The Dark Star

The Princess finally answered with a question:

“Did she cause you any trouble, Jim?”

“Every bit I had was due to her. Also – and here’s a paradox – I shouldn’t be here now if Ilse Dumont had not played square with me. Who is she?”

The Princess Naïa did not reply immediately. Instead, she dropped one silken knee over the other, lighted a cigarette, and sat for a few moments gazing into space. Then:

“Ilse Dumont,” she said, “is a talented and exceedingly pretty young woman who was born in Alsace of one German and one thoroughly Germanised parent.

“She played two seasons in Chicago in light opera under another name. She had much talent, an acceptable voice and she became a local favourite.”

The Princess looked at her cigarette; continued speaking as though addressing it:

“She sang at the Opéra Comique here in Paris the year before last and last year. Her rôles were minor ones. Early this spring she abruptly broke her contract with the management and went to New York.”

Neeland said bluntly:

“Ilse Dumont is an agent in the service of the Turkish Government.”

The Princess nodded.

“Did you know it, Naïa?”

“I began to suspect it recently.”

“May I ask how?”

The Princess glanced at Rue and smiled:

“Ruhannah’s friend, Colonel Izzet Bey, was very devoted to Minna Minti–”

“To whom!” exclaimed Neeland, astounded.

“To Ilse Dumont. Minna Minti is her stage name,” said the Princess.

Neeland turned and looked at Rue, who, conscious of his excitement, flushed brightly, yet never suspecting what he was about to say.

The Princess said quietly:

“Yes, tell her, Jim. It is better she should know. Until now it has not been necessary to mention the matter, or I should have done so.”

Rue, surprised, still prettily flushed with expectancy, looked with new curiosity from one to the other.

Neeland said:

“Ilse Dumont, known on the stage as Minna Minti, is the divorced wife of Eddie Brandes.”

At the mention of a name so long hidden away, buried in her memory, and almost forgotten, the girl quivered and straightened up, as though an electric shock had passed through her body.

Then a burning colour flooded her face as at the swift stroke of a lash, and her grey eyes glimmered with the starting tears.

“You’ll have to know it, darling,” said the Princess in a low voice. “There is no reason why you should not; it no longer can touch you. Don’t you know that?”

“Y-yes–” Ruhannah’s slowly drooping head was lifted again; held high; and the wet brilliancy slowly dried in her steady eyes.

“Before I tell you,” continued Neeland, “what happened to me through Ilse Dumont, I must tell you what occurred in the train on my way to Paris… May I have a cigarette, Princess Naïa?”

“At your elbow in that silver box.”

Rue Carew lighted it for him with a smile, but her hand still trembled.

“First,” he said, “tell me what particular significance those papers in the olive-wood box have. Then I can tell you more intelligently what happened to me since I went to Brookhollow to find them.”

“They are the German plans for the fortification of the mainland commanding the Dardanelles, and for the forts dominating the Gallipoli peninsula.”

“Yes, I know that. But of what interest to England or France or Russia–”

“If there is to be war, can’t you understand the importance to us of those plans?” asked the Princess in a low, quiet voice.

“To – ‘us’?” he repeated.

“Yes, to us. I am Russian, am I not?”

“Yes. I now understand how very Russian you are, Princess. But what has Turkey–”

“What is Turkey?”

“An empire–”

“No. A German province.”

“I did not know–”

“That is what the Ottoman Empire is today,” continued the Princess Mistchenka, “a Turkish province fortified by Berlin, governed from Berlin through a Germanised Turk, Enver Pasha; the army organised, drilled, equipped, officered, and paid by the Kaiser Wilhelm; every internal resource and revenue and development and projected development mortgaged to Germany and under German control; and the Sultan a nobody!”

“I did not know it,” repeated Neeland.

“It is the truth, mon ami. It is inevitable that Turkey fights if Germany goes to war. England, France, Russia know it. Ask yourself, then, how enormous to us the value of those plans – tentative, sketchy, perhaps, yet the inception and foundation of those German-made and German-armed fortifications which today line the Dardanelles and the adjacent waters within the sphere of Ottoman influence!”

“So that is why you wanted them,” he said with an unhappy glance at Rue. “What idiotic impulse prompted me to put them back in the box I can’t imagine. You saw me do it, there in the taxicab.”

Ruhannah said:

“The chauffeur saw you, too. He was looking at you in his steering mirror; I saw his face. But it never entered my mind that anything except idle curiosity possessed him.”

“Perhaps,” said the Princess to Neeland, “what you did with the papers saved your life. Had that chauffeur not seen you place them in the box, he might have shot and robbed you as you left the cab, merely on the chance of your having them on your person.”

There was a silence; then Neeland said: