THE BURIED RAY
The Queen lay on a bed to which none had access save the Princess
Elizabeth and one maid-of-honour—for Her Majesty would see no doctor.
It was nine in the night, a reddish shine, remote from that tumbled
bed, shedding through the room a mood of the moon in eclipse, and the
Princess at the bedside had on hat and gloves, just come, her gloves
grasped in the Queen’s hands, who feverishly said: “Did you lay before
him all your latest thoughts?”
“Everything!”—from the Princess.
“And he his to you?”
“Everything. Sir Robert does not think Teddy dead, Your Majesty——”
“Call me mama; say ‘mama.’”
“And he thinks that if he and I only keep on collating and dove-tailing
all our latest thoughts, we shall yet discover Teddy.”
With the wild eyes of fever, her palms clasping her forehead, the Queen
said: “Yes! _he_ and you—you two—_you_’ll find him! _He_ knows! _He_ is
strong!”
A furtive smile curved the Princess’s thin lip, enjoyment in her at the
sight of that royal mind which had dominated her now broken and in the
dust.
“I told him I would see him to-morrow evening again——”
“That’s it! And what does he say? Does he stoop? Does he look sad?”
“Yes, but Your Majesty should try to sleep”—she kissed the Queen’s
hand—“I am doing wrong, I won’t stay another moment.”
“Elizabeth, you leave me?” the Queen called to her.
“Let Your Majesty consider that you have not slept for three days,” the
Princess turned her chin to say, “and I, too, am sleepy. I will be with
Your Majesty again at midnight.”
Her Majesty now dropped back upon her pillows, and was tossing there
with distracted changes of attitude until, all at once, she sat up,
stared, pondering, then urgently turned to touch a button, but checked
herself, and then with clandestine haste was standing on the floor,
staggering, yet grand, a ghost in laces.
In a fever of haste she proceeded to dress herself, delicately treading
by an ante-room’s doors beyond which ladies waited, cautiously opening
wardrobe doors, quickly selecting, steadily building herself into a
state of dress, save when she paused at a mirror to hold up on her palm
four grey hairs, at which she gazed with the greatest interest, amazed,
gravely amused.
Soon after which she was in flight through a postern behind tapestry,
hardly very exquisitely groomed, but careless, to make her way into the
Park; and both an amazed Master of the Household and Inspector of the
Palace, who chanced to catch the spurt of her escaping skirt at the
turn of a stair, felt an impulse to address her, this apparition of her
so suggested hectic and ecstasy of mind.
After making her way to the bottom of the Park, she flew from the
little gate there, stumbling, to Sir Robert Barrington’s, a minute’s
distance away.
Luckily, something in her rap inspired him to open the door himself,
and, finding her leaning there, her eyes closed, powerless, like
an outcast at his door, he moaned “Come” to her, took her bodily,
supporting her to a couch spacious like a bed in a morning-room, he
himself very breathlessly agitated at this happening—no longer so young
as he had been!
And hand on heart, panting, he stood, saying: “I cannot think that Your
Majesty—so ill—has done well——”
A lamentable protest broke from her buried throat, breaking his heart:
“Oh, my soul is exceedingly sorrowful in me, Robert Barrington!”
At which his forehead dropped before her, his breath uttered: “God
grant me strength.”
“I have had hope,” she said—“you promised——”
But now he was harshly sharp. “No! It is false! I say that it is
abominable, that it is unpardonable, if any unfounded hopes are
conveyed as from me to Your Majesty. I declare that I am utterly
powerless, absolutely in the dark. The Princess Elizabeth may be an
interesting, if somewhat fantastic, young woman, but I say——”
“You need not be angry,” the Queen wearily said, raising herself: “I
come to you, and you get angry. Why did I come? I am sick of living,
and I come to you.”
“Then, I will say now that you did well to come, Ma’am. But Your
Majesty is aware, by training, that opinions have no value. My
_opinion_ is that Your Majesty’s boy is in the hands of Anarchists, is
still living, may yet be discovered; but, then——”
“Then, that is how it is, if you think so! You will find him, and it
is exceedingly dear of you to give——” Here her hands were going out
to his, but she suddenly saw and snatched them back, with a breath of
scare which she sucked in, which sounded like “Ah, take care, don’t let
me!”
Then, ten seconds, she sat lost in astonishment, not very sure what
she had said, or how loudly; and suddenly, with “let me get away” was
tearing angrily out in advance of her arm which he held; and he, too,
when he had followed her steps to the Park gate, and was back, sat
asking himself in a long reverie: “What, really, was it that she said?”
