CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

THE LOST SHEEP

In the small hours of the morning, a party of half a dozen men on skis issued from the courtyard of the Brunvarad. They were weary-looking folk, dull-eyed and taciturn, and without a word they set themselves in motion along the road to Riefinsdorf. The remains of a huge bonfire glowed dully by the roadside, and a pillar of black smoke streamed straight up into the windless air. Where the snow had thawed in a circle round the once festive blaze it had frozen again into lumps of discoloured ice. Dark, recumbent forms showed here and there in the snow, heavy breathing wretches who had gone to sleep, warmed with abundant wine and the glowing flames, but who would wake in the morn to the misery of frost-bite and its attendant horrors. But the little group of ski-ers had no thought for such as these, and they passed them by with scarce a glance. Onward they went without a word, till Meyer tripped up over a sleeping form in the roadway, and broke the silence with a bitter curse, as he dragged himself to his feet.

"Why don't you go home, Meyer?" suggested Saunders, "you are fagged out, and we may have to sprint later on."

"If Bilderbaum can go on, I can go on," said the Commander-in-Chief irritably. "He is ten years older than I am."

"Five," corrected the General snappishly.

"The pursuit is farcical," said Meyer. "It would have been useless if we had undertaken it at once. At this hour it is a piece of ludicrous folly."

"You need not come," snapped Saunders, who, like the others, seemed to be in the worst of humours.

"Thanks," retorted Meyer. "We must play the game to its weary end. We have shown ourselves fools, and the least part of our penalty is a sleepless night after a restless day."

"We may overtake them yet," said Captain Lexa, who, with two of his riflemen, made up the little party.

"Impossibilities seem possibilities only to geniuses and fools," said Meyer rudely. "It is hardly necessary to state to which category we belong."

"While there is life there is hope," maintained Lexa stubbornly.

Meyer made an exclamation of contempt.

"Supposing the miracle is realised," he said, "and the slower catches the swifter, even then they will certainly outwit us again. In the proverb the tortoise caught the hare--but then the tortoise had brains."

Meyer's sarcasm had anything but a cheering effect on the dismal spirits of the company.

"To think of our never recognising them!" said Saunders bitterly. "To think of Trafford fooling us----"

"Oh, Trafford has imagination and initiative, in strong contradistinction to ourselves!" interrupted Meyer. "He has fooled us before and he would fool us again twenty times if twenty opportunities were offered him. We are not very clever people, my dear Saunders."

"If we are ever to catch them," said Lexa, "it must be by taking every short cut that offers itself. The road to Wallen winds round in and out of the mountains, and our only chance of overtaking the fugitives is to go straight up hill and down dale, no matter how steep and difficult the track."

Meyer groaned. His legs were aching intolerably, and the thought of breasting a steep ascent on skis almost overwhelmed his flagging spirit. No one, however, answered his groan with another suggestion that he should go back. The Jew had expressed his determination to go on to the bitter end, and nothing but complete physical collapse would stop him. They glissaded swiftly and almost recklessly down the hillside, and the rush of keen air somewhat quickened their flagging energies.

"Bend to the left!" called out Saunders, himself executing a fine "Christiania swing," and thereby just saving himself from charging the snow-wall that banked the bob-sleigh run. The others swung round at his call, and for a time proceeded parallel to the track at a reduced speed.

"Man ahead!" called out Saunders presently; and true enough a dark object was advancing slowly towards them up the path bordering the run. The two soldiers cuddled their rifles suggestively, and the others proceeded at an even pace towards the strange walker of the night.

"A wounded soldier finding his way back," suggested Lexa.

"He may be able to give us information," said Von Bilderbaum.

"Or he may be going to shoot us," said Meyer, prepared as usual for the worst. "Hands up, man," he called nervously, "or we fire!"

The man slowly raised his hands above his head, and continued to plod wearily up the path towards them. In the vague moonlight the newcomer seemed of gigantic stature, and his soundless footsteps suggested a being from another world. On he came with upraised arms and bent head, and then suddenly he lifted his face so that the rays of the sinking moon fell full upon it.

Lexa uttered a cry, but the others stood still in frozen silence, believing they dreamed. Then old Bilderbaum called out hoarsely to the soldiers, "Present arms!" and himself stood stiffly at the salute.

"Must I continue to hold my hands in the air?" asked Karl. "I am very tired."

"Your Majesty!" gasped Saunders.

"Good-evening, gentlemen," said the King, at length lowering his arms. "This is an unexpected pleasure. You are indefatigable."

