Chapter Eighteen. Told in the Café Métropole.

Weary and fagged Waldron descended from the sleeping-car at the Gare de Lyon in Paris twenty hours later and dispatched a telegram to the address Lola had given him. Then he drove in a taxi across the French capital, and next morning found himself in the Grand Hotel in gay little Brussels—awaiting a reply.

About eleven o’clock it came—a message by express making an appointment to meet at noon at the Café Métropole a little farther up the boulevard.

Hubert was wasting no time. He had not lost a single moment since leaving the Eternal City, and on that rush northward his mind was ever centred upon the crisis between the two Powers which had evidently occurred.

He had left word with Peters that if any person called, or anyone rang up on the telephone, the reply was that he had left Rome on urgent business for three or four days. On no account was his man to say whither he had gone.

He flung off his coat and cast himself upon the bed to rest for an hour. But the noise in the busy boulevard outside was irritating, worse even than the roar of the great international express which had borne him half across Europe.

Presently he washed, changed his clothes, and then went forth to the café, a popular rendezvous which he had known when, six years before, he had served temporarily at the Brussels Legation.

It was a huge, square, open place, with walls tiled to represent various Bacchanalian pictures, and many tables, upon half of which were laid cloths for the déjeuner. Being winter there were only a dozen tables set on the pavement outside, but in summer there are a hundred spread over the broad footway, and in an evening the place, being a highly papular resort, is crowded to overflowing by the chattering, bearded Bruxellois and their female friends.

At that hour, however, the place was nearly empty as Hubert entered, his sharp eyes gazing around. Then suddenly he saw a youngish man in grey overcoat and wearing a Tyrolese hat of dark green plush, seated in a far corner.

He rose and smiled as Waldron entered, and the latter instantly recognised him as the secret lover—the man who had travelled with them down the Nile, and whose attitude towards Lola had so completely disarmed all suspicion.

The two men lifted hats to each other in the foreign manner, and then Hubert exclaimed with a pleasant smile:

“This is a strange renewal of our acquaintance, M’sieur Pujalet, is it not?”

“Hush?” exclaimed the other warningly. “Not Pujalet here—Petrovitch, if you please!” and a mysterious expression crossed his dark, rather handsome, features.

“As you wish, of course,” replied Waldron with a bright laugh. “You, of course, know the object of my mission? The—”

He hesitated, for he was naturally cautious, and it had suddenly occurred to him at that second that this Frenchman was, no doubt, in ignorance of the true station of the woman he loved, just as he himself had been. So the word “Princess” died from his lips.

“Mademoiselle asked you to give me a letter, did she not?” said the man politely in French. “I am sure, M’sieur Waldron, I do not know how to thank you sufficiently for making this long journey in order to meet me.”

“No thanks are necessary,” the other replied. “I am simply Mam’zelle’s messenger,” he laughed, producing the letter from his pocket-book and handing it to him.

“Ah! but this is really a great service you have done both of us,” he declared earnestly. “One that I fear I shall never be able to repay,” he declared, taking the letter in his eager hands.

Waldron, watching keenly, saw that the man’s fingers trembled visibly. That letter contained some message of greatest import to him, without a doubt. Yet he held it unopened—not daring, it seemed, to break the seal and learn the truth.

“Candidly,” Waldron said, now sitting back easily in a chair opposite Pujalet, “I wondered why it could not be entrusted to the post. It would in that case have reached you two days earlier.”

“Ah! there are some things one does not exactly care to trust to the post even though registered.”

“If a packet is insured it is rarely lost—even in Italy where the post is so uncertain and insecure. The Administration of Posts and Telegraphs does not care to be called upon to pay an indemnity.”

Pujalet did not reply. And by his silence Waldron was convinced that he feared the letter might have been tampered with and opened—that the secret it contained might be revealed.

If this were so, then, after all, it was more than probable that he did really know Lola’s actual identity!

And again, what had Her Highness meant when she had hinted at blackmail! Why, too, had not Pujalet travelled to Rome himself instead of burying himself in Brussels.

From that moment Waldron viewed Henri Pujalet with suspicion. Why should he, a Frenchman, be passing there as a Servian, and living in obscurity? His manner, from the very first moment when he had seen him with Lola in his arms under those dark palms in far-off Wady Haifa, had been suspicious. For some reason—why, he could not himself tell—Hubert felt a bitter antagonism towards the Frenchman. Surely it was a foolish fancy of Her Royal Highness to allow herself to love that man—a person whose movements were, on the face of them, not those of an honourable man.

Yet, on the other hand, Waldron remembered how devoted the pair had seemed towards each other. And it was only because of this, because of his intense interest and admiration for Lola, that he had declared himself her friend, and had undertaken that mad rush across Europe on her behalf.

“Please disregard me entirely,” he said to the Frenchman, “if you wish to open your letter,” and taking out his cigarette-case he selected one and slowly lit it, the while covertly watching the man before him as he broke the seal and drew forth a sheet of paper.

Pujalet eagerly devoured what was written there, while Waldron, from the opposite side of the little marble table, watched his countenance keenly.

He saw a sudden expression of blank amazement. Then his sharp, dark eyes narrowed, and surprise gave way to a distinct expression of evil.

Whatever the Princess’s missive contained, it certainly caused him both annoyance and alarm. The man’s astute cleverness, however, was shown by the manner in which he made pretence of disregarding it and treating it with nonchalance.

He smiled as he looked again into the face of his companion, though it was but a strange, sickly smile, like that seen upon a criminal’s face on listening to his sentence. And without a word he signalled to a waiter and called for a cognac.

