“I think that I am wrong, but that I propose to forget,” he told her. “You have probably made many men forget themselves in your brief years, Princess. You will make many more. What I read, I shall communicate to Berati. The source of my information I shall keep to myself. Take the slipper.”
Her hands were drawing it off the table but, as though by accident, they passed over Fawley’s and he felt their shivering warmth. There was a softer light in her eyes than he had ever seen.
“Princess—Elida—” he whispered.
She leaned towards him but Fawley swung suddenly around in his chair. Patoni, stark and sinister, was standing by the side of the screen, looking in. His smile was one of composed malevolence.
“I beg a thousand pardons,” he apologised, with a stiff little bow. “I am here on a mission of great importance.”
Fawley rose to his feet. He was as tall as Patoni and at that moment his face was as hard and set.
“It is part of your Italian manners,” he asked, “to play the spy in this way?”
“I have offered you my apologies,” was the cold retort. “A quarrel between us is not possible, Major Fawley. I am still of the Church and I do not fight duels. I am compelled to ask you to accompany me without a moment’s delay to the Generalissimo.”
“The Princess—” Fawley began.
“Has her duenna,” Patoni interrupted.
Elida leaned forward and suddenly clasped Fawley’s hand. He seemed somehow to have grown in stature, a man on fire with anger and without a doubt dangerous. Even the two carabinieri standing behind Patoni looked at him with respect.
“Please go,” she begged. “Please go with Prince Patoni, my friend. My car is waiting, my servant is here. I need no escort. I wish so much that you do as I ask.”
Fawley bent over her hands and touched them with his lips. Then he turned and left the room with Patoni.
CHAPTER VI
In a life full of surprises Martin Fawley was inclined to doubt whether he had ever received a greater one than when, for the second time during the same day, he was ushered into the presence of General Berati, the most dreaded man in Rome. Gone was the severe high-necked and tight-waisted uniform; gone the iciness of his speech and the cold precision of his words. It was a tolerable imitation of a human being with whom Fawley was confronted—a dark-haired, undersized but sufficiently good-looking man dressed in a suit of apparently English tweeds, stretched at his full length upon the sofa of a comfortable sitting room leading out of his bureau, reading the New York Herald and with something that looked suspiciously like a Scotch whisky and soda by his side. He threw down his paper and welcomed his visitor with a grim cordiality.
“Come in, Major,” he invited. “I will offer you a whisky and soda as soon as you tell me exactly whom you found on the other side of that door.”
Fawley accepted the chair to which his host had pointed.
“May I take the liberty,” he begged, “of asking a question first?”
“Why not?” Berati answered with unabated good humour. “This is an unofficial conversation. Proceed.”
“Where did you disappear to after that first shot?”
Berati chuckled.
“I give audiences too easily,” he confided, “and for that reason, I have several little contrivances of my own invention. Some day I will show you this one. There is a button on my desk which I touch, the rubber floor upon which I sit disappears, and so do I, into the room below. I should explain perhaps that it is only a drop of a few feet and the end is what you call in England a feather bed. And now the answer to my question, please.”
Martin Fawley was probably as near complete embarrassment as ever before in his life. He hated the position in which he found himself. He hated what he was about to do. He kept his countenance but he was bitterly mortified as he felt for a secret pocket inside his coat and silently withdrew his cigarette case.
“General Berati,” he said, “I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself and I shall merit what you will doubtless think of me. At the same time, do remember this—I am to some extent a mercenary in your service. I allow myself that amount of excuse. It was a woman who fired the shot and, as you see, I am handing back my papers.”
“This is most intriguing,” Berati observed. “I gather then that you refuse to tell me her name?”
“Frankly,” Fawley replied, “I believe you know it already but, all the same, you are right: I refuse to tell you her name. I have been in your service for the matter of a few hours, I see you nearly killed, I know who fired the shot and I am not going to tell you who it was.”
“Capital,” Berati exclaimed. “Just what I should have expected from you. Put back your cigarette case, my young friend. After all, you probably saved my life, for, thanks to you, there was no second shot.”
“You know who it was?” Fawley asked, a little bewildered.
“Perfectly well,” Berati confided. “I joined my wife’s guests,” he went on, “chiefly for the pleasure of seeing whether you showed any embarrassment when you were presented to a certain one of our Roman beauties. My congratulations, Major. You have some of the gifts necessary in our profession, at any rate. Let me offer you a whisky and soda.”
Fawley thanked him and helped himself. Berati’s intonation as well as his manner seemed to have become curiously Anglo-Saxon.
“Listen, my friend,” he continued, “when an attempt is made upon my life, I never, if I can help it, allow anything to appear in the journals. You do not wish to give away a beautiful lady any more than I want to admit to the indignity of having been nearly wiped off the earth by so frail an instrument.”
“I think, sir, that you are a very brave and a very forgiving man,” Fawley declared, with an impulsiveness which was absolutely foreign to his character.
Berati laughed almost gaily.
“No man,” he said, “who is in touch with the great affairs of the world can afford to be made ridiculous. An attempt on my life by my wife’s niece, by the Princess Elida, is a thing to smile at. Nevertheless,” he went on, his tone becoming a trifle graver, “I have reason to believe that the Princess was carrying with her a paper of some importance.”
“She was,” Fawley admitted.
“You discovered it?” Berati snapped out with a trace of his former manner.
“I discovered it,” Fawley confessed. “Its purport is at your disposal.”
“And the paper?”
“I returned it to the Princess.”
