faithful wife? Come up, love! No, the fact was that Flashy five years on (seen at his worst, mind, flat on his back and beat, and now a hapless invalid) no longer aroused her amorous interest. Well, I could take the jolt to my amour-propre the more easily because while she’d been a prime ride and good company, she’d never had the magic that gets beneath your hide, like Yehonala or Lakshmi or Sonsee-array … or Elspeth. She was too young for that … but old enough to know better than to play the saucy minx, teasing me into a frustrated heat and then showing me the door.
Oh, some of the old affection lingered, no doubt, hence the fatuous tale of marital fidelity, to let me down lightly. I could have swallowed it if she’d come right out with it first thing, but she hadn’t been able to resist her wanton instinct to set me panting—even now there was a glint of mockery in the ever-so-contrite smile that told me she was enjoying feeling sorry for the randy old fool, well pleased with her beauty’s power … and doubtless convincing herself that she felt a touch of sentimental remorse, the littIe hypocrite. Even the best of them like to make you squirm. I had a sudden memory of the salt-mine and that cold steel being driven ruthlessly home … and call it sour grapes if you like, but I found myself warming to the thought of Princess Kralta.
'Angry, little one? Not a bit of it!' cries I, beaming like any-thing, and pecked her back. 'I’m sorry, o' course —but jolly glad for you! He’s a lucky chap, your Charlie—what is he, a dashing hussar, eh?'
'Oh, no . but he is a soldier … that is, he is a professor of l’histoire militaire, at St Cyr.'
'I say! He must be a bright spark! Blackboard-wallahs are pretty senior as a rule.'
She confessed that he was older than she (nearly twice her age, in fact) and from an old service family—the usual decayed Frog nobility by the sound of the name,' but she wasn’t forthcoming at all, and I guessed that the mere thought of the raffish Flashy being presented to dear Charles' parents, as an old acquaintance even, filled her with dismay. I found myself wondering how much they knew about her … and whether the arrival on Papa d’Auvergne’s breakfast table of that splendid photograph of his daughter-in-law, bare-titted among the potted palms and nigger stallions, mightn’t enliven his petit dejeuner. A passing thought, and cheered me up no end.
'But what do Charles' people think about your working for the secret department? Hardly the thing for a staid married lady, what?' 'They did not approve, of course. But that is past now. We agreed, Charles and I, that I must resign before our marriage—' 'But here you are!'
'Only because this was une crise, an emergency, and Delzons was in despair to recruit agents for the occasion. The departement, Hike your own in England, must make do with little … and I could not refuse Delzons. I owe him too much.'
'And Charles didn’t mind? Well, he’s a sportsman! Of course, it was an important affair, international crisis, and all that.'
She hesitated. 'He did not know. I am at this moment visiting a school friend in Switzerland.'
Better and better. Not the kind of thing to confide to a lover who’s just been handed his travel warrant, mind.
'Well, God bless Charles, anyway! I’d like to meet him one o' these days.' She didn’t clap her hands, so I took them gently in mine and gave her my best wistful sigh, like a ruptured uncle. 'And bless you, too, my dear. And since you don’t want to talk about t’other thing, in that beastly cave—'
'Non, non—'
'Well, then, I shan’t, so there. I’ll only say that I’m monstrous glad that you visited your school chum in Switzerland, what? And that you came to see me this evening. Quite like old times, eh , . well, almost.' I winked and slid my hands round her rump, kneading away to show there were no hard feelings—and blowed if the sentimental little tart didn’t start piping her eye.
'Oh, you are the best man alive! So kind, so genereux!' She clung to me, bedewing my shirt, and raised her face to mine. 'And … and never shall I forget Berlin!' She threw her arms round my neck and kissed me—none of your pecks this time, but the full lascivious munch, wet and wonderful, and if you don’t breathe through your nose you die of suffocation. I had to press my stitches hard until she came loose at last, lips quivering, dabbing at her eyes.
