Her Royal Highness: A Romance of the Chancelleries of Europe

“I shall act exactly as I think proper,” was the spy’s indignant reply.

“You will think proper to hand me over those letters – letters of an innocent girl who has been misled by as clever and cunning a plot as has ever been conceived in the whole history of espionage. I admit that you, Mijoux Flobecq, are an artist. But in this case, you have been betrayed by the patriotism of your unfortunate victim.”

“Ah! She has told you then!” he remarked with a smile of contempt.

“No, I watched and found out for myself,” was Hubert’s reply. “The key plan of which you had so ingeniously contrived to obtain possession, is safe in my hands, and – ”

“Because she handed it over to you!” he cried. “Because she grew afraid at the last second. All women do! It seems that her love for me waned,” he added in a strange voice.

“That may be. But can a woman ever really love a man who is suddenly revealed to her as an enemy?” queried the diplomat. “No. You were amazingly clever, M’sieur Flobecq, but your estimate of human nature was entirely wrong. As soon as she knew that you were a spy of Italy’s hereditary enemy, Austria, her love turned to hatred. That was but natural.”

“And she betrayed me?”

“No, she did not. There, you are quite mistaken,” was Hubert’s quick response. “It will surprise you to know that I was in the Hôtel Belle Arti and overheard every word that passed between you. It was there, for the first time, that I realised the truth. And – ” He looked straight into the eyes of the spy. ”… and I tell you openly and frankly that I am her friend!”

“Then it was your threat I overheard while speaking to her! Well, and what can you do, pray? She has misled me.”

“Do!” echoed Waldron, still standing with his back to the door of the little, shabbily furnished reading-room. “Do! I merely ask you for those letters.”

“Which you will never get. I have them here safe in my pocket,” and he drew out a bulky envelope which he exhibited in triumph. “At noon to-day I shall sell them to my friend, Stein, who can easily place them in the proper quarter. It will be my revenge, my dear m’sieur,” he laughed.

“And a pretty revenge – eh? – upon a defenceless girl whom you have deceived – whom you have met in all sorts of odd, out-of-the-way places. I saw you together as far away as Wady Haifa, in the Sudan. And I watched you all the time you were together in Egypt.”

“I think that to discuss this affair further is quite useless,” Flobecq said with an annoyed look. “You can rest assured that neither your bluff, nor any other influence that you could bring to bear upon me, would ever induce me to give up the letters to you.”

“That is your decision – eh? Reflect – because your defiance may cost you more than you imagine.”

“Bah! 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.

“Seven months ago there was an incident at Toulon Arsenal – regarding the Admiralty wireless station there – and you escaped,” Hubert remarked in a low, meaning voice.

“Well?”

“Well, that incident is not yet forgotten,” the Englishman said with a curious smile.

“I don’t follow you.”

“Well, in this hotel there are three agents of police now waiting to place you under arrest as a spy of Austria,” he said very quietly; “therefore I think, M’sieur Flobecq, you really must admit that, in this particular game, I just now hold most of the honours – eh?”

The spy’s face darkened. He saw himself checkmated for the first time by a better and more ingenious man.

“You will hand me over those letters at once,” Waldron went on, “or I shall call into this room the inspector of the Sûreté who is anxious to arrest you on charges of espionage. And they have been wanting you now for fully seven months, remember. But they are not yet tired. Oh, dear no! The Sûreté is never tired of waiting. If it is ten years, the penalty for espionage in France is the same!” Hubert added, with a grin of triumph.

In an instant Mijoux Flobecq flew into a passion, declaring that the Englishman should never regain possession of the incriminating correspondence for which he had so heartlessly practised blackmail upon Her Royal Highness.

“I defy you!” he cried with a sneer. “I have arranged the price with my friend, Stein. And he shall have the letters for publication – to reveal to Europe how, even in Royal circles, traitors exist?”

“Traitors!” cried Hubert, advancing towards him threateningly. “Repeat that word, and, by gad! I’ll strangle you – you blackguard! The Princess Luisa is no traitor. You have held her in an evil bondage – you, the agent of your taskmasters in Vienna – you, who with your devilish cunning, hoped to betray Italy into Austria’s hands.”

Hubert Waldron was intensely angry, now that he had cast that outrageous reflection upon Lola’s honour.

“Now, once and for all, I demand those letters?” he added, facing Flobecq very determinedly.

“And I, on my part, refuse to give them to you.”

“Then you are prepared to accept the consequences – eh?”

“Quite.”

“You refuse to release an unfortunate girl from the consequences of a foolish infatuation?”

“She has betrayed me. Therefore I feel myself entirely at liberty to act just as I deem fit.”

“Act as you wish, M’sieur Flobecq, but I warn you that it is at your own peril. I am prepared to endeavour to give you your liberty in exchange for those letters.”

