Grey dined that evening across the Boulevard at the Maison Dorée, in company with Fr?ulein von Altdorf and Herr Captain Lindenwald; and, as the officer insisted that it was advisable for them to avoid as much as possible the public eye, the trio dined in a cabinet particulier on the second floor with windows open on the street. It was not a very gay dinner, in spite of the Herr Captain’s efforts to infuse some mirth into it. Miss von Altdorf was apparently still grief-stricken over her great-uncle’s sudden death, and though she strove valiantly to smile at Lindenwald’s essays at wit and to respond with some animation to Grey’s less jocose but cheerful observations, it was with such palpable exertion as to rather discourage her would-be entertainers.
Her youth was a surprise to the American. At first sight he had fancied her three or four-and-99twenty, but he was satisfied now that she could not be more than eighteen. Her figure was distinctly girlish.
She was all in white, from her great ostrich-plumed hat of Leghorn straw to her tiny canvas bottines, because, young as she was, she entertained prejudices against conventional mourning, and exercised them. It was a question, however, whether in black or white she was more beautiful. In the death-chamber Grey had seen her sombre-robed and had pronounced her rarely lovely, and now in raiment immaculately snowy she was equally alluring. Her expression was naturally pensive and her recent sorrow had given to her big, deep-set, long-lashed blue eyes a pathos that awoke the tenderest emotions. As the American gazed at her across the table he experienced a thrill of sentiment that was undeniable, and he had but to glance at Lindenwald to see in his contemplation the same fervency of soul.
“I should like it,” Grey said to her when the dinner was about over and he was burning his cognac over his coffee, “if you would take a trip with me tomorrow into the country. We will100 start early and have déjeuner at some inn, under the trees. It will do you a world of good.”
Something very like a frown gathered on Lindenwald’s brow, but it passed before he spoke.
“Do not forget my warning, Herr Arndt,” he interjected. “It would perhaps be safer for me to accompany Fraülein von Altdorf.”
“I will chance it,” Grey replied, decisively. “I feel that I, too, need a little outing.”
“It will be lovely, Uncle Max,” the girl responded, with more animation than she had previously shown. “Let us go to Versailles. I have never been, and I have read so much about it.”
“Versailles it shall be, my dear,” he answered, lighting a cigarette, while Lindenwald brushed his hand across his brow to hide a scowl.
Grey’s broken, unrefreshing, dreamful slumber of the night before, followed by a tiresome, distressing day, resulted early in the evening in a drowsiness that he could not shake off. For a while he dozed in a chair by an open window, but when the clock had struck eleven he arose and prepared for bed, and in a little while he was sleeping soundly behind his blue velvet curtains.
101 The night, however, was warm and close after the rain of the day, and, as the hours wore on, the sleeper grew restless and turned uneasily from side to side, by-and-by waking at each turning and seeking a cool spot between the sheets. At length sleep forsook him altogether, and he lay quite wide awake peering into the darkness in an effort to distinguish objects. But the night was very black and the room was enveloped in a pall of ink, save where the reflection from the street lamps spread patches of dim yellow light on wall and ceiling. The stillness, too, was oppressive. The boulevard was dead, and within doors no sound except the monotonous ticking of the clock on the mantel-shelf was audible.
He waited longingly for the clock to strike that he might know how many hours must elapse before the dawn; and as he waited, his senses alert, there broke softly on the silence the stealthy tread of feet in the passage on the other side of the wall near which he lay. No sooner had he heard the footsteps than they ceased, and the sound was succeeded by a muffled, metallic clicking from the direction of his door. With Lindenwald’s warning102 in mind he had turned the key in the lock before retiring, and he recalled this now with a sense of satisfied security; but even as he did so he was conscious of the door being pushed slowly but creakingly ajar, and then the tread that he had heard without he heard within. He held his breath, not in affright, for he was, he realised, wonderfully composed, but lest he scare away the intruder before the object of his visit was made plain.
Another second and a figure had crossed in the dim light that came from one of the windows. It was a rather undersized figure, Grey thought, but its attitude was crouching, almost creeping, and he might be deceived. Quickly a hand went to the cord loops at either side of the casements and dropped the curtains, and now the room was devoid of even the dim illumination from the street lamps. Then again, for a heart-beat, there was a blade of light visible as the visitor’s arm shot quickly between the lowered window hangings and drew cautiously together the open sashes, first one and then the other.
The steps now approached the bed—very slowly, haltingly, as though the intruder stopped103 at each footfall to listen. Grey waited, with every muscle tense, his nerves a-strain, wondering, speculating as to this night prowler’s next move. For a little while his approach ceased and the suspense grew maddening. The man had evidently halted in the centre of the room. Then there came the faintest tinkle of glass touched to glass, so faint that the ticking of the clock made question whether it was not imagination; and then the stealthy stepping was resumed, but more nearly silent than before, until the man in the bed, with heart pounding, teeth shut tight and breath indrawn and held, knew that the other was there beside him—leaning in over him, between the curtains, with a hand outstretched....
Blindly, into the pitch dark, with all its power of nerve and muscle, Grey’s clenched fist shot upward just as a cloth, wet with a liquid so suffocatingly volatile as to stagger him for the instant, dropped on his face. He heard a startled cry, half moan, half groan, and then a crash as a body reeled backward and, losing its balance, toppled over a chair. On his feet in a flash, Grey made haste to follow up his advantage. His foot touched his104 fallen assailant and he flung his full weight down upon him, groping wildly in the dark to find his arms and pinion them. But the fellow wriggled like a worm—twisting agilely, squirming from under his clutch—and his arms evaded capture. Locked in a desperate embrace they rolled over and over, now half rising to their knees, now thrown back again, upsetting tables and chairs, pounding their heads stunningly on floor and wall, clutching at each other’s hair, gripping each other’s throats—a wrestling match in which science had neither time nor place; a struggle for capture on the part of one, and for escape on the part of the other.
Grey was the stronger of the two, the heavier, the more muscular, but his foe was all elasticity, wiry, resilient, untiring, indomitable. The minutes passed without any apparent advantage to either. The smaller man was swearing in four languages and Grey was breathing hard. The noise they were making, as they rose and fell and overturned furniture, was thunderous. Each moment Grey expected the house would be awakened and assistance would arrive. Perspiration was105 pouring from his every pore; his pyjamas were in ribbons, his body and limbs half naked. Vainly he strove to strike and stun his adversary. His blows were dodged as if by instinct and his knuckles were bleeding where they had come in contact with the floor.
At length he succeeded in laying hold of the fellow’s face, his nose and mouth in his iron grasp, but instantly the jaws wrenched open and then closed savagely with Grey’s finger between viciously incisive teeth. A cry of pain escaped him as for the smallest moment a wave of faintness swept over him, and then he felt his antagonist slipping sinuously from under him and he grabbed wildly for a fresh hold. He caught a wrist and tried to cling to it, but the teeth were cutting to the bone, grinding on the joint, and the wrist slid through his grasp and the head followed in a twinkling. He rolled over and lunged out again, but the steely jaws had at that instant released his mangled finger, and even as he was striving to reach, struggling pantingly to his knees, he heard the door open quickly and he knew that he was alone.
106 He sank back to a sitting posture, breathing hard and deeply, but the air seemed suddenly to have grown thick and foul and choking, and he clambered to his feet and sought in the darkness for a window. Presently the touch of the curtains rewarded him. He thrust them frantically aside, pushed open the sashes and then dropped down again with his head and shoulders far out over the balcony, drinking in the cool, fresh air of the very early morning.
And it was here, in this position, a minute later that Johann, who had after considerable deliberation decided to investigate the cause of the disturbance, found him pale and exhausted, with the remnants of his pyjamas spattered with blood from his bleeding finger.
“Oh, Herr Arndt,” he cried, in perturbation, “what has happened? Have you tried to kill yourself? Oh, it is suffocating here! The gas—the room is full of gas.”
Johann helped Grey to his feet, sat him in a chair by the window, and having discovered the four gas jets of the chandelier which depended from the ceiling in the centre of the room turned107 full on, he turned them off, opened the other window and threw wide the door to effect a draft. Then he lighted the candles and returned to make an inventory of his master’s injuries.
“I’m not very much hurt, Johann,” Grey assured him; “but it was a pretty tough scrimmage while it lasted, and the brute did give my finger a biting. He had teeth like a saw and jaws like a vise. His original idea was asphyxiation, I suppose. He fancied I was asleep and that he would make it my last. By the way, look in the bed over there. You’ll find a chloroformed handkerchief, I think.”
“And was it for robbery, do you imagine, Herr Arndt, that he came?” Johann asked, as he went toward the bed.
“God knows,” Grey answered. “It looks rather professional when a fellow unlocks your door with a pair of nippers. The key was in the lock, you see.”
“You did not see his face, Herr Arndt? You would not know him?”
“I’m not a cat, Johann, and I cannot see in the dark.”
108 Then the valet hastened away to investigate, but returned without any information worth the calling. He had aroused the portier only to learn that the street door had not been opened in two hours either for ingress or egress. Whoever the depredator was he must either have come in early and remained hidden or have entered through some unbarred window in the rear of the hotel, probably escaping by the same means. Having made his report Johann bathed and bound Grey’s finger, drew a bath for him, got out clean nightwear, remade the bed, and, just as the clock struck the half-hour after four, left him once more alone, still with the chloroformed handkerchief in his hand, which he was examining carefully for the third time. But it was merely a square piece of fine hemstitched linen without any distinguishing mark whatever. In that, certainly, there was no clue to his visitor.
