Well, perhaps, after all your choice is but natural."
"I do not prefer," she declared, pa.s.sionately. "Cannot you see, George, that there are circ.u.mstances which compel me to act as I am acting?
Heaven knows, I have suffered enough, because you are the only man I can love."
"Then why not remain mine, darling?" he said, more tenderly, with a slight pressure of her hand as he gazed with intense earnestness into her tear-dimmed eyes. "We love one another, therefore why should both our lives be wrecked?"
"Because it is imperative," she answered, gloomily.
"But what motive can you have in thus ruining your future, and casting aside all chance of happiness?" he inquired, puzzled.
"It is to secure my future, not to ruin it, that I have promised to marry the Prince," she answered.
"And for no ulterior motive?"
"Yes," she faltered. "There is still another reason."
"What is it? Tell me."
"No, George," she answered in a low, hoa.r.s.e voice. "Do not ask me, for I can never tell you--never."
"You have a hidden motive which you refuse to explain," he observed resentfully. "I have placed faith in you; surely you can trust me, Liane!"
"With everything, save that."
"Why?"
"It is a secret which I cannot disclose."
"Not even to me?"
"No, not even to you," she answered, pale to the lips. "I dare not!"
He remained silent in perplexity. A bevy of bright-faced, laughing girls pa.s.sed them in high spirits, counting as they went by the coin they had won at the tables. Liane turned her face from them to hide her emotion, and stood motionless, leaning still upon the bal.u.s.trade. The sun was sinking behind the great dark rock whereon was perched Monaco, and the mountains were already purple in the mystic light of evening.
"Why are you so determined that we should separate, darling?" he asked, in a low, pained voice, bending down towards her averted face. "Surely your Prince can never love you as devotedly as I have done!"
"Ah! George," she cried, with a tender pa.s.sion in her glance as she again turned to him, "do not tempt me. It is my duty, and I have given a pledge. I have never loved Prince Zertho, and I never shall. Mine will be a marriage of compulsion. In a few short weeks I shall bid farewell to hope and happiness, to life and love, for I shall become Princess d"Auzac and lose you for ever."
"As Princess you may obtain many of the pleasures of life. Far more than if you were my wife," he observed, in a hollow tone, as if speaking to himself.
"No, no," she protested. "The very name is to me synonymous of all that is hateful. Ah! you do not know, George, the terrible thoughts that seem to goad me to madness. Often I find myself reflecting whether death would not be preferable to the life to which I am now condemned.
Yet I am held to it immutably, forced against my will to become this man"s wife, in order that the terrible secret, which must never be disclosed, may still remain where it is, locked in the breast of the one man who, by its knowledge, holds me irrevocably in his power."
"Then you fear this Prince Zertho?" he said slowly, with deep emphasis.
She seemed quite unlike the laughing, happy girl he had known at home in their quiet rural village. Her strange att.i.tude of abject dejection and despair held him stupefied.
"Yes," she answered hoa.r.s.ely, after a long pause, "I dare not disobey him."
"From your words it would seem that your crime is of such a terrible nature that you dare not risk exposure. Is that so?" he hazarded in a hard voice, scarcely raised above a whisper.
"My crime!" she cried, all colour instantly dying out of her handsome face, while in her clear, grey eyes was a strange expression as if she were haunted by some fearsome spectre of the past. Her white lips quivered, her hands trembled, "What do you mean?" she gasped. "What do you know of my crime?"
Next instant she started, her lips held tight together as she drew herself up unsteadily with a sudden movement.
She knew that she had involuntarily betrayed herself to the man she loved.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
LIP-SALVE.
In a room on the second floor of an old, high, dingy-looking house in one of the dingiest back streets near the flower-market in Nice sat a man and a woman. The room was lofty, with a ceiling which had once been painted but had now faded and fallen away in great flakes, while the furniture was frayed and shabby. The shutters of the two long windows were closed, and the place was lit by a cheap shaded lamp suspended in the centre, its light being too dim to sufficiently illuminate the whole apartment. Beneath the circle of light stood a table marked in squares, and in its centre a roulette-wheel.
