“Absolutely,” she answered in quick breathlessness. “In those days I was supercilious and disdainful, being taught to regard my dignity as Grand Duchess with too great a conceit to make a mésalliance. My mother used constantly to urge that in the marriages contracted by members of our family love was not absolutely necessary – position was everything. Well, the months went by. We left Algiers, returned to St Petersburg, and soon afterwards my mother died, leaving me alone. I found myself possessor of great wealth, and when, after a period of mourning, I reappeared in society, I was courted and flattered by all sorts and conditions of men. In a year I grew tired of it all and longed to return to England, the land wherein I had spent many years of my youth; therefore I engaged a woman to pose as my mother, and dropping my title, went to London and lived there as Ella Laing. Then I met you,” and she paused, looking earnestly into my face with her deep blue eyes. To me she had embodied everything that was fair, honourable, and pure, yet I had dreaded some sinister peril from an unknown source.

“And we loved each other,” I said simply.

“Yes,” she went on fervently. “But from the first I was fettered, being unable to act as my heart prompted. I loved you fondly, and knew you wished to make me your wife, yet I dared not to risk such a step without the permission of our House. I went to St Petersburg, explained who and what you were, and craved leave to marry you. A family council was held, but the suggestion was unanimously denounced as a piece of sentimental folly. Ah, shall I ever forget that night? I pleaded to them upon my knees to let me obtain happiness in your love, but they were inexorable and refused. At length, when in a moment of despair I threatened that if shut out from love by the barrier of birth I would end my life, a suggestion was made – a horrible, infamous one, prompted by Makaroff, Minister of the Household. Yet I was ready to commit any act, to do anything in order to secure happiness with you. Permission was given me to marry you on condition that I entered the Secret Service as spy. I appealed personally to the Tzar, but in vain. You were in the Earl of Warnham’s confidence, and it was seen that from you I could obtain information which would be of greatest utility to our Foreign Department.”

“So you accepted,” I said sternly.

“Yes. I accepted their abominable conditions because I loved you so well, Geoffrey,” she said gloomily, her trembling hand upon my shoulder. “It was not my fault, indeed it wasn’t. If I had known what was to follow I would have killed myself rather than bring about all the trouble and disaster for which I became responsible.”

“No,” I said, “don’t speak like that.”

“I would,” she declared despairingly. “What followed was a dark, mysterious tragedy, while all the time I knew that you must suspect – that, after all, you might forsake me. Within a week after binding myself irrevocably to the Tzar’s army of spies I made a discovery that held me appalled. I found that my master, the man to whose will I was compelled to submit, was none other than our discharged valet de chambre– the man who two years before had declared his love. At the time my mother had engaged him he was already in the Secret Service, and had no doubt kept watch upon us. He came to me at ‘The Nook,’ and, exulting in the fact that I had become his puppet, renewed his protestations of affection. When, frankly, I told him that I hated him and loved only you, he at once informed me, with a grin of satisfaction, that the department in St Petersburg found it compulsory to obtain possession of a copy of a secret convention at that moment being concluded between your country and Germany, and that I must get possession of it at any cost, through you. It was in order that I might betray you that the Imperial permission had been given to our marriage. In indignation I refused, whereupon he threatened to expose me to you as a Russian spy, and I saw only too clearly that any such revelation must end for ever our acquaintance. He cajoled, urged, threatened, and explained all the elaborate precautions that had been taken by two clerks in Russian pay at your Foreign Office in order that on a certain day you should carry the precious document in your pocket, and how he had prepared the dummy envelope sealed with your Minister’s seal. At last – at last, after striving long and vainly against the performance of this ignominious action that I knew must reflect on your honesty, I was compelled to submit. Ah! you can never know what agony I suffered. I verily believe that in those few days the terrible vengeance of that scoundrel drove me insane. The hideous ghost of the past causes me to shudder whenever I think of it.”

I echoed her sigh, but no word escaped me. Her revelations were astounding. I had never suspected her of being actually a spy, although the discovery of the stolen convention in her escritoire had lent colour to that view.