But just as he was about to blow out his candles his foot trod on something hard, and he stooped and picked up a seal ring. It was very heavy and richly chased, and it bore an elaborately engraved coat of arms. In that last despairing clutch at the109 fellow’s hand he had evidently stripped this from his finger—this which could not but prove damaging evidence of his identity. The heraldic device was to Grey unfamiliar, but it would be a comparatively easy matter to learn to what family it belonged. Indeed, he had a vague recollection of having noticed a ring of this pattern on the little finger of Baron von Einhard’s ungloved hand the afternoon before in the hotel reading-room; but the pattern was not uncommon, and— but it was preposterous to fancy that a man of his position, no matter what Lindenwald had said, no matter what his reputation for chicanery, craft, and cunning, would personally undertake a deliberate attempt at homicide. Such impossible characters might figure in melodramas, but in real life they were out of the question. And then he looked at the ring again, turning it over and inspecting it very minutely in the light of the candle flame.
Captain Lindenwald, when he was told of the affair, was quite sure it was von Einhard even before he was shown the ring, and when that was forthcoming he was willing to swear to it. The arms, he declared, were the von Einhard arms,110 and the ring could have been worn by no one save the Baron himself. He was for putting the matter in the hands of the police and thus avoiding future dangers, but after a little deliberation he realised that such a course would be impracticable. For the present it was absolutely necessary, he knew, to reveal nothing as to his and his charge’s whereabouts. Too much was known already; and general publicity, even though it put von Einhard where he could do no personal harm, would more greatly imperil the carrying out of the plans that were indispensable.
This, at least, was the impression he conveyed to Grey, though he was, as usual, most guarded in his choice of words. Never yet, the American observed, had he directly spoken of his mission, nor had he once so much as intimated to him that he knew him as other than Herr Max Arndt. That he was a crown prince en route to the bedside of his dying sire Captain Lindenwald had zealously refrained from uttering save to a third party under stress of unusual circumstance, and then in a tone so low that he could not reasonably be expected to hear.
111 “If I may be permitted,” the Captain requested, “I will keep this ring for a little. I may run across von Einhard, and I should like to give him this one hint that his attempt on your life is known to us.”
But for some reason which he could not define Grey demurred.
“I have a whim to wear it,” he said, replacing it upon his finger; and Lindenwald made no further plea.
It was deemed best not to mention the incident of the night to Miss von Altdorf, and on their way to the Gare St. Lazare that morning Grey accounted for his bandaged finger by the subterfuge of having caught it in a door. He was not altogether satisfied with the spot chosen for the day’s outing. Had he been allowed unaided to make the choice he would undoubtedly have selected a resort of quite different character, but the girl had expressed a wish to visit Louis XIV’s “Ab?me des dépenses,” and he had without demur acceded to her desire. After all, to be alone with her and thus gather from her knowledge as much information as possible concerning the mystery that surrounded him was his prime object, and for this purpose Versailles offered as propitious a background as Bougival or Croissy or a dozen other places that he personally would have preferred.
113 The day, washed clear and brilliant by the rain of yesterday, was not uncomfortably warm, and, though the maimed finger ached distractingly at times, Grey, in spite of his misgivings, found the little jaunt delightfully diverting. The Fraülein had shaken off much of her melancholy of the previous evening, and her mood was cheerful, if not merry. Her appreciation, which was mingled with a joyousness almost childish, was especially gratifying to her companion. Everything she saw interested her, and her comment, while invariably intelligent, was so unaffected and ingenuous as to be ofttimes amusing.
When, after déjeuner at the Café de la Comédie, they had come out upon the terrace of the palace and stood overlooking the quaint, solemn, old-fashioned gardens, cut up into squares and triangles and parallelograms and ornamented with statues and vases and fountains arranged with monotonously geometric precision, her face shone with pleasure for a moment and then a shadow crossed it.
“Are all landscape gardeners atheists?” she asked, na?vely.
114 “I’m sure I don’t know,” Grey replied, smiling; “I’ve never investigated their religious beliefs.”
“Well, the one who designed all this,” she added, with a sweep of her hand, “had very little respect for God’s taste.”
And later, as they sauntered through room after room and gallery after gallery of the palace, with their interminable succession of paintings and sculptures, she was much impressed by the pictured ceilings.
“I wonder why they put their best work where one must break one’s neck to see it?” she queried; and then she laughed. “Do you suppose it was to encourage the kings and queens and other grandees to bear in mind their exalted position and to hold their heads high?”
Grey had thus far refrained from broaching the subject which had inspired the excursion. He had chosen first of all to study the girl and gauge her character. Over her presence in the little party of questionables in which he had so unexpectedly found himself he was much perplexed. It seemed scarcely reasonable to suppose that she was not in some way involved in the plot, but whether actively115 or passively, with knowledge or without, was, or at least might be, open to question. He certainly could gather no indication from her attitude, her manner, or her utterance that she was other than artless and sincere. She appeared, in fact, uncommonly simple-hearted, straightforward, and guileless, and, after weighing the evidence, he reached the conclusion that if she had a place in the scheme of his enemies it was most assuredly without her ken or connivance. It was nevertheless clear that she must be innocently aware of much that he wished eagerly to know, and, as they wandered over the palace together, from the sumptuously decorated Salles des Croisades, reflecting in picture, trophy and souvenir the conquest of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, to the magnificent Galerie des Glaces, with its many high-arched windows and glittering, gilt-niched mirrors, he ponderingly strove to outline some course of procedure that would yield him what he desired and yet not reveal his own delicately fragile position.
It was not, however, until they had finished their inspection of the palace and had passed out116 into the gardens by the Cour des Princes that an opportunity offered to make trial of the plan he had conceived. They had strolled under the orange trees beside that long stretch of velvet lawn towards what is known as the basin of Apollo and had found seats on the marble coping of the fountain. As they sat there facing each other amid the perfume of the flowers and the spice of the shrubbery, the balmy breath of summer fanning their cheeks and the genial glow of a tempered June sun bathing them, the girl’s eye fell for the first time upon the ring on Grey’s little finger, and she gave an involuntary start of surprise.
“Oh, is it you, then?” she cried, and there was something of awe in her voice, though her eyes were smiling. “But no,” she added, quickly, “that cannot be. I do not understand, Uncle Max.”
“Nor I, child,” Grey replied, smiling back at her. He had not observed her glance, and her exclamation had startled him. She took his hand in her long, white, rose-tipped fingers and held it up before his eyes, the ring glinting in the sunshine.
117 “That!” she said. “What does it mean, your wearing it?”
“Mean?” he hesitated, wondering. “Why should it mean anything? Has not a gentleman a right to wear a ring if his fancy runs that way?”
“Oh, yes, of course; some rings; but no ordinary gentleman has a right to wear that one.”
“But suppose I am not an ordinary gentleman?” he pursued. “Suppose I have a title and bear arms, have I not a right to engrave those arms upon gold and wear them on my finger?”
She looked at him very seriously from out her deep-set, long-lashed eyes of purplish blue, and then she said:
“But it is the ring of the Crown Prince. And you are not the Crown Prince. If you were you could not be my uncle.”
Grey’s heart leaped. His decision had been confirmed. She was not trying to put him on a throne to which he had no more right than those workmen who were repairing the stone margin of the great canal a hundred yards away. Yet, at the same time, she had filled him with a new perplexity.118 It was evident that the ring was quite familiar to her. Therefore it could hardly be von Einhard’s, and Lindenwald’s assertion must not only have been false but knowingly false, and with an object. If the Fraülein von Altdorf knew the ring as the Crown Prince’s ring, Lindenwald must also have known it as such. It was for that reason he did not wish Grey to keep it. He feared, probably, just such a revelation as had come about. These points were plain enough, but the whole intricate problem was growing more and more involved. Its likeness to a maze again recurred. With every effort to extricate himself he seemed to get further and more bewilderingly entangled. And once more he was tempted to leave the path, which seemed to turn and turn again on itself, and to cut his way through thicket and underbrush regardless of consequences.
“What a wise Fraülein it is!” he replied, after a pause. “What you say is very true. If I am the Crown Prince I am not your uncle, and if I am your uncle I am not the Crown Prince. Now which would you prefer to have me?”
“Oh, for your sake,” she answered, quickly,119 “I’d rather you were heir to the throne; but for my sake I’d rather you were my uncle.”
“But not being able to be both, suppose you should learn that I am neither?” he queried, laughing.
“But you are,” she protested, with conviction. “You are my uncle, that is a fact.”
“How do you know?” Grey asked. The situation was growing interesting; disclosures were imminent, and they were coming quite naturally without his having had to resort to the plan he had mapped out.
“How does one ever know such things?” she replied, a little annoyance in her tone. “You were my Great-uncle Schlippenbach’s nephew and I am your niece. I call you Uncle Max and you call me Minna.”
“Ah, yes, that is very true,” Grey went on, banteringly, and he remembered what O’Hara had told him of how they had met in London a week after his setting foot on English soil; “but you never saw me in your life until two months ago. Do you remember how we first met?”
“I have a very vivid recollection of it. It was120 at dinner at the Folsonham, in London. I wore a pale green frock. And poor Great-uncle Schlippenbach said: ‘Minna, my dear, this is your Uncle Max, who hasn’t seen you since you were a baby.’”
“And what else did he say?”
“Oh, I don’t remember all the conversation.”
“Did he say anything about where we were going, and what we were going for?”
“I don’t think he said anything then. But you must remember. You were as much there as I was.”
“Ah, but I was not listening,” Grey pleaded, his eyes a-twinkle. “I had something better to do.”
“What was that, pray?”
“I had my pretty niece to look at.”
The rose in Minna’s cheeks deepened and her eyes fell shyly.
“Now you are teasing me again,” she said.
Grey turned an uninterested gaze for a brief space on the sun-god and his chariot which, surrounded by tritons, nymphs, and dolphins, rose in heroic proportions from the centre of the basin.
121 “I never knew much of my Uncle Schlippenbach,” he ventured, after a little; “tell me about him.”
“You should know more than I,” the Fraülein returned. “You were in New York with him while I was in England.”
“Yes, I know,” her companion went on, as he took a cigarette from his case and struck a match, “but I don’t mean intimately, personally. Tell me a little of his history.”
“Everybody knew he was eccentric.”
“Of course.”
“Otherwise he would never have left Budavia. Just think of what he gave up!”
“That’s just it,” Grey interposed, eagerly. “What did he give up? I’ve heard stories, to be sure, but I don’t know that I ever had the truth of it.”
“Oh, I’ve heard it a hundred times,” Minna responded, digging the point of her parasol into the gravel. “You see, he was tutor to the Court. He had taught King Frederic about all there was to teach, and when His Majesty outgrew school books—of course he wasn’t His Majesty then,122 but His Royal Highness the Crown Prince—Great-uncle Schlippenbach accompanied him on the grand tour. They visited every court in Europe and then went over to Africa and Turkey in Asia, and I don’t know where else. Then when Frederic succeeded to the throne, Great-uncle Schlippenbach was still retained, and after a while, when a little prince was born to Queen Anna, he was constituted a sort of kindergarten-professor to the royal infant.”
“In other words, a mental wet-nurse,” suggested Grey.
“Yes, exactly. I think he taught him to say ‘bah’ and ‘boo’ and ‘gee-gee’ and ‘moo-cow’—or rather their German equivalents—and led him gloriously on to the alphabet. Then, just as he was beginning to spell nicely in words of three letters, something happened. Nobody ever knew just exactly what it was, but Great-uncle Schlippenbach took offence. Her Majesty, Queen Anna, it seems, was to blame. He brooded over the matter for weeks and months, growing more and more incensed, more and more bitter. In vain King Frederic tried to mollify him. He was very123 fond of Great-uncle Schlippenbach, and he wanted to smooth matters over, but the royal tutor was not to be pacified. He broke out in a torrent of rage, recounting his fancied wrongs and declaring that he had wasted the best years of his life in a hopeless effort to grow flowers of intellect from barren soil. The German Emperor would have had him behind the bars for lèse-majesté, but King Frederic only laughed and offered him a baronetcy. But Great-uncle Schlippenbach scorned the offer. Having spoken his mind, he packed his boxes and left the Court, left Kürschdorf, left Budavia, left Europe and went to America to begin life anew. That was twenty-five years ago, and he was forty years old.”
“And the poor little Crown Prince had to learn his words of four letters from someone less gifted, eh?”
“Dear only knows from whom he ever did learn them,” Miss von Altdorf continued. “He disappeared the very next week after Great-uncle Schlippenbach.”
“Disappeared?” repeated Grey.
“Oh, yes, you remember that, surely. He was124 abducted, you know. Why, that’s a part of the history of your own country. That’s why there’s so much excitement now over rumours of his turning up at this late day. Oh, dear, Uncle Max, why will you tease me so? You made me tell you that whole story, and I’m sure you knew it quite as well as I.”
Grey laughed joyously.
“I love to hear you talk,” he told her, his gaze lingering fondly on her blushing face. “And so,” he added, “they are looking for the kidnapped baby to reappear a man and claim his own? Is that it?”
But she was silent, her eyes downcast.
“Won’t you answer me?” he pleaded.
“I won’t again tell you what you already know,” she answered, a little petulantly.
“But I don’t know about this ring, really,” Grey urged. “Tell me about it. What has it got to do with the stolen Crown Prince?”
Minna looked up, regarding him searchingly.
“Where did you get it?” she asked.
“I found it,” he answered, quite truthfully.
“In a jewel casket, within a great iron chest,125 inside an ordinary travelling box?” she cross-questioned.
The significance of the description was not lost on her hearer.
“No,” he returned, frankly, “not in anything at all. On the floor of my room.”
Her eyes were round with surprise.
“And how did it come there?”
“I cannot imagine. That is why I’d like you to tell me what you know of it.”
“And before you found it on the floor of your room you had never seen it?”
“Never. I swear it by the sun-god yonder.”
“My great-uncle never showed it to you—never told you of it?”
“Never,” Grey repeated.
“He showed it to me in London,” she confessed, reaching out for the finger it adorned, “and told me all about it. It seems that when he left Budavia it had in some way got in with his effects. He did not find it until a year or more afterward. It had belonged to the King before his coronation, and to his father before him, and to his grandfather before that. The arms are those of the126 Prince of Kronfeld. The Crown Prince is always, you know, the Prince of Kronfeld.”
“And as the little Prince of Kronfeld had been kidnapped and Uncle Schlippenbach did not know where to find him, he simply put the ring away for safe-keeping, eh?” asked Grey, quizzically.
“He was taking it back to Kürschdorf when he died,” Minna answered, with rebuke in her tone. “As soon as he heard that the Crown Prince had been found he started. He wished, he said, to put it on his finger with his own hand. ‘His Royal Highness will probably travel incognito,’ he said to me, ‘but I shall know him; and when we meet I shall give him the ring. When you see it worn you will know that the wearer is the Crown Prince.’”
“And when you saw it on my finger you thought—just for a moment—that I was he, didn’t you, Minna? But then, as I am your uncle I cannot be the Prince of Kronfeld, so we will take it off and wear it no more,” Grey concluded, slipping the golden circlet from his finger and stowing it away in a pocket of his waistcoat.
“But what I should like to know,” continued127 the Fraülein, “is how it came on the floor of your room?”
“And so should I,” her companion echoed; “how it got out of the casket, and the iron chest, and the travelling box.”
Presently the sound of many shuffling feet was borne to their ears, accompanied by the discordant piping of high-pitched voices, and turning their heads they saw approaching an army of tourists with a gesticulating, haranguing guide in the lead.
“It’s a case of ‘follow the man from Cook’s,’” Grey observed, annoyed at having their privacy invaded. “We had better stroll on.”
They walked rapidly for a while, keeping always to the right, until they were out of sight and sound of the disturbing company, and then they dawdled from terrace to terrace; leaned over lichen-stained marble balustrades to see their reflections in the dark, silent pools; loitered on banks of mossy turf beneath the shade of towering trees; stopped to admire, to criticise, and not infrequently to laugh over the sculptures that dotted the way, and came out at length upon an128 avenue, long and straight and level and gleaming white in the afternoon sunshine.
“You want to see the Trianons, of course,” Grey suggested to the girl. “I know you are familiar with many of the events that took place there.”
And so, turning to the left, they sauntered on until they came to the one-story horse-shoe shaped villa that Louis XIV built for Madame de Maintenon. But Minna was tired of sight-seeing, and the porcelains and the pictures proved alike uninteresting. The Petit Trianon pleased her much better because of its associations with Marie Antoinette, who had been one of her school-girl heroines, and over its delightful English-looking garden she grew enthusiastic.
They strolled along the winding paths, dallied on the shore of the funny little artificial lake, and rested for a while in the “Temple de l’Amour.” The number of visitors, however, was to both of them a disturbing influence. They would have liked the place to themselves, but they were at every turn running into couples and parties whose presence, as Grey put it, “spoiled the picture.”
129 They had just emerged from that group of homely, quaint cottages in a far corner of the garden where the fair ladies of Louis’s Court were wont to play at peasant life, when the rippling laughter of women and the more hearty if less musical merriment of men broke jarringly upon their hearing.
“Can’t we have some milk at the vacherie Suisse?” Grey heard a woman’s voice ask in the English of the well-bred.
And then a man rejoined:
“Milk! What for? There’s still an unopened case of champagne in the coach.”
Again the laughter echoed, but nearer. The little company were coming towards them, hidden by the shrubbery. A second later and they came into view—a tall, large woman with brilliant auburn hair, in gown and hat of pale lavender; a middle-aged man, red-faced and well-groomed; a dainty little dark woman, all in red, with a tall, dark man in grey, and then—Grey went white as the whitest cloud overhead, for Hope Van Tuyl was approaching, and with her was the young man from the Embassy whom he had seen yesterday130 at the hotel. And there was Frothingham, too, whom he had not recognised at first glance; and it was Nicholas Van Tuyl, he saw now, who was with the red-haired woman in the lead.
For a second he halted, undecided, a powerful impulse urging him to speak to the woman he loved, at all hazards. His lips were framing words, his eyes were beaming, his hand was half way to his hat, before his judgment came to the rescue—and held him; told him that it would be folly, that now as never before it was his duty to maintain his disguise and thereby eventually establish his innocence. His eyes cooled, his teeth closed on his embryo utterance, his hand dropped to his side.
“Carey Grey!”
Hope’s voice rang out suddenly above the babble of the party. She had seen him and recognised him. The others had passed on. Only she and Edson were there beside him. With an effort that cost him the most poignant torture he ever suffered he turned to Minna, murmuring words that had no meaning and walked heedlessly by.
Edson caught Miss Van Tuyl’s trembling arm.
131 “Sh!” he warned, a little excitedly; “you’ve made a mistake. That isn’t Grey.”
“But”—and the colour came and went in her face and she breathed quickly—“but I know it is. I know him, I’m sure; oh, quite, quite sure. I cannot be mistaken. His hair is changed; yes, and he has a beard, but his eyes—I should always know his eyes; and”—as she stood gazing after him—“his shoulders. There isn’t another man in the world who has shoulders just like Carey Grey’s.”
“No other man, possibly,” added Edson, “except the Crown Prince of Budavia.”
At the door of the H?tel Grammont, Grey and O’Hara stood for some little time in conversation. As they were about to part, O’Hara asked: “You haven’t a revolver, have you?”
“No,” Grey answered, carelessly. “Shall I need one, do you think?”
“After your experience of last night it seems to me it would be just as well to sleep with one under your pillow.”
Grey laughed.
“I don’t fancy I shall be disturbed again,” he said.
“I’ll run over to my place and get you one,” O’Hara insisted. “I shall be back in ten minutes.”
As he went off at a brisk walk Grey turned into the wide passage that gave entrance to the court. The portier was not visible, but at the foot of the narrow stairway to the right a man who in the150 dim light had the appearance of one of the hotel valets, addressed him.
“Captain Lindenwald has returned, Monsieur Arndt,” he said, quietly, respectfully; “he met with an accident and has come back. He begs that Monsieur Arndt will see him before retiring.”
For a moment Grey stood silent in surprise.
