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 dined _en 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 pa.s.sed, 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 gla.s.sy 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 he pulled 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 b.u.t.toned 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 the main 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 sh.o.r.e 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 men hauled 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 b.u.t.toned down the flap again and returned to the deck. The four went down into the cabin: gla.s.ses 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 pa.s.senger lying in the swinging boat, and the unseen watchers standing by the helmsman....
More earth-hours pa.s.sed. 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 dropped a 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 pa.s.sed 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 picture of 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 a.s.senting 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.
CHAPTER XXII
A TRIP ON THE SOUND
"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?"
"_I_ trust 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 to _my_ mercies--and I can a.s.sure you that he will find 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 pa.s.sive 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 appet.i.te. 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 take a 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 the _Grashna_ back to Cowes, gone up to London, plunged into a maelstrom 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, putting her 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."