"Yes, but for the intervention of Don Juan d'Alta, my Chancellor at that time," continued the old lady, "my life might have ended in despair.

"From the very first, although he did not tell me so then, he saw that I had been simply exploited by this heartless and unprincipled scoundrel, Prince Adalbert of Rittersheim. But your father," she proceeded, turning to Dolores and placing her hand on hers, "your father, my dear, by his self-sacrifice and the pure affection which he bore me, saved me.

"He realised that he had to do with a villain whose object was plunder, and who at that time dominated the situation. He foresaw that a liberal outlay of money was the only thing that would rid me of this fiend. He went to Prince Adalbert and simply asked him his price.

"He named at first an exorbitant sum, and the diamonds of my late father contained in the steel safe.

"This was refused. Don Juan at last brought him to his knees by defying him and telling him to do his worst.

"Then he agreed to a yearly pension of one hundred thousand dollars, which would be paid to him on condition that he left me unmolested.

"He made a fight for the custody of the child which was coming, as I doubt not he thought that he could have a greater hold over me if he had it, but this request was flatly refused, and he sailed away from Aquazilia the richer by a great income, but bought at the price of a loving woman's happiness."

The old queen stopped and wiped the tears from her eyes.

"Do not go on, your Majesty," urged Dolores, half dazed at the disclosures; "you distress yourself."

The old lady brightened at once and pressed her hand, putting away her handkerchief.

"No," she answered; "I prefer to tell you all and now.

"By the aid of Don Juan and the Baroness d'Altenstein, who was broken down with grief at the course affairs had taken, my condition was concealed, and arrangements were made for my accouchement under circumstances of the greatest secrecy. Don Juan had abandoned all hope from the outset of legitimatising the child; his one object was to conceal my shame. This he succeeded in doing. I gave birth to a boy, and my love for him has been the great solace of my life."

"And he is living, madame?" I ventured to ask.

"Yes, living," she answered, the sweet smile playing about her lips again—"living, and the greatest comfort God has given me in my trials.

"From his babyhood he was the one thought I had; his training, his education, the fostering of good in his receptive mind that he might grow up a good man. And he has repaid me a thousandfold.

"But in those years great troubles came upon me. Prince Adalbert, known as one of the greatest rouÉs and spendthrifts in Europe, had succeeded his father two years after he left me, and was now Grand Duke. His first wife had been taken back again—or he never could have faced his people—and had borne him a son. This son was fated to be the scourge of my life hereafter.

"Meanwhile, in the throes of a continental war, the Grand Duchy of
Rittersheim was absorbed into the neighbouring great state, and the
Grand Duke Adalbert, deposed and impoverished, became simply a
pensioner, and a most importunate blackmailer of myself.

"His one great object in life—and later he confided this secret, with the story of our marriage, to his son—was to obtain possession of the great fortune in diamonds, still locked in the steel safe bequeathed me by my father, and which I had steadfastly refused to part with, nay, even to withdraw a single stone from.

"But the value had, in the drink-distorted mind of the Grand Duke
Adalbert, become immensely exaggerated. The safe was believed by his
son Waldemar to contain diamonds to the value of five millions of
English pounds!"

Hence his intense rapacity in later years; for when my boy was twenty-five his father, the Grand Duke Adalbert, died, and was succeeded in the title only, for the power was gone, by his son Waldemar, but two years younger than my own.

"This Waldemar appears to have been evilly disposed from boyhood, and embittered against mankind in general, first by the loss of his Duchy, and in addition by the destruction of an eye which he suffered in some low fracas, for his delight was to mingle and drink with the lowest of mankind. On his father's death he came to Valoro and demanded that the pension paid to the late Duke by me should be continued to him!

"This was refused.

"Then he had the impudence to try and bargain with me, offering to keep silence for a certain sum. Finally he laid claim to the diamonds in the steel safe, which he stated were his father's property. My answer to his requests and fraudulent claims was to have him placed on board a steamer bound for Europe.

"Then he threatened me with his life-long vengeance. Leagued with a professional agitator named Razzaro, he commenced to undermine my authority with great subtilty, till in the end my simple people who once had loved me and my family grew to hate me, and to look upon Waldemar, even the Royalists, as a much-wronged person.

"You know the rest; it is written in the history of the world. My people rose in rebellion. I was dethroned, and with one single faithful companion, the Baroness d'Altenstein, fled to Europe in the warship of a friendly nation.

"But before the storm burst I had sent to Europe the steel safe and its precious contents, the diamonds.

"For some reasons, I have many times since wished that it had sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic.

"For years I lived in one of the fairest cities of Europe with my faithful d'Altenstein, and for those years the Duke Waldemar left me in peace, being, I suppose, occupied in some other villainy.

"But suddenly he commenced his importunities again, and made one dastardly attempt, through others, to steal the safe from the bankers' vaults in which it lay, but this was frustrated.

