an American--to whom we owe a great deal. Come and have supper, Eugen.’
‘I won’t,’ answered Eugen doggedly. ‘I’m waiting here for her. You
didn’t think anyone had kept me here, did you, against my will? I tell
you I’m waiting for her. She said she’d come.’
‘Who is she?’ Aribert asked, humouring him.
‘She! Why, you know! I forgot, of course, you don’t know. You mustn’t
ask.
Don’t pry, Uncle Aribert. She was wearing a red hat.’
‘I’ll take you to her, my dear Eugen.’ Prince Aribert put his hands on
the other’s shoulder, but Eugen shook him off violently, stood up, and
then sat down again.
Aribert looked at Racksole, and they both looked at Prince Eugen. The
latter’s face was flushed, and Racksole observed that the left pupil was
more dilated than the right. The man started, muttered odd, fragmentary
scraps of sentences, now grumbling, now whining.
‘His mind is unhinged,’ Racksole whispered in English.
‘Hush!’ said Prince Aribert. ‘He understands English.’ But Prince Eugen
took no notice of the brief colloquy.
‘We had better get him upstairs, somehow,’ said Racksole.
‘Yes,’ Aribert assented. ‘Eugen, the lady with the red hat, the lady you
are waiting for, is upstairs. She has sent us down to ask you to come
up. Won’t you come?’
‘Himmel!’ the poor fellow exclaimed, with a kind of weak anger. ‘Why did
you not say this before?’
He rose, staggered towards Aribert, and fell headlong on the floor. He
had swooned. The two men raised him, carried him up the stone steps, and
laid him with infinite care on a sofa. He lay, breathing queerly through
the nostrils, his eyes closed, his fingers contracted; every now and
then a convulsion ran through his frame.
‘One of us must fetch a doctor,’ said Prince Aribert.
‘I will,’ said Racksole. At that moment there was a quick, curt rap on
the french window, and both Racksole and the Prince glanced round
startled. A girl’s face was pressed against the large window-pane. It
was Nella’s.
Racksole unfastened the catch, and she entered.
‘I have found you,’ she said lightly; ‘you might have told me. I
couldn’t sleep. I inquired from the hotel-folks if you had retired, and
they said no; so I slipped out. I guessed where you were.’ Racksole
interrupted her with a question as to what she meant by this escapade,
but she stopped him with a careless gesture. ‘What’s this?’ She pointed
to the form on the sofa.
‘That is my nephew, Prince Eugen,’ said Aribert.
‘Hurt?’ she inquired coldly. ‘I hope not.’
‘He is ill,’ said Racksole, ‘his brain is turned.’
Nella began to examine the unconscious Prince with the expert movements
of a girl who had passed through the best hospital course to be obtained
in New York.
‘He has got brain fever,’ she said. ‘That is all, but it will be enough.
Do you know if there is a bed anywhere in this remarkable house?’
Chapter Eighteen IN THE NIGHT-TIME
‘HE must on no account be moved,’ said the dark little Belgian doctor,
whose eyes seemed to peer so quizzically through his spectacles; and he
said it with much positiveness.
That pronouncement rather settled their plans for them. It was certainly
a professional triumph for Nella, who, previous to the doctor’s arrival,
had told them the very same thing. Considerable argument had passed
before the doctor was sent for. Prince Aribert was for keeping the whole
affair a deep secret among their three selves. Theodore Racksole agreed
so far, but he suggested further that at no matter what risk they should
transport the patient over to England at once. Racksole had an idea that
he should feel safer in that hotel of his, and better able to deal with
any situation that might arise. Nella scorned the idea. In her quality
of an amateur nurse, she assured them that Prince Eugen was much more
seriously ill than either of them suspected, and she urged that they
should take absolute possession of the house, and keep possession till
Prince Eugen was convalescent.
‘But what about the Spencer female?’ Racksole had said.
‘Keep her where she is. Keep her a prisoner. And hold the house against
all comers. If Jules should come back, simply defy him to enter--that is
all.
There are two of you, so you must keep an eye on the former occupiers,
if they return, and on Miss Spencer, while I nurse the patient. But
first, you must send for a doctor.’
‘Doctor!’ Prince Aribert had said, alarmed. ‘Will it not be necessary to
make some awkward explanation to the doctor?’
‘Not at all!’ she replied. ‘Why should it be? In a place like Ostend
doctors are far too discreet to ask questions; they see too much to
retain their curiosity. Besides, do you want your nephew to die?’
Both the men were somewhat taken aback by the girl’s sagacious grasp of
the situation, and it came about that they began to obey her like
subordinates.
She told her father to sally forth in search of a doctor, and he went.
She gave Prince Aribert certain other orders, and he promptly executed
them.
By the evening of the following day, everything was going smoothly. The
doctor came and departed several times, and sent medicine, and seemed
fairly optimistic as to the issue of the illness. An old woman had been
induced to come in and cook and clean. Miss Spencer was kept out of
sight on the attic floor, pending some decision as to what to do with
her. And no one outside the house had asked any questions. The
inhabitants of that particular street must have been accustomed to
strange behaviour on the part of their neighbours, unaccountable
appearances and disappearances, strange flittings and arrivals. This
strong-minded and active trio--Racksole, Nella, and Prince Aribert--
might have been the lawful and accustomed tenants of the house, for any
outward evidence to the contrary.
On the afternoon of the third day Prince Eugen was distinctly and
seriously worse. Nella had sat up with him the previous night and
throughout the day.
Her father had spent the morning at the hotel, and Prince Aribert had
kept watch. The two men were never absent from the house at the same
time, and one of them always did duty as sentinel at night. On this
afternoon Prince Aribert and Nella sat together in the patient’s
bedroom. The doctor had just left. Theodore Racksole was downstairs
reading the New York Herald. The Prince and Nella were near the window,
which looked on to the back-garden.
It was a queer shabby little bedroom to shelter the august body of a
European personage like Prince Eugen of Posen. Curiously enough, both
Nella and her father, ardent democrats though they were, had been
somehow impressed by the royalty and importance of the fever-stricken
Prince--impressed as they had never been by Aribert. They had both felt
that here, under their care, was a species of individuality quite new to
them, and different from anything they had previously encountered. Even
the gestures and tones of his delirium had an air of abrupt yet
condescending command--an imposing mixture of suavity and haughtiness.
As for Nella, she had been first struck by the beautiful ‘E’ over a
crown on the sleeves of his linen, and by the signet ring on his pale,
emaciated hand. After all, these trifling outward signs are at least as
effective as others of deeper but less obtrusive significance. The
Racksoles, too, duly marked the attitude of Prince Aribert to his
nephew: it was at once paternal and reverential; it disclosed clearly
that Prince Aribert continued, in spite of everything, to regard his
nephew as his sovereign lord and master, as a being surrounded by a
natural and inevitable pomp and awe. This attitude, at the beginning,
seemed false and unreal to the Americans; it seemed to them to be
assumed; but gradually they came to perceive that they were mistaken,
and that though America might have cast out ‘the monarchial
superstition’, nevertheless that ‘superstition’ had vigorously survived
in another part of the world.
‘You and Mr Racksole have been extraordinarily kind to me,’ said Prince
Aribert very quietly, after the two had sat some time in silence.
‘Why? How?’ she asked unaffectedly. ‘We are interested in this affair
ourselves, you know. It began at our hotel--you mustn’t forget that,
Prince.’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘I forget nothing. But I cannot help feeling that I
have led you into a strange entanglement. Why should you and Mr Racksole
be here--you who are supposed to be on a holiday!--hiding in a strange
house in a foreign country, subject to all sorts of annoyances and all
sorts of risks, simply because I am anxious to avoid scandal, to avoid
any sort of talk, in connection with my misguided nephew? It is nothing
to you that the Hereditary Prince of Posen should be liable to a public
disgrace. What will it matter to you if the throne of Posen becomes the
laughing-stock of Europe?’
‘I really don’t know, Prince,’ Nella smiled roguishly. ‘But we Americans
have, a habit of going right through with anything we have begun.’
‘Ah!’ he said, ‘who knows how this thing will end? All our trouble, our
anxieties, our watchfulness, may come to nothing. I tell you that when I
see Eugen lying there, and think that we cannot learn his story until he
recovers, I am ready to go mad. We might be arranging things, making
matters smooth, preparing for the future, if only we knew--knew what he
can tell us. I tell you that I am ready to go mad. If anything should
happen to you, Miss Racksole, I would kill myself.’
‘But why?’ she questioned. ‘Supposing, that is, that anything could
happen to me--which it can’t.’
‘Because I have dragged you into this,’ he replied, gazing at her. ‘It
is nothing to you. You are only being kind.’
‘How do you know it is nothing to me, Prince?’ she asked him quickly.
Just then the sick man made a convulsive movement, and Nella flew to the
bed and soothed him. From the head of the bed she looked over at Prince
Aribert, and he returned her bright, excited glance. She was in her
travelling-frock, with a large white Belgian apron tied over it. Large
dark circles of fatigue and sleeplessness surrounded her eyes, and to
the Prince her cheek seemed hollow and thin; her hair lay thick over the
temples, half covering the ears. Aribert gave no answer to her query--
merely gazed at her with melancholy intensity.
‘I think I will go and rest,’ she said at last. ‘You will know all about
the medicine.’
‘Sleep well,’ he said, as he softly opened the door for her. And then he
was alone with Eugen. It was his turn that night to watch, for they
still half-expected some strange, sudden visit, or onslaught, or move of
one kind or another from Jules. Racksole slept in the parlour on the
ground floor.
Nella had the front bedroom on the first floor; Miss Spencer was immured
in the attic; the last-named lady had been singularly quiet and
incurious, taking her food from Nella and asking no questions, the old
woman went at nights to her own abode in the purlieus of the harbour.
Hour after hour Aribert sat silent by his nephew’s bed-side, attending
mechanically to his wants, and every now and then gazing hard into the
vacant, anguished face, as if trying to extort from that mask the
secrets which it held. Aribert was tortured by the idea that if he could
have only half an hour’s, only a quarter of an hour’s, rational speech
with Prince Eugen, all might be cleared up and put right, and by the
fact that that rational talk was absolutely impossible on Eugen’s part
until the fever had run its course. As the minutes crept on to midnight
the watcher, made nervous by the intense, electrical atmosphere which
seems always to surround a person who is dangerously ill, grew more and
more a prey to vague and terrible apprehensions. His mind dwelt
hysterically on the most fatal possibilities.
He wondered what would occur if by any ill-chance Eugen should die in
that bed--how he would explain the affair to Posen and to the Emperor,
how he would justify himself. He saw himself being tried for murder,
sentenced (him--a Prince of the blood!), led to the scaffold... a scene
unparalleled in Europe for over a century! ... Then he gazed anew at the
sick man, and thought he saw death in every drawn feature of that
agonized face. He could have screamed aloud. His ears heard a peculiar
resonant boom. He started--it was nothing but the city clock striking
twelve. But there was another sound--a mysterious shuffle at the door.
He listened; then jumped from his chair. Nothing now! Nothing! But still
he felt drawn to the door, and after what seemed an interminable
interval he went and opened it, his heart beating furiously. Nella lay
in a heap on the door mat. She was fully dressed, but had apparently
lost consciousness. He clutched at her slender body, picked her up,
carried her to the chair by the fire-place, and laid her in it. He had
forgotten all about Eugen.
‘What is it, my angel?’ he whispered, and then he kissed her--kissed her
twice. He could only look at her; he did not know what to do to succour
her.
At last she opened her eyes and sighed.
‘Where am I?’ she asked vaguely, in a tremulous tone as she recognized
him. ‘Is it you? Did I do anything silly? Did I faint?’
‘What has happened? Were you ill?’ he questioned anxiously. He was
kneeling at her feet, holding her hand tight.
‘I saw Jules by the side of my bed,’ she murmured; ‘I’m sure I saw him;
he laughed at me. I had not undressed. I sprang up, frightened, but he
had gone, and then I ran downstairs--to you.’
‘You were dreaming,’ he soothed her.
‘Was I?’
‘You must have been. I have not heard a sound. No one could have
entered.
But if you like I will wake Mr Racksole.’
‘Perhaps I was dreaming,’ she admitted. ‘How foolish!’
‘You were over-tired,’ he said, still unconsciously holding her hand.
They gazed at each other. She smiled at him.
‘You kissed me,’ she said suddenly, and he blushed red and stood up
before her. ‘Why did you kiss me?’
‘Ah! Miss Racksole,’ he murmured, hurrying the words out. ‘Forgive me.
It is unforgivable, but forgive me. I was overpowered by my feelings. I
did not know what I was doing.’
‘Why did you kiss me?’ she repeated.
‘Because--Nella! I love you. I have no right to say it.’
‘Why have you no right to say it?’
‘If Eugen dies, I shall owe a duty to Posen--I shall be its ruler.’
‘Well!’ she said calmly, with an adorable confidence. ‘Papa is worth
forty millions. Would you not abdicate?’
‘Ah!’ he gave a low cry. ‘Will you force me to say these things? I could
not shirk my duty to Posen, and the reigning Prince of Posen can only
marry a Princess.’
‘But Prince Eugen will live,’ she said positively, ‘and if he lives--’
‘Then I shall be free. I would renounce all my rights to make you mine,
if--if--’
‘If what, Prince?’
‘If you would deign to accept my hand.’
‘Am I, then, rich enough?’
‘Nella!’ He bent down to her.
Then there was a crash of breaking glass. Aribert went to the window and
opened it. In the starlit gloom he could see that a ladder had been
raised against the back of the house. He thought he heard footsteps at
the end of the garden.
‘It was Jules,’ he exclaimed to Nella, and without another word rushed
upstairs to the attic. The attic was empty. Miss Spencer had
mysteriously vanished.
Chapter Nineteen ROYALTY AT THE GRAND BABYLON
THE Royal apartments at the Grand Babylon are famous in the world of
hotels, and indeed elsewhere, as being, in their own way, unsurpassed.
Some of the palaces of Germany, and in particular those of the mad
Ludwig of Bavaria, may possess rooms and saloons which outshine them in
gorgeous luxury and the mere wild fairy-like extravagance of wealth; but
there is nothing, anywhere, even on Eighth Avenue, New York, which can
fairly be called more complete, more perfect, more enticing, or--not
least important--more comfortable.
The suite consists of six chambers--the ante-room, the saloon or
audience chamber, the dining-room, the yellow drawing-room (where
Royalty receives its friends), the library, and the State bedroom--to
the last of which we have already been introduced. The most important
and most impressive of these is, of course, the audience chamber, an
apartment fifty feet long by forty feet broad, with a superb outlook
over the Thames, the Shot Tower, and the higher signals of the South-
Western Railway. The decoration of this room is mainly in the German
taste, since four out of every six of its Royal occupants are of
Teutonic blood; but its chief glory is its French ceiling, a masterpiece
by Fragonard, taken bodily from a certain famous palace on the Loire.
The walls are of panelled oak, with an eight-foot dado of Arras cloth
imitated from unique Continental examples. The carpet, woven in one
piece, is an antique specimen of the finest Turkish work, and it was
obtained, a bargain, by Felix Babylon, from an impecunious Roumanian
Prince. The silver candelabra, now fitted with electric light, came from
the Rhine, and each had a separate history. The Royal chair--it is not
etiquette to call it a throne, though it amounts to a throne--was looted
by Napoleon from an Austrian city, and bought by Felix Babylon at the
sale of a French collector. At each corner of the room stands a gigantic
grotesque vase of German faïence of the sixteenth century. These were
presented to Felix Babylon by William the First of Germany, upon the
conclusion of his first incognito visit to London in connection with the
French trouble of 1875.
There is only one picture in the audience chamber. It is a portrait of
the luckless but noble Dom Pedro, Emperor of the Brazils. Given to Felix
Babylon by Dom Pedro himself, it hangs there solitary and sublime as a
reminder to Kings and Princes that Empires may pass away and greatness
fall. A certain Prince who was occupying the suite during the Jubilee of
1887--when the Grand Babylon had seven persons of Royal blood under its
roof--sent a curt message to Felix that the portrait must be removed.
Felix respectfully declined to remove it, and the Prince left for
another hotel, where he was robbed of two thousand pounds’ worth of
jewellery. The Royal audience chamber of the Grand Babylon, if people
only knew it, is one of the sights of London, but it is never shown, and
if you ask the hotel servants about its wonders they will tell you only
foolish facts concerning it, as that the Turkey carpet costs fifty
pounds to clean, and that one of the great vases is cracked across the
pedestal, owing to the rough treatment accorded to it during a riotous
game of Blind Man’s Buff, played one night by four young Princesses, a
Balkan King, and his aides-de-camp.
In one of the window recesses of this magnificent apartment, on a
certain afternoon in late July, stood Prince Aribert of Posen. He was
faultlessly dressed in the conventional frock-coat of English
civilization, with a gardenia in his button-hole, and the indispensable
crease down the front of the trousers. He seemed to be fairly amused,
and also to expect someone, for at frequent intervals he looked rapidly
over his shoulder in the direction of the door behind the Royal chair.
At last a little wizened, stooping old man, with a distinctly German
cast of countenance, appeared through the door, and laid some papers on
a small table by the side of the chair.
‘Ah, Hans, my old friend!’ said Aribert, approaching the old man. ‘I
must have a little talk with you about one or two matters. How do you
find His Royal Highness?’
The old man saluted, military fashion. ‘Not very well, your Highness,’
he answered. ‘I’ve been valet to your Highness’s nephew since his
majority, and I was valet to his Royal father before him, but I never
saw--’ He stopped, and threw up his wrinkled hands deprecatingly.
‘You never saw what?’ Aribert smiled affectionately on the old fellow.
You could perceive that these two, so sharply differentiated in rank,
had been intimate in the past, and would be intimate again.
‘Do you know, my Prince,’ said the old man, ‘that we are to receive the
financier, Sampson Levi--is that his name?--in the audience chamber?
Surely, if I may humbly suggest, the library would have been good enough
for a financier?’
‘One would have thought so,’ agreed Prince Aribert, ‘but perhaps your
master has a special reason. Tell me,’ he went on, changing the subject
quickly, ‘how came it that you left the Prince, my nephew, at Ostend,
and returned to Posen?’
‘His orders, Prince,’ and old Hans, who had had a wide experience of
Royal whims and knew half the secrets of the Courts of Europe, gave
Aribert a look which might have meant anything. ‘He sent me back on an--
an errand, your Highness.’
‘And you were to rejoin him here?’
‘Just so, Highness. And I did rejoin him here, although, to tell the
truth, I had begun to fear that I might never see my master again.’
‘The Prince has been very ill in Ostend, Hans.’
‘So I have gathered,’ Hans responded drily, slowly rubbing his hands
together. ‘And his Highness is not yet perfectly recovered.’
‘Not yet. We despaired of his life, Hans, at one time, but thanks to an
excellent constitution, he came safely through the ordeal.’
‘We must take care of him, your Highness.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Aribert solemnly, ‘his life is very precious to
Posen.’
At that moment, Eugen, Hereditary Prince of Posen, entered the audience
chamber. He was pale and languid, and his uniform seemed to be a trouble
to him. His hair had been slightly ruffled, and there was a look of
uneasiness, almost of alarmed unrest, in his fine dark eyes. He was like
a man who is afraid to look behind him lest he should see something
there which ought not to be there. But at the same time, here beyond
doubt was Royalty. Nothing could have been more striking than the
contrast between Eugen, a sick man in the shabby house at Ostend, and
this Prince Eugen in the Royal apartments of the Grand Babylon Hôtel,
surrounded by the luxury and pomp which modern civilization can offer to
those born in high places. All the desperate episode of Ostend was now
hidden, passed over. It was supposed never to have occurred. It existed
only like a secret shame in the hearts of those who had witnessed it.
Prince Eugen had recovered; at any rate, he was convalescent, and he had
been removed to London, where he took up again the dropped thread of his
princely life. The lady with the red hat, the incorruptible and savage
Miss Spencer, the unscrupulous and brilliant Jules, the dark, damp
cellar, the horrible little bedroom--these things were over. Thanks to
Prince Aribert and the Racksoles, he had emerged from them in safety. He
was able to resume his public and official career. The Emperor had been
informed of his safe arrival in London, after an unavoidable delay in
Ostend; his name once more figured in the Court chronicle of the
newspapers. In short, everything was smothered over. Only--only Jules,
Rocco, and Miss Spencer were still at large; and the body of Reginald
Dimmock lay buried in the domestic mausoleum of the palace at Posen; and
Prince Eugen had still to interview Mr Sampson Levi.
That various matters lay heavy on the mind of Prince Eugen was beyond
question. He seemed to have withdrawn within himself. Despite the
extraordinary experiences through which he had recently passed, events
which called aloud for explanations and confidence between the nephew
and the uncle, he would say scarcely a word to Prince Aribert. Any
allusion, however direct, to the days at Ostend, was ignored by him with
more or less ingenuity, and Prince Aribert was really no nearer a full
solution of the mystery of Jules’ plot than he had been on the night
when he and Racksole visited the gaming tables at Ostend. Eugen was well
aware that he had been kidnapped through the agency of the woman in the
red hat, but, doubtless ashamed at having been her dupe, he would not
proceed in any way with the clearing-up of the matter.
‘You will receive in this room, Eugen?’ Aribert questioned him.
‘Yes,’ was the answer, given pettishly. ‘Why not? Even if I have no
proper retinue here, surely that is no reason why I should not hold
audience in a proper manner?... Hans, you can go.’ The old valet
promptly disappeared.
‘Aribert,’ the Hereditary Prince continued, when they were alone in the
chamber, ‘you think I am mad.’
‘My dear Eugen,’ said Prince Aribert, startled in spite of himself.
‘Don’t be absurd.’