Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

PART III.

PART III.Aweek later the negotiations for the secret treaty, that the Transbalkanian Government desired to sign with His Catholic and Apostolic Majesty, were quite complete. Many alterations had been made to the original draft, but now it stood in its entirety: and the Emperor’s signature having been obtained, his Excellency the Ambassador would start for Yiddiz the next morning, where His Majesty the King of Transbalkania would affix to the treaty his own hand and seal.

It had been a very great blow to the Ambassador when André Zaika suddenly told him, that as soon as his Excellency could dispense with his services, he would like to leave, as he had the intention of going to America for an indefinite time. Zaika had been more than usually taciturn for the last day or two, and, when the Ambassador pressed him with questions, as to the reason of this sudden determination, Andre was so reticent that his Excellency, discomfited and a little huffed, was forced to be content with some palpably lame excuse.

“I presume,” said his Excellency a trifle irritated, “that you will not leave me till after the secret treaty is signed on both sides.”

“As long as your Excellency requires me, I am at your service,” said the young man; “but I am longing to leave Europe, where I have no friends save your Excellency.”

“I need not remind you,” replied the Ambassador, “that if you have any desire for friends, or i*********e with people of birth or distinction, I will help you in any way I can, but you have always refused my offers in that quarter. But we won’t refer to that now. I have important matters to discuss with you; in fact, I must have your help in a very serious difficulty in which I am placed.”

André Zaika took the chair his Excellency pushed towards him, and listened.

“For some days now,” said the Ambassador, “I have been under grave apprehension that a spy has been set upon my track.”

André turned very pale, his hand clutched the arm of his chair, his mouth quivered, his eyes were riveted on the Ambassador’s lips, as if life and death hung upon his next words.

“As you know, Russia is ever on the alert where matters which might endanger her interests are concerned; she, more than any other European country, carries on an elaborate system of espionage, which enables her to know all the sayings and doings of every personage of importance, both diplomatic and otherwise. I think, therefore, it is Russia who, through one of her numerous spies, has obtained the knowledge that I am negotiating an important and secret treaty between the Court of Vienna and the Transbalkanian Government; and having obtained this information, all her energies will be devoted to endeavouring to gain knowledge of the various clauses of the treaty. On one or two occasions it has seemed to me that the lock of my bureau had been tampered with. I pointed the fact out to you at the time, and we have both, I am sure, doubled our watchfulness, but, up to this moment, we have neither of us had the slightest clue that might lead us to the discovery of the spy. That is so, is it not?”

André bowed in acquiescence. He dared not trust himself to speak for fear that his voice might betray his emotion.

“I think, however,” said his Excellency after a thoughtful pause, “that I have arranged a plan that will, without imperilling our secrets, place the spy within our power—that is to say, if he fall into the trap I have laid for him.”

“Will your Excellency expose that plan to me?” said André Zaika eagerly.

“Most certainly I will, Andre, as your help will be quite indispensable. What I intend to do is very simple. I shall give out that both you and I will be out to-night until very late. I will then start out, taking the document with me, you remaining behind. The spy, whoever he may be, is evidently well acquainted with all my movements. As I am leaving for Yiddiz to-morrow, he will undoubtedly wish to take the opportunity of making a copy of the secret treaty, as it now stands, knowing that alterations in such treaties are often made at the eleventh hour; we may therefore safely presume that, sometime after my departure, he will be in my study, and with his false keys try to gain access to my bureau.

“Baron de Hermansthal, the chief of the police, and half-a-dozen of his men, will in the meantime be stationed in my bedroom, the door of which is, as you know, exactly opposite to the study door. As soon as they have seen that the spy is within, they will line the passage guarding every exit, Baron de Hermansthal will enter the study by one door, while you, whom I shall ask to remain in the adjoining room, will enter by the other; and I think,” added his Excellency, rubbing his hands with delight, “that when our spy finds himself thus confronted, he will be only too willing to sell us himself and his silence for whatever we choose to offer him.”

Zaika had listened to his Excellency’s discourse silently and attentively; he did not wish to lose a single word of the plan that was to expose the spy to infamy. That spy was his wife, the Countess Wladimir Rostopchine, the bearer of his own historic name.

What he said in answer to his Excellency he did not know; it was evidently satisfactory, for the Ambassador appeared not to notice anything peculiar in his secretary’s demeanour; how he spent the early part of the evening he knew still less; all he was distinctly conscious of was the all-pervading thought: “Count Wladimir Rostopchine must save his wife’s honour, his own, at any cost, but how?” By warning her, of course. But she was not in the hotel; the young man had seen her going out radiantly beautiful, laughing and chatting gaily. She had not dined in the hall. Would he have an opportunity of speaking to her? If he had, would she listen? He had written to her a guarded, carefully-worded epistle, which she alone would understand, and he had bribed one of the hotel servants to place the letter in her room.