Then he was roaming the room with a brutal jaw, breathing between his
teeth, “Man, eh? Impotent! Brainless! Vain! The petty pates of apes!
A world to lift with a worm’s sinews!” In the midst of which, in an
impulse, he sat down and penned a letter to Eulalia:
“I am impelled to express the hope that all is well with Your Royal
Highness.... Ever since the Prince’s disappearance I have received not
one line, though I have twice written.... A natural anxiety impels me
to pray Your Royal Highness to send me a word at the first possible
moment....”
• • • • •
Three evenings later when this came to Eulalia’s hand, that was the
first she had heard of any “disappearance” of the Prince: for on the
day after her discovery of the Six Millions she had had attacks of
dizziness, which had caused her to be put to bed in cantonment upon a
pair of peasants in Nürnfeld village; and not only had a surgeon-major
forbidden any news or letter being given her, but the 2nd and 3rd,
after the Battle of the Moselle, had taken up positions thirty miles
further into German territory, and had left her; and since her German
was not fluent, her conversations with her aged hosts had included no
news but news of skirmishes within thirty kilometres of their door.
Then one noon one Sister Darling—a tall strip of uniform under the face
of a saint in a painting—had pelted into Nürnfeld to pay the patient
an angel’s visit, and Eulalia, seeing that face pale and careworn, had
felt so ill at ease, that the next day she had found herself saying,
“No, I am going to do my work—not so much Teddy.”
That day she had got up, had dizzied, fainted, gone back to bed; but
three mornings after, gathering from rumour that her whole brigade was
engaging a garrison of the enemy, she had procured a manure-cart, and,
after travelling all day long, had come up with the brigade’s field
hospital in a field a league eastward of the Soar.
She found her coming eagerly welcomed, for the enemy that evening had
suffered, not merely a defeat, but a rout, and of the crowd of captives
left in the British hands sixteen were wounded: so that, with the host
of British wounded, the hospital had enough to do.
Eulalia was in a waggon at the bottom of a steep field, the waggon
standing beneath a bay-tree by the bank of a brook whose babble among
stones, together with a garrulous soprano of grasshoppers, aggravated
the silence of a night dark and starless, warm and calm. Outside—the
brook, rough scrub, Oyone in an ulster seeking to peep between two
waggon-flaps, some lanterns straying among waggons, waggon-shines
thrown on the grass, a sound of horses’ jaws which grossly ground and
ground in the gloom, a tent, two heaps of stretchers under tarpaulins
in corners of the field; and within—sighs, spring beds, splints, lint,
a hospital scent of sickness and carbolic, scarlet spots on bandages,
and eyes—eyes pining, dying, sightless.
Into which came Sister Darling to throw a busy look from bed to bed,
and to breathe “How are you?” to Eulalia.
And Eulalia with a shrug: “I shall pull through.”
“Brave! You are dropping, really, after that terrible journey. You
shall have these now as a reward”—she gave three letters out of her
pouch.
All from Sir Robert Barrington: and when Eulalia had managed to catch
by snatches the sense of them, she called out lamentably to her maimed:
“_It is Oyone!_”
At which outcry, Oyone, startled into fancying that she had been
noticed, made a motion to run from between the waggon-shafts, but now
saw coming a Tommy who led a horse by the mane, and she crouched under
the waggon, till he should be gone. But the horse came to a stoppage,
and the man also, resting his head on the horse’s neck, like one
dead-weary, or asleep.
After a little she hissed toward him: “_Go away!_”
She had been to the wood of the Six Millions, and, though the gold
had not been touched, in the dust was a footprint which, she had
determined, was not hers. Up to that moment she had more or less
believed what she had fiercely hoped, that she had not really been
seen; but now she was sure: Eulalia had been there.
At which thing a gang of assassins, of Richards III., of grinning
aristocrats, were instantly grinning in her inwards, and she ran to
kill as if to catch a ball; but it had taken her two hissing days to
seek out the 2nd Somersetshires and then the field hospital—she,
meantime, in a state of amazement that Eulalia had done nothing to the
hoard, or to her, all these weeks! for surely, she thought, unless
Eulalia was weak in the head, she must see now that it was Oyone who
had destroyed the air-boats, had shot the Prince in the Strand, and—had
the Prince a prisoner now! At this last thought she had felt faint, and
had made haste.
When it was well dark she had walked to the hospital, had dodged from
waggon to waggon to Eulalia’s, and had been fingering her trigger—for
there was little difficulty as to escaping in the dark—when Sister
Darling’s coming had checked her; and now she was waiting for the man
and horse to pass and not pester her, for it was as if some pestering
thing obstructed her.
