The Great Prince Shan by E. Phillips Oppenheim (red seas under red skies .TXT) 📕

the girl continued. "One concerned France. That one he has discarded. Through me he learned of the military strength of France, her secret resources, of her tireless watch upon the Rhine. So he listens to Immelan, and Immelan and he together, oh, English lady, they have made a wonderful plan!"

"Are you going to tell me what it is?" Maggie asked, her eyes bright with excitement.

"I cannot tell you because I do not know," was the unwilling admission, "but I will make it so that you can discover for yourself. A few hours ago, the plan was submitted to Prince Shan. It lies in the third drawer of an ebony cabinet, in the room on the left-hand side of the hall after you have entered his house in Curzon Street."

"But no one can enter it!" Maggie exclaimed. "The place is like a fort. No stranger may pass the threshold even. The Prince has told me himself that he receives no visitors."

La Belle Nita smiled. From a pocket somewhere within the folds of her flowing gown, she produced two small keys.

"Listen," she said. "The house in Curzon Street has been called the House of Silence. There are many servants there, but they come only from beneath and when they are summoned. There is what no other person has ever possessed—the key of the front door. There is also the key of the cabinet. Prince Shan has ordered his automobile for two o'clock. It is now barely midnight."

The keys lay in the palm of Maggie's hand. Her heart had begun to beat quickly. Somehow or other, she was conscious of a thrill of excitement which she had never before experienced, even when she had sat back in her corner of the railway carriage, watching for the frontier, knowing that the wires were busy with her name, and that men who knew no mercy were on her track.

"If the servants should hear me?" she faltered.

"You say only 'I await the Prince'," La Belle Nita murmured. "That key never leaves his own person save for one in great favour. They will believe that he gave it to you. You will be unmolested."

A queer sensation suddenly assailed Maggie. She felt extraordinarily primitive, ridiculously feminine. She looked at the girl opposite to her, the girl whose body was draped in perfumed silks, whose face was thick with rice powder, whose eyes were sad. She felt no pity. What feeling she had, she did not care to analyse.

"Is this your key?" she asked.

"It was mine once, but its use has been forbidden to me," the girl replied. "Prince Shan is a changed man. Something has come into his life of which I know nothing, but as it has come, so must I go. I give you your chance, lady, but already I weaken. Go quickly, if you go at all. Please leave me, for I am very unhappy."

Maggie stole quietly out and made her way through the jostling throng back to her own box, which for the moment was empty. She slipped on her cloak, and from the hidden spaces where she stood she looked across the auditorium. The silent figure in green silk robes was still seated in his place, his eyes following the movements of the dancers, his head a little thrown back, a slight weariness in his face. He was still alone. He still had the air of being alone because it was his desire. Once he looked up towards the box in which she was, and Maggie, although she knew she was invisible, shrank back against the wall. She set her teeth hard and looked back through the slightly misty space. An unfamiliar feeling for a moment almost choked her. She waited until she had vanquished it, then adjusted her mask and left the box.

CHAPTER XX

From the moment when the taxicab drove away and left her in the deserted street, Maggie was conscious of a strange sense of suppressed excitement, something more poignant and mysterious, even, than the circumstances of her adventure might account for. It was exciting enough, in its way, to play the part of a marauding thief, to find herself unexpectedly face to face with a possible solution of the great problem of Prince Shan's intentions. But beneath all this there was another feeling, more entirely metaphysical, which in a sense steadied her nerves because it filled her with a strange impression that she had lost her own identity, that she was playing somebody else's part in a novel and thrilling drama.

The street was empty when she inserted the little key in the front door. There was not a soul there to see her step in as it swung open and then softly, noiselessly, but without any conscious effort of hers, closed again behind her. She held her breath and looked around.

The hall was round, painted white and dimly lit by an overhead electric globe. In the centre was a huge green vase filled with great branches of some sort of blossoms. Not a picture hung upon the walls, nor was there any hall stand, chest, closet for coats or hats, or any of the usual furbishings of such a place. There were three rugs upon the polished floor and nothing else except a yawning stairway and closed doors. Whatever servants might be in attendance were evidently in a distant part of the building. Not a sound was to be heard. Still without any lack of courage, but oppressed with that curious sense of unreality, she turned almost automatically towards the door on the left and opened it. Again it closed behind her noiselessly. She realised that she was in one of the principal reception rooms of the house, dimly lit as the hall from a dome-shaped globe set into the ceiling. She moved a yard or two across the threshold and stood looking about her. Here again there was an almost singular absence of furniture. The walls were hung with apple-green silk, richly embroidered. There were some rugs upon the polished floor, a few quaintly carved chairs set with their backs against the wall, and opposite to her the ebony cabinet of which La Belle Nita had spoken. She moved towards it. Somehow or other, she found herself with the other key in her hand, stooping down. She counted the drawers—one, two three—fitted in the key, turned it, and realised with a little start the presence in the drawer of a roll of parchment, tied around with tape and sealed with a black seal. She laid her hand upon it, but even at that moment she felt a shiver pass through her body. There had been no sound in the room, which she could have sworn had been empty when she entered it, yet she had now a conviction that she was not alone. She turned slowly around, her lips parted, breathing quickly. Standing in the middle of the room, a grim, commanding figure in his flowing green robes, the dim light flashing upon the great diamonds in his belt, stood Prince Shan.

