Chapter Thirty One. The Bond Revealed.

“The whole affair last night was a complete fiasco, thanks to you!”

“I know it, alas!”

“And all through your infernal friendship with Waldron?”

“I cannot help it. I did my very best, Henri.”

“Your best!” sneered the Frenchman. “You actually allowed him to take the tracings from you when you already had them in your possession! Faugh! It is all too childish.”

“Childish!” Lola echoed in anger. “Ah, yes, I know. What affection have you now for me—you who declared that you were mine—that—”

“Love is out of the question,” the man replied brutally. “With me it is a matter of business. We must all live. You—a Royal Princess—are in no want. I, agent of the Foreign Office at Vienna, am in constant want of money. You gave me plans that were useless. I merely asked you to contrive to obtain for me the missing tracings.”

“In return for my letters to you!” she cried, in bitter reproach.

But the man merely laughed as he replied:

“Have I not told you, my dear Lola, it is with me purely a matter of finance, not of sentiment.” They were together in a small, plainly furnished sitting-room on the first floor of the mediaeval Palazzo Bisenzi, now occupied by the Hôtel Belle Arti, in ignorance that every word spoken could be overheard by the Englishman and his companion.

The two latter were listening intently at the door of an adjoining room—for in Italian hotels the communicating doors are always an invitation to the eavesdropper. The old place had frescoed walls and ceilings, and in some rooms the floors were of marble.

“And because I have failed, you will carry out your disgraceful threat—eh? You told me so on the telephone this morning,” she asked in a low, nervous voice.

“You have failed purposely—because you did not intend that I should gain knowledge of that military secret. I know how strenuously active that English friend of yours has been in endeavouring to elucidate the mystery of the theft—and now, thanks to you, he has succeeded,” replied Mijoux Flobecq, alias Henri Pujalet, the well-known spy of Austria—the man to whom, though young, the authorities in Vienna had practically entrusted the direction of her wide network of spies across the face of Europe. So cleverly had he concealed his identity that even Ghelardi—the great Ghelardi, whose boast it was that he knew every secret agent of importance in Europe—had been utterly unaware that Henri Pujalet and Mijoux Flobecq were one and the same!

Hubert had long ago heard him spoken of as a man whose phenomenal successes in espionage had been most remarkable for their cleverness, ingenuity, and daring. The foreign policy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had practically been based upon his reports—as that of Italy was based upon those of Luigi Ghelardi—and in every chancellerie in Europe the name of Flobecq was synonymous of all that was crafty, cunning, and unscrupulous.

The official head of Austria’s Secret Service was a stout and rather slow-speaking, plethoric man of middle-age, who had graduated under Azeff in Russia, and who was well-known to Ghelardi. But Mijoux Flobecq was a man of meteoric fame, a man who had recently come to be regarded in almost legendary light as one of the most remarkable of the unseen and unknown characters in European espionage.

There are several others, Bylandt of Berlin, Captain Hetherington of London, Gomez of Petersburg, and the mysterious and elusive Monsieur X. of the Quai D’Orsay. Diplomats know them by name, and are too well aware of their successes. But not one of them has ever been identified in the flesh.

Lola uttered a loud protest against the allegation that she had purposely played into the Englishman’s hands, and then turned and reproached him bitterly for his heartless and brutal treatment.

“I have failed through no want of tact,” she cried. “Was it not clearly to my own advantage to preserve my honour—now, alas! that you stand revealed in your true light—that I should act as you directed and become a thief?”

“You used the safe key I gave you with great success on the first occasion—”

“Because I was in ignorance of the terrible gravity of my action,” she interrupted. “You told me that the plans were of no real consequence, but if you could obtain them it would put you in the good graces of your firm in Paris. You told me that your firm were Government contractors who were seeking to learn certain details in order that they might tender to our Ministry for the construction of the forts. I never dreamed the truth. I had no idea that you were Mijoux Flobecq, the spy of Austria! Not until three days after I had handed you the plans were my suspicions aroused by some remark which His Majesty dropped while speaking with General Cataldi after one of the State banquets. Then, making a few inquiries in secret, aided by my friend, Pietro Olivieri, I was horrified to discover the ghastly truth,” she said. “I found that you—the man who had declared your profound love for me—had practised a most wicked deception. You had induced me to hand over one of the most important of our State secrets to our enemies in Vienna!”

“It was useless without the key,” he remarked, quite unaffected by the bitterness of her reproach.

