The Lady in the Car Part 12

A week of suspense went by, when one evening he received a note from his Highness, in consequence of which he went to Dover Street, where he found him smoking one of his "Petroffs," as was his wont.

"Well, Garrett?" he laughed. "Sit down, and have a drink. I've got eight hundred pounds for you here--your share of the boodle?"

"But I don't understand," he exclaimed. "What boodle?"

"Of course you don't understand!" he laughed. "Just carry your mind back. You told me the story of little Elfrida's unfortunate secret marriage, and that her husband had a red ring tattooed around his left wrist. That conveyed nothing to you; but it told me much. That afternoon I was walking with the ladies up Glenblair village when, to my surprise, I saw standing at a door no less a person than Jacques Fourrier, or `Le Bravache,' as he's known in Paris, an `international,'

like ourselves."

"Le Bravache!" gasped Garrett, for his reputation was that of the most daring and successful adventurer on the Continent, besides which he knew him as his Highness's arch-enemy owing to a little love affair of a couple of years before.

"Yes. `Le Bravache'!" the Prince went on. "He recognised me, and I saw that our game was up. Then you told me Elfrida's story, and from the red circle on the man's arm I realised that Paul Berton, the engineer, and `Le Bravache' were one and the same person! Besides, she had actually given you to take to her husband the very thing we had gone to Glenblair to obtain!"

"What was it?" he asked excitedly.

"Well, the facts are these," answered the audacious, good-looking Prince, blowing a cloud of smoke from his lips. "Old Blair-Stewart has taken, in secret, a contract from the German Government to build a number of submarine boats for naval use. The plans of these wonderful vessels are kept in a strong safe in the old chap's private office in Dumbarton, and both Fourrier and ourselves were after them--the French Intelligence Department having, in confidence, offered a big sum to any one bringing them to the Quay d'Orsay. Now you see the drift of the story of the exemplary Paul to his pretty little wife, and why he induced her to take impressions in wax of her father's safe-key, she believing that he merely wanted sight of the plans in order to ascertain whether they were any better than his own alleged invention.

Fortunately for us, she induced you to be her messenger. When we sent you up there with orders to be nice to Elfrida we never antic.i.p.ated such a _contretemps_ as Fourrier's presence, or that the dainty little girl would actually take the impressions for us to use."

"Then you have used it?"

"Of course. On the night after leaving you, having made the false key in Glasgow, we went over to Dumbarton and got the plans quite easily.

We crossed by Harwich and Antwerp to Brussels on to Paris, and here we are again. The Intelligence Department of the Admiralty are very satisfied--and so are we. The pretty Elfrida will no doubt remain in ignorance, until her father discovers his loss, but I'm half inclined to write anonymously to her and tell the poor girl the truth regarding her mysterious husband. I think I really shall, for my letter would cast a good deal of suspicion upon the Man with the Red Circle."

CHAPTER FIVE.

THE WICKED MR WILKINSON.

How my cosmopolitan friend, the Prince, was tricked by a woman, and how he was, entirely against his inclination, forced to run the gauntlet of the police at Bow Street at imminent risk of identification as Tremlett, form an interesting narrative which is perhaps best told in his own words, as he recounted it to me the other day in the noisy Continental city where he is at this moment in hiding.

An untoward incident, he said one afternoon as we sat together in the "sixty" on our way out into the country for a run, occurred to me while travelling from Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, to Bucharest, by way of Rustchuk. If you have ever been over that wonderfully-engineered line, which runs up the Isker defile and over the high Balkans to the Danube, you will recollect, Diprose, how grand is the scenery, and how full of interest is the journey across the battlefields of Plevna and the fertile, picturesque lands of Northern Bulgaria.

It is a corner of Europe practically unknown.

At Gornia, a small wayside station approaching the Danube, the train halts to take up water, and it was there that the mishap occurred to me.

I had descended to stretch my legs, and had walked up and down the platform for ten minutes or so. Then, the signal being given to start again, I entered my compartment, only to discover that my suit-case, despatch-box, coat, and other impedimenta were missing!

The train was already moving out of the station, but, in an instant, my mind was made up, and, opening the door, I dropped out. My Bulgarian is not very fluent, as may be supposed, but I managed to make the dull station-master understand my loss.

He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, and exhibited his palms in perfect ignorance. This rendered me furious.

Within my official-looking despatch-box were a number of valuable little objects, which I wished to keep from prying eyes my pa.s.sport and a quant.i.ty of papers of highest importance. No doubt some clever railway thief had made off with the whole!

For a full ten minutes I was beside myself in frantic anger; but judge my amazement when presently I found the whole of my things piled up outside the station in the village street! They had been placed there by a half-drunken porter, who believed that I intended to descend.

Fortunately no one understood German or English, for the language I used was rather hem-st.i.tched. My annoyance was increased on learning that there was not another train to Rustchuk--where I had to cross the Danube--for twenty-four hours, and, further, that the nearest hotel was at Tirnovo, eighteen miles distant by a branch line.

I was therefore compelled to accept the inevitable, and in the dirty, evil-smelling inn at Tirnovo--about on a par with a Russian post-house-- I met, on the following day, Madame Demidoff, the queer-looking old lady with the yellow teeth, who, strangely enough, came from London.