“An accident?” he queried, recovering himself.
“Yes, monsieur. His train ran into an open switch at Villieurs. His leg is broken in two places, and he is injured internally. I will show monsieur to his room.”
As he led the way to the floor above and along a passage towards the back of the house where Herr Schlippenbach’s room had been, Grey marvelled over this new twist in the thread of fate. That the Captain had returned to this hotel and had sent for him argued, he thought, that there must have been some mistake or misunderstanding as to his departure. If he had meant to desert his charge he would not under any circumstances have acted in this fashion. Perhaps—indeed it was quite possible—he had left a letter which some stupid French servant had failed to deliver,151 or it might simply have been his intention to spend Sunday out of Paris, giving Lutz and Johann permission to take a brief holiday as well. O’Hara had said something about their luggage being gone, but that might have been an error, too.
At a turn in the passage Grey’s guide halted before a door and rapped, playing, as it were, a sort of brief tattoo on the panel with his knuckles; and at the same time a waiter passed on his way to the rear stairway.
An instant later the door was opened by someone who shielded himself behind it. The man who had led the way and done the rapping stepped back, and the American, his eyes a little dazzled by the light, put a foot across the threshold. Just what followed Grey never exactly knew. A myriad brilliant, sparkling, rapidly darting specks of fire filled his vision. In his ears was a thunderous rushing sound like a storm sweeping through a forest—a swollen river churning through rocky narrows. His body seemed dropping through interminable space, gaining momentum with every foot of its fall, but shooting straight, straight downward without a swerve; the lights flashing152 by him, the winds roaring past him as he sped. An agony of apprehension seized him. He was going to be crushed to atoms; mangled, broken, distorted. He tried to raise his arms, to clutch at the impalpable, but they were held down as if by leaden weights. To bend a knee, to lift a foot, to cry out, were alike impossible of achievement. And then, with a crash that split his ears, that tore every joint asunder, that racked every nerve, muscle, sinew and tendon, the end came. The myriad sparks, like the countless flashing facets of countless diamonds, were drowned in blackest night and the terrifying rush of furious winds and frantic waves was hushed in a silence profound and awful—the blackness and the silence of unconsciousness.
Very gradually, but in much shorter time than he fancied, or than his assailants expected, he recovered command of his faculties and became aware that he was lying upon a couch, an improvised gag in his mouth, his arms pinioned in a most uncomfortable way at his sides, and his feet bound together with cords that cut cruelly into the flesh of his ankles. He realised then that he had153 been led into a trap and had been sandbagged or otherwise assaulted as he entered it. His mind was still busy with Lindenwald and his motives, he fancied at first that he was responsible for this outrage, and warily, between his lashes, with his eyes scarcely opened, he glanced about the room in search of this gallant member of the Budavian royal household.
There were, however, but two persons present, and Lindenwald was not one of them. One was the little man whom he had mistaken for a hotel valet and who had lured him to his downfall; and the other was a tall, burly, bearded fellow, with a low forehead and sinister, bloodshot eyes. The two were standing near an open window and the larger man had in his hands a thick hempen rope, one end of which Grey observed was knotted about the heavy post of an old-fashioned mahogany bedstead which stood against the opposite wall. On more careful inspection he saw that the man was deliberately making a slip knot of the pattern known as a hangman’s noose. The only light in the room was that given by a single candle, but it sufficed for Grey to gather these details.
154 The smaller man leaned out of the window for a moment, and on drawing in his head he turned to the other with the remark:
“The carriage is there. Make haste with your knot. I’m not in love with this business.”
He spoke in German and his partner replied in the same tongue.
“Have patience,” he said, calmly; “it’s a heavy body we’ve got to lower and the knot must be strong. There’s plenty of time. He won’t come to himself for hours, and there’s no fear of anyone interrupting us now.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” was the reply, in a tone of nervous apprehension; “we have been here too long as it is. If we should fail at the last minute, the Baron would——”
“S—sh!” warned the other, “no names is safer. Just another wrapping now and she’ll hold all right. Some wrap it seven times and some only five, but I’m giving it nine, to be sure.”
He had scarcely finished the sentence when a blow, aggressive and imperious, sounded on the door. The younger man started nervously, but155 the other just phlegmatically lowered his work and raised his head.
“What’s that mean?” he whispered.
“God knows!” the other replied, agitatedly. “What’s to be done?”
“Done? Nothing. Keep still, that’s all. Blow out that candle,” he commanded. Though he spoke very low his voice penetrated and Grey caught every word.
Again a heavy blow struck the door, repeated blows, accompanied by a demand:
“Ouvrez la porte!”
The voice was O’Hara’s. Grey recognised it with a thrill. He had returned with the revolver, and not finding him in his room had set out in search of him. But how, he wondered, could he have traced him here? And then he thought of the waiter he had seen in the passage, who had evidently recognised him. Yes, the waiter must have told.
Now Grey heard other voices outside. There was the shuffling, too, of many feet. Still, the men within made no sound. The candle had been extinguished and the darkness was intense.
156 The knocking became clamorous. There was a general ominous murmur like low growling thunder from the other side of the door.
Bang! bang! bang! resounded the blows.
“Open the door! Open at once or I’ll break it down,” O’Hara roared.
Grey’s enforced silence and inertia were maddening. He bit at his gag, contorted his mouth, tugged at his arms, but could accomplish nothing, beyond a wriggling change of position.
“Perhaps they have gone,” he heard someone say, whose voice was sonorous, “perhaps they have gone. Escaped by the window. There is no light there; and no sound.”
“Stop!” It was O’Hara speaking. “Listen!”
With an effort Grey squirmed to the edge of the couch and dropped his bound body to the floor with a thud that echoed through the silent room.
“Damn him!” he heard the bigger of his two companions hiss through his teeth.
From outside there came a yell of triumph; and then a heavy, crashing, catapultian mass fell upon the fragile portal. There was a crackling, splintering sound of wood rent apart, and through the157 aperture thus made, in the dim light of the single gas-jet in the passage, O’Hara came plunging with half a dozen of the hotel employés at his heels.
At the same instant a head disappeared below the sill of the window, and the rope from the bedpost was stretched taut and creaking with the weight of two descending bodies.
The Irishman, crossing the room in a flash, missed the form of his prostrate friend by a hair’s-breadth and dived headlong for the open casement. But quick as he was the fleeing scapegraces, realising their danger, were even more speedy. As his head shot out into the night the strain on the rope relaxed and there came up from the darkness below a patter of feet on the stone flagging of the alley. His pistol was in his hand and he fired once—twice—three times—blindly into the blackness beneath, guided only by the echo of those retreating footsteps.
Meanwhile, one of the Frenchmen—Baptiste, the waiter, by the way, who had told O’Hara that he saw Monsieur Arndt enter this room—was removing the gag from Grey’s mouth, while others158 were cutting the cords that bound his limbs. For a moment the American’s view of the Irishman’s broad back was cut off by those surrounding him, but the next minute he was on his feet and—but in that instant O’Hara had disappeared. Clutching the dangling rope, he had swung himself out of the window and had slid down nimbly in pursuit.
Grey’s impulse was to follow, but at the first step he reeled dizzily and would have fallen had not Baptiste thrown an arm about him and aided him to a chair. His head was aching splittingly and his legs and arms were numb. For a little while he was lost to everything save the racking torture of physical pain. Then the voluble, excited clatter of the men about him recalled him to a sense of what had happened.
“What are you standing here for?” he cried, vexedly. “Get down to the street, every one of you. Monsieur O’Hara may need you. Off, I say. Be quick!”
“But, monsieur,” urged Baptiste, hanging back as the other five made a hasty exit, “is it not that monsieur would like a surgeon?”
159 “Surgeon be damned!” yelled Grey, excitedly. “Out with you!”
But in five minutes they were back again in augmented numbers, with O’Hara accompanied by a sergent de ville at their head.
“They got clean away, the beggars,” the Irishman announced; and then seeing Grey very white, he exclaimed: “Are you hurt, lad? What in God’s name did they do to you, the scalawags?”
“I’m only a little knocked up,” the American answered, with a forced smile; “it was a pretty hard rap on the head they gave me, though.”
The police officer had taken out a notebook, and now he began to ask questions. There was very little, however, that anyone could tell him. Grey described his assailants as accurately as he knew how, and gave him the benefit of his suspicions.
“By whom was the room engaged?” asked the sergent, addressing Baptiste; but Baptiste did not know. Then a messenger was sent to arouse the portier, who had been abed for an hour or more, and when at length he came in, still rubbing his eyes, the information that he gave conveyed nothing.
160 The room, he said, was taken that evening by a man of ordinary appearance who gave the name of Schmidt. His brother and a friend would occupy it, he told the portier, and he paid one day’s rent in advance.
“Was the man tall or short?” asked the officer.
The portier shrugged his stalwart shoulders.
“I do not know,” he replied.
“Was he dark or fair?”
“I cannot tell you, monsieur,” he repeated; “I did not notice.”
“Of what age?”
“It is impossible that I should conjecture, monsieur,” with another shrug.
Grey laughed, sneeringly. “He evidently paid more than room rent,” he said to O’Hara. “The Baron von Einhard is very clever.”
And when, a little while after, he thought of looking through his pockets he had reason to reiterate and emphasise this opinion. Not a penny of his money had been touched; his watch and chain were still in his possession, as were indeed all of his belongings save one. The ring of the Prince of Kronfeld alone was missing.
Resentment—fierce, vengeful, absorbing—took possession of Carey Grey. That he should have been disgraced, dishonoured, robbed for a time of his reason and his memory, his friends made to suffer, his life put in jeopardy, and all without the slightest provocation, was an outrage so heinous that he considered no punishment too great for its perpetrators. The fact that the one who was apparently mainly responsible for the inspiration and the execution had been summoned to a spiritual tribunal to answer for his misdeeds tempered not a whit the victim’s bitter animosity. Indeed, he felt that death had cheated him of what he craved as a meagre compensation for his wrongs—the opportunity to visit personally upon the arch-offender his own retribution. But if Herr Schlippenbach had been snatched from his hands by a too kindly Providence there162 were others remaining who should feel the weight of his relentless vengeance.
In this mood, wakeful and dreamful by turns, a cold compress on his bruised head, Grey worried through the early hours of the morning. With the first sign of the blue dawn, however, he became more composed. His meditations took on a more gentle guise; his brow, which had been wrinkled with frowns, smoothed; into his eyes came a tenderness that routed spleen, and his mouth softened its tensity of line. The day held for him a joy the anticipation of which was a benison.
After all, heaven was not wholly unkind. He had been made to suffer cruelly and undeservedly, but there was at least one compensation—the woman he loved was here, near him, in the same city; in a few hours he would meet her, talk with her, feel the warmth of her hand in his, experience the benignant sympathy of her eyes and the caressing graciousness of her voice. With the dawn had come confidence, and he smiled as he recalled his doubts of the previous afternoon. Her love was steadfast, enduring, immutable. Of this he felt assured. And her faith and loyalty were163 like her love. He lay for hours in blissful contemplation of the character, disposition, mind, manner and person of the woman he adored.
He recalled their first meeting at a barn dance at Newport, when she was in her débutante year; and then, an event of the following day came back to him vividly as in a picture. The scene was the polo field at Point Judith. He had just made a goal by dint of hard riding and unerring strokes, and a hurricane of applause had followed, led, it seemed to him, by a tall young woman in white, with great, shining brown eyes and flushed cheeks, who was standing up in her place atop a coach, clapping her hands in frantic delight. And this picture was followed by others—a panorama in which the same girl figured again and again—always beautiful, always smart, always gracious.
He attired himself, this fine Sunday morning, with more than usual care, despite the absence of his valet, and set forth early for the rendezvous he had chosen. Already the boulevards were alive. Many of the chairs in front of the cafés were occupied by sippers of absinthe and drinkers of black164 bitters. From the gratings in the sidewalks arose the appetising aroma of the Parisian déjeuner à la fourchette. He crossed the Avenue de l’Opéra and, turning into the rue de la Paix, was presently passing the entrance of the hotel that sheltered her who filled his thoughts—her whom he had come out to meet. A fiacre was at the curb, and, fancying that it might be awaiting her, he hastened his steps so that he should not encounter her in so public a place. From the summit of the Vend?me Column the imperial-robed Napoleon cast an abbreviated shadow across his path as he cut across the place into the rue de Castiglione. A man he did not remember bowed graciously as he passed him at the corner of the rue de Rivoli, and a little further on a somewhat showily gowned woman in an enormous picture hat, probably on her way to the Madeleine, leaned from her carriage to smile upon him. And she, likewise, was without his recollection.
At the corner of the rue Cambon he made a diagonal cut to the garden side of the street, and a minute later reached the broad and imposing Place de la Concorde in all its bravery of bronzed165 iron and granite fountains, sculptured stone figures, rostral columns and majestic Obelisk.
As he turned into the gardens of the Tuileries, Grey glanced at his watch to discover that the time still lacked five minutes of eleven. He looked back in expectation of seeing a cab approaching, but, though there were many crossing the place at various angles, there was none headed in his direction. He strolled off between the flower-beds into the little grove at his right. Just ahead of him he descried a figure in pink, and his heart bounded; but he overtook it only to meet disappointment. He lighted a cigarette, sat down on a bench, and dug in the gravel with his walking-stick; his eyes, though, ever on the alert, looking now one way, now another. He took out his watch again. The minute hand was still a single space short of twelve. He got up and retraced his steps towards the entrance with the object of meeting her as she came in. Again he gazed across the wide, sun-washed area of the place, but without reward, and then a dour melancholy threatened him. He was assailed by forebodings. She would not come. He had offended her beyond166 reparation. The day suddenly grew dull. A cloud hid the sun. The gaiety of those who passed him became offensive. The sight of a youth with his sweetheart hanging on his arm filled him with rancour. He walked back and forth irritably. He was depressed, heavy-hearted, apprehensive.
Another five minutes dragged by, with a corresponding increase in the young man’s dejection. His imagination was now active. It was quite possible she had left Paris. His messenger, perhaps, had failed to deliver his note. He wondered if by any chance she might be ill.
He was standing, pensive, by the fountain, undecided whether to wait longer or to go on to the Ritz in search of her, when the rustle of skirts behind him caused him to turn.
“Ah—h!” exclaimed a laughing voice, “it is then you after all. I was not sure. I looked and I looked, but you are so changed, Mr. Grey!”
It was Marcelle, Miss Van Tuyl’s maid, and at the sound of her peculiar accent Grey recognised her instantly. He realised, too, that it was she whom he had seen on the moment of his coming—the figure in the pink frock.
167 “Miss Van Tuyl sent this note, Mr. Grey,” she went on, handing him an envelope which he noticed was unaddressed.
His spirits rose a trifle. She had not left Paris, then, and she had received his message.
“Miss Van Tuyl is not ill, I hope?” he questioned, anxiously.
“Oh, no, Mr. Grey,” and Marcelle shrugged her plump shoulders and raised her black eyebrows, “but—” and she hesitated just the shade of a second “she is—oh, I fear she is most unhappy.”
“Thank you very much, Marcelle,” he said, ignoring her comment, though the words were as a sword-thrust, and handing her a louis. “Is there an answer?”
“I do not know, monsieur; but I think not.”
Grey tore open the envelope and glanced over the inclosure.
“No,” he announced, his face very set and suddenly pale. “Give my compliments to Miss Van Tuyl,” he added, “that is all.”
When the girl had gone he turned again into the little grove and once more found the seat under168 the trees where a few minutes before he had impatiently dug the gravel with his walking-stick. He sat now with his forearms resting on his thighs, the note crushed in his hand, his eyes bent, thoughtful but unseeing, on the grass across the walk.
She had refused to come to him. It was probably better, she had written, that they should not meet again. She could imagine nothing in the way of explanation that would form an adequate excuse for his action of the afternoon before. And that was all. Only five lines in a large hand.
The self-chastisement of the man was pitiless; his contrition pathetic. He was willing now to make any sacrifice, to suffer any abasement, to risk any punishment, to sustain any loss if by so doing he could gain forgiveness, achieve reinstatement in favour—aye, even attain the privilege of pleading his cause. He had been so sure of her; it had not seemed possible that she could ever be other than love and devotion and loyalty personified. Her smile was the one sun he thought would never set and never be clouded. And now she had taken this light from his life forever. With that gone,169 he asked himself, what else in all the world mattered? What were honour, position, credit, fortune, if she were not to share them?
He smoothed out the crumpled sheet and read it again, slowly, carefully, weighing each word, measuring each phrase, considering each sentence. And then the utter hopelessness of his expression changed. “It is probably better,” he repeated, quoting from the note, and the “probably” seemed larger and more prominent than any other eight letters on the page. There was nothing absolutely final about that. It was an assertion, to be sure, but there was a lot of qualification in that “probably.” And further on, she had not said: “There is nothing in the way of explanation you can offer,” but “I can imagine nothing.” He thanked God for that “I can imagine.” Oh, yes, indeed, there was a very large loophole there; and so he took heart of grace, and even smiled, and got up swinging his stick jauntily. All he wanted was a fighting chance. He had won her a year ago from a score of rivals, and he would win her now from herself. And not from herself, either, for with the return of hope he felt that he170 would have no more stanch ally than she. It was with her sense of what was fit and becoming that he must battle—her pride and her self-esteem which he had outraged. He would go to her, bravely, as he should have done before, instead of asking her to meet him in this clandestine fashion. He had been a fool, but he would make amends and she would forgive him. Yes, he was quite sanguine now that he could win her pardon.
He retraced his steps briskly to the Place Vend?me and turned in at the Ritz with head erect and chin thrust forward. He had no cards, of course, but he scribbled “Carey Grey” upon a slip of paper and asked that it be sent to Miss Van Tuyl at once. And then he waited, nervously, smoking one cigarette after another, walking back and forth, sitting down, only to get up again, agitatedly, and to resume his pacing to and fro.
“Miss Van Tuyl is not at home, monsieur.”
It was the portier who delivered the message. Grey stood for a full half-minute, staring stupidly. He had not counted upon this. He had been all confidence. That she was in the hotel he felt very certain; but she would not see him. He might171 have foreseen that consistency demanded this attitude of her. To send him a note one moment refusing to permit him to explain and at the next to grant him an audience was not to be expected of a young woman of Hope Van Tuyl’s sterling character. There was, therefore, but one course open to him. What he had to say he must put in writing.
“I’ll leave a note,” he said to the portier; and he went into the writing-room and sat down at a table. But when he came to write he was embarrassed by the flood of matter that craved expression. There was so much to tell, so much to make clear, so much to plead that he was staggered by the contemplation. Again and again he began, and again and again he tore the sheet of paper into tiny bits. He dipped his pen into the ink and held it poised while he made effort to frame an opening sentence; and the ink dried on the nib as one thought after another was evolved only to be rejected.
For the fifth time he wrote: “My Very Dearest,” and then, nettled over his laggard powers, he dove straight and determinedly into the midst of172 the subject that engrossed him, writing rapidly and without pause until he had finished:
“I cannot find it in my heart to question the justice of your decision,” he began. “Viewed in the light of your meagre knowledge, or rather ignorance, of facts, I must look indeed very black. But I am guiltless; that I swear. Under the circumstances you must know how anxious I am to prove this, and how, in justice to you and myself, I must let no opportunity pass to discover and convict the real culprits. To have recognised you at Versailles yesterday before the man you were with would have been to ruin every chance of accomplishing what I have set out to do. Imagine, my dear, the alternative from which I had to choose. Had it been simply a question of my personal liberty, you cannot doubt which course I should have taken. I was burning to speak to you—to look into the eyes I love, to hear the voice I adore—and yet for both our sakes I had to deny myself. The child who was with me is sweet and charming, and in no way implicated in the plot against me. When you know her, as I hope you will one day, you will be very fond of her. But I173 can understand how the situation must have appeared to you. I would give all I have and all I hope for if I could but be with you and tell you everything. All I ask now is that you trust me. I am leaving Paris this afternoon for Kürschdorf by the Orient Express. I cannot say when I shall return. But when I do it will be to search for you, and with honour vindicated and no further need of secrecy. My heart is with you always, my darling. ’Au revoir.”
