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I took the first chance I got of having a chat with Edmond Troyte. He was perfectly frank with me and told me all about the scheme for making his nephew King of Lystria.

He began with the political part of the plan. The Lystrians are, so he said, an intensely patriotic people, and they very much dislike being merged in the Republic of Megalia. In fact, Edmund admitted this to me, the framers of the Treaty of Trianon made a mistake, a bad mistake, in depriving Lystria of its independence.

“They are a people,” said Troyte, “with a strong feeling in favor of monarchy. They don’t like the republican form of government. The aristocracy doesn’t like it. The Church doesn’t like it, and in Lystria the Church counts for a lot. Whatever the patriarch says the people say after him. The patriarch’s name is Menelaus.”

“How do you manage to keep all these details in your head?” I asked. “Fancy your knowing the Christian name of the Patriarch of Lystria!”

Troyte was mildly pleased with the compliment. He went on to tell me that the Lystrians would like to have their old king back.

“But that’s impossible. The Entente powers wouldn’t stand it. Besides, that fellow Wladislaws is a bad one.”

“I met him once,” I said, “when I was attached to the legation at Sophia. He struck me as a bit gay.”

“He treated his wife badly,” said Troyte, “and she was an Englishwoman. As a matter of fact, she was a distant cousin of my own.”

Any king who treats a relative of Troyte’s badly deserves to lose his throne. I saw at once that Wladislaws had irretrievably lost his.

“The Patriarch Menelaus and the Lystrian aristocracy,” said Troyte, “know perfectly well that they can’t have Wladislaws back. So, some time ago, they asked for an Englishman. The only condition they made was that he should marry the ex-king’s daughter. Of course we turned the proposal down at once and no more was heard of it.”

“You seem to have turned it up again,” I said. “Now why?”

That, it appeared, is where Procopius Cable came in. He had found out that the Lystrian mountains were full of oil. According to the private reports of experts whom he had sent out, certain parts of the country were likely to prove the greatest oil-producing districts in the world. He naturally wanted to secure the oil. He tried to get a concession for the development of the Lystrian oil-fields. The Megalian Government hesitated and wrangled and procrastinated until Cable got tired of trying to deal with them. They had not money enough to develop the place themselves. They had not the knowledge or enterprise or energy to do it even if they had the money. And they would not let Cable do it. So he started working up patriotic feeling in Lystria, or rather financing it, for it did not need working up. He got into touch with the patriarch and he got into touch with the aristocracy through a certain Count Istvan Casimir. He gave them all the money they wanted. According to Cable’s account everything was ready for a revolution. All that was wanted was a king whom the Entente powers would recognize. The Megalian Republic would be quite helpless if England or any other great power recognized the new King of Lystria.

Having got all that settled, Cable approached Lord Edmund Troyte with a proposal that the Marquis of Norheys, my godson, should be King of Lystria. He would have to marry the princess of course. The Lystrians, being strong legitimists, insisted on that. But the princess, so Cable said, was a beautiful girl, with charming manners and far more respectable than her father had ever been.

“As a matter of fact,” said Troyte, “she’s a dancer in Berlin. Wladislaws did not succeed in carrying off a penny from Lystria, so both he and the girl have to work for their living. But that is not an insuperable objection to her.”

“Her dancing ought to be rather a recommendation to Norheys,” I said.

I was thinking of Viola Temple, who dances in London. Edmund Troyte was thinking of her too. He saw in the Lystrian marriage scheme a hope of saving his nephew from an undesirable alliance with a dancer who did not happen to be a princess. He said so to me quite frankly.

“Have you,” I said, “laid that part of the scene before Norheys, asked him whether he was willing to marry the princess?”

“Not yet.”

“I would,” I said. “If I were you I’d mention that to Norheys before going any further. Indeed, it might be as well to find out what the princess thinks about it too.”

“She’ll be all right,” said Troyte. “Her name is Calypso.”

