The Powers and Maxine Part 13

"Shall I mention the word--_doc.u.ment?_" he hinted. "Really, I'm sure you won't regret it if you let me drive home with you, Mademoiselle."

"I can't do that," I answered. "And I can't take you into my carriage here. But I'll stop for you, and wait at the corner Rue Eugene Beauharnais. Then you can go with me until I think it best for you to get out."

"Very well," he agreed. "But send your maid home in a cab; I can not talk before her."

"Yes, you can. She knows no language except French--and a little English. She always drives home with me."

This was true. But if I had been talking to Raoul, I would perhaps have given the dear old woman her first experience of being sent off by herself. In that case, she would not have minded, for she likes Raoul, admires him as a "dream of a young man," and already suspected what I hadn't yet told her--that we were engaged. But with Count G.o.densky forced upon me as a companion, I would not for any consideration have parted with Marianne.

Three or four minutes after starting I was giving instructions to my chauffeur where to stop, and almost immediately afterwards G.o.densky appeared. He got in and took the place at my left, Marianne, silent, but doubtless astonished, facing us on the little front seat.

"Now," I exclaimed. "Please begin quickly."

"Don't force me to be too abrupt," he said. "I would spare you if I could. You speak as if you grudged me every moment with you. Yet I am here because I love you."

"Oh, please, Monsieur!" I broke in. "You know I've told you that is useless."

"But everything is changed since then. Perhaps now, even your mind will be changed. That happens with women sometimes. I want to warn you of a great danger that threatens you, Maxine. Perhaps, late as it is, I could save you from it if you'd let me."

"Save me from what?" I asked temporising. "You're very mysterious, Count G.o.densky. And I'm Mademoiselle de Renzie except to my very intimate friends."

"I am your friend, always. Maybe you will even permit me to speak of myself as your 'intimate friend' when I have done what I hope to do for you in--in the matter of a certain doc.u.ment which has disappeared."

I was quivering all over. But I had not lost hope yet; I think that some women, feeling as I did, would have fainted. But it would have been better for me to die and be out of my troubles for ever, than to let myself faint and show G.o.densky that he had struck home.

"Be quiet. Be cool. Be brave now, if never again," I said to myself. And my voice sounded perfectly natural as I exclaimed: "Oh, the 'doc.u.ment'

again. The one you spoke about when we first met to-night. You rouse my curiosity. But I don't in the least know what you mean."

"The loss of it is known," he said.

"Ah, it's a lost doc.u.ment?"

"As you will be lost, Maxine, if you don't come to me for the help I'm only too glad to give--on conditions. Let me tell you what they are."

"Wouldn't it be more to the point if you told me what the doc.u.ment is, and how it concerns me?" I parried him, determined to bring him to bay.

"Aren't _you_ evading the point far more than I? The doc.u.ment--which you and I can both see as plainly before our eyes at this instant as though it were in--let us say your hands, or--du Laurier's, if he were here--that doc.u.ment is far too important even to name within hearing of other ears."

"Marianne's? But I told you she can't understand a word of Russian."

"One can't be sure. We can never tell, in these days, who may not be--a spy."

There was a stab for me! But I would not give him the satisfaction of showing that it hurt. He wanted to confuse me, to put me off my guard; but he should not.

"They say one judges others by one's self," I laughed. "Count G.o.densky, if you throw out such lurid hints about my poor, fat Marianne, I shall begin to wonder if it's not _you_ who are the spy!"

"Since you trust your woman so implicitly, then," he went on, "I'll tell you what you want to know. The doc.u.ment I speak of is the one you took out of the Foreign Office the other day, when you called on your--friend, Monsieur le Vicomte du Laurier."

"Dear me!" I exclaimed. "You say you want to be my friend, yet you seem to think I am a kleptomaniac. I can't imagine what I should want with any dry old doc.u.ment out of the Foreign Office, can you?"

"Yes, I can imagine," said G.o.densky drily.

"Pray tell me then. Also what doc.u.ment it was. For, joking apart, this is rather a serious accusation."

"If I make any accusation, it's less against you than du Laurier."

"Oh, you make an accusation against him. Why do you make it to me?"

"As a warning."

"Or because you don't dare make it to anyone else."

"Dare! I haven't accused him thus far, because to do so would brand your name with his."

"Ah!" I said. "You are very considerate."

"I don't pretend to be considerate--except of myself. I've waited, and held my hand until now, because I wanted to see you before doing a thing which would mean certain ruin for du Laurier. I love you as much as I ever did; even more, because, in common with most men, I value what I find hard to get. To-night I ask you again to marry me. Give me a different answer from that you gave me before, and I'll be silent about what I know."

"What you know of the doc.u.ment you mentioned?" I asked, my heart drumming an echo of its beating in my ears.

"Yes."

"But--I thought you said that its loss was already discovered?" (Oh, I was keeping myself well under control, though a mistake now would surely cost me more than I dared count!)

For half a second he was taken aback, at a loss what answer to make.

Half a second--no more; yet that hardly perceptible hesitation told me what I had been playing with him to find out.

"Discovered by me," he explained. "That is, by me and one person over whom I have such an influence that he will use his knowledge, or--forget it, according to my advice."

"There is no such person," I said to myself. But I didn't say it aloud.

Quickly I named over in my mind such men in the French Foreign Office as were in a position to discover the disappearance of any doc.u.ment under Raoul du Laurier's charge. There were several who might have done so, some above Raoul in authority, some below; but I was certain that not one of them was an intimate friend of Count G.o.densky's. If he had suspected anything the day he met me coming out of the Foreign Office he might, of course, have hinted his suspicions to one of those men (though all along I'd believed him too shrewd to risk the consequences, the ridicule and humiliation of a mistake): but if he had spoken, it would be beyond his power to prevent matters from taking their own course, independent of my decisions and his actions.

I believed now that what I had hoped was true. He was "bluffing." He wanted me to flounder into some admission, and to make him a promise in order to save the man I loved. I was only a woman, he'd argued, no doubt--an emotional woman, already wrought up to a high pitch of nervous excitement. Perhaps he had expected to have easy work with me. And I don't think that my silence after his last words discouraged him. He imagined me writhing at the alternative of giving up Raoul or seeing him ruined, and he believed that he knew me well enough to be sure what I would do in the end.

"Well?" he said at last, quite gently.

My eyes had been bent on my lap, but I glanced suddenly up at him, and saw his face in the light of the street lamps as we pa.s.sed. Count G.o.densky is not more Mephistophelian in type than any other dark, thin man with a hook nose, keen eyes, heavy browed; a prominent chin and a sharply waxed, military moustache trained to point upward slightly at the ends. But to my fancy he looked absolutely devilish at that moment.

Still, I was less afraid of him than I had been since the day I stole the treaty.

"Well," I said slowly, "I think it's time that you left me now."

"That's your answer? You can't mean it."

"I do mean it, just as much as I meant to refuse you the three other times that you did me the same honour. You asked me to hear what you had to say to-night, and I have heard it; so there's no reason why I shouldn't press the electric bell for my chauffeur to stop, and--"

"Do you know that you're p.r.o.nouncing du Laurier's doom, to say nothing of your own?"

"No. I don't know it."