The Great Impersonation Read online

  “Leopold!” she faltered. “The Holy Saints, why did you not let me know!”

  Dominey bowed very slightly. His words seemed to have a cut and dried flavour.

  “I am so sorry,” he replied, “but I fear that you make a mistake. My name is not Leopold.”

  She stood quite still, looking at him with the air of not having heard a word of his polite disclaimer.

  “In London, of all places,” she murmured. “Tell me, what does it mean?”

  “I can only repeat, madam,” he said, “that to my very great regret I have not the honour of your acquaintance.”

  She was puzzled, but absolutely unconvinced.

  “You mean to deny that you are Leopold von Ragastein?” she asked incredulously. “You do not know me?”

  “Madame,” he answered, “it is not my great pleasure. My name is Dominey—Everard Dominey.”

  She seemed for a moment to be struggling with some embarrassment which approached emotion. Then she laid her fingers upon his sleeve and drew him to a more retired corner of the little apartment.

  “Leopold,” she whispered, “nothing can make it wrong or indiscreet for you to visit me. My address is 17, Belgrave Square. I desire to see you tonight at seven o’clock.”

  “But, my dear lady,” Dominey began—

  Her eyes suddenly glowed with a new light.

  “I will not be trifled with,” she insisted. “If you wish to succeed in whatever scheme you have on hand, you must not make an enemy of me. I shall expect you at seven o’clock.”

  She passed away from him into the restaurant. Mr. Mangan, now freed from his friends, rejoined his host, and the two men took their places at the side table to which they were ushered with many signs of attention.

  “Wasn’t that the Princess Eiderstrom with whom you were talking?” the solicitor asked curiously.

  “A lady addressed me by mistake,” Dominey explained. “She mistook me, curiously enough, for a man who used to be called my double at Oxford. Sigismund Devinter he was then, although I think he came into a title later on.”

  “The Princess is quite a famous personage,” Mr. Mangan remarked, “one of the richest widows in Europe. Her husband was killed in a duel some six or seven years ago.”

  Dominey ordered the luncheon with care, slipping into a word or two of German once to assist the waiter, who spoke English with difficulty. His companion smiled.

  “I see that you have not forgotten your languages out there in the wilds.”

  “I had no chance to,” Dominey answered. “I spent five years on the borders of German East Africa, and I traded with some of the fellows there regularly.”

  “By the by,” Mr. Mangan enquired, “what sort of terms are we on with the Germans out there?”

  “Excellent, I should think,” was the careless reply. “I never had any trouble.”

  “Of course,” the lawyer continued, “this will all be new to you, but during the last few years Englishmen have become divided into two classes—the people who believe that the Germans wish to go to war and crush us, and those who don’t.”

  “Then since my return the number of the ‘don’ts’ has been increased by one.”

  “I am amongst the doubtfuls myself,” Mr. Mangan remarked. “All the same, I can’t quite see what Germany wants with such an immense army, and why she is continually adding to her fleet.”

  Dominey paused for a moment to discuss the matter of a sauce with the head waiter. He returned to the subject a few minutes later on, however.

  “Of course,” he pointed out, “my opinions can only come from a study of the newspapers and from conversations with such Germans as I have met out in Africa, but so far as her army is concerned, I should have said that Russia and France were responsible for that, and the more powerful it is, the less chance of any European conflagration. Russia might at any time come to the conclusion that a war is her only salvation against a revolution, and you know the feeling in France about Alsace-Lorraine as well as I do. The Germans themselves say that there is more interest in military matters and more progress being made in Russia today than ever before.”

  “I have no doubt that you are right,” agreed Mr. Mangan. “It is a matter which is being a great deal discussed just now, however. Let us speak of your personal plans. What do you intend to do for the next few weeks, say? Have you been to see any of your relatives yet?”

  “Not one,” Dominey replied. “I am afraid that I am not altogether keen about making advances.”

  Mr. Mangan coughed. “You must remember that during the period of your last residence in London,” he said, “you were in a state of chronic impecuniosity. No doubt that rather affected the attitude of some of those who would otherwise have been more friendly.”

  “I should be perfectly content never to see one of them again,” declared Dominey, with perfect truth.

  “That of course, is impossible,” the lawyer protested. “You must go and see the Duchess, at any rate. She was always your champion.”

  “The Duchess was always very kind to me,” Dominey admitted doubtfully, “but I am afraid she was rather fed up before I left England.”

  Mr. Mangan smiled. He was enjoying a very excellent lunch, which it seemed hard to believe was ordered by a man just home from the wilds of Africa, and he thoroughly enjoyed talking about duchesses.

  “Her Grace,” he began—

  “Well?”

  The lawyer had paused, with his eyes glued upon the couple at a neighbouring table. He leaned across towards his companion.

