Grey had set apart the books and papers that had to do either directly or indirectly with his case, because he saw in them a circumstantial defence to the charges which were still hanging over him at home. To his use of them for this purpose Minna and her sister gladly consented, and so when that evening, after having been cropped and clean-shaven by Johann, he bade the little household good-bye and was driven into town to the Grand Hotel K?nigin Anna, he carried this evidence with him.
It was, as has been observed, a day rife with revelations. The discoveries of its daylight hours were of incalculable value, but the disclosures reserved for the night were of even more consequence. The train that afternoon had brought from Paris a large company of visitors intent upon viewing the pomp and panoply of a royal293 funeral, and among them were the remaining members of that gay little dinner party at Armenonville the week before.
The Van Tuyls ran into them at the hotel on their return from the Fahler farm, and Hope immediately had an inspiration.
“I’m going to give a dinner tonight,” she said, “just the most informal sort of a dinner in our salon. And I want you all to come. It doesn’t make any difference whether you have your trunks or not. You are not expected to dress. I’m going to treat you to a surprise.”
The women were all curiosity on the instant and showed it. The men accepted politely, but declared that the hostess was attraction sufficient.
Hope had made the proposition on impulse, and it was too late to draw back when she caught her father’s disapproving eye.
“I’m not at all sure,” he commented, once they were alone, “that this thing is wise. Carey isn’t yet out of the woods, and the story of his alleged embezzlement and all that is too fresh to have been forgotten. Explanations at a dinner party aren’t pleasant things. We know he is innocent,294 but you don’t want to put him on trial before a jury of your guests.”
But Hope was staunch in her loyalty.
“Our verdict will be sufficient,” she answered, bravely. “If I had stopped to think of all you say I probably shouldn’t have asked them, but as it is I’m glad I did it. It clears the situation at once. They must know from my having promised to be his wife and your having given your consent, that he is innocent.”
Nicholas Van Tuyl shrugged his shoulders.
“Perhaps,” he replied, a little doubtfully, “perhaps; but, my dear girl, don’t hint at the Prince business. The Fahlers will keep their mouths closed for the sake of their dead relative, but no injunction of secrecy would still the tongues of Mrs. Dickie and Lady Constance.”
Hope demurred.
“It’s such an interesting story,” she protested, “and I am a woman!”
“But the Government here does not want it to get out.”
“And I’d like to know what we owe to the Government,” the girl inquired. “I don’t want295 to be disobedient, father dear, but I can’t promise to control myself under provocation.”
Again Mr. Van Tuyl shrugged his shoulders. His daughter was his idol and he was as yarn in her hands.
When Grey arrived and was told of the plan, he received the tidings somewhat ruefully. He complained that his trunks were still at the Residenz Schloss, and that, in the torn and bedraggled raiment he was wearing, to pose as the object of interest at a dinner party, no matter how informal, was apt to be a little trying, to say the least. But O’Hara, who had driven into town with him, came to the rescue. He and Grey were very nearly of a size, and as he was the fortunate possessor of two evening suits he promptly placed one of them at Grey’s disposal.
Nevertheless, in spite of this satisfactory overcoming of a grave difficulty, Grey was not present when the party sat down to dinner; for, as he was about to join the company, Nicholas Van Tuyl broke in upon him, carrying in his hand a note which had just been delivered by an orderly from the Royal Hospital.
296 “You’ll have to go, won’t you?” he asked, as Grey ran his eye over the page.
It was from Chancellor von Ritter and was addressed to the banker.
“If you are in communication with Mr. Grey,” it read, “send him here with all speed. The man Lutz can last only a few hours. He is anxious to make an ante-mortem statement, but insists that Mr. Grey shall be present when he makes it.”
And so Grey rushed off in a cab, and as the dinner party took their places at table in the Van Tuyl salon, he was climbing the Royal Hospital stairs to the little white room in which lay dying the young man who had served him faithfully for over two years as valet, only to fall by reason of avarice into the r?le of villain in his life’s melodrama.
The eyes that looked up at him from dark, cavernous depths in a face pale as chalk had in them an appeal that touched a chord of his sympathy, and for the moment he forgot the injuries he had suffered and remembered only the services he had experienced at those hands, which lay limp297 and waxen-yellow against the spotless white of the coverlet.
