Mr. Standfast by John Buchan (mystery books to read .TXT) 📕

“I suppose so,” he said, and his manner was not cordial. “Anyhow I was ordered down here. My business is to do as I am told.”

“Coming to dine?” I asked.

“No. I’m dining with some friends at the Crillon.”

Then he looked me in the face, and his eyes were hot as I first remembered them. “I hear I’ve to congratulate you, Hannay,” and he held out a limp hand.

I never felt more antagonism in a human being.

“You don’t like it?” I said, for I guessed what he meant.

“How on earth can I like it?” he cried angrily. “Good Lord, man, you’ll murder her soul. You an ordinary, stupid, successful fellow and she⁠—she’s the most precious thing God ever made. You can never understand a fraction of her preciousness, but you’ll clip her wings all right. She can never fly now⁠ ⁠…”

He poured out this hysterical stuff to me at the foot of the staircase within hearing of an elderly French widow with a poodle. I had no impulse to be angry, for I was far too happy.

“Don’t, Wake,” I said. “We’re all too close together to quarrel. I’m not fit to black Mary’s shoes. You can’t put me too low or her too high. But I’ve at least the sense to know it. You couldn’t want me to be humbler than I felt.”

He shrugged his shoulders, as he went out to the street. “Your infernal magnanimity would break any man’s temper.”

I went upstairs to find Blenkiron, washed and shaven, admiring a pair of bright patent-leather shoes.

“Why, Dick, I’ve been wearying bad to see you. I was nervous you would be blown to glory, for I’ve been reading awful things about your battles in the noospapers. The war correspondents worry me so I can’t take breakfast.”

He mixed cocktails and clinked his glass on mine. “Here’s to the young lady. I was trying to write her a pretty little sonnet, but the darned rhymes wouldn’t fit. I’ve gotten a heap of things to say to you when we’ve finished dinner.”

Mary came in, her cheeks bright from the weather, and Blenkiron promptly fell abashed. But she had a way to meet his shyness, for, when he began an embarrassed speech of good wishes, she put her arms round his neck and kissed him. Oddly enough, that set him completely at his ease.

It was pleasant to eat off linen and china again, pleasant to see old Blenkiron’s benignant face and the way he tucked into his food, but it was delicious for me to sit at a meal with Mary across the table. It made me feel that she was really mine, and not a pixie that would vanish at a word. To Blenkiron she bore herself like an affectionate but mischievous daughter, while the desperately refined manners that afflicted him whenever women were concerned mellowed into something like his everyday self. They did most of the talking, and I remember he fetched from some mysterious hiding-place a great box of chocolates, which you could no longer buy in Paris, and the two ate them like spoiled children. I didn’t want to talk, for it was pure happiness for me to look on. I loved to watch her, when the servants had gone, with her elbows on the table like a schoolboy, her crisp gold hair a little rumpled, cracking walnuts with gusto, like some child who has been allowed down from the nursery for dessert and means to make the most of it.

With his first cigar Blenkiron got to business.

“You want to know about the staff-work we’ve been busy on at home. Well, it’s finished now, thanks to you, Dick. We weren’t getting on very fast till you took to peroosing the press on your sickbed and dropped us that hint about the ‘Deep-breathing’ ads.”

“Then there was something in it?” I asked.

“There was black hell in it. There wasn’t any Gussiter, but there was a mighty fine little syndicate of crooks with old man Gresson at the back of them. First thing, I started out to get the cipher. It took some looking for, but there’s no cipher on earth can’t be got hold of somehow if you know it’s there, and in this case we were helped a lot by the return messages in the German papers. It was bad stuff when we read it, and explained the darned leakages in important noos we’ve been up against. At first I figured to keep the thing going and turn Gussiter into a corporation with John S. Blenkiron as president. But it wouldn’t do, for at the first hint of tampering with their communications the whole bunch got skeery and sent out SOS signals. So we tenderly plucked the flowers.”

“Gresson, too?” I asked.

He nodded. “I guess your seafaring companion’s now under the sod. We had collected enough evidence to hang him ten times over⁠ ⁠… But that was the least of it. For your little old cipher, Dick, gave us a line on Ivery.”

I asked how, and Blenkiron told me the story. He had about a dozen cross-bearings proving that the organization of the “Deep-breathing” game had its headquarters in Switzerland. He suspected Ivery from the first, but the man had vanished out of his ken, so he started working from the other end, and instead of trying to deduce the Swiss business from Ivery he tried to deduce Ivery from the Swiss business. He went to Berne and made a conspicuous public fool of himself for several weeks. He called himself an agent of the American propaganda there, and took some advertising space in the press and put in spread-eagle announcements of his mission, with the result that the Swiss Government threatened to turn him out of the country if he tampered that amount with their neutrality. He also wrote a lot of rot in the Geneva newspapers, which he paid to have printed, explaining how he was a pacifist, and was going to convert Germany to peace by “inspirational advertisement of