Schuabe and Llwellyn walked to the Cecil, no great distance, saying little by the way, and presently they were in the millionaire's great room, with its spacious view over the river.
The place was beautifully cool and full of flowers. A great block of ice rose from a copper bowl placed on a pedestal. The carpet had been covered with light matting of rice straw, brought from Rawal-pindi. All the windows leading to the balcony were wide open, and the balcony was covered with striped awning, underneath which the electric lights glowed on the leaves of Japanese palms, seeming as if they had been cunningly lacquered a metallic green colour, and on low chairs of white bleached rushes.
The two men sat down in the centre of the room on light chairs, with a small Turkish table and cool drinks between them.
"You've had all my letters, my last from Jaffa?" asked Sir Robert.
"Yes, all of them," said Schuabe; "each one was carefully destroyed after I had read it and memorialised the contents. Let me say now that you have done your work with extraordinary brilliance. It has been an intellectual pleasure of a high order to follow your proceedings and know your plans. There is not another man in the world who could do what you have done. Everything seems guarded against, all is secure."
"You are right, Schuabe," said Llwellyn, in a matter-of-fact voice. "You bade me make a certain thing _possible_. You paid me proportionately to the terrible risks and for my unrivalled knowledge. Well, you and I are going to shake the whole world as no two other men have ever done, and what will be the end?"
"The end!" cried Schuabe, in a high, strained, unnatural voice. "Who shall say? What man can know? For ever more the gigantic fable of the Cross and the Man God will be overthrown. The temples of the world will fall into the abomination of desolation, and you and I, latter-day bringers of light--Lucifers!--will kill the pale Nazarene more surely than the Sanhedrists and soldiers of the past."
There was a thin madness in his voice. The great figure of the _savant_ shifted uneasily in its chair.
"That fellow Gortre, that abominable young priest, has been getting in my way to-night," he said with a savage curse. "I found him with Gertrude Hunt, the woman I've spent thousands on! The priests have got her; she's going to 'lead a new life.' She has 'found Christ'!"