To Maggie at that moment came a great throbbing in her ears, a sense of remoteness from this terrible happening, followed by an intense and vital consciousness of danger. The man who had brought new things into her life, the polished gentleman of the world, with his fascinating brain and gentle courtesy, had gone. It was Prince Shan of China who stood there. She felt the chill of his contempt and disapproval in her heart. She had forfeited her high estate. She was a convicted thief,—an adventuress!

She gripped at the side of the cabinet. Her poise had gone. She had the air of a trapped animal.

"You!" she exclaimed. "How did you get here?"

He answered her without change of expression. A sense of crisis seemed to have made his tone more level, his face stony.

"It is my house," he said. "I do not often leave it. I sat in my sleeping chamber behind"—he pointed to the silken curtains through which he had passed—"I heard your entrance and guessed with pain and regret at your mission."

"But a quarter of an hour ago you were at the ball!"

"You are mistaken," he replied. "I do not attend such gatherings. I had given you my word that I should not be there."

"But I saw you," she persisted, "in that same costume!"

"Surely not," he dissented. "The person whom you saw was a gentleman from my suite, who wore the dress of an inferior mandarin. He is sometimes supposed to resemble me. I should have believed that your apprehension of such things would have informed you that no Prince of my line would wear the garments of his order for a public show."

Her fingers had left the drawer now. She stood upright, pale and desperate.

"That woman of your country, then—La Belle Nita—did she lie to me?"

"How can I tell?" he answered coldly, "because I do not know what she said."

Maggie made an effort to test her position.

"I came here as a thief," she confessed. "I am detected. What are your intentions?"

He moved very slowly a little closer to her. Maggie felt her sense of excitement grow.

"You came here as a thief," he repeated, "as a spy. Why did you not ask me for the information you desired?"

"Because you would not have told me," she replied, "at least you would not have told me the truth."

"For a price," he said, "the truth would have been yours for the asking. For a different price it is yours now."

Again without noticeable movement he seemed to have drawn nearer. The edge of that cool ebony cabinet seemed to be burning her fingers. Try however hard, she could not frame the question which had risen to her lips.

"The price," he continued, "is you—yourself. A few hours ago it was your love I craved for. Now it is yourself."

He was so near to her now that she faced the steady radiance of his wonderful eyes, so near that she could trace the faint lines about his mouth, the strong, stern immobility of his perfectly shaped, olive-tinted features.

"You are too wonderful," he went on, "to remain a daughter of the crude West. I want to take you back with me to the land where life still moves to poetry, to the land where one can live in a world unknown by these struggling hordes. You shall live in a palace where the perfume of flowers lingers always, with the sound of running water in your ears, a palace from which all sordid things and all manner of ugliness are banished because we alone have found the key to the garden of happiness."

He raised his hand, and it seemed as though unseen eyes watched them from every quarter. The silken curtains through which he had issued were drawn back by invisible hands, and the inner apartment was disclosed. Its faint illumination was obscured with purple shades. There was a high lacquer bedstead, with little ivory ladders on either side, a bedstead hung with silks of black and purple and mauve. There was a huge couch, a shrine opposite the bed, in which was a kneeling figure of black marble. A faint odour, as though from thousand-year-old sachets, very faint indeed and yet with its mead of intoxication, seemed to steal out from the room, which had borrowed from its curious hangings, its marvellous adornments, its strangely attuned atmosphere, all the mysticism of a fabled world.

"You have come," he said. "Will you stay?" The inertia seemed suddenly to leave her limbs. She threw up her head as though gasping for air, escaped, somehow or other, from the thrall of his eyes, and passed across the smooth floor with flying footsteps. Her fingers seized the handle of the door and turned it, only to find it held by some invisible fastening. She shook it passionately. There was not even sound. She turned back once more. Prince Shan had only slightly changed his position. He stood upon the threshold of the inner room,