Now, Eulalia, on getting the sense of her letters, had started to
run—to abandon her sick, to be off somehow to London; but, as she
started, a dying voice called to her in a key which she could not
resist: “_Mees_,” it groaned, and she moved back to the waggon-head
to bow over a brow that had a bandage aslant about it, hiding the
right eye, while already in his windpipe was the whistle of death:
yet both Eulalia and Oyone, their ears within three feet of his lips,
heard each word when he said: “A favour—service to humanity—my name
Hartmann—Russian. Dig up a black box in the back yard of 11 Frith
Street, Whitechapel—back yard, right-hand corner, dig it up. Send box
to Taska—Bowery—New York—shoe-maker—well known. Tell Taska someone who
is lately dead—he will know—gave me secret to pass on. It is the Ray,
say—just that—he will know—the Ray—and be careful of the cap, say. This
is death—I am going——”
Eulalia hardly waited a few seconds to close his eyes when she flew,
nor did Oyone know when she flew, so open-mouthed she sat there on her
toes at this wondrous discovery of the Ray. It was in the yard of 11
Frith Street—how marvellous a talisman in those three words!
She had once kept Chinnery three days without drink to force him to
make her a new black box like that lost box, and, what was strange for
him, he had resisted, asking her “_why do you want it?_” but then had
yielded, had got her to get together lots of objects, had commenced to
make, but then had failed, or had pretended to fail.
But here it now was: and with the Ray all her terrors were at an end,
all her ambitions realised. Chinnery could be forced to show her how to
use it with her own hands....
She sprang up, careless now of the man and horse still there, measured
her chances swiftly, resolved to act, peeped between flaps more boldly
than before: a dresser was in there, but not Eulalia.
Her heart started at the question: “_Does Eulalia know_ the
preciousness of the Redlike Ray, of those three words just heard, and
has rushed out already to go to clutch it?” She must have rushed very
lightly, flyingly!... Whither? Oyone moved to seek her, clambering
the field from waggon to waggon, and, on being seen by a running
hospital-orderly, who stopped to stare at her, asked him where Nurse
Bayley was.
“I think at the staff-waggon,” he answered, pointed, and ran.
But Eulalia was not there, was nowhere in the meadow, and now Oyone
moaned, “She _has_ gone,” and flew down to the brook, and up to a
pony-trap awaiting her beyond.
Eulalia had, in fact, to the amazement of the staff, gone off in a
flutter with her bag, as she could without formality, being still on
the sick-list; and after stumbling westward seven miles, she tumbled to
slumber some hours with a cow in a hut by a covert.
A comet’s light in the morning sky caused her to start up, and she
plodded on, anon conning her map by the shine of a match, anon
conjecturing her way toward Nancy, for between Nancy and the front the
railway had been destroyed, so that it was not till eleven the next
night that she entered a train.
By that time Oyone was at Boulogne: but the Channel boats,
requisitioned at intervals for war purposes, were not running
regularly, and, having to wait, she lay in the railway restaurant, a
desert now, lamenting, thinking of her air-boat, how well if she had
it now, visited now by a panic as to the Prince, impeaching herself of
dallying and self-pleasing, promising to be prompt as hammer-stroke, if
he was not yet dead, telling heaven with accusing looks that Eulalia
had taken another route, and already had the Redlike Ray safe....
It was not until the next afternoon that she could look back from the
boat upon Boulogne as upon a hell escaped. At about the same hour
Eulalia left Dieppe.
They arrived in London within a few minutes of each other, one
alighting at London Bridge, one at Victoria, and now Oyone stood two
seconds doubtful, still undecided whether to fly home and see things,
or to make straight for the Redlike Ray. The latter drew her strongest:
she flew and got a cab.
Soon after this Eulalia, too, was in a cab, making for the Horseferry
Road, looking out with amaze at the changed air of London—hardly
anyone in the streets, save a flock of jackals _en queue_ before a
soup-kitchen in Marsham Street, and a crowd round a coffee-stall; and
though it was not yet nine in the night she was given a feeling of a
London of three +a.m.+
Even the policemen appeared fewer, and looked as if all was up; she saw
two rolling a dead woman on a hooded stretcher; and between Victoria
and Marsham Street noticed three dead cats, two closed public-houses,
and a coster selling red herrings to a drunken man in evening-dress.
At a paper shop she noticed an _Evening News_ poster: “Let Them Come!”
and a _Star_: “England Expects!” and a _Pall Mall_: “Sea-fight for
To-morrow.”
Then before that darkling old home of Chinnery she alighted, for she
remembered to have read that a neighbour’s maid knew “Monty’s” address,
so she knocked there, hoping to find “Monty,” and so Oyone. But a woman
told her that “Mrs Montgomerry is dead.”