“I deceived you,” she went on in a hard, monotonous voice. “But only because I loved you so fondly, and dreaded that this man, who had long ago vowed to wreck my life, would expose, and thus part us. Yet I could not bring myself to commit the theft. How could I place upon you – the man who was all in all to me – the stigma of having traitorously sold your country’s secrets? The man who held me enslaved, and whose attentions I had spurned, exulted in his malevolent revenge. Once he offered, if I would renounce all thought of you and treat him with more cordiality, to commit the theft himself; but I refused, determined at all hazards to remain with you as long as possible. Once it was thought that the secret convention would be sent to Warnham Hall, and I was compelled to go down there to devise some means of obtaining it. I found Dudley staying in the village, and we returned to London together. The end must soon come, I knew. Therefore I lived on in daily terror of what must follow. At last the day dawned on which I had to meet you at the Foreign Office, and filch from you the bond of nations. After breakfast I stood out on the lawn by the sunny river’s brink, contemplating suicide rather than your ruin, when there rowed up to the steps Dudley Ogle, who hailed me, inviting me to pull up to Windsor, and there lunch with him. At once I accepted, and after embarking, told him of my dilemma, and besought his assistance. As you know, he was a good amateur conjurer, and skilled in feats of sleight-of-hand. Without thought of the consequences, he resolved to commit the theft for my sake, and when I had fully explained all the facts and given him the dummy envelope that the cunning chief of the Okhrannoë Otdelenïe had prepared, he turned the boat and put me ashore at ‘The Nook,’ afterwards rowing rapidly down to Shepperton to change and go at once to London.”

“He did this because he loved you?” I exclaimed sternly.

“No,” she answered reassuringly. “Poor Dudley was simply my friend. He called on you and extracted the document from your pocket while you lunched together, because he saw in what a dilemma I was. He knew I loved you dearly, and never once spoke a single word of affection to me. That I swear before Heaven. What followed his visit to Downing Street I have only a hazy idea, so full of awful anxieties was that breathless day. From Waterloo Station he telegraphed to me that he had successfully secured the agreement and handed it to the chief of spies. The latter, who had been waiting in Parliament Street expecting me, seeing him, took in the situation at a glance, and approaching him, asked for the document, which he gave up. An hour afterwards, fearing that you might suspect me, I telegraphed to you at Shepperton to dine with us, well knowing that already the text of the convention was at that moment being transmitted to Petersburg, and that war was imminent. You came; you kissed me. I loved you dearer than life, yet dreaded the frightful consequences of the dastardly act I had instigated. Suddenly, while we were at dinner, and you were laughing, happy and unconscious of the conspiracy against the peace of Europe, a thought flashed across my mind. I well knew that an awful conflict of armed forces must accrue from my deep, despicable cunning, and it occurred to me, as I sat by your side, that I would, using the secret cipher I had been provided with, telegraph to St Petersburg in the name of the chief of spies, assuring our Foreign Department that a mistake had been made. I slipped out, and running down to the telegraph office just before it closed, sent a message to an unsuspicious-looking address, stating that the text of the convention already sent had been discovered to be that of a rejected draft, and not that of the actual defensive alliance which had received the signature of the Emperor William.”

“Then it was actually this message of yours that prevented war?” I gasped, in profound astonishment.

“Yes,” she answered. “Before receipt of my telegram all preparations were being made for the commencement of hostilities, but on its arrival the Tzar at once countermanded the mobilisation order, and Europe was thereby spared a terrible and bloody conflict. Ah! that was indeed a memorable night, brought to a conclusion by a dark and terrible tragedy.”

Her astounding disclosures held me dumbfounded. I remembered vividly how, during our lunch at the Ship, Dudley had risen and gone out to the bar to speak to an acquaintance. It was at that moment, having stolen the document from me, he glanced at its register number and imitated it upon the dummy with which Ella had provided him.

“But how came you possessed of the original of the convention?” I asked.

“A week before I fled from you I received it by post anonymously,” she replied. “When compelled by my enemy to leave you and return here to my true position, I unfortunately left it behind, and knew that, sooner or later, you must discover it. The man who, with the Tzar’s authority, held me under the lash, still holds me, the plaything of his spite, and threatens that if I allow you to come here and occupy your rightful place as my husband, he will denounce me to the British Government as a spy. Hence I am still his puppet, still held by a bond of guilt that I dare not break asunder.”

“Be patient,” urged Sonia, in a deep, calm voice. “Be patient, and you shall yet be free.”