  “The Duchess herself, Sir Everard, just behind you, with Lord St. Omar.”

  “This place must certainly be the rendezvous of all the world,” Dominey declared, as he held out his hand to a man who had approached their table. “Seaman, my friend, welcome! Let me introduce you to my friend and legal adviser, Mr. Mangan— Mr. Seaman.”

  Mr. Seaman was a short, fat man, immaculately dressed in the most conventional morning attire. He was almost bald, except for a little tuft on either side, and a few long, fair hairs carefully brushed back over a shining scalp. His face was extraordinarily round except towards his chin, where it came to a point; his eyes bright and keen, his mouth the mouth of a professional humourist. He shook hands with the lawyer with an empressment which was scarcely English.

  “Within the space of half an hour,” Dominey continued, “I find a princess who desires to claim my acquaintance; a cousin,” he dropped his voice a little, “who lunches only a few tables away, and the man of whom I have seen most during the last ten years amidst scenes a little different from these, eh, Seaman?”

  Seaman accepted the chair which the waiter had brought and sat down. The lawyer was immediately interested.

  “Do I understand, then,” he asked, addressing the newcomer, “that you knew Sir Everard in Africa?”

  Seaman beamed. “Knew him?” he repeated, and with the first words of his speech the fact of his foreign nationality was established. “There was no one of whom I knew so much. We did business together—a great deal of business—and when we were not partners, Sir Everard generally got the best of it.”

  Dominey laughed. “Luck generally comes to a man either early or late in life. My luck came late. I think, Seaman, that you must have been my mascot. Nothing went wrong with me during the years that we did business together.”

  Seaman was a little excited. He brushed upright with the palm of his hand one of those little tufts of hair left on the side of his head, and he laid his plump fingers upon the lawyer’s shoulder.

  “Mr. Mangan,” he said, “you listen to me. I sell this man the controlling interests in a mine, shares which I have held for four and a half years and never drew a penny dividend. I sell them to him, I say, at par. Well, I need the money and it seems to me that I had given the shares a fair chance. Within five weeks—five weeks, sir
,” he repeated, struggling to attune his voice to his civilised surroundings, “those shares had gone from par to fourteen and a half. Today they stand at twenty. He gave me five thousand pounds for those shares. Today he could walk into your stock market and sell them for one hundred thousand. That is the way money is made in Africa, Mr. Mangan, where innocents like me are to be found every day.”

  Dominey poured out a glass of wine and passed it to their visitor.

  “Come,” he said, “we all have our ups and downs. Africa owes you nothing, Seaman.”

  “I have done well in my small way,” Seaman admitted, fingering the stem of his wineglass, “but where I have had to plod, Sir Everard here has stood and commanded fate to pour her treasures into his lap.”

  The lawyer was listening with a curious interest and pleasure to this half bantering conversation. He found an opportunity now to intervene.

  “So you two were really friends in Africa?” he remarked, with a queer and almost inexplicable sense of relief.

  “If Sir Everard permits our association to be so called,” Seaman replied. “We have done business together in the great cities—in Johannesburg and Pretoria, in Kimberley and Cape Town—and we have prospected together in the wild places. We have trekked the veldt and been lost to the world for many months at a time. We have seen the real wonders of Africa together, as well as her tawdry civilisation.”

  “And you, too,” Mr. Mangan asked, “have you retired?”

  Seaman’s smile was almost beatific.

  “The same deal,” he said, “which brought Sir Everard’s fortune to wonderful figures brought me that modest sum which I had sworn to reach before I returned to England. It is true. I have retired from money-making. It is now that I take up again my real life’s work.”

  “If you are going to talk about your hobby,” Dominey observed, “you had better order them to serve your lunch here.”

  “I had finished my lunch before you came in,” his friend replied. “I drink another glass of wine with you, perhaps. Afterwards a liqueur—who can say? In this climate one is favoured, one can drink freely. Sir Everard and I, Mr. Mangan, have been in places where thirst is a thing to be struggled against, where for months a little weak brandy and water was our chief dissipation.”

  “Tell us about this hobby?” the lawyer enquired.

  Dominey intervened promptly. “I protest. If he begins to talk of that, he’ll be here all the afternoon.”

  Seaman held out his hands and rolled his head from side to side.

  “But I am not so unreasonable,” he objected. “Just one word—so? Very well, then,” he proceeded quickly, with the air of one fearing interruption. “This must be clear to you, Mr. Mangan. I am a German by birth, naturalised in England for the sake of my business, loving Germany, grateful to England. One third of my life I have lived in Berlin, one third at Forest Hill here in London, and in the city, one third in Africa. I have watched the growth of commercial rivalries and jealousies between the two nations. There is no need for them. They might lead to worse things. I would brush them all away. My aim is to encourage a league for the promotion of more cordial social and business relations between the people of Great Britain and the people of the German Empire. There! Have I wasted much of your time? Can I not speak of my hobby without a flood of words?”

