by an honest but impractical idealist. He had the germ of an idea, but he thrust it on the world before even his own country was ready for it. In time the nations would certainly have elaborated something more workable." "You cannot keep a full-blooded man from clenching his fist if he's insulted," Nigel pointed out, "and nations march along the same lines as individuals. Its existence has never for a single moment weakened Germany's hatred of England, and the stronger she grows, the more she flaunts its conditions. France guards her frontiers, night and day, with an army ten times larger than she is allowed. Russia has become the country of mysteries, with something up her sleeve, beyond a doubt, and there are cities in modern China into which no European dare penetrate. Japan quite frankly maintains an immense army, the United States is silently following suit--and God help us all if a war does come!" "You are right," Karschoff assented gloomily. "The last glamour of romance has gone from fighting. There were remnants of it in the last war, especially in Palestine and Egypt and when we first overran Austria. To-day, science would settle the whole affair. The war would be won in the laboratory, the engine room and the workshop. I doubt whether any battleship could keep afloat for a week, and as to the fighting in the air, if a hundred airships were in action, I do not suppose that one of them would escape. Then they say that France has a gun which could carry a shell from Amiens to London, and more mysterious than all, China has something up her sleeve which no one has even a glimmering of." "Except Jesson," Nigel muttered. "And Jesson's gleam of knowledge, or suspicion," Prince Karschoff remarked, "seems to have brought him to the end of his days. Can anything be done with Prince Shan about him, do you think?" "Only indirectly, I am afraid," Nigel replied. "Maggie is seeing him this afternoon. As a matter of fact, I believe she telephoned to him before luncheon, but I haven't heard anything yet. When a man goes out on that sort of a job, he burns his boats. And Jesson isn't the first who has turned eastwards, during the last few months. I heard only yesterday that France has lost three of her best men in China--one who went as a missionary and two as merchants. They've just disappeared without a word of explanation." The telephone extension bell rang. Nigel walked over to the sideboard and took down the receiver. "Is that Lord Dorminster?" a man's voice asked. "Speaking," Nigel replied. "I am David Franklin, private secretary to Mr. Mervin Brown," the voice continued. "Mr. Mervin Brown would be exceedingly obliged if you would come round to Downing Street to see him at once." "I will be there in ten minutes," Nigel promised. He laid down the receiver and turned to Karschoff. "The Prime Minister," he explained. "What does he want you for?" "I think," Nigel replied, "that the trouble cloud is about to burst." _ |
||