"Excellent! the very thing!" exclaimed the Prince. "It couldn't be better if I had arranged it myself. My yacht is down in the Solent waiting for Cowes Week. I'll be afloat to-morrow. Give that woman a ten-pound note from me with my blessing. Now, I shall leave everything else to you. Do what you think fit with regard to our friends of the International. Kill as many of their spies as you can with safety, and make the chiefs believe that they are fighting the Devil himself. And now, good-night."
When Peter Petroff brought him the papers the next morning, the Prince took up theTelegraph, and turned to the page devoted to the minor events of the previous day. His eye was almost immediately caught by a paragraph headed:
"SUICIDE IN THE WATERLOO ROAD"Shortly after seven last evening the passers-by on the eastern side of this thoroughfare were startled by hearing the report of a firearm,apparently coming from the office of Mr Isaac Josephus at 138a. Constable 206 Q., who was on point-duty near the spot, had seen Mr Josephus enter the office with his key only a few minutes before, walking in a rather curious way, and staring straight before him. As the door was locked, the officer thought it his duty to force it. The door of the inner office was also locked, and when this was opened, the unfortunate man was found lying across the desk with a bullet wound in his temple. His right hand still clutched a cheap revolver which was loaded in five chambers. There appears at present to have been no reason for the rash act. Mr Josephus was a broker dealing chiefly in curios and antique jewellery. Although not in a large way of business, his affairs are understood to have been in a prosperous condition. What makes the tragedy all the more strange is the fact that suicide is almost unknown among persons of the Jewish faith."
"Shortly after seven last evening the passers-by on the eastern side of this thoroughfare were startled by hearing the report of a firearm,apparently coming from the office of Mr Isaac Josephus at 138a. Constable 206 Q., who was on point-duty near the spot, had seen Mr Josephus enter the office with his key only a few minutes before, walking in a rather curious way, and staring straight before him. As the door was locked, the officer thought it his duty to force it. The door of the inner office was also locked, and when this was opened, the unfortunate man was found lying across the desk with a bullet wound in his temple. His right hand still clutched a cheap revolver which was loaded in five chambers. There appears at present to have been no reason for the rash act. Mr Josephus was a broker dealing chiefly in curios and antique jewellery. Although not in a large way of business, his affairs are understood to have been in a prosperous condition. What makes the tragedy all the more strange is the fact that suicide is almost unknown among persons of the Jewish faith."
Oscarovitch felt a little shiver run down his back as he read the commonplace lines. The man who had done this had been in this room with him a few hours before, and one of the means of murder was now in his safe. It would have been just as easy for Phadrig to have caused him to look upon the fatal gem, left a bottle of poison with him, and told him to take it as medicine on going to bed. The only difference would have been that there would have been a very much greater sensation in the papers.
Nicol Hendry was reading the paragraph about the same time. His eyes contracted, and he stroked his beard with slow motions of his hand.The hand was steady, but even his nerves quivered a little. He divined instantly how the suicide-murder had been brought about, and this very fact, coupled with the absolute impossibility of proving anything, made the affair all the more disquieting.
"So that is the sort of thing we've got to fight, is it? I don't like it. Still, it goes far to prove that the Professor was perfectly right when he told me to keep a sharp eye on Mr Phadrig Amena."
As they discovered that the sea journey to Copenhagen would be somewhat tedious and uninteresting, and that the steamers were not exactly palatial, Nitocris and her father decided at the last minute to cross to Ostend, spend a day there and go on to Cologne, put in a couple of days more among its venerable and odorous purlieus, and two more at Hamburg, so that, while the present-day inhabitants were asleep, they might, as Nitocris somewhat flippantly put it, take a trip back through the centuries, and watch the great city grow from the little wooden village of the Ubii and the Roman colony of Agrippina into the Hanse Town of the thirteenth century: watch the laying of the first stone of the mighty Dom, the up-rising of the glorious fabric, and the crowning of the last tower in 1880.
During the journey from Hamburg to Copenhagen, Nitocris, reclining comfortably in a corner of their compartment in the long, easily-moving car, entertained herself with a review of these extraordinary experiences from the point of view of her temporal life, and found them not onlyextraordinary, but also very curious. She had already learnt that the connecting link between the two existences, when once the border had been passed, was Will: but Will of a far more intense and exalted character than that which was necessary as an incentive to action on the lower plane. There was naturally something that seemed extra-human in the mysterious force which was capable of bidding the present-day world vanish like a shadow into either the future or the past, its solid-seeming substance melt away like "the airy fabric of a vision," and summon in an instant, too brief to be measured, the past from the grave where it lay buried beneath the dust of uncounted ages, or the future from the womb of unborn things.
But to her, at least at first, the strangest part of the new revelation was this: When her will had carried her across the confines of the tri-dimensional world, and she saw the centuries marshalled and motionless before her, she felt not the slightest sense of wonder or awe. She was simply a being apart, moving along their ranks and passing them in review, herself unseen and unknown save by that other being who, in this state, was no longer her father or even her friend, but merely a companion endowed with power and intelligence equal to her own. Her human hopes and fears and loves and passions had, as it were, been left behind. The men and things she saw were absolutely real to her, as they had been to the men of other days, orwould be in days to come; but she herself was a pure Intelligence which saw and acted and thought with perfect clearness, but with absolutely no feeling save that of intellectual interest.
She saw armies meet in the shock of battle without a thrill of fear or horror; towns and cities roared up to the unheeding heavens in flame and smoke, and left her standing unmoved amidst their ruins; she heard the screams of agony that rang through the torture chambers without a quiver, and watched the long, pale lines of the martyrs to what in the earth-life was called Religion pass to the stake without a quiver of pity or a thrill of disgust. She stood face to face with the great ones of the earth who have graven their names deep upon the tablets of Time without reverence or admiration; and she witnessed the most heroic deeds and the most atrocious crimes with neither respect for the one nor hatred for the other.
Human history was in her eyes merely a logical sequence of necessary events, neither good nor bad in themselves, but only as they were viewed from this standpoint or that, by the oppressor or the oppressed, the slayer or the slain, the robber or the robbed, the governor or the governed. She learned that human emotion is merely a matter of time and space. One century does not feel the loves and hates of another, and the sorrows of Here have no real sympathy with the sufferings of There. Beyond the Border all these were merely matters of intense intellectual interest.
But when she returned to the temporal life the memory of them was marvellous and terrible. Her heart throbbed with pity and burned with righteous anger. Horror seemed to take hold of her soul and shake it with earthquake shudders when she thought that what she had seen but a few time-moments ago had really come to pass; and she longed for the power to show all this to the men and women of her own passing day, and bid them have done with the poor, shadowy images of themselves, which, had they really been gods, would have made of human life something better and happier and nobler than the ghastly tragedy which, as she had seen with her own eyes, it had been. But she knew that such a power was not hers. She, like her father, had, through the toil and strife and stress of many lives of mingled good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, won her way to the Perfect Knowledge; and so she knew that all these poor kings and slaves, conquerors and conquered, torturers and tortured, were all doing the same thing, were all groping their way through the shadows and the night towards the dawn and the light, through the hell of ignorance to the heaven of knowledge.
And now, too, since the Wisdom of the Ages was hers, she saw that over all the vast, weltering swarm of struggling immortals, hung the inevitable decree of silent, impersonal destiny. "As ye live, so shall ye die; as ye end, so shall ye begin again—in knowledge or ignorance, in goodor evil, life after life, death after death, world without end."
It was clear to her now why "some are born to honour and some to dishonour": some to happiness and some to misery, each in his or her degree; why the liver of a good life was happy, no matter what his place in the earth-life might be: and why the evil liver, no matter how high he might stand in his own or others' sight, carried the canker of past misdeeds in his heart. Standing, as she now did, in the midway of the present, looking with single gaze on past and future, she saw at once the honest striver after good in his yesterday-life rise to his reward in the life of to-day, and the dishonest rich and powerful sitting in the high places of to-day cast down into the gutterways of to-morrow. Life had ceased to be a riddle to her now.
What with their halts at Ostend, Cologne, and Hamburg, the thirty-three-hour journey lengthened itself out very pleasantly into a week; and so, when the famous city on the Sound was reached, they were as fresh and unfatigued as they were on the morning that they left "The Wilderness." Of course, they put up at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, and here they enjoyed themselves quietly for four days, for of all European capitals, Copenhagen is one of the pleasantest in which to idle a few fine summer days away.
On the evening of the fourth day they were just sitting down to their table by one of thewindows overlooking the Oestergade when Nitocris happened to look up towards the door through which the diners were trickling in an irregular stream of well-dressed men and women. For a moment her eyes became fixed. Then she bent her head over the table, and said:
"Dad, there is Prince Oscarovitch. I wonder what he is doing here? He is alone: please go and ask him to join us. I will tell you why afterwards."
They exchanged glances, and the Professor got up and went towards the door, while his daughter got through a considerable amount of hard thinking in a very short time. She was, of course, perfectly conversant with his share in the Zastrow affair, so far as her father had yet gone with it; but she determined that when Copenhagen had gone to sleep that night they would cross the Border and pay a visit to the Castle of Trelitz at the time of the tragedy, and follow it out as far as it had gone.
It has already been shown that on her first meeting with the Prince she conceived an aversion from him which was then inexplicable save by the ordinary theory of natural antipathy: but now she knew that she had been Nitocris, Queen of Egypt, when he was Menkau-Ra, the Lord of War, who would have forced her to wed him by the might and terror of the sword, and the will of a blind and blood-intoxicated populace. She had hated him then even to death, and now she hated him still in life; wherefore shedesired to make his closer acquaintance on the earth-plane on which they had met once more after many lives.
As he had been in those far-off days, so he was now, a splendid specimen of aristocratic humanity. Many eyes had followed her as she had walked to her table, but there were more people in the room now, and as the Prince walked towards her beside the famous Professor who had puzzled all the mathematicians of Europe, the whole crowd of guests was looking at nothing but these three.
"This is indeed good fortune, Miss Marmion, and as good as it is unexpected—which, perhaps makes it all the better! Who would have thought of finding you in Copenhagen?" he said, as he bowed low over her hand.
"If there is any reason at all for it, Prince, it is that my father and I always like to take our holidays at irregular times and in unexpected places: by which, I mean places where we do not expect to meet all our acquaintances," she replied, as she sat down. "I think we manage to bore each other quite enough in London, and we like each other all the better when we meet again."
"Is not that rather an ungracious speech, Niti, seeing that one of the said acquaintances has only just chanced to join us?" said the Professor mildly.
"You mean as regards the Prince?" she laughed. "Certainly not. His Highness is hardly an acquaintance—yet. You know we have onlyhad the pleasure of meeting him once: and then, of course, I saidallour acquaintances. There might be exceptions."
These words, spoken with a quite indescribable charm, were, as he thought, quite the sweetest that Oscarovitch had heard for many a day. It had been perfectly easy for a man with his official influence to trace by telegraph every movement that the Marmions had made after he had guessed that they would travel by either Calais or Ostend. He had wired for his yacht, theGrashna, to meet him at Dover, run across to Ostend, found that they had left there for Cologne with through tickets for Copenhagen, again guessed rightly that they would spend a few days there and in Hamburg, and then steam away for the Sound.
The farther north he travelled, the farther he left Phadrig and his phantasies behind, and the nearer he came to the belief that, if he had only a fair chance and the field to himself, as he intended to have, he would not find very much difficulty in convincing Nitocris that there was no comparison at all between the humble naval officer she had left behind to do his work on his dirty little destroyer, and the millionaire Prince who could give her one of the noblest names in Europe and everything that the heart of woman could desire. And now these sweetly-spoken words and the glance which accompanied them, her undisguised pleasure at the chance meeting, and her father's very evident approvalof his presence, quickly but finally convinced him that he had come to a perfectly just conclusion.
Of course, there was the memory of another woman, only a little less fair than Nitocris, who had shut herself up yonder in the gloomy Castle of Trelitz, acting the farce of her official sorrow for love of him, and pining for the time when the finding of her betrayed husband's corpse should leave her free, after a decent interval of mock-mourning, to join her lot with his: but what did that matter? Was it not as easy to get rid of a woman as a man? Was not the fatal beauty of the Horus Stone at his command now that he was its possessor for good or evil? A well-arranged suicide might easily be taken by the world as the excusable, if deplorable, result of her mysterious bereavement.
The conversation during dinner naturally turned on ways and means of travelling, and, when the Professor had sketched out their plans, Oscarovitch said with an admirably simulated deference:
"My dear sir, I most sincerely hope that you and Miss Marmion will not think that I am presuming on an acquaintance which, if only a new one now, may perhaps one day be older, if I venture to suggest another way of making your tour. I am an old voyager in these waters, and I can assure you that the steamers, though vastly improved, have not quite reached the standard of the Atlantic liner."
"Oh, but you know, Prince, we didn't expect it," interrupted Nitocris. "Neither my father nor Ihave the slightest objection to roughing it a little. In fact, that is half the fun of wandering."
"And slow travelling between stated points, not always of the greatest or any interest, together with the enforced company of a promiscuous crowd of tourists and commercial travellers, who, by the way, are mostly German, and therefore of nature and necessity disagreeable, would about make up the other half," said Oscarovitch, leaning back in his chair with a low laugh. "No, no, my dear Miss Marmion, I am afraid you would not find that the reality quite squared with the anticipation. Now, may I risk the suspicion of presumption and offer an alternative proposition?"
"Why not?" said Nitocris with a smile, and a glance which dazzled him. "I'm sure it is very kind of you to take so much interest in our poor little attempt to get away for a while from the madding crowd who are doing the round of the same stale, weary pleasures that they try so hard to enjoy year after year, and then come backsotired, after all."
"Then," he replied, looking at them alternately, "as I have your permission, I would suggest that, instead of rushing from fixed point to fixed point in crowded steamers and the shackles of Company or Government regulations, you should take possession of a fairly comfortable steam yacht of a little over a thousand tons which will be entirely at your disposal, and will run you from anywhere to anywhere you choose at any speed you like, from five to thirty-five knots anhour, with properly trained servants to attend to you, and, as the advertisements say, 'every possible comfort and convenience.'"
"Which, of course, means that you have got your yacht here, and are so very kind as to ask us to become your guests for a time," said the Professor, with a suspicion of stiffness. "It is more than generous of you, Prince, but really——"
"But really, my dear sir," Oscarovitch interrupted, with a gesture of deprecation, "I can assure you that, so far as I am concerned, there is no kindness, to say nothing of generosity. It is pure selfishness. This is my position. I have managed to escape for a time from the toils of official work and worry, and the almost equally irksome bonds of that form of penal servitude which is called Society. Like you, I have fled overseas, but, unlike you, I have no company but my own, and I have had a great deal too much of that already, though I have only been three days and nights at sea. I have no plans, I have got nothing to do and nowhere to go; and so, if you and Miss Marmion would take pity on my loneliness all the generosity would be on your side. Of course, I cannot presume to ask you to change your plans all at once, but if you will sleep on my proposition and come and lunch with me to-morrow on board theGrashnaand take a run up the Sound, say, to Elsinore, you may be able to come to a decision."
It was a lovely night, and so they took their coffee and liqueurs, and the two men their smokeson the balcony overlooking the Oestergade, which might be called the Rue de la Paix of Copenhagen, and watched the well-dressed crowds sauntering to and fro past the brilliantly lighted shops; and Nitocris, who seemed to her father to be in singularly high spirits, sent the conversation rippling over all manner of subjects with the exception of politics and the Fourth Dimension. Oscarovitch was becoming more and more fascinated as the light-winged minutes sped by, and he took but little pains to conceal the fact. Nitocris, of course, saw this, and simulated a delightful unconsciousness. The Professor was, for the time being, completely mystified. He knew that his daughter hated the Prince with a thorough cordiality, and yet he had never seen her make herself so entirely charming to any man, not even excepting Merrill himself, as she was to this man, her enemy of the Ages. He could have solved the problem instantly by crossing the Border, but then the sudden vanishing of a famous scientist from the midst of the brilliant company on the balcony would have set all the newspapers in Europe chattering, with consequences which would have been the reverse of pleasant both to his daughter and himself.
However, he had not long to wait, for Nitocris soon rose, saying that she must go to Jenny, her maid, to see about packing arrangements for to-morrow; and the Prince, after another cigarette and liqueur, took his leave and went on board the yacht to give orders for her to be put intoher best trim, and then to have a luxurious half-hour with the Horus Stone, and indulge in fond imaginings as to how it would look hanging from a chain of diamonds on the white breast of Miss Nitocris.
When the Professor went to his own sitting-room he found his daughter waiting to say good-night.
"Niti," he said, as he closed the door, "I don't want to seem inquisitive, but, frankly, I was astounded at the gracious way in which you treated that scoundrel Oscarovitch."
"Dad," she replied, with apparent irrelevance, "do you believe in the forgiveness of sins?"
"Of course not! How could any one who holds the Doctrine do that? We know that every moral debit must be worked off and turned into a credit by the sinner, however many lives of suffering it takes to do it. Why do you ask?"
"So that you might answer as you have done!" she said, with a little laugh. "Now this Oscarovitch has sinned grievously, not only in this life but in many others, and I am going to see that he works off at least some of his debit as you put it somewhat commercially. He loved me in the old days in Memphis, and he loves me still in the same brutal, animal way. I know that if he cannot get me by fair means he will try to take me by force—and I am going to let him do it."
"Niti!"
"Yes, he shall take me; he shall think he hadgot me safe away from you and Mark—and when he has got me he shall taste what the hot-and-strong sort of Christian preachers call the torments of the damned. No, I shall not kill him. He shall live till he prays to all his gods, if he has any, that he may die. He shall hunger without eating, thirst without drinking, lie down without sleeping, have wealth that he cannot spend, and palaces so hideously haunted that he dare not live in them, until, when men wish to illustrate the uttermost extreme of human misery, they shall point to Prince Oscarovitch. I, the Queen, have said it!"
Then, with a swift change of voice and manner, she laid her hands on her father's shoulders, kissed him, and murmured:
"Good-night, Dad—at least as far as this world is concerned."
It was the 6th of June again.
Once more Prince Zastrow rode with Ulik von Kessner and Alexis Vollmar and the attendant huntsmen up the avenue of pines leading to the gate of the Castle of Trelitz, but now accompanied by two unseen Presences which belonged at once to their own world and also to another and wider one. Once more the great doors opened and they passed into the trophy-decked, skin-carpeted hall: and once more they were welcomed by the stately, silken-clad woman who came down the broad staircase to greet her lord and his guests. Emil von Zastrow, last and worthiest scion of his ancient line, the verybeau idealof youthful strength and manly dignity, ran half-way up the stairs to meet his lady and his love, and then the men went away to their rooms, while the Princess Hermia, true housewife as well as princess, betook herself to the pleasant task of making sure that all the preparations for dinner were complete.
The dinner was served in one of the smaller rooms, in the modern wing of the Castle, on an oval table. The Prince sat at one end faced by his beautiful consort. To his right sat his guest,Alexis Vollmar, and a tall, handsome, but somewhat hard-featured woman of about thirty, with the clear blue eyes and thick, yellow-gold hair which proclaimed her a daughter of the northern German lowlands. This was Hulda von Tyssen, the Princess's companion and lady-in-waiting. They were faced by a stout, powerfully-built man with a full beard and moustacheà laFriedrich, Ulik von Kessner, High Chamberlain of Boravia. Captain Alexis Vollmar was a typical Russian officer of the younger school, tall, well-set-up, and good-looking after the Muscovite fashion. He had distinguished himself in the Far East, but just now he preferred the serene atmosphere of Boravia to the thunder-laden air of Holy Russia.
