William Le Queux (continued 7)
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“Then the world shall know that the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Nicolayevna is in the Secret Service!” he cried fiercely. “She has betrayed her country and her kinsman, the Emperor!”
Sonia, smiling in contempt, said,—
“The denunciation will be your own condemnation.”
“Why? What have I to lose?” he asked indignantly. “Your life. The police have not yet forgotten the tragedy at ‘The Nook.’”
He glared at her open-mouthed.
“Perhaps it may be well at this moment to recall some facts that you may have found convenient to forget,” she went on ruthlessly, while I, standing beside Ella, drank in eagerly every word. “You will remember where you reduced the stolen document to cipher, imitating Dudley’s handwriting on the telegraph forms. It was at my house. The envelope containing the agreement had been opened in the ‘cabinet noir’ at the Embassy, the intention being to replace it at the Foreign Office. But it was I who broke the seal. In your hurry you left the document behind, and even when you returned two hours later, your mind was so full of other things that you did not remember it; so I gummed down the cut edges, and sent it afterwards to Elizaveta. When you came the second time you had with you a pair of men’s gloves. Whose they were I knew not, but you got me to sew inside the index-finger of the left hand a tiny, jagged splinter of glass, and upon that glass, when you thought I did not observe you, you smeared some of that fluid that Ruyandez, the Haytian merchant, had given me long ago. That poison I kept locked away in a small cabinet, but many months before I had shown it to you and explained that it was some of that used by the Obeah men, and so rapid was it in effect that one single drop would cause paralysis of the heart within five minutes without leaving any trace of poison. You obtained a key to that cabinet, for when I had gone from the room on that afternoon I watched you unlock it, take out the reed containing the decoction, and prepare the glove.”
“Liar!” gasped Beck. “I didn’t touch it.”
“The glove,” she continued, “belonged to Dudley Ogle. That day Elizaveta had told him that you, a member of the English Parliament, was the chief of Russian spies, and you feared lest he should expose you, as no doubt he would have done if you had not, with cowardly cunning, taken his life.”
“Murderer!” cried Ella, amazed. “You—you killed him! Ah! I suspected it. Tell us, Sonia, how it was accomplished.”
“The gloves this man brought to my house were a pair he had taken up by mistake when at Shepperton on the previous evening. For cool and desperate plotting, the manner in which he killed the man he feared was astounding, for, having introduced into the finger of the glove the tiny piece of glass, he, during that evening at ‘The Nook,’ took out his victim’s gloves from his overcoat in the hall and replaced them by those prepared. When Dudley left to walk home he bade farewell to you, and at once proceeding to put on his gloves, received a scratch on the finger so slight as to be almost unnoticeable, yet within five minutes the effects of the poison had reached his heart, and he was beyond human aid.”
“Amazing!” I cried, regarding my whilom friend with intense loathing as he stood before us, his face a ghastly hue.
“It’s untrue! Who will believe such a woman?” he cried.
“Everyone will,” Sonia retorted quickly. “See, here is the proof,” and she drew from her pocket a well-worn suède glove of dark grey, which I recognised at once as being one of the kind always worn by Dudley. “The splinter of glass is still inside.”
The man who had led the double life of spy and legislator, and who had amassed a great fortune in his speculations in African gold, stood livid, with terror-stricken eyes riveted upon the evidence of his crime, like one transfixed.
“The Tzar will have no further employment for a murderer,” exclaimed Ella at last. “Neither will the House of Commons permit a spy to sit in its midst. When I consented to enter the Secret Service of His Majesty, it was with one object—to obtain permission to marry. This I have attained, and because of Geoffrey’s generosity and free forgiveness I have now no further fear of the opinion of the world or of revelations by a man who is proved to be a murderer. At last I have secured freedom from your hateful tie.”
“Then you intend to denounce me?” Beck cried, glancing round with a wild, hunted look.
