CHAPTER XVIII

LANDRASSY'S LAST STROKE [IDNIGHT—one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock. Big Ben boomed the hours, and from St. James' Palace came the stroke of the quarters, lighter, quicker, almost pensive in tone. From St. James' Street below came no sounds at last. The clatter of the hoofs of hansom horses had ceased, the rumble of drays carrying their night freights, the shouts of the newsboys making sensation out of rumors made in a newspaper office, had died away. Peace came, and a silver moon gave forth a soft light which embalmed the old thoroughfare, and added a tenderness to its workaday dignity. In only one window was there a light at three o'clock. It was the window of Ian Stafford's sitting-room.

He had not left the Foreign Office till nearly ten o'clock, then had had a light supper at his club, and had written letters there, and after a long walk up and down the Mall had, with reluctant feet, gone to his chambers.

The work which for years he had striven to do for England had been accomplished. The Great Understanding was complete. In the words of the secretary of the American Embassy, "Mennaval had delivered the goods," and an arrangement had been arrived at, completed this very night, which would leave England free to face her coming trial in South Africa without fear of trouble on her flank or in the rear.

The key was turned in the lock, and that lock had been the original device and design of Ian Stafford. He had done a great work for civilization and humanity; he had made improbable, if not impossible, a European war. The Kaiser knew it, Franz Joseph knew it, Nicholas knew it, the White House knew it, and its master nodded with satisfaction, for John Bull was "waking up"-getting a move on. America might have her own family quarrel with John Bull, but when it was John Bull

versus the world, not even James G. Blaine would have been prepared to see the old lion too deeply wounded. Even Landrassy, ambassador of Slavonia, had smiled grimly when he met Ian Stafford on the steps of the Moravian Embassy. He was artist enough to appreciate a well-played game, and, in any case, he had had done all that mortal man could in the way of intrigue and tact and device. He had worked the international press as well as it had ever been worked; he had distilled poison here and rosewater there; he had again and again baffled the English Foreign Office, again and again cut the ground from under Ian Stafford's feet; and if he could have staved off the pact, the secret international pact, by one more day, he would have gained the victory for himself, for his country, for the alliance behind him.

One day, but one day, and the world would never have heard of Ian Stafford! England would then have approached her conflict with the cup of trembling at her lips, and there would be a new disposition of power in Europe, a new dominating force in the diplomacy and the relations of the peoples of the world. It was Landrassy's own last battlefield of wit and scheming, of intellect and ambition. If he failed in this, his sun would set soon. He was too old to carry on much longer. He could not afford to wait. He was at the end of his career, and he had meant this victory to be the crown of his long services to Slavonia and the world.

But to him was opposed a man who was at the beginning of his career, who needed this victory to give him such a start as few men get in that field of retarded rewards, Diplomacy. It had been a man at the end of the journey, and a man at the beginning, measuring skill, playing as desperate a game as was ever played. If Landrassy won-Europe a red battlefield, England at bay; if Ian Stafford wonEurope at peace, England secure.

Ambi

tion and patriotism intermingled, and only He who made human nature knew how much was pure patriotism and how much pure ambition. It was a great stake. On this day of days to Stafford destiny hung trembling, each hour that passed was throbbing with unparalleled anxiety, each minute of it was to be the drum-beat of a funeral march or the note of a Te Deum.

Not more uncertain was the roulettewheel spinning in De Lancy Scovel's house than the wheel of diplomacy which Ian Stafford had set spinning. Rouge ou noir -it was no more, no less. But Ian had won; England had won-black had been beaten.

Landrassy bowed suavely to Ian as they met outside Mennaval's door in the early evening of this day, when the business was accomplished, the former coming out, the latter going in.

"Well, Stafford," Landrassy said in smooth tones and with a jerk of the head backward, "the tables are deserted, the croupier is going home. But perhaps you have not come to play?"

Ian smiled lightly. "I've come to get my winnings as you say," he retorted.

Landrassy seemed to meditate pensively. "Ah yes, ah yes, but I'm not sure that Mennaval hasn't bolted with the bank and your winnings, too!"

His meaning was clear-and hateful. Before Ian had a chance to reply, Landrassy added in a low, confidential voice, saturated with sardonic suggestion, "To tell you the truth," he said, "I had ceased to reckon with women in diplomacy. I thought it was dropped with the Second Empire; but you have started a new dispensationévidemment, évidemment. . . . Still Mennaval goes home with your winnings. bien, we have to pay for our game! Allons gai!"

Eh,

Before Ian could reply-and what was there to reply to insult couched in highly diplomatic language?-Landrassy had stepped sedately away, swinging his gold-headed cane and humming to himself.

"Dueling had its merits," Ian said to himself, as soon as he had recovered from the first effect of the soft, savage insolence. "There is no way to deal with our Landrassys except that, except to beat them, as I have done, in the business of life."

He tossed his head with a little pardonable pride, as it were, to soothe his heart, and then went in to Mennaval. There,

in the arrangements to be made with Moravia he forgot the galling incident; and for hours afterward it was set aside. When, however, he left his club after supper, and after scribbling letters which he put in his pocket absent-mindedly, and having completed his work at the Foreign Office, it came back to his mind with sudden and scorching force.

