“A Frenchman?”
“Si, signore. His behaviour was curious, therefore I came here with him. I have made a discovery. Will you come here? If you leave by the two-eighteen from Rome—the Milan express—you can be here soon after five. I would return to Rome but I have no one here whom I can trust to follow if he leaves,” Pucci explained.
Waldron felt that in the circumstances to leave Rome was impossible—and yet on further reflection he saw that if the King summoned him to audience would it not be best to be absent from the capital and thus gain time for action? The brigadier, Pucci, was not a man ever to follow false scents. He must have discovered something gravely mysterious. Was it possible that he had found out that the elegant Frenchman was the lover of Princess Luisa!
He had only a few seconds to make up his mind. “Very well, Pucci. If you think it necessary I will leave by the train you mention. Meet me at the station.”
“Benissimo, signore,” answered the voice faintly dying away, as it does upon some trunk-telephone lines.
Waldron tried to question him further, when the querulous voice of the female clerk at the Exchange declared that the time was up, and promptly cut him off without further ceremony. Telephone operators are no respecters of persons, whether one Is in Paris, Pekin, Petersburg, or Paddington.
Swallowing a sandwich at the station buffet, and travelling without luggage, Hubert Waldron entered a first-class compartment of the express, which that afternoon was well-filled by foreigners leaving Rome for the north—the reason being that the Roman season, now over, Society was making for Paris and London, as fast as it could. There is always a headlong rush at the end of the season, be it in Egypt, on the Riviera, from Algeria or from any French or German watering-place. It is always helter-skelter to the capitals, regardless of comfort or of expense, and the Compagnie des Wagons-lits reaps a rich harvest always.
The journey from Rome up the wooded valley of the winding Tiber, through a country rich in ruins of the ancient Etruscans, lay through the real heart of Italy, delightfully picturesque, yet for Hubert in his state of mind it held no attraction. He sat in the compartment together with two elderly Englishwomen of the quiet, pension type, and a young and rather foppish German student, impatient to meet the detective, and hear from him the result of his observations.
Orte, high up amid its most delightful surroundings, was passed at last, and then, after several stoppages—though the train was termed an express—Orvieto, situate upon the top of its steep rock was reached, a Gibraltar on land, an invulnerable fortress in the days of the Etruscan League, and in mediaeval times a great stronghold of the Guelphs, and often affording refuge to the Popes.
The station lay below the town, which latter was reached by a funicular railway through a long, dark tunnel beneath the fortress. And upon the platform, as the train ran in, Hubert discerned a rather insignificant-looking man in shabby black and somewhat down at heel—a man at whom no one would cast a second glance. It was the brigadier, Pucci.