The Grand Babylon Hote

by Arnold Bennett

  'I shall shoot.'

  She pressed her lips together.

  'I shall shoot,' he repeated. 'One - two - three.'

  Bang, bang! He had fired twice, purposely missing her. Miss Spencer never blenched. Racksole was tremendously surprised - and he would have been a thousandfold more surprised could he have contrasted her behaviour now with her abject terror on the previous evening when Nella had threatened her.

  'You've got a bit of pluck,' he said, 'but it won't help you. Why won't you let us pass?'

  As a matter of fact, pluck was just what she had not, really; she had merely subordinated one terror to another. She was desperately afraid of Racksole's revolver, but she was much more afraid of something else.

  'Why won't you let us pass?'

  'I daren't,' she said, with a plaintive tremor; 'Tom put me in charge.'

  That was all. The men could see tears running down her poor wrinkled face.

  Theodore Racksole began to take off his light overcoat.

  'I see I must take my coat off to you,' he said, and he almost smiled. Then, with a quick movement, he threw the coat over Miss Spencer's head and flew at her, seizing both her arms, while Prince Aribert assisted.

  Her struggles ceased - she was beaten.

  'That's all right,' said Racksole: 'I could never have used that revolver - to mean business with it, of course.'

  They carried her, unresisting, upstairs and on to the upper floor, where they locked her in a bedroom. She lay in the bed as if exhausted.

  'Now for my poor Eugen,' said Prince Aribert.

  'Don't you think we'd better search the house first?' Racksole suggested; 'it will be safer to know just how we stand. We can't afford any ambushes or things of that kind, you know.'

  The Prince agreed, and they searched the house from top to bottom, but found no one. Then, having locked the front door and the french window of the sitting-room, they proceeded again to the cellar.

  Here a new obstacle confronted them. The cellar door was, of course, locked; there was no sign of a key, and it appeared to be a heavy door. They were compelled to return to the bedroom where Miss Spencer was incarcerated, in order to demand the key of the cellar from her. She still lay without movement on the bed.

  'Tom's got it,' she replied, faintly, to their question: 'Tom's got it, I swear to you.

  He took it for safety.'

  'Then how do you feed your prisoner?' Racksole asked sharply.

  'Through the grating,' she answered.

  Both men shuddered. They felt she was speaking the truth. For the third time they went to the cellar door. In vain Racksole thrust himself against it; he could do no more than shake it.

  'Let's try both together,' said Prince Aribert. 'Now!' There was a crack.

  'Again,' said Prince Aribert. There was another crack, and then the upper hinge gave way. The rest was easy. Over the wreck of the door they entered Prince Eugen's prison.

  The captive still sat on his chair. The terrific noise and bustle of breaking down the door seemed not to have aroused him from his lethargy, but when Prince Aribert spoke to him in German he looked at his uncle.

  'Will you not come with us, Eugen?' said Prince Aribert; 'you needn't stay here any longer, you know.'

  'Leave me alone,' was the strange reply; 'leave me alone. What do you want?'

  'We are here to get you out of this scrape,' said Aribert gently. Racksole stood aside.

  'Who is that fellow?' said Eugen sharply.

  'That is my friend Mr Racksole, an Englishman - or rather, I should say, an American - to whom we owe a great deal. Come and have supper, Eugen.'

  'I won't,' answered Eugen doggedly. 'I'm waiting here for her. You didn't think anyone had kept me here, did you, against my will? I tell you I'm waiting for her.

  She said she'd come.'

  'Who is she?' Aribert asked, humouring him.

  'She! Why, you know! I forgot, of course, you don't know. You mustn't ask.

  Don't pry, Uncle Aribert. She was wearing a red hat.'

  'I'll take you to her, my dear Eugen.' Prince Aribert put his hands on the other's shoulder, but Eugen shook him off violently, stood up, and then sat down again.

  Aribert looked at Racksole, and they both looked at Prince Eugen. The latter's face was flushed, and Racksole observed that the left pupil was more dilated than the right. The man started, muttered odd, fragmentary scraps of sentences, now grumbling, now whining.

  'His mind is unhinged,' Racksole whispered in English.

  'Hush!' said Prince Aribert. 'He understands English.' But Prince Eugen took no notice of the brief colloquy.

  'We had better get him upstairs, somehow,' said Racksole.

  'Yes,' Aribert assented. 'Eugen, the lady with the red hat, the lady you are waiting for, is upstairs. She has sent us down to ask you to come up. Won't you come?'

  'Himmel!' the poor fellow exclaimed, with a kind of weak anger. 'Why did you not say this before?'

  He rose, staggered towards Aribert, and fell headlong on the floor. He had swooned. The two men raised him, carried him up the stone steps, and laid him with infinite care on a sofa. He lay, breathing queerly through the nostrils, his eyes closed, his fingers contracted; every now and then a convulsion ran through his frame.

  'One of us must fetch a doctor,' said Prince Aribert.

  'I will,' said Racksole. At that moment there was a quick, curt rap on the french window, and both Racksole and the Prince glanced round startled. A girl's face was pressed against the large window-pane. It was Nella's.

  Racksole unfastened the catch, and she entered.

  'I have found you,' she said lightly; 'you might have told me. I couldn't sleep. I inquired from the hotel-folks if you had retired, and they said no; so I slipped out.

  I guessed where you were.' Racksole interrupted her with a question as to what she meant by this escapade, but she stopped him with a careless gesture.

  What's this?' She pointed to the form on the sofa.

  'That is my nephew, Prince Eugen,' said Aribert.

  'Hurt?' she inquired coldly. 'I hope not.'

  'He is ill,' said Racksole, 'his brain is turned.'

  Nella began to examine the unconscious Prince with the expert movements of a girl who had passed through the best hospital course to be obtained in New York.

  'He has got brain fever,' she said. 'That is all, but it will be enough. Do you know if there is a bed anywhere in this remarkable house?'

  18. In The Night-Time

  'HE must on no account be moved,' said the dark little Belgian doctor, whose eyes seemed to peer so quizzically through his spectacles; and he said it with much positiveness.

  That pronouncement rather settled their plans for them. It was certainly a professional triumph for Nella, who, previous to the doctor's arrival, had told them the very same thing. Considerable argument had passed before the doctor was sent for. Prince Aribert was for keeping the whole affair a deep secret among their three selves. Theodore Racksole agreed so far, but he suggested further that at no matter what risk they should transport the patient over to England at once. Racksole had an idea that he should feel safer in that hotel of his, and better able to deal with any situation that might arise. Nella scorned the idea. In her quality of an amateur nurse, she assured them that Prince Eugen was much more seriously ill than either of them suspected, and she urged that they should take absolute possession of the house, and keep possession till Prince Eugen was convalescent.

  'But what about the Spencer female?' Racksole had said.

  'Keep her where she is. Keep her a prisoner. And hold the house against all comers. If Jules should come back, simply defy him to enter - that is all.

  There are two of you, so you must keep an eye on the former occupiers, if they return, and on Miss Spencer, while I nurse the patient. But first, you must send for a doctor.'

  'Doctor!' Prince Aribert had said, alarmed. 'Will it not be necessary to make some awkward explanation to the doctor?'

>   'Not at all!' she replied. 'Why should it be? In a place like Ostend doctors are far too discreet to ask questions; they see too much to retain their curiosity. Besides, do you want your nephew to die?'

  Both the men were somewhat taken aback by the girl's sagacious grasp of the situation, and it came about that they began to obey her like subordinates.

  She told her father to sally forth in search of a doctor, and he went. She gave Prince Aribert certain other orders, and he promptly executed them.

  By the evening of the following day, everything was going smoothly. The doctor came and departed several times, and sent medicine, and seemed fairly optimistic as to the issue of the illness. An old woman had been induced to come in and cook and clean. Miss Spencer was kept out of sight on the attic floor, pending some decision as to what to do with her. And no one outside the house had asked any questions. The inhabitants of that particular street must have been accustomed to strange behaviour on the part of their neighbours, unaccountable appearances and disappearances, strange flittings and arrivals.

  This strong-minded and active trio - Racksole, Nella, and Prince Aribert - might have been the lawful and accustomed tenants of the house, for any outward evidence to the contrary.

  On the afternoon of the third day Prince Eugen was distinctly and seriously worse. Nella had sat up with him the previous night and throughout the day.

  Her father had spent the morning at the hotel, and Prince Aribert had kept watch.

  The two men were never absent from the house at the same time, and one of them always did duty as sentinel at night. On this afternoon Prince Aribert and Nella sat together in the patient's bedroom. The doctor had just left. Theodore Racksole was downstairs reading the New York Herald. The Prince and Nella were near the window, which looked on to the back-garden.

  It was a queer shabby little bedroom to shelter the august body of a European personage like Prince Eugen of Posen. Curiously enough, both Nella and her father, ardent democrats though they were, had been somehow impressed by the royalty and importance of the fever-stricken Prince - impressed as they had never been by Aribert. They had both felt that here, under their care, was a species of individuality quite new to them, and different from anything they had previously encountered. Even the gestures and tones of his delirium had an air of abrupt yet condescending command - an imposing mixture of suavity and haughtiness. As for Nella, she had been first struck by the beautiful 'E' over a crown on the sleeves of his linen, and by the signet ring on his pale, emaciated hand. After all, these trifling outward signs are at least as effective as others of deeper but less obtrusive significance. The Racksoles, too, duly marked the attitude of Prince Aribert to his nephew: it was at once paternal and reverential; it disclosed clearly that Prince Aribert continued, in spite of everything, to regard his nephew as his sovereign lord and master, as a being surrounded by a natural and inevitable pomp and awe. This attitude, at the beginning, seemed false and unreal to the Americans; it seemed to them to be assumed; but gradually they came to perceive that they were mistaken, and that though America might have cast out 'the monarchial superstition', nevertheless that 'superstition' had vigorously survived in another part of the world.

  'You and Mr Racksole have been extraordinarily kind to me,' said Prince Aribert very quietly, after the two had sat some time in silence.

  'Why? How?' she asked unaffectedly. 'We are interested in this affair ourselves, you know. It began at our hotel - you mustn't forget that, Prince.'

  'I don't,' he said. 'I forget nothing. But I cannot help feeling that I have led you into a strange entanglement. Why should you and Mr Racksole be here - you who are supposed to be on a holiday! - hiding in a strange house in a foreign country, subject to all sorts of annoyances and all sorts of risks, simply because I am anxious to avoid scandal, to avoid any sort of talk, in connection with my misguided nephew? It is nothing to you that the Hereditary Prince of Posen should be liable to a public disgrace. What will it matter to you if the throne of Posen becomes the laughing-stock of Europe?'

  'I really don't know, Prince,' Nella smiled roguishly. 'But we Americans have, a habit of going right through with anything we have begun.'

  'Ah!' he said, 'who knows how this thing will end? All our trouble, our anxieties, our watchfulness, may come to nothing. I tell you that when I see Eugen lying there, and think that we cannot learn his story until he recovers, I am ready to go mad. We might be arranging things, making matters smooth, preparing for the future, if only we knew - knew what he can tell us. I tell you that I am ready to go mad. If anything should happen to you, Miss Racksole, I would kill myself.'

  'But why?' she questioned. 'Supposing, that is, that anything could happen to me

  - which it can't.'

  'Because I have dragged you into this,' he replied, gazing at her. 'It is nothing to you. You are only being kind.'

  'How do you know it is nothing to me, Prince?' she asked him quickly.

  Just then the sick man made a convulsive movement, and Nella flew to the bed and soothed him. From the head of the bed she looked over at Prince Aribert, and he returned her bright, excited glance. She was in her travelling-frock, with a large white Belgian apron tied over it. Large dark circles of fatigue and sleeplessness surrounded her eyes, and to the Prince her cheek seemed hollow and thin; her hair lay thick over the temples, half covering the ears. Aribert gave no answer to her query - merely gazed at her with melancholy intensity.

  'I think I will go and rest,' she said at last. 'You will know all about the medicine.'

  'Sleep well,' he said, as he softly opened the door for her. And then he was alone with Eugen. It was his turn that night to watch, for they still half-expected some strange, sudden visit, or onslaught, or move of one kind or another from Jules.

  Racksole slept in the parlour on the ground floor.

  Nella had the front bedroom on the first floor; Miss Spencer was immured in the attic; the last-named lady had been singularly quiet and incurious, taking her food from Nella and asking no questions, the old woman went at nights to her own abode in the purlieus of the harbour. Hour after hour Aribert sat silent by his nephew's bed-side, attending mechanically to his wants, and every now and then gazing hard into the vacant, anguished face, as if trying to extort from that mask the secrets which it held. Aribert was tortured by the idea that if he could have only half an hour's, only a quarter of an hour's, rational speech with Prince Eugen, all might be cleared up and put right, and by the fact that that rational talk was absolutely impossible on Eugen's part until the fever had run its course. As the minutes crept on to midnight the watcher, made nervous by the intense, electrical atmosphere which seems always to surround a person who is dangerously ill, grew more and more a prey to vague and terrible apprehensions.

  His mind dwelt hysterically on the most fatal possibilities.

  He wondered what would occur if by any ill-chance Eugen should die in that bed

  - how he would explain the affair to Posen and to the Emperor, how he would justify himself. He saw himself being tried for murder, sentenced (him - a Prince of the blood!), led to the scaffold . . . a scene unparalleled in Europe for over a century! . . . Then he gazed anew at the sick man, and thought he saw death in every drawn feature of that agonized face. He could have screamed aloud. His ears heard a peculiar resonant boom. He started - it was nothing but the city clock striking twelve. But there was another sound - a mysterious shuffle at the door. He listened; then jumped from his chair. Nothing now! Nothing! But still he felt drawn to the door, and after what seemed an interminable interval he went and opened it, his heart beating furiously. Nella lay in a heap on the door mat.

  She was fully dressed, but had apparently lost consciousness. He clutched at her slender body, picked her up, carried her to the chair by the fire-place, and laid her in it. He had forgotten all about Eugen.

  'What is it, my angel?' he whispered, and then he kissed her - kissed her twice.

  He could only look at her;
he did not know what to do to succour her.

  At last she opened her eyes and sighed.

  'Where am I?' she asked. vaguely, in a tremulous tone. as she recognized him.

  'Is it you? Did I do anything silly? Did I faint?'

  'What has happened? Were you ill?' he questioned anxiously. He was kneeling at her feet, holding her hand tight.

  'I saw Jules by the side of my bed,' she murmured; 'I'm sure I saw him; he laughed at me. I had not undressed. I sprang up, frightened, but he had gone, and then I ran downstairs - to you.'

  'You were dreaming,' he soothed her.

  'Was I?'

  'You must have been. I have not heard a sound. No one could have entered.

  But if you like I will wake Mr Racksole.'

  'Perhaps I was dreaming,' she admitted. 'How foolish!'

  'You were over-tired,' he said, still unconsciously holding her hand. They gazed at each other. She smiled at him.

  'You kissed me,' she said suddenly, and he blushed red and stood up before her.

  'Why did you kiss me?'

  'Ah! Miss Racksole,' he murmured, hurrying the words out. 'Forgive me. It is unforgivable, but forgive me. I was overpowered by my feelings. I did not know what I was doing.'

  'Why did you kiss me?' she repeated.

  'Because - Nella! I love you. I have no right to say it.'

  'Why have you no right to say it?'

  'If Eugen dies, I shall owe a duty to Posen - I shall be its ruler.'

  'Well!' she said calmly, with an adorable confidence. 'Papa is worth forty millions.

  Would you not abdicate?'

  'Ah!' he gave a low cry. 'Will you force me to say these things? I could not shirk my duty to Posen, and the reigning Prince of Posen can only marry a Princess.'

  'But Prince Eugen will live,' she said positively, 'and if he lives - '

  'Then I shall be free. I would renounce all my rights to make you mine, if - if - '

  'If what, Prince?'

  'If you would deign to accept my hand.'

  'Am I, then, rich enough?'