The talk was of hunting and war and politics and the chances of the Russian revolution, and on this latter subject it was perfectly unrestrained, for all knew that the Powers had made a secret compact by which they bound themselves, in the event of the fall of the Romanoff Dynasty and the Arch-Ducal oligarchy—which all Europe would be very glad to see the last of—to support Prince Zastrow as elective candidate for the vacant throne.
The Revolutionary leaders had been sounded on the subject, and were found strongly in favour of the scheme. It meant a return to the ancient principle of elected monarchy, and Prince Zastrow, though now a German ruling prince, represented the union of two of the oldest and noblest families in Russia and Poland. Moreover, he had pledged himself to a Constitution which, without going toRadical or Socialistic extremes, embodied all that the moderate and responsible adherents of the Revolutionary cause desired or considered suitable for the people in their present stage of political development—which, of course, meant everything that Oscar Oscarovitch did not want.
After dinner they went out through the long French windows on to a verandah which overlooked a vast sea of forest, lying dark and seemingly limitless under the fading daylight and the radiance of the brightening moon. Since their marriage day the Prince had made it a bargain that whenever they dineden famille, his wife should prepare his coffee with her own hands. She even roasted the berries and ground them herself, and, as many a time before, she did it to-night in the seclusion of the little room set apart for that and similar purposes. She was alone in the physical sense, for the two watching Presences were invisible to her, and so, for all she knew, no one saw her measure twenty drops of a colourless fluid from a little blue bottle into the coronetted cup of almost transparent porcelain which had been one of her wedding presents to her husband.
After a couple of cups of coffee and half a dozen half-smoked cigarettes, the Prince stretched his long legs out, struggled with a yawn, and said in a sleepy voice:
"My Princess, you must ask our guests to excuse me. I am tired after the long day in the sun; and so, if I may, I will go to bed."
He rose, and the rest rose at the same moment. He bowed his good-night, and the two saluted. The Princess followed him into the dining-room.
The unseen watchers stood by the end of the great heavily-hung bed, in the midst of which lay Prince Zastrow, seemingly sinking into the slumber of death. Von Kessner leaned over and raised an eyelid, and said to the Princess, who was standing on the other side, the single word: "Unconscious." She bent forward for a moment as though she were bidding a silent farewell to the man to whom she had pledged her maiden troth, then straightened up and walked like some beautiful simulacrum of a woman towards the door which Vollmar held open for her....
The earth-hours passed, and the two men kept their watch by the bed, conversing now and then in whispers between long intervals of anxious silence, until three strokes sounded from the bell of the Castle clock. The whole household, save one fair woman, who, in softly-slippered feet, was pacing the floor of her bedroom, was fast asleep, and the days of sentries were far past. Von Kessner gently lifted one of the arms lying on the coverlet of the bed and let it fall. It dropped as the arm of a man who had just died might have done. Again he raised an eyelid, this time with some difficulty. The eyeball beneath was fixed and glassy as that of a corpse. He nodded across the bed to the Russian, and together they turned the bedclothes down to the foot. Then from under the bed hepulled out a bundle of grey skins which he spread on the floor beside the bed. It was a sleeping bag such as hunters use in winter on the snow-swept plains and forests of Northern Europe. Vollmar turned the head-flap back. Then they lifted the body of the Prince from the bed, slid it into the sack, and buttoned the flap down over the face.
"That Egyptian's drug has worked well," whispered Von Kessner.
Vollmar nodded, and whispered back:
"I wish I had a handful of it. But it is time. He will be ready for us now."
Even as he spoke the locked door opened, as it were of its own accord, and Phadrig stood in the room dressed in the livery of the Prince's coachman. Von Kessner and Vollmar turned grey as he bowed, and whispered:
"The doors are open, Excellencies, and all is ready!"
Then the three lifted the shapeless bag and carried it with noiseless tread down to the hall and out through the half-open doors to where a carriage drawn by four black horses stood waiting. Though there was no one in charge of them, they stood as still as though carved out of blocks of black marble until the body of the Prince had been laid in the carriage and Von Kessner and Vollmar had taken their places beside it. Then Phadrig mounted the box, shook the reins, and the rubber-shod horses moved silently away at a trot, which, as soon as themain road was reached, became a gallop only a little less silent than the trot.
The carriage turned aside from the road, and ran down a broad forest lane till it stopped by the shore of a little sandy inlet. The bow of a long black boat was resting on the sand, and six closely-blindfolded men were sitting on the thwarts with oars out. Another stood on the beach with the painter in his hands. The body of the Prince was carried from the carriage to the boat, and laid in the stern sheets. Von Kessner and Vollmar remained on board, and Phadrig went back to the carriage. At a short word of command the oarsman backed hard, and the boat slid off the sand into the smooth water of the little cove. Then she shot away and melted into the light haze which hung over the outside sea.
The boat stopped under the shadow of the long, low-lying black hull of a four-funnelled destroyer. A rope dropped from the deck and was made fast by Vollmar in the bow. The blindfolded crew were helped up the ladder which hung over the side and taken below forward. Then came a sharp order: "All hands below"; and when the deck was deserted, Von Kessner and Vollmar went up the ladder and were met on deck by Oscar Oscarovitch in civilian dress. There was another man beside him in the uniform of a lieutenant. He slacked off the tackle falls of the davits under which the boat had brought up, dropped down the ladder and hooked them on. When he got back to the deck the four menhauled first on one tackle and then on the other, till the boat was up flush with the deck. The falls were belayed, and Oscarovitch got into the boat and opened the flap of the sleeping-sack. He touched the spring of an electric pocket-lamp and looked upon the calm, cold features of his rival. Then he buttoned down the flap again and returned to the deck. The four went down into the cabin: glasses were filled with champagne, and as Oscarovitch raised his to his lips, he said:
"Count and Captain Vollmar, I am satisfied. Let us drink to the New Empire of the Russias and the sceptre of Ivan the Terrible!"
"And his illustrious successor!" added Von Kessner.
Within half an hour a small boat was lowered; the Chamberlain and Vollmar got into it and rowed away toward the cove. The Russian officer went on to the little bridge, signalled "full speed ahead" to the engine-room, and then took the wheel. The screws ground the water astern into foam, the black shape leapt forward and sped away eastward into the glimmering dawn with its silent passenger lying in the swinging boat, and the unseen watchers standing by the helmsman....
More earth-hours passed. The sun rose upon a lonely sea. The destroyer stopped, and a white speck on the eastward horizon rapidly grew into the white shape of a large yacht flying through the water at a tremendous speed. In a few minutes she was almost alongside. She swung round in a sharp curve, slowed down and droppeda boat. Oscarovitch and the lieutenant lowered the destroyer's boat till it touched the water. The other came alongside, and the body of Prince Zastrow was transferred to it, and Oscarovitch followed it. Four men from the yacht's boat jumped on board the destroyer and hauled hers up. The other was backed to the ladder and they came on board. A silent salute passed between Oscarovitch and the lieutenant, and a few minutes later the yacht's boat was hoisted to the davits, and the white shape was growing smaller and dimmer amidst the light haze that lay on the water shimmering under the slanting rays of the rising sun.
Morning grew into noon, noon faded into evening, and evening darkened into night. The yacht ran into a wide-opening gulf between two forest-clad points, on the southern of which twinkled the lights of a large town. These were soon left behind by the flying yacht, and as a vast sea of fleecy cloud drifted up from the north-east and spread its veil across the path of the half moon, a little cluster of lights gleamed out on the port bow. Her bowsprit swerved to the left till it pointed directly to them. Presently she slowed down and ran into a little land-locked bay surrounded with dense pine woods which came down almost to the water's edge, swung round and slowed up alongside a wooden jetty. From this a broad road, cut straight through the forest, sloped steeply up to a plateau on which stood a gaunt, grey, turreted castle, the very pictureof the sea-robbers' home that it had been in the days of Oscarovitch's not very remote ancestors. Up this road and into the outer gate across the lowered drawbridge the sleeping-sack and the insensible man within were borne. Through the keep-yard it was taken into the Castle and up to a large room in the eastern turret, comfortably furnished, and containing a bed almost as luxurious as that in which Prince Zastrow had lain down to sleep the evening before. Oscarovitch preceded the men who carried him, and was met at the door by a grey-haired, keen-eyed man, who bowed before him, and said in a low tone:
"May I presume to ask if this is my charge, Highness?"
"It is, Doctor Hugo; and I give him into your hands with every confidence that you will restore your patient to health as quickly as any man in Europe could do. I must leave immediately, and so I trust everything to you. All care must be taken of him. He must want for nothing that you can give him—except liberty."
Oscarovitch returned the doctor's assenting bow and left the room. In half an hour the yacht was flying at full speed over the smooth waters of the Baltic, heading a little to the south of West.
"Good morning, Dad," said Nitocris, as she entered the sitting-room about half an hour before breakfast the next morning. "What is your opinion of the European situation now?"
"Good morning, Niti; what is yours?" asked her father, looking at her with grave eyes and smiling lips.
"As it was yesterday, only rather more so. In his present incarnation, Prince Oscar Oscarovitch is, I should think, about as black-hearted a scoundrel as ever polluted the air that honest people breathe."
"I entirely agree with you. And now, believing that, do you still propose to trust yourself to his tender mercies on board his own yacht, surrounded, as you will be, by men who, no doubt, are his absolute slaves?"
"Itrust myself to his tender mercies, Dad?" she replied, drawing herself up and throwing her head back a little; "you seem to have got hold of the thing by the wrong end, as Brenda would say. That is only what it will look like. The reality will be that he will blindly trust himself tomymercies—and I can assure you that he willfind them anything but tender. No, dear, we shall accept His Highness's invitation to lunch, and then his offer of the hospitality of the yacht for the trip, which, by the way, I fancy will be more to the eastward than to the northward——"
"You mean, I suppose, Trelitz and Viborg?"
"Not Trelitz, I think, but Viborg almost certainly. That will be the end of the abduction as far as I can see from our present plane of existence."
"Really, Niti—well, well. Of course, I know that you will be perfectly safe: but what would our good friends on this plane, as you put it, the Van Huysmans, for instance, think if they could hear you talking so calmly to your own father about getting yourself abducted by a man whom you justly think to be one of the most unscrupulous scoundrels on earth! And, by the way, what is to become of me in the carrying out of this little scheme of yours? I hope you don't expect me to connive at the abduction of my own daughter. I have a certain amount of reputation to lose, you know."
"Oh, if His Highness is the clever villain that we know him to be, I think we may safely trust him to arrange for your temporary disappearance from the scene. And whatever he does it will be easy for you to play the part of the passive victim for the time being. He can't injure or kill you, for if it came to extremities you have the means of giving his people such a fright as would probably drive them out of their senses,just as I could if their master got troublesome. Really, from a certain point of view, the adventure will have a decidedly humorous aspect."
"With a very considerable leaven of tragedy."
"Yes, the tragedy will be a logical sequence of the comedy—and, as I said last night, it will be tragedy. And now suppose we go to breakfast. I have been up nearly two hours helping Jenny with the packing, and this lovely air has given me a raging appetite. There's a little more to do yet, and we shall have His Highness here before long to ask for our decision and take us off to the yacht."
Here she was quite right, for she had hardly left her father to his after-breakfast pipe and gone upstairs to help her maid, than Oscarovitch came into the smoking-room.
"Good morning, Professor Marmion! I need not ask you if you have had a good night. You look the very picture of a man who has slept the sleep of the just. And Miss Marmion?"
"Thanks, Your Highness, I think we have both managed to spend the night to good purpose. The air here is glorious just now. I always think that sound, dreamless sleep is the best sign that a place is doing you good."
"Oh, undoubtedly, though for some reason or other I did not sleep very well last night. Something had disagreed with me, I suppose. I seemed to have a sense of being pursued to the uttermost ends of the earth and back again by some relentless foe who simply would not allow me to takea moment's rest. But I didn't come to talk about the stuff that dreams are made of. I came to ask whether my cruise is to be a lonely one, or whether I am to have the very great pleasure of your company."
Franklin Marmion, for perhaps the first time in his life, felt distinctly murderous towards a fellow-creature as he looked at this splendid specimen of physical humanity, knowing so well the real man who was hiding behind that fascinating exterior; but he managed to answer pleasantly enough:
"We have talked the matter over, Prince, and we have come to the conclusion that your very kind invitation is really too good to be refused. We know that we are incurring a debt that we shall not be able to pay, but we are trusting to your generosity to let us off."