The small room was somewhat crowded. Chancellor von Ritter was there with a notary and a stenographer; near the window stood a soldier, whose very presence seemed an irony, which he appeared to recognise in retiring as far as the limits of the tiny chamber would permit; and there, too, of course, was the inevitable nun-like nurse in significantly immaculate muslin and the great flaring headdress of her sisterhood.
“He seems a little stronger at the moment,” whispered the Chancellor; “you came at an opportune time. He has been asking for you all the afternoon.”
The nurse was moistening the sufferer’s lips. When she finished, Grey spoke to him.
“I am sorry to see you here, Lutz,” he said, simply.
His breathing, he noticed, was very short and laboured.
“I’m obliged to you for coming, sir,” he replied, and his voice was stronger than one would have expected. “I’ve got a lot to tell you; but it’s298 so late now I don’t know whether I’ll be able.” He paused between his sentences in an effort to husband his waning strength. “I was a good enough fellow once, Mr. Grey, wasn’t I?”
Grey nodded.
“Yes,” he agreed, with sincerity, “you were all right, Lutz.”
“I never really meant you any harm, sir,” he went on. “It seemed to me that it would be a good thing for you.”
The Chancellor motioned to the stenographer, who drew his chair closer to the bedside and took a note-book and pencil from his pocket.
“Afterwards,” Lutz continued, “after Dr. Schlippenbach died and I knew we couldn’t keep you under the spell any more, I got frightened; and then I drank a good deal, and I—yes, I was crazy at times. Absinthe, Mr. Grey. I wasn’t used to it, and it turned my head. I thought to save myself I must get rid of you. I tried to smother you with gas that night last week in Paris. Captain Lindenwald knew of it. He was afraid of you, too. He said suspicion would fall on Baron von Einhard; that we would never be299 suspected. And when I failed he went to Baron von Einhard and—how much he got I don’t know; but the Baron paid him to go away and leave you, agreeing that he would put you where you would never be heard of again. Then we came here, with a story about your being mad and being locked up in a Paris sanitarium. It was the only thing we could do. If the plan had worked we should have been in trouble for a while, maybe, but when Prince Hugo came to the throne we should have been rewarded. I sold the Baron the strong-box with all those manufactured proofs of your right to the crown; and I told him you had the Prince of Kronfeld ring. I’m sorry, sir, I’m sorry. But I’m a coward, and I was in terror and more than half insane with that green stuff.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Grey interjected. “But tell me, Lutz, how this whole thing started, back in New York. Tell me about Schlippenbach and how you and he managed it together.”
The nurse, from her place by the pillow, leaned over and wiped her patient’s brow. Then she moistened his lips again, and his deep-sunken eyes looked his appreciation. For some minutes he300 was silent, endeavouring apparently by an effort of will to gather fresh energy; and to Grey’s mind recurred the picture of that darkened room in Paris, just six days ago, with the dying Herr Schlippenbach struggling to make himself understood.
“He was more devil than man,” Lutz resumed. “He was always working with strange drugs and experimenting with batteries on cats and dogs, and children, too. One day he asked me a great many questions about you, Mr. Grey, and then he asked me if I’d like to be rich—very rich, he said. ‘Everyone wants to be rich,’ I answered. ‘If you’ll do just as I tell you,’ he said, ‘you’ll have more money than you ever dreamed of.’ He told me he wanted me to put just one tiny pellet in your coffee each morning. It would not harm you, he said, but you would doze off for just ten minutes after you had taken it, and you would never know you had been dozing. ‘And while he is asleep,’ he said, ‘you can tell him to do anything you wish at any time in that day and he will do it. Tell him, for instance,’ he advised me, ‘to double your wages when he returns from his office in the evening,301 and he will do it.’ I laughed at the idea and had no faith in it; but I consented to try it. And it worked. You did double my wages, Mr. Grey, just as I asked you to, and you never knew I had asked you. Each day I gave you the pellet, as he directed, and each day I suggested that you do certain things at certain hours, and you always did them.”
“Hypnotic suggestion,” commented Grey, involuntarily.
“Something like it,” Lutz replied, “but he said it was not. At least, only in part. The pellet was the principal thing. He made the pellets himself. They were his secret. I gave you the last the day before he died; and I knew then that I could control you no more.”
“Yes,” Grey urged, “but after the first, what happened? After I raised your wages, what other things did you suggest?”
“Nothing of importance for a month or two. Just trifles—that you come home early and tell me you would not require me that night; or that you would give me a coat I wanted very much, and things of that sort. But one day Schlippenbach302 came to the rooms while you were down town. ‘Tomorrow morning,’ he said,’I am coming here early, before Mr. Grey is up. You must hide me somewhere until you have given him the pellet.’ He came and I hid him in your wardrobe; but when you had had your coffee with his drug in it he came out, and then I saw for the first time the power of this thing. He directed you very minutely and very exactly. Every minute in the day you were under his commands. You were to secure a hundred thousand dollars in cash and you were to bring it to his house on Avenue A at four o’clock in the afternoon. And at this house you were to remain. That evening I went there, and there you were. You did not know me. Your name had been changed to Arndt. I called you Mr. Grey to test the thing, and you appeared to think I was crazy. Schlippenbach told me you had brought the money. You never left his house until we sailed for this country.”
“What did I do there?”
“You did very little, but Schlippenbach did a great deal. Each day he had his batteries working on your head. He told me he was building303 up your self-esteem and that he was depleting your reverence. He was developing those cerebral organs which he thought would fit you for a throne and reducing those which he thought would unfit you. He said that in this way he could change you completely. After a few years of constant treatment, three or four years at most, you would, he told me, be no more Mr. Grey, the New York broker, than I would. You would be the King of Budavia and never know that you had not been born to it. And then there would be no further need of pellets or of galvanism. The transformation would have been accomplished.”
The dying man, becoming more and more interested in his subject, was speaking in clearer tones and with much less effort; and his auditors listened, spellbound, to his exposition of the marvellous methods of his mountebank master.
“And as the days went on it was wonderful how you did change, sir. You spoke differently and you acted differently. He made you grow a beard and moustache, which he bleached without your knowledge, as he did your hair, and your most intimate friend wouldn’t have recognised304 you, Mr. Grey. I don’t believe your mother would have known you, sir.”
“And the money?” Grey queried, fearing that in his enthusiasm Lutz would overtax his strength and leave this most important point uncovered. “What did Schlippenbach do with the hundred thousand dollars?”
“A good deal of it was spent,” the valet answered, “but some of it is still in the East River National Bank, and some with Graeff & Welbrock, the German bankers. When we came away we brought with us two letters of credit, one in his name and one in yours, for twenty thousand dollars each.”
Of these facts Grey made a mental note.
“Some of it you will get back, sir,” Lutz added, after a pause. “Perhaps most of it, for the old man owns some property on the East Side, and you can prove that he was responsible for the theft. And now, Mr. Grey”—and something in the nature of a smile flickered ghastly and distressful about the corners of his livid mouth—“I think I have told you all. But”—his yellow right hand slid slowly a few inches over the coverlet305 towards its edge—“I have in return a favour to ask. Maybe you’ll feel you can’t grant it. I’m going pretty fast, I imagine. They say I won’t last till daylight comes, and—I’d like, sir—if you don’t mind too much”—his sentences were very halt once more—“don’t mind too much——”
Grey leaned over and took the sliding hand in his own.
“All right, Lutz,” he said, with a tremour in his voice that he could not control, “all right, man. I don’t believe you were half to blame. He had you under a spell, too, I dare say. I forgive you freely, and God bless you!”
The flickering, vagrant smile merged into an expression of peace. Into the sunken eyes came resignation.
“Thank you, sir!” the grey lips murmured, “thank you! thank you!”
The notary mumbled a form of oath to which Lutz gave a voiceless assent. Then his lids fell, and when Grey and Count von Ritter left the room he was barely conscious.
“I’ll have a certified copy of the statement sent to you Mr. Grey,” the Chancellor volunteered.306 “In it you will have evidence that is beyond all dispute. I congratulate you on securing such a complete refutation of so baseless and yet so dangerous a slander.”
The contrast between the tiny white room in the hospital with the dire shadow of the Grim Reaper hovering over the narrow cot bed, and the spacious, brilliant salon of the hotel, where life, assertive, aggressive, almost obtrusive, was dominant, had something of a dazzling effect on Carey Grey, and he paused a moment on the threshold, with blinking eyes, in an effort to adjust his vision to the sudden change of scene.
There was a momentary lull in the merriment that smote him as the door swung open in answer to his knock, and then the cannonade of voices—of cries of surprise, of welcoming greetings, of laughter—was resumed, and Nicholas Van Tuyl rose from his place at the round table, which, with its snowy damask dotted with pink-shaded candles and dappled with silver and crystal, seemed like the centre of some giant flower of which the308 men and women about it were the variegated petals.
