In Direst Peril

by David Christie Murray

She answered that she was sure of that; and when she had given me the name of her bankers and I had made a note of it, we shook hands and parted. For my own part I was glad that Lady Rollinson's presence made our parting commonplace.

I hailed the first hackney carriage I met and drove to my rooms. There I found my passport, and went with it to the Foreign Office, where, through the good offices of an old schoolfellow, I had it vised without loss of time, and then home again to pack. Travelling was slower then than it is to-day, but we thought it mighty rapid, and scarcely to be improved upon, it differed so from the post-chaise and stage-coach crawl of a few years before. There was no direct correspondence between Hamburgh and Vienna, but the journey was shorter by a day than it had been when I had last made it. I reached the Austrian capital after an entirely adventureless journey, and felt that my enterprise was begun.

I called at the Embassy, and had my papers finally put in order. I called on the Viennese agents of Miss Rossano's bankers, and found that no less a sum than one thousand pounds had been placed to my credit. Not only was this liberal provision made for contingencies, but I received a letter from Miss Rossano telling me that anything within her means was fully at my disposal. I thought it not unlikely that with so persuasive a sum behind me I might be able to win over the kindly jailer to our side. My thoughts were very often with this man, and I spent a good deal of useless time in speculating about him. Was he married or single? That was a point on which much depended, and I was half inclined to pray that he might prove to be a bachelor. Marital responsibilities were all against my hopes. Marital confidences might well upset the best-laid plans I could devise.

I was thinking thus as I paced the Ring Strasse on the third day after my arrival in Vienna. I lingered in the capital against the grain, for I was eager to be at work, but it was part of a policy which I had already settled. Itzia was not the sort of place for which one would make a straight road, unless one had special business there, and it was the merest seeming of having any special business there which I was profoundly anxious to avoid. So I lingered in Vienna, and on this third day, pacing the chief street, I felt a sudden hand clapped upon my shoulder, and, turning, faced Brunow.

“Here you are,” he cried, still keeping his hand upon my shoulder as I turned. “I have been to the bank and to your hotel. I have been hunting you, in point of fact, all day, and here at last I come upon you by chance.”

“What brings you in Vienna?” I asked him. I did my best to be cordial, but I was sorry for his intrusion, and would willingly have known him to be a thousand miles away.

He glanced swiftly and warily about him, and, seeing nobody within ear-shot, answered in an easy tone:

“I have come to assist in your enterprise, Fyffe, and I mean to see you through it.”

“I think,” I told him, “that I prefer to go through my enterprise alone.”

“My dear fellow,” said Brunow, “I couldn't dream of allowing you to run any risk alone in such a cause. And besides that, I have a little selfish reason of my own. In addition, you don't speak the language, and will be in a thousand corners. I was bred here, and speak the language like a native. I have already the entree to the place you desire to get into, and I can introduce you. My sympathetic friend—” He broke off suddenly because a foot-passenger drew near. “It is, as you say, a beastly journey, but, as you say again, it's done with, and when you know Vienna as well as I do, you will say it pays for the trouble ten times over. Vienna, my dear fellow, is the jolliest and the handsomest city in the world.” The passenger went by, and he resumed at the dropped word. “My sympathetic friend will recognize me, and at my return will be immediately on the qui vive. Negotiations will be as good as opened the very minute of my arrival. You'll want an interpreter, and here am I sworn to the cause, and secret as the tomb. In effect, I'm going, and I don't see how the deuce you expected to get on without me.”