Straz devoured her hand with kisses, became more enterprising as she grew, or seemed to grow, more yielding. But she put him from her, suffering her bright glance to linger on him amorously, saying in tones of liquid sweetness, with a bewitching accent of rebuke:
"Be good now! I am tired, and must positively dine in my room to-night. My maid will bring you in a few moments a case containing—what I mentioned just now. Late as it is, shops are still open ... there is a firm of jewelers—Müller and Stettig in the Charlotten-Strasse, who will buy such things for ready money.... It should bring sufficient to supply us with funds for a long time.... Poor Valverden paid eighteen thousand thalers for it!" She added as Straz licked his lips appreciatively: "It is a star of emeralds and brilliants you have often seen me wear."
"Thou art my star! O incomparable Adelaide!"
She pushed him from her, yet oozing with impassioned admiration. She gently shut the boudoir-door—and noiselessly shot the bolt. Then her face changed, and all her disgust for Straz, his cheap compliments—his slovenliness—his arrogance and self-satisfaction, his impecuniousness and his cold in the head, was written on her face and expressed by every movement of her body. She ran across the boudoir, abandoning her air of languor, burst into the bedroom beyond, and aroused a dozing maid.
"Wake up, Mariette! Find me—it is in the red morocco jewel-case in the brown leather imperial—the diamond star with emerald points!"
While the woman rummaged, the mistress swiftly reviewed the situation. The cold, clear brain that dwelt behind that velvet mask of sensuous beauty had formulated a plan for getting rid of the Slav.
He would be an enemy dangerous as a rattlesnake, she told herself. But—trap your rattlesnake, and he cannot bite. On the other hand, his subtle capacity for intrigue—his swift Oriental cunning—even his masculine strength,—made of him a useful ally, even when he had no more secrets for a clever woman to ferret out and sell.
For the brief telegram in cipher, dispatched by Madame to a studiously unsuspicious address in Berlin before nightfall of the day of the arrival in Sigmaringen—with the later-sent copies of Gramont's letters—the formal introduction which had secured the Agent from the Tuileries an audience of Prince Antony, and the four pages of secret instructions margined with the Emperor's annotations, had brought in a handsome sum of money, thanks to the potency of mulled Burgundy heavily dosed with laudanum. Adelaide had known a moment of deadly terror when the Slav's black eyes had looked at her with that sinister stare of suspicion, and his conjectures had leaped in the dark, so very near the actual verity. She felt no desire to encounter that look again.
So she pondered, fingering the bulky roll of Prussian banknotes paid her by Privy Councillor Bucher a few days previously,—how she might best get rid of Straz without another scene. His Oriental cunning, his childish vanity, his petulance and sensuality, his colossal greed of money and money's worth, blinded her to the ruthlessness and ferocity of his tigerish nature, and provoked her to brave a risk far greater than she guessed.
She would get rid of him—play the game he had devised, without him; and win, in spite of cold water thrown by M. de Bismarck. The trap he had planned to catch the son of the Emperor should yet be set successfully. Was not the intended bait of living maiden's flesh her own?