“Don’t say that....”
“Of hunger, I’m afraid”—she closed the door.
What now to do? Her plan had been to go to Oyone, to accuse Oyone
suddenly of having killed the Prince, and if the Prince was dead, or if
he was living, she would know the whole truth without fail from Oyone’s
face, and would then measure strengths with her—a rash thing, for she
had no weapon, nor had thought of such a thing, nor knew her Oyone.
However, she had had the prudence to write a statement of the grounds
of her suspicions, and had posted it to Sir Robert Barrington, marked
“Open After Four Days.”
But as to where Oyone lived she had no notion. The Chinese Embassy
occurred to her; her cabman knew where it was; she drove to Portland
Place.
Here she was received in a room to the right of the door, where a lean
and a portly Chinaman, seated each in an opposite corner, solemnly,
hands on knees, kept exchanging glances; and the interview, which
should have lasted one minute, lasted twenty. Probably they were dull,
and Eulalia an incident: anyway, she had never known anyone who, having
once got her, was so reluctant to part from her.
“What person may she want?” Stout ventured to ask mildly, and Lean
perused the floor with a weak and troubled brow.
“I only know her as Oyone,” Eulalia said: “but I thought you might
know——”
“Is she a friend to you?” Lean thought of asking, to which she lusted
to answer “Yes” (knowing now that they knew Oyone), but, dainty in that
way (by training), she said: “Not a friend: a matter of business, but
very pressing and momentous.”
It was now that one remarked that he thought now that he could guess
who was meant, and might telephone, if the lady would mention her name.
This put Eulalia at her wits’ end: to say “Bayley” would be simply to
prepare Oyone, and in the end, pushed to say something, she came out
with “‘The Nurse’—tell her that.”
Both went out; she heard them at a telephone; and they came back with
some bustle, saying: “But you are late! Go if you like, but you will
only be in time for the invitation.”
Eagerly she seized a piece of paper that gave the address, with a sob
of relief, and was gone, her eyes bright for battle, careless of which
“invitation” that was for which she would only just be in time, they
urging their reluctant steps to chase and gaze wistfully after her to
the last.
By which time Oyone, on her side, was driving home from Whitechapel.
She had discovered Frith Street—an alley five houses long, joining two
streets—decent little homes of retired seamen, say—No. 11 in darkness,
apparently unoccupied, but for curtains at one window on the upper
story.
Oyone pressed the latch of a side gate, peeped, went in: no one about:
and there, leaning against the house-side, was the very thing which she
was wondering how she could get—a spade.
With this she crept on to a strip of back yard planted with some
stripling trees, making straight for the Ray “in the right-hand
corner”; and the night was so dark, that she was quite in the corner
before she became aware that there was a hole already there—square—of
the same area as the Redlike Ray—three feet deep.
“She has beaten me”—her forehead dropped forward, and then her knees
yielded, and, as if prostrate in prayer, she knelt over the hole,
thinking, “she has it, she is more favoured than I, she seems to beat
me, to escape me, to be born to molest, and balk, and waylay, and
pester me, this woman: but wait: if I kill her, I will kill her twice,
and thrice.”
She went back to her cab, and started in haste for home—down Leadenhall
Street—by St Martin’s....
By this time Eulalia was there, ringing a bell under leafage at a green
gate that had “Ning Shou Kung” painted in yellow letters across its
concave top.
A very old Chinaman opened, dwelt upward on her with his eyes, led
her inward through darkness to light, to a hall where stood a small
woman of fifty, gorgeously gowned, stout and chubby, but grim in some
wrinkle about the mouth. She, on seeing Eulalia, crossed her hands and
raised them, bending her head—Chinese, not Manchu; and she muttered
with reproach: “But you come so late: the going-away (funeral) dress
all done.”
Eulalia palely smiled, shrugged, and replied in a shame-faced mutter
that she could not come before, discerning that she was being taken
for some other nurse; so, to make sure of her entrance, she kept
her face as little in evidence as possible—though this proved to be
needless, for even if she had been unlike the other nurse in uniform
and everything, that would not have mattered, when the Chinese woman
was once preoccupied with the idea of identity: for just as to English
eyes fresh in India all Indians are twins, so to Chinese eyes that live
retired in England each English visage is a pea in a heap.
The light, besides, though abundant—Eulalia felt that some _fête_ must
be taking place—was very veiled and restrained, like the vague rainbow,
and those soap-bubble veins of opal and mother-of-pearl; so the woman,
whose name was Huang, said quite naturally: “No trouble, you come see,”
and led Eulalia up to a landing, from which by three steps they entered
a death-chamber.
