“I suppose,” I said, as coolly as I could, “that whatever information you have upon this matter comes from the Baroness Bonnar?” I waited for an answer, but she gave no sign. “I must trouble you to tell me if that is so.”
“You know that well enough,” she answered. “The Baroness Bonnar is the only friend the poor creature has in London.”
“Do you know much of the Baroness Bonnar?” I asked. “Would it ever have occurred to you to guess that the Baroness Bonnar is neither more nor less than a paid Austrian spy, and that Miss Constance Pleyel is, in all probability, her confederate?”
She looked at me with an incredulity so open that I felt it to be an insult, and she preserved the same disdainful silence.
“I came here yesterday,” I continued, “to consult Violet—”
She interrupted me almost with a shriek.
“Don't mention that poor girl's name!” she cried. “I won't have it mentioned! I won't listen to it in this connection!”
“Pardon me,” I said, “it has to be mentioned, and unless you are in the humor to permit yourself to be made the dupe and tool of as wicked a little adventuress as ever lived, you must listen to what I have to tell you. I came here yesterday to consult Violet as to what I should do with respect to a plot in which I have found the baroness to be engaged. You have often heard the count and myself speak of poor old Ruffiano. You know him as one of Violet's pensioners, and, indeed, I remember that twice or thrice I have met him in your house. He has been betrayed to the Austrians, and is at this minute in their hands. The prime mover in that matter is the Baroness Bonnar, and her tool was the Honorable George Brunow.”
Now surely one would have thought that a charge so plain and dreadful was at least worth investigation, and it had not entered my mind to conceive that even an angry woman could fail to take some sort of account of it. Lady Rollinson took it merely as a tissue of absurdities.
“It only shows,” she said, “how desperate your own case must be when you need to bolster it by a story like that—a story which could be proved to be false in half a minute.”