Would she get the letter? Would she read it? were the eternal questions that recurred to his fevered brain, as his Excellency, very excited, was giving him some final instructions, and then left him in the room next to the study, face to face for half-an-hour, with torturing hopes and fears, while the clock ticked mercilessly on.

How short, and yet how interminably long, the minutes seemed! All at once André Zaika jumped up, every nerve tingling with emotion; he had heard in the study a faint noise—a mere nothing, the rustle of a silk dress. It was curious that he should feel so calm suddenly; his emotion had vanished, his nerves seemed to have gone to rest. He pushed open the door of the study and turned up the electric light. The Countess did not seem frightened or even astonished at seeing him; she raised her eyebrows slightly, and her lips were once more parted in that curious, half-contemptuous smile.

The young man seized her hand, and with utmost calm drew her to the sofa, forcing her by gentle pressure to sit down near him.

“Monsieur——” she began.

“Hush!” he whispered commandingly; “there is no time now.”

Truly there was none, for he heard Baron de Hermansthal’s men lining the passage outside, and presently the door was thrown open, and the officer himself entered the room. The lady had turned very pale—she understood at once; the hand that still lay in André Zaika’s was icy cold.

“By order of his Excellency the Transbalkanian Ambassador—” began Baron de Hermansthal.

“I am afraid, Monsieur,” said André, who had risen, very calmly and somewhat ironically, “that there is some mistake.”

“Mistake?” said the chief of the police, who had been a little taken aback on seeing a beautiful, richly-dressed woman and his Excellency’s secretary the only occupants of the room. “I and my men saw a person surreptitiously entering this door, and I certainly——”

“You certainly were set here by his Excellency,” said André, “to watch for a spy whom the Ambassador suspects of breaking open his bureau. You do not, I presume, imagine that the Countess Wladimir Rostopchine is here for that purpose.”

“It is just as easy to suppose,” said Baron de Hermansthal, highly nettled, and still doubting, “that the Countess Wladimir Rostopchine is in a gentleman’s room at twelve o’clock at night for political purposes as for——”

“As for what, Monsieur?” said André icily. “Pray continue. Why should not the Countess Wladimir Rostopchine be at any hour she chooses, of the day or of the night, in her husband’s rooms?”

“Her husband—you, M. Zaika?” said Baron Hermansthal, struggling to retain official sangfroid.

“My name, Monsieur, is Wladimir Rostopchine,” said the young man proudly; “an outcast and an exile from my country, one condemned to death, but still with the right to his own privacy and the society of his own wife. Madame,” he added, turning to the Countess, who had stood impassive at first, but on whose face now a look of pity spread as her eyes met those of André, “will you allow me to conduct you to your own rooms, while we leave Monsieur to effect the capture of the spy, who surely will not tarry if he means to come at all?”

She took his arm, and he led her away past Baron de Hermansthal and his men, who saluted them both as they went. At the door of her own room she stopped; evidently she meant, wished, to say something; Andre took her hand, forcing her to look him straight in the eyes.

“Monsieur——” she began.

“Ah, Madame!” he said, “do not speak to the dead, bid them good-bye, and wish them Godspeed, and let them go whence they came.”

“I owe you my safety and my honour, Monsieur.”

“You owe me nothing, Madame,” said the young man simply; “the name you bear is still mine, and it was but the ghost of Wladimir Rostopchine who came to defend what was his own.”

“You are not going, Monsieur?” she said in intreaty, as the young man turned away.

She held out her hand to him, and once more their hands were joined, as they had been ten years ago, and their eyes met, but pity and contempt had faded from her enigmatical face now; she could read in his that their parts had been exchanged.

He bent low and kissed her icy cold fingers, close to the spot where the old pope had placed the narrow gold band—“in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

The next moment Countess Wladimir Rostopchine was alone.

The arrest of Count Wladimir Rostopchine, whom everyone had believed to be dead, and his subsequent trial on a charge preferred against him ten years previously, became the talk of St. Petersburg society that winter. It was said that high influence was being exerted on his behalf; that his Excellency the Transbalkanian ambassador, accredited to the Court of Vienna, moved heaven and earth on behalf of the young man, who had been his friend and secretary for years. Therefore, when Count Wladimir received from His Majesty a gracious pardon, mitigated by an order that he should continue to live out of Russia, no one was particularly astonished.

As usual, rumour had been altogether on the wrong scent. The young Count’s chief advocate was a beautiful woman whom society had long known and admired as the widowed Countess Rostopchine, and whose honour her husband had so bravely saved by his noble self-sacrifice. And as her honour also entailed that of Russia, whose prestige would have gravely suffered, had her agent been exposed and compromised, the paternal Government was obliged to grant the young man in return both his life, and the use of his name.

He now lives in Paris with his young wife, whom he is said to idolise. They both go a great deal into society, but neither of them has ever touched on politics since the night when Countess Rostopchine so narrowly escaped being branded as a spy.