The Double Four Part 11

"G.o.d help me!" he moaned.

She turned to de Grost.

"Take him away with you, please," she said. "I have finished with him!"

"Sophia!" he pleaded.

She leaned across the table and struck him heavily upon the cheek.

"If you stay here," she muttered, "I shall kill you myself!"

That night the body of an unknown foreigner was found in the attic of a cheap lodging-house in Soho. The discovery itself and the verdict at the inquest occupied only a few lines in the morning newspapers. Those few lines were the epitaph of one who was very nearly a Rienzi. The greater part of his papers de Grost mercifully destroyed, but one in particular he preserved. Within a week the much-delayed treaty was signed at Paris, London and St. Petersburg.

CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST SHOT

De Grost and his wife were dining together at the corner table in a fashionable but somewhat Bohemian restaurant. Both had been in the humour for reminiscences, and they had outstayed most of their neighbours.

"I wonder what people really think of us," Violet remarked pensively. "I told Lady Amershal, when she asked us to go there this evening, that we always dined together alone somewhere once a week, and she absolutely refused to believe me. 'With your own husband, my dear?' she kept on repeating."

"Her ladyship's tastes are more catholic," the baron declared dryly.

"Yet, after all, Violet, the real philosophy of married life demands something of this sort."

Violet smiled and fingered her pearls for a minute.

"What the real philosophy of married life may be I do not know," she said, "but I am perfectly content with our rendering of it. What a fortunate thing, Peter, with your intensely practical turn of mind, that Nature endowed you with so much sentiment."

De Grost gazed reflectively at the cigarette which he had just selected from his case.

"Well," he remarked, "there have been times when I have cursed myself for a fool, but, on the whole, sentiment keeps many fires burning."

She leaned towards him and dropped her voice a little.

"Tell me," she begged, "do you ever think of the years we spent together in the country? Do you ever regret?"

He smiled thoughtfully.

"It is a hard question, that," he admitted. "There were days there which I loved, but there were days, too, when the restlessness came--days when I longed to hear the hum of the city and to hear men speak whose words were of life and death and the great pa.s.sions. I am not sure, Violet, whether, after all, it is well for one who has lived to withdraw absolutely from the thrill of life."

She laughed softly but gaily.

"I am with you," she declared, "absolutely. I think that the fairies must have poured into my blood the joy of living for its own sake. I should be an ungrateful woman indeed if I found anything to complain of nowadays. Yet there is one thing that sometimes troubles me," she went on, after a moment's pause.

"And that?" he asked.

"The danger," she said slowly. "I do not want to lose you, Peter. There are times when I am afraid."

De Grost flicked the ash from his cigarette.

"The days are pa.s.sing," he remarked, "when men point revolvers at one another, and hire a.s.sa.s.sins to gain their ends. Now it is more a battle of wits. We play chess on the board of life still, but we play with ivory pieces instead of steel and poison. Our brains direct, and not our muscles."

She sighed.

"It is only the one man of whom I am afraid," she said. "You have outwitted him so often and he does not forgive."

De Grost smiled. It was an immense compliment, this.

"Bernadine," he murmured softly, "otherwise our friend, the Count von Hern."

"Bernadine," she repeated. "All that you say is true; but when one fails with modern weapons, one changes the form of attack. Bernadine at heart is a savage."

"The hate of such a man," de Grost remarked complacently, "is worth having. He has had his own way over here for years. He seems to have found the knack of living in a maze of intrigue and remaining untouchable. There were a dozen things before I came upon the scene which ought to have ruined him. Yet there never appeared to be anything to take hold of. The Criminal Investigation Department thought they had no chance. I remember Sir John Dory telling me in disgust that Bernadine was like one of those marvellous criminals one only reads about in fiction, who seem when they pa.s.s along the dangerous places to walk upon the air and leave no trace behind."

"Before you came," she said, "he had never known a failure. Do you think that he is a man likely to forgive?"

"I do not," de Grost answered grimly. "It is a battle, of course--a battle all the time. Yet, Violet, between you and me, if Bernadine were to go, half the savour of life for me would depart with him."

Then there came a serious and wholly unexpected interruption. A man in dark, plain clothes, still wearing his overcoat and carrying a bowler hat, had been standing in the entrance of the restaurant for a moment or two, looking around the room as though in search of someone. At last he caught the eye of the Baron de Grost and came quickly towards him.

"Charles," the Baron remarked, raising his eyebrows. "I wonder what he wants?"

A sudden cloud had fallen upon their little feast. Violet watched the coming of her husband's servant and the reading of the note which he presented to his master with an anxiety which she could not wholly conceal. The Baron read the note twice, scrutinising a certain part of it closely with the aid of the monocle which he seldom used. Then he folded it up and placed it in the breast-pocket of his coat.

"At what hour did you receive this, Charles?" he asked.

"A messenger brought it in a taxi-cab about ten minutes ago, sir," the man replied. "He said that it was of the utmost importance, and that I had better try and find you."

"A district messenger?"

"A man in ordinary clothes, sir," Charles answered. "He looked like a porter in a warehouse, or something of that sort. I forgot to say that you were rung up on the telephone three times previously by Mr.

Greening."

The Baron nodded.

"You can go," he said. "There is no reply."

The man bowed and retired. De Grost called for his bill.

"Is it anything serious?" Violet inquired.

"No, not exactly serious," he answered. "I do not understand what has happened, but they have sent for me to go--well, where it was agreed that I should not go, except as a matter of urgent necessity."