"Pardon me," said Meyer yawning; "we are exceedingly tired. But as I have been constantly reminding my comrades,--almost to the point of boredom,--we are a pack of fools and must pay for our folly by the inconvenience of a night in the snow."

"If you are fools," said Karl, "I am the king of fools. But at least there is something noble in your folly, if it leads you from warmth and shelter to a hopeless search over a snow-bound countryside."

"But you have escaped, sire?" said Bilderbaum.

"Yes and no," replied Karl. "When the grand coup occurred on the bob-sleigh run I was partially stupefied by the fumes of chloroform. I quickly recovered, however, from its effects, and was even beginning to appreciate the fascinations of a moonlight abduction when an accident occurred to the sleigh."

"You were hurt?" inquired Saunders anxiously.

"No; I fell on my head--which is vastly harder than the snow."

"What happened, sire?" asked Lexa.

And then the King went on to tell that when Trafford enfiladed Saunders' trench with curling-stones he had won the first trick in the game and unwittingly lost the last. That the stones went gaily down the bob-sleigh run en route for Riefinsdorf, and might have gone Heaven knows where had not a subsidence of snow, caused doubtless by the reverberation of the guns, blocked the track. "The snow held the stones up," he concluded, "and the Providence, which manages the unstable affairs of kings and tobogganers, arranged that our runners should strike a large pink stone with a blue ribbon on it."

"Splendid!" cried Bilderbaum enthusiastically. "The 'bob' was wrecked, and the Princess and Trafford being stunned or disabled, you escaped from their clutches."

"Your imagination does you infinite credit, General," said Karl dryly, "but it outruns fact. No one was stunned or disabled; of the three, I was distinctly the most shaken."

"But how----"

"The situation was simple," said Karl. "The 'bob,' as you surmise, was wrecked. My abduction, therefore, was rendered abortive. There were only two courses open to my enemies--to kill me and make their way on foot to Wallen, where their friends were awaiting them, or to set me free and themselves fly the country. Those of you who know Trafford and his charming wife----"

"Wife!" interrupted Saunders.

"Yes," affirmed Karl; "the Princess Gloria was secretly married some days ago to your friend Trafford in the Chapel Royal of the Neptunburg. They are a healthy-minded couple, and they refused to entertain seriously the idea of murder."

"They set you free!" ejaculated Saunders. "Well done, Nervy Trafford! I am not so ashamed of my friend after all."

"He is a splendid fellow," said Karl, "and incidentally, my cousin by marriage. I assure you I for my part am not ashamed of the relationship."

"But where are they now?" asked Meyer.

"They are--where they are. They are free to leave the country without let or hindrance. When things are quieted down and I am firmly in the saddle again, they can come back in their true capacity--as my friends."

"We shall not have to wait long, sire," said Meyer with an unwonted note of jubilation in his voice. "Even before yesterday's battle the tide was running strongly for you at the capital. Henceforth Weidenbruck and the whole country will be loyal. Long live Karl the Twenty-second of Grimland!"

"Long live Karl!" echoed Saunders, Von Bilderbaum, and Lexa. "Long live Karl!" reiterated the riflemen, raising their shakos aloft on their musket barrels.

Karl stood still, with eyes that swam. He began to speak, but ended with a shake of his head, as if something had choked him.

"To-morrow, dear friends," he muttered very low. "To-morrow. To-night I am tired, very tired and very happy. Long live George Trafford and his beautiful bride!" he said in stronger tones. "God bless them! God bless our poor country! God help me to rule"--but his voice had sunk again to a whisper and as he spoke he reeled against Saunders.

The latter held the massive but limp frame from falling, while someone produced brandy from a flask and poured a generous measure down the King's throat. Then the soldiers made a seat of their crossed weapons, and shoulder-high and supported by willing arms, Karl of Grimland was borne, half-fainting with exposure and fatigue, but serene of mind, to the winter palace of his beloved Weissheim.

EPILOGUE

Down the great, white highway of the Rylvio Pass a bob-sleigh was speeding in the early hours of a perfect morning. The incense of dawn was in the air, and the magic of stupendous scenery uplifted the souls of the two travellers. Fantastic peaks of incomparable beauty rose up in majesty to meet the amazing turquoise of the heavens. Sparkling cascades of dazzling whiteness hung in streams of frozen foam from dun cliffs and larch-crowned boulders. The roadway down which the sleigh was coursing with unchecked speed wound like a silver ribbon at the edge of precipices, sometimes tunnelling through an arch of brown rock, only to give again, after a moment's gloom, a fresh expanse of argent domes and shimmering declivities. Perched high on perilous crags were ancient castles of grim battlements and enduring masonry, stubborn homes of a stubborn nobility that had levied toll in olden times on all such as passed their inhospitable walls. Below, in the still shadowed valley, were villages of tiny houses, the toy campanili of Lilliputian churches, and a grey-green river rushing over a stony bed to merge itself in the ampler flood of the Danube.

"Oh, could anything be more perfect?" asked Gloria, who, as on the previous night, was doing duty at the wheel. There was a flush on her cheeks that was a tribute to the keen mountain air, and a sparkle in her dark eyes that told of welling happiness and a splendid conscious joy. Radiant as the morn, fragrant as the pine-laden air, she seemed the embodiment of a hundred vitalities crowded into one blithe being.

"We are on our honeymoon," returned Trafford, "and it would be a cold, dank day that could depress my soaring spirits. As it is, the impossible beauty of our surroundings is so intoxicating my bewildered brain that I am neglecting my duties as brakesman in a most alarming manner. We shall be over a precipice in a minute, if I don't master my exaltation of spirits."

"Perfect love casteth out fear," laughed Gloria.

"Is it perfect?" he asked.

"Absolutely--now, dear," she replied. "From the first you captured my fancy; that was why I did not lie to you in Herr Krantz's wine-shop. Then, when I thought you had killed Karl in the Iron Maiden, my heart grew sick and cold, for I believed you were, as the others, without ruth or mercy. The news that you had saved his life while pretending to take it, put new fire into my soul; but there was ever a war in my breast between true tenderness and the lust of power. I had inherited ambition from a long line of callous ancestors; my whole life had been a tale of scheming, deadening opportunism. And Bernhardt, as we know, with his great domineering personality, was as death to sentiment. And then, last night, well, you took the bit between your teeth and let yourself go. You over-rode my will, you set at nought my interests: you were master, and I handmaid, and my whole soul went out to you in admiration of your strength, and love of the way you used it."

Trafford drank in the words as he drank in the clear, sweet air of the mountain-side, and happiness--the heroic happiness that befel poets and warriors in the days of the world's youth, when men were demi-gods and gods were demi-mortals--took him with golden wings and exalted him, so that the soaring mountain and the wheeling bird and the forest and the crag and the river were as his brothers and sisters, fellow members of the worshipful company of rejoicing creation.

Onward and downward they flew, while the beams of the rising sun climbed down the valley walls, ledge by ledge and rock by rock, turning brown cliffs to gold, and snowy slopes to diamond and silver. Already they were far below the supreme height of the Weissheim plateau, and the air, dry though it was in reality, seemed almost damp in comparison after the moistureless atmosphere of the lofty tableland they had quitted. The snow held everywhere, but it was the thin covering of an English hill-side in January, not the sumptuous and universal mantle of frost-bound Weissheim. The larch and fir of the uplands were giving gradual place to the stunted oak and the starved chestnut. A thin hedge maintained a scrubby, struggling line at the edge of the roadside, and on the southern slopes the fields were furrowed in endless terraces for the vine.

"We shall reach the frontier in an hour," said Trafford.

"And then?"

"Then we must quit our faithful 'bob.' The road ceases to run downhill at Morgenthal, and a bob-sleigh will not defy the laws of gravity even for the happiest couple in Christendom."

"Then what are our plans?" asked Gloria.

"Plans!" he echoed; "we have no plans. The poor, the unhappy, and the hungry have plans, for they must scheme to improve their condition. But you and I are rich in every gift, and life will be one delicious and unending bob-sleigh ride through gorgeous scenery and vitalising air."

The Princes sighed luxuriously. Then, after a pause--

"We must reach the valley some day," she said.

"Some day, yes," he acquiesced. "Some day the ride will be done, and the road end in the great shadows which no human eye can pierce. But that day will find us hand in hand, with no fear in our hearts, and ready for a longer, stranger, and even more beautiful journey."

As he spoke the valley widened out, and the hills on either side receded at a broad angle. The roofs of Morgenthal were plain to their gaze, and the tinkling of goats' bells broke the silence.

"Austria!" cried Gloria.

"Austria, Vienna, Paris, London," he said, "Southampton, and then the very first boat bound for little old New York. But in our hearts Grimland--always Grimland."