“Ah! Geoffrey,” sobbed my wife, her blanched, tearful face buried in her hands, “you can never, I fear, forgive. After all, notwithstanding the glamour that must surround me as Grand Duchess, I am but a mean, despicable woman who foully betrayed you, the man who loved me.”

“You atoned for your crime by your successful effort to preserve the peace of Europe,” I answered.

“Yes, yes,” she cried, with a quiver in her voice there was no mistaking for any note save that of love; “but, alas! I am in the power of an unscrupulous knave who parted us because he saw me happy with you. Can you ever forgive me? Can you, now you know of my unworthiness, ever say that you love me as truly as you did in those bygone days at ‘The Nook’? Speak! Tell me?”

“Yes,” I answered, fervently pressing her closely in affectionate embrace. “I forgive you everything, darling. You sinned; but, held as you have been by the hateful conditions imposed upon you by a base, unprincipled villain, I cannot blame, but only pity you.”

“Then you still love me, Geoffrey?” she cried, panting, gazing up into my face.

For answer I bent until my lips met hers in a long fond caress. In those moments of ecstasy I was conscious of having regained the idyllic happiness long lost. Even though her story was full of bitter and terrible sorrow, and rendered gloomy by the tragic death of her self-sacrificing friend, the truth nevertheless brought back to me the joys and pleasures of life that not long ago I believed had departed from me for ever.

Again and again our lips met with murmured words of tender passion – she declaring that her crime had been flagitious and unpardonable, yet assuring me of what I now felt convinced, that her love had been unwavering. If it were not that she had resolved to renounce her title and become my wife she would never have fallen beneath the vassalage of the infamous scoundrel who sought her social ruin.

Thus we stood together locked in each other’s arms, exchanging once again vows of love eternal, while Sonia stood watching us, sad, silent and motionless, save for a deep sigh that once escaped her. She knew that supreme happiness had come to the woman she had once denounced as my bitterest foe.

Chapter Thirty Seven
Conclusion

It was four o’clock on the following afternoon. The black, iron-studded doors of the Bank of England were just closing. The beadle mopped his brow. The traffic around the Royal Exchange was becoming more congested, as it generally does at that hour, and perspiring clerks hurrying along Threadneedle Street sought the shady side, for the sun was still powerful. So hot indeed was the season that general permission had been granted everywhere in the City to wear the jacket suit and straw headgear reminiscent of Margate, in place of the conventional silk hat and frock coat. Although in the West the houses were mostly closed, and thousands were absent in the country and by the sea, the great, turbulent, bustling crowd that constitutes business London showed no sign of inactivity or decrease as, accompanied by my wife and Sonia, I walked up Old Broad Street to that pile of offices known as Winchester House, through the swing doors of which passed a constant stream of hurrying clerks.

By the lift we ascended to the second floor, and then passed down a long corridor to a door on which was inscribed the name “Mr Andrew Beck.” We entered a large office of business-like aspect, where some dozen clerks were busy writing, and were informed that their principal, although absent, would return in a few minutes, therefore we decided to wait, and were ushered into a comfortable private room, one door of which opened on to the corridor.

Scarcely had we been seated a few moments when the click of a latch-key was heard in the door, and my friend Beck entered. He was well-dressed as usual, with a green-tinted carnation in his button-hole, and a glossy hat with brim of the latest curl stuck a trifle rakishly upon his head. The instant he confronted us the light died out of his face.

He drew himself up with a quick look of suspicion, while from his lips there escaped a muttered imprecation. Without further ado he turned on his heel, as if preparing to make a hurried exit, but in a moment Sonia, detecting his intention, sprang towards the door and prevented him.

“Well?” he asked, with a sorry endeavour to remain cool, “why are you all here? This is an unexpected pleasure, I assure you.”

It was Sonia who, standing before him with dark, flashing eyes, answered in a tone of fierce hatred and contempt, —

“I have come, Andrew, to present my congratulations upon your forthcoming marriage,” she said, with her pronounced foreign accent.

“They could have been conveyed by a penny stamp,” he retorted impatiently.