“I have my liberty. I do not wish to bargain for it with you!” laughed the other in open defiance.

“For the last time, I ask you to hand me over that packet.”

“And I refuse.”

“Give the letters to me, I say?” cried Hubert, and, exasperated by the fellow’s demeanour, he sprang suddenly upon him.

He was strong and athletic, and the insults which the spy had cast upon Lola had caused him to lose his temper. His hands were at Flobecq’s throat.

A second later, however, the spy drew a revolver, and only just in the nick of time did the Englishman manage to turn the barrel aside ere it went off.

Then ensued a fierce and desperate struggle for the weapon – indeed a fight for life.

Hubert held Flobecq’s right wrist in a grip of iron, at the same time endeavouring to obtain possession of the envelope containing the letters. In this latter, however, he was unsuccessful.

Again the weapon went off in the mêlée, the bullet embedding itself in the ceiling, while the two men, locked in each other’s deadly embrace, fell against a table, smashing a large porcelain vase to fragments.

The reports aroused the alarm of the agents of police who, a few seconds later, rushed into the room where they found the two men struggling desperately. But just as they entered, accompanied by the proprietor of the hotel in a state of the utmost alarm, Flobecq discharged his weapon a third time. The bullet struck a huge mirror, shattering it into a thousand pieces.

With the aid of the police agents, Flobecq was, with difficulty, secured, whereupon Hubert – with the one thought uppermost in his mind, that of Lola’s honour – placed his hand swiftly into the inner pocket of his adversary’s coat and abstracted the envelope containing the fateful letters.

“That man is a thief!” yelled the spy, white to the lips with fury. “Arrest him! Arrest him, I say. He has stolen my property.”

Next second, as Hubert drew back and before anyone was aware of it, the man under arrest snatched a heavy police revolver from the hand of one of the men holding him, and fired point-blank at the Englishman.

Again, in the spy’s passion of hatred, his shot went wide of the mark, and Hubert stood unharmed, the letters already safe in his pocket.

In a moment all three men, finding their prisoner armed, drew back. Then in an instant he had freed himself.

His back was set against the wall, and flourishing the heavy weapon he held them all at bay.

“You shan’t take me!” he shrieked in defiance. “Touch me again, any of you, and I’ll shoot you dead!” he shouted in desperation.

And by the distorted expression of his livid face they all knew he meant it.

Berton, the inspector of the Sûreté, made a sudden dash forward, in order to again secure the man so long wanted for espionage, but in less time than it takes to describe the dramatic scene he received a bullet in the shoulder.

Again Flobecq, still holding them all at bay and defying them to arrest him, fired at Waldron, once more missing him, and then firing two further shots at random, one taking effect upon the hand of the elder of the two French agents.

Then the third man, finding his two companions wounded, and himself at the mercy of the frenzied spy, raised his own revolver, took careful aim and fired in self-defence.

The shot took instant effect.

Mijoux Flobecq, the handsome adventurer, shot through the heart, fell forward, face downwards, dead.

Chapter Thirty Four.

The Truth is Told

At the Quirinale the last State Ball of the season was in full swing.

The Palace was ablaze with light. In the great courtyard, where the sentries paced, there were constant arrivals and departures. All aristocratic and official Rome was there. Smart uniforms were everywhere, and in the great ballroom with its wonderful chandeliers the scene was perhaps the most brilliant of any to be witnessed in the whole of Europe.

In a small salon in the private apartments far removed from the music and glitter of the Court – a delightful and artistic room with white-enamelled walls, and furniture and carpet of old rose – stood Hubert Waldron, who had only arrived back in the Eternal City an hour before. He had hastily changed into uniform, and stood there with Her Royal Highness, Princess Luisa, whose slim figure was a tragic one, notwithstanding her handsome Court gown of white satin, and the black watered ribbon of her decoration in her corsage.

He had just related, as briefly as he could, the exciting chase from Orvieto, a thousand miles, to Paris, and the dramatic meeting in the frowsy little hotel in the Rue d’Amsterdam.

“And here, Lola, are your letters,” he said calmly, drawing from his tunic the envelope which he had sealed in Paris without prying into its contents, save to reassure himself that they were letters in the handwriting of the woman he loved so devotedly.

“My letters!” she gasped, casting her ivory fan aside and eagerly taking them in her gloved and trembling hands. “Then – then you have recovered them!” she cried in sudden glee. “You – you have saved me, Mr Waldron, for to-night I – I confess to you, my friend – I had the fixed intention to end it all. I could not bear to live and face the terrible exposure, for I knew not from day to day if one of the scurrilous papers in Paris might print my letters – the confession of a woman who, though a Princess of a Royal House, was also a spy, because she was fooled – tricked into love!”

