Whoso Findeth a Wife - William Le Queux

Elizaveta Nicolayevna, or Ella, as I still call her, has now renounced her country, and become thoroughly English. A year ago Lord Warnham, assured of my wife’s probity—for greatly to Monsieur Grodekoff’s dismay, she had given some valuable information regarding the activity of the Russian Secret Service at Downing Street—appointed me to a responsible post at our Embassy in Paris, so that we now live together at the big white house in the Avenue des Champs Elysées, while Sonia and Cecil are also married and live quietly in a quaint old manor-house near Winchester.

It was only the other day, however, that we heard mention of Andrew Beck, the popular legislator who so mysteriously accepted stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds. There was a paragraph in the newspapers stating that he had been found drowned in the Scheldt, near Antwerp, and foul play was suspected. Then Ella explained to me that the woman who had passed as her mother, Mrs Laing, was, she afterwards discovered, a well-known Nihilist, and it was in order to keep observation upon her that the detective Renouf had entered her service. This woman, whose real name was Sophie Grunsberg, was greatly incensed against Beck on account of certain false accusations he had made against members of the revolutionary organisation, and there was little doubt that he had fallen beneath their far-reaching vengeance.

Here, as I pen these last few lines of my strange story of England’s peril, my own betrayal, and my wife’s fond love, Ella, with sweet, glad smile, moves forward to stroke my hair with soft, caressing hand. The odour of sampaguita pervades her chiffons, stirring within me memories of the past. We are together in the room I know so well, with its great windows overlooking the leafy Avenue. It is warm, the sun-shutters are closed, and from somewhere outside the gay air, “Si qu’on leur-z-y f’rait ça” is borne in upon the summer wind.

At last our days are full of passionate love and idyllic happiness. Verily there is great truth in those words of Holy Writ, “Whoso findeth a wife, findeth a good thing.”

The End.