Eulalia’s eyes, meantime, had been keen for any sign of Oyone, but,
as she now moved into the room, the woman looked at her to moan with
reproach and opening arms: “But no Oyone come!—too bad.”
And now, when Eulalia understood that Oyone was away, there welled in
her a question that made her faint: “If he is alive! and here! and I
can find out!”—Oyone away—and here, evidently, the head of the place
dead, into so splendid a chamber had she been led, and never corpse
more gorgeous than A-lu-te, stretched there in lantern-sheen in her
phœnix hat, her robe and cloak of state, her badges of rank.
At once Huang led Eulalia to exhibit everything, Eulalia’s knees weak
beneath her weight, meantime, at that question that was in her, at
her fear of the real nurse turning up at any moment, of Oyone turning
up, of something happening, at the consciousness of her precious
seconds passing, passing, while she stood there foolishly watching the
exhibition, the chemise of white silk, the jacket of grey silk over it,
the wadded robe of blue satin, the belt of jade, the abounding outer
robe of sable, the badges, the collar of amber, the hair one glow of
gold, the astonishing coffin of lacquer, padded with crimson silk and
straw.
But she could think of nothing to do, to say; any syllable might betray
her; the moment was too pressing for her; she wished to be alone to sit
and think; a gorgeous tall Gorgon at the corpse’s feet appeared to keep
his eyes tied to her face; and she felt her frame trembling in every
limb, like the tongues of little bells that flutter.
Then two more came in, a man and a woman, then the old gateman came,
and she helped to bear the body from the bed and lay its head on the
red “cock-crow” pillow of satin in the coffin, and then they commenced
some ceremony—inviting the dead to rise to heaven: during which she
moved away to a window, anguished at the chance she was casting away,
asking again and again of heaven, “Oh, my God, what can I do?”
In the midst of which she was touched on the shoulder, and Huang, with
one rather cynical eyebrow on high, was saying to her: “You invite
A-lu-te go up, may be?”
At which Eulalia shrank—from an instant train of ideas that sprang
up in her—ideas that meant desecration of the dead, prevarication,
pretence, in recompense for a politeness, for she divined that the
request was made more out of politeness to her than for the benefit
of A-lu-te, who probably had already gone up at the invitation of the
others.
However, as to desecrating the dead, Eulalia had (naturally) much less
respect for dead bodies than, say, her mother had, being accustomed to
see young doctors throw dead men’s arms at one another’s heads across
dissecting-rooms, and bodies cheap as cabbages on fields of battle; and
before she knew that she had resolved, she was saying with a bashful
and begging grace which she had: “But in the English way.”
Huang shrugged and smiled.
“You must let me drive the devils first from all the corners.”
Huang shrugged and smiled.
“Well, then....”
By this time there were only two in the room with her, Huang and the
eunuch; and these strolled with a sluggish and indulgent disgust after
her to the four corners, in which she stood with a booing to-do ...
boo-boo ... boo-boo-boo....
Then it was out on the stair corners, boo-boo-boo, patiently, one by
one, and up, they following, hardly any longer bothering to smile; but
at the first stair-top, when she turned into a certain passage, Huang
stopped her with “No trouble no more.”
“Oh, I must now,” she said bashfully, beggingly, with that grace which
gains everything.
And thenceforth she booed at every door-cornice, managing in the jam
of every boo to mix the pill, “_Whose boy are you?_” until she was
there in the darksome corner of that passage a door of which had a hole
in it, though she did not see any hole; and there, too, she booed a
“boo-boo, _whose boy are you?_ boo-boo-boo.”
There was still no reply, and by this time despair was in her, the
thing was so trying and vile, her two followers becoming obviously
sick of it, and she without any faith now in its success. However, she
moved on, away now from that door with the hole, and was now about to
boo anew, when, fully half-a-minute after her last boo, a dreadful
outcry, pressing, as of one roused in terror out of dreadful depths and
dreams, screamed out of that black darkness of the cross-passage: “_I
am Eulalia’s boy!_”
The franticness of that cry in the silence, the chasm and extremity out
of which it came, its crazy rage, its horrid suddenness, struck Eulalia
colourless to the lips, though she just had the wit left to lift her
hand with “Hark! a devil!”
“Poh,” said Huang, cross now, “no devil—man-cook sick—you come—all
devil gone now.”
“If I must—though I have not finished.”
“No trouble, you come”—and they descended to the death-chamber, where
Eulalia, standing by the coffin, glad enough to hide her mottled face,
raised her arm to say: “A-lu-te, I invite you to rise to the skies.”
But at the same moment the gate-bell began gabbling outside the house,
and Huang, crying to the eunuch, “_Oyone!_” flew out.
From which Eulalia well understood that Oyone was come; and now that
she had found, and that the fire to find was extinguished in her, a
chill and grisly realisation of peril gripped at her; for, if not
killed, she could be imprisoned....
Some moments more and Oyone’s voice was coming up the stair, Eulalia’s
escape cut off now, and all lost that had been won, if Oyone once saw
her. And since Huang had told her that Oyone did not know that A-lu-te
was dead, she felt certain that the death-chamber was the first which
Oyone would enter, and now blamed herself bitterly for not bolting out
at the bell-sound and stowing herself away somewhere. The only hope now
was to look out of a window, and to one she flew....
In some moments Oyone was at the door....
But it was only to cast one flying glance into the room, and she was
gone flying up, to dash along the passage to the door with a hole,
eager before everything to relieve herself of the evil thing that was
hot on her breath.
See her there! stooping at the hole, calling it to the dark, hot,
envenomed: “Here I am back! A-lu-te is dead, and your Eulalia, too.
Two nights ago—she was in a waggon in a field near Siebenberg—so I
crept up—it was quite dark—and pried in through two flaps; and, as she
was stooping over a wounded soldier, I gave it her right through the
brain, the beast, and she bit a piece of her tongue right off, as she
stiffened and kicked. She is well dead. She had been to the wood of the
Six Millions, for I saw her footprint, and she had got the Redlike Ray
from a dying Russian, but I have it safe now—I shall be sending it to
Li Ku Yu to-morrow. I will come again——” she was gone.
Her prisoner, at her coming, had been seated on his bed’s brink,
staring, quivering on the _qui vive_, in a craziness of hopes: if she
could have seen, she would have seen him tumble back, done for, at her
news.
It may be thought, indeed, that he could scarcely believe that Eulalia
had been killed when he had lately heard Eulalia’s voice say: “whose
boy?” but, on the contrary, he believed every word.
Much bane, in fact, had been mixed with his food on the day before
Oyone had left him, and he was aware that his brain was not in a sane
state.
All anight his head had been tossed in nightmare on the horns of the
question, “which is the yellowest, momentum or energy?” and in the
morning he had thought “I am done.”
Hence, on hearing “whose boy,” for some time he had not answered, not
believing his ears. That was nothing odd now for him to hear something
say “boo-boo, whose boy....”
However, the feet of his saviour were in haste. Eulalia was outside
the gate before Oyone was again down, and, running till she found a
cab-driver, she said to him between crying and laughing: “Grosvenor
Place! The Prince of Wales! he is found.”
He sprang upright.
“Fast, will you? He is found.”
They were away.
But she was not wise to tell, since she wished to be quick, for the
man thrice almost stopped to proclaim it, twice to policemen, once to
a lady on a lone pavement, and as though his breath bore death and
pestilence, the three instantly took to their heels.
And at Grosvenor Place Eulalia had to wring her hands—Sir Robert not at
home!
“I mean that Sir Robert is really out,” the man added, “and he may not
see you at once when he comes, as another lady—a Princess—is awaiting
him.”
“No, he will see me first—you tell him—‘Miss Bayley,’” Eulalia said,
and he led her to that large drawing-room where Sir Robert had once
interviewed Her Majesty.
This ran at right angles to the stair-head; and parallel to the stair
ran a small drawing-room, which opened into the large; in which latter,
pacing, was the Princess Elizabeth, fraught with her latest thoughts.
As one of the two sets of folding-doors between the two rooms was open,
she could hear the other led in, and, on peeping—started! It was _she_,
the bliss-licker! though the Queen had informed her that the minx was
at the war. What, then, was she doing here? Her Imperial Highness
condescended to the keyhole, peering with no little greed to get a view
of that plebeian puss who had proved tastier bait than her own imperial
being; nor did Eulalia’s assumed mutiny and raid on dainties make
Eulalia a less interesting object to her—on the contrary.
But she was amazed when Sir Robert hurried in first to Eulalia, though
he must have known...! She saw Sir Robert bend to kiss Eulalia’s hand
like a sovereign’s, or an idol’s, with deference, with reverence; and
then what followed was all a reeling dream to her, intensely immense.
She was aware of Eulalia panting her passion of tidings, of wine
shaking in the baronet’s hand, of the fact that the Prince was found,
found by another woman than she, of the words “Oyone,” “Regent’s Park,”
“Ning Shou Kung”; and the next thing was that she found herself down
and out in her brougham bound for “Ning Shou Kung”—which means “Palace
of Unperturbed Old Age,” not of burning, and bursting, and turbulent
youth.
