Читать книгу The Lady Called Nita - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4

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M. Goucouldis was a very patient man up to a point. He was also a very discreet man, and, knowing something of the ways of young men, did not press his inquiries too far.

He was dressed for the Foreign Office reception when Prince John met him in the private dining-room for a tête-à-tête meal.

"Your Serene Highness will be glad to know that our dear friend, the Duchess, is in London: she has been here for a week," he said.

"Indeed?" said John indifferently.

He had only known Marie for a week. How wonderful it seemed! A week—seven days—a hundred and sixty-eight hours—and yet it was as though he had known her for all eternity.

"I have written to her illustrious uncle, the Prince Paul of Georgia, requesting the honour of an interview."

"Do you know the Duchess?" asked John, with sudden interest.

"I have not met her, but there is no question of her charm. Her photographs—"

"Every one of her photographs looks different," said John contemptuously. "I shouldn't know her if I met her. Chancellor, you are romantic!"

"Romantic?" demanded the astounded Minister, against whom such a charge had never been brought.

"Of course you are! You are for ever weaving stories and imagining tender situations! You have jumped to the conclusion that because the Duchess is eccentric she must necessarily be a desirable wife for me. You think, because she loves to move incognito, she would be a fit mate for one who is also keen on hiding his identity. I'll bet you've thought how wonderful it would be if I met her thus, and, ignorant of one another's identity, we fell in love!"

M. Goucouldis blinked.

"I have thought nothing so absurd, Highness," he said, and knew that he lied.

Since his charge turned the conversation in the direction of a race meeting he wished to attend, he did not return to the subject.

John went out before the Chancellor took his departure—otherwise the adventure might have had a different ending.

M. Goucouldis went into his own private suite to finish his preparations for the reception, and there he found an agitated Chief of Sergovian Police. One glance at the sallow face of the man brought the Chancellor's heart into his mouth.

"Well, well," he snarled, "what is this bad news?"

"It is about the girl—the lady," stammered the officer.

"The girl he was talking with last night? Remember this, Sava, that His Serene Highness is a young man, and his flirtations are of no great consequence. I tell you this for fear you exaggerate the importance of any little recreation which His Highness may enjoy during his stay in this dismal city. Moreover, I seem to remember that you told me that they walked and they talked and they parted. That is how all flirtations should end, Sava—with a walk and a talk and a parting."

"I have traced the woman and her maid."

"If she had a maid with her, that is all the more proper," said Goucouldis. "Well—and having traced her, what do you find?"

"She is Mademoiselle Lemair," blurted the man.

For a second Goucouldis could not take in the awful 'significance of the discovery.

"Lemair?" he said incredulously. "Lemair? Which Lemair?"

"Sergius Lemair."

The Chancellor staggered back and held on to a chair for support.

"Sergius Lemair?" he croaked. "You're mad! You're trying to frighten me, you scoundrel!"

"Excellency, I swear that I have taken every care to learn the truth," pleaded the man. "She lives in a large flat in Cumberland Place, and her servant told me that her name was Lemair, and that she was the daughter of Sergius Lemair of Sergovia."

M. Goucouldis sat down heavily.

"This is terrible," he said, dry-lipped, "terrible! It is a plot! Oh, for one glimpse of Her Serene Highness the Duchess, for all her pranks and her shocks! Go quickly, find if His Highness has left the hotel, and ask him if I may wait upon him."

The Chief of Police departed, and returned with the announcement that Prince John had left a few minutes before.

All that happened on that afternoon seemed like a nightmare to the distracted diplomatist. It is said that he shook hands with a Foreign Office footman, and addressed a waiting chauffeur as "Your Grace." It seemed an eternity before the exigent rules of etiquette released him to hurry back to the hotel. The Prince had not returned, but ominous news came from his valet, who had been ordered to pack two suit-cases and reserve a compartment on the Continental Mail, which left that night.

At six o'clock came the Prince, flushed, exalted, bright-eyed. M. Goucouldis pulled himself together with an effort. He brought to his dissimulation the experience and training of a lifetime, and outwardly there was no evidence of the horror which consumed him when he knocked at the door of the Prince's suite and walked in, to greet his master with a profound bow.

"I have to tell Your Serene Highness that the Minister for Foreign Affairs was most sympathetic in regard to the question of our frontier, which will be adjusted... "

"I've got something to tell you of much more interest than the demarcation of our frontier," said John, "and I've a feeling that I'd better tell you without any preamble. Goucouldis, I was married this afternoon to the most beautiful woman in the world!"

The Chancellor's face was a mask.

"Your Highness has taken an extraordinary step, one which is not usual without conference with Your Highness's officers of state," he said.

"This is a matter which concerns me much more than my officers of state," said Prince John briefly.

His jaw was set, there was a look in his eyes which did not encourage the Chancellor's continuance; but Goucouldis had very much at stake, and princes to him were at best but pieces in a game.

"Your Highness is aware that, by the constitution of 1909, no marriage of the ruling Prince of Sergovia is recognised unless the marriage certificate bears my signature, or the signature of the chief officer of state, for the time being?"

The Prince looked at him oddly, took a cigarette from his case and lit it before he spoke.

"I am fairly well acquainted with the procedure," he said coolly. "But be that as it may, my marriage is irrevocable, and if the Diet does not accept—"

"It is not a question for the Diet, Your Highness," said the other suavely. "If I approve the marriage, the Diet approves. We are fortunate in possessing parliamentary institutions, even more fortunate in the fact that they count very little."

Their eyes met.

