The Lady in the Car Part 20

Upon my right palm, branded as by a hot iron, was the Sign of the Cat's-paw!

Horrified I stared at it. It was the same mark that I had seen upon the hand of Va.s.sos! What could be its significance?

In a few days the burn healed, leaving a dark red scar, the distinct imprint of the feline foot. From Mayhew I tried, by cautious questions, to obtain some information concerning the fair-faced girl who had played such a prank on me. But he only knew her slightly. She had been staying with a certain Madame Sovoff, who was something of a mystery, but had left Sofia.

A month pa.s.sed. Mademoiselle and Madame returned from Belgrade and were both delighted when I suggested they should go for a run in the "sixty."

I took them over the same road as I had taken Olga Steinkoff. In a week Mademoiselle became an enthusiastic motorist, and was full of inquiry into the various parts of the engine, the ignition, lubrication, and other details. One day I carefully approached the matter of this remarkable mark upon my palm. But she affected entire ignorance. I confess that I had grown rather fond of her, and I hesitated to attribute to her, or to Madame, any sinister design; the strange mark on my hand was both weird and puzzling. We drove out in the car often, and many a time I recollected pretty Olga, and her horrible fate.

Va.s.sos, who was still at the hotel, annoyed me on account of his extreme politeness, and the manner in which he appeared to spy upon all my movements. I came across him everywhere. Inquiries concerning the reason of the ugly Greek's presence in Bulgaria met with negative result. One thing seemed certain; he was not a prince _incognito_.

How I longed to go to him, show him the mark upon my hand, and demand an explanation. But my curiosity was aroused; therefore I patiently awaited developments, my revolver always ready in my hip pocket, in case of foul play.

The mysterious action of the pretty girl from Galatz also puzzled me.

At last the Cabinet of Prince Ferdinand were in complete accord with the Prime Minister Petkoff, regarding the British proposals. All had been done in secret from the party in opposition, and one day I had lunched with his Excellency the Prime Minister, at his house in the suburbs of the city.

"You may send a cipher despatch to London, if you like, Mr Martin," he said, as we sat over our cigars. "The doc.u.ments will all be signed at the Cabinet meeting at noon to-morrow. In exchange for this loan of three millions raised in London, all the contracts for quick-firing guns and ammunition go to your group of financiers." Such was the welcome news his Excellency imparted to me, and you may imagine that I lost no time in writing out a cipher message, and sending it by the man-servant to the nearest telegraph office.

For a long time I sat with him, and then he rose, inviting me to walk with him in the Boris Gardens, as was his habit every afternoon, before going down to the sitting of the Sobranje, or Parliament.

On our way we pa.s.sed Va.s.sos, who raised his hat politely to me.

"Who's that man?" inquired the Minister quickly, and I told him all I knew concerning the ugly hunchback.

In the pretty public garden we were strolling together in the sundown, chatting upon the situation in Macedonia and other matters, when of a sudden, a black-moustached man in a dark grey overcoat and round astrachan cap, sprang from the bushes at a lonely spot, and raising a big service revolver, fired point-blank at his Excellency.

I felt for my own weapon. Alas! It was not there! I had forgotten it!

The a.s.sa.s.sin, seeing the Minister reel and fall, turned his weapon upon me. Thereupon, in an instant I threw up my hands, crying that I was unarmed, and was an Englishman.

As I did so, he started back as though terrified. His weapon fell from his grasp, and with a spring, he disappeared again into the bushes.

All had happened in a few brief instants; for ere I could realise that a tragedy had actually occurred, I found the unfortunate Prime Minister lying lifeless at my feet. My friend had been shot through the heart!

Readers of the newspapers will recollect the tragic affair, which is no doubt still fresh in their minds.

I told the Chief of Police of Sofia of my strange experience, and showed him the mark upon my palm. Though detectives searched high and low for the hunchback Greek, for Madame Sovoff, and for the fascinating Mademoiselle, none of them were ever found.

The a.s.sa.s.sin was, nevertheless, arrested a week later, while trying to cross the frontier into Servia. I, of course, lost by an ace the great financial coup, but before execution the prisoner made a confession which revealed the existence of a terrible and widespread conspiracy, fostered by Bulgaria's arch-enemy Turkey, to remove certain members of the Cabinet who were in favour of British influence becoming paramount.

Yes. It was a rather narrow squeak.

Quite unconsciously, I had, it seemed, become an especial favourite of the silent, watchful old Konstantinos Va.s.sos. He had no idea that I was a "crook" or that I was a secret agent. Fearing lest I, in my innocence, should fall a victim with his Excellency--being so often his companion--he had, with the a.s.sistance of the pretty Marie Balesco, contrived to impress upon my palm the secret sign of the conspirators.

To this fact I certainly owe my life, for the a.s.sa.s.sin--a stranger to Sofia, who had been drawn by lot--would, no doubt, have shot me dead, had he not seen upon my raised hand "The Sign of the Cat's-paw."