At Ning Shou Kung gate she sent in her name, left her lady without as
sentinel, and soon in a cosy room had that dark-brown eye of Oyone
resting sidewards on her, cold, darksome in meaning, mysterious,
teeming with strategic and dangerous statecraft: for when at bay she
was ever brave, ready, dexterous, self-protective; while the Princess’s
spectacles stared calmly like starlight, speculative, unblinking,
noting the movement of Oyone’s bosom, her beauty, her sinuousness, her
nose pinched and blanched.
“Your Imperial Highness—honours me?”
“No talk is necessary: conduct me instantly to the Prince of Wales.”
Oyone let slip one half-a-glance toward the gods, and hummed a little.
“Your Imperial Highness thinks that the Prince of Wales is here?”
“No talk is necessary: I know.”
Oyone was up. “How?”
The Princess shrugged. “By deductions from clues.”
“As I hoped!”—Oyone locked the door.
“Oh, that is nonsense to lock the door,” Elizabeth said, _her_ nose,
too, paler now, “when others know that I am here, and that the Prince
is.”
“But do you suppose I do not see that I have beaten _you_ by locking
it?” Oyone looked down upon her with a bitter lip of contempt. “You
come here, alone, hurried, after learning from a nurse that the Prince
is here, your reason being that you want it to be thought that you have
discovered him by your excessive cleverness; and I imprison you as an
evidence of your cleverness.”
“That seems a little silly. Others are coming——”
“Precisely. You tell me everything which I wish to know. I will let
those ‘others’ get the credit you crave for.”
“Why should you—care?”
“Oh, if you are not so clever as you pretend to the Queen, you are
infinitely cleverer than you pretend to me. You see that _my_ liberty
is in danger, and _your_ wedding bed. Let us be friends!”
“I have not said that I am unwilling,” said the Princess Elizabeth,
up-looking.
Palely they smiled at each other.
“Shake hands!” said Oyone authoritatively.
Their right hands just met, while Oyone, reaching sidewards with the
left, unlocked the door.
“Now, how did you know?” she asked: “tell quick!”
“A girl named Bayley, his _bonne amie_, came here, was mistaken for
another nurse, heard his voice——”
“It was _she_? _Eulalia?_ She booed——” This made Oyone faint that such
a thing should be; her arm searched blindly for a chair behind her; she
sat.
“We have no time——” the Princess commenced to suggest, when the other
struck her dumb: “She is not his _bonne amie_, I think she is his
wife....”
At this Elizabeth blanched as from a slash, as there flashed across her
memory Sir Robert Barrington’s manner of kissing Eulalia’s hand. But
this was an idea that would take her brain days to receive and believe,
and she said with a shuddering hauteur: “That is an impertinent
suggestion—you speak of an impossibility.”
“But if the Prince has admitted it to me?” Oyone said. “And you need
not care. She will not live long, if _I_ live.”
At which Elizabeth’s eyes dropped, her lips letting out: “One should
not be horrid.”
“But you will be delighted if I am horrid? All women are the same! we
care much for nothing, except some man. And since you can never get
the Prince, not legally, while this girl is alive, then, you wish me
to live. You agree? You see? Then, you will let me go first to him, to
make him think for a minute that I am releasing him of my own will, on
condition that he signs a promise to protect me from consequences; and
_you_ will help to protect!” She sprang up, and Elizabeth, too, rose,
saying, “On condition that I come with you.”
“Why not?” answered Oyone, eyeing her aside, “are we not allies? Kiss
me.”
Elizabeth’s eyes dropped.
“Four men are said to have committed suicide for my lips,” Oyone
mentioned.
“You _are_—one admits——”
“Then, you may.”
Elizabeth let slip a peep from beneath sheepish lids, but then shook
her head, breathing “Not now.”
Oyone now wrote some phrases in haste, and they ran out, a sense of
no little surprise in the Princess to find herself “the ally” of
the miscreant whom she had come to smite and quell with her mighty
spectacles; and she stood beyond the lantern-shine that stood on the
floor by the door with the hole, while Oyone spoke....
The difficulty, however, was to get a signature to the phrases that
lay on the iron-lined hole, or any kind of reply from within—and every
second so precious.
But when Oyone told her motive—that a naval battle impended, and that
Li Ku Yu instructed her to set free, since he did not wish an invasion
of England until he invaded, then in a rush a shuddering pen was
spluttering, and the thing was done.