“My friends,” cried the host, raising his voice and hand simultaneously for silence, “I have pleasure in presenting to you my future son-in-law, Mr. Carey Grey, of New York.”
The next instant everybody was shouting at once. The men were up and bearing down on the newcomer in a solid phalanx, and Lady Constance and Mrs. Dickie were waving their napkins and fairly shrieking their congratulations. When at length something like order reigned again, Frothingham found his champagne glass and proposed a toast:
“To the bride-elect,” he cried. “‘She moves a goddess and she looks a queen.’”
Grey’s response was brief but enthusiastic, and the significance of the quotation with which he closed it evoked an outburst of applause that must have been heard as far as the Kursaal, two blocks away.
“All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,
The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.
The king’s a beggar now the play is done:
All is well ended, if this suit be won.”
309 He did not know it at the time, but prior to his coming the whole story of his adventure had been related and discussed, much to the entertainment of the party in general and to the intense edification and delight of young Edson in particular, who resolved to make to his chief, the Ambassador, a full report of the extraordinary affair, with a view to having it forwarded to Washington to be filed among the State archives, as indicative of a vulnerable point in Budavia’s boasted supremacy in statecraft. The aptness of the quotation, therefore, was more generally appreciated than Grey had any notion it would be, and the hilarious approbation of his auditors was consequently a good deal of a surprise.
Nicholas Van Tuyl, however, leaned over in the midst of the cheering, to tell him that the plot of his play and the part he had enacted were known to the company. The news was not ungrateful, for from the moment of his entrance he had felt a natural restraint, which was now relieved. Very soon the matter came up again, and he related his experience at the hospital, which was listened to with the deepest interest.
310 “Under the circumstances,” observed Sinclair Edson when Grey had finished, “it is not surprising that the extradition proceedings have been withdrawn.”
“Withdrawn?” exclaimed Grey, in amazement. “If it be true I should say it were most surprising.”
“We had a cable to that effect yesterday before I left Paris,” continued the secretary. “They were withdrawn at the instance of your partner, Mr. Mallory.”
“That is inexplicable,” Grey commented. “He doesn’t know anything more now than he did a week ago.”
Van Tuyl drained his wine-glass and wiped his lips with his napkin.
“Oh, yes he does, Carey,” he said, “he knows pretty much about it. I took the liberty of cabling to him all I knew. Besides, that whole business was a mare’s nest. If you hadn’t disappeared there would never have been any prosecution. Any one knows that a partner can’t be held for borrowing from his own firm, and unless I’m very much mistaken you were in a position to turn over311 real estate worth several times the amount secured on the bonds.”
“That is very true,” Grey replied, smiling, “but, strange as it may seem, that view of the situation never occurred to me before.”
“The newspapers were responsible for most of the hue and cry, I fancy,” Van Tuyl continued, “and as for the extradition part, I imagine Mallory took that step more from an impulse to find out whether the cable you sent him was really from you, and with the hope of locating you—dragging you back from the grave, so to speak—than with an idea of punishment for a crime that was never really committed.”
A Dresden clock on the mantel-shelf had tinkled midnight before the party broke up, agreeing to be down for an early breakfast at a quarter of eight, since the Van Tuyls and Grey were leaving Kürschdorf at nine, to connect with the Orient Express at Munich.
When the rest had gone, Grey, who had lingered, drew Hope out onto the balcony. The music of the band which had floated up from below throughout the evening had ceased, but the312 rushing Weisswasser and the breeze stirring the foliage of the trees on the Quai combined in a melody to which their hearts beat a joyous refrain. The stars twinkled in unison in the blue-black canopy of the heavens, and from the distance a nightingale’s song made chorus.
“‘She moves a goddess and she looks a queen,’” Grey repeated, his arm about the girl’s supple waist. “That was an inspiration on Frothingham’s part. The line was never more aptly quoted. My goddess! My queen! Ah, my darling, if I could only make you know the happiness that is mine tonight!”
Her head was resting against his shoulder, but now she turned her face to him and in her eyes was a world of passionate adoration.
“I know,” she murmured, softly. “It is mine, too, dear. It is a mutual happiness, and we both know it. That is the reason it is so sweet.”
He drew her still closer, until he could feel her heart beating against his side.
“God is good,” he said, reverently. “There were moments in the past week when I saw only the frowning face of an implacable fate; when I313 felt that the net woven about me was too cruelly strong ever to give way to my struggles; and then I was more than half inclined to curse God and die. But we are only blind children, as it has been said, and when Providence is preparing for us the most delectable morsels we grow rebellious because we can’t see just how it is being done.”
“‘More welcome is the sweet,’” she quoted, returning the pressure of his hand. “You will never know, my very dear, the agony I suffered in those weeks after your disappearance. I would have died gladly—oh, so gladly; but, as you say, God is good, only we cannot always see. The sky was very black, without a single star, and the sun would never rise again, never, never. I knew it.”
“But it has, love, hasn’t it?” Grey asked, cheerily. “And we’ll pray now for a long, long, sunshiny day to make up for so dark a night.”
Then he bent his head and kissed her; and the nightingale’s song was a p?an, and the music of the trees and the river a serenade.
After a little, Nicholas Van Tuyl joined them.
“Well, lad,” he said to Grey, as he flicked the ashes from his cigar, “what are your plans?”
314 “I’m taking La Savoie from Havre on Saturday,” the young man answered. “I’d rather lose my right arm than leave Hope now, just as I have found her, but there’s no getting out of it. I must hurry back to New York and square things.”
“You must go so soon, dear?” she questioned, with just a suspicion of a pout.
“I must,” he replied, reluctance in his voice. “I’ll try to rejoin you later; but every duty demands my presence in America now.”
“We’ll have to stop, of course,” Van Tuyl observed; and then he added, with a smile: “my daughter, here, will be very busy, I fancy, for the next few weeks with couturières and marchandes de modes in the rue de la Paix and thereabouts. So don’t exercise yourself unnecessarily, Carey. She’ll hardly have time to miss you. There’s no salve in the world to a woman so effective as that to be found in ordering new finery.”
“Don’t you believe him, dear,” the girl protested, her fingers tightening on Grey’s hand. “I shall think of you every minute I’m awake, and dream of you every minute I’m asleep.”
The two men lounging against the iron railing315 of the balcony smoked and chatted for a long time after Hope went in. They had much in common, and to each occurred a multiplicity of matters of mutual interest.
Meanwhile the street below grew quiet, the terrace was deserted, the wind in the trees died to a whisper, and the incessant murmur of the hurrying waters accentuated rather than disturbed the silence. But the two great lamps on either side of the hotel’s broad entrance still blazed, throwing a half circle of illumination out across the roadway and in under the lindens of the Quai.
Grey, flinging away the end of his cigar, turned and looked down, watching it fall and sputter red sparks upon the macadam of the drive. And as he looked a shadow glided swiftly across the arc of light beneath the trees and was swallowed up in the gloom beyond—a shadow, the contour of which even in that brief moment struck Grey as unmistakably familiar, recalling a figure that he had seen twenty-four hours before, leaping wildly, from dark to dark, down a winding stone stairway.
“It’s bed time,” said Nicholas Van Tuyl, yawning. “You must be tired. Suppose we——”
316 A pistol shot, startlingly loud and sharp against the night silence, clipped off the end of the sentence.
For a moment neither spoke, and the stillness was the stillness of death. Then came the patter of hurrying steps, and presently voices were heard and men were darting across the street from all directions, and all heading toward the Quai at a point just opposite the balcony.
“Murder?” suggested Van Tuyl.
“No,” answered Grey, with conviction. “Suicide.”
Five minutes later, as they watched and listened, the crowd came straggling back, two by two and in groups, all chattering.
“Poor devil!” said one. The words rose distinctly audible.
“He made very sure,” commented another.
“Fancy blowing out his brains on the edge of the Quai and burying himself in the river!” exclaimed a third.
“For love, I suppose,” a young man ventured.
“Lost his last mark at the Kursaal tonight probably,” an older man theorised.
317 Grey and Van Tuyl turned into the salon through the open window.
“That is what is called retribution,” said the younger man, “but it is usually longer delayed.”
Van Tuyl’s face asked for enlightenment.
“I could hardly have been mistaken,” Grey answered, with assurance. “I saw the fellow just a moment before. It was Captain Lindenwald, of the Royal Household and Equerry to the late King Frederic of Budavia.”
The End