CHAPTER EIGHT.

CONCERNING A WOMAN'S HONOUR.

Few people are aware of the Prince's serious love affair.

Beyond his most intimate friend, the Parson, I believe n.o.body knows of it except myself.

The truth I have managed to glean only bit by bit, for he has never told me himself. It is a matter which he does not care to mention, for recollections of the woman are, no doubt, ever in his heart, and as with many of us, ever painful.

No man or woman is thoroughly bad. Adventurer that he is, the Prince has ever been true and honourable, even generous, towards a good woman.

The best and staunchest of friends, yet the bitterest of enemies if occasion required, he has never, to my knowledge, played an honest woman a scurvy trick.

The little romance of real life occurred in Florence about three years ago. A good many people got hold of a garbled version of it, but none know the actual truth. He loved, and because he loved he dare not pose in his usual character as a prince, for fear that she should discover the fraud. On the contrary, he was living at a small cheap hotel on the Lung Arno as Jack Cross, and posing as a man who was very hard-up and, besides, friendless.

He had entered upon the campaign with an entirely different object--an object which had for its consummation the obtaining of some very fine jewels belonging to the wife of an American who had made a corner in cotton, and who was engaged in seeing Europe. Max Mason and the Parson were both living as strangers to each other at the Savoy, in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, and idling daily in the Via Tornabuoni. A big coup had been planned, but instead of bringing it off, as luck would have it, his Highness had fallen hopelessly in love, and with a real royal princess, a woman whose beauty was universally proverbial.

Their love-story was full of pathos.

They were standing together in a garden one sunny afternoon, and were alone, without eavesdroppers. A moment before, he had been wondering what she would do; what she would say if she knew the ghastly truth-- that he was a thief!

He had been born a gentleman--though he had no more right to the t.i.tle of "prince" than I had. True, at college at Cheltenham he had been nicknamed "the prince," because of his charming manner and elegant airs.

Few of us even imagined, however, that he would, in later years, pa.s.s himself off as a German princeling and gull the public into providing him with the wherewithal to live in ease and luxury.

As he stood at the handsome woman's side, thoughts of the past--bitter and regretful--flashed upon him. His conscience p.r.i.c.ked him.

"Princess!--I--I--" he stammered.

"Well?" and her sweet red lips parted in a smile.

"I--ah! yes, it's madness. I--I know I'm a fool! I see danger in all this. I have jeopardised your good name sufficiently already. People are looking at us now--and they will surely misjudge us!"

"You are not a fool, my dear Jack," she answered in her charming broken English. "You are what you call a goose." And she laughed outright.

"But think! What will they say?"

"They may say just whatever pleases them," she answered airily, glancing at the half a dozen or so smartly dressed people taking tea in the beautiful Italian garden overlooking the red roofs and cupolas of the Lily City, Florence. "They--the world--have already said hard things about me. But what do I really care?"

"_You_ care for the Prince's honour, as well as your own," he ventured in a low serious voice, looking straight into her blue eyes.

Her Imperial and Royal Highness Angelica Pia Marie Therese Crown-Princess of Bosnia, and daughter of a reigning Emperor, was acknowledged to be one of the most beautiful and accomplished women in Europe. Her photographs were everywhere, and a year before, at her brilliant marriage in Vienna, all the States of Europe were represented, and her photograph had appeared in every ill.u.s.trated newspaper on the two Continents. The world, ignorant of the tragedy of life behind a throne, believed the royal marriage to be a love-match, but the bitter truth remained that it was merely the union of two imperial houses, without the desire of either the man, or the woman. Princess Angelica had, at the bidding of the Emperor, sacrificed her love and her young life to a man for whom she had only contempt and loathing.

As she stood there, a tall, frail figure, in plain white embroidered muslin, her fair hair soft beneath her big black hat, her sweet delicately moulded face and her eyes of that deep childlike blue that one so seldom sees in girls after fourteen, there was upon her countenance an undisguised love-look. She was indeed the perfect incarnation of all that was graceful and feminine; little more indeed, than a girl, and yet the wife of a prince that would ere long become a king.

For a few moments the man and the woman regarded each other in silence.

He was spell-bound by her wondrous beauty like many another man had been. But she knew, within herself, that he was the only man she had ever met that she could love.

And surely they were a curiously ill-a.s.sorted pair, as far as social equality went, she the daughter of an Emperor, while he a hard-up young Englishman, tall, dark-haired, with a handsome, serious face, lived, he had explained to her, in Florence, first, because it was cheap, and secondly, because his old aunt, who had a small house out on the Fiesole Road, practically kept him. His story to her was that he had once been on the Stock Exchange, but a run of ill-luck had broken him, so he had left England, and now managed to sc.r.a.pe along upon a couple of hundred or so a year paid him by a firm of Italian shipping and forwarding agents, for whom he now acted as English manager. The position was an excellent "blind." n.o.body recognised him as Tremlett, alias "his Highness."