A Traitor's Wooing

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

TWO VILLAINS AND THE HEROINE

"Your Highness will find your opportunity now; Miss Maynard is for the moment alone," Mr. Travers Nugent whispered to his companion.

A guttural "Ah!" was the only answer as the individual addressed left the speaker's side and made his way through the crush towards a tall girl who had just dismissed her partner in the last dance. The ball-room at Brabazon House was almost inconveniently crowded on the occasion of this, the first great function of the London season, and progress was a little difficult. A gleam of satisfaction crept into Mr. Nugent's steadily following eyes when at length the Maharajah stood bowing before the fair young Englishwoman.

The Indian Prince, a notable figure by reason of the jewelled turban that crowned his otherwise orthodox European evening dress, gave his arm to the girl, who greeted him with a pleasant smile of recognition, and together the pair strolled out through one of the French windows into the vast tropical winter-garden for which Brabazon House is celebrated. The dusky face of the Maharajah as it disappeared from view wore an expression of ecstatic rapture that caused Mr. Nugent's thin lips to curl in the ghost of a sneer.

"His Highness won't look like that when he comes back," the watcher muttered under his breath, as he leaned against a pillar and composed himself to wait. Mr. Travers Nugent spent much of his life in waiting—with the consolation of knowing that there was generally a big stake to wait for. He was a well-built man of middle age and height, wearing a long, fair moustache that at first sight gave him rather a distinguished air—an impression that was, however, negatived for any student of character by a hint of shiftiness in the close-set blue eyes.

A bachelor of good family, and of no visible occupation, Travers Nugent moved easily in the orbit of West End society. He occupied a luxurious flat in Jermyn Street, and rented besides a pretty cottage in Devonshire, to which he retired after the fatigues of the season. He had a host of acquaintances, but very few intimates, and even to these latter the source of his income was a mystery. He was vaguely supposed to have inherited a small patrimony from an adventurous uncle who had died in America, and to whom he sometimes jocularly referred as his "avuncular oof-bird." As a matter of fact, there was a substratum of truth in this, to the extent of about a hundred a year, but as Mr. Nugent usually spent £2,000 in that period some other explanation was needed.

He could have furnished one readily, had he been so minded. He lived, and lived well, upon the best asset with which kindly Nature can endow a man not otherwise provided for—a clever, subtle brain, prompt to seize every chance that may come to it, and, failing such fortuitous aid, equally prompt to manufacture the chances for itself. To put it plainly, Travers Nugent lived upon his wits. A soldier of fortune, he belonged to the commissioned ranks of the great predatory army which sacrifices nothing to scruple, to compassion, or to honour. As cruel and as secret as the grave, he made a very good thing of it, and on its profits fed several unholy vices which no one knew that he possessed.

For the last three months he had been acting as self-appointed bear-leader to the arrogant Indian prince who had gone out into the winter garden with the loveliest of all the budding débutantes of the year upon his arm. There are many ways in which a not too scrupulous man of the world can be of use to an Oriental potentate whose civilization is only skin deep, and Travers Nugent had already established many claims upon the exalted visitor's gratitude.

His prophecy was quickly verified. Black thunder lowering on his swarthy brows, the Maharajah of Sindkhote came back through the window into the ball-room, and he came alone. Another dance was in progress now, but the Eastern barbarian, under the veneer of Western polish, had broken loose. Like one demented, yet with some remnants of savage dignity clinging to him, he strode straight across the floor to where Nugent still leaned against the pillar....