a doubt,” he admitted. “The only thing is that I am not coming with you.”
“You refuse?” Patoni demanded, his voice shaking with anger.
“I refuse,” Fawley reiterated. “I am a nervous man and I have learnt to take care of myself. When you introduce yourself into my apartment, following close upon an attempt at assassination by one of your countrymen, I find myself disinclined to remain alone in your company during that lonely flight over the Alps, or anywhere else, in fact.”
“This will mean trouble,” Patoni warned him.
“What more serious trouble can it mean,” Fawley asked, “than that you should commence your mission to me—if ever you had one—by having one of your myrmidons steal into my bedroom and nearly murder my brother, who was unfortunately occupying it in my place? That is a matter which has to be dealt with between you and me, Patoni.”
The Italian’s right hand groped for a minute to the spot where the hilt of his sword might have been.
“That is a private affair,” he said. “I am ready to deal with it at any time. I am a Patoni and we are in the direct line with the Di Rezcos. The presence of my cousin in your rooms is a matter to be dealt with at once.”
“It will be dealt with by ordering you out of them,” Fawley retorted, as he pressed the bell.
Patoni sprang to his feet. He looked more than ever like some long, lean bird of prey.
“This is an insult!” he exclaimed.
Elida rose from her chair and moved over between the two men. It was her cousin whom she addressed.
“No brawling in my presence, if you please,” she insisted. “You have put yourself hopelessly in the wrong, Pietro. A would-be assassin cannot claim to be treated as a man of honour.”
“A would-be assassin!” he exclaimed furiously.
“I will repeat the words, if you choose,” she went on coldly. “I too am well served by my entourage. I know quite well that you arrived in this country with two members of Berati’s guard and that it was you yourself who gave the orders for the attack upon Major Fawley.”
“You are a traitress!” he declared.
“You may think what you will of me,” she rejoined, “so long as you leave me alone.”
“Am I to suffer the indignity, then, of finding you here alone with this American at this hour of the night?” Patoni demanded harshly.
“So far as you are concerned, there is no indignity,” Elida replied. “You are not concerned. I am past the age of duennas. I do as I choose.”
Jenkins presented himself in answer to the bell.
“Show this gentleman out,” his master instructed.
The man bowed and stood by the opened door. Patoni turned to his cousin.
“You will leave with me, Elida.”
She shook her head.
“I shall leave when I am ready and I shall choose my own escort,” she replied. “It will not be you!”
Patoni was very still and very quiet. He moved a few steps towards the door. Then he turned round.
“I shall report to my Chief what I have seen and heard,” he announced. “I think that it will cure him of employing any more mercenaries in the affairs of our country.”
“I hope that at the same time he will be cured of sending offensive envoys,” Fawley concluded, with a valedictory wave of the hand.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Right Honourable Willoughby Johns, the very harassed Prime Minister of England, fitted on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and studied the atlas which lay before him.
“Take a sharp pencil, Malcolm,” he invited his secretary, “and trace the frontier for me from the sea upwards.”
The latter promptly obeyed. The map was one which had been compiled in sections and the particular one now spread out stretched from Nice to Bordighera.
“You will find it a little irregular, sir,” he warned his chief. “The road from the sea here mounts to the official building on the main thoroughfare in a fairly straight line, but after that in the mountains it becomes very complicated. This will doubtless be the excuse the French authorities will offer in the matter of the subterranean passages.”
“And the roads?”
“There is a first-class road on the French side from a place called Sospel running in this direction, sir. The whole range of hills on the right-hand side is strongly fortified, but our military report, which I was studying this afternoon at the War Office with General Burns, still gives the situation here entirely in favour of an attacking force. Fawley’s latest information, however,” the secretary went on, dropping his voice, “changes the situation entirely. The new French defences, starting from this bulge here, and which comprise some of the finest subterranean work known, strike boldly across the frontier and now command all the slopes likely to be dangerous. If a copy of Fawley’s plan should reach Italy, I imagine that there would be war within twenty-four hours.”
“Has Fawley reported any fresh movements of troops in the neighbourhood?”
“Major Fawley himself, as you know, sir, has been in Berlin for some short time,” Malcolm replied. “So far as our ordinary sources of information are concerned, we gather that everything on the Italian side is extraordinarily quiet. The French, on the other hand, have been replacing a lot of their five-year-old guns with new Creuzots at the places marked, and trains with locked wagons have been passing through Cagnes, where we have had a man stationed, every hour through the night for very nearly a fortnight. So far as we know, however, there has been no large concentration of troops.”
The Prime Minister studied the atlas for some minutes and then pushed it on one side.
“Seems to me there is some mystery about all this,” he observed. “Bring me Grey’s textbook upon Monaco.”
“I have it in my pocket, sir,” the young man confided, producing the small volume. “You will see that the French have practically blotted out Monaco as an independent State. There is no doubt that they will treat the territory in any way they wish. The old barracks at the top of Mont Agel, which used to contain quite a formidable number of men and a certain strength in field artillery, has been evacuated and everything has been pushed forward towards the frontier. It would seem that the whole military scheme of defence has been changed.”
The Prime Minister leaned back in his chair a little wearily.
“Telephone over to the War Office and see if General Burns is still there,” he directed. “Say I should like to see him.”
“Very
