THE PASSING PRINCESS AND THE MISTAKEN COUNTESS
With the sapphire bay of Puntal at his back, his knees clasped between
interlacing fingers, Benton sat on the stone sea-wall and affected to
whistle up a lightness of heart. Near at hand sprawled a picturesque
city, its houses tinted in pea-greens, pinks and soft blues, or as white
and decorative as though fashioned in icing on a cake.
Clinging steeply to higher levels and leaning on buttressing walls, lay
outspread vineyards and cane fields and gardens. Splotching the whole
with imperial and gorgeous purple, hung masses of bougonvillea between
trellis and masonry. At a more lofty line, where the sub-tropical
profusion halted in the warning breath of a keener atmosphere, came the
scrub growth and beyond that, in succeeding altitudes, the pine belt,
the snow line and the film of trailing cloud on the white peaks.
Out of the center of the color-splashed town rose the square tower of
the ancient cathedral, white in a coat of plaster for two-thirds of its
height, but gray at its top in the nakedness of mossy stone.
To its dilapidated clock Benton's eyes traveled repeatedly and anxiously
while he waited.
From the clock they wandered in turn to the road circling the bay, and
the cliff at his left, where the jail-like walls of the King's Palace
rose sheer from the rock, fifty feet above him.
From the direction of the Cathedral drifted fragments of band music, and
the bugle calls of marching platoons. Everywhere festivity reigned,
working great profits to the keepers of the wine-shops.
Manuel Blanco turned the corner and Benton slipped quickly down from his
perch on the wall and fell into step as the other passed.
"It is difficult to learn anything, _Señor_." The Spaniard spoke low as
he led the way outward from the city.
"Puntal is usually a quiet place and the festivities have made it like a
child at a _fiesta_. One hears only 'Long live the King--the Queen!'
There are to be illuminations to-night, and music, and the limit will be
taken off the roulette wheels at the Strangers' Club. Bah! One could
have read it in the papers without leaving Cadiz."
"Then you have learned nothing?"
"One thing, yes. An old friend of mine has come for the festivities from
the Duke's estate. He says the pass is picketed and a guard is posted
at the Look-out Rock."
"The Look-out Rock?" Benton repeated the words with an inflection of
inquiry.
"Yes--look above you at the hill whose summit is less high than the
ridge peaks--there below the snow." Blanco suddenly raised his voice
from confidential undertone to the sing-song of the professional guide.
"Yonder," he said, scarcely changing the direction of his pointed
finger, "is the unfinished sanatorium for consumptives which the Germans
undertook and left unfinished." Two soldiers were sauntering by, smart
in newly issued uniforms of tall red caps, dark tunics, sky-blue
breeches, and polished boots. "That point," went on Blanco, dropping his
voice again, as they passed out of earshot, "is three thousand, five
hundred feet above the sea. From the rock by the pines--if you had a
strong glass, you could see the Galavian flag which flies there--the eye
sweeps the sea for many empty leagues. One's gaze can also follow the
gorge where runs the pass through the mountains. Also, to the other
side, one has an eagle's glimpse of the Grand Duke's hunting lodge.
There is an observatory just back of the rock and flag. The speck of
light which you can see, like a splinter of crystal, is its dome, but
only military astronomers now look through its telescope. There one can
read the tale of open shutters or barred windows in the house of Louis,
the Dreamer. You understand?"
"Yes."
"Now, do you see the thread of broken masonry zig-zagging upward from
the Palace? That is a walled drive which runs part of the way up to the
rock. In other days the Kings of Galavia went thus from their castle to
the point whence they could see the peninsula spread out below like a
map on the page of a school-book."
"Yes? What else?"
"This. The lodge of the Duke as seen by the telescope sleeps
shuttered--an expanse of blank walls. Yet the Duke is there!"
"Louis--in Galavia?"
"Wait." Blanco laid his hand on the other's arm and smiled.
"My friend is superstitious--and ignorant. He tells how the Duke has a
ship's mast with wires on a tower fronting the far side. He says Louis
talks with the open sea."
