"I saw the extreme peril of the situation. I had acted clumsily in not first ascertaining that the way was clear. To fly at once was to condemn myself. I reflected for a moment, and then, resolving upon a desperate course of action, returned to the house, in spite of Bourne's counsel to get away as quickly as possible. I went straight to her Ladyship's room, but from the way she spoke to me saw that up to the present her son had told her nothing. This was fortunate for me. He was keeping the secret in order, no doubt, to call the police on the morrow and accuse me in their presence. I saw that the only way was to bluff him; therefore I went very carefully to work.

"Just before midnight I slipped into his sitting-room, which adjoined his bedroom, and secreted myself behind the heavy plush curtains that were drawn; then when he was asleep I took the rubies from the drawer in which he had placed them, but in doing so the lock of the drawer clicked, and he awoke. He saw me, and sprang up, openly accusing me of theft. Whereupon I faced him boldly, declaring that if he did not keep his mouth closed I would alarm the household, who would find me alone in his room at that hour. He would then be compromised in the eyes of the woman whom in two days he was about to marry. Instantly he recognised that I held the whip-hand. He endeavoured, however, to argue; but I declared that if he did not allow me to have the rubies to replace in the cupboard and maintain silence, I would arouse the household. Then he laughed, saying, `You're a fool, Leucha. I'm very hard up, and you quite providentially lowered them down to me. I intend to raise money on them to-morrow.' `And to accuse me!' I said. `No, you don't. I shall put them back, and we will both remain silent. Both of us have much to lose--you a wife, and I my liberty. Why should either of us risk it? Is it really worth while?' This argument decided him. I replaced the jewels, and next day left Lady Milborne's service.

"That was, however, one of the narrowest escapes I ever had, and it required all my courage to extricate myself, I can tell you."

"So your plots were not always successful," remarked the Princess, smiling and looking at her wonderingly. She was surely a girl of great resource and ingenuity.

"Not always, your Highness. One, which father had planned here a couple of months ago, and which was to be effected in Paris, has just failed in a peculiar way. The lady went to Paris, and, unknown to her husband, suddenly sold all her jewels _en ma.s.se_ in order to pay her debts at bridge."

"She forestalled him!"

"Exactly," laughed the girl. "But it was a curious _contretemps_, was it not?"

Next day proved an eventful one to the Crown Princess, for soon after eleven o'clock, when with Leucha and Ignatia she went out of the hotel into the Strand, a man selling the _Evening News_ held a poster before her, bearing in large capitals the words:--

EVENING NEWS, FRIDAY, JUNE 26th.

DEATH OF THE KING OF MARBURG.

EVENING NEWS.

She halted, staring at the words.

Then she bought a newspaper, and opening it at once upon the pavement, amid the busy throng, learnt that the aged King had died suddenly at Treysa, on the previous evening, of senile decay.

The news staggered her. Her husband had succeeded, and she was now Queen--a reigning sovereign!

In the cruelly wronged woman there still remained all the fervour of youthful tenderness, all the romance of youthful fancy, all the enchantment of ideal grace--the bloom of beauty, the brightness of intellect, and the dignity of rank, taking the peculiar hue from the conjugal character which shed over all like a consecration and a holy charm. Thoughts of her husband, the man who had so cruelly ill-judged her, were in her recollections, acting on her mind with the force of a habitual feeling, heightened by enthusiastic pa.s.sion, and hallowed by a sense of duty. Her duty to her husband and to her people was to return at once to Treysa. As she walked with Leucha towards Trafalgar Square she reflected deeply. How could she go back now that her enemies had so openly condemned her? No; she saw that for her own happiness it was far better that she still remain away from Court--the Court over which at last she now reigned as Queen.

"My worst enemies will bow to me in adulation," she thought to herself.

"They fear my retaliation, and if I went back I verily believe that I should show them no mercy. And yet, after all, it would be uncharitable. One should always repay evil with good. If I do not return, I shall not be tempted to revenge."

That day she remained very silent and pensive, full of an acute sense of the injustice inflicted upon her. Her husband the King was no doubt trying to discover her whereabouts, but up to the present had been unsuccessful. The papers, which spoke of her almost daily, stated that it was believed she was still in Germany, at one or other of the quieter spas, on account of little Ignatia's health. In one journal she had read that she had been recognised in New York, and in another it was cruelly suggested that she was in hiding in Rome, so as to be near her lover Leitolf.

The truth was that her enemies at Court were actually paying the more scurrilous of the Continental papers--those which will publish any libel for a hundred francs, and the present writer could name dozens of such rags on the Continent--to print all sorts of cruel, unfounded scandals concerning her.

During the past few days she had scarcely taken up a single foreign paper without finding the heading, "The Great Court Scandal," and something outrageously against her; for her enemies, who had engaged as their secret agent a Jew money-lender, had started a bitter campaign against her, backed with the sum of a hundred thousand marks, placed by Hinckeldeym at the unscrupulous Hebrew's disposal with which to bribe the press. A little money can, alas! soon ruin a woman's good name, or, on the other hand, it can whitewash the blackest record.

This plot against an innocent, defenceless woman was as brutal as any conceived by the ingenuity of a corrupt Court of office-seekers and sycophants, for at heart the King had loved his wife--until they had poisoned his mind against her and besmirched her good name.

Of all this she was well aware, conscious of her own weakness as a woman. Yet she retained her woman's heart, for that was unalterable, and part of her being: but her looks, her language, her thoughts, even in those adverse circ.u.mstances, a.s.sumed the cast of the pure ideal; and to those who were in the secret of her humane and pitying nature, nothing could be more charming and consistent than the effect which she produced upon others.