Calypso is a pretty name, but I did not see that it gave us any guarantee that the girl would marry Norheys.

“Girls are dreadfully independent nowadays,” I said. “You can’t be sure.”

“She’s dancing in a cabaret in Berlin. So Cable says.”

“She ought to prefer being married to that,” I said. “Still if I were you I’d consult her. I should certainly consult Norheys.”

Troyte took my advice about consulting Norheys; but he did not give me the satisfaction of telling me he meant to. He went on to discuss another side of the affair.

“The main thing,” he said, “is that England should obtain control of the Lystrian oil. The civilization of the twentieth century rests on oil precisely as that of the nineteenth century rested on coal.”

Troyte is a great statesman. Only a great statesman could or would say a thing like that. Only a sincerely patriotic man would have gone on as Troyte did.

“If England is to hold her place in the van of the world’s progress she must control an adequate supply of oil. With an English king on the throne of Lystria and an English company at work in the oil-fields——”

“Is that fellow Cable an Englishman?”

“He’s a British subject,” said Troyte, “naturalized before the war.”

After that I had to listen to an account of the uses of oil in peace and war which bored me; to a description of the distribution of the present oil supply of the world and the small quantity of it controlled by England.

There, I think, lay the real motive of Troyte’s action, the explanation of his consent to the plan of setting Norheys on the throne of Lystria. No doubt it pleased him—Troyte has a great deal of family pride—to think of his nephew being a king. And the Troytes had some slight connection with the Lystrian Royal Family. No doubt he thought that marriage to the Princess Calypso would save Norheys from an undesirable entanglement with Viola Temple. Troyte hated the idea of having to welcome that young lady as the next Marchioness of Norheys. No doubt also Cable’s remarkable personality had some influence with him. Procopius Cable is accustomed to getting his own way with all sorts of people, and has persuaded several clever men to do astonishingly foolish things. Troyte likes and admires men of the Cable kind. He has a theory that the British Empire has been built up by buccaneers; in the Elizabethan days by buccaneers who went forth in ships and looted, flying the British flag for their own protection, leaving it still fluttering in the places which they sacked after they sailed away. In the eighteenth century the empire-building buccaneers called themselves merchants, or merchant adventurers, but they acted exactly as their predecessors did, looting, and then leaving the care of the conquered provinces to embarrassed statesmen at home. At the end of the nineteenth century the buccaneers became financiers. But their methods and the results of them were the same as before. Procopius Cable was the latest and ablest of these filibustering empire-builders. That was Troyte’s theory about him. And it influenced him in favor of any scheme suggested by Cable.

But the main thing was England’s need of oil, and the possibility of obtaining an enormous supply of it in Lystria. For the sake of England’s greatness he was ready to sacrifice Norheys, if sacrifice had been necessary.

There was also another consideration which weighed with Troyte. He came to it when he had finished with the oil.

“The Germans,” he said, “are scheming to put up a king of their own in Lystria.”

“Heard of the oil?”

“I don’t think it’s the oil so much as their policy of obtaining a dominating influence in the Balkans. The man they have in mind is the Prinz von Steinveldt.”

“I used to know him,” I said. “He was in the Foreign Office in Berlin. He must be a bit too old for the princess. Do you think she’d marry him?”

“The princess,” said Troyte, “will marry the man she’s told to.”

I was not so sure about that. The spirit of revolt against that doctrine of a girl’s duty laid firm hold upon the middle classes years ago. Since then it has been spreading upward, and, I dare say, downward. It would not surprise me to hear that rebellion is now openly advocated in the schoolrooms of palaces. Besides, Calypso appeared to be an emancipated young woman. If she dances in a cabaret in Berlin she must have shed most of the garments of conventionality in which most princesses are wrapped.

“By the way,” I said, “where’s King Wladislaws now? As the girl’s father he may want to have a say about her marriage.”

“Wladislaws has gone under utterly,” said Troyte. “I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. We need not consider him.”