Behind the Throne Read online

gallantly. "The sun isstill too warm to be comfortable. Perhaps you will show me the gardensinstead?"

  "Willingly," she answered. "But there's not much to see here, I fear,"and they strolled together between the high box-hedges, into thewell-kept flower-garden with its grey old sundial and beds edged withcurbs of lichen-covered stone. Beyond lay another lawn, which rosegently until it gave entrance into a small shady wood of high old oaksand elms wherein the rooks were cawing.

  The pair were comparatively strangers. A fortnight before, he hadcalled with his uncle, the rector of Thornby, whom he was visiting, andon several occasions since they had met at tennis or at tea in thedrawing-rooms of various houses in the neighbourhood.

  They chatted while strolling around the great sloping lawn, and he wasexpressing admiration at the excellent game she had played. Sheinwardly reflected that he seemed a very pleasant companion--sodifferent from those over-dressed young Roman nobles, all elegance,swagger, and pose.

  To George Macbean Nature had been kind and Chance had been cruel.

  He was tall, slender, and athletic, with pale, refined features and alook of thoughtful and reticent calm. People looked at him far oftenerthan they did at handsomer men. It was one of those faces which suggestthe romance of fate, and his eyes, under their straight brows and theirdrooping lids, could gaze at women with an honest, open look. And yetwomen seldom saw him for the first time without thinking of him when hehad passed from sight. He aroused at a first glance a vague speculativeinterest--he was a man whom women loved, and yet he was utterlyunconscious of it all.

  He was son of a younger son of the Macbeans of Castle Douglas; the bloodof the ancient Galloway lairds ran in his veins; yet it was all thatremained to him of the vanished greatness of a race that had fought sovaliantly on the Border. He had, on his father's death, been compelledto come down from Cambridge only to find himself launched upon the worldpractically penniless, when, by good fortune, an influential friend ofhis father's in the City had contrived to obtain for him a situation asprivate secretary to Mr Morgan-Mason, a wholesale provision merchant,who, having made a fortune in business, sought to enter society by theparliamentary back door. He sat for South-West Norfolk, and was mainlydistinguished in the House by his loudness of dress and his vulgarostentation.

  The post of secretary to such an impossible person was by no means acongenial occupation for a gentleman. The white-waistcoated vulgariansmiled at the poverty of the peerage, and treated his secretary as hewould one of his shopmen in the Goswell Road; yet George Macbean couldonly "grin and bear it," for upon this aspiring merchant of cheese andbacon his very living depended. He could not afford to lose the onehundred and eighty pounds a year which the bacon merchant paid him.

  It being the recess, and Mr Morgan-Mason having followed in the wake ofa needy earl and his wife to Vichy, Macbean was spending a month withthe Reverend Basil Sinclair, his bachelor uncle, when he had becomeacquainted with that bright, vivacious girl who was walking beside him.

  She was speaking of Italy, and life there in winter, without, of course,mentioning the official position of her father, when he said--

  "Ah! I too love Italy. I have been to Rome and Florence several times.Both cities are delightful--even to the mere visitor like myself."

  "Perhaps you speak Italian?" she hazarded in that language.

  "I am fairly well acquainted with it," he responded in the purestTuscan, laughing the while. "Before I went to Cambridge I lived fiveyears with my mother's brother, who was a priest in Pisa."

  "Why, you speak like a born Italian!" she laughed. "It is so difficultfor us English to roll our r's--to give the exact accent, for instance,to _cane_ and to _carne_. Over those two words we make ourselvesridiculous." They had entered the wood, where the damp smell ofdecaying leaves, so essentially English, met their nostrils, and werestrolling up one of the mossy paths in the cool shadow. Yes, she wascertainly lovely, he reflected. Report had not lied about her. She wasmore beautiful than any woman he had ever before beheld, more graceful,more cosmopolitan.

  Morini? Morini? Yes, he had heard the name before. It was not at alluncommon in Tuscany. She was Anglo-Italian, and the girl born ofAnglo-Italian parents is perhaps the most charming and cosmopolitan ofany in Europe.

  Chatting gaily, they lingered in the wood, strolled through the longrange of hothouses, and then back again to the lawn, where they foundthe guests bidding farewell to their hostess and departing.

