The Secret of the Silver Car by Wyndham Martyn (best classic romance novels txt) 📕

Almost the moment he stepped from his tall ebony armoire Trent heard steps coming toward him. He was at the moment passing a door. His pass key opened it instantly and he stepped into darkness and shut the door carefully. But he knew he was not alone. There was a heavy unrhythmic snoring of a man far gone in sleep. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness Trent saw the outlines of a big bed.

He passed the foot of it on hands and knees. The professional always takes this precaution. A man waked from sleep by hearing a stranger at the foot of his bed invariably aims at a man supposed to be standing up. Although the sounds Trent detected were genuine sleep induced snores he could not be sure that another watchful occupant of the bed was not listening breathlessly and even now reaching for a weapon.

When he assured himself everything was quiet he looked about the room with the light of his electric torch. The sleeping man was a stranger to him. He was a red faced man of middle age and on a chair nearby was the undress uniform of an officer of high rank, a light blue uniform with silver facings. Accustomed as he was to khaki uniform alone Trent had no idea to what European service the sleeper belonged. He remembered Hentzi’s remark that there were more people at the dinner table than one might suppose. Trent was certain he had never seen this officer about the castle grounds and had never driven him.

From the bedroom a door led evidently to a room en suite. This was unlocked and Trent entered noiselessly. It was a room twice the size of the adjoining apartment and furnished magnificently. So vast and splendid was the chamber he thought it must be that of Count Michael, the room where perchance the treaty lay concealed for which he had risked so much. But it was not Count Michael who lay stertorously slumbering. It was instead a prince of a great and lately reigning family who had strangely disappeared from the world a few months earlier and had been, so report ran, drowned in escaping from exile.

Anthony Trent was looking at one, worthless in character and devoid of ability but nevertheless a man who might by reason of his name rally about him an army which could start again the dreadful struggle whose scars were yet fresh. A great ceremony had been made of the funeral and a society of his former officers had been organized to perpetuate his memory by embarrassing his opponents. Trent remembered, dimly, reading an article in a London paper which spoke of the prince as being as dangerous dead as when leading his dissolute life.

Anthony Trent looked at the weak, passion-lined face of the man who had sought Count Michael’s shelter and smiled. He had long ago been intrigued by the idea of mixing himself in high politics. Here, possibly, was an excellent beginning. But the prince could wait a little while. The time was not yet ripe for his resurrection.

Looking across the room Trent saw two long French windows lighting it. One was open. Instead of the balcony upon which the intruder assumed these windows opened, they led into a large courtyard some eighty feet long and forty feet wide. He did not understand how it was this great open space should have its being in the middle of the castle. There seemed no reason why it existed in a building of this sort. He was to find later that its origin was accidental. What was now a paved and open courtyard had been the magazine of the castle during the Turkish occupation of Croatia. The castle itself had never given in to the Ottoman conqueror. It had been shelled in the Reformation uprising in 1607 and a ball shot had exploded the ammunition. The chamber had never been rebuilt but a century later was turned into a pleasant garden.

Trent stepped through the open window and down three steps into the courtyard. It was plainly much used. There were lounges and chairs and tables. Pausing at one of them he saw London and New York papers which he had brought up from Fiume earlier in the week. There were French novels and bon-bons and a feather fan. Evidently the prince was not without his feminine companionship. In one of these big chairs Trent sat down and looked about him. The room from which he had come faced due east. To the north and south were plain solid walls without windows. Only to the West at the other end of the space could he see that the walls were pierced with French windows. As he looked these were suddenly illuminated. He made no motion. He felt reasonably certain that he was in such a position as to be unobserved.

But he grew less calm when the count’s unmistakable figure passed up and down before the two windows and finally opening one stepped out into the courtyard. Behind him came Hentzi who should have been in bed long ago. The two passed so close he could have touched them. They were speaking rapidly and in what he supposed must be the Croatian tongue. Twice he heard his name mentioned. The count always called him by the assumed name of Alfred pronouncing it “Arlfrit.”

It was not pleasant hearing. They might be, for all he knew, discussing his already discovered abscence from his room. It was true he had bolted the door but someone from the outside might have detected the dark-clad cumber making his unlawful ascent. Already a search might be in progress which would eventually claim him as the third failure. Count Michael was often so excited about trivial things that the listener was not able to guess whether his present mood was the outcome of some small irritation or of something far more sinister. There recurred frequently the name of Pauline and once or twice the count pointed to the windows where slept the man whom his people had mourned as dead.

There was one moment of dreadful anticipation for the American. He noticed that Hentzi was permitting himself to argue with his master. Suddenly as the train passed by Trent’s refuge the count buffetted his secretary on the head. It was Count Michael’s favorite expression of annoyance. Trent himself had suffered thus on the golf links. Hentzi ducked in time to receive merely a glancing blow but he gripped the arm of Trent’s chair to steady himself. If he had taken his eyes off the count’s still upraised hand he could not have failed to see the intruder.

For a full half hour Anthony Trent sat quiet. Then the count and Hentzi left him alone. Now that immediate risk of detection seemed past Trent assured himself that his evening had been well spent. Undoubtedly Count Michael’s rooms, the rooms he wanted to investigate were those through whose windows the two had come and gone. He memorized as well as he could the position in the corridors the doors would occupy. The discovery of this courtyard three floors in depth helped him to understand what had baffled him in his explorations of the corridors many of which came to abrupt meaningless ends. In other days they had continued across the space that had once been arsenal, magazine and strong room.

He made his way through the open window and past the sleeping men without mishap. In the corner of a panel in the armoire he bored two small holes and blew away the dust that fell from them. He descended the copper pipe prepared to find his room invaded by vengeful servants. But it was as he had left it. It was not for his arrest that the count had dragged Arlfrit into his conversation.

Trent was annoyed next morning to learn from Hentzi that he was to accompany Pauline and the count to the links. The only redeeming thing about the expedition was that he himself could get a few strokes in the demonstration.

The count was in high good spirits and gracious to them all.

“Ah, Arlfrit,” he cried, “this is my last game for two weeks. Yes, I shall be too busy playing another and a greater game. And you, too, will be busy. Tell me you know the roads to Fiume, Zengg and Agram well?”

“I could set them to music,” Trent said forgetting that it was Alfred Anthony who was answering his august employer. He waited until the count drove. He saw that the autocrat broke every rule of the many which go to make a perfect drive yet sent his ball every inch of two hundred yards. Never had Count Michael done such a thing before.

“Let us see you beat that,” he said dramatically.

Trent pressed. He wanted to outdrive the other by fifty yards and ordinarily would have done so. He took too much earth and sent a rocketting ball skyward which dropped full fifty yards behind the

other.

“That was very tactful of you,” Pauline whispered. “His Excellency will be in a good temper the whole day.”

“Do you think I tried to do that?” he asked.

“Why not?” she asked, “I only know you are of a timid disposition. I hate timid men.”

“I can’t help being timid,” he said grinning genially, “it’s my nature.”

So gratified was the count by his unusual showing at the game that he did not notice how close Pauline kept to Alfred Anthony. It was nervous work for Anthony and he answered the girl abruptly trying to keep her attention on the game.

“You are two men,” she said presently when Hentzi and his employer were a little ahead of them. For a moment Trent was thoroughly alarmed. What did she know?

He had always known that it was a fallacy to assume because he had seen none on his midnight wanderings that he had been unobserved. In a vast house such as Castle Radna there were nooks and crannies where frightened servants or timid guests might hide from him momentarily only to denounce him later.

“What do you mean?” he asked teeing up her ball. He had not answered her immediately.

“That you are two men. There may be three of you but I have seen two already. There is the timid, servile creature accepting a coin or a blow and eating with the servants as among his equals. I hate that man. The other is a creature that every now and then looks out of your eyes like a bird of prey. It is the man who drives the great car over the mountain passes as though it were on a smooth boulevard. It is the man who beat big Peter Sissek to the earth with tight lips and eyes that flashed. That is a man I could love.”

He could feel her arm brush against his own. There was a caressing tenderness in her voice.

“Tell me, which is the real you?”

Anthony Trent looked straight ahead of him.

“If you slice your ball,” he said, “you’ll get into the rough. Golf, like other things is largely a matter of self control.”

“I could kill you,” she said, her eyes blazing.

“Think of my wife and children,” he answered with a grin.

“That is why,” she retorted. “The count is right. One should have only contempt for lackeys. I honor you too much as it is.”

“Fine!” Trent observed, “suits me all right. How many quarterings of nobility have you Mademoiselle Pauline?”

“I at least am an artiste,” she flung back at him. “To be the most graceful skater