The letter dulled, in a measure, the keenness of Grey’s disappointment and reinspired him to the accomplishment of the task that lay before him. After luncheon he had up his trunks from the hotel storeroom and with Baptiste’s assistance accomplished his packing. Already O’Hara had engaged places for three on the train, for Miss von Altdorf’s destination was the same as theirs. She had a married sister living in Kürschdorf, and she was most anxious to join her at the earliest possible moment.
By half-past five everything was in readiness for their departure; Baptiste had retired with a liberal tip, and Grey and O’Hara were making174 themselves ready for the journey. Just at this juncture there was a knock at the door, and in answer to Grey’s command to enter, it swung open to reveal, bowing on the threshold, the sturdy little figure, pale face, and close-cropped yellow head of Johann.
The two occupants of the room stood astonished, their eyes wide with surprise.
“Johann!” they exclaimed together.
“Yes, Herr Arndt,” said the lad, bowing again; “it is as you see—I have come back.”
“Back from where, Johann?” Grey asked.
“I started for Kürschdorf with the Herr Captain Lindenwald; but I am come back from Strasburg.”
“And why?” queried the American, very much puzzled.
“Because, Herr Arndt, I knew it was not right for me to be going with the Herr Captain. I was in your service, and perhaps if you were seized with madness you have all the more need of me.”
“Madness!” repeated Grey, frowning. “What is this? Who said I was mad?”
“The Herr Captain and Lutz,” confessed Johann,175 stolidly, with scarce a change of expression.
O’Hara laughed. “Oh, ho!” he shouted, dropping into a chair, “now we have it. You are mad, and so you cannot go to Budavia to claim your own.”
Johann nodded; and Grey, leaning against the edge of the table, was lost for a moment in thought.
“But the Fraülein?” O’Hara questioned. “What did they say of her? Was she to be left with the madman?”
“No, Herr O’Hara; only for a little. The Herr Captain Lindenwald had arranged, Lutz told me, to have Herr Arndt taken to an asylum by the doctors and then the Fraülein was to be brought to Kürschdorf.”
Grey smiled, grimly. “The doctors were the gentlemen you chased out of the window last night, Jack,” he said. And then he asked of Johann: “Did they say anything of Baron von Einhard?”
“No, Herr Arndt.”
“You are quite sure?”
176 “I have not heard of his name, Herr Arndt.”
Then Johann was told of the plan of departure and was sent off to telephone for another place on the Orient Express for himself. When he returned the American said to him:
“It was very good of you, Johann, to come back.”
“Ah, Herr Arndt,” he returned, in a tone of appreciation, “I could not do less. Can I ever, do you think, forget that it was you who saved my life?”
Grey’s surprise must have shown in his eyes, but he asked no questions. Later, however, just as they were about to start for the Gare de Strasbourg, he found himself alone with O’Hara for a moment and put the query to him:
“What is this about my having saved Johann’s life?”
“You don’t remember it? Oh, of course not,” the Irishman answered. “Well, you had your pluck with you, lad, if you didn’t have your memory. We were in that fire at the Folsonham, in Piccadilly. It happened in the early morning when the whole house was asleep, and that the death list177 was not larger was little short of a miracle. The front stairs were burning as Schlippenbach, the Fraülein and you and I reached them. When I got to the bottom I missed you, and looking back saw you through the smoke still standing at the top. ‘For God’s sake, make haste, man!’ I called, ‘the stairs may fall at any minute.’ But you had seen a figure staggering down, half suffocated, from the floor above. Well, instead of saving yourself you went back to help that figure, which proved to be Johann. And even at that moment the staircase fell with a crash. But you caught the stumbling, dazed Budavian from out a hurricane of sparks, rushed him through a room filled with blinding smoke and climbed with him hanging limp over your shoulder out of a window onto an already burning ten-inch cornice. And there you held him, against the wall, God only knows how, until a ladder was run up and the pair of you brought safely to the street just as the cornice crumbled and went down. And, good Lord, but didn’t the crowd cheer! Only fancy your not remembering anything of it!”
“I’m glad I managed it,” said Grey, simply.178 But the story depressed him. What else had he done in those five months of somnambulism? The thought of that period and its possibilities had grown distressful to him. He had committed a great crime and he had performed a brave deed. They were the opposite poles of that world of sleep. But what other acts lay between? What other incidents of right and wrong filled the intermediate zones? He shrank from asking general questions on the subject, and speculation was as distasteful as it was futile. When, as in this instance, accident had revealed something, the result was a sort of emotional nausea.
On the platform of the Gare de l’Est, with ten minutes to spare before the departure of the Orient Express, Grey and O’Hara, with the fair Minna von Altdorf between them, strolled leisurely up and down beside the long and lugubrious train of wagons-lit. There was the usual bustle incident to the leaving of the great transcontinental flyer. Passengers were nervously seeking their locations; blue-overalled porters wheeling trucks piled high with trunks and boxes hurried towards the luggage vans, and others with smaller impedimenta in hand crowded on the narrow platforms of the cars and ran into the still smaller passageways upon which the compartments opened. English and American tourists unable to speak the language of the country were besieging the interpreters; friends and kinsfolk with lingering handshakes, effusive embraces, and180 kisses upon either cheek were bidding departing travellers farewell, and dapper-uniformed guards were at intervals repeating the stereotyped command: “En voiture, messieurs!” There was the distracting hissing of escaping steam, the shrill piping of whistles, the rumble and roar of arriving trains. And over all hung an atmosphere of intolerably humid heat.
O’Hara and the Fraülein were chatting animatedly, but Grey was still depressed and silent. The delay irritated him. He was impatient to be gone. For the hundredth time he was wondering whether he had said too much or too little in his letter to Hope Van Tuyl; wondering how she regarded it; whether she was still obdurate. He had not given her an address and there was no way in which she could communicate with him. He regretted this now. A word from her would be a talisman.
His memory of her as he had seen her yesterday at Versailles was very vivid. It was only a glimpse, but in that instant he had drunk in greedily the marvellous perfection of her beauty; and the picture had dwelt with him since. Sleeping181 and waking he could see the bronze dusk of her hair, the gentleness of her eyes, the softly flushed curve of her cheek, the tender sympathy of her mouth, the supple grace of her figure. The portrait was not new to him, to be sure—he had many times revelled in fond contemplation of those rare features—but absence had its usual effect, and it had been centuries, it seemed, since his vision had been so blessed. Against the dull, dun, grimy background of the railway station this radiant reflection was projected, clear and sharp. He saw her mentally just as he had seen her physically on the previous afternoon.
And as he gazed a miracle was wrought. For into and out of the image came and grew the reality, and he suddenly realised that she was standing before him, that in one hand he was holding his hat and that his other hand was clasping hers. All the sights and sounds of the platform died away, and he saw only her, more beautiful even than he had dreamed, her eyes alight with love, her lips smiling forgiveness.
O’Hara and the Fr?ulein had passed on, and he and the one woman in the world had drawn aside182 out of the hurry and scurry. A few steps away stood Marcelle, the maid, her interest decorously diverted.
“Oh, how good you are!” Grey was saying, his heart in his voice; “how very, very good you are!”
Her hand answered the ardent pressure of his.
“I just couldn’t let you go without seeing you,” she returned. “You cannot imagine what I have suffered. I tried to be brave—I tried so hard, dear; but I’m only a weak woman and my soul longed for you every minute.”
What bliss it was to hear her speak! It set the man’s pulses surging. His face was flushed and young and happy again, as it had not been since his awakening.
“The whole thing has been frightful,” he told her, clenching his teeth at the recollection. “You haven’t an idea what a net of circumstance has been thrown around me.”
“Yes,” she hastened, “I know—they told me you had been ill, irresponsible; that you had had brain fever or something, and—oh, Carey, why did you do that?” and she pointed to his beard.
183 He smiled grimly.
“I didn’t do it,” he answered, with emphasis. “You surely don’t think I’d be guilty of such a ridiculous transformation, do you?”
“But——”
“I’ll explain some day, dear heart,” he interrupted her, “but there isn’t time now; the train leaves in about five minutes, and I want all of that in which to tell you how very beautiful you are and how very, very much I love you.”
She wore a perfectly fitting gown of white with rich lace, and a large hat of pale blue with a circling ostrich plume of the same delicate tint. Her tall and shapely figure was quite unavoidably a little conspicuous, and a target for admiring glances.
“Leaves in five minutes?” she repeated, dolorously. “But I can’t let you go in five minutes. I have so much to say to you. It has been five months since I spoke to you. You must wait and take the next train—wait until tomorrow.”
“If only I might!” Grey replied, his eyes in hers. “If it could only be we should never part184 again, never! Ah, my own, how my arms ache for you!”
“But you can stay,” she urged. He was still holding her hand, and now she placed her other hand over his as she pleaded. “There is no reason why you shouldn’t. What difference will twenty-four hours make? Are you going for the King’s funeral? It is set for Friday, you know. We are thinking of going ourselves. Wait until tomorrow, and you and papa and I can go together.”
“But, my darling,” Grey protested, arguing against his inclination, “don’t you see that that would be quite impossible? Your father could not afford to be seen with me. I am a supposed fugitive from justice. He would be guilty of aiding and abetting a criminal,” and he smiled grimly again.
“What would he care?” the young woman demanded, airily. “He doesn’t believe you guilty. He knows you are not. He has said as much. I can’t let you go, dear; I can’t—I won’t.”
