"The Doctrine, Miss Marmion?" he asked, as he placed a chair for her at his right hand. "May I ask what the Doctrine is?"

"Of re-incarnation," she replied, sitting down and looking at him across the corner of the table.

"Really? I most sincerely wish that I could believe in it. Mr Amena, whom I took the great liberty of bringing to your garden-party, a man of very remarkable powers, as you saw, holds the Doctrine, as you call it, and he has been trying for months to convert me to it; but, as I said going to Elsinore, I'm afraid I am too hopelessly materialistic for any conversion to be possible in my case, at least as far as my present experiences have gone."

"As the belief so must be the faith," she said with a grave smile. "It is no more possible to have true faith when you do not really believe than it is to be hungry when you have not got an appet.i.te. That is quite a material simile; but I think it is true."

"Absolutely true!" he replied, looking at her again with a note of interrogation in each eye. "But, really, these things are too deep for me, a mere human animal. And now, talking about appet.i.te, here comes the soup."

The dinner _a deux_ was just what he had intended it to be, simple and yet perfect in every detail. The subject of Franklin Marmion's departure from the world was, as if by mutual consent, dropped. Oscarovitch comforted such conscience as he had by trying to believe that what Nitocris had said about her belief in the Doctrine was to her really true. He also honestly believed that she had faced her great sorrow in solitude, and overcome it in the strength of that belief. Their conversation turned easily away to other topics, and by the time that coffee was brought in and he had obtained her permission to light a cigarette, his beautiful guest appeared to have left the recent past behind her, for the time being at least, and was almost as she had been during the run up to Elsinore.

Her manner was that of complete composure, and it is hardly necessary to say that this mastery of her emotion forced him to a degree of admiration, almost of worship, which the physical charm that appealed only to his animal senses could never have inspired. Here, truly, was the ideal Empress of the Russias and the East sitting almost beside him.

And now the psychological moment had come!

"Will you excuse me for a couple of minutes, Miss Marmion?" he asked, as he finished his coffee and rose from his chair. "Going back to what you were saying about re-incarnation: I have something in my room which I hope may interest you. I got it from my friend, the miracle-worker. He told me a long story about it that I don't want to trouble you with: but the thing in itself is quite worth seeing. At least, I never saw anything like it before."

"Then please let me see it," she replied, a.s.senting with an inclination of her head. "If that is so it must be, as you say, well worth seeing."

He went to his room and came back with a large square morocco case in his hand. He gave it to her, and said:

"Do me the favour to open it, and tell me what you think of it."

She touched the spring and the cover flew up. She half-expected what she saw. There, lying in a nest of soft black velvet, encircled by a triple halo of whitely gleaming diamonds, was the Horus Stone. In an instant she travelled back through fifty centuries to the scene of the death-bridal of her other self, Nitocris the Queen, in the banqueting-hall of the Palace of Pepi. Then it had lain gleaming on her breast, and now she saw it again with the eyes of flesh, after nearly five thousand years. Now, too, she grasped in all the fullness of its evil meaning the reason why Oscarovitch had brought it to her in such an hour as this. With utter contempt in her soul and a smile on her lips, she leaned back in her chair and said in a voice which had a note of ecstasy in it:

"Oh, Prince, how lovely! What a glorious gem! The diamonds are, of course, splendid, but they are only a setting for the emerald. What a magnificent stone! Rich as you are, you are very fortunate to be the possessor of such a treasure--for treasure it surely must be."

"It is, as you say, a magnificent stone," he replied, looking steadily into her questioning eyes. "But if what Amena told me was true, it is something more than a unique gem. There is an inscription on it, some characters carved in the stone which are, as he said, the history of it, but to me they are as unintelligible as the a.s.syrian cuneiform would be.

Possibly you may know something of them. If you do, here is a lens that will help your sight."

She took the gla.s.s from him and bent down over the gem. She read the sacred symbol of the Trinity as she had read it and known it ages before. But while she was gazing at it, she also read the intent of the man who had given it into her hands. She put the lens aside, and, laying her palms on her temples, she looked deep down into the luminous depths of the great emerald in a silence which Oscarovitch interpreted into such meaning as he was able to make for himself.