“Twenty-four hours from now I shall place Lord Warnham in possession of the whole of these curious facts. If you are still upon English soil, you will be arrested for the murder of my friend,” I answered calmly. “I see plainly how, while I left you alone with the dead man, you placed in his pocket the brass seal found upon him, and how cleverly you managed to introduce the bogus passport and evidences of forgery among his possessions. Yours was a devilish ingenuity, indeed.”
“If I fly you will not follow?” he gasped eagerly.
“Wherever you may hide you will be followed by your guilt,” I answered. “A murderer can hope for no forgiveness from his fellow-men.”
With his chin sunk upon his breast, and his wild eyes downcast, he stood in silence, leaning heavily against the wall. Then, slowly, with a final look upon him, I passed out behind my wife and the pale-faced woman who had so clearly substantiated her terrible charge. The vengeance he had sought to bring upon Ella had fallen upon him and completely crushed him.
In the library at Berkeley Square on the following afternoon I explained the whole of the startling facts, to the wizened, ascetic old Earl, who sat speechless in amazement when he realised that Andrew Beck was actually a foreign spy. It was during the conversation that followed I learnt that the man who had been loved by Sonia was Cecil Bingham, the young country gentleman who, known to both, had sought to assist Ella in unearthing the identity of Dudley’s murderer. Sonia had misjudged my wife entirely, for she had never denounced her to Cecil, and the latter, being at that moment a guest in the Earl’s house, was sent for, and before us all the pair became reconciled.
Elizaveta Nicolayevna, or Ella, as I still call her, has now renounced her country, and become thoroughly English. A year ago Lord Warnham, assured of my wife’s probity—for greatly to Monsieur Grodekoff’s dismay, she had given some valuable information regarding the activity of the Russian Secret Service at Downing Street—appointed me to a responsible post at our Embassy in Paris, so that we now live together at the big white house in the Avenue des Champs Elysées, while Sonia and Cecil are also married and live quietly in a quaint old manor-house near Winchester.
It was only the other day, however, that we heard mention of Andrew Beck, the popular legislator who so mysteriously accepted stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds. There was a paragraph in the newspapers stating that he had been found drowned in the Scheldt, near Antwerp, and foul play was suspected. Then Ella explained to me that the woman who had passed as her mother, Mrs Laing, was, she afterwards discovered, a well-known Nihilist, and it was in order to keep observation upon her that the detective Renouf had entered her service. This woman, whose real name was Sophie Grunsberg, was greatly incensed against Beck on account of certain false accusations he had made against members of the revolutionary organisation, and there was little doubt that he had fallen beneath their far-reaching vengeance.
Here, as I pen these last few lines of my strange story of England’s peril, my own betrayal, and my wife’s fond love, Ella, with sweet, glad smile, moves forward to stroke my hair with soft, caressing hand. The odour of sampaguita pervades her chiffons, stirring within me memories of the past. We are together in the room I know so well, with its great windows overlooking the leafy Avenue. It is warm, the sun-shutters are closed, and from somewhere outside the gay air, “Si qu’on leur-z-y f’rait ça” is borne in upon the summer wind.
At last our days are full of passionate love and idyllic happiness. Verily there is great truth in those words of Holy Writ, “Whoso findeth a wife, findeth a good thing.”
The End.
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Chapter 1
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Chapter 2
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Chapter 3
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Chapter 4
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Chapter 5
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Chapter 6
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Chapter 7
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Chapter 8
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Chapter 9
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Chapter 10
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Chapter 11
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Chapter 12
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Chapter 13
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Chapter 14
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Chapter 15
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Chapter 16
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Chapter 17
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Chapter 18
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Chapter 19
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Chapter 20
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Chapter 21
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Chapter 22
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Chapter 23
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Chapter 24
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Chapter 25
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Chapter 26
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Chapter 27
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Chapter 28
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Chapter 29
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Chapter 30
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Chapter 31
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Chapter 32
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Chapter 33
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Chapter 34
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Chapter 35
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Chapter 36
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Chapter 37
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