“Please, please don’t make it more difficult for me to part from you than it is already,” he begged.185 “You know how much I long to have you with me, and yet another day’s delay might ruin everything. I should be in Kürschdorf at this very minute.”
Her eyes glistened and tears hung on her lashes.
“Why?” she asked, simply.
“All my hopes of undoing the wrong that has been done me lie in that direction,” he answered, gravely. “It was a conspiracy, dear, involving men high in the Budavian government. The work of unmasking them will grow more difficult with each hour it is put off.”
She gazed at him in sudden alarm.
“You are going into danger,” she murmured. Her voice trembled. Anxiety was in her tone. She pressed his hands nervously, convulsively. “Tell me the truth. You are, aren’t you?”
Grey laughed to reassure her.
“Not a bit, my darling,” he answered, with an assumption of nonchalance; “the whole affair can, I think, be adjusted most peacefully.”
For a moment she was silent, her eyes reading his thoughts.
“I’m going with you,” she exclaimed, suddenly.
186 Grey stared at her in surprise.
“I only wish you could,” he said, refusing to take her seriously, “but I don’t see just how——”
“I’m going,” she interrupted, determinedly. “I shan’t be in the least in your way, that I promise. But I’m going. I refuse to be left behind.”
“En voiture, messieurs et mesdames!”
The guard’s command had grown imperative. The second bell had rung.
Grey pulled out his watch. It showed thirty seconds of starting time. O’Hara was standing at the car’s step looking anxiously towards him. Johann was at his side, his hat deferentially raised.
“The train is now to start, Herr Arndt,” he said.
The man turned to the woman he loved.
“I am going with you,” she reiterated before he could speak; and she beckoned to Marcelle.
“En voiture!” shouted the guards.
There was no time for further protest or parley. The four crossed the platform hurriedly. Hope entered the car, her maid following; and then Grey, with O’Hara at his heels and Johann bringing187 up the rear, stepped from the platform of the station to the platform of the wagon-lit.
The third bell rang; the locomotive whistled its piping treble, gates clashed, doors slammed, and the Orient Express drew slowly and solemnly out of the hot, dingy station into the red glare of the torrid June sunset.
After the presentation of Miss von Altdorf and Lieutenant O’Hara had been accomplished Grey left Hope in their company and went in search of the conductor. As it happened, there were several berths to spare in the sleeping-car, and he arranged for the accommodation of Miss Van Tuyl and her maid. There would be no stop, however, he learned, until they reached Chateau-Thierry, at 8.15. From there, the conductor told him, a telegram might be sent.
Before returning to the compartment Grey lit a cigarette and stood for a few minutes in the refreshing draft that swept through the narrow passage. To have Hope with him was a joy undreamt, and yet he could not repress a little uneasiness over her action. He feared that in a calmer mood she might regret her impulsiveness188 as savouring too strongly of a sensational elopement. He wondered how Nicholas Van Tuyl would regard it. He was, Grey knew, the most indulgent of fathers, but his anxiety over her absence would necessarily be poignant, and there was no possible means of getting word to him of her safety until hours after he had missed her. But in spite of these reflections Carey Grey was experiencing a gratified pride in the fact that the girl had acted as she had. She was proving her love for him and her faith in him by a disregard of convention that was undeniably very flattering, particularly grateful after his recent trying experiences, and his affection for her, if possible, waxed warmer under the stimulus of appreciation.
Meanwhile the trio Grey had left to their own devices, with scarcely a word of explanation, were getting into a wellnigh inextricable tangle.
“Fancy my deciding to run off this way on the spur of the moment, without even a handful of luggage,” Miss Van Tuyl had exclaimed, “but Mr. Grey and I have so much to talk about I just couldn’t think of waiting another twenty-four189 hours, and he said he couldn’t possibly stop over another day in Paris.”
Minna had recognised her minutes before on the platform, as the beautiful lady she had noticed the previous afternoon at Versailles, and she had been and was still wondering how it came about that her Uncle Max had not seen her and spoken to her there. And now this mention of a Mr. Grey perplexed her. Was he in another car or another compartment? And if she had so much to say to him why had she stood talking to another man until the train was on the point of leaving? and why was she sitting here now instead of being with him?
“American women are such fun,” O’Hara was saying, his cheery, ruddy face one broad smile. “I admire them awfully. They’re so superbly self-reliant.”
“You’re an American, Miss Van Tuyl?” the Fr?ulein ventured. “Oh, of course. It was in America, I suppose, you met Uncle Max?”
Hope stared questioningly.
“Uncle Max?” she questioned. “I don’t understand you. Who is——”
190 “Didn’t you know he was my uncle?” the girl asked, a little embarrassed.
“Really, I—” she began again. And then O’Hara came to the rescue:
“Our mutual friend, Miss Van Tuyl. After all, what’s in a name? Miss von Altdorf calls him ‘Uncle Max’ and you—what is your favourite pet name for him? Or is it rude of me to ask?”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” Hope implored, addressing the fair-haired girl beside her; “how stupid of me! Yes, of course; I met him in America when we were both very young. You were with him yesterday at Versailles, weren’t you? I remember you distinctly. Mr. Grey wrote me something very nice about you.”
“About me? Mr. Grey?” It was the Fr?ulein’s turn to be audibly perplexed.
“Yes, certainly, Mr. Grey wrote me about you.”
“But I don’t know any Mr. Grey.”
O’Hara laughed aloud. Should he or should he not, he asked himself, set them right and thus end this game of cross-purposes? It was very amusing, it appealed to his native love of fun and191 he enjoyed it, so he concluded to let the play go on.
“Why, my dear Miss von Altdorf,” Hope insisted, “do you mean to tell me that you don’t know your Uncle Max’s name is Grey?”
Minna’s eyes were wide with amazement. Could it be possible that her uncle was known in the United States by another name? The supposition was preposterous.
“My Uncle Max’s name is Arndt,” she said, very decidedly. “He is my mother’s brother, and my mother’s name was Arndt before she married.”
Hope leaned back in the hot, stuffy cushions of the railway carriage, nonplussed. This was altogether beyond her understanding. And the Fr?ulein, a little nettled, but triumphant, sat looking at her with something of pity in her great long-lashed blue eyes, while O’Hara on the seat opposite was bent double in a convulsion of merriment.
“I don’t really see, Mr. O’Hara,” Minna observed, rebukingly, a moment later, “what there is to laugh over. Would you mind telling me?”
The Irishman, who had more than a passing192 fondness for the girl, pulled a straight face on the instant.
“I’m sorry, Miss von Altdorf,” he apologised. “It’s too bad of me, isn’t it? And I beg Miss Van Tuyl’s pardon, too. I’d like to explain the whole blessed thing to you both, but to tell the truth, I fancy the gentleman of the mixed nomenclature had better be after doing it himself.”
But when Grey arrived and the situation was laid before him, the explanation was not at the moment forthcoming. He evaded it as deftly as he knew how, which, if the truth be told, was not by any means to the taste of either of the ladies. It would have been an easy matter to clear the mystery for Hope, but he hesitated to confess to Minna, in the presence of the others, that he had been sailing under false colours. She was a sensitive child, and serious, and he had no relish for inflicting the pain that his unmasking would, he knew, entail. So he simply said:
“Ah, that’s a long story and we’ll have it at another time. Just now I want to know what Miss Van Tuyl is going to wire to her doting father.”
O’Hara excused himself and went out, and Miss193 von Altdorf extracted a novel from her satchel and buried herself in its pages.
“Wire him,” Hope directed, “that I’ve gone on with you unexpectedly to Kürschdorf to secure rooms for the royal obsequies, and that he is to follow tomorrow night with the luggage.”
“But he won’t get it until late tonight, you know; possibly not until tomorrow morning,” Grey told her.
“No, he won’t get it until after two o’clock tomorrow, at the earliest,” she replied, smiling.
“How do you know that?” he asked, surprised.
“Because he went to Trouville last night to see a man,” she laughed. “He does not leave there until nine-one tomorrow morning, and it takes these crawling French railway trains five hours to make the journey.”
“Kürschdorf,” the guide-books will tell you, “is the Capital of the Kingdom of Budavia; 118 miles from Munich and forty-nine miles from Nuremberg. It stands on both banks of the Weisswasser, united by the Charlemagne and Wartberg bridges, 400 yards long. Surrounded by towering mountains its King’s Residenz Schloss, erected 1607-1642, rises like the Acropolis above the dwellings and other buildings of the city. The steep sides of the Wartberg (1,834 feet) rise directly from amid the houses of the town, and it is on one extremity of the elevation that the imposing royal palace is located, with its 365 rooms, frescoes and statues, a ‘Diana’ of Canova, a ‘Perseus’ of Schwanhaler, a ‘Sleeping Ariadne’ of Thorwaldsen,195 and casts. The palace gardens are two miles long, and consist of a series of terraces overlooking the Wartberg valley on one side and a fertile plain on the other.”
The guide-books, too, will tell you of the K?nigsbau, a quarter-mile long, containing a coffee house, the Bourse, and the Concert Hall; and of the Museum, where the chief treasures of Kürschdorf are on view daily (10 A. M. TO 4 P. M.); and of the Hof Theatre, and of the beer gardens. And they will give you a long and detailed description of the cathedral, completed in 1317, with its spire 452 feet high, ascended by 575 steps, its wonderful astronomical clock, and its great west window. They will even tell you that the best shops are in the Schloss Strasse, and that the Grand Hotel K?nigin Anna is a first-class and well-situated hostelry. But in no one of them will you find any mention of the most ancient dwelling house in all Kürschdorf, a quaint, dark stone building, on the Graf Strasse, only a stone’s throw from the Friedrich Platz and two blocks away from the Wartburg Brücke.