“You taunt me, do you?” she cried in a towering passion. “You, the cunning, cowardly spy whom I shielded because you professed love for me. Had I spoken long ago you would have met with your deserts, either at the hands of the Nihilists, or at those of justice. Although myself a criminal I yearned for love, and foolishly believing that you cared for me, preserved the secret of your guilt, allowing you to wreck the happiness of Geoffrey Deedes, the man who twice proved my friend, and of Elizaveta, the only honest woman who ever spoke kindly to me or endeavoured to induce me to reform. Because you were chief of the Tzar’s spies and I was notorious, with plenty of money always at command, you imagined that you held me irrevocably. Well, for a time, you did. Your false protestations of affection caused me to refrain from exposing your base, cunning, heartless infamy. It was you, with your renegade underling Renouf, who contrived to get me introduced to Elizaveta in order to further your own ends; but it was you also, when fearing that I might make some ugly revelations, made unfounded allegations against me to General Sekerzhinski, and informed him of my whereabouts, so that I was compelled to fly from Pembroke Road and seek shelter where I could.”

His eyes were fixed upon her with a look of fierce hatred, and he muttered some incoherent words between his teeth.

“Yes,” she went on defiantly, “I know you are anxious to close my lips, because of the startling disclosures it is within my power to make. The Department in St Petersburg have in you a keen, cunning spy, but when it becomes known throughout England that Andrew Beck, the popular Member for West Rutlandshire, is in the pay of the Russian Government, do you anticipate that you will still occupy your seat in the House of Commons, or at the Committee you have so ingeniously obtained for the investigation of the strength of England’s defences?”

He started. His face was ashen pale; his cigar dropped from his nerveless, trembling fingers.

“Geoffrey,” she went on, “has already heard from Elizaveta how cleverly you tricked her, and with what dastard knavishness you compelled her to instigate the theft of the secret convention. She – ”

“Then the world shall know that the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Nicolayevna is in the Secret Service!” he cried fiercely. “She has betrayed her country and her kinsman, the Emperor!”

Sonia, smiling in contempt, said, —

“The denunciation will be your own condemnation.”

“Why? What have I to lose?” he asked indignantly. “Your life. The police have not yet forgotten the tragedy at ‘The Nook.’”

He glared at her open-mouthed.

“Perhaps it may be well at this moment to recall some facts that you may have found convenient to forget,” she went on ruthlessly, while I, standing beside Ella, drank in eagerly every word. “You will remember where you reduced the stolen document to cipher, imitating Dudley’s handwriting on the telegraph forms. It was at my house. The envelope containing the agreement had been opened in the ‘cabinet noir’ at the Embassy, the intention being to replace it at the Foreign Office. But it was I who broke the seal. In your hurry you left the document behind, and even when you returned two hours later, your mind was so full of other things that you did not remember it; so I gummed down the cut edges, and sent it afterwards to Elizaveta. When you came the second time you had with you a pair of men’s gloves. Whose they were I knew not, but you got me to sew inside the index-finger of the left hand a tiny, jagged splinter of glass, and upon that glass, when you thought I did not observe you, you smeared some of that fluid that Ruyandez, the Haytian merchant, had given me long ago. That poison I kept locked away in a small cabinet, but many months before I had shown it to you and explained that it was some of that used by the Obeah men, and so rapid was it in effect that one single drop would cause paralysis of the heart within five minutes without leaving any trace of poison. You obtained a key to that cabinet, for when I had gone from the room on that afternoon I watched you unlock it, take out the reed containing the decoction, and prepare the glove.”

“Liar!” gasped Beck. “I didn’t touch it.”

“The glove,” she continued, “belonged to Dudley Ogle. That day Elizaveta had told him that you, a member of the English Parliament, was the chief of Russian spies, and you feared lest he should expose you, as no doubt he would have done if you had not, with cowardly cunning, taken his life.”

“Murderer!” cried Ella, amazed. “You – you killed him! Ah! I suspected it. Tell us, Sonia, how it was accomplished.”

“The gloves this man brought to my house were a pair he had taken up by mistake when at Shepperton on the previous evening. For cool and desperate plotting, the manner in which he killed the man he feared was astounding, for, having introduced into the finger of the glove the tiny piece of glass, he, during that evening at ‘The Nook,’ took out his victim’s gloves from his overcoat in the hall and replaced them by those prepared. When Dudley left to walk home he bade farewell to you, and at once proceeding to put on his gloves, received a scratch on the finger so slight as to be almost unnoticeable, yet within five minutes the effects of the poison had reached his heart, and he was beyond human aid.”

“Amazing!” I cried, regarding my whilom friend with intense loathing as he stood before us, his face a ghastly hue.