'My goodness, what would Charles say?' I wondered, playful-like. 'I can’t believe professors of l’histoire militaire approve o' that sort of thing.'
She looked uncertain, and decided to be airy. 'Oh, chacun a son goat, you know.'
'Well, you mustn’t shock him. Can’t think when I was last kissed thataway. Not since the Orient Express, anyway.'
'Que’est-ce que c’est?' A moment’s perplexity, and then the penny dropped, and she went pink and took a step back. 'Oh! La princesse … I … I did not …'
'Ah, you’ve met her, then?'
'I have seen her, with Delzons. When we were at the police commissariat.' She was confused, but recovered, smiling brightly. 'But of course, she and that other brought you from Germany. She is … very beautiful.'
'Fine figure of a woman,' says I, looking her up and down.
More to the point, she has no conscience where her husband’s concerned.' I grinned and repeated her own words. 'D’you mind very much? You’re not angry?'
Just for a moment her eyes flashed, and then she laughed—and riposted neatly by repeating mine.
'Angry? Not a bit of it; I am jolly glad for you. She is perhaps …' she made a little fluttering gesture '… how do you say … more your style?'
'More my age, you mean.'
'No such thing!' cries she merrily. 'Now, you will take care of your wound, and not make too much exertion —'
'Oh, beef tea and bedsocks, that’s my ticket! Don’t you over-exert yourself either, or you’ll scandalise Charles.'
We smiled amiably on each other, and when I’d helped her put on her cape she held out her hand, not her lips.
'Adieu, then,' says she.
I bowed to kiss her hand. 'Au’voir, Caprice … oh, pardon—Madame. Bonne chance.'
She went, and as I listened to her heels clicking on the stairs I was wondering where the devil I’d put that photograph. Saving Flashy’s life is all very well, but don’t ever play fast and loose with his affections. He’s a sensitive soul.
The older you get, the longer you take to heal. The hole in my gut was as neat and handy as a wound can hope to be, and thirty years earlier would have been right in a fortnight, but now it turned angry, no doubt from the strain imposed by my frustrating half-dalliance with Madame de la Tour d’Auvergne, damn her wanton ways. The stitches had come adrift, and had to be replaced by my little medico, I developed a fever which returned me to bed for more than a week, and after that I was no better than walking wounded, for I was weak as a rat and common sense demanded that I should go canny, as Elspeth would say.
She was much in my mind at that time, but then she always is when I’ve passed through the furnace and am looking for consolation. The thought of that loving smile, the child-like innocence of the forget-me-not eyes, the soft sweet voice, and the matronly charms bursting out of her corset, made me downright homesick, and with Caprice turning me off, the stupid little trollop, I’d have been tempted to set my sights on London if it hadn’t been for the prospect of rattling Kralta all over Vienna. I couldn’t forego that, in all conscience; our railway idyll had given me an appetite, and after it was satisfied would be time enough to cry off with the new love and on with the old.
So I bore my captivity into November, glad to be alive, and passing the time pondering on the mysteries of those few short days of strange adventure—barely a week, from the time when I’d been sitting in Berkeley Square gloating over Kralta’s picture, to the awful moment when I’d pegged out in that hellish mine, with Caprice clucking over me like an anxious hen and Starnberg’s corpse floating in the limpid brine. Reviewing it all … I knew what had happened, but not why; in all the confusion of lies and deceits and voltes-face, there were mysteries, as I say, which I didn’t understand, and still don’t.
On the face of it, Bismarck had concocted a lunatic but logical scheme to save the Austrian Emperor from assassination, and it had succeeded in a way he could never have foreseen, with his gusted henchman proving traitor but being foiled by old Flashy’s blundering. Well, lucky old Otto—and lucky Franz-Josef and lucky Europe. (And when we’d gone, no one would ever believe it.) Knowing my opinion of Bismarck, you may wonder that I don’t suspect him of some gigantic Machiavellian double-deal whereby he’d invented the tale of a Holnup plot (to hoax