At the moment Carey Grey was sending his telegram196 from the railway station at Chateau-Thierry to Nicholas Van Tuyl, in Paris, Count Hermann von Ritter, Chancellor of Budavia, was standing at a rear window of this venerable Kürschdorf mansion, gazing out upon a spacious and orderly rose garden. He was very tall and very angular. From a fringe of silver-white hair rose a shining pink crown; from beneath bushy brows of only slightly darker grey appeared small, keen black eyes; and a moustache of the same colour, heavy but close-cropped, accentuated rather than hid a straight, thin-lipped, nervous mouth. His head was bent thoughtfully forward and his hands, long and sinewy, with sharply defined knuckles, were clasped behind his back.
The drawing-room in which he stood was large and square, with high walls hung with many splendid pictures in heavy gilded frames. The furniture was massive and richly carved. Rococo cabinets held a wealth of curios—odd vases and drinking cups of repoussé work in gold and silver; idols from the Orient, peculiar antique knives—bodkins and poniards, and carvings of jade and ivory and ebony. The polished floor was strewn197 with Eastern rugs of silken texture, and at the doors and windows were hangings of still softer fabric and less florid colour and ornamentation.
After a little the Count crossed to a table on which stood lighted candelabra, and taking out his watch glanced at it with some show of impatience. Almost at the same moment a bell jangled, and very soon after a portière was raised by a servant wearing the Court mourning livery.
“Herr Captain Lindenwald, your Excellency!” he announced. And the Captain entered, saluting.
He was flushed and somewhat ill at ease, and the Chancellor’s icy manner as he bade him be seated was not altogether reassuring.
“I am very much distressed over the news conveyed by your telegram,” began the older man, when he had taken a chair at a little distance from his visitor. “Any delay at this juncture, you must understand, is only calculated to result in complications. Was His Royal Highness so violent that to bring him with you was impracticable?”
Lindenwald hesitated for just the shade of a second, his fingers playing nervously with the arm of his chair.
198 “I regarded the risk as too great,” he ventured.
“That is no answer,” the Count returned, irritably. “I asked you if he was violent.”
“Yes, Count, he was,” replied the Captain, with sudden assurance. “He was very violent at intervals. It would have been impossible to get him here without his causing a scene at some stage of the journey and probably revealing his identity. Besides, it was most dangerous. He was liable to evade his watchers and throw himself from the train.”
The annoyance of the Chancellor increased.
“You have never heard, Captain,” he said with a sneer, “that there are such things as handcuffs and strait-jackets.”
“Ah, but Count,” pleaded the other, in a tone of conciliation. “His Royal Highness! Could I put the Crown Prince to such humiliation? You know yourself that I would not be justified. It was better, it seemed to me, to have him safely confined in a private hospital in Paris for the present. In a little while, perhaps, his mind will clear.”
“What is the form of his mania?”
199 “It is most peculiar,” explained the Herr Captain. “You understand, of course, that until five months ago he had no idea whatever that he was who he is. He was, as you have been told, a valet, but a very superior man of his class. It is most certainly true that blood counts. He had all the inherent dignity of birth. His mind was far above his assumed station. All this you know. You may not have heard, though, that he was employed by an American stock broker named Grey who one day embezzled four hundred thousand marks and ran away.”
“Yes,” put in the Count, “I was informed of that as well.”
“Just so. Well,” continued the Captain, “His Royal Highness now, strangely enough, imagines that he is Grey.”
“Imagines that he is an embezzler?” queried Ritter.
“Precisely. He even cabled to New York giving his Paris address, and the United States Embassy there was for arresting him and having him extradited.”
“And when did this mania develop?”
200 “After the death of the Herr Doctor Schlippenbach.”
The Chancellor sat thoughtfully rubbing together his long, virile hands.
“But I thought that this man Grey, this embezzler, committed suicide—was drowned or something.”
“He was,” Lindenwald assented, “at least he is supposed to be dead.”
“It will be possible, I presume,” the Count pursued, after another moment of meditation, “to have the present temporary regency continued by simply proving that Prince Maximilian, the heir apparent, is alive and mentally incapacitated, though to have had him here in the flesh would have been far better. And now as to these proofs—I am in possession of copies of the papers, but where are the originals?”
The Captain shifted uneasily in his chair, and his eyes refused to meet those of his interlocutor.
“That is a question, Count,” he replied.
“A question!” cried the other, surprised and annoyed. “Why a question? Surely you are in possession of them!”
201 “Alas, I am not!”
His Excellency, his face crimson, sprang to his feet.
“My God, Captain!” he exclaimed in a rage, “you exasperate me beyond all bearing.”
“I am deeply sorry, Count von Ritter,” returned Lindenwald, “but if you will hear me for one moment you will know that I am not to blame.”
“Excuses will not avail,” he retorted, glowering. “You are a bungler, sir, a bungler. You have been either criminally careless in this matter or intentionally—yes, Captain, intentionally criminal.”
“Your Excellency!” The Captain arose with a fine assumption of anger. “I permit no man, your Excellency——”
The Chancellor’s lips were close pressed. His beady eyes were two points of fire.
“Tut, tut,” he said, “this is neither the time nor place for that sort of thing. I am pained, distressed, mortified. From first to last your mission has been a series of blunders. Delay has followed delay; excuse has followed excuse; and202 now, at the crucial moment, comes the climax of your incapacity. A child could have done better. Knowing the importance of getting the Prince of Kronfeld here while His Majesty still lived you, on one pretext and another, dawdled away week after week in London and Paris; you permitted knowledge of the existence of the Prince to leak out; you could not even hide your stopping place from Hugo’s emissaries—ah, you see I am well posted—and finally you come here not only without the heir but without the documents that are absolutely essential to the continuance of the direct succession.”
Lindenwald listened, cowed and speechless. After a little, however, he spoke falteringly, while the Count, his hands behind him, strode excitedly up and down the large, square drawing-room.
“If you will but hear me,” he protested, sullenly, “I think—I am indeed almost certain, your Excellency, that I can show you I am at least not altogether to blame. The Herr Doctor was ill when he landed in England. He was, moreover, most eccentric and most self-willed. And His Royal Highness was of the Herr Doctor’s mind, always.203 For me to make a more expeditious journey was, under the circumstances, impossible. It appeared to me that it was the Herr Doctor’s object to delay our arrival until after the death of His Majesty. Then, as you know, Herr Doctor Schlippenbach died, somewhat suddenly, and the madness of the Prince ensued.”
“But the papers, the papers?” cried von Ritter, irritably, halting in his walk. “What of them?”
“The Herr Doctor never so much as showed them to me, Count. They were, I understand, in a strong-box, of which he and Prince Maximilian had duplicate keys. But the strong-box when we reached Paris was not brought to our hotel. Schlippenbach seemed to think it would be safer at the railway station. I argued with him, but to no avail. There was a fire, you remember, at our hotel in London, and that it and its contents were not destroyed was simply miraculous. It was that which frightened the Herr Doctor, and he refused to risk it in another hotel. Well, your Excellency, after his death we could find no trace of the box. The receipt for it had disappeared. I did my utmost to locate and secure it, but as yet I have been204 unsuccessful. I have tracers out, however, and it may be discovered any day.”
“Bah!” almost shrieked the Chancellor, irascibly, “and a throne hangs on the slender thread of that ‘may be.’ Unless the box is found, Captain, it will be well for you to—but it is needless for me to suggest. You yourself know that your life, henceforth, would be not only useless, but a burden.”
Lindenwald’s chin dropped and his eyes sought the floor.
“The box shall be found,” he said; but the assurance in his tone was meagre.
“And His Royal Highness,” continued von Ritter, “is in a sanitarium in Paris?”
“Yes, Count; the sanitarium of——”
But a rap on the door cut short his answer, and the name either was not pronounced or was drowned in the Chancellor’s stentorian:
“Herein!”
A footman handed His Excellency a telegram, and with a “Pardon me, Captain!” he opened it.
Years of diplomatic training had given the Count von Ritter a command of his facial muscles205 that was perfect. Not by so much even as the quiver of an eyelash did he signify the character of the tidings thus conveyed to him. Having read the message at a glance he refolded the paper with some deliberation, and then turning to Lindenwald again, asked:
“In whose sanitarium did you say?”
“Dr. De Cerveau’s.”
“You saw him there yourself?”
“Yes, Count.”
“And there is no possible chance of his escaping?”
“None whatever, Count.”
His Excellency took another turn to the window overlooking the rose garden, his head bowed meditatively. Lindenwald was still standing, his arm resting on the high back of the chair from which he had risen.
“You are quite sure,” His Excellency pursued, when he was again opposite the Captain, “that we need have no apprehension on that score?”
“Quite sure, Count von Ritter.”
Very slowly, and with a care and precision that emphasised the action, the Chancellor again unfolded206 the telegram he held and extended it towards Lindenwald.
“Then you will, perhaps, explain to me what that means?” he said, with a calmness that was portentous.
The face of the Herr Captain went ashen white. He caught his breath sharply, and his left hand gripped the chair back where a second before his arm had rested.
“Am leaving this evening, Orient Express,” he read. “Have me met on arrival. Arndt.”
He made as if to speak, but his lips emitted no sound.
“Well? Well?” queried the Count, impatiently. “What is it? Explain it. That is from His Royal Highness, isn’t it?”
“I—I—you see, I—” stammered the Captain, dazed and affrighted, “I—I am not so sure. It may be a hoax—a trap.”
Von Ritter’s eyes poured out upon him their contempt.
“A hoax, a trap,” he sneered. “No, no, unless207 it be a trap in which to catch a certain officer of the Army who is not so very far away. I think, Captain, that it is useless to prolong this interview,” and he pressed an electric button in the table under his thumb.
Captain Lindenwald bowed, but said nothing.
At the same moment the footman reappeared and at a signal from the Chancellor lifted the portière, and the Captain went rather shamefacedly from the room.
When the Count heard the street door close he pressed the button in the table again, and to the footman who entered he said:
“Otto, I wish to speak to the Chief of Police. Call him up, and when you have him on the telephone let me know.”
He walked to the window again. The moon had risen, and the rose garden was clad in luminous white with trimmings of purplish grey and black shadows.