William Le Queux

“ Thoughts of Beatriz, too, flashed across his mind. How different was the pale recumbent figure in white to that dashing Andalusian dancer!
He dropped upon one knee at the side of the couch, looked intently upon the white unconscious countenance, and held his breath.
“Lola!” he whispered, but so low that sound hardly passed his fevered lips. “I love you, darling! I love you, though you shall never know, because our love is forbidden. Alas! it could only bring grief, sorrow, and disaster upon both of us. But—ah, my God! I love you—I love you!” ”

“ But the Cote d’Azur and its habitués, its demi-mondaines and its escrocs soon pall upon one; hence Society nowadays goes farther afield—to Egypt, the land of wonders, where there is ever-increasing charm, where the winter days amid those stupendous monuments of a long-dead civilisation are rainless, the land where Christmas is as warm as our English August, where all is silent and dreamy beside the mighty Nile, and where the brown-faced sons of the desert kneel Mecca-wards at sunset and praise the name of Allah the One. Allah is just; Allah is merciful. There is no God but Allah! ”

“ Italy, par excellence the country of the British tourist, has its charm even in its officialdom.
At the top of the staircase stood the Minister himself, His Excellency General Cataldi, resplendent in his brilliant, gold-laced uniform, glittering with decorations, saluting as he received his guests.
Hubert smiled bitterly within himself. He recollected that last occasion when, after travelling many miles, he had seen him driving to the Univers at Tours, and remembered the subsequent conversation when he had accepted the bribe to place brown-paper boots upon the feet of the Italian Army. ”

“ What do you mean?” he inquired eagerly.
“Ah! you do not know—you can never tell!” she cried. “The evil hand of Jules Gigleux is ever upon me, a hard, iron, inexorable hand. Ah! M’sieur Waldron, you would, if you only knew the truth, pity a woman who is in the power of a man of that stamp—a man who has neither feeling, nor conscience, neither human kindness nor remorse.” ”

“ Waldron smiled. Then he said:
“His Majesty is exceedingly gracious to me. I had not been back here a week before I had a command to private audience, and he was kind enough to say that he was pleased to resume my acquaintance after my years of absence from Rome. Yes, Contessa,” he added, “here I feel that I am at home and among friends, for I love Italy and her people. Your country possesses a grace and charm which one does not find elsewhere in Europe. There is but one Italy as there is but one Rome in all the world.” ”

“ Her Royal Highness wears an exact replica—except that it contains a portrait of Hubert Waldron—concealed beneath her corsage, the one talisman which never leaves her either by night or by day.
Though Europe divides them, and the barrier of birth can never be bridged, the little golden lockets form the hidden link which still connects their lives.
When either gaze upon the other’s pictured face, as oftens happens, memories from out the misty past arise. ”

“ From the shadows of the opposite shore came the low beating of a tom-tom and the Arab boatman’s chant—that rather mournful chant one hears everywhere along the Nile from the Nyanza to the sea, and which ends in “Al-lah-hey! Al-lah-hey!” Allah! Always the call to Allah.
The sun—the same sun god that was worshipped at Abu Simbel—had gone long ago, tired Nubia slept in peace, and the stars that gazed down upon her fretted not the night with thoughts of the creeds of men. ”

“ The secret lover sank into a chair at the diplomat’s side and slowly lit a cigarette.
He was a good-looking—even handsome—man, with refined and regular features, a smiling, complacent expression, and a small, well-trimmed moustache. But his cheek-bones were high, and his eyes rather narrowly set. To-day no young Frenchman—as was the fashion ten years ago—wears a beard. Time was when the beard was carefully oiled, perfumed, trimmed and curled. But to-day the fashion in France is a hairless face—as in America and in England.
Waldron examined his companion for the hundredth time. ”

