Part 7

“Follow him,” Grey answered, promptly. “Take the Orient Express tomorrow night.”

“And once we are there; what then?”

“The Crown Prince claims the throne.”

O’Hara put down his pipe and sat staring in amazement.

“Claims the throne?” he repeated, “the Crown Prince?”

“The Crown Prince claims the throne.” Grey reiterated it with calm decision.

“You mean that _you_ will claim the throne?” the Irishman persisted, still perplexed.

“Precisely.”

The dragoon guard got up and walked the length of the room, smoking very hard.

“That’s a dangerous business,” he said, as he came back and stood with the tips of his fingers resting on the table, “a very dangerous business.”

“There’s no other way in God’s world to find out who are in the plot,” Grey returned, grimly.

“I don’t quite see--” O’Hara began, but the American interrupted him.

“I haven’t mastered all the details myself,” he said, “but that’s the kernel of the nut we’re cracking. Perhaps von Einhard can aid us. He must know the conspirators, and he can give us the names of the men into whose hands we are supposed to play. I have a suspicion that the Budavian Minister here in Paris is one of the lot. But it won’t do to take that for granted. Otherwise I’d see him before leaving.”

“I have been thinking over the idea of consulting the Baron,” O’Hara ventured, after a pause. “Suppose he won’t believe you?”

“Oh, but he will,” the other insisted; “I’ll make it quite clear to him that I am an American and that I’m a victim and not an aspirant for kingly honours, except in so far as goes to set matters right and bring the guilty to justice.”

“It’s a risk that you take there, lad,” the Irishman argued; “the more I think of it the bigger it looks. He’s just as likely to fancy it’s only a game of yours to throw him off the scent and secure your own ends. I don’t believe Lindenwald exaggerated his shrewdness. I’ve heard of him myself.”

Grey rose, leaned over the table and took a cigarette from a tray.

“Come,” he said, as he struck a match, “we’re liable to find him about this time.”

During the past twenty-four hours he had experienced a gradual reawakening of faculties that had previously lain dull or dormant. His five months of lost memory had had an after-effect in what he could only describe as a mental thickness. His thoughts had run slowly and sluggishly; he had lacked keenness of perception and the ability to draw deductions; he had been all the while conscious of a timidity, an indecision, a hesitation, a tendency to rely upon others, against which he strove with but little effect. His actions were dictated by outside suggestion rather than by his own judgment. And with this, too, was a contrasting dignity of demeanour unnatural to him, and all the more annoying in that it was, he knew, superficial and at discord with his temperament.

The clearing of his brain, the reassertion of his naturally alert mentality, the recovery of his self-reliance, were now becoming evident; but that unwonted, and to him unwelcome, exaggeration of dignity in his carriage and demeanour gave no sign of deserting him.

O’Hara observed the change and delighted in it. The soldier in him could find only admiration for the manner in which Grey had risen mentally in one day from a subaltern to a commanding officer; and the dignified, distinguished air which had seemed, he once thought, a little incongruous appeared now as most fitting and admirable.

Together they went in search of the Budavian Baron. Into one café after another they wandered, but always without success. They encountered acquaintances by the dozen--men and women whom Grey and O’Hara had met since their arrival in Paris, and whom Grey had no recollection of ever having seen before--but the little, wiry, sallow-faced Italian-looking nobleman was nowhere in evidence.

It is never safe, however, to assume that a visitor to the French capital is abed and asleep simply because he cannot be found in any of the boulevard cafés around the hour of midnight.

X

At the door of the Hôtel 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 the 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, 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 flashing 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 had 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.

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, but 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.

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 the 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 others 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?”

“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.

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.

XI

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 there 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 were 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 black 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 Vendôme 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 bronzed 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 beyond 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.

“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 under 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.