  The Reverend Basil Sinclair was bending over Madame Morini's hand, anexample which his nephew, though loth to leave the side of the girl whohad so entirely charmed him, was bound to follow, and five minutes laterthe two men mounted into the rector's pony-cart, raised their hats, anddrove away.

  Later that evening, as General Borselli, ready dressed for dinner,stood, a well-set-up figure in the long, low, old-fashioneddrawing-room, with its perfume of pot-pourri, awaiting the appearance ofthe ladies, the door suddenly opened, and there entered a dark,good-looking, brown-bearded man of about thirty, who was a guest atOrton, but having been up to London for the day, had only just returnedin time to slip into his dinner-jacket.

  The two men faced each other.

  The new-comer, also a foreigner, started back, halting on the thresholdas he recognised the sallow, sinister countenance of the other in thedim half-light. Angelo Borselli was the very last man he expected tomeet beneath the Minister's roof in England, and the encounter was, tohim, somewhat disconcerting.

  "You!" cried the general in surprise, speaking in French. "So youactually have the audacity to pose as a friend of His Excellency, afterthose very plain words I spoke in the Florence Club! You accept myfriend's invitation and dare pay court to mademoiselle! Is this not adangerous game you are playing, my friend?"

  "I conceive no danger in it--as far as I am concerned," replied theyoung Frenchman, Jules Dubard, coolly. "Besides, my private affairs aresurely no concern of yours! If His Excellency does me the great honourto invite me to his English home, I shall certainly accept, even at riskof incurring your displeasure," he added, with a supercilious smile.

  "You recollect what I told you?"

  "Perfectly," replied the well-dressed young count, with an air ofextreme politeness, as he rearranged his cravat in the mirror. "But youappear to overlook one rather important fact."

  "And what is that, pray?" inquired the Sicilian, with an evil flash inhis dark eyes.

  "Exposure to His Excellency is synonymous with exposure of yourself inquite another quarter, my dear general," replied the guest, in a meaningtone. "You cannot afford to risk that, you know. We both of us maythreaten, but it is, after all, what these English call a fool's game.Neither of us dare give each other away. So we may just as well befriends as enemies--eh?"

  CHAPTER THREE.

  IN WHICH MARY REVEALS CERTAIN SUSPICIONS.

  Dinner, served with that same stiff stateliness that characterisedeverything in the Morini household, was over, and the three men hadrejoined the ladies in the drawing-room.

  Mary, in a pretty _decollete_ dinner-gown of pale pink chiffon, with asingle tea-rose in her corsage, had, at Dubard's suggestion, gone to thepiano, and in a sweet contralto had sung some of those old Florentinefolk-songs, or _stornelli_, as they are called, those weirdly mediaevalsongs that are still sung by the populace in the streets of Florenceto-day. Then as conclusion she ran her fingers lightly over the keysand sang--

  "Fiorin Fiorello! Di tutti i fiorellin che fioriranno, Il fior del' amor mio sara il piu bello?"

  "Brava! Brava!" cried the young Frenchman standing by the piano, and asshe raised her eyes to his, it was patent that the pair entertained aregard for each other.

  "Your songs of old Florence are so charming, so different fromeverything else in music, mademoiselle," he declared. "We have nothinglike them in France. Our _chansons_ are, after all, inharmoniousrubbish. It is not surprising that you in Italy have a contempt for ourliterature, our music, and our drama, for it can
not compare with yours.We have had no poet like Dante, no composer like Verdi, no musician likePaganini--and," he added, dropping his voice to a low whisper as he bentquickly to her ear, "no woman so fair as Mary Morini."

  She blushed, and busied herself with her music books in order to concealher confusion. The general was chatting with her father and mother atthe farther end of the long room, and therefore did not notice thatswift passage of admiration on the part of Jules Dubard.

  The Frenchman was a friend of the family, mainly because he had beenhelpful to Morini in a variety of ways, and also on account of hispleasant, easy-going manner and quiet elegance. He was from the South.The old family chateau--a grey, dismal place full of ghostly memoriesand mildewed pictures of his ancestors--stood high up in the Pyreneesabove Bayonne, five miles