"On the contrary, my dear Professor," said Oscarovitch, without the slightest attempt to conceal the pleasure that the acceptation gave him, "it is yourself and Miss Marmion who have made me your debtor. In fact, if you had not found yourselves able to come, I should have run theGrashnaback to Cowes, gone up to London, plunged into a maelström of dissipation, and probably ended by losing a great deal of money at Ascot and Goodwood. Ah, Miss Marmion, good morning! How well the air of Copenhagen seems to agree with you! The Professor has just gladdened my soul by telling me that you have decided to take pity on my loneliness."
"Good morning, Prince!" she replied, puttingher hand for a moment in the one he held out. "Yes, we are coming, if you will have us. In fact, I have just finished packing."
"Ah, excellent! Well now, since that is happily arranged, it would be a pity to waste any of this lovely morning. The Sound is like a streak of blue sky fallen from heaven. My gig is down at the jetty, and I have a couple of my men here who will convoy your baggage down. If it is packed, as you say, you need not trouble about it. You will find everything safe on board."
"Thank you, Prince," said the Professor. "Then I will go and settle up at the office while Niti puts her hat on. I will have the things sent down, and we may as well walk to the jetty. It will do me good after that big breakfast. Jenny had better get into a cab and go down with the luggage."
When they reached the promenade along the Sound shore Oscarovitch pointed to a beautifully-shaped, three-masted, two-funnelled white yacht lying about five hundred yards out, and said:
"That is theGrashna, Miss Marmion. I hope you like the look of her."
"She is beautiful!" exclaimed Nitocris, recognising at once the vessel which had met the Russian destroyer on the early morning of the 7th. "She almost looks as if she could fly."
"So she can in a sense," laughed the Prince. "Come now, here is the gig. We will get on board, and you shall see her go through her paces."
Neither she nor her father were strangers to yachts, but when they mounted the bridge of theGrashnaand looked over her from stem to stern, they had to admit that they had never seen anything quite so daintily splendid. They had chosen their rooms, and Jenny was below unpacking. Although, of course, he had a captain on board, the Prince often sailed the yacht himself when he had guests on board. He had a genuine love for the beautiful craft, and he took an almost boyish delight in showing what she could do. She was a twelve-hundred-ton, triple-screw, turbine-driven boat, and, thanks to the space-economy of the new system, her builders had been able to stow away fifteen thousand horse-power in her engine-room, and this when fully developed gave a speed in smooth water of thirty-five knots or a little over forty statute miles an hour.
The anchor was up almost as soon as they got on to the bridge, and Oscarovitch moved the pointer of the telegraph to "Ahead slow." The quartermaster in the oval wheel-house behind him moved the little wheel a few spokes to starboard, her mellow whistle tooted, and she glided in an outward curve through the other yachts and shipping, and gained the open water.
"Now," he said, turning to Nitocris, "we can begin to move. It is roughly thirty English miles to Elsinore. If you have never done any fast travelling at sea and would like to do some now, I can get you there in about three-quarters of an hour."
"What!" exclaimed the Professor, "thirty miles in forty-five minutes by sea! That is over forty miles an hour. A wonderful speed."
"Yes," he replied, almost tenderly; "but my beautifulGrashnais a wonderful craft—at least, I think you will say so when you see what she can do. Now, if you will take advice, you and Miss Marmion will go into shelter, for it will begin to blow soon."
Behind the wheel-house was an observation room, as it would be called in the States, running nearly the whole length of the bridge, and fronted with thick plate glass. They went in, and Oscarovitch turned the pointer to half-speed. There was no increase in vibration, but the shore began to slip away behind them faster and faster, and the northern suburbs of Copenhagen rose ahead and fell astern as though they were part of a swiftly moving panorama. Then the pointer went down to full speed, and the Prince, after a word to the quartermaster, joined them in the bridge-house and closed the door.
"You will need all your eyes to see much of the shore now," he said; "I have given her her wings."
Nitocris felt a shudder in the carpeted floor. Looking ahead she saw the bow lift slightly. Then a smooth, green swathe of water curled up on either side. She looked aft, and saw a broad torrent of froth, foaming like a furious, rapid stream away from the stern. The houses and trees on the shore seemed to run into each other, and slide out of sight almost before the eye could rest upon them. The water alongside was merely a blue-green blur. Nitocris involuntarily held her breath as though she had been out on deck.
"It is wonderful, Prince!" she said, almost in awhisper. "That alleged express from Hamburg was nothing to this: and yet how steadily she moves in spite of the speed. I should have thought that it would have nearly shaken us to jelly."
"That is the turbines, dear," said her father, who was already wondering whether Oscarovitch was doing this just to show how hopeless any pursuit of such a vessel would be. "They are a marvellous means of applying steam power. Lieutenant Parsons is robbing the sea of one, at least, of its worst terrors."
"Yes," added the Prince, "we are travelling a little over forty miles an hour; and if you got that speed out of reciprocating engines you would scarcely be able to lie on the deck without holding on to something, yet here we are as comfortable as though we were standing in a drawing-room."
"You have given us a new experience to begin with," said Nitocris, thinking how nice it would be to take her wedding trip with Merrill in such a craft as this. "Why, look at the two shores coming together, Dad!"
"No, excuse me," said Oscarovitch, "we are only about half-way to the Gate of the Baltic yet. That land on the right is the island of Hvreen. When we have passed that you will soon see the heights of Elsinore and Helsingborg rising ahead. There are only about two and a half miles between Denmark and Sweden there."
"Oh yes, of course. I am forgetting my geography," laughed Nitocris, as the low, wooded patch of land came rushing towards them asthough it were adrift on a fast-flowing stream. "Goodness, what a speed!"
"A very wonderful craft, Prince," added the Professor, as the island drifted past; "she quite inclines me towards a breach of the tenth commandment. Now that you have given us this taste of the delights of speed, I think that if I were a millionaire, I should try to build one to beat her."
"Exactly," laughed Oscarovitch. "It is marvellous this fascination of speed. Your poet, Henley, touched the pulse of the times when he wrote those splendid lines of his. But surely, Professor,youwould not have very much difficulty in leaving all far behind. A man to whom mathematical impossibilities are as easy as an addition sum ought to be able to realise the dream of the ages and solve the problem of aerial navigation."
He looked him straight in the eyes as he said this. He fully believed in the possibility of human flight, given the transcendent genius who could work out the equation of weight and power. Perhaps that genius might be with him now in the bridge-house. His vivid imagination was already picturing the lovely girl at his side crowned Empress of the Russias and the East, and himself in command of an aerial navy, beneath whose assault the armies and navies and fortresses of the rest of the world would be as so many toys to play with and destroy.
"If I could do that, and I do not think it would be so very difficult after all," said Franklin Marmion, returning his glance, "I would notdo it. It would put too much power in the hands of a few men, and we have enough of that already. The owner of a fleet of aerial warships would be above all human law. He could terrorise the earth, and make mankind his slaves. Life would become unendurable under such conditions. Commercialism, which only means slavery plus the liberty to starve, is bad enough, but it is at least possible. The other would be impossible. There is no man quite honest enough to be trusted with such a power as that. I have worked the thing out, and it is perfectly feasible, but I burnt my designs and calculations."
"What!" exclaimed Oscarovitch, flushing in spite of his effort to keep the blood back from his face. "You have solved the problem, and won't make use of the greatest invention of all the ages! Surely, Professor, that is a little quixotic, is it not?"
"Who am I that I should bring a curse upon humanity, Prince?" he answered gravely. "Do you not kill each other fast enough now? No, the world is not fit for such a development yet. My results will remain my own until Tom Hood's ideal of good government has been realised."
"And what was that, Dad?" asked Nitocris, who had a double reason for being interested in the conversation. "If I ever knew it, I have forgotten it."
"Despotism, Niti—and an angel from heaven for the despot," he replied, with another look into the Prince's eyes which brought him to theconclusion that the sooner his presence on board theGrashnawas dispensed with the better for his plans. There was a sense of quiet mastery in Franklin Marmion's manner which made him uneasy.
"Ah! there is the famous fortress, is it not? the home of Hamlet and Ophelia and the Ghost!" she exclaimed, pointing ahead to where a grey-blue mass was rising out of the water. "Do you believe in ghosts, Prince?" she added suddenly, flashing a glance at him which seemed to pierce his brain like a ray of unearthly light.
"Ghosts? No, Miss Marmion. I'm afraid I am too hopelessly materialistic for that. I never saw or heard of an authentic ghost, and I do not propose to believe until I see."
"We have a ghost at 'The Wilderness,'—the wraith of a poor young lady who killed herself after some royal blackguard had abused his own hospitality. She often comes to visit me in my study," said the Professor, as though he were relating the most ordinary occurrence.
"Ah," smiled the Prince, "that is very interesting: but, of course, it would be in the power of a man like yourself to have experiences which are denied to ordinary mortals. Still, granted all that, I confess that I have often wondered whether or not I should be frightened if I really did see a ghost."
"Yes, I wonder?" murmured Nitocris, with a great deal more meaning than he had any idea of just then.
All three felt that the conversation was getting a little difficult, and they were not sorry whenthe rapid rising of the rock of Elsinore made it necessary for Oscarovitch to go out to the engine telegraph.
"His Highness doesn't believe in ghosts now," whispered Nitocris to her father, when the door shut behind him, "but I think he will before very long. I wonder what he is really going to do? I've half a mind to——"
"No, no, Niti," he said quickly; "keep this side of the Border till you really have to cross it. What on earth, literally, would happen if he came back and found me standing here alone?"
"Oh, of course I didn't mean it," she smiled. "It would be very poor sport to spoil both the comedy and the tragedy before the curtain goes up. I wonder if the drama will begin to-night? I shouldn't be surprised."
"Nor I," said the Professor, a trifle grimly. "I didn't at all like his looks when I was talking about the flying machine. The brute looked as if he were quite capable of locking me up and starving or torturing me until I gave him the secret. My word, I should like to see him try! I'd have him grovelling at my feet in five minutes."
The door opened and Oscarovitch came in. He took off the cap which had been pulled tight over his eyes, and said:
"Well, we have arrived! Almost exactly forty-five minutes. There is Elsinore, there is Kronborg, King Frederick's sixteenth-century castle, and there is Marienlyst, which is to Copenhagen what Brighton is to London, only, I must say, in amuch more refined sense. Now what is your pleasure, Miss Marmion? We have still nearly two hours before lunch, so, if you would like an hour's stroll ashore, the gig will be ready in a couple of minutes."
"Thank you, Prince," she said with a rewarding smile. "Dad, what do you think? It all looks very beautiful under this sun and sky."
"Which, of course, means that you want to go ashore, Niti," said her father. "For my own part, I certainly should like a little walk on new ground. I have never been here before."
"Then, of course we will go," said Oscarovitch, opening the door and going to the telegraph.
The yacht came to a standstill in a few minutes, and the gig was waiting at the foot of the gangway ladder. They spent a very pleasant hour ashore, and what they saw, you may read of in your Murray and Baedeker, wherefore there is no need to set it down here. When they came aboard again, lunch was almost ready, and the steward presented his master and the Professor with quite exceptional cocktails in the smoking-room. Then they went and had a wash, and the mellow gong sounded.
I am not very fond of those descriptions in stories which read like extracts from an upholsterer's price-list, nor yet those accounts of meals that, after all, are only menus writ large, so it may suffice to say that the saloon of theGrashnawas an arrangement of sandal-wood panels, framed in thin silver filigree, and hung with exquisitelittle masterpieces in water-colour, and black and white, and crayon, mostly sea-scapes, with here and there a beautiful head with living eyes which followed you everywhere; that the rich yellow of the panels was enhanced byportièresand curtains of deep golden-bronze silk, and that the domed ceiling was of pale, sky-blue enamel spangled with the constellations of the northern heavens, which at night lit up the whole saloon with a soft electric radiance. As for the lunch, it was as nearly perfect as the best-paid chef afloat could make it, after his master had asked him as a personal favour to do so.
They ran back quietly to Copenhagen at twenty knots, and Oscarovitch and the Professor went ashore to send off a few telegrams, leaving Nitocris, for her own reasons, to make herself at home on the yacht. They returned in time to dress for dinner and enjoy a stroll on the broad upper deck, and watch the sunset over the town and the quickly-increasing sparkle of the myriad lights on shore and sea. When they came up after dinner, these lights were only represented by a luminous haze glimmering under the stars to the northward. TheGrashnawas heading nearly due south at an easy speed towards the Baltic Islands.
Something told both Nitocris and her father that the decisive hour would come soon, and they were both prepared for its advent.
The Prince and the Professor sat up in the smoking-room for a considerable time after Nitocris had retired. Oscarovitch was doing his utmost to persuade his guest to revoke his decision as to the creation of the aerial warships. Franklin Marmion's simple announcement, which he never thought for a moment of disbelieving, had filled his mind with new ideas, which were rapidly taking the shape of gorgeous dreams of an empire such as mortal man had never ruled over before. All his present designs faded away into mere trivialities in comparison with this splendid conception. He pictured Nitocris, as his consort, Empress of the air, and himself Lord of earth and sea and sky. But all his subtle arguments, all his delicately-put suggestions, and his skilfully framed promises failed to produce the slightest effect upon the genially inflexible man, who quietly turned them all aside, as a grown man might deal with the arguments of a boy.
The thought that this man who was lying back in his deep-seated armchair, holding a cigar in a white, delicately-shaped hand which was strongenough to shake the world to its foundations, should possess such a tremendous power and yet refuse to use it, as quietly as he might have declined an invitation to dinner, exasperated him almost beyond the bounds of patience. If he would only join forces with him what glories might they not achieve, what splendours of power and possession might not be theirs! Here was universal empire, in one sense, only a couple of yards away from him! In another it was more distant than the suns which flame in Space beyond the Milky Way. It was maddening, but it was true, and he knew the man well enough now to feel absolutely assured that no extremity of mental or physical torment would wring the priceless secret from him.
Well, if it had to be, it must be. If he could not learn the secret, at least no one else should. Before morning it would be buried for ever under the waters of the Baltic, and he would revenge himself on the daughter for that which the father refused to do. If Franklin Marmion would not give him the sceptre of the World-Empire, then Nitocris should be his wife and Empress if she would, and if not, his slave and plaything, as he had sworn to Phadrig the Egyptian. The fortress-castle of Oscarburg, on the lonely wooded shore of Viborg Bay, had kept many a secret safely before now, and it would keep this one. Every retainer in the Castle, every man, woman, and child on the estates for leagues around, was his, body andsoul, as their fathers before them had been the blind, unquestioning serfs of his fathers. There his word was law, and his will was fate. There was no "liberty" within his domains, since no man wanted it, or would have understood it had it been given to him.
When their argument was over they parted, apparently the best of friends. Franklin Marmion went to bed calmly curious as to what was going to happen, and Oscarovitch paid a visit to his captain.
A little after three that morning he opened the door of the Professor's state-room very gently and looked in. The room was dark, and he listened. A soft, just audible sound of breathing came from the bed. It was the breathing of a man fast asleep. He pressed the spring of his electric lamp, and turned the thin ray on to the water-bottle in the rack over the wash-stand. It was half-empty, and a glass stood on the table in the middle of the room. Then the ray fell on the face of the sleeping man. It was as Prince Zastrow's face had been the last night he went to sleep in the Castle of Trelitz—rather the face of a corpse than that of a living man. His captain stood behind him, and he turned and whispered:
"He is ready. Are the men below?"
"All, Highness, save Grovno at the wheel and Hartog on the look-out. They will see nothing, as they did before," came the whispered reply.
"Very well, then. You and I can manage this between us. You have the line?"
The captain nodded, and they went into the room, softly closing the door. In a few minutes they came out again, carrying between them a long bundle of blankets lashed from end to end with thin line. They took it aft along the alloway and out on to the lower deck by the stern. Two iron doors of a port used for coaling stood open on the starboard side. On the deck lay a couple of pigs of iron lashed together. These the captain made fast to one end of the bundle and lifted them towards the port. Oscarovitch took hold of the other end. They lifted it. The weights dropped outside the port, and the bundle followed them. The captain started up, clasped his hands to his forehead, and said in a gasping whisper:
"Holy God, Highness, what have we done?"
"What do you mean, Derevskin? You have obeyed my orders; that is all. Is it not enough for you?"
"Yes, Highness—but who or what was that man? Was he really a man?"
"Are you mad, Derevskin?"
"No, Highness, I hope not: but did you hear—or, rather, did you not hear?"
"What, you fool?"
"He—it—the body—it made no splash when it touched the water!"
The stammered words struck Oscarovitch like so many puffs of frozen air. No, the body of Franklin Marmionhadmade no splash. It had vanished through the port into silence. That was all. He beat back his own terror with theexertion of all his will-power, and said in a sneering whisper:
"Derevskin, you are either mad or drunk; but I will forgive you this time because you have obeyed. Go to bed, and don't forget to be either sober or sane when I come on deck."
The captain bowed his head, and went forward with shambling steps and shaking limbs. Oscarovitch closed the port with hands which all his force could not keep steady, and betook himself to bed, to lie awake for the rest of the short summer night wondering vainly what really had happened.
He had had his bath and dressed soon after six, and went on deck. The captain was on the bridge, and he joined him.
"Good morning, Derevskin!"
"I have the honour to wish Your Highness good morning!"
"Nothing happened during the night worth reporting, I suppose?"
"No, Highness, nothing."
"Very good: but I have slept badly, and you look as if you had been on the bridge all night. Perhaps it is necessary among all these islands, and I am pleased that you are so watchful, especially as I have guests on board. Come down to your room now and send your steward for a bottle. It will do neither of us any harm."
There was a somewhat lengthy conversation over this early breakfast of champagne and biscuits after the door had been closed and locked, and when it was finished, Oscarovitch and his captainunderstood each other as completely as was necessary.
An hour later he saw Nitocris walking about the upper deck looking pale and anxious. He went to her and said in a tone which intentionally betrayed his own nervousness:
"Good morning, Miss Marmion! Have you seen anything of the Professor?"
"No, Prince, I have not. I went to his room just now and knocked. There was no reply and I opened the door. The room was empty, but he had evidently been to bed. Is he not on deck?"
"No, Miss Marmion, he is not. He said last night that he would like his bath about six, and the steward I sent to valet him went to his room and found it as you say. I have had the ship searched high and low, and from stem to stern, and there is no sign of him. I have had every one questioned, and no one has seen anything of him since last night."
"Oh, my poor, poor Dad, I have lost him! Yes, I suppose it must have been that. He has walked overboard."
"Walked overboard, Miss Marmion?"
"Yes, yes, it must be that. Prince Oscarovitch, my father, like most very clever men, had one dangerous failing. He walked in his sleep and did things unconsciously. That was why he told you about the ghost at 'The Wilderness' just as though he really had seen it. Yes, he must have got up in the night and come on deck, and walked overboard, and so I have lost the best friend I everhad, or shall have. You must excuse me, Prince. I must go to my room. The very sunlight seems horrible now. Jenny will look after me. Good morning!"
Her face was white and her eyes were staring at nothing. She spoke with a horrible, stony calm which, crime-hardened as he was, sent a thrilling shiver through his nerves. A spasm of remorse shook him; then his self-control came back, and he offered her his arm in silence. He led her down to the saloon, and gave her into Jenny's charge. Then he went on deck again, lit a cigar, and proceeded to congratulate himself on the great good fortune which had, from his point of view at least, so happily explained away the disappearance of Franklin Marmion.