"A Marconi mast?"
Manuel nodded.
Benton's eyes narrowed under drawn brows. When he spoke his voice was
tense.
"In God's name, Manuel," he whispered, "what is the answer?"
The Spaniard met the gaze gravely. "I fancy, _Señor_," he said slowly,
"the matches will burn."
"When? Where?"
"_Quien sabe?_" Blanco paused to light a cigarette. Two priests, their
black robes relieved by crimson sashes and stockings, approached, and
until they were at a safe distance he talked on once more at random with
the sing-song patter of the guide. "That dungeon-like building is the
old Fortress _do Freres_. It has clung to that gut of rock out there in
the bay since the days when the Moors held the Mediterranean. It is said
that the new King will convert it from a fortress into a prison. It is
now employed as an arsenal."
Slowly the two men moved back to the busier part of the city. They
walked in silence until they were swallowed in the crowds drifting near
the Central Avenue. Finally Blanco leaned forward, moved by the anxious
face of his companion. "_Mañana, Señor_," he suggested reassuringly.
"Perhaps we may learn to-morrow."
"And to-morrow may be too late," replied Benton.
"Hardly, _Señor_. The marriage and coronation are the day following. It
should be one of those occasions." Benton only shuddered.
They swung into the _Ruo Centrale_, between lining sycamores, olive
trees and acacias, to be engulfed in a jostling press of feast-day
humanity. Suddenly Benton felt his coat-sleeve tugged.
"Let us stop," Manuel shouted into his ear above the roar of the
carnival clamor. "The Royal carriage comes."
Between a garden and the pavement ran a stone coping, topped by a tall
iron grill, and laden with screening vines. The two men mounted this
masonry and clung to the iron bars, as the crowd was driven back from
the street by the outriders. Before Benton's eyes the whole mass of
humanity swam in a blur of confusion and vertigo. The passing files of
blue and red soldiery seemed wavering figures mounted on reeling horses.
The King's carriage swung into view and a crescendo of cheering went up
from the crowd.
Benton saw blurred circles of color whirling dizzily about a steady
center, and the center was the slender woman at Karyl's side, who was
the day after to-morrow to become his Queen. He saw the fixed smile with
which she tried to acknowledge the salutations as the crowd eddied about
her carriage. Her wide, stricken eyes were shimmery with imprisoned
tears. To drive through the streets of Puntal with that half-stunned
misery written clear in lips and eyes, she must, he knew, have reached
the outmost border of endurance. Karyl bent solicitously forward and
spoke, and she nodded as if answering in a dream, smiling wanly. It was
all as some young Queen might have gone to the guillotine rather than to
her coronation. As she looked bewilderedly from side to side her glance
fell upon the clustering flowers of the vine. Benton gripped the iron
bars and groaned, and then her eyes met his. For a moment her pupils
dilated and one gloved hand convulsively tightened on the paneling of
the carriage door. The man dropped into the crowd and was swallowed up,
and he knew by her familiar gesture of brushing something away from her
temples, that she believed she had seen an image projected from a
troubled brain.
"Come," he said brokenly to his companion, "for God's sake get me out of
this crowd."
* * * * *
The Strangers' Club of Puntal sits high on a solid wall of rock and
overlooks the sea. Its beauty is too full of wizardry to seem real, and
what nature had done in view and sub-tropical luxuriance the syndicate
which operates the ball rooms, tea gardens, and roulette wheels has
striven to abet. To-night a moon two-thirds full immersed the grounds in
a bath of blue and silver, and far off below the cliff wall the
Mediterranean was phosphorescent. In the room where the _croupiers_ spun
the wheels, the color scheme was profligate.
Benton idled at one of the tables, his eyes searching the crowd in the
faint hope of discovering some thread which he might follow up to
definite conclusion. Beyond the wheel, just at the _croupier's_ elbow,
stood a woman, audaciously yet charmingly gowned in red, with a
scale-like shimmer of passementerie. A red rose in her black hair threw
into conspicuous effect its intense luster.
