XV POTTERS CONFER

On this same morning there was a brief but pithy interview between Styr and Excellenz in the very centre of the Nachmeister gardens.

“So! so!” exclaimed the old woman; her grey eyes glittered like ice, the corners of her mouth were down, of her nose up. “It comes to this! Poor Fritz! We can save the young man if we are quick enough, but what of my poor old friend? . . . Ach, yes! You are not interested. He is old. You—yourself—look full of insolent youth this morning. I have never seen you in this mood. Cultivate it. You look twenty-eight. Myself, were I your age, should prefer to look more like a woman than a goddess. Also! Fritz must suffer in any case, so all we can do is to save the young man and spare the old one a lesion. Fritz is the vainest man in Germany or he would have found her out long since. He remains in Berlin ten days. You think she intends to make Mr. Ordham elope with her before his return. I wonder! Gott! I fancy it would take more than ten days to work our young friend up to that heroic pitch. More likely she has planned a coup of some sort. Otherwise—I doubt. He will politely promise to meet her at the train. At the last moment he will send a message—but in haste! ‘I am so sorry! I can’t go to-day. I have a cold.’ I know all the ingenious devices of that charming youth, and so, I doubt not, does Frau Hélène. He has not eaten of the big black cake of life yet, merely nibbled at its edges.”

“He is likely to choke on a slice unless we are quick enough.”

“True. Also! I repeat, she must know all his little ways by this time, have discovered that he is by no means as ingenuous as he looks, nor as easy to manage. She moves and lives in a network, a very maze, of intrigue. Only the devious ways appeal to her. You may be sure she has some plot on foot which the sudden departure of Fritz disarranged. That would account for her excitement that same afternoon. I have watched this little drama from the first, but she seems to have been playing a deeper game than I fancied—and different! I have watched many of her little dramas in the last twenty years. Of late it would seem that she had been lulling the suspicions of our young friend while she laid her wires. But what and where are those wires? There is only one way to find out and that is through her maid.”

“I thought of that, of course; but none of my servants know any of the Wass household.”

“Nor mine, probably. But I do my scheming through no such dangerous channels. The secret police is always at my service. By to-morrow night I shall have had an interview with the woman. If she has anything to reveal I shall extract it with the promise of a position in the Residenz; that is a bribe more potent than gold—which we will not use unless we must. As soon as I am in possession of the facts I shall act—you say he has vowed to do nothing rash for a week?”

“To be ill, if necessary. Fortunately she cannot storm the Legation.”

“Even so, we must act quickly. If the woman is really desperate, she will find some way to compromise him—and what more effective than a violent scene in the British Legation? It would be all over Munich in an hour. But, by all the saints,” Nachmeister crossed herself devoutly, “that scene she shall never make. We will baffle her before she has quite lost her patience.”

When Excellenz had bidden good-by to her guest she stood for a moment regarding the path with drawn brows. Had she engaged upon an enterprise to deliver the lamb from the panther to the tigress? In a moment she shook her head. She was a very wise old woman, and she recalled that Styr had made no apologies, no explanations. She had said nothing about disinterested friendship, taking a natural interest in a man so much younger than herself. Nachmeister had long outlived the folly of generalizing, of assuming that the same set of motives must govern the most diverse individuals. For the present, at least, Ordham was in no danger from the prima donna, who, no doubt, had lived her life, and would hardly waste her time playing upon the weakness of young men.

“But if I should be mistaken,” she thought grimly, “she too can be circumvented. Ordham must marry Mabel Cutting.”