Waldron refused his invitation to drink, but watched him as he tossed off the petit verre at a single gulp.

“I regret if the news I have brought is unwelcome,” Waldron remarked, as he drew slowly at his cigarette and watched the smoke curling upwards. “But m’sieur must forgive me.”

“Oh, no,” he laughed, “the news is not unwelcome in the least. At first I regarded it as such, but on mature reflection I see it is not,” he declared, quite unperturbed.

But Waldron knew from the man’s manner that he was lying. He felt that Henri Pujalet was not the charming, educated man which he had believed him to be on the Nile.

“I hope Mademoiselle has not been—well, indiscreet,” the Englishman remarked with a smile. “Ladies so often are.”

“Ah, yes. Well—she has, truth to tell, been just a little indiscreet. But it is nothing,” he declared, “really nothing whatever.”

“Is there any reply I can convey to her?” asked Waldron. “I am leaving for Paris at four o’clock.”

“So soon—eh? Will you not remain and be my guest at dinner this evening?” urged the other. “Do. You must be tired and want rest.”

“Ah, no. I much regret, M’sieur Pujalet. But I have to be back at my post at the Embassy at once. I travel to Italy direct—just as I came.”

“Of course. You are a diplomat! I clean forgot!” exclaimed the man before him. “Ah! yours must be a most interesting profession! I have several good friends at the foreign Embassies in Paris. But I heard yesterday that trouble seems to be brewing in Europe—another war-cloud, they say.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Waldron, in an instant interested. “I know nothing of it. Who told you?”

Pujalet seemed upon his guard in an instant.

“Oh—er—I—well, somebody here in this café last night was telling us that secret mobilisation orders had been given.”

“Secret mobilisation! Where?”

The Frenchman hesitated and reflected.

“In Austria—I believe,” was his reply. “But, really, I did not take much notice.”

Hubert Waldron held his breath for a few seconds. Was the great secret already out? The political gossip of the cafés was very often correct. “Was the man unknown to you?”

“Quite. While I was seated over yonder with a friend of mine, a banker of Liège, the man came in, greeted his friend, and joined us. And then they began to chat. Personally, I’m tired of all these war alarms. They come too frequently, being set about by unscrupulous operators on the Bourses.”

“Then you don’t believe the rumour—eh?”

“I never believe rumours which I hear in such circumstances as those. Not until I have some confirmation,” the man declared.

“I have not seen the papers to-day. Is there any mention of the crisis?” Hubert asked.

“None that I have seen,” Pujalet replied. “It is merely an alarmist rumour, no doubt.”

Waldron lit another cigarette and reflected deeply.

It was distinctly curious and certainly most alarming that the fact which was regarded as such a dead secret in Vienna should have been openly discussed in that café in Brussels on the previous night. On his journey he had carefully watched the principal French and Italian papers, but there was no mention whatever of the affair. Besides, before leaving Rome he had arranged that if anything fresh leaked out regarding the crisis a telegram should meet him on his arrival at the Gare de Lyon.

With that innate cautiousness and shrewd discretion which was inborn in him, and which had placed him above others in the profession of diplomacy, he carefully questioned Henri Pujalet further, asking him the opinion held by the stranger regarding the pending crisis, and other such-like questions.

But the mind of the man seated before him seemed an utter blank regarding what had transpired.

“All I know is that the man told us that Austria is secretly preparing for war, and that in a few days Europe would be aflame. I naturally put him down to be one of those alarmist cranks with whom one so often comes into contact—a man who exaggerates the gossip of the Bourse and repeats it as actual fact with embroidery of his own.”

“Your friend was a banker?” Waldron remarked. “Perhaps the man had received some inside knowledge from Vienna for the purpose of operating on the Bourse?”

“He may have done,” replied the other thoughtfully. “But really I don’t know. I didn’t take much notice of his words.”

Waldron said nothing for a few moments.

“And your reply to Mam’zelle?” he asked at last.

“If I bring it to you at the Grand by three o’clock will that be convenient to you?”

“Quite,” was the reply, and then the two men parted, Hubert taking a taxi up to the British Legation in the Rue de Spa, where he had a pleasant luncheon with Hugh Bennett, the Minister, and his wife, returning to the Grand at three o’clock, where in his room he received a sealed letter from the Frenchman’s hand.

It was addressed “To Mademoiselle Lola Duprez” and not to the Princess Luisa of Savoy, as Hubert had half expected.

“I can, alas! do no more than thank you most warmly and deeply both on my own behalf and upon Mam’zelle’s,” said Pujalet in his polite Parisian manner. “By coming here you have rendered a great service to us both—one that I can never in all my life forget.”

But Hubert Waldron, though he placed the letter in his pocket, held the man in distinct antipathy. He could read men’s minds better than most of his fellows. It was his profession as a diplomat.

And in the heart of Henri Pujalet, that man who had come up out of the desert from nowhere, he felt that there was a hidden yet distinct evil.

Upon him on that grey, wintry afternoon as he drove to the station to catch the express back to Paris there fell a feeling that a crisis—a dangerous and dramatic crisis—was imminent.

Ah! had he but known the truth—had he had but sight of what the Princess had written in that fatal letter he had conveyed to her lover—how differently would he have acted!

But, alas! he travelled back to the Eternal City bearing the bitter reply of the Princess’s secret lover—a reply by which her own young life was held in the balance, which crushed her soul, which held her in breathless terror, and, alas! caused her to long for the dark oblivion of death.