On which Oyone’s lips brushed Elizabeth’s cheek with the whisper,
“I’ll write—the key,” and she flew, scattering gold over the hands
of two whom she met, with “fly! fly! for a time: all lost!” then was
wild-handed at a glass, disguising as a Cockney coster-girl, and within
six minutes was out, raining sables and bags into the air-boat, which
she ever kept in petrol, then was heaping a beseeching Chinnery in,
then was wiping her brow, sighing, high behind brown clouds....
Meantime, the Princess was labouring under the Prince’s weight,
staining her rose-satin mantle, broderie anglaise and arum lilies with
that shirt-front and dirty evening-dress—she eager, with “poor Teddy,
try now,” he slow with “It will be well—wait one tick,” during fifteen
minutes from prison door to brougham.
But it was ten minutes more before Sir Robert Barrington, who had been
delayed by communications with Scotland Yard, arrived with a force of
men—to find in “Ning Shou Kung” no one but A-lu-te.
London, meantime, had pricked the ear, and was up, so that as the
Prince drove from street to street, his forehead on the Princess’s
shoulder, he was conscious of commotion each moment increasing,
newsboys who flew hooting the rumour, ten o’clock editions, populous
windows, footsteps of runners that sent echoes of running, as when
there is a fire in the night, and London sends out runners and echoes.
And from Hamilton Place there was some trouble: the carriage doors were
opened, many pressing to shake hands, the police failing to reach him,
and the Princess preaching continuously that he was ill, so that she
was in a condition of exhaustion before they could get to the Park gate.
Just there, at that end of Constitution Hill, some man, seeing Eulalia
straining and fainting to see, snatched her up, and she saw a nose
beyond the Princess’s shoulder, to console her during her night-ride
to the coast. As to how the Princess came to be with him, and not Sir
Robert, was beyond her comprehension.
But if she could have waited, she would have seen him better, for later
the Queen would have him be seen by the people, and he was supported to
the balcony by the King and Elizabeth.
It was now first that the Palace was wrapt in a rapture of sound; and
crowds were still coming to eye its windows almost all the night long.
And the wings of the wind bruited that thing through Britain that
night: the dead was alive again, and somehow through the wonderful
wit of that wonderful Princess Elizabeth, when all the tecs had long
despaired. The heart of England softened toward Germany.
But none the less, England with all its heart longed that the next
day’s battle should be lost by Germany, and with its whole heart wrote
its hope that night, its demand—in nine million letters that drove
crazy the Circulation Office of the London Postal Department—that none
but the Prince should be the British strategist in that battle.
But of this the Queen would not hear, for seeing him on a bed strangely
before her sight, she meant to keep him, sharing her eyes, meantime,
between him and Elizabeth.
Elizabeth had calmly led him to her, saying: “Your Majesty, I have
brought you your son.”
Willy nilly, she _had_ now to be a charlatan, and it was willy, for
by heredity and nature this German girl was a greater charlatan and
farçeur than Cagliostro or Casanova: so, having some genuine dexterity,
she entertained Her Majesty half the morning in showing how clue on
clue had finally led her to the gate of “Ning Shou Kung”; nor had the
Queen’s feverish happiness the time to spy shaky spots in the chain.
Also Elizabeth related how, having gone to share with Sir Robert her
final thoughts, she would not wait, as he had been engaged with some
lady; an untruth which Sir Robert, on hearing of it, knew to be an
untruth, though now, of course, he was discreetly mum; so that the
Queen, and the Prince, remained unconscious that, not one, but _two_,
rescue parties had gone to “Ning Shou Kung” that night.
What the Queen, or no one, could definitely gather was _why_ the Prince
ever went to “Ning Shou Kung,” or its inmates’ motive for imprisoning
him! for the Prince, under contract to Oyone, refused details—the
motive was “political”; and though a mob sacked some of the rooms
of “Ning Shou Kung” the next day, its inmates were soon back in it
unpunished—to the wonder of public and police. Only Oyone lived no more
there, having no confidence in the Prince’s promise; and with her were
Chinnery and the air-boat.
But to the Queen’s fever details were of little importance for the
moment; there he lay safe; his saviour was her favourite and elect for
him; and “All, all, Teddy,” she said that morning, “you owe to this
dear and knowing head.”
At which the Prince lifted himself, bowed, kissed the Princess’s hand
in a particular manner. The Princess’s forehead rushed into a blush,
her eyes blazed. The Queen’s bent head dropped a tear. It was an
engagement.
Some moments later, though, the Prince again raised his head to say: “I
fancy, Your Majesty, that I shall be well enough for the fight”—and she
started! knowing that tone of her son.
He, for his part, had it in him that Eulalia lay dead of Oyone’s hand,
and, on the whole, thought well of wars.