“It’s untrue! Who will believe such a woman?” he cried.

“Everyone will,” Sonia retorted quickly. “See, here is the proof,” and she drew from her pocket a well-worn suède glove of dark grey, which I recognised at once as being one of the kind always worn by Dudley. “The splinter of glass is still inside.”

The man who had led the double life of spy and legislator, and who had amassed a great fortune in his speculations in African gold, stood livid, with terror-stricken eyes riveted upon the evidence of his crime, like one transfixed.

“The Tzar will have no further employment for a murderer,” exclaimed Ella at last. “Neither will the House of Commons permit a spy to sit in its midst. When I consented to enter the Secret Service of His Majesty, it was with one object – to obtain permission to marry. This I have attained, and because of Geoffrey’s generosity and free forgiveness I have now no further fear of the opinion of the world or of revelations by a man who is proved to be a murderer. At last I have secured freedom from your hateful tie.”

“Then you intend to denounce me?” Beck cried, glancing round with a wild, hunted look.

“Twenty-four hours from now I shall place Lord Warnham in possession of the whole of these curious facts. If you are still upon English soil, you will be arrested for the murder of my friend,” I answered calmly. “I see plainly how, while I left you alone with the dead man, you placed in his pocket the brass seal found upon him, and how cleverly you managed to introduce the bogus passport and evidences of forgery among his possessions. Yours was a devilish ingenuity, indeed.”

“If I fly you will not follow?” he gasped eagerly.

“Wherever you may hide you will be followed by your guilt,” I answered. “A murderer can hope for no forgiveness from his fellow-men.”

With his chin sunk upon his breast, and his wild eyes downcast, he stood in silence, leaning heavily against the wall. Then, slowly, with a final look upon him, I passed out behind my wife and the pale-faced woman who had so clearly substantiated her terrible charge. The vengeance he had sought to bring upon Ella had fallen upon him and completely crushed him.

In the library at Berkeley Square on the following afternoon I explained the whole of the startling facts, to the wizened, ascetic old Earl, who sat speechless in amazement when he realised that Andrew Beck was actually a foreign spy. It was during the conversation that followed I learnt that the man who had been loved by Sonia was Cecil Bingham, the young country gentleman who, known to both, had sought to assist Ella in unearthing the identity of Dudley’s murderer. Sonia had misjudged my wife entirely, for she had never denounced her to Cecil, and the latter, being at that moment a guest in the Earl’s house, was sent for, and before us all the pair became reconciled.

Elizaveta Nicolayevna, or Ella, as I still call her, has now renounced her country, and become thoroughly English. A year ago Lord Warnham, assured of my wife’s probity – for greatly to Monsieur Grodekoff’s dismay, she had given some valuable information regarding the activity of the Russian Secret Service at Downing Street – appointed me to a responsible post at our Embassy in Paris, so that we now live together at the big white house in the Avenue des Champs Elysées, while Sonia and Cecil are also married and live quietly in a quaint old manor-house near Winchester.

It was only the other day, however, that we heard mention of Andrew Beck, the popular legislator who so mysteriously accepted stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds. There was a paragraph in the newspapers stating that he had been found drowned in the Scheldt, near Antwerp, and foul play was suspected. Then Ella explained to me that the woman who had passed as her mother, Mrs Laing, was, she afterwards discovered, a well-known Nihilist, and it was in order to keep observation upon her that the detective Renouf had entered her service. This woman, whose real name was Sophie Grunsberg, was greatly incensed against Beck on account of certain false accusations he had made against members of the revolutionary organisation, and there was little doubt that he had fallen beneath their far-reaching vengeance.

Here, as I pen these last few lines of my strange story of England’s peril, my own betrayal, and my wife’s fond love, Ella, with sweet, glad smile, moves forward to stroke my hair with soft, caressing hand. The odour of sampaguita pervades her chiffons, stirring within me memories of the past. We are together in the room I know so well, with its great windows overlooking the leafy Avenue. It is warm, the sun-shutters are closed, and from somewhere outside the gay air, “Si qu’on leur-z-y f’rait ça” is borne in upon the summer wind.

At last our days are full of passionate love and idyllic happiness. Verily there is great truth in those words of Holy Writ, “Whoso findeth a wife, findeth a good thing.”