Landrassy's insult to Jasmine rankled as nothing had ever rankled in his mind before, not even that letter which she had written him so long ago announcing her intended marriage to Byng. He was fresh from the first triumph of his life: he ought to be singing with joy, shouting to the four corners of the universe his pride, walking on air, finding the world a good, kind place made especially for him-his oyster to open, his nut which he had cracked; yet here he was fresh from the applause of his chief, with a strange heaviness at his heart, a gloom upon his mind out of all keeping with the Splendid Fact.

He

Victory in his great fight-and love; he had them both; and so he said to himself as he opened the door of his rooms and entered upon their comfort and quiet. had love, and he had success; and the one had helped to give him the other, helped in a way which was wonderful, and so brilliantly skilful and delicate! As he poured out a glass of water, however, the thought stung him that the nature of the success and its value depended on the nature of the love and its value. As the love was, so was the success, no higher, no different, since the one, in some deep way, begot the other. Yes, it was certain that the thing could not have been done at this time without Jasmine, and if not at this time, then the chances were a thousand to one that it never could be done at any time; for England's enemies would be on her back while she would have to fight in South Africa. The result of that would mean a shattered, humiliated land, with a people in pawn to the will of a rising power across the northern sea. That it had been prevented just in the nick of time was due to Jasmine, his fate, the power that must beat in his veins till the end of all things.

Yet what was the end to be? To-day he had buried his face in that wonderful cloud of hair and had kissed her; and with it, almost on the instant, had come the end of his great struggle for England and himself; and for that he

was willing to pay any price that time and Nemesis might demand-any price save

one.

As he thought of that one price his lips tightened, his brow clouded, his eyes half closed with shame.

Rudyard Byng was his friend, whose bread he had eaten, whom he had known since they were boys at school. He remembered acutely Rudyard's words to him that fateful night when he had dined with Jasmine alone-"You will have much to talk about, to say to each other, such old friends as you are." He recalled how Rudyard had left them, trusting them, happy in the thought that Jasmine would have a pleasant evening with the old friend who had first introduced him to her, and that the old friend would enjoy his eager hospitality. Rudyard had blown. his friend's trumpet wherever men would listen to him; had proclaimed Stafford as the coming man; and this was what he had done to Rudyard!

This was what he had done; but what did he propose to do? What of the future? To go on in secret, in miserable intrigue, degrading to mind and body, twisting the nature, making demands upon life out of all those usual ways in which walk love and companionship-paths that lead through gardens of poppies, maybe, but finding gray wilderness at the end? Never, "Alone and absolute and free"; never the right to take the loved one by the hand before all the world and say: "We two are one, and the reckoning of the world must be made with both." Never to have the right to stand together in pride before the wide-eyed many and say: "See what you choose to see, say what you choose to say, do what you choose to do-we do not care." The open sharing of worldly success; the inner joys which the world may not see -these things could not be for Jasmine and for him.

Yet he loved her. Every fibre in his being thrilled to the thought of her. But as his passion beat like wild music in his veins, a blindness suddenly stole into his sight, and in deep agitation he got up, opened the window, and looked out into the night. For long he stood gazing into the quiet street, and watched a daughter of the night, with dilatory steps and neglected mien, go up towards the more frequented quarter of Piccadilly. Life was grim in so much of it, futile in more,

feeble at the best, foolish in the light of a single generation or a single century or a thousand years! It was only reasonable in the vast proportions of eternity. It had only little sips of happiness to give, not long draughts of joy. Who drank deep, long draughts? Who of all the men and women he had ever known? Who had had the primrose path without the rain of fire, the cinders beneath the feet, the gins and the nets spread for them?

Yet might it not be that here and there people were permanently happy? And had things been different, might not he and Jasmine have been of the radiant few? He desired her above all things; he was willing to sacrifice all-all for her, if need be; and yet there was that which he could not, would not face. All or nothing—all or nothing! If he must drink of the cup of sorrow and passion mixed, then it would be from the full cup.

With a stifled exclamation he sat down and began to write. Again and again he stopped to think, his face lined and worn and old; then he wrote on and on. Ambition, hope, youth, the Foreign Office, the chancelleries of Europe, the perils of impending war, were all forgotten, or sunk into the dusky streams of subconsciousness. One thought dominated him. He was playing the game that has baffled all men, the game of eluding destiny; and, like all men, he must break his heart in the playing.

"Jasmine," he wrote, "this letter, this first real letter of love which I have ever written you, will tell you how great that love is. It will tell you, too, what it means to me, and what I see before us. To-day I surrendered to you all of me that would be worth your while keeping, if it was so that you might take and keep it. When I kissed you, I set the seal upon my eternal offering to you. You have given me success. It is for that I thank you with all my soul, but it is not for that I love you. Love flows from other fountains than gratitude. It rises from the well which has its springs at the beginning of the world, where those beings lived who loved before there were any gods at all, or any faiths, or any truths save the truth of being.

"But it is because what I feel belongs to something in me deeper than I have ever known that, since we parted a few hours ago, I see all in a new light. You have brought to me what perhaps could only have come as it did through fire and cloud and storm. I did not will it so, indeed, I did not wish it so, as you know; but it came in spite of all. And