England -- Fiction; Political fiction; Politicians -- Fiction; Spy stories
Elizaveta Nicolayevna, or Ella, as I still call her, has now renounced
her country, and become thoroughly English. A year ago Lord Warnham,
assured of my wife's probity--for greatly to Monsieur Grodekoff's
dismay, she had given some valuable information regarding the activity
of the Russian Secret Service at Downing Street--appointed me to a
responsible post at our Embassy in Paris, so that we now live together
at the big white house in the Avenue des Champs Elysees, while Sonia and
Cecil are also married and live quietly in a quaint old manor-house near
Winchester.
It was only the other day, however, that we heard mention of Andrew
Beck, the popular legislator who so mysteriously accepted stewardship of
the Chiltern Hundreds. There was a paragraph in the newspapers stating
that he had been found drowned in the Scheldt, near Antwerp, and foul
play was suspected. Then Ella explained to me that the woman who had
passed as her mother, Mrs Laing, was, she afterwards discovered, a
well-known Nihilist, and it was in order to keep observation upon her
that the detective Renouf had entered her service. This woman, whose
real name was Sophie Grunsberg, was greatly incensed against Beck on
account of certain false accusations he had made against members of the
revolutionary organisation, and there was little doubt that he had
fallen beneath their far-reaching vengeance.
Here, as I pen these last few lines of my strange story of England's
peril, my own betrayal, and my wife's fond love, Ella, with sweet, glad
smile, moves forward to stroke my hair with soft, caressing hand. The
odour of sampaguita pervades her chiffons, stirring within me memories
of the past. We are together in the room I know so well, with its great
windows overlooking the leafy Avenue. It is warm, the sun-shutters are
closed, and from somewhere outside the gay air, "Si qu'on leur-z-y
f'rait ca" is borne in upon the summer wind.
At last our days are full of passionate love and idyllic happiness.
Verily there is great truth in those words of Holy Writ, "Whoso findeth
a wife, findeth a good thing."
The End.
End of Project Gutenberg's Whoso Findeth a Wife, by William Le Queux
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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