The Complete Four Just Men (21 page)

‘The Woman of Gratz,’ repeated Poiccart, nodding slowly.

They sat in silence, each thinking out his solution after his own fashion. Leon, rolling a Spanish cigarette with deft fingers, looked vacantly out of the great window, but the passing procession of light-hearted people was not his object.

‘Heigh-ho!’ he sighed at last.

‘You were thinking of the woman?’ accused Manfred.

Gonsalez displayed genuine astonishment at the suggestion.

‘I was thinking of something quite different – have you ever noticed, George, how frequently mentally unsound people have full heavy chins and fine hair? I think it was Lambroso who said – ’

‘If you are going to talk physiognomy, I’m going,’ said Poiccart with his heavy smile; ‘yesterday you refused me a hearing on the subject of protoxides – and you missed a good story.’

Leon’s hand was on his arm.

‘I can spare myself the protoxides, but not the story,’ he laughed.

‘It is a queer little story,’ said Poiccart, resuming his seat, ‘but chemistry comes into it, and all the queer formulae that Leon so dislikes. It is about a chemist – he was in the Argentine – who was shamefully betrayed by a woman.’

Poiccart was never a great speaker and only in moments of rare excitement was he ever lucid.

Now he told his story hesitatingly.

‘A woman betrayed this man for a few pieces of gold . . . somehow his rage was not directed against the woman, for she was terrified and confessed and threw the money at his feet, and he gathered the pieces up. It was the man who had betrayed the friendship against whom his rage was directed . . . ’

Here he came to the part of his story with which he was more at home. He spoke of ‘terchlorides’ and ‘protoxides’, of chemical treatments, of a mysterious AuO
3
which, combined with caustic ammonia, formed something else, and the two men grew bewildered at the rapidity with which he handled the technical side of the subject.

Then, as the story neared its conclusion, as if by one accord, the eyes of Manfred and Gonsalez met.

As Poiccart finished Leon bent forward and looked curiously at the teller of the story.

‘Do we understand your story to be a parable?’ he asked.

Poiccart nodded, and Manfred asked: ‘Would it be practicable?’

‘I think so,’ said Poiccart gravely.

This conversation, and particularly this story, had an important bearing upon the event which, more than any other, subsequently destroyed for ever the power of the Red Hundred – this and the little house that Don Emanuel built on the Sierras.

Chapter 10

In the Calle Mayor

The irregular-shaped dining-room of the Hôtel de la Paix was thronged. It was the hour when the brilliant assembly of guests dined.

The greater portion of the hôtel had been reserved by the Government for its illustrious guests, and the babel of talk that drowned the music of the orchestra was made up of a dozen different tongues. At the little white tables where silver and glass sparkled in the light of the shaded lamps, ministers of every nation, soldiers and attachés, austere court officials and secretaries to a score of special embassies, sat laughing and talking. Every table accommodated more than its usual quota, and scarcely a moment passed but there arrived some belated and apologetic attaché, for whom, with a great pushing of chairs and to the accompaniment of laughter, place had to be found.

One table alone was set for a solitary occupant, and toward her every masculine eye in the room strayed and strayed again.

‘My word! that’s a pretty girl.’ The Major of the Lancers put up his eyeglass and gazed furtively.

‘Who is the woman?’ asked Prince Dalgouriski, of the Russian Mission, and stared.

The waiter in attendance supplied the information covertly.

‘Very rich, your excellency – the Baroness von Zinnitt-Durnstadt; yes, I think she is married. It is said that she has large estates in Russia, but spends most of her time in Paris.’

‘Wise woman,’ growled the Russian. ‘Russia is a cursed country, a thrice accursedly dull hole.’

The waiter smiled and made a mental note.

I step aside from the set course of my story to offer the above dialogue as a very reasonable explanation for
Dalgouriski’s subsequent banishment from
Court,
for all
was fish that came to Menshikof
f
’s net. Menshikoff’s enemies have said that he so frequently adopted the rôle of waiter in pursuing his investigations, because in that capacity he was in his element; that, in fact, he had risen from that humble position, but there is little doubt that such a disguise gave him greater opportunities than any other.

The presence of the Woman of Gratz in Madrid he had all along anticipated. When he found that she had established herself at the Hôtel de la Paix his excellent credentials enabled him, with little difficulty, to secure service under the same roof. To very few people in Russia was Menshikoff known personally. In the main he was a name – and not always the same name. His duty in Madrid was to protect the Grand Duke, to whose suite he was in a measure attached; the Grand Duke himself was not aware of the presence in his retinue of such a person as M. Menshikoff.

Not inclined to interfere in matters outside his immediate province, he was not greatly concerned for the safety of the Prince of the Escorial. So long as his own charge was secure, it mattered very little who else might suffer.

He obeyed a signal from the beautiful woman who sat alone.