She might have been the genius of _Rouge et Noir_. Her litheness had the
panther's sinuous strength. The vivid contrast of olive cheeks, carmine
lips and dark eyes, gave stress to her slender sensuousness.
Hers was the allurement of poppy and passion-flower. In her movements
was suggestion of vital feminine force.
Perhaps the incurious glance of the American made itself felt, for as
she threw down a fresh _louis d'or_, she looked up and their eyes met.
For an instant her expression was almost that of one who stifles an
impulse to recognize another. Possibly, thought Benton, she had mistaken
him for someone else.
"_Mon dieu_," whispered a voice in French, "the Comptessa d'Astaride is
charming this evening."
"Ah, such wit! Such charm!" enthused another voice at Benton's back.
"She is most perfect in those gowns of unbroken lines, with a single
rose." Evidently the men left the tables at once, for Benton heard no
more. He also turned away a moment later to make way for an Italian in
whose feverish eyes burned the roulette-lust. He went to the farthest
end of the gardens, where there was deep shadow, and a seaward outlook
over the cliff wall. There the glare of electric bulbs and blazing
doorways was softened, and the orchestra's music was modulated.
Presently he was startled by a ripple of laughter at his shoulder, low
and rich in musical vibrance.
"Ah, it is not like this in your gray, fog-wrapped country."
Benton wheeled in astonishment to encounter the dazzling smile of the
Countess Astaride. She was standing slender as a young girl, all agleam
in the half-light as though she wore an armor of glowing copper and
garnets.
"I beg your pardon," stammered the American, but she laid a hand lightly
on his arm and smilingly shook her head.
"I know, Monsieur Martin, we have not met, but you were with the Duke at
Cadiz. You have come in his interest. In his cause, I acknowledge no
conventions." In her voice was the fusing of condescension and regal
graciousness. "It was wise," she thoughtfully added, "to shave your
mustache, but even so Von Ritz will know you. You cannot be too
guarded."
For an instant Benton stood with his hands braced on the coping
regarding her curiously. Evidently he stood on the verge of some
revelation, but the rôle in which her palpable mistake cast him was one
he must play all in the dark.
"You can trust me," she said with an impassioned note but without
elevating her voice. "I am the Countess--"
"Astaride," finished Benton.
Then he cautiously added the inquiry: "Have you heard the plans that
were discussed by the Duke, and Jusseret and Borttorff?"
"And yourself and Lieutenant Lapas," she augmented.
"And Lapas and myself," admitted Benton, lying fluently.
"I know only that Louis is to wait at his lodge to hear by wireless
whether France and Italy will recognize his government," she hastily
recited; "and that on that signal you and Lapas wait to strike the
blow."
"Do you know when?" inquired the American, fencing warily in the effort
to lead her into betrayal of more definite information.
"It must be soon--or never! But tell me, has Louis come? Has he reached
his hunting lodge? Does he know that guards are at the rock? Do you, or
Lapas, wait to flash the signal from the look-out? Ah, how my gaze shall
be bent toward the flag-staff." Then, as her eyes wandered out to sea,
her voice became soft with dreams. She laughed low and shook her head.
"Louis, Louis!" she murmured. "When you are King! But tell me--" again
she was anxious, executive, imperious--"tell me everything!"
Obviously he was mistaken for the English Jackal!
Benton countered anxiously. "Yet, Your Majesty,"--he bent low as he
anticipated her ambition in bestowing the title--"Your Majesty asks so
many questions all at once, and we may be interrupted."
Once more she was in a realm of air castles as she leaned on the stone
coping and gazed off into the moonlight. "It is but the touching of a
button," she murmured, "and _allons_! In the space of an explosion,
dynasties change places." Suddenly she stood up. "You are right. We
cannot talk here. I shall be missed. Take this"--she slipped a seal ring
from her finger. "Come to me to-morrow morning. I am at the Hôtel de
France. I shall be ostensibly out, but show the ring and you will be
admitted. When I am Queen, you shall not go undecorated." She gave his
hand a warm momentary pressure and was gone.