These were dark days for the nation but their gloom was lightened at intervals for Roger by several pleasurable episodes and minor pieces of good fortune.
On his return to London he found a notification from the Foreign Office that some packages were awaiting his collection. These turned out to have been forwarded by Hugh Elliot, and contained all the things that both Roger and Natalia had left behind when they had quitted Copenhagen. He was a little disconcerted at the sight of Natalia's furs and dresses, and he found that his money-chest was empty, but he was extremely glad to recover his own expensive wardrobe.
Then, having had no acknowledgment of an application which he had put in privately to Lord Carmarthen early in December, for the reimbursement of his expenses while abroad, he waited upon that nobleman personally. True to the policy of the British Government, which reserves all but minor rewards and honours for its paid official servants working under those who have the distribution of them, and expects its private citizens to give their services from patriotism alone, his lordship pointed out that Roger must have had a very interesting time and that, in any case, a considerable proportion of the money he had spent must have been on his own enjoyment. However, Roger succeeded in obtaining a draft on the Treasury for five hundred pounds and, although several hundreds out on the deal, considered himself lucky to have settled for that sum before the dissolution of the administration jeopardised his chances of getting anything at all.
In mid-January he received a letter from Hugh Elliot, reporting that he had now succeeded in tracing Natalia. She had gone to Stockholm and was living there again in the Russian Embassy with her father, Count Andrew Razumofsky. Having known that she dared not return to Russia, Roger was a little surprised that this solution to the problem had not occurred to him before. He was much relieved to think that she was safe and well cared for; as, although he knew perfectly well inside himself that she was much too tough to come to any serious harm, he had occasionally had fits of morbid depression in which he had imagined her in the most dire straits, or even taking her own life on account of his having deserted her. He was glad, too, to know her whereabouts as it would facilitate his proceedings against her for divorce, although these could not be instituted for some time to come.
Next, towards the end of the month, he had another letter from Georgina. It was written from the Principality of Monaco on his birthday, the 8th, and was to wish him good luck on his coming of age. She was still enjoying the sunshine of the Mediterranean but now had a heartache to be back at her beloved Stillwaters to see its gardens blossom in the spring. Fortunately, she wrote, her father's business interests now demanded his return to England after his long absence, so they planned to get home towards the end of the first week in February.
At the prospect of seeing her again so soon Roger felt the first real thrill of pleasure that he had known for many weeks. It was not that he wanted to make love to her; it was a feeling that he could not possibly have described, but he knew that he felt more content and happy when he was with her than with any other person that he had ever known.
Lastly, on the 1st of February he was elected a member of White's. On his attaining his majority he had become eligible for membership, and Droopy Ned had put him up. As a young man of respectable, but not distinguished, parentage, he felt that it was a considerable honour to belong to the Club which was the stronghold of all the great Tory families in the land; and he derived a particular satisfaction in having, in this way, nailed his colours to the mast at the very hour when Pitt's government was about to fall, and so many friends and proteges of the Prime Minister were turning their coats in the hope of saving their places or gaining benefits from the other side.
For well over three months now he had been like a billiards ball in baulk; in the forefront of events but out of action and with his future entirely problematical. Suddenly he was brought into play again, and his affairs began to move with staggering swiftness.
CHAPTER XXII
THE FATE OF THE NATION
O N the 3rd of February, a Foreign Office messenger brought Roger two letters. Both were addressed in the writing of Hugh Elliot, and on opening the more bulky of the two he found it to be an appeal for help.
The diplomat wrote that, although he had browbeaten the Danes into withdrawing their army from Sweden in mid-November and agreeing to prolong the armistice for six months, the Northern powers were still far from showing any inclination to accept a permanent settlement on the basis of status quo ante helium.
Gustavus, now cock-a-hoop in the belief that he had the full weight of the Triple Alliance behind him, had become overbearing towards the Danes and twice committed flagrant breaches of the armistice; so, if the status quowas to be maintained, it might next be the Danes whom Britain would be called on to protect from aggression.
They had been deprived of all the initial advantages of their surprise invasion and Gustavus was no longer naked in the wind before them. With his usual amazing energy he had set his country on its feet again, and had now considerable forces at his command. Just before Christmas he had returned to his capital and performed miracles in repatriating and re-organising a large part of the army he had left in Finland. All the officers who had shown mutinous tendencies, and had not succeeded in escaping into Russia, had been seized, court-martialled and punished with the utmost savagery. New levies were being trained in every province and in the dockyards shipwrights were working night and day to get new war-keels on the stocks. By the early summer he would therefore be in a position to resume the war both in the North and in the South.
The Danes believed that the Czarina Catherine would be able to afford them little aid, owing to the terrible casualties that her armies had sustained in a series of bloody battles with the Turks. It was anticipated that she would be able to hold her own in Finland, but do little more.
Elliot then went on to say that he had received secret intelligence that the news of King George's madness had caused the Empress to reconsider her position. She had always loathed and feared Pitt, but now that his downfall was assured she believed that the time had come when she might detach the support of Britain from the Turks. She had, accordingly instructed her Ambassador, Count Vorontzoff, to make overtures to Charles Fox, and Fox had promised that on coming to office he would reverse Britain's foreign policy in her interests.
Should that, said Elliot, prove to be the attitude of the new Government it would be his duty to act upon such fresh instructions as he received; but he pointed out that if the burden of Catherine's war against the Turks was eased she would be able to send a strong army into Finland which might well result in the Russians and Danes achieving their old ambition of dividing Sweden between them. And, however provocative and unreasonable Gustavus's conduct might be at the moment, the elimination of Sweden from the European family must, in the long run, prove a major disaster; for Catherine would, in due course, turn upon and destroy the Danes. Russia would then be the mistress of the whole of Northern Europe, with her frontiers facing Scotland across the North Sea, and in a position directly to menace Britain with fleets based On the Danish and Norwegian ports.