She was exquisitely dressed in a dress of soft black chiffon, unrelieved by ornament save a collar of pearls she wore about the tightly-fitting lace collar at her neck.

‘The Red Hundred has spent money less advantageously,’ thought Menshikoff as he bent forward deferentially to hear her order.

‘I am expecting a visitor,’ she said in French; ‘he is to be shown into my
salon
.’

‘
Oui, madame
,’
said the agent; ‘I will transmit your order to the
maître
.’

She looked at him with sudden interest.

‘Your voice sounds familiar,’ she said. ‘Have you waited on me before?’

‘Not to my recollection,’ he said with the apologetic smirk of his assumed profession.

He hastened to carry out her instructions, and came back to tell her that the order had been given.

‘I will take coffee,’ she said, and looked at him again.

He bore the scrutiny placidly, skilfully and noiselessly removing the covers before her.

She sat at her coffee for ten minutes, taking a complete survey of the room. Cold, impassive, unsmiling, she felt and showed no response to the frothy gaiety of the place. Perfectly harmonious as she appeared in the splendid setting of gay uniforms and glittering orders, she was apart and aloof from it all. Not that this peasant’s daughter experienced discomfort or embarrassment from the magnificence of her surroundings. Uncrowned queen of a terrible empire she was by right of her rare intellect, no less than by that beauty of hers which fired men’s hearts to dreadful deeds.

Conscious of her limitless power, she could well afford to regard this chattering throng as so much background against which the vision of her schemes passed in slow review.

Hat in hand came the obsequious hall porter to tell her that ‘M’sieur waited her excellency in her
salon
.’

She dismissed the man with a curt nod.

Then she rose and walked from the room, the focusing point of a hundred eyes.

Her suite was on the next floor; she declined the diminutive lift-boy’s invitation and mounted the broad stairs.

At the door of her room she stopped a moment to take a paper from her pocket, then she turned the handle and entered. There was only one dim light in the great cheerless reception-room, and the man who rose to meet her was between her and the single lamp.

She stopped irresolutely, for it was not Von Dunop, whom she expected, but a taller man. She could not see his face.

‘I am afraid – ’ she began.

‘I wish you were,’ said the other easily; then she recognized the voice and the blood came to her pale cheeks.

‘You!’ she said almost under her breath.

The man bowed.

He had walked forward to meet her and now he was between her and the door, so that the light fell on him and she saw his face, and the sad eyes that had lived with her since the day she had first felt their power, held her again speechless.

‘I wish you were afraid,’ he went on a little bitterly; ‘or that you had some human weakness or some soft womanly spot in your heart that could be reached.’

Her voice was uneven as she spoke.

‘What do you desire?’ she asked.

‘The happiness of my fellows, security for the weak, justice for the oppressed,’ he said simply.

‘Who is it that deals in canting platitudes now?’ she asked scornfully.

‘Not I,’ he said, ‘nor my friends. My life is forfeit to every state in the civilized world because I believe in these principles – and, believing, have acted.’

‘And now?’ she asked calmly. She had recovered from the shock of the meeting, and was keenly alive to its possibilities. There would be no mistake this time. Once he had surprised her into a display which was wholly feminine; she was on her guard.

‘And now,’ he repeated, ‘I have come to call a truce.’

‘Ah!’ The note of triumph left him unmoved.

‘I have no reason for asking this,’ he went on, ‘save a desire to avoid useless bloodshed – the taking of lives which God knows might be more usefully and profitably employed than in the dreadful destructive work your people have undertaken – the casualties have been one-sided.’

‘We have a score to settle,’ she blazed forth.

He nodded. ‘And we,’ he said.

There was a sinister emphasis in his words.

‘A score, indeed, madame!’ he lowered his voice when she had expected him to raise it. It was a little thing, but it disconcerted her. He was always doing the unexpected.

‘How many lives does the Red Hundred owe to civilization? Von Dunop, for instance, you expected him, did you not?’

‘Is he dead?’ she gasped.

Manfred smiled. After all, she was a woman, and it was the woman who observed the sweetness of that smile, and the little lines that came to the corners of his eyes. The woman thought that this must be the man who smiled often.

‘No, he is not dead – did I not say a “truce” – but Von Dunop, has he personally no life to offer to the state? If he were slain, would his death lie on the conscience of any man? And Fritz Meister of Altona, and Carronalli, and De Vitzy – I could name a host who have struck in the name of the Red Hundred – what score does humanity hold against them?’

Her mind was moving quickly. She had a thought that grew and shaped as he spoke. It was to her back that he addressed his last words, for with a shrug of her shoulder, she had turned from him and walked to an open bureau.

Over her shoulder she flung the contemptuous question: ‘And you?’

‘Once only have we killed a good man,’ he said gravely, ‘and that, for humanity’s sake.’

She was silent, then she turned and walked carelessly back to where she had stood when he began.