Minute after minute pa.s.sed in silence, and still her eyes were fixed upon the Stone. Her face became like that of a beautiful masterpiece of Phidias: pure, cold, and true. A feeling of something like awe crept over him as he watched her, and he found himself asking whether, after all, Phadrig's story might have been true. But, true or not, there was the fascination which, as Phadrig had told him, had lured Isaac Josephus to his self-inflicted doom. Her eyes were chained to the gem: her face was no longer that of a living woman dominated by her own will. After all his disbelief, there _was_ an enchantment in the Stone, for here, even she, Nitocris, had succ.u.mbed to it.

He sat and waited for a few minutes longer. If there is magic in the Stone, let it work, he thought; and so he sat and watched her until he saw that the fixed stare of her eyes and the rigidity of her now perfectly statuesque face convinced him that the magic of the Stone had, as Phadrig had told him, made him the possessor of it, absolute master of the man or woman who had gazed upon its fatal beauty.

Then he got up and, reaching over her shoulders, took up the diamond chain, glistening under the soft light of the starry dome of the saloon, shook it out into a flood of white radiance, lifted it above her head, and let it fall very gently round her neck. The Horus Stone, as though endowed with sentience, fell and rested where it had rested five thousand years before. As it touched her flesh Nitocris felt a tremor of indescribable emotion, not only of the body but of the soul, pa.s.s through her. She leaned back in her chair again, and whispered:

"Is it really mine now, Prince? But no! How could I take it from you--I who can give nothing in exchange for such a treasure? No, no, you must take it back. I am not worthy to wear it."

He laid his hands gently on her arms, and said in a soft, murmuring tone which sounded like the purring of a tiger-cat:

"Nitocris, if all the choicest gems in all the world could be put into a crucible and fused into one, all its splendour would still be unworthy to lie on that white breast of yours. Give me your love, Nitocris. I am hungering and thirsting for it. Come with me to Oscarburg, and you shall be crowned Princess--and after that Empress--Empress of the Russias and the East. I will give you a dominion such as the great Catherine never dared to dream of. Say yes, and in a month you shall be seated on her throne. It is only a little word, dearest, only a little word--will you not say it, and be my Princess, my Queen, my Empress?"

"I am tired now, Oscar," she said wearily, "so much has happened in so short a time. Yes, I will, if it is possible: but let me go now. No, you must not kiss me yet. Remember that Russian saying, 'Take thy thoughts to bed with thee, for the morning is wiser than the evening.'

Good-night, Oscar, I am very tired. You shall have your answer in the morning. May I take this with me?"

"Yes," he replied, giving her his hand as she rose from her chair, and bowing over hers until his lips touched it. "Take it, unworthy as it is, as an earnest of the realisation of the happy dreams that will come to me to-night. Au revoir, pas adieu!"

"Auf viedersehn, mein Oscar!" she replied as she pa.s.sed him, leaving the sensation of a gentle flutter of her hand in his. "We shall understand each other better still before long--I hope."

"It is my dearest wish. Good-night, Nitocris, and when the dawn comes may it find nothing but sunshine in that sweet soul of yours!"

Nitocris went to her room and found her maid waiting, white-faced and anxious. She was frightened and nearly worn out with caring for her mistress. She would have been very glad to have been back that very night at "The Wilderness," even if it had lost its master.

"Go to bed at once, Jenny; you look like a ghost, as you may well do after all the trouble I've given you. No, I don't really want you, and you want sleep rather badly. Go to bed, like a good girl. It will not be the first time that I have undressed myself."

And when Jenny had gone and she had locked the door, Nitocris stripped herself, save for the collar of diamonds and the pendant Horus Stone.

She took a long veil of Indian muslin out of her dress-box and wound it round her after the fashion of old Egypt, leaving her left breast bare.

Only the Ureaus Crown was wanting to make her, in the flesh, Nitocris the Queen: but here on her bosom flashed and flamed the Horus Stone--hers once again, as it had been in the far-off past, symbol of her sovereignty, and proof of her faith in the one true Doctrine.

She looked at the lovely reflection in the long mirror behind her dressing-table, and said to herself in a low, whispering laugh:

"This for you, Oscar Oscarovitch that is, Menkau-Ra who was! Yes, you may dream your pleasant dreams to-night; you may take me to your lonely castle in Viborg Bay; you may make me marry you, as you think I shall--and here is my wedding gift--mine again after all these ages--blessed be for ever the Holy Trinity, Osiris, Isis, and Horus. May the Most High G.o.ds help and protect me!"