“ In the lazy indolence of that sun-baked land of silence, idleness and love, affection is quickly cultivated, as the fast-living set who go up there each winter know well. Hubert Waldron, man of the world that he was, had watched and knew. He stood there, however, dumbfounded, for there was now presented a very strange and curious state of affairs. Lola, the dark-eyed girl who had enchanted him and held him by the great mystery which surrounded her, was now revealed keeping tryst with a stranger—a mysterious Frenchman who had come up from the blazing Sudan—a man who had come from nowhere. ”

“ But how long would that last—how long before Italy, and indeed the whole of Europe, rang with the terrible scandal of a Royal House!
That night he locked away the envelope with its precious contents safely in his steel dispatch-box and still in his clothes, cast himself upon the bed to sleep. But it was already nearly five in the morning, and he failed even to close his eyes.
The discovery of Lola’s treachery had utterly bewildered and unnerved him. Surely she could not want money—and the temptation of money alone makes the traitor. He loved her still. ”

“ That afternoon at half-past three o’clock, the hour when in winter all Rome goes out for its airing on the Pincio, Hubert Waldron was idling along the terrace, gazing at the wonderful panorama of the Eternal City stretched away before him in the yellow sundown.
In Rome it is the correct thing to go to the Pincio, and there pay visits to the Roman ladies who sit in their smart carriages or automobiles as they slowly file up the historic hill and down on the other side. ”

“ For half an hour, or more, he remained talking with men and women he knew—the same old weary chatter of which the diplomat serving his country abroad grows so unutterably tired.
Who, of all that gay throng save His Majesty himself, dreamed of the sharp-edged sword of war suspended above them? Who knew of the black peril which threatened the fair land of Italy, or of the carefully prepared plot which her enemies in Vienna had prepared against her. ”

“ What do I care for you, a mere British diplomat! What do you know of Secret Service ways, or methods?” he laughed.
“I know this,” was Hubert’s reply, “that if you refuse to give back to me the correspondence of your unfortunate victim you will find yourself in a very awkward predicament here in Paris.”
“Bah! You are only bluffing, I repeat! What, do you think I have any fear of you? You diplomats are merely air bubbles of self-importance. You are so easily pricked.” And he turned from Waldron with an expression of supreme contempt. ”

“ At their feet, winding its way for thousands of miles between limitless areas of sand, its banks lined for narrow distances with green fields and the habitations of men, flowed dark and wondrous the one thing that makes human life possible in all the lands of the Sudan and of Egypt—flowed from sources that for ages were undiscovered, and which even in this day of boasted knowledge are yet incompletely known—the Nile. ”

“ On the veranda sat a crowd of chattering English men and women of wealth and leisure—taking tea. The women were mostly in white muslins, and many wore white sun-helmets though it was December, while the men were mostly in clean suits of “ducks.” An orchestra from Italy was playing Musetta’s waltz-song from “La Bohème,” and the same people one meets at the opera, at supper at the Savoy or the Ritz, were chattering over tea and pastries served by silent-footed, dark-faced Nubians in scarlet fezes and long white caftans. ”

“ It will be best for us in the end—best for both of us. You have your future before you—so have I. In my profession as diplomat I have to bow to the inevitable whenever I am transferred. You are a great dancer—a dancer who has won the applause of Europe. May I not still remain your humble and devoted friend?”
For answer Beatriz, the idol of London at that moment, fell upon his shoulder and shed tears of poignant, bitter regret, while he, with knit brows, held his breath for a moment, and then tenderly bent and kissed her upon the cheek. ”

“ Boulos, the faithful Egyptian dragoman, in his red fez and long caftan of yellow silk reaching to his heels, stood leaning over the bows of the small white steamer which was slowly wending its way around the many curves of the mighty river which lay between the Island of Philae and the Second Cataract at Wady Haifa, the gate of the Sudan.
No railway runs through that wild desert of rock and sand, and the road to Khartoum lies by water over those sharp rocks and ever-shifting shoals where navigation is always dangerous, and progress only possible by daylight. ”

“ As the British diplomat made his way through the throng—for the waltz had just concluded—he bowed over the hands of a dozen pretty women, dames of high degree in the Eternal City, wives of Roman princes, of marquises, of great signori, and of diplomats. With many men, politicians, financiers, Court sycophants, and those struggling for distinction—that crowd of place-seekers and unscrupulous officials with which every European Court is surrounded—he nodded acquaintance, until suddenly espying Sir Francis Cathcart, he made his way to him. ”

“ He halted instantly. The voice was Lola’s! In the shadow he could just distinguish two forms, that of a man and a woman.
He drew back in breathless amazement. Mademoiselle’s eagerness to return across from Elephantine was now explained. She had kept a secret tryst.
As he watched, he heard her speaking quickly and angrily in an imperative tone. The man was standing in the full moonlight, and Waldron could see him quite plainly—a dark, short-bearded man of middle-age and middle-height, wearing a soft felt Tyrolese hat. ”

“ The Nile Travellers. The mystic hour of the desert afterglow.
A large, square wooden veranda covered by a red and white awning, above a wide silent sweep of flowing river, whose huge rocks, worn smooth through a thousand ages, raised their backs about the stream, a glimpse of green feathery palms and flaming scarlet poinsettias on the island opposite, and beyond the great drab desert, the illimitable waste of stony, undulating sands stretching away to the infinite, and bathed in the blood-red light of the dying day. ”

“ The Earl had risen as a sign that the interview was over. He was usually a sharp-speaking, brusque and busy man. To interviewers he was brief, and had earned for himself the reputation of the most hard and unapproachable man in the Service which he controlled. But Hubert Waldron had certainly not found him so, and as he descended the great handsome staircase and went out into the falling fog in Downing Street, he could not help a feeling of joy that he had been promoted over the heads of a dozen others to the second secretaryship of His Majesty’s Embassy to the Quirinale. ”

“ Then London holds some painful memory for you—eh?” remarked Waldron with sympathy.
“Yes,” he answered, with a hard, bitter look upon his face. “But there,” he added quickly, “I suppose I shall get over it—some day.”
“Why, of course you will,” replied the diplomat cheerfully. “We all of us have our private troubles. Some men are not so lucky as to be able to put everything behind them, and go into self-imposed exile.” ”

“ Hubert Waldron, a smart figure in his diplomatic uniform, strolled along the corridor, followed at a respectable distance by the neatly-dressed waiter until, at a convenient point, the diplomat halted at the junction of two corridors, as though in doubt. Pucci was at his side in an instant.
“I learnt only half an hour ago, signore, that there is a plot against you!” he said. “Signor Ghelardi is your enemy. You were attacked by the two assassins whom he bribed, but the conspiracy failed. Be careful. Exercise the greatest caution, signore—I beg of you.” ”

“ They were alone together, for Pucci had gone out to hire a car. “But I have no time to lose. The spy has escaped us, and we must follow instantly if we are to be successful in preventing this exposure. Return at once to Rome, and behave just as though nothing whatever had happened. Trust in me, Lola,” he said, and looking straight into her eyes he took her small hand gently in his, and raised it in reverence to his lips.
“Yes,” she whispered in a low, intense voice. “You are my only friend, Mr Waldron. I will put my entire trust in you.” ”

“ What, in face of those words of his concerning His Excellency, could he think? Truly, the head upon which lies a crown must, indeed, be very weary. How little does the general public know of that narrow, glittering, fevered world which, in every capital, surrounds a throne—that world where place-seekers intrigue, where money brings power, where morality is so often scoffed at as antiquated and out-of-date, and where the true, honest love of man and woman is forbidden because of rank and blood. ”

“ But under the benign British influence and control it is to-day as safe as Brighton.
Hubert Waldron lit a cigar, and alone ascended the long flight of steps which led from the landing-stage to the quay. On the right lay the long, well-lit European railway station, beyond, a clump of high palms looming dark against the steely night sky. The white train, with its closed sun-shutters, stood ready to start on its long journey south, conveying the European mail over the desert with half a dozen passengers to the capital of the Sudan. ”