  “Conciseness itself,” Mangan admitted, “and I compliment you most heartily upon your scheme. If you can get the right people into it, it should prove a most valuable society.”

  “In Germany I have the right people. All Germans who live for their country and feel for their country loathe the thought of war. We want peace, we want friends, and, to speak as man to man,” he concluded, tapping the lawyer upon the coat sleeve, “England is our best customer.”

  “I wish one could believe,” the latter remarked, “that yours was the popular voice in your country.”

  Seaman rose reluctantly to his feet.

  “At half-past two,” he announced, glancing at his watch, “I have an appointment with a woollen manufacturer from Bradford. I hope to get him to join my council.”

  He bowed ceremoniously to the lawyer, nodded to Dominey with the familiarity of an old friend, and made his bustling, good-humoured way out of the room.

  “A sound business man, I should think,” was the former’s comment. “I wish him luck with his League. You yourself, Sir Everard, will need to develop some new interests. Why not politics?”

  “I really expect to find life a little difficult at first,” admitted Dominey, with a shrug of his shoulders. “I have lost many of the tastes of my youth, and I am very much afraid that my friends over here will call me colonial. I can’t fancy myself doing nothing down in Norfolk all the rest of my days. Perhaps I shall go into Parliament.”

  “You must forgive my saying,” his companion declared impulsively, “that I never knew ten years make such a difference in a man in my life.”

  “The colonies,” Dominey pronounced, “are a kill or cure sort of business. You either take your drubbing and come out a stronger man, or you go under. I had the very narrowest escape from going under myself, but I just pulled together in time. Today I wouldn’t have been without my hard times for anything in the world.”

  “If you will permit me,” Mr. Mangan said, with an inherited pomposity, “on this our first meeting under the new conditions, I should like to offer you my hearty congratulations, not only upon what you have accomplished but upon what you have become.”

  “And also, I hope,” Dominey rejoined, smiling a little seriously and with a curious glint in his eyes, “upon what I may yet accomplish.”

  The Duchess and her companion had risen to their feet, and the former, on her way out, recognising her solicitor, paused graciously.

  “How do you do, Mr. Mangan?” she said. “I hope you are looking after those troublesome tenants of mine in Leicestershire?”

  “We shall make our report in due course, Duchess,” Mangan assured her. “Will you permit me,” he added, “to bring back to your memory a relative who has just returned from abroad—Sir Everard Dominey?”

  Dominey had risen to his feet a moment previously and now extended his hand. The Duchess, who was a tall, graceful woman, with masses of fair hair only faintly interspersed with grey, very fine brown eyes, the complexion of a girl, and, to quote her own confession, the manners of a kitchen maid, stared at him for a moment without any response.

  “Sir Everard Dominey?” she repeated. “Everard? Ridiculous!”

  Dominey’s extended hand was at once withdrawn, and the tentative smile faded from his lips. The lawyer plunged into the breach.

  “I can assure your Grace,” he insisted earnestly, “that there is no doubt whatever about Sir Everard’s identity. He only returned from Africa during the last few days.”

  The Duchess’s incredulity remained, wholly good-natured but ministered to by her natural obstinacy.

  “I simply cannot bring myself to believe it,” she declared. “Come, I’ll challenge you. When did we meet last?”

  “At Worcester House,” was the prompt reply. “I came to say good-bye to you.”

  The Duchess was a little staggered. Her eyes softened, a faint smile played at the corners of her lips. She was suddenly a very attractive-looking woman.

  “You came to say good-bye,” she repeated, “and?”

  “I am to take that as a challenge?” Dominey asked, standing very upright and looking her in the eyes.

  “As you will.”

  “You were a little kinder to me,” he continued, “than you are today. You gave me—this,” he added, drawing a small picture from his pocketbook, “and you permitted—”

  “For heaven’s sake, put that thing away,” she cried, “and don’t say another word! There’s my grown-up nephew, St. Omar, paying his bill almost within earshot. Come and see me at half-past three th
is afternoon, and don’t be a minute late. And, St. Omar,” she went on, turning to the young man who stood now by her side, “this is a connection of yours—Sir Everard Dominey. He is a terrible person, but do shake hands with him and come along. I am half an hour late for my dressmaker already.”

  Lord St. Omar chuckled vaguely, then shook hands with his new-found relative, nodded affably to the lawyer and followed his aunt out of the room. Mangan’s expression was beatific.

  “Sir Everard,” he exclaimed, “God bless you! If ever a woman got what she deserved! I’ve seen a duchess blush—first time in my life!”