It was deemed best not to mention the incident of the night to Miss
von Altdorf, and on their way to the Gare St. Lazare that morning Grey
accounted for his bandaged finger by the subterfuge of having caught
it in a door. He was not altogether satisfied with the spot chosen for
the day’s outing. Had he been allowed unaided to make the choice he
would undoubtedly have selected a resort of quite different character,
but the girl had expressed a wish to visit Louis XIV’s “_Abîme des
dépenses_,” and he had without demur acceded to her desire. After
all, to be alone with her and thus gather from her knowledge as much
information as possible concerning the mystery that surrounded him was
his prime object, and for this purpose Versailles offered as propitious
a background as Bougival or Croissy or a dozen other places that he
personally would have preferred.
The day, washed clear and brilliant by the rain of yesterday, was not
uncomfortably warm, and, though the maimed finger ached distractingly
at times, Grey, in spite of his misgivings, found the little jaunt
delightfully diverting. The Fraülein had shaken off much of her
melancholy of the previous evening, and her mood was cheerful, if not
merry. Her appreciation, which was mingled with a joyousness almost
childish, was especially gratifying to her companion. Everything she
saw interested her, and her comment, while invariably intelligent, was
so unaffected and ingenuous as to be ofttimes amusing.
When, after _déjeuner_ at the Café de la Comédie, they had come out
upon the terrace of the palace and stood overlooking the quaint,
solemn, old-fashioned gardens, cut up into squares and triangles and
parallelograms and ornamented with statues and vases and fountains
arranged with monotonously geometric precision, her face shone with
pleasure for a moment and then a shadow crossed it.
“Are all landscape gardeners atheists?” she asked, naïvely.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Grey replied, smiling; “I’ve never
investigated their religious beliefs.”
“Well, the one who designed all this,” she added, with a sweep of her
hand, “had very little respect for God’s taste.”
And later, as they sauntered through room after room and gallery after
gallery of the palace, with their interminable succession of paintings
and sculptures, she was much impressed by the pictured ceilings.
“I wonder why they put their best work where one must break one’s neck
to see it?” she queried; and then she laughed. “Do you suppose it was
to encourage the kings and queens and other grandees to bear in mind
their exalted position and to hold their heads high?”
Grey had thus far refrained from broaching the subject which had
inspired the excursion. He had chosen first of all to study the girl
and gauge her character. Over her presence in the little party of
questionables in which he had so unexpectedly found himself he was much
perplexed. It seemed scarcely reasonable to suppose that she was not
in some way involved in the plot, but whether actively or passively,
with knowledge or without, was, or at least might be, open to question.
He certainly could gather no indication from her attitude, her manner,
or her utterance that she was other than artless and sincere. She
appeared, in fact, uncommonly simple-hearted, straightforward, and
guileless, and, after weighing the evidence, he reached the conclusion
that if she had a place in the scheme of his enemies it was most
assuredly without her ken or connivance. It was nevertheless clear that
she must be innocently aware of much that he wished eagerly to know,
and, as they wandered over the palace together, from the sumptuously
decorated _Salles des Croisades_, reflecting in picture, trophy and
souvenir the conquest of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, to the
magnificent _Galerie des Glaces_, with its many high-arched windows and
glittering, gilt-niched mirrors, he ponderingly strove to outline some
course of procedure that would yield him what he desired and yet not
reveal his own delicately fragile position.
It was not, however, until they had finished their inspection of the
palace and had passed out into the gardens by the _Cour des Princes_
that an opportunity offered to make trial of the plan he had conceived.
They had strolled under the orange trees beside that long stretch
of velvet lawn towards what is known as the basin of Apollo and had
found seats on the marble coping of the fountain. As they sat there
facing each other amid the perfume of the flowers and the spice of the
shrubbery, the balmy breath of summer fanning their cheeks and the
genial glow of a tempered June sun bathing them, the girl’s eye fell
for the first time upon the ring on Grey’s little finger, and she gave
an involuntary start of surprise.
“Oh, is it you, then?” she cried, and there was something of awe in
her voice, though her eyes were smiling. “But no,” she added, quickly,
“that cannot be. I do not understand, Uncle Max.”
“Nor I, child,” Grey replied, smiling back at her. He had not observed
her glance, and her exclamation had startled him. She took his hand in
her long, white, rose-tipped fingers and held it up before his eyes,
the ring glinting in the sunshine.
“That!” she said. “What does it mean, your wearing it?”
“Mean?” he hesitated, wondering. “Why should it mean anything? Has not
a gentleman a right to wear a ring if his fancy runs that way?”
“Oh, yes, of course; some rings; but no ordinary gentleman has a right
to wear that one.”
“But suppose I am not an ordinary gentleman?” he pursued. “Suppose I
have a title and bear arms, have I not a right to engrave those arms
upon gold and wear them on my finger?”
She looked at him very seriously from out her deep-set, long-lashed
eyes of purplish blue, and then she said:
“But it is the ring of the Crown Prince. And you are not the Crown
Prince. If you were you could not be my uncle.”
Grey’s heart leaped. His decision had been confirmed. She was not
trying to put him on a throne to which he had no more right than
those workmen who were repairing the stone margin of the great canal
a hundred yards away. Yet, at the same time, she had filled him with
a new perplexity. It was evident that the ring was quite familiar
to her. Therefore it could hardly be von Einhard’s, and Lindenwald’s
assertion must not only have been false but knowingly false, and with
an object. If the Fraülein von Altdorf knew the ring as the Crown
Prince’s ring, Lindenwald must also have known it as such. It was for
that reason he did not wish Grey to keep it. He feared, probably, just
such a revelation as had come about. These points were plain enough,
but the whole intricate problem was growing more and more involved.
Its likeness to a maze again recurred. With every effort to extricate
himself he seemed to get further and more bewilderingly entangled. And
once more he was tempted to leave the path, which seemed to turn and
turn again on itself, and to cut his way through thicket and underbrush
regardless of consequences.
“What a wise Fraülein it is!” he replied, after a pause. “What you say
is very true. If I am the Crown Prince I am not your uncle, and if I
am your uncle I am not the Crown Prince. Now which would you prefer to
have me?”
“Oh, for your sake,” she answered, quickly, “I’d rather you were heir
to the throne; but for my sake I’d rather you were my uncle.”
“But not being able to be both, suppose you should learn that I am
neither?” he queried, laughing.
“But you are,” she protested, with conviction. “You are my uncle, that
is a fact.”
“How do you know?” Grey asked. The situation was growing interesting;
disclosures were imminent, and they were coming quite naturally without
his having had to resort to the plan he had mapped out.
“How does one ever know such things?” she replied, a little annoyance
in her tone. “You were my Great-uncle Schlippenbach’s nephew and I am
your niece. I call you Uncle Max and you call me Minna.”
“Ah, yes, that is very true,” Grey went on, banteringly, and he
remembered what O’Hara had told him of how they had met in London a
week after his setting foot on English soil; “but you never saw me in
your life until two months ago. Do you remember how we first met?”
“I have a very vivid recollection of it. It was at dinner at the
Folsonham, in London. I wore a pale green frock. And poor Great-uncle
Schlippenbach said: ‘Minna, my dear, this is your Uncle Max, who hasn’t
seen you since you were a baby.’”
“And what else did he say?”
“Oh, I don’t remember all the conversation.”
“Did he say anything about where we were going, and what we were going
for?”
“I don’t think he said anything then. But you must remember. You were
as much there as I was.”
“Ah, but I was not listening,” Grey pleaded, his eyes a-twinkle. “I had
something better to do.”
“What was that, pray?”
“I had my pretty niece to look at.”
The rose in Minna’s cheeks deepened and her eyes fell shyly.
“Now you are teasing me again,” she said.
Grey turned an uninterested gaze for a brief space on the sun-god and
his chariot which, surrounded by tritons, nymphs, and dolphins, rose in
heroic proportions from the centre of the basin.
“I never knew much of my Uncle Schlippenbach,” he ventured, after a
little; “tell me about him.”
“You should know more than I,” the Fraülein returned. “You were in New
York with him while I was in England.”
“Yes, I know,” her companion went on, as he took a cigarette from his
case and struck a match, “but I don’t mean intimately, personally. Tell
me a little of his history.”
“Everybody knew he was eccentric.”
“Of course.”
“Otherwise he would never have left Budavia. Just think of what he gave
up!”
“That’s just it,” Grey interposed, eagerly. “What did he give up? I’ve
heard stories, to be sure, but I don’t know that I ever had the truth
of it.”
“Oh, I’ve heard it a hundred times,” Minna responded, digging the
point of her parasol into the gravel. “You see, he was tutor to the
Court. He had taught King Frederic about all there was to teach,
and when His Majesty outgrew school books--of course he wasn’t His
Majesty then, but His Royal Highness the Crown Prince--Great-uncle
Schlippenbach accompanied him on the grand tour. They visited every
court in Europe and then went over to Africa and Turkey in Asia, and
I don’t know where else. Then when Frederic succeeded to the throne,
Great-uncle Schlippenbach was still retained, and after a while, when
a little prince was born to Queen Anna, he was constituted a sort of
kindergarten-professor to the royal infant.”
“In other words, a mental wet-nurse,” suggested Grey.
“Yes, exactly. I think he taught him to say ‘bah’ and ‘boo’ and
‘gee-gee’ and ‘moo-cow’--or rather their German equivalents--and led
him gloriously on to the alphabet. Then, just as he was beginning to
spell nicely in words of three letters, something happened. Nobody
ever knew just exactly what it was, but Great-uncle Schlippenbach took
offence. Her Majesty, Queen Anna, it seems, was to blame. He brooded
over the matter for weeks and months, growing more and more incensed,
more and more bitter. In vain King Frederic tried to mollify him. He
was very fond of Great-uncle Schlippenbach, and he wanted to smooth
matters over, but the royal tutor was not to be pacified. He broke out
in a torrent of rage, recounting his fancied wrongs and declaring that
he had wasted the best years of his life in a hopeless effort to grow
flowers of intellect from barren soil. The German Emperor would have
had him behind the bars for _lèse-majesté_, but King Frederic only
laughed and offered him a baronetcy. But Great-uncle Schlippenbach
scorned the offer. Having spoken his mind, he packed his boxes and
left the Court, left Kürschdorf, left Budavia, left Europe and went to
America to begin life anew. That was twenty-five years ago, and he was
forty years old.”
“And the poor little Crown Prince had to learn his words of four
letters from someone less gifted, eh?”
“Dear only knows from whom he ever did learn them,” Miss von Altdorf
continued. “He disappeared the very next week after Great-uncle
Schlippenbach.”
“Disappeared?” repeated Grey.
“Oh, yes, you remember that, surely. He was abducted, you know. Why,
that’s a part of the history of your own country. That’s why there’s so
much excitement now over rumours of his turning up at this late day.
Oh, dear, Uncle Max, why will you tease me so? You made me tell you
that whole story, and I’m sure you knew it quite as well as I.”
Grey laughed joyously.
“I love to hear you talk,” he told her, his gaze lingering fondly
on her blushing face. “And so,” he added, “they are looking for the
kidnapped baby to reappear a man and claim his own? Is that it?”
But she was silent, her eyes downcast.
“Won’t you answer me?” he pleaded.
“I won’t again tell you what you already know,” she answered, a little
petulantly.
“But I don’t know about this ring, really,” Grey urged. “Tell me about
it. What has it got to do with the stolen Crown Prince?”
Minna looked up, regarding him searchingly.
“Where did you get it?” she asked.
“I found it,” he answered, quite truthfully.
“In a jewel casket, within a great iron chest, inside an ordinary
travelling box?” she cross-questioned.
The significance of the description was not lost on her hearer.
“No,” he returned, frankly, “not in anything at all. On the floor of my
room.”
Her eyes were round with surprise.
“And how did it come there?”
“I cannot imagine. That is why I’d like you to tell me what you know of
it.”
“And before you found it on the floor of your room you had never seen
it?”
“Never. I swear it by the sun-god yonder.”
“My great-uncle never showed it to you--never told you of it?”
“Never,” Grey repeated.
“He showed it to me in London,” she confessed, reaching out for the
finger it adorned, “and told me all about it. It seems that when
he left Budavia it had in some way got in with his effects. He did
not find it until a year or more afterward. It had belonged to the
King before his coronation, and to his father before him, and to his
grandfather before that. The arms are those of the Prince of Kronfeld.
The Crown Prince is always, you know, the Prince of Kronfeld.”
“And as the little Prince of Kronfeld had been kidnapped and Uncle
Schlippenbach did not know where to find him, he simply put the ring
away for safe-keeping, eh?” asked Grey, quizzically.
“He was taking it back to Kürschdorf when he died,” Minna answered,
with rebuke in her tone. “As soon as he heard that the Crown Prince had
been found he started. He wished, he said, to put it on his finger with
his own hand. ‘His Royal Highness will probably travel _incognito_,’ he
said to me, ‘but I shall know him; and when we meet I shall give him
the ring. When you see it worn you will know that the wearer is the
Crown Prince.’”
“And when you saw it on my finger you thought--just for a moment--that
I was he, didn’t you, Minna? But then, as I am your uncle I cannot be
the Prince of Kronfeld, so we will take it off and wear it no more,”
Grey concluded, slipping the golden circlet from his finger and stowing
it away in a pocket of his waistcoat.
“But what I should like to know,” continued the Fraülein, “is how it
came on the floor of your room?”
“And so should I,” her companion echoed; “how it got out of the casket,
and the iron chest, and the travelling box.”
Presently the sound of many shuffling feet was borne to their ears,
accompanied by the discordant piping of high-pitched voices, and
turning their heads they saw approaching an army of tourists with a
gesticulating, haranguing guide in the lead.
“It’s a case of ‘follow the man from Cook’s,’” Grey observed, annoyed
at having their privacy invaded. “We had better stroll on.”
They walked rapidly for a while, keeping always to the right, until
they were out of sight and sound of the disturbing company, and then
they dawdled from terrace to terrace; leaned over lichen-stained
marble balustrades to see their reflections in the dark, silent pools;
loitered on banks of mossy turf beneath the shade of towering trees;
stopped to admire, to criticise, and not infrequently to laugh over
the sculptures that dotted the way, and came out at length upon an
avenue, long and straight and level and gleaming white in the afternoon
sunshine.
“You want to see the Trianons, of course,” Grey suggested to the girl.
“I know you are familiar with many of the events that took place there.”
And so, turning to the left, they sauntered on until they came to the
one-story horse-shoe shaped villa that Louis XIV built for Madame de
Maintenon. But Minna was tired of sight-seeing, and the porcelains and
the pictures proved alike uninteresting. The Petit Trianon pleased
her much better because of its associations with Marie Antoinette,
who had been one of her school-girl heroines, and over its delightful
English-looking garden she grew enthusiastic.
They strolled along the winding paths, dallied on the shore of the
funny little artificial lake, and rested for a while in the “_Temple
de l’Amour_.” The number of visitors, however, was to both of them a
disturbing influence. They would have liked the place to themselves,
but they were at every turn running into couples and parties whose
presence, as Grey put it, “spoiled the picture.”
They had just emerged from that group of homely, quaint cottages in a
far corner of the garden where the fair ladies of Louis’s Court were
wont to play at peasant life, when the rippling laughter of women and
the more hearty if less musical merriment of men broke jarringly upon
their hearing.
“Can’t we have some milk at the _vacherie Suisse_?” Grey heard a
woman’s voice ask in the English of the well-bred.
And then a man rejoined:
“Milk! What for? There’s still an unopened case of champagne in the
coach.”
Again the laughter echoed, but nearer. The little company were coming
towards them, hidden by the shrubbery. A second later and they came
into view--a tall, large woman with brilliant auburn hair, in gown and
hat of pale lavender; a middle-aged man, red-faced and well-groomed; a
dainty little dark woman, all in red, with a tall, dark man in grey,
and then--Grey went white as the whitest cloud overhead, for Hope Van
Tuyl was approaching, and with her was the young man from the Embassy
whom he had seen yesterday at the hotel. And there was Frothingham,
too, whom he had not recognised at first glance; and it was Nicholas
Van Tuyl, he saw now, who was with the red-haired woman in the lead.
For a second he halted, undecided, a powerful impulse urging him to
speak to the woman he loved, at all hazards. His lips were framing
words, his eyes were beaming, his hand was half way to his hat, before
his judgment came to the rescue--and held him; told him that it would
be folly, that now as never before it was his duty to maintain his
disguise and thereby eventually establish his innocence. His eyes
cooled, his teeth closed on his embryo utterance, his hand dropped to
his side.
“Carey Grey!”
Hope’s voice rang out suddenly above the babble of the party. She had
seen him and recognised him. The others had passed on. Only she and
Edson were there beside him. With an effort that cost him the most
poignant torture he ever suffered he turned to Minna, murmuring words
that had no meaning and walked heedlessly by.
Edson caught Miss Van Tuyl’s trembling arm.
“Sh!” he warned, a little excitedly; “you’ve made a mistake. That isn’t
Grey.”
“But”--and the colour came and went in her face and she breathed
quickly--“but I know it is. I know him, I’m sure; oh, quite, quite
sure. I cannot be mistaken. His hair is changed; yes, and he has a
beard, but his eyes--I should always know his eyes; and”--as she stood
gazing after him--“his shoulders. There isn’t another man in the world
who has shoulders just like Carey Grey’s.”
“No other man, possibly,” added Edson, “except the Crown Prince of
Budavia.”