She had with her a rather attractive young girl of about twenty, Mademoiselle Elise, her niece, and she told me that they were travelling in the Balkans for pleasure, in order to ascertain what that unbroken ground was like.

The first hour I was in Tirnovo and its rat-eaten "hotel" I longed to be away from the place; but next morning, when I explored its quaint terrace-like streets, built high upon a sleep cliff where the river below takes a sweep almost at right angles, and where dense woods rise on the opposite bank, I found it to be a town full of interest, its old white mosques and other traces of Turkish occupation still remaining.

To the stranger, Tirnovo is but a name on the map of the Balkans, but for beauty of situation and quaint interest it is surely one of the strangest towns in Europe.

The discomforts of our hotel caused me to first address the ugly old lady in black, and after luncheon she and her niece Elise strolled out upon the high bridge with me, and through the Turkish town, where the little girls, in their baggy trousers, were playing in the streets, and where grave-faced men in fezzes squatted and smoked.

Madame and her niece were a decidedly quaint pair. The first-named knew her London well, for when she spoke English it was with a distinctly c.o.c.kney accent. She said "Yers" for "Yes," and "'Emmersmith" for "Hammersmith." Mademoiselle was, however, of a type, purely Parisienne--thin, dark-haired, narrow-featured, with bright, luminous, brown eyes, a mouth slightly large, and a sense of humour that attracted me.

Both of them had travelled very extensively, and their knowledge of the Continent was practically as wide as my own. Both were, of course, much impressed by my princely position. It is marvellous what a t.i.tle does, and how sn.o.bbish is the world in every quarter of the globe.

So interesting did I find the pair that I spent another day in Tirnovo, where, in the summer sunset, we were idling after dinner on the balcony overhanging the steep cliff above the river. Our _salle-a-manger_ was half filled by rough, chattering peasants in their white linen clothes embroidered in red, and round pork-pie hats of fur, while our fare that night had been of the very plainest--and not over fresh at that.

But it was a distinctly curious incident to find, in that remotest corner of the Balkans, a lady whose residence was in the West End of London, and who, though a foreigner by birth, had evidently been educated "within the sound of Bow Bells."

"I love Bulgaria," the old lady had said to me as we had walked together down by the river bank that afternoon. "I bring Elise here every summer. Last June we were at Kazanlik, among the rose-fields, where they make the otto of rose. It was delightful."

I replied that I, also, knew Servia, Bulgaria, and Roumania fairly well.

"Then your Highness is travelling for pleasure?" she inquired.

I smiled vaguely, for I did not satisfy her. She struck me as being a particularly inquisitive old busybody.

When next morning Mademoiselle Elise informed me that her aunt was suffering from a headache, I invited her to go for a stroll with me out of the town, to which she at once acceded.

Her smart conversation and natural neat waisted _chic_ attracted me.

She used "Ideale," the very expensive Parisian perfume that to the cosmopolitan is somehow the hall-mark of up-to-date smartness. Her gown was well-cut, her gloves fresh and clean, and her hat a small toque of the very latest _mode_.

Idling beside her in the bright sunshine, with the broad river hundreds of feet below, and the high blue Balkans on every side about us, I spent a most delightful morning.

"We move down to Varna to-morrow, and then home by way of Constantinople," she replied in French in answer to my question. "Aunt Melanie has invited your Highness to our house in Toddington Terrace, she tells me. I do hope you will come. But send us a line first. In a month we shall be back again to the dreariness of the Terrace."

"Dreariness? Then you are not fond of London?"

"No." And her face fell, as though the metropolis contained for her some sad memory she would fain forget. Her life with that yellow-toothed, wizen-faced old aunt could not be fraught with very much pleasure, I reflected. "I much prefer travelling. Fortunately we are often abroad, for on all my aunt's journeys I act as her companion."

"You are, however, French--eh?"

"Yes--from Paris. But I know the Balkans well. We lived in Belgrade for a year--before the Servian _coup d'etat_. I am very fond of the Servians."

"And I also," I declared, for I had been many times in Servia, and had many friends there.

They were a curious pair, and about them both was an indescribable air of mystery which I could not determine, but which caused me to decide to visit them at their London home, the address of which I had already noted.

At five o'clock that evening I took farewell of both Madams and her dainty little niece, and by midnight was in the Roumanian capital. My business--which by the way concerned the obtaining of a little matter of 20,000 francs from an unsuspecting French wine merchant--occupied me about a week and afterwards I went north to Klausenburg, in Hungary, and afterwards to Budapest, Graz, and other places.

Contrary to my expectations, my affairs occupied me much longer than I expected, and four months later I found myself still abroad, at the fine Hotel Stefanie, among the beautiful woods of evergreen laurel at Abbazia, on the Gulf of Quarnero. My friend, the Rev Thomas Clayton from Bayswater, was staying there, and as, on the evening of my arrival, we were seated together at dinner I saw, to my great surprise, Madame Demidoff enter with the pretty Elise, accompanied by a tall, fair-haired gentlemanly young man, rather foppishly dressed.

"Hulloa?" I exclaimed to my friend, "there's somebody I know! That old woman is Madame Demidoff."

"No, my dear Prince," was my friend's reply. "You are, I think, mistaken. That is the old Countess Gemsenberg, and the girl is her daughter Elise. She's engaged to that fellow--an awful a.s.s--young Hausner, the son of the big banker in Vienna, who died last year, leaving him thirty million kroners."