“Is time of great importance to your Highness?” asked the head of the association, speaking with his decidedly Cockney twang.
“A week or ten days—not longer,” she replied.
“Then we will try Père Perrin to-morrow, and let you know the result. Of course, I shall not tell him whose property it is. He will believe that we have obtained it in the ordinary way of our profession. Perrin is an old Jew who lives over at Batignolles, and who asks no questions. The stuff he buys goes to Russia or to Italy.”
“Very well. I leave it to you to do your best for me, Mr Redmayne,” was her reply. “I put my trust in you implicitly.”
“Your Imperial Highness is one of the few persons—beyond our own friends here—who do. To most people Roddy Redmayne is a man not to be trusted, even as far as you can see him!” and he grinned, adding, “But here we are at the Pont d’Austerlitz. Harry and I will descend, and you, Bourne, will accompany the Princess to her hotel.”
Then he shouted an order to the man to stop, and after again receiving her Highness’s warmest thanks, the expert thief and his companion alighted, and, bowing to her, disappeared.
When the cab moved on again towards the Place de la Bastille, she turned to the Englishman beside her, saying—
“I owe all this to you, Mr Bourne, and I assure you I feel most deeply grateful. One day I hope I may be of some service to you, if,” and she paused and looked at him—“well, if only to secure your withdrawal from a criminal life.”
“Ah, Princess,” he sighed wistfully, “if I only could see my way clear to live honestly! But to do so requires money, money—and I have none. The gentlemanly dress which you see me wearing is only an imposture and a fraud—like all my life, alas! nowadays.”
She realised that this man, a gentleman by birth, was eager to extricate himself from the low position into which he had, by force of adverse circumstances, fallen. He was a cosmopolitan of cosmopolitans, a quiet, slow-speaking, slightly built, high-browed, genial-souled man, with his slight, dark moustache, shrewd dark eyes, and a mouth that had humour smiling at the corners; a man of middle height, his dark hair showing the first sign of changing early to grey, and a countenance bitten and scarred by all the winds and suns of the round globe; a wise and quiet man, able to keep his own counsel, able to get his own end with few words, and yet unable to shape his own destiny; a marvellous impostor, the friend of men and women of the haut monde, who all thought him a gentleman, and never for one instant suspected his true occupation.