“I committed a theft for which others were suspected, because of my love for you,” she went on in a low, hard tone. “You, as Henri Pujalet, had very cleverly led me to believe you had no idea that I was any other than Lola Duprez, niece of old Jules Gigleux of Paris. Yet you knew my real identity all the time! You had laid your plans cleverly, and made me believe that you spoke the truth when you swore undying devotion to me. For nearly nine months you made pretence to love me, and wrote me many letters, to which I naturally responded. Our stolen interviews took place in many cities, but you had always one fixed idea—the coup which you would one day make with my assistance. At last, on that occasion when at midnight I met you on the road to Tivoli, you put before me a proposition. To save you from bankruptcy, and in order that your position might be assured with your firm in Paris, you begged me to obtain the plans of those frontier fortresses—to steal them! You had, it seemed, intimate inside knowledge of all the arrangements at our Ministry of War. You actually described the very portfolio in which they were kept, and knew the very hour at which they would be placed in the Minister’s safe, to which you even gave me a duplicate key.”

The man only laughed aloud at her chagrin.

“I now know how you had met General Cataldi at Biarritz, and had, by a clever ruse, taken a wax impression of his safe key, and how, indeed, for months you had been contemplating the theft, feeling certain that my love for you would be strong enough to induce me to fall your helpless victim. Well, I fell. Yes, I believed in you, Henri—believed that you really loved me. I sacrificed all for your sake. But it never crossed my mind that your love was only a hollow pretence, that you were fooling me with your soft-spoken speeches, and that you were the enemy of my country or a professional spy.”

“You could have had me arrested,” he laughed. “Why didn’t you?”

“Ah, when I realised what I had done I begged you to return the plans I had stolen. Mr Waldron conveyed my imploring message to you in Brussels and what was your reply? That I must remain silent—that the key plan was wanted—and that if I did not consent to help you to obtain it you would hand over my letters to you for publication in the Matin!”

“That is exactly what I intend now to do,” was his cold reply. “Our bargain was that I would return your letters on condition that you obtained the tracings of the key.”

“I failed to do that,” she cried frantically. “I was detected.”

“By Waldron. Because you intended that you should be caught in the act, and thus prevented from carrying out your part of the contract.”

“But surely you will give me back my letters!” she implored eagerly. “You will not hound me—a helpless girl—to death by my own hand! I could not bear the exposure, for the honour of my House.”

“You should have thought of all that before,” he laughed mockingly. “The bargain was fair enough, and you accepted readily.”

“Because I could not bear exposure. Think what the publication of those letters will mean to me. In them I have admitted committing a theft. I—a Royal Princess—have betrayed my own country?”

“You are not the first woman who has sacrificed her life for her love,” he answered, quite regardless of her emotion.

“But have you no pity for me, no remorse?” she cried in frantic despair.

“I repeat that, to me, this is not a matter of sentiment. All I required was the cipher key plan—which you actually had in your possession and gave up to Waldron. I was in the Ministry that night in the garb of a waiter. I watched him follow you into the Minister’s private cabinet, and I saw Ghelardi go in later. He came out, and presently you came out with Waldron. I followed you both down to the vestibule, but from your faces I knew that you had been discovered.”

“Yes, Mijoux Flobecq,” she cried in sudden defiance, “the game is up, and the honour of Italy is saved. The timely entry of Mr Waldron into that room has averted a European war!”

“And brought exposure and disaster upon yourself,” answered the man in harsh tones. “Within a week from to-day Europe will read in the Paris Press a most interesting correspondence which will reflect anything but honour upon the Royal House of Savoy.”

“Then you really intend to crush me, and send me to my death—eh?”

“I intend to act exactly as I have said,” was the fellow’s firm response. “When my mind is made up I never alter it.”

“So this is how you repay me for all my sacrifice for you—eh?” she asked with poignant bitterness, and a catch in her voice which was distinctly audible by the two men listening.

“The brute,” whispered Waldron loudly to his companion. “He shall answer to me for this!”

“But I appeal to you,” she implored; “I—”

“It is useless. I gave you an excellent opportunity of recovering your letters, but you have not taken it. The bargain, I repeat, was a fair and straightforward one. You wanted your letters—I wanted the key plan. But—” and he hesitated as though a sudden suggestion had crossed his mind. “Just wait a few moments. I have forgotten something in my room. I will not be a minute or two—and then we can resume this highly interesting conversation.”

And the two men listening breathlessly heard the door open and shut, and then the silence was broken only by Lola’s low, despairing sobs within.