CHAPTER 20

Grey had set apart the books and papers that had to do either directly or indirectly with his case, because he saw in them a circumstantial defence to the charges which were still hanging over him at home. To his use of them for this purpose Minna and her sister gladly consented, and so when that evening, after having been cropped and clean-shaven by Johann, he bade the little household good-bye and was driven into town to the Grand Hotel K?nigin Anna, he carried this evidence with him.

It was, as has been observed, a day rife with revelations. The discoveries of its daylight hours were of incalculable value, but the disclosures reserved for the night were of even more consequence. The train that afternoon had brought from Paris a large company of visitors intent upon viewing the pomp and panoply of a royal293 funeral, and among them were the remaining members of that gay little dinner party at Armenonville the week before.

The Van Tuyls ran into them at the hotel on their return from the Fahler farm, and Hope immediately had an inspiration.

“I’m going to give a dinner tonight,” she said, “just the most informal sort of a dinner in our salon. And I want you all to come. It doesn’t make any difference whether you have your trunks or not. You are not expected to dress. I’m going to treat you to a surprise.”

The women were all curiosity on the instant and showed it. The men accepted politely, but declared that the hostess was attraction sufficient.

Hope had made the proposition on impulse, and it was too late to draw back when she caught her father’s disapproving eye.

“I’m not at all sure,” he commented, once they were alone, “that this thing is wise. Carey isn’t yet out of the woods, and the story of his alleged embezzlement and all that is too fresh to have been forgotten. Explanations at a dinner party aren’t pleasant things. We know he is innocent,294 but you don’t want to put him on trial before a jury of your guests.”

But Hope was staunch in her loyalty.

“Our verdict will be sufficient,” she answered, bravely. “If I had stopped to think of all you say I probably shouldn’t have asked them, but as it is I’m glad I did it. It clears the situation at once. They must know from my having promised to be his wife and your having given your consent, that he is innocent.”

Nicholas Van Tuyl shrugged his shoulders.

“Perhaps,” he replied, a little doubtfully, “perhaps; but, my dear girl, don’t hint at the Prince business. The Fahlers will keep their mouths closed for the sake of their dead relative, but no injunction of secrecy would still the tongues of Mrs. Dickie and Lady Constance.”

Hope demurred.

“It’s such an interesting story,” she protested, “and I am a woman!”

“But the Government here does not want it to get out.”

“And I’d like to know what we owe to the Government,” the girl inquired. “I don’t want295 to be disobedient, father dear, but I can’t promise to control myself under provocation.”

Again Mr. Van Tuyl shrugged his shoulders. His daughter was his idol and he was as yarn in her hands.

When Grey arrived and was told of the plan, he received the tidings somewhat ruefully. He complained that his trunks were still at the Residenz Schloss, and that, in the torn and bedraggled raiment he was wearing, to pose as the object of interest at a dinner party, no matter how informal, was apt to be a little trying, to say the least. But O’Hara, who had driven into town with him, came to the rescue. He and Grey were very nearly of a size, and as he was the fortunate possessor of two evening suits he promptly placed one of them at Grey’s disposal.

Nevertheless, in spite of this satisfactory overcoming of a grave difficulty, Grey was not present when the party sat down to dinner; for, as he was about to join the company, Nicholas Van Tuyl broke in upon him, carrying in his hand a note which had just been delivered by an orderly from the Royal Hospital.

296 “You’ll have to go, won’t you?” he asked, as Grey ran his eye over the page.

It was from Chancellor von Ritter and was addressed to the banker.

“If you are in communication with Mr. Grey,” it read, “send him here with all speed. The man Lutz can last only a few hours. He is anxious to make an ante-mortem statement, but insists that Mr. Grey shall be present when he makes it.”

And so Grey rushed off in a cab, and as the dinner party took their places at table in the Van Tuyl salon, he was climbing the Royal Hospital stairs to the little white room in which lay dying the young man who had served him faithfully for over two years as valet, only to fall by reason of avarice into the r?le of villain in his life’s melodrama.

The eyes that looked up at him from dark, cavernous depths in a face pale as chalk had in them an appeal that touched a chord of his sympathy, and for the moment he forgot the injuries he had suffered and remembered only the services he had experienced at those hands, which lay limp297 and waxen-yellow against the spotless white of the coverlet.

The small room was somewhat crowded. Chancellor von Ritter was there with a notary and a stenographer; near the window stood a soldier, whose very presence seemed an irony, which he appeared to recognise in retiring as far as the limits of the tiny chamber would permit; and there, too, of course, was the inevitable nun-like nurse in significantly immaculate muslin and the great flaring headdress of her sisterhood.

“He seems a little stronger at the moment,” whispered the Chancellor; “you came at an opportune time. He has been asking for you all the afternoon.”

The nurse was moistening the sufferer’s lips. When she finished, Grey spoke to him.

“I am sorry to see you here, Lutz,” he said, simply.

His breathing, he noticed, was very short and laboured.

“I’m obliged to you for coming, sir,” he replied, and his voice was stronger than one would have expected. “I’ve got a lot to tell you; but it’s298 so late now I don’t know whether I’ll be able.” He paused between his sentences in an effort to husband his waning strength. “I was a good enough fellow once, Mr. Grey, wasn’t I?”

Grey nodded.

“Yes,” he agreed, with sincerity, “you were all right, Lutz.”

“I never really meant you any harm, sir,” he went on. “It seemed to me that it would be a good thing for you.”

The Chancellor motioned to the stenographer, who drew his chair closer to the bedside and took a note-book and pencil from his pocket.

“Afterwards,” Lutz continued, “after Dr. Schlippenbach died and I knew we couldn’t keep you under the spell any more, I got frightened; and then I drank a good deal, and I—yes, I was crazy at times. Absinthe, Mr. Grey. I wasn’t used to it, and it turned my head. I thought to save myself I must get rid of you. I tried to smother you with gas that night last week in Paris. Captain Lindenwald knew of it. He was afraid of you, too. He said suspicion would fall on Baron von Einhard; that we would never be299 suspected. And when I failed he went to Baron von Einhard and—how much he got I don’t know; but the Baron paid him to go away and leave you, agreeing that he would put you where you would never be heard of again. Then we came here, with a story about your being mad and being locked up in a Paris sanitarium. It was the only thing we could do. If the plan had worked we should have been in trouble for a while, maybe, but when Prince Hugo came to the throne we should have been rewarded. I sold the Baron the strong-box with all those manufactured proofs of your right to the crown; and I told him you had the Prince of Kronfeld ring. I’m sorry, sir, I’m sorry. But I’m a coward, and I was in terror and more than half insane with that green stuff.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Grey interjected. “But tell me, Lutz, how this whole thing started, back in New York. Tell me about Schlippenbach and how you and he managed it together.”

The nurse, from her place by the pillow, leaned over and wiped her patient’s brow. Then she moistened his lips again, and his deep-sunken eyes looked his appreciation. For some minutes he300 was silent, endeavouring apparently by an effort of will to gather fresh energy; and to Grey’s mind recurred the picture of that darkened room in Paris, just six days ago, with the dying Herr Schlippenbach struggling to make himself understood.

“He was more devil than man,” Lutz resumed. “He was always working with strange drugs and experimenting with batteries on cats and dogs, and children, too. One day he asked me a great many questions about you, Mr. Grey, and then he asked me if I’d like to be rich—very rich, he said. ‘Everyone wants to be rich,’ I answered. ‘If you’ll do just as I tell you,’ he said, ‘you’ll have more money than you ever dreamed of.’ He told me he wanted me to put just one tiny pellet in your coffee each morning. It would not harm you, he said, but you would doze off for just ten minutes after you had taken it, and you would never know you had been dozing. ‘And while he is asleep,’ he said, ‘you can tell him to do anything you wish at any time in that day and he will do it. Tell him, for instance,’ he advised me, ‘to double your wages when he returns from his office in the evening,301 and he will do it.’ I laughed at the idea and had no faith in it; but I consented to try it. And it worked. You did double my wages, Mr. Grey, just as I asked you to, and you never knew I had asked you. Each day I gave you the pellet, as he directed, and each day I suggested that you do certain things at certain hours, and you always did them.”

“Hypnotic suggestion,” commented Grey, involuntarily.

“Something like it,” Lutz replied, “but he said it was not. At least, only in part. The pellet was the principal thing. He made the pellets himself. They were his secret. I gave you the last the day before he died; and I knew then that I could control you no more.”

“Yes,” Grey urged, “but after the first, what happened? After I raised your wages, what other things did you suggest?”

“Nothing of importance for a month or two. Just trifles—that you come home early and tell me you would not require me that night; or that you would give me a coat I wanted very much, and things of that sort. But one day Schlippenbach302 came to the rooms while you were down town. ‘Tomorrow morning,’ he said,’I am coming here early, before Mr. Grey is up. You must hide me somewhere until you have given him the pellet.’ He came and I hid him in your wardrobe; but when you had had your coffee with his drug in it he came out, and then I saw for the first time the power of this thing. He directed you very minutely and very exactly. Every minute in the day you were under his commands. You were to secure a hundred thousand dollars in cash and you were to bring it to his house on Avenue A at four o’clock in the afternoon. And at this house you were to remain. That evening I went there, and there you were. You did not know me. Your name had been changed to Arndt. I called you Mr. Grey to test the thing, and you appeared to think I was crazy. Schlippenbach told me you had brought the money. You never left his house until we sailed for this country.”

“What did I do there?”

“You did very little, but Schlippenbach did a great deal. Each day he had his batteries working on your head. He told me he was building303 up your self-esteem and that he was depleting your reverence. He was developing those cerebral organs which he thought would fit you for a throne and reducing those which he thought would unfit you. He said that in this way he could change you completely. After a few years of constant treatment, three or four years at most, you would, he told me, be no more Mr. Grey, the New York broker, than I would. You would be the King of Budavia and never know that you had not been born to it. And then there would be no further need of pellets or of galvanism. The transformation would have been accomplished.”

The dying man, becoming more and more interested in his subject, was speaking in clearer tones and with much less effort; and his auditors listened, spellbound, to his exposition of the marvellous methods of his mountebank master.

“And as the days went on it was wonderful how you did change, sir. You spoke differently and you acted differently. He made you grow a beard and moustache, which he bleached without your knowledge, as he did your hair, and your most intimate friend wouldn’t have recognised304 you, Mr. Grey. I don’t believe your mother would have known you, sir.”

“And the money?” Grey queried, fearing that in his enthusiasm Lutz would overtax his strength and leave this most important point uncovered. “What did Schlippenbach do with the hundred thousand dollars?”

“A good deal of it was spent,” the valet answered, “but some of it is still in the East River National Bank, and some with Graeff & Welbrock, the German bankers. When we came away we brought with us two letters of credit, one in his name and one in yours, for twenty thousand dollars each.”

Of these facts Grey made a mental note.

“Some of it you will get back, sir,” Lutz added, after a pause. “Perhaps most of it, for the old man owns some property on the East Side, and you can prove that he was responsible for the theft. And now, Mr. Grey”—and something in the nature of a smile flickered ghastly and distressful about the corners of his livid mouth—“I think I have told you all. But”—his yellow right hand slid slowly a few inches over the coverlet305 towards its edge—“I have in return a favour to ask. Maybe you’ll feel you can’t grant it. I’m going pretty fast, I imagine. They say I won’t last till daylight comes, and—I’d like, sir—if you don’t mind too much”—his sentences were very halt once more—“don’t mind too much——”

Grey leaned over and took the sliding hand in his own.

“All right, Lutz,” he said, with a tremour in his voice that he could not control, “all right, man. I don’t believe you were half to blame. He had you under a spell, too, I dare say. I forgive you freely, and God bless you!”

The flickering, vagrant smile merged into an expression of peace. Into the sunken eyes came resignation.

“Thank you, sir!” the grey lips murmured, “thank you! thank you!”

The notary mumbled a form of oath to which Lutz gave a voiceless assent. Then his lids fell, and when Grey and Count von Ritter left the room he was barely conscious.

“I’ll have a certified copy of the statement sent to you Mr. Grey,” the Chancellor volunteered.306 “In it you will have evidence that is beyond all dispute. I congratulate you on securing such a complete refutation of so baseless and yet so dangerous a slander.”