During the past few days she had scarcely taken up a single foreign paper without finding the heading, “The Great Court Scandal,” and something outrageously against her; for her enemies, who had engaged as their secret agent a Jew money-lender, had started a bitter campaign against her, backed with the sum of a hundred thousand marks, placed by Hinckeldeym at the unscrupulous Hebrew’s disposal with which to bribe the press. A little money can, alas! soon ruin a woman’s good name, or, on the other hand, it can whitewash the blackest record.
This plot against an innocent, defenceless woman was as brutal as any conceived by the ingenuity of a corrupt Court of office-seekers and sycophants, for at heart the King had loved his wife—until they had poisoned his mind against her and besmirched her good name.
Of all this she was well aware, conscious of her own weakness as a woman. Yet she retained her woman’s heart, for that was unalterable, and part of her being: but her looks, her language, her thoughts, even in those adverse circumstances, assumed the cast of the pure ideal; and to those who were in the secret of her humane and pitying nature, nothing could be more charming and consistent than the effect which she produced upon others.
As the hot, fevered days went by, she recognised that it became hourly more necessary for her to leave London, and conceal her identity somewhere in the country. She noticed at the Savoy, whenever she dined or lunched with Leucha, people were noting her beauty and inquiring who she was. At any moment she might be recognised by some one who had visited the Court at Treysa, or by those annoying portraits that were now appearing everywhere in the illustrated journals.
She decided to consult Guy Bourne, who, Leucha said, usually spent half his time in hiding. Therefore one evening, with “the Ladybird,” she took a cab to a small semi-detached villa in Wolverton Gardens, off the Hammersmith Road, where she alighted and entered, in utter ignorance, unfortunately, that another hansom had followed her closely all the way from the Savoy, and that, pulling up in the Hammersmith Road, the fare, a tall, thin, middle-aged man, with a black overcoat concealing his evening dress, had alighted, walked quickly up the street, and noted the house wherein she and her maid had entered.
The stranger muttered to himself some words in German, and with a smile of self-satisfaction lit a cigar and strolled back to the Hammersmith Road to wait.
A fearful destiny had encompassed her.