Page:Edgar Wallace - The Green Rust.djvu/232

228 "It wasn't the hope of reward or hope of pardon that made me break with van Heerden," he said in his slow way. "You'd laugh yourself sick if I told you. It was—it was the knowledge that this country would be down and out; that the people who spoke my tongue and thought more or less as I thought should be under the foot of the Beast—fevered sentimentality! You don't believe that?"

"I believe it."

It was Oliva who spoke, and it appeared that this was the first time that Milsom had noticed her presence, for his eyes opened wider.

"You—oh, you believe it, do you?" and he nodded.

"But why is van Heerden waiting?" asked McNorton. "What is he waiting for?"

The big man rolled his head helplessly from side to side, and the hard cackle of his laughter was very trying to men whose nerves were raw and on edge.

"That's the fatal lunacy of it! I think it must be a national characteristic. You saw it in the war again and again—a wonderful plan brought to naught by some piece of over-cleverness on the part of the super-man."

A wild, hope leapt to Beale's heart.

"Then it has failed! The rust has not answered?"

But Milsom shook his head wearily.

"The rust is all that he thinks—and then some," he said. "No, it isn't that. It is in the work of organization where the hitch has occurred. You know something of the story. Van Heerden has agents in every country in the world. He has spent nearly a hundred thousand pounds in perfecting his working plans, and I'm willing to admit that they are wellnigh perfect. Such slight mistakes as sending men to South Africa and Australia where the crops are six months later than the European and American harvests may be forgiven, because the German thinks longitudinally, and north and south are the two points of the compass which he never bothers his head about. If the Germans had been a seafaring people they'd have discovered America before Columbus, but they would never have found the North Pole or rounded the Cape in a million years."