Lola uttered a loud protest against the allegation that she had purposely played into the Englishman’s hands, and then turned and reproached him bitterly for his heartless and brutal treatment.
“I have failed through no want of tact,” she cried. “Was it not clearly to my own advantage to preserve my honour—now, alas! that you stand revealed in your true light—that I should act as you directed and become a thief?”
“You used the safe key I gave you with great success on the first occasion—”
“Because I was in ignorance of the terrible gravity of my action,” she interrupted. “You told me that the plans were of no real consequence, but if you could obtain them it would put you in the good graces of your firm in Paris. You told me that your firm were Government contractors who were seeking to learn certain details in order that they might tender to our Ministry for the construction of the forts. I never dreamed the truth. I had no idea that you were Mijoux Flobecq, the spy of Austria! Not until three days after I had handed you the plans were my suspicions aroused by some remark which His Majesty dropped while speaking with General Cataldi after one of the State banquets. Then, making a few inquiries in secret, aided by my friend, Pietro Olivieri, I was horrified to discover the ghastly truth,” she said. “I found that you—the man who had declared your profound love for me—had practised a most wicked deception. You had induced me to hand over one of the most important of our State secrets to our enemies in Vienna!”
“It was useless without the key,” he remarked, quite unaffected by the bitterness of her reproach.
“I committed a theft for which others were suspected, because of my love for you,” she went on in a low, hard tone. “You, as Henri Pujalet, had very cleverly led me to believe you had no idea that I was any other than Lola Duprez, niece of old Jules Gigleux of Paris. Yet you knew my real identity all the time! You had laid your plans cleverly, and made me believe that you spoke the truth when you swore undying devotion to me. For nearly nine months you made pretence to love me, and wrote me many letters, to which I naturally responded. Our stolen interviews took place in many cities, but you had always one fixed idea—the coup which you would one day make with my assistance. At last, on that occasion when at midnight I met you on the road to Tivoli, you put before me a proposition. To save you from bankruptcy, and in order that your position might be assured with your firm in Paris, you begged me to obtain the plans of those frontier fortresses—to steal them! You had, it seemed, intimate inside knowledge of all the arrangements at our Ministry of War. You actually described the very portfolio in which they were kept, and knew the very hour at which they would be placed in the Minister’s safe, to which you even gave me a duplicate key.”
The man only laughed aloud at her chagrin.
“I now know how you had met General Cataldi at Biarritz, and had, by a clever ruse, taken a wax impression of his safe key, and how, indeed, for months you had been contemplating the theft, feeling certain that my love for you would be strong enough to induce me to fall your helpless victim. Well, I fell. Yes, I believed in you, Henri—believed that you really loved me. I sacrificed all for your sake. But it never crossed my mind that your love was only a hollow pretence, that you were fooling me with your soft-spoken speeches, and that you were the enemy of my country or a professional spy.”
“You could have had me arrested,” he laughed. “Why didn’t you?”
“Ah, when I realised what I had done I begged you to return the plans I had stolen. Mr Waldron conveyed my imploring message to you in Brussels and what was your reply? That I must remain silent—that the key plan was wanted—and that if I did not consent to help you to obtain it you would hand over my letters to you for publication in the Matin!”