‘There can be no truce,’ she said, ‘we have set ourselves to remove the obstacles in the path of struggling mankind – the accidental obstructions that old dead systems have bequeathed us. The sons of fathers who were the sons of fathers who had some time ruled by might, and left the legacy of their dominion to their haphazard progeny.’

She wheeled round on him with a burst of anger.

‘If in England you race a horse and it wins your Derby, must the stock of that horse be acclaimed winners of the race from birth? Must their sons be Derby winners, though they do not race for the prize? Are your doctors’ sons born doctors, or your judges born in ermines?’

‘Yes and no,’ he replied calmly; ‘for the son of the Derby horse will win the race – if he is fit and trained. And the doctor’s son will be a doctor, if he follows the course, and the king’s son, wise and strong, will rule his people and dominate his councillors – if he has the training.’

‘And if not?’ she said fiercely. ‘If he be a weakling or a madman?’

‘Then his councillors will rule him,’ said Manfred, a little wearily.

‘You talk to me as though I were a child,’ she raged on; ‘as if I were to be humoured and persuaded and cajoled, as if every ounce of blood in my body did not throb for freedom, and every instinct cry “Death to kingship”.’

‘Another king will come – or the councillors, which is worse – or the dictator, who is worse than all,’ he said sadly. ‘You are fighting inevitable laws which decree that one man shall always have power over his fellows and rule them for the common good.’

‘We’re fighting ambition with terror,’ she said; ‘we are imposing our natural law upon another – the fear of death upon the hunger for power. One by one they shall go, these rulers of yours – ’ she came closer and spoke rapidly, and he saw how quickly she breathed.

‘King and councillors and dictator, till the lower steps of the throne are so set about with dead men’s bones that even a crown shall not be worth the risk. And the men who oppose us shall go with the ruck – little and great, chancellor and courtier – even such men as you!’

He saw the flash of poignard and sprang to one side.

The razor-like edge of the knife caught his shoulder in passing, and before she could raise her hand again he had her in his arms; only for a second she felt herself crushed against him and his breath on her hair, then his hands slid down her arm, and her wrists were held.

She looked at him wildly.

The wave of passion that had swept her along had receded and left her white and trembling.

‘Now,’ she whispered huskily, ‘you may kill me.’

He shook his head, and she saw the pain in his eyes.

‘No,’ he said shortly, and released her.

He stooped and picked up the dagger, looked at it curiously, and replaced it on the bureau.

Then he turned to her again.

‘There is to be no truce?’ he asked.

She made no reply.

‘So be it,’ he said, and turned to go.

He took two steps and reeled a little, steadying himself with his hand on the wall.

She was at his side in a moment, this extraordinary Woman of Gratz.

‘You are hurt,’ she cried, in a frenzy of alarm, and held his arm. ‘Let me – !’

Manfred looked down at her from his height, and over his face came a strange shadow.

‘Is there a truce?’ he asked again. She drew back sharply, the fire rekindled in her eyes.

‘Never!’ she cried and stamped her foot.

Manfred bowed and left the room, walking slowly.

* * *

‘Not a very serious wound,’ said Gonsalez critically. ‘The Woman of Gratz, of course – what did you do?’

‘I left her unrepentant,’ said Manfred with a grim smile.

Which may or may not have been true – for who shall say what induced the tears that the Woman of Gratz shed that night?

* * *

Carlos of the Escorial had conducted his courtship in that hurricane manner that was peculiarly his. With every chancellory of Europe making agitated search for precedent, with the Vatican ominously antagonistic, with the Grand Duchess of Sofia moving heaven and earth in a disinterested endeavour to break off the engagement – her daughter, the Princess Marie Teresa, will be thirty in March – the path of true love was made anything but smooth. But the young Prince held on his way untroubled by the succession of autographed letters that came to hand by special envoys. Father Mathias, his confessor, unwisely overstepped the bounds of discretion in lending gratuitous counsel, and was promptly dismissed. He came back in triumph with the support of Supreme Authority and was refused admittance. Then came a mission from Rome headed by a Prince of the Church, and Carlos listened courteously, and replied in brief.

‘If you worry me I will turn Protestant.’

Because he was quite capable of carrying out this outrageous plan, they left him in peace. Then unexpected support came for him, from Central Europe, and most powerful of all, from the King of the Northern Islands. Such a combination was too tremendous for the quibblers, and they subsided, the Grand Duchess of Sofia talking to the last.

Of the high-born lady upon whom his choice fell, there is no need to tell here. That she was, and is, very beautiful, with wondrous blue eyes and hair of spun gold, all the world knows. That the young prince was head over heels in love with her goes without saying; for the rest, her life, her ancestral homes and illustrious progenitors, scenes of her early childhood, her dresses and such-like, I refer you to the picture postcards that sold by the million on the day of her marriage.