“Lola,” he said, still speaking earnestly and very calmly, “you need have no further fear of that man. He came near bringing you to ruin – nay to death. But the peril is now at an end.”

“At an end – how?” she asked.

“I begged of you to leave all to me – that I would settle the account with him. I have brought you back your letters,” he said, very gravely. “You need have no further fear, because the scoundrel who made such dastardly pretence of loving you, Lola, is dead!”

“Dead!” she gasped with startled, wide-open eyes.

“Yes; shot dead by the Paris police who had wanted him for espionage. He fired at them, and they retaliated in self-defence.”

“Then my enemy is dead!” she exclaimed in a whisper, standing motionless, her big, expressive eyes fixed straight before her.

“Yes. The peril which threatened you, Lola, and the very existence of the Italian nation, is at an end.”

“And you, Mr Waldron,” she cried in a voice broken by emotion, turning to him suddenly with hand outstretched, “you have risked your own life and have averted a war in Europe, of which I, in my unfortunate ignorance, was so nearly the cause.”

“Because your actions and your movements have been – well, just a little too unconventional,” he laughed, bowing gallantly over her outstretched hand and kissing it fervently.

She knew the truth. She knew how devotedly the Englishman loved her. And she, in return, reciprocated his affection. Had she not, in that moment of her ecstasy, responded to his well-remembered kisses?

He was holding her hand, gazing long and deeply into those fathomless eyes of hers. He was about to speak – again to confess to her his great all-consuming passion, when a hand was placed upon the door knob and they sprang apart, as of a sudden His Majesty the King, a brilliant figure in his uniform and glittering decorations, entered.

“Ah, Waldron?” he cried in his usual cheery way, “I received your message, and came here to find you. They told me that you were here, with Lola. Well? You have a report to make, I suppose. What is it? Lola,” he said, addressing Her Highness, “I fear I must ask you to leave us. I have some business to talk over with Mr Waldron.”

“I ask Your Majesty’s pardon,” the diplomat said; “but I would beg that Her Royal Highness be allowed to remain. My report closely concerns her.”

“Concerns her! How?”

“If Your Majesty will have patience with me I will explain,” Hubert replied, and then, as briefly and tersely as possible, he related to the King the series of startling and exciting events recorded in the preceding chapters – how Lola, at the instigation of the Austrian spy, Flobecq, in guise of lover, was induced to go in secret to the private safe of the Minister of War and thence abstract the plans of the new frontier defences. He explained, too, how these being found useless without the key – though in secret Austria mobilised her army in readiness for a descent upon her neighbour at the moment that key was forthcoming – Flobecq, the cunning scoundrel in the employ of the Vienna Foreign Office, had blackmailed the unfortunate Princess by threatening to publish her letters if she did not dare further – and steal the key plan.

“And you, it seems, entered His Excellency’s cabinet just in the very nick of time,” the King said, both surprised yet gratified. “Yes, Waldron, I am seldom mistaken in my man,” he went on, “and when I called you and asked you to assist me, as your respected father assisted my own father, I felt that I could trust you. My confidence has not been misplaced. By your staunch friendship to me – not loyalty, because you are loyal only to your own Sovereign, my good brother – you have saved my beloved nation, saved an international complication which must have cost Europe a terrible war. And more – you have saved my madcap little niece’s honour. And why?” he demanded suddenly.

Hubert did not answer for several moments.

“Well, I will be frank, Your Majesty,” he responded. “Because ever since we met in Egypt and I believed her to be Lola Duprez, niece of the cantankerous old Gigleux, we have been most excellent friends. I have only done my duty towards her as a friend, and towards you as Sovereign of Italy, at whose Court I am humbly attached as servant of my own King.”

“Waldron!” exclaimed His Majesty, “to-night I sleep securely for the first time for several months. The war-cloud has been dispersed – and by you. You have my heartfelt thanks – the thanks of a man who has the misfortune perhaps of being born a King.” And he gripped the diplomat’s hand warmly in his own, and looked into his face as only one man can look at another who returns thanks from the very depths of his heart. “We can only reflect, Waldron,” added the King in a low, earnest voice, “upon how many lives might have been sacrificed, of what ruin and desolation must have resulted and of the terrible horrors of modern warfare that have been averted by your devotion to Lola, to myself, and to my own beloved Italy!”

But Hubert Waldron was thinking only of Lola. His Majesty’s eulogy was lost upon him.

He bowed low, and declared himself as the devoted servant of Italy and her Sovereign, as his father had been before him.

Again the King grasped his hand, and then and there declared that he bestowed upon him the coveted Grand Cross of the Order of Saints, Maurice and Lazarus, an order which very few of the Italian Cabinet Ministers possessed, and one of the principal distinctions of Italy.

Afterwards His Majesty bade him a cheery addio, and, turning, left the room.

For some moments Hubert stood facing Lola, without speaking.

What could he say?

“Lola,” he exclaimed at last, “there is one point which still remains to be cleared up. Tell me. How did you manage to enter the General’s room while the corporal, Tonini, was there on sentry duty?”

“Tonini knew me well. He is engaged to marry my maid, Renata. I entered the room on pretence of paying a visit to General Cataldi, and finding that His Excellency was not there, I waited in the room a few minutes, during which time I opened the safe. Then I called him in and made him promise solemnly to tell no one that I had paid the General a visit, explaining that I had come to crave the promotion of one of my friends – a captain of cavalry – and was not desirous of the fact becoming public property. He understood the scandal at which I hinted, and therefore loyally preserved silence – even when he knew that the plans had been stolen. Imagine my horror when I realised the full gravity of my action. I had handed over the plans to Austria! At once – ignorant of the inquiry you were making – I called a man I knew, Pietro Olivieri, an ex-police officer, and begged him to assist me to recover the plans. But, alas! he failed. And then Flobecq, holding out the threat to publish my letters, forced me to make an attempt to gain the tracings which formed the key.” And she drew her hand wearily across her brow as though to clear her brain of those terrible memories.

A few moments later Hubert stretched forth his hand in farewell.

He loved her with all his heart and all his soul, but, alas! he knew too well the wide barrier of birth that lay between them.

He saw, too, in Lola’s face a sweet, passionate love look, that one expression which a woman can never feign. By that alone he knew his affection was reciprocated.

The cup of bitterness was at his lips. But with supreme self-control he dashed it from him.

To speak would only bring upon her grief and sorrow. Yes. Silence was best, after all, even though it cost him all that he held most dear in the world – best for her sake, and for his.

He took her white-gloved hand in his, and bowing over it till his lips touched its back, wished her a courtly addio.

“But how can I ever thank you sufficiently for saving me, Hubert?” she cried, addressing him by his Christian name, hot tears welling in her great dark eyes.

“I desire no thanks, Lola,” was his low, earnest reply. “If sometimes you remember me as your friend – as your most true, and most devoted friend – then that is an all-sufficient recompense for me.”

His voice trembled with emotion and she saw a strange expression at the corners of his mouth.

“But I will see you soon – to-morrow – eh? Where?” she said eagerly.

“No,” he answered briefly. “I am leaving Rome.”

“Leaving Rome!” she echoed in dismay.

“Yes. I am applying for transfer to another post. There are reasons why I cannot remain here any longer. I could not bear it. You know why.” And he looked her straight in the face, still holding her hand strongly in his.

She averted her gaze and sighed deeply.

He saw the hot tears upon her cheeks, therefore slowly he drew her towards him in his strong arms, and impressing one last fervent kiss upon her cold white brow, released her, and with bowed head left the room with a whispered:

“Addio – addio, my own beloved!”

The door closed, and for a moment she stood motionless as a statue.

Then in sudden frenzy, with wild despair in her eyes, she threw herself upon her face on the rose-coloured silk couch, and there burst into a fit of violent sobbing – sobbing as though her young heart would break.

The sun of her life had, at that moment, been suddenly extinguished.

Several years have now brought their changes.

A new King rules in Italy. He has a new entourage and a new Cabinet, but the Princess Luisa stills lives at the Palace, sweet, handsome, yet ever pale and thoughtful.

Her acts of charity and her blameless life have rendered her highly popular in the Eternal City, and when she drives out in one of the royal automobiles the men raise their hats and the populace cry after her, “Viva Luisa! Viva Luisa di Savoia!”

The giddy world of Rome has often wondered why Her Royal Highness, so bright and vivacious, has never married, though her name has frequently been coupled by gossips with that of one or other of the eligible Royal Princes of Europe, notably the Crown Prince of Saxony.

The truth, however, has never leaked out, for his late Majesty, King Umberto, who alone knew his niece’s secret, never betrayed it, even to his Queen.

Sir Hubert Waldron, K.C.M.G., is now British Ambassador at St. Petersburg, yet still a bachelor. In diplomatic circles it has long been a matter of surprise that he has never taken to himself a wife, for many wealthy women are known to have set their caps at him.

However, the world is in ignorance that the plain disc of gold which he wears upon his watch-chain, though it has not the appearance of a locket, nevertheless is one, and opens with a cunningly concealed spring. Within, on one side, is an exquisite little ivory miniature of the Princess Luisa, while on the other two simple words are engraved upon the gold case – “For Ever.”

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. Those engraved words are as a message passing between them – a promise that will never be broken, the pledge of a passionate and unsuspected royal romance —

“FOR EVER.”

The End