“Our host is in an obstinate humour this evening,” the Baroness confided. “I have been watching you from a distance,” he admitted. “If such a thing were possible, I should have divined that you were asking him a favour which he was not disposed to grant.”
“You are evidently,” she said, sinking into one of the beautiful Empire chairs and motioning him to draw one to her side, “a person of discernment, perhaps I should also add—tact.”
“You flatter me,” he murmured. “As a matter of fact, I generally lose my head when I have a really pleasant surprise.”
She tapped his knuckles with her fan.
“But listen,” she begged. “I was really giving Mr. Benjamin some wonderful advice, if he would listen to it. The situation to-night is worse but—you know a little of the Viennese temperament, I’m sure—nobody will believe it. They are light-hearted; they hope always for the best. No one will believe what I know to be the truth. The Germans have two divisions of picked troops actually on the frontier. They will be in Austria before daylight tomorrow.”
“As bad as that,” he murmured.
“Worse,” she answered, “a great deal worse for Leopold Benjamin. I need not tell you how the Jews have been treated in Germany. It is too awful a subject to discuss—especially in this house. But listen, my friend—I know these things because I have influential connections—in this country Leopold Benjamin stands upon a pinnacle. He is the Emperor of all the Jews. No one believes that harm could come to him. All the same, it will. I want him to leave at once. I want him to pack up all those treasures of his—millions and millions of your English pounds they are worth—and take them over the Swiss frontier. He would be safe there. Not only that—his treasures would be safe. He will not listen to me. He will not believe even the late news that I bring him. Look at him listening to the Princess Sophie’s chatter! Don’t you love that gracious stoop of the neck he has? Have you influence with him, Mr. Mildenhall?”
“Not a scrap,” Mildenhall assured her. “He was a great friend of my uncle’s, but I only met him a few days ago and he knows nothing about me except that I am distantly connected with the British Embassy here.”
She looked up at him with a reawakened gleam of interest in her eyes.
“So that was why you were dining with Freddie Lascelles!”
“An old friend of mine,” he assented. “We started our career together in Paris.”
“Later on this evening you must tell me all about yourself,” she said. “Just now I feel that I want to talk about nothing but Leopold Benjamin. Someone ought to make him see reason. He has bad advisers here.”
“He looks far too intelligent to make mistakes of that sort,” Mildenhall remarked.
“He is too kindly. He sees nothing but the best side of everybody. How he came to make this enormous fortune banking I cannot imagine, except that his father had paved the way for him. Tell me, do you know a queer little man—Marius Blute, I think his name is?”
“Yes, I know him. I met him the same day that I met Mr. Benjamin. He’s dining here to-night.”
“That man,” she said seriously, “is one of Leopold Benjamin’s most dangerous advisers.”
“Really? Of course, I know nothing about him,” Mildenhall continued, “but I should not have thought that he possessed sufficient significance to be an adviser to one of the most astute men in Austria.”
Patricia Grey glided up to them. In her simple black frock, with her delightful figure and marvellous colouring, she presented an altogether charming appearance—a complete and intriguing foil to the Baroness.
“We are going in to dinner quite informally,” Patricia announced. “We have not even table cards. Will you look after the Baroness, Mr. Mildenhall? I am told that I must be somewhere in the neighbourhood as Mr. Mildenhall is our only stranger tonight.”
“Seems to me,” he remarked with a smile as he offered his arm to the Baroness, “that the strangers get all the luck here.”
CHAPTER V
“This,” Patricia told Mildenhall as he took his place in the high-backed chair next to her at the dining table, “is what Mr. Benjamin’s industrious librarian calls in his guide to the house ‘the smaller banqueting hall.’ The fact that there is room for eighty to sit at this table he carefully ignores. One of Mr. Benjamin’s visiting friends called it ‘The Room of Faded Splendours.’”
“He was probably not a person of observation,” Mildenhall remarked. “A few hundreds of years only added subtlety to the colouring of Gobelin tapestries and the wonder of the world is still the freshness of these Renaissance paintings. I have never dined before facing a genuine Andrea del Sarto.”
“And what do you think of your servitors?” she asked smiling.
He glanced round the table. Behind every chair, in plain but attractive costume, stood a Viennese parlourmaid. With the exception of Heinrich, the butler, there was only one manservant in the room—the wine seneschal—and he stood immovable behind his master’s chair.
“To tell you the truth,” Mildenhall confided, “it was the strangeness of the—er—domestic staff which I noticed even before I realized the wonder of the picture.”
“The service is an old feature of the housekeeping here,” Patricia said. “It was like this in Mr. Benjamin’s father’s time and his grandfather’s.”
“To me it always seems,” the Baroness remarked from his other side, “that, notwithstanding all its treasures, the most wonderful thing in the house is its owner.”
“This is only the second time I have seen him,” Mildenhall observed, “but I should think you are probably right.”
“If he were not a Jew,” she went on, “if he had been able to give his whole attention to politics, he would without a doubt have led the country. I do not think that it would have been in its present unhappy state. I think it would still have been a monarchy with a court the most brilliant in Europe.”
“It is an interesting speculation,” Mildenhall admitted. “I doubt, though, whether the bourgeoisie of any country would submit to a revival of monarchal rule in these days.”
“England, my friend! England!”
“The only exception,” he agreed, “and Cromwell wasn’t much of a dictator, was he? England is a difficult problem for any historian. When I was at Oxford the professors told us that the Stuarts had murdered the bourgeoisie just as the Pitts crushed labour.”
“The English tolerate Jews as we do, don’t they?” Patricia asked.
“Rather,” he answered. “I should imagine that it is to the Jews England owes her financial prosperity. Except for Disraeli they have never been a success in politics. They may even have made us a nation of shopkeepers, but they are the greatest and most vital force in the country now. It is in