"I am bringing my wife to dinner to-night, Goucouldis," said John quietly. "Whatever views you may have upon the wisdom or unwisdom of my marriage, I trust that you will not communicate your disapproval to the lady of my choice. She was a Mademoiselle Lemair."

"So I understand," he said quietly.

"Oh, you knew, did you?" The Prince laughed. "What a sly old devil you are! Isn't she lovely? Am I not the most fortunate man in the world!"

The Chancellor was thinking rapidly; all the resources of diplomacy were not yet exhausted. Mademoiselle Lemair, patently an adventuress, might prove a more tractable subject than her husband. Moreover, he had most thoughtfully provided for such a situation as this, for in the constitution it was decreed that, if an undesirable wife voluntarily renounced her husband (for a consideration not stated), the marriage was ipso facto annulled. The Chancellor was no seer, but he had had a long and bitter experience of the matrimonial adventures of Sergovian princes, and this clause in the constitution had been accepted without comment by other Sergovian statesmen, who remembered a certain dancing-woman, taken from a low cabaret and elevated to the throne, in the 'seventies.

"I shall be most happy to meet Her Highness," he said, almost pleasantly. "But at the same time I must ask permission to explain to her, in my own way, the consequences to Your Highness which must necessarily follow this act."

John looked at him suspiciously.

"If by any chance you are thinking of inducing her to sign a renunciation, you may save yourself a whole lot of trouble," he said.

The Chancellor spread out his hands in a gesture of self- depreciation.

"I am an old man, Highness," he said. "Surely it is within my province to give advice to those who are younger and more inexperienced?"

It was eight o'clock when the new bride arrived, a tall, radiant being, dressed a little more daringly than the old-fashioned Chancellor cared to see; a dark-eyed, smiling girl, who met the challenge of his glance without faltering.

"A snake," he said to himself; "a green-and-yellow snake!"

Yet he was most friendly and most deferential through the meal that followed. It was not until the end that John of Sergovia began to feel uneasy. He took the Chancellor aside.

"Is it necessary that you should see the Princess?" he asked. "We are leaving by the eleven o'clock train—"

"It is very necessary, Highness," said the old man sorrowfully; "necessary for your happiness and for the happiness of Her Highness."

She was a Lemair all right! The boldness of her, the ready wit of her, the mercenary cunning of Sergius Lemair's daughter were all too apparent. Perhaps she shared some other of her father's qualities. He was a man not unsusceptible to the influence of money—the Chancellors of Sergovia seldom are. His price would be high, his daughter's price even higher; but the house could stand even their exorbitant demands.

John went upstairs to change, and the girl and the old man were left alone, and he thought he saw her bracing herself for the coming struggle.

He walked to the door and closed it after the Prince, and then came slowly back to the writing-table, on the side of which she was sitting.

"Highness, I am a very plain man, with only one tongue. You must realise, both from your associations with your illustrious father, and your knowledge of my country, that this marriage is disastrous to Sergovia."

"I am not thinking of Sergovia," she said quietly. "Does it occur to you that I may really love the Prince?"

That possibility had not occurred to the Chancellor, and he dismissed such an unlikely factor with a wave of his hand.

"I will not tell you that it is my earnest desire, and the desire of my colleagues, that this marriage should be instantly dissolved," he said. "I am a plain man, as I remarked before, and I talk the language which is understandable in every country."

He took from his pocket a paper and laid it on the table. One glance told her that it was the carefully prepared renunciation which she had expected to see, and she laughed.

"You will sign this, Highness," said the Chancellor, "and you will name your own price."

She looked up from the paper to him.

"The gold isn't coined that would buy my signature," she said.

And then, in a softer tone:

"Do you realise what you are doing?" he mouthed.

"Very well indeed I understand," she said.

She walked to where she had left her bag, opened it, and took out a long slip of paper, which she brought back to the table and laid before him. He saw that it was her marriage certificate, so recently written that the ink had not yet darkened.

"Your name across that certificate would make our marriage legal," she said softly. "Am I not a desirable princess for the people of Sergovia, or must they have"—she spoke deliberately —"a young and unknown Duchess, rather freakish in her habits... rather inclined to shock... even hardened Chancellors, with her disguises and masquerades?"

He stared at her and gasped.

"What—what?" he stammered.

"I met your Prince by accident," she said. "I had no design, no intention, of making him love me or of loving him. It was one of those queer strokes of fate that cannot be accounted for.... I told him my name was Nita. And the fun of this very vulgar flirtation so appealed to me that—"

"You're the Duchess!" The trembling finger pointed at her almost in accusation. "What a fool I've been!... Romance, of course... you wanted to shock me, you—you—Your Highness!"

His trembling hand took up the pen, his signature scrawled across the marriage certificate. She blotted it carefully.

"Romance, of course!" he babbled on. "I ought to have known that something like that would have happened.... How wonderful! And to think that I was worrying my head because I couldn't arrange a meeting with the Duchess, and all the time she was arranging matters ever so much better than an old blunderer like myself could have done! It is wonderful!"

The telephone bell rang at that moment, and a well-known voice called Goucouldis.

"My friend, I have arranged that meeting for you with the Duchess. She is here—"

"Here!" shrieked Goucouldis. "You're mad! I beg your pardon, Highness. I mean... the Duchess is here."

"Then she's in two places at once," said the jovial voice.

The Chancellor dropped the receiver and turned his ashen face to the girl.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"I am Marie Lemair," she said. "Didn't you read the marriage certificate?... why, Chancellor, I really believe that you are romantic after all!"

"Married . . and approved!" he said hollowly.

"And your father..."

She nodded.

"Father will be pleased," she said, "and Sergovia will be pleased. Be a dear and say that you are pleased too."

But the Chancellor could say nothing.