moisture of the recent massage. In their hands quivered sabres as sharp as razors.
"Ready!"
Some one was directing the fight.
"Why this is barbarous!" thought the Spaniard. "These men are savages."
He did not dare say it aloud because he was a soldier, and more than that, a Colonel; but during the rest of his life he never could forget that scene.
They crossed swords, parried, attacked, the Prince with firm poise, the other with catlike agility. Toledo could see that their bodies were blood red, but at the moment he thought it an effect of the torchlight. As they drew near him, circling about in their deadly play, he realized that they were actually red with blood. Their bodies seemed covered with a purple vestment that was torn to shreds and the shreds quivered at the ends as the blood dripped off. Standing out against that warm moist garment rose their white arms. The Prince was getting the worst of it. Toledo suddenly saw a deep gash appear in his brow; a moment later he thought he saw one of his ears hang half severed from the skull. But that wild cat from the steppes always sprang free from every sabre thrust. No one dared intervene; it was a duel without quarter, without rest, with no condition save the death of one or the other combatant. At times they came together, forming a single body bristling with white flashes in the shadow of the trees; a moment later they appeared apart, seeking each other in the fiery circle of the torches.
Suddenly Toledo heard a wild cry of pain, the howl of a poor animal caught unawares. The Prince was the only one still standing. A straight thrust had slashed his adversary's jugular. Lubimoff stood there a moment motionless. Then his superhuman strength, which had sustained him until then, left him. With the loss of blood, all the weariness of the struggle came over him like a shot. He too tottered and fell, but into the arms of friends. There was not a single doctor among the spectators. No one had thought of that. They considered the presence of one unnecessary in an encounter that could end only in death.
All the curiosity seekers left the garden, following the unconscious Prince. A few servants stayed behind, gathered about the body of the Cossack. He was lying face downward. With respectful awe they watched as his legs quivered for the last time, as the blood slowly emptied itself from the neck, and spread out across the snow, in a black stain that was beginning to take on a bluish tinge in the livid light of dawn.
At the court, which had already shown frequent alarm over the Prince's notorious adventures, this event caused a great stir. Lubimoff's duels, his love affairs, his scandalous entertainments, annoyed the young Emperor, who had taken it upon himself to improve the morals of his associates.
In aristocratic gatherings, the freakish whims of the almost forgotten Nadina Lubimoff were brought to memory and discussed again. The young Cossack was related to people of influence, and his death contributed to the complete disgrace of his sister.
Michael Fedor had not yet entirely recovered from his wounds, when he received the order to leave Russia. The Czar was banishing him, and for an indefinite period. He might live in Paris with his mother.
"That's all right; so long as they respect his income," was the Colonel's only comment.
Arriving in Paris, the Prince was convinced of his mother's insanity. That was something he had suspected for some time, from her letters. Sir Edwin had died, rather suddenly, three years before, in England, following defeat in an election. The palace in the Monçeau quarter had suffered an interior transformation that represented a cost of several millions. The Princess was devoting all her time to it. The Arabic, Persian, Greek, or Chinese drawing rooms, the construction and decoration of which had made the fortune of two architects and several dealers in doubtful antiques, had just disappeared; while furnishings acquired years before as extremely rare pieces had been scattered to the four winds as though they were mere rubbish of no value. The palace remained the same as before on the outside; but the interior, beginning with the stairway, was rebuilt in imitation of a medieval castle. Not a single window remained without its stained glass, not a room but was shrouded in the vague half light of a cellar. All the conventional Gothic known to modern contractors was employed by order of the Princess in the restoration of the house. Three stories and one entire wing had been torn down to form the nave of a cathedral.
Michael saw advancing toward him a tall austere woman, with long transparent fingers, and large, staring, uncanny eyes. She was dressed in black, with loose sleeves that almost touched the ground, and with a white bonnet fitting close to the head beneath her mourning veils. In spite of the fact that she had a rosary at her wrist and talked with the air of a martyr, her son imagined that he was looking at an opera singer.
The expulsion of the Prince from Russia had caused her neither surprise nor sorrow.
"Those Romanoffs have always disliked us. They cannot forget that your illustrious ancestor, so they say, used to beat Catherine when he caught her with anyone else."
Her thoughts rose above all such worldly considerations. She had never, as a matter of fact, taken any stock in religion; but now she declared herself a Catholic. She had made no public declaration of conversion, to be sure, but she felt she must adopt the belief. Her new and final personality demanded it.
"Your father approves of my new stand. Often in the night I have talked with my hero. He is glad to see me in the path of truth."
No sooner had Michael Fedor and the Colonel arrived, than they noticed the strange visitors who were frequenting the palace. The long haired terrorists had been succeeded by numerous fortune tellers, soothsayers, clairvoyants, and solemn professors of occult sciences. A plain old lamp-stand, which looked as though it might have walked upstairs by itself from the concierge's quarters, was jumping about and rapping, at all hours, in the bedroom of the Princess.
One day she decided to tell her son the great secret of her life. At last she knew who she was; the spirits had revealed to her the knowledge of her true personality. In one of her many previous existences she had been the most unfortunate and beautiful, the most "romantic", of queens. The soul of the Russian princess, Nadina Lubimoff, centuries ago had dwelt in the body of Mary Stuart.
"That is why I always had a special liking for the story of the unhappy queen. And now I know why, when I saw Sir Edwin in London, I fell in love with him on the spot, in the most irresistible fashion. His ancestors were Scottish."
Such reasons were to her as unanswerable as all the others which had guided her actions. And to pay homage to the queenly soul which was, according to all her mystic attendants, reincarnated in her, she was going to live like the beheaded sovereign of Scotland, copying the Queen's clothes as she had seen them in pictures, converting her palace into a mediæval castle, and eating from antique plates nothing but Renaissance delicacies, the recipes for which she had employed a history professor to discover in ancient chronicles.
Carriages now rarely entered the Court of Honor of the palace. The grand stairway was growing mossy between its steps. Not so the delivery entrance. There, each day, the professionals of "the beyond" appeared, poorly dressed and suspicious looking men and women, who were exploiting the Princess, generous as a queen – and was she not one? – under the guise of aiding her in the manipulation of the lamp table, and conjuring up historic phantoms which, to prove their presence, moved the carpets, made the pictures fall from the walls, changed the positions of the chairs, and committed other childish deviltries.
Doña Mercedes avoided visiting the Princess. Her simple faith caused her to be frightened at queens that last for centuries, and at those halls with old furniture that seemed to palpitate with mysterious life. She preferred the quiet wholesome conversation of the priests whom she was supporting for herself. The Aragonese vicar had allowed himself to be snatched away in triumph by another devout millionaire. He had grown tired, no doubt, of the excessive ease and idleness afforded him by his penitent, and was bored with