"Harried to death by his persecution, I consulted a learned English judge whom I met in Society in Paris, Sir Henry Anstruther, your father," she added, turning to me, "and it has always seemed to me a providential coincidence that in my need I should also have turned to you.

"I asked this good English judge, without disclosing my secret, what he considered the most effectual mode for a woman to adopt to hide herself entirely from the world and her friends. I said I was very curious to know what his long experience had taught him in that respect.

"He seemed amused at my question, and thought for some time before replying, little guessing what was running in my mind. He answered me at last, and said that he thought that a person could be best hidden and lost to the world by living just a fairly ordinary life in a quiet way in one of the larger towns in England. That was his experience during his long life as a lawyer.

"I treasured his opinion, and formed a scheme in my mind upon it.

"Just then poor Carlotta d'Altenstein, a widow without friends, my dear companion, was seized with her mortal illness, and then I saw my scheme complete before me.

"By the lavish use of money, of which I had more than I needed by far, for my father's private fortune invested in Europe was very great, I contrived that I should change places with the Baroness d'Altenstein.

"To the public it was I who was ill; to the world at large, even to Don Juan, it was I who died. It was then that, passing as the Baroness d'Altenstein—in England as plain Mrs. Carlotta Altenstein—I went to the city of Bath, which had been recommended, and also offered certain devotional advantages to me, for I intended to give the remainder of my life to religion and the poor.

"There in Monmouth Street, where you saw me, Mr. Anstruther, amusing myself with philanthropic literature, I succeeded for ten years in hiding myself from the Duke Waldemar of Rittersheim, who had in a manner reformed himself and become a philanthropist too, in public; in secret his life was worse than ever. In that little room in which you found me, I was foolish enough to keep the steel safe, hidden away in a receptacle cut in the stone wall of the house. But the safe no longer contained all the diamonds. I had been gradually selling them and devoting the proceeds to the poor of the world. This convent, a refuge for aged men and women, and orphaned children, was founded with part of the money.

"But to my horror, at the end of the ten years, I met the Duke Waldemar, face to face, coming out of the Pump Room at Bath, where quietly and unobtrusively I had gone to take the waters. That was on the morning of the day I spoke to you, for I knew then that my refuge was a refuge no longer.

"I intended on the morrow to have asked you to help me remove what remained of the diamonds to a place of security and leave the safe behind. Perhaps I might have even encroached on your kindness to have asked you to escort me here, but it was arranged otherwise.

"During the night and early morning, I became aware that something was taking place in the next house, which up to then had stood empty. I connected it in my mind with some plot of the Duke, who I doubted not had had me followed home. The sequel proved I was right.

"This fear so worked upon me that, towards morning, I rose and commenced to write the letters to you and Don Juan, and to make them up in packets.

"The letter to the latter, in which I told him I should come here if I lived, of course I placed in the ebony casket with something else that was worth more to me than all the diamonds in the world; it was the certificate of my marriage to Prince Adalbert of Rittersheim at the little church of the remote mountain village in Aquazilia.

"I was far more fearful of losing that than all my fortune. It was the certificate of my honour and my son's birthright. I knew that if the Duke Waldemar once got it into his possession he could demand any price from me for its return.

"It was late in the morning, a dull foggy November morning, when I had finished sealing the packets and locked them away in the steel safe with my own key. The one I had given you was the only duplicate in existence; they both bore my father's initial C, he was Carlo the Third of Aquazilia.

"Having left directions on a paper which you could see within the safe when you opened it, I carefully locked it and hid my own key under a special place in the carpet.

"I intended then to write to you at once and tell you to come and open the safe, whatever might happen to me, for I believed that its hiding-place would not easily be discovered, but I never had this chance.

"Exhausted with want of sleep, I went back to my room and threw myself on my bed, half dressed as I was, with my white silk dressing-robe on in which I had sat writing half the night.

"I at once fell asleep and must have slept for hours, for it was dark again when I awoke, and then I was called back to consciousness by having my arm roughly shaken. I found the Duke Waldemar and two other men in my room.

"He at once demanded to know the whereabouts of the steel safe with the diamonds, and held a naked knife to my throat to force me to tell him.

"Life was of very little value to me in comparison with the needs of the poor for whom I was determined to preserve the riches.

"Each time I refused to tell him he pressed the knife closer to my throat, until it cut into the flesh, and I felt the warm blood trickling down on to my white dressing-robe.

"When he and his companions had been there it seemed to me a long, long time, and it was useless for me to shriek for help, I gave myself up for lost, turning my thoughts as well as I could to the next world.

"It was then that the Duke and his men were startled by hearing you open the front door of the house and stumble through the dark passage.

"With horrible curses they fled through the window.

