At the top of the stairs I paused a moment, and put my ear to the keyhole of our room. Though I listened for five minutes I did not hear the sound of any voice; and making sure from this that the police officer was alone in the place, I knocked gently with the butt-end of the revolver upon the door. A loud "Herein!" answered me; but taking no notice of this, I knocked again, and at the second knock the door was thrown wide open, and the man was before me. Quick as he was—and he put out his arm to grasp my collar directly he saw me—I gripped him by the throat in such a lightning grip that his eyes seemed to start straight out of his head, and the flesh of his face went all blue and discolored. Never was a man more taken by surprise than he was. He had looked to be the attacking party; I had forestalled him; and now as he reeled back over my knee, and the gurgling in his throat was an awful thing to hear, I forced him into the bedroom close by, and held him on the bed.
"Now," said I, not caring a rap whether he understood English or the other thing—"now, move a hand and I'll shoot you like a dog. What I've come here for is my money. Let me take that, and I'll give you a hundred pounds. But open your lips, and I'll close them with a bullet."
I said this still clutching his throat, and with my knee hard down upon his chest. He was pretty nearly insensible by that time, and when I made sure that he had not strength enough left to give me trouble, I snatched a sheet from the bed and bound it round his face and arms, tying knots which would have held a bullock. A couple of straps, torn off one of my master's trunks, did for his feet; and a length of rope from my box bound him up to the bed. When I had finished with him, I don't believe that he could move his neck an inch either way; and only then did I look for the money. It was lying, fair for all the world to see, on the table by the window. The draft had been in his hand when I knocked at the door; he had simply laid it down when he came to answer me.
Five minutes before closing time that night, we drew our money from the Bank of Vienna. A quarter of an hour later we were in Lobmeyr's shop. I don't think I ever heard a man apologize so much or look so astonished.
"This will teach you," said Sir Nicolas, "to be less hasty in your conclusions, sir. You have done us a very great injury, which I hope you will at once repair."
"Most certainly, I will," exclaimed Lobmeyr, as he turned his notes over and over, and examined them for the tenth time. "I will send to the police at once. But what was I to think? I telegraphed to Rome for the references of the Comte de Laon, and they said that he was not here at all, but in Normandy."
"And can't you understand," cried Sir Nicolas, "that a man may very well give it out that he's in Normandy and yet be in Vienna? Oh, you're a person of small discernment, Herr Lobmeyer! I shall have to call upon the police myself. And that reminds me, we left one of your agents in a bad way up at the Singer Strasse. You can just send up a man to release him, and give him a thousand florins for the inconvenience. Indeed, we had to tie him up to the bed before he would let us have our own money."
"I will do it with pleasure," said Lobmeyr, "and add a hundred florins of my own. I cannot express my sorrow at the whole episode. At any rate, you will have one of the finest diamonds in Europe to be a constant pledge of my regrets."
With this adieu we left him, and drove straight to the station.
"Bedad!" said Sir Nicolas, as we took our tickets, "to think that men could go through what we've gone through these past ten days and yet be gay about it! Hildebrand, ye've made a fortune for me, and I'll not forget it to my dying day."
I couldn't deny this, except that part about the fortune. What we really cleared was three thousand five hundred apiece. Benjamin King, like a true Yankee, knocked three thousand off our original figure, and we didn't make a fuss about the balance, you may be sure.
CHAPTER XV
QUEEN AND KNAVE
There is no date in my diary which tells me exactly when we arrived in Brittany; but I shall not be far wrong if I set it down as the month of March, and, to be particular, rather late than early, in a week when there was spring in the air, and the smell of the country was like new wine to a man. I can remember well that there were many to chaff us for leaving Paris at such a season; and, so far as that goes, it was a queer sort of journey to make just when the town was full of life, and most folks were coming in from the provinces. But Sir Nicolas was hit again, and like many a one before his day, and many a one to come after, time and season were nothing when laid against a woman's pretty face. He would have gone to the other end of the world for Mme. Pauline—aye, I believe he would go now, if it were in his power.
I have seen women enough in my time,—and a man's no worse judge of a pretty girl because fortune compels him to look at her through an attic window,—but this I will say, that a finer creature than the mistress of the Château de l'Épée never drew breath. We had met her first in the Vienna express on our return from that business with Benjamin King,—I laugh now when I think of it,—and she and Sir Nicolas struck up a friendship at once. This was not surprising, for he had the ways which go down with women to a degree I've never seen before or since; and she—well, she was a creature who could walk straight to a man's heart, so to speak. All said and done, it isn't the schoolgirl with the pink-and-white skin, and the simper you find in story-books, that a man of the world cares twopence about, Youth? Yes, he won't turn his head away from that; nor prettiness either, so far as it goes. But it's soul and devil, light and shade, that hold him—and there never was a woman who had them like madame.
I said, when first I saw her, that she was a stranger to the thirties, and this was no wonder, for she had the face of a child. It was not until we had spent some few days in her company that I changed my opinion, and put her down as thirty-one or thirty-two. It's always difficult to read the age of a brunette; and her hair was as dark as night. Not that years made any difference to her; for she was just one of those rare creatures whose acquaintance age seems to shun. There is no greater compliment to a woman than this—that men are glad to hear she is no child. In her case, she was both child and woman, slight and graceful as a young girl should be, gay in talk as one who has not taken a downward rung on the ladder of life. And I never met a man yet who wasn't her servant ten minutes after he knew her.
It is to be imagined how my master carried himself in an affair of this sort. He had seen madame first on the platform at Munich; he was raving about her before we got to Strasbourg; when at last the train drew up at the Gare de l'Est, he spoke to her as though he had known her all his life. I heard him promise to call upon her immediately at her apartment in the Rue de Lisbonne. He couldn't talk of any thing else for hours after.
"Indeed, and 'tis lucky entirely I am to have travelled in that same train," said he to me, directly we were alone together in the cab. "Was there ever the like to her born? She's Mme. Pauline Sainte-Claire, the sister to the artist of that name, I'd have you know. Her husband died at Brest three years ago——"
"Oh," said I, for I saw how the land lay, "they always die like that."
But at this he flared up in a minute.
"If it's any insult you mean to her," cried he, "you'll go out of the cab this minute. Was there any need to remind ye that ye're a servant?"
"None at all," said I, though I could have have hit him for the word. "A servant I am; maybe an indispensable one"—and with that I looked him full in the face, and he turned as white as a sheet.
"’Tis late in the day to quarrel, isn't it?" he asked.
"You're the best judge of that, sir," said I.
After this we rode on to the hotel without a word; but he went the same afternoon to leave his