Part 9

The Irishman, who had more than a passing 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 Miss 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.”

XIII

“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, 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 Königsbau, 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 Königin 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 telegram from the railway station at Château-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 strewn 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.

“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?”

“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?”

“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!”

“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; and 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. 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 been 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 muscles 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 unfolded 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, unless 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.

XIV

Passengers for Kürschdorf by the Orient Express change cars at Munich, which, if the train is on time, is reached at 12.24 on the day following the departure from Paris. On this particular Monday the express was nearly forty minutes late, and, as the connecting train was timed to start at 1.02, the transfer was of necessity accomplished with somewhat undignified expedition. That it was accomplished at all, however, and that the quartet, of which Carey Grey was one, was so fortunate as to secure a compartment to itself, were subjects for mutual congratulation.

The journey from the French to the Bavarian capital had been rife with explanations. To Hope Van Tuyl, Grey had made the entire situation most clear, though he considerately refrained from revealing any feature or incident that would tend to alarm her. In his interview with Minna von Altdorf he had brought to bear all the tact of which he was possessed. It was no easy matter for him, in view of his duplicity that day at Versailles, to make her a completely veracious statement of the facts; and it was especially difficult because of her veneration for her great-uncle, the late Herr Schlippenbach, whom Grey could not but regard as an egregious knave.

She had been startled, surprised, pained, and bewildered by turns as he told her the story, but she never once questioned the truth nor doubted the honesty of the narrator.

“I simply can’t understand it,” she said, with distress in her pathetic eyes. “Why should Great-uncle Schlippenbach do such a thing? Why should he? How could he?”

“And I am just as much in the dark as you are,” Grey answered, soothingly. “I have thought it over continually, and I can’t arrive at any satisfactory conclusion. I don’t remember ever having seen him, and why he should have selected me for this great honour--for, after all, it is an honour to be elevated to the throne, isn’t it?” he laughed--“I can’t imagine.”

“We always knew he was eccentric,” the Fraülein went on. “He had most marvellous ideas on certain subjects, but I won’t believe he was criminal. He must have been just a little bit insane.”

And then Grey asked her how it came that she joined the little party in London.

“You see, Great-uncle Schlippenbach wrote me that he was going to Budavia and asked me if I would like to go with him and see my sister in Kürschdorf,” she explained. “That was reasonable enough--there was nothing insane about that, was there? My school term had just ended, and it was a question whether I should make my home with my sister over here or return to America with him.”

“And he told you I was your uncle?”

“Oh, yes. You know I have an uncle in New York. His name is Max Arndt. That is true. And he told me that you were he.”

Grey shook his head in token of his perplexity.

“What became of your Great-uncle Schlippenbach’s luggage?” he asked, suddenly, after a pause.

“I have it with me,” the girl answered, frankly. “I shall take it to my sister’s.”

“Have you opened it?”

“No. I thought that she and I would open it together.”

“It is possible, you know, that it may contain something that will give us a hint as to his motive in this matter,” Grey said, in explanation of his interest.

“Oh, I do hope so,” the Fräulein returned. “I am so anxious about it.”

Grey was on the point of leaving the compartment, when he felt a hand holding the hem of his coat.

“I have just one question to ask,” said the girl as he turned. She was not looking at him, but she still retained her hold.

“Well?” he queried, laconically; and his voice was kindly inviting.

“Would you mind very much if I--that is to say, may I, still, although you are not really, but--may I go on calling you Uncle Max?” The hesitating embarrassment of the first part of her utterance was followed by a nervous blurting of the question in conclusion.

“I shall feel very much hurt, Minna,” Grey answered, “if you call me anything else.” And he took the little hand from his coat and pressed it affectionately.

* * * * *

When the train for Kürschdorf arrived at Anslingen, on the Budavian border, there was more than the ordinary delay. There was, moreover, evidence of something unusual in the throng upon the platform and the suppressed excitement of those composing it. Johann, who had sprung out instantly from the third-class carriage in which he and Marcelle were travelling--his object being to secure the passage of the party’s luggage through the Custom House--was at once recognised and besieged by a horde of questioners.

“The Prince!” they cried with one accord. “You are with him, are you not? Where is he? In which carriage? What is he like?” And he had no little difficulty in shaking them off and attending to the business in hand.

By some mysterious means the report had spread, and what was at first mere rumour had later found substantial confirmation in the discovered presence at the station of two distinguished personages: General Roederer, Commander of the Budavian army, and Prince von Eisenthal, conservative leader of the Budavian Assembly; each accompanied by a more or less gorgeously uniformed retinue.

Grey, looking from the carriage window, noted the crowd with some little apprehension. He glanced at O’Hara and saw that he too suspected the cause. To the two ladies of the party nothing had been said of the telegram addressed to the name appended to the Lindenwald despatch, and they consequently saw less of significance in the demonstration, though they noted the gathering as extraordinary.

As Grey peered at the constantly increasing throng he wondered whether his message had been ill-considered. He had, in a way, sent it blindly, not knowing whether Ritter was an ally or a dupe of the conspirators, and he had sent it knowing that, in either event, Lindenwald was on the spot to take whatever ground he chose and to use whatever argument he deemed most fitting. If the Captain so fancied he could have him arrested on the charge of being a pretender to the throne, and would, armed with that strong-box left by old Schlippenbach, have small difficulty in proving his allegation. For exoneration he himself might appeal to his Government, but as an absconding defaulter he could look for meagre assistance from that quarter. O’Hara had told him it was dangerous business, but he had spurned advice, and now he was face to face with the consequences, whatever they might be. He was a trifle nervous, his heart was beating faster than its wont, and there was a red spot in each cheek; but even while looking on the darkest side of the picture he regretted nothing. This crisis had to be faced in one form or another, and he was glad the moment for facing it had arrived.

There was a movement in the crowd a few yards down the platform. The police were ordering the people back and clearing a lane beside the railway carriages. Grey thrust his head from the window and saw coming down this lane, in company with the train conductor, an army officer in olive green uniform and black helmet. Upon his breast was pinned a rosette of crepe, the insignia of mourning for the dead monarch.

At the door of each first-class compartment the two men halted for a second, asked a question and came on. But before they reached the carriage in which Grey was waiting, Johann, who had discerned their object, overtook them and led the way. Meanwhile, though Grey had not spoken, his companions had, intuitively, or by some other occult means, become aware of what was impending, and sat in breathless expectation.

And then, suddenly, before anticipation had been quite dethroned by realization, the officer was saluting, was being joined by his superiors and the rest of their retinues, and Grey was standing erect and dignified, listening to a little formal speech of welcome from the bearded lips of Prince von Eisenthal.

The crowd cheered lustily, of course, and cried: “God save Prince Max!” And a band played the Budavian national anthem. After which, or rather in the midst of which, the Prince and General Roederer entered the compartment with Grey and his friends, their suites finding places as best they could elsewhere, and the train, with much ringing of bells and blowing of whistles, moved off into the valley of the Weisswasser, its locomotive now gay with many Budavian flags and streamers of red and white bunting--colours of the royal house of Kronfeld.