"Then you came, and I had just the strength left to whisper to you to open the safe when I fainted away.

"I have no recollection of what occurred after. Many hours must have elapsed before I regained consciousness, and then I came to myself in an underground room of what I knew after to be a lonely tower on the hills near Bath."

"What, not Cruft's Folly?" I suggested.

"Yes," she replied thoughtfully; "I believe that was the name I afterwards learned was given to the place.

"I was waited on by a German woman, the wife of one of the Duke's followers, a big dark man with a black beard.

"My dress, my bed, and general surroundings were those of a poor country woman.

"But this black-bearded German and his wife were the means of saving me.

"There had been an accident, a man had fallen off the tower and been killed.

"The big dark man and his wife were terribly frightened, and in this state could not withstand the temptation of the big bribe I promised them if they would obtain my release.

"They brought a country cart to the tower, full of straw, as soon as it was dusk on the day of the accident, and in this I was driven to Devizes. From there I telegraphed to my bankers and they sent a special messenger to me with an abundance of money and a new cheque-book; from that time forth I was my own mistress again.

"The wound in my neck, which was only skin deep, had been carefully bandaged by the German woman; under the hands of a skilled doctor and nurse, it soon healed.

"I have very little doubt but that the Duke intended to keep me a prisoner in the tower until I disclosed the whereabouts of the diamonds.

"The big German who had arranged my escape—and to whom I gave five hundred pounds—told me that a grave had already been dug to receive my body in the old graveyard behind the house in Monmouth Street.

"Had the Duke discovered the diamonds, I should have been murdered to save further trouble from me; he knew, of course, I was already dead to the world. As it was, they only buried my bloodstained bed-linen in the grave when they carried me off from the house, after you had left the Duke stunned."

I could have told the old Queen that the big German did not long enjoy her five hundred pounds, but that he himself filled the grave intended for her, and which, probably, he had helped to dig. I did not tell her this, she had had trouble enough; but I had little doubt that the Duke had discovered that the man had played him false, and had shot him and disposed of his body in that way.

Queen Inez paused, and passed her frail white hand across her eyes.

"I have told you all now, I think," she said slowly, for she was fatigued. "When I was well enough I came here and found a telegram from Don Juan. I knew you had delivered the casket. Here I have remained; here I shall, if it be God's will, remain to the end."

Seeing that the long relation had tired her, I leant forward and filled one of the little liqueur glasses with the golden Chartreuse and handed it to her. She took it from me with a smile, and insisted that we should take some too. We sat sipping the delicious liqueur in silence, our gaze fixed on the blue lake and the white sails slowly moving in the stillness of the afternoon heat.

As I saw the colour returning to the Queen's face, I ventured to ask her another question.

"There is one person, madame," I said, "who's history you have not yet thought fit to tell us. Forgive me if I am presumptuous in asking the question. It is your son I speak of."

A very sweet smile came over her face as I ceased speaking. She glanced, it appeared involuntarily, at the sparkling liqueur in her little glass.

"My dear son's history is soon told," she said, still smiling. "He has been a Carthusian monk, a Trappist, since his youth. He never had the least inclination for the life of the world. He is the abbot of the monastery of San Juan del Monte, near Valoro."

Then I recollected his fair face, and blue eyes, and remembered that he had reminded me of some one; now I knew who that some one was—his mother. It was plain to me why Don Juan had taken us there.

"Every year," continued Queen Inez, "by the special permission of the head of his order, he comes to me and stays ten days. Those are, to me, ten days stolen from heaven. Thank God, he comes next month, and each time he comes," she added, with a smile, raising her little glass, "he brings me a present from his monastery of the veritable Chartreuse."

We lingered with the dear old Queen until the sun was declining over the lake, whose waters were turning a darker blue; the sister came with wraps and a warning glance to take her to her rooms in the convent.

At her request, during our short stay at Lucerne, we visited her again and again, until the day of parting came, and we bade her farewell on the terrace where we had first met her, above the blue waters of the lake.

There were tears in her eyes and ours when we left her, and the tears came back again to ours as we looked wistfully up at the terrace as Fritz rowed us away, and we saw her waving to us no longer.

That was the last we saw of her, or shall ever see in this world, for six months after we received a letter from the Reverend Mother telling us that "Madame la Comtesse" was dead, and Dolores and I, remembering her sufferings, her patience, and her great love, are presumptuous enough to think that heaven has gained another saint.

* * * * *

No, neither Ethel nor St. Nivel are married yet, but I would not say that they never will be. I have heard rumours of a Guardsman on the one hand, and a sweet Irish girl on the other.

At any rate, during those happy autumn weeks which Dolores and I invariably spend at dear old Bannington in the shooting season, if, by any chance, Ethel and I meet in the gloaming in the long, oak-panelled corridors, we indulge in no more cousinly kisses; she won't.

*******

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