It was deemed best not to mention the incident of the night to Miss von Altdorf, and on their way to the Gare St. Lazare that morning Grey accounted for his bandaged finger by the subterfuge of having caught it in a door. He was not altogether satisfied with the spot chosen for the day’s outing. Had he been allowed unaided to make the choice he would undoubtedly have selected a resort of quite different character, but the girl had expressed a wish to visit Louis XIV’s “Ab?me des dépenses,” and he had without demur acceded to her desire. After all, to be alone with her and thus gather from her knowledge as much information as possible concerning the mystery that surrounded him was his prime object, and for this purpose Versailles offered as propitious a background as Bougival or Croissy or a dozen other places that he personally would have preferred.
113 The day, washed clear and brilliant by the rain of yesterday, was not uncomfortably warm, and, though the maimed finger ached distractingly at times, Grey, in spite of his misgivings, found the little jaunt delightfully diverting. The Fraülein had shaken off much of her melancholy of the previous evening, and her mood was cheerful, if not merry. Her appreciation, which was mingled with a joyousness almost childish, was especially gratifying to her companion. Everything she saw interested her, and her comment, while invariably intelligent, was so unaffected and ingenuous as to be ofttimes amusing.
When, after déjeuner at the Café de la Comédie, they had come out upon the terrace of the palace and stood overlooking the quaint, solemn, old-fashioned gardens, cut up into squares and triangles and parallelograms and ornamented with statues and vases and fountains arranged with monotonously geometric precision, her face shone with pleasure for a moment and then a shadow crossed it.
“Are all landscape gardeners atheists?” she asked, na?vely.
114 “I’m sure I don’t know,” Grey replied, smiling; “I’ve never investigated their religious beliefs.”
“Well, the one who designed all this,” she added, with a sweep of her hand, “had very little respect for God’s taste.”
And later, as they sauntered through room after room and gallery after gallery of the palace, with their interminable succession of paintings and sculptures, she was much impressed by the pictured ceilings.
“I wonder why they put their best work where one must break one’s neck to see it?” she queried; and then she laughed. “Do you suppose it was to encourage the kings and queens and other grandees to bear in mind their exalted position and to hold their heads high?”
Grey had thus far refrained from broaching the subject which had inspired the excursion. He had chosen first of all to study the girl and gauge her character. Over her presence in the little party of questionables in which he had so unexpectedly found himself he was much perplexed. It seemed scarcely reasonable to suppose that she was not in some way involved in the plot, but whether actively115 or passively, with knowledge or without, was, or at least might be, open to question. He certainly could gather no indication from her attitude, her manner, or her utterance that she was other than artless and sincere. She appeared, in fact, uncommonly simple-hearted, straightforward, and guileless, and, after weