She tapped the table with her pretty fingers, and poured me out a second glass of port wine.
"Unless the mountain will come to Mahomet—but I guess you don't know what that means, Britten, now do you?"
She screwed her lips up to the kissing point with this, and looked at me so tenderly that I began to feel nervous—upon my word I did.
"Do you mean that your husband must come here, madame?"
"Of course I mean it, Britten. You must fetch him—by a trick. Now wouldn't that be splendid—say, wouldn't it be fine? If we could outwit them—if we could make the Emperor look foolish!"
I rubbed my chin and thought about it. There isn't much modesty in my profession, but the idea of getting up against a policeman so far from my humble home somehow put the brake on, and I found myself misfiring like one o'clock in spite of her pretty eyes and her red lips, and her "take me in your arms and kiss me" look. The Croydon lot are bad enough, but as for the beaks at Montey—well, I've heard tales of them and to spare.
"It would be fine, madame, if we could do it," said I at last; "but between talking of it here in this hotel and crossing the frontier——"
"Oh," she cried, interrupting me almost angrily—and she has the devil of a temper—"oh, there's no difficulty, Britten. Just drive to the Hermitage after my husband has dined to-morrow night, and say that if he wants the news of Madame Clara, you can take him where he will get it. Don't you see, Clara is one of my pet names. He'll understand in a moment, and you can drive him to this hotel. Are you afraid to do that, Britten?"
Of course I wasn't afraid, and she knew it. It was nothing to me anyway, and I could always plead that I was her servant and an Englishman, and didn't care a damn for this particular Emperor or any other. None the less, if she hadn't smiled upon me as she did at that particular moment—smiled like a daffy-down-dilly in April, and squeezed my hand as soft as June roses, which the same appeared to be done by accident, I might have left it alone, after all. As it was, I had set off at seven o'clock on the following evening, and at a quarter past nine I was asking at the Hermitage for Count Joseph, just as full of the story I had to tell as a history-book of kings.
A black and white maître d'hôtel, picked out with gold, replied to this, and after talking to half a dozen waiters and sending for another chap with a shirt-front like a Mercedes bonnet, they directed me to a little hotel down by Monaco; and there the head waiter received me quite affably, and said, "Certainly, the gentleman was at home." When I had given my name, but not my business, I was ushered up, perhaps after an interval of ten minutes, to a sitting-room on the first floor, and there I found myself face to face with a fat, red-faced man in evening dress; and if ever there was a martinet down Montey way, this fine gentleman was that same. He was fat, I say, and forty—but to write that he was fair would be impossible, for he hadn't more than about half a dozen hairs on his head, and those had drifted down his neck to get out of the wind. When I came in he appeared to be sipping Cognac out of a long green bottle, and to be reading private papers just as fast as he could get through them, but he looked up presently, and a pair of wickeder eyes I do not want to see.