*chapter Xii*

*THE GATHERING OF THE STORM*

“Sit down, Tido!” said Lady Wathe. “What is the matter with everybody? What are they talking about? Tell a waiter to get us a paper! What do you say, Sir Thomas? Of course! Stupid of me to forget. To-day was to be the official summing-up of the evidence in the Perdroux Murder Case. A French Jury won’t guillotine a woman—you said they wouldn’t, Sir Thomas, from the beginning. But of course the verdict’s ‘Guilty’ for Madame! …”

Brayham, with a King’s Bench cough, admitted that he had few misgivings as to the ultimate upshot. Upon the waiter’s return without a newspaper, affirming a copy not to be procurable, judicial inquiries elicited from the man that the general furore for news was less due to popular interest in the famous cause celebre than to popular thirst for details with reference to the Assassinations at Serajevo. Which brought from Lady Wathe the shrill query:

“Sarajevo—where’s Sarajevo? Ask him about the Verdict—I simply must know!”

The Verdict had been “Not Guilty,” according to the waiter… The Goblin screamed:

“But she is!—she is! Good heavens, my dear Sir Thomas! Isn’t it murder to riddle an editor to death in his own office, before his subordinates, with bullets from a revolver you’ve hidden in your muff?”

Brayham summoned up his best King’s Bench manner to answer:

“If he dies—and a jury don’t happen to decide that you’re innocent—the evidence is against you, my dear ma’am!”

Lady Wathe’s vivacious gestures provoked astounding coruscations from her panoply of jewels. She had been certain from the first that there would be no capital sentence. But “Not Guilty.” … Surely it should have been Mazas for life. Or New Caledonia—didn’t they send murderesses to New Caledonia?

Brayham, with a tone and manner even more deeply tinged with the King’s Bench, begged leave to correct—arah!—his very dear friend’s impression that the blameless and much-tried lady, now probably—aha—arah!—supping in the company of her husband and her advocate in her own luxurious dining-room, might, without libel, be called a murderess. Like—aha!—many other highly-strung women, Madame Perdroux had had recourse to the revolver as the ultima ratio. But the Verdict pronounced by the President of the Paris Court of Assize that afternoon had—arah!—purged—

“Bother the Verdict!” snapped the Goblin.

Brayham, incensed at this irreverence, replied with acrimony. The pair wrangled as Paris had wrangled since March 16th, while the great, crowded restaurant buzzed with the name of an obscure town in Eastern Europe—“Sarajevo, Sarajevo”—tossed and bandied from mouth to mouth.

We have learned to our bitter cost the appalling significance of this crime of Sarajevo, which had dwarfed in the estimation of the keen-witted Parisians the most sensational cause celebre ever tried before a French Criminal Court.

The Perdroux trial and its probable result had split Paris into hostile factions. The Press had attacked or defended, lauded or vilified the chief personages of the drama with tireless energy for weeks. The Verdict of “Not Guilty” would have caused fierce rioting upon the boulevards this sultry night of July. Blood would have been spilt between the partisans of Madame Perdroux and her opponents, but for this unexpected bolt from the blue.

Berlin had had the story of the assassinations with its breakfast-rolls and hot creamed coffee. Now, in the blue-white glare of the great electric arc-lamps of the Paris boulevards, men and women leaned over one another’s shoulders to get a whiff of the big black letters on the displayed contents-bills; at every kiosk and bookstall the newspaper-vendors were sold out; much-thumbed copies of the papers were bought by knowing speculators, to be sold and bought and sold again.

The Kaiser at Kiel was racing his own clipper when the operator of the Imperial private wireless read a story from the notes of the singing spark that smote him pale and sick. When his anointed master heard the gory news, his chief regret seems to have concerned the untimely decease of the partner of his “life-work.” “It will have,” he said with bitterness, “to be begun all over again!”

One wonders, in the blood-red light of four years of dreadful carnage, seeing Hell and its dark Powers still unchained, and raging on this War-torn earth of ours—what would have been the nature of the edifice reared by these two Imperial craftsmen, had the younger not been removed by a violent and sudden death?

Did the prospect of unlocking—with one touch on an electric button and the scrawl of a wet pen—the brazen gates of Death and Terror ever strike cold to the heart of the rufous Hapsburg Archduke? Madness, we know, is in the blood of his evil-fated House. But, when the shots from a Bosnian High School student’s revolver pierced Franz Ferdinand’s brain and body, was he sane enough to realise that the crime of the Anarchist had saved his own name from foul, indelible, and hideous infamy? We shall know when the trumpet of the Archangel sounds the Last Reveille, and the grave gives up its dead, and the Sea spews forth its victims, and the secrets of that deeper abyss, the human heart, are revealed in the sheer, awful Light that streams from the Throne of God.