She raised the Sacred Stone to her lips as she spoke, turned off the light, and lay down in her bed to dream dreams of forgotten ages.

CHAPTER XXV

THE Pa.s.sING OF PHADRIG

In all London, or, indeed, in any capital of Europe, there were no more angrily puzzled men than Nicol Hendry and his colleague and subordinates. He was perfectly certain now that Phadrig Amena held the key to the conspiracy which had resulted in the disappearance of Prince Zastrow. Oscarovitch had vanished. He had been traced to Copenhagen, and then absolutely lost sight of. Three agents, all picked experts, had been put on to watch Phadrig and the Pentanas, as they were known to him, and within a fortnight they had all died. One had fallen down crossing the north side of Trafalgar Square: the verdict had been heart failure. Another threw himself into the river from the Tower Bridge; and the third, a woman who was one of the most skilful spies in the service of the International, had made his acquaintance and had dinner with him at the "Monico," and was found dead the next morning with an empty morphia syringe in her hand and a swollen puncture in her left arm.

Thus four more or less valuable lives had been lost, and not a shred of tangible evidence obtained against the Egyptian. Convinced as he was that this man was as responsible for their deaths as he had been for that of Josephus, neither he nor his colleagues could find the slightest grounds for applying for a warrant for his arrest, and meanwhile things were going from bad to worse in Russia. The Romanoff dynasty was tottering to its fall. The responsible leaders of the Revolution, angry and bewildered by the loss of the man whom they had practically chosen to rule over them, were distributing thousands of copies of an unsigned manifesto which could not have come from any one but "the new Skobeleff." What was left of the army and the navy was rallying to the nameless standard of the still unknown saviour of Russia. Von Kessner and Captain Vollmar had apparently ceased to exist, and the Princess Hermia was living with her lady-in-waiting in the strictest retirement in Dresden.

"It seems to me that things are at an utter deadlock," said Nicol Hendry to the Chief of the German section, who had come over to London to confer with him. "Four of our best agents have died in a fortnight, and the others are getting shy. Really, we can't blame them. This is not like fighting the ordinary sort of anarchist or regicide, who, after all, does content himself with physical means. This infernal scoundrel, as I must confess I was warned to begin with, is quite independent of the rules of the game. He kills people by their own hands, not his, and, literally, there seems no way of catching him."

"There must be a way, my dear Hendry," replied the German, who was the very incarnation of mechanical officialism. "You look at these things as consequences, I regard them only as rather extraordinary coincidences.

If this is anything like what you seem to think it, it is supernatural, and I don't believe in that."

"There is a very easy way to convince yourself, my dear Von Hamner,"

replied Hendry, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. "Suppose you go and interview this modern Mephistopheles yourself?"

"Will you come with me if I do?" asked the German, with a straight stare through his spectacles.

"Certainly. In our profession it is necessary to take risks. The thing has gone far enough. Here we are in my room at New Scotland Yard, the centre and stronghold of the British police system, and there is this man or super-man, if you like, making no sign, doing nothing that will give us a hold upon him, and yet killing our agents as fast as we send them to find out what he is working at, and we know just as much to-day as we did three weeks ago. Now, what is your idea?"

"Just this: if the English law won't touch him, do as we do in Germany, take the law into your own hands. We know where the fellow is to be found down in that slum near the Borough Road. Send a few of your plain-clothes men there this afternoon, and we will follow in a cab.

Bring your bracelets with you, and I shall take my revolver. We don't want any nonsense this time. If it goes on much longer we shall be the laughing-stock of the whole force from end to end of Europe, and that will not do us any good. Shall it be for this afternoon?"

"It will be better done now. He has worked mischief enough, and if we are going to do it we may as well bring the thing to a head at once, as they say in the States. Now I will give the instructions, and we will go to lunch. It may be the last that either of us will eat, you know."

"Poof!" exclaimed Von Hamner, who was feeling not a little nettled at this quiet challenge to test his personal courage. "You are the last man on earth that I should have suspected of superst.i.tion, my dear Hendry.

But, there, give your orders, and we will go to lunch, and then about four o'clock we may make our call in Candler's Court."

While the two Chiefs of the International were talking, Phadrig was reading a cypher telegram, of which the meaning was this: