'Why should I weary you with my confidences?' he said. 'I don't know, I cannot tell; but I feel that I must. I feel that you will understand me better than anyone else in the world. And yet why should you understand me? Again, I don't know. Miss Racksole, Iwill disclose to you the whole trouble in a word. Prince Eugen, the hereditary Grand Duke of Posen, has disappeared. Four days ago Iwas to have met him at Ostend. He had affairs in London. He wished me to come with him. I sent Dimmock on in front, and waited for Eugen. He did not arrive. I telegraphed back to Cologne, his last stopping-place, and I learned that he had left there in accordance with his programme; I leamed also that he had passed through Brussels. It must have been between Brussels and the railway station at Ostend Quay that he disappeared. He was travelling with a single equerry, and the equerry, too, has vanished.
I need not explain to you, Miss Racksole, that when a person of the importance of my nephew contrives to get lost one must proceed cautiously. One cannot advertise for him in the London Times.
Such a disappearance must be kept secret. The people at Posen and at Berlin believe that Eugen is in London, here, at this hotel; or, rather, they did so believe. But this morning I received a cypher telegram from - from His Majesty the Emperor, a very peculiar telegram, asking when Eugen might be expected to return to Posen, and requesting that he should go first to Berlin. That telegram was addressed to myself. Now, if the Emperor thought that Eugen was here, why should he have caused the telegram to be addressed to me? I have hesitated for three days, but I can hesitate no longer. I must myself go to the Emperor and acquaint him with the facts.'
'I suppose you've just got to keep straight with him?' Nella was on the point of saying, but she checked herself and substituted, 'The Emperor is your chief, is he not? "First among equals", you call him.'
'His Majesty is our over-lord,' said Aribert quietly.
'Why do you not take immediate steps to inquire as to the whereabouts of your Royal nephew?' she asked simply. The affair seemed to her just then so plain and straightforward.
'Because one of two things may have happened. Either Eugen may have been, in plain language, abducted, or he may have had his own reasons for changing his programme and keeping in the background - out of reach of telegraph and post and railways.'
'What sort of reasons?'
'Do not ask me. In the history of every family there are passages - '
He stopped.
'And what was Prince Eugen's object in coming to London?'
Aribert hesitated.
'Money,' he said at length. 'As a family we are very poor - poorer than anyone in Berlin suspects.'
'Prince Aribert,' Nella said, 'shall I tell you what I think?' She leaned back in her chair, and looked at him out of half-closed eyes.
His pale, thin, distinguished face held her gaze as if by some fascination. There could be no mistaking this man for anything else but a Prince.
'If you will,' he said.
'Prince Eugen is the victim of a plot.'
'You think so?'
'I am perfectly convinced of it.'
'But why? What can be the object of a plot against him?'
'That is a point of which you should know more than me,' she remarked drily.
'Ah! Perhaps, perhaps,' he said. 'But, dear Miss Racksole, why are you so sure?'
'There are several reasons, and they are connected with Mr Dimmock. Did you ever suspect, your Highness, that that poor young man was not entirely loyal to you?'
'He was absolutely loyal,' said the Prince, with all the earnestness of conviction.
'A thousand pardons, but he was not.'
'Miss Racksole, if any other than yourself made that assertion, Iwould - I would - '
'Consign them to the deepest dungeon in Posen?' she laughed, lightly.
'Listen.' And she told him of the incidents which had occurred in the night preceding his arrival in the hotel.
'Do you mean, Miss Racksole, that there was an understanding between poor Dimmock and this fellow Jules?'
'There was an understanding.'
'Impossible!'
'Your Highness, the man who wishes to probe a mystery to its root never uses the word "impossible". But I will say this for young Mr Dimmock. I think he repented, and I think that it was because he repented that he - er - died so suddenly, and that his body was spirited away.'
'Why has no one told me these things before?' Aribert exclaimed.
'Princes seldom hear the truth,' she said.
He was astonished at her coolness, her firmness of assertion, her air of complete acquaintance with the world.
'Miss Racksole,' he said, 'if you will permit me to say it, I have never in my life met a woman like you. May I rely on your sympathy - your support?'
'My support, Prince? But how?'
'I do not know,' he replied. 'But you could help me if you would. Awoman, when she has brain, always has more brain than a man.'
'Ah!' she said ruefully, 'I have no brains, but I do believe I could help you.'
What prompted her to make that assertion she could not have explained, even to herself. But she made it, and she had a suspicion - a prescience - that it would be justified, though by what means, through what good fortune, was still a mystery to her.
'Go to Berlin,' she said. 'I see that you must do that; you have no alternative. As for the rest, we shall see. Something will occur. Ishall be here. My father will be here. You must count us as your friends.'
He kissed her hand when he left, and afterwards, when she was alone, she kissed the spot his lips had touched again and again.
Now, thinking the matter out in the calmness of solitude, all seemed strange, unreal, uncertain to her. Were conspiracies actually possible nowadays? Did queer things actually happen in Europe? And did they actually happen in London hotels? She dined with her father that night.
'I hear Prince Aribert has left,' said Theodore Racksole.
'Yes,' she assented. She said not a word about their interview.