The man, lying lazily back in an armchair, smoking a long cigar, was about thirty-five, dark, with well-cut aquiline features, in which craft and intelligence were combined, a small pointed moustache, and a pair of keen black eyes full of suspicion and cunning. His companion was old, perhaps sixty, lean, ill-attired and wizened, her face being almost brown as a toad"s back, her body bent, and her voice weak and croaking.
They sat opposite to one another, talking. Around the walls there were tacked copies of a leaflet headed, in huge black capitals, "The Agony of Monte Carlo," which declared that the advertiser, an Englishman who offered his services to the public, had vanquished the hazard, and was the only person who could gain indefinitely at either roulette or trente-et-quarante. He had solved the puzzling problem of "How to Win."
The French in which the circular was printed was not remarkable for its grammar or diction, but it was certainly a brilliant specimen of advertis.e.m.e.nt, and well calculated to entrap the unwary. Copies of it had for several weeks been widely distributed in the streets of Nice, flung into pa.s.sing cabs, or handed to those who took their daily airing on the Promenade, and it had given rise to a good deal of comment.
Among many other remarkable statements, it was alleged that the discoverer of this infallible method had gained five hundred francs an hour upon an ordinary capital of five francs, and so successful had been his play that the Administration of the Casino, in order to avert their own ruin, had denied him any further card of admission. The remarkable person declared further that so certain was he of success that he was prepared to place any stake against that of any person who doubted, and to allow the player to turn the roulette himself. To those who arranged to play under his direction the circular promised the modest gain of one million two hundred thousand francs a month! Truly the remarkable circular was aptly headed "The Agony of Monte Carlo."
The inventor was the dark-eyed man with the cigar, and it was upon the table before him that he gave ill.u.s.trations of his marvellous discovery to his clients. All the systems of Jacquard, Yaucanson, Fulton, Descartes and Copernic were declared to be mere jumbles of false principles, and held up to derision. This was actually infallible.
Nice had heard of a good many methods of winning before, but never one put forward by an inventor sufficiently confident to offer to bear the losses; hence, from the hours of ten to twelve, and two to six, the foppishly-attired man who declared in his circular, "_Je mis la force, parceque je suis la verite_," was kept busy instructing amateur gamesters how to act when at Monte Carlo, and receiving substantial fees for so doing.
The clocks had chimed ten, and the street was quiet. The old woman, who with difficulty had been reading the feuilleton in the _Pet.i.t Nicois_ yawned, flung down her paper, and glanced over at the cosmopolitan adventurer who, with his head thrown back, was staring at the ceiling, humming in a not unmusical voice the catchy refrain of Varney"s popular "Serenade du Pave--"
"Sois bonne, O ma chere inconnue, Pour qui j"ai si souvent chante!
Ton offrande est la bienvenue, Fais-moi la charite!
Sois bonne, O ma chere inconnue, Pour qui j"ai souvent chante!
Devant moi, devant moi Sois la bienvenue?"
So light-hearted he seemed that possibly he had succeeded in inventing some other system whereby the pockets of the long-suffering public might be touched. Suddenly a footstep on the landing outside caused them both to start and exchange quick glances. Then the bell rang, and the conqueror of the hazard rose and opened the door.
Their visitor was Zertho. He was in evening clothes, having left the theatre early to stroll round there.
"Well, Mother Valentin," he exclaimed in French, tossing his hat carelessly upon the table, and sinking into a chair. "Rheumatism still bad--eh?"
"Ah, yes, m"sieur," croaked the old woman in the Provencal patois, "still very bad," and grunting, she rose, and hobbled out of the room.
"And how"s business?" Zertho inquired of the other.
"Pretty fair. Lots of mugs in the town just now," he smiled, speaking in c.o.c.kney English.
"That handbill of yours is about the cheekiest bit of literature I"ve ever come across," he said, nodding towards one of the remarkable doc.u.ments tacked upon the wall.
"It has drawn "em like honey draws flies," said the other, smiling and regarding it with pride. "The offer to pay the losses does it. You can always make a lie truth by lying large enough."
He had resumed his seat, and was puffing contentedly at his cigar.
"It"s a really marvellous specimen of bluff," Zertho observed, in a tone of admiration. "When I first saw it I feared that you had been a bit too extravagant in your promises."