“Ah! non,” he laughed. “I cannot. Excuse me. My pronunciation is so faulty. Your English is so ve-ry deefecult!”
And so we talked in French, and I found the queer old fellow was on his way to Sofia. He seemed slightly deformed, his face was distinctly ugly, broad, clean-shaven, with a pair of black, piercing eyes that gave him a most striking appearance. His grey hair was long, his nose aquiline, his teeth protruding and yellow; and he was a grumbler of the most pronounced type. He growled at the food, at the service, at the draughts, at the light in the restaurant, at the staleness of the bread we had brought with us from Paris, and at the butter, which he declared to be only Danish margarine.
His complaints were amusing. At first the maître d’hôtel bustled about to do the bidding of the newcomer, but very quickly summed him up, and only grinned knowingly when called to listen to his biting sarcasm of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lit and all its works.
Next day, at Semlin, where our passports were examined, the passport officer took off his hat to him, bowed low and viséd his passport without question, saying, as he handed back the document to its owner:
“Bon voyage, Highness.”
I stared at the pair. My fussy friend with the big head must therefore be either a prince or a grand duke!
As I sat opposite him at dinner that night, he was discussing with me the harmful writings of some newly discovered Swiss author who was posing as a cheap philosopher, and denouncing them as dangerous to the community. He leaned his elbow upon the narrow table and supported his clean-shaven chin upon his fingers, displaying to me—most certainly by accident—the palm of his thin right hand.
What I discovered there caused me a great deal of surprise. In its center was a dark, livid mark, as though it had been branded there by a hot iron, the plain and distinct imprint of a pet dog’s pad!
It fascinated me. There was some hidden meaning in that mark, I felt convinced. It was just as though a small dog had stepped in blood with one of its forepaws and trodden upon his hand.
Whether he noticed that I had detected it or not, I cannot say, but he moved his hand quickly, and ever after kept it closed.