As the hot, fevered days went by, she recognised that it became hourly more necessary for her to leave London, and conceal her ident.i.ty somewhere in the country. She noticed at the Savoy, whenever she dined or lunched with Leucha, people were noting her beauty and inquiring who she was. At any moment she might be recognised by some one who had visited the Court at Treysa, or by those annoying portraits that were now appearing everywhere in the ill.u.s.trated journals.

She decided to consult Guy Bourne, who, Leucha said, usually spent half his time in hiding. Therefore one evening, with "the Ladybird," she took a cab to a small semi-detached villa in Wolverton Gardens, off the Hammersmith Road, where she alighted and entered, in utter ignorance, unfortunately, that another hansom had followed her closely all the way from the Savoy, and that, pulling up in the Hammersmith Road, the fare, a tall, thin, middle-aged man, with a black overcoat concealing his evening dress, had alighted, walked quickly up the street, and noted the house wherein she and her maid had entered.

The stranger muttered to himself some words in German, and with a smile of self-satisfaction lit a cigar and strolled back to the Hammersmith Road to wait.

A fearful destiny had encompa.s.sed her.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

THE HERMIT OF HAMMERSMITH.

Guy Bourne, in his shirt sleeves, was sitting back in a long cane lounge-chair in the little front parlour when the Princess and her companion entered. He had just finished his frugal supper.

He jumped up confusedly, threw the evening paper aside, and apologised that her Highness had discovered him without a coat.

"Please don't apologise, Mr. Bourne. This is rather an unusual hour for a visit, is it not? But pray forgive me," she said in English, with scarcely any trace of a German accent.

"Your Highness is always welcome--at any hour," he laughed, struggling into his coat and ordering his landlady to clear away the remnants of the meal. "Leucha was here yesterday, and she told me how you were faring. I am sorry that circ.u.mstances over which I, unfortunately, have no control have not permitted my calling at the Savoy. At present I can only go out after midnight for a breath of air, and time pa.s.ses rather slowly, I can a.s.sure you. As Leucha has probably told you, certain persons are making rather eager inquiries about me just now."

"I understand perfectly," she laughed. "It was to obtain your advice as to the best way to efface myself that I came to see you this evening.

Leucha tells me you are an expert in disappearing."

"Well, Princess," he smiled, offering her a chair, "you see it's part of my profession to show myself as little as possible, though self-imprisonment is always very irksome. This house is one among many in London which afford accommodation for such as myself. The landlady is a person who knows how to keep her mouth shut, and who asks no questions. She is, as most of them are, the widow of a person who was a social outcast like myself."

"And this is one of your harbours of refuge," her Highness exclaimed, looking around curiously upon the cheaply furnished but comfortable room. There was linoleum in lieu of carpet, and to the Londoner the cheap walnut overmantel and plush-covered drawing-room suite spoke mutely of the Tottenham Court Road and the "easy-payment" system.

The Princess was shrewd enough to notice the looks which pa.s.sed between Leucha and the man to whom she was so much indebted. She detected that a pa.s.sion of love existed between them. Indeed, the girl had almost admitted as much to her, and had on several occasions begged to be allowed to visit him and ascertain whether he was in want of anything.

It was an interesting and a unique study, she found, the affection between a pair of the criminal cla.s.s.

What would the world say had it known that she, a reigning Queen, was there upon a visit to a man wanted by the police for half a dozen of the most daring jewel robberies of the past half-century?

She saw a box of cheap cigarettes upon the table, and begged one, saying,--

"I hope, Mr. Bourne, you will not be shocked, but I dearly love a cigarette. You will join me, of course?"

"Most willingly, your Highness," he said, springing to his feet and holding the lighted match for her. She was so charmingly unconventional that people of lower station were always fascinated by her.

"You know," she exclaimed, laughing, "I used to shock them very much at Court because I smoked. And sometimes," she added mischievously, "I smoked at certain functions in order purposely to shock the prudes. Oh, I've had the most delightful fun very often, I a.s.sure you. My husband, when we were first married, used to enter into the spirit of the thing, and once dared me to smoke a cigarette in the Throne Room in the presence of the King and Queen. I did so--and imagine the result!"

"Ah!" he cried, "that reminds me. Pray pardon me for my breach of etiquette, but you have come upon me so very unexpectedly. I've seen in the _Mail_ the account of his Majesty's death, and that you are now Queen. In future I must call you `your Majesty.' You are a reigning sovereign, and I am a thief. A strange contrast, is it not?"

"Better call me your friend, Mr. Bourne," she said, in a calm, changed voice. "Here is no place for t.i.tles. Recollect that I am now only an ordinary citizen, one of the people--a mere woman whose only desire is peace."

Then continuing, she explained her daily fear lest she might be recognised at the Savoy, and asked his advice as to the best means of hiding herself.

"Well, your Majesty," said the past master of deception, after some thought, "you see you are a foreigner, and as such will be remarked in England everywhere. You speak French like a _Parisienne_. Why not pa.s.s as French under a French name? I should suggest that you go to some small, quiet South Coast town--say to Worthing. Many French people go there as they cross from Dieppe. There are several good hotels; or you might, if you wished to be more private, obtain apartments."

"Yes," she exclaimed excitedly; "apartments in an English house would be such great fun. I will go to this place Worthing. Is it nice?"

"Quiet--with good sea air."

"I was once at Hastings--when I was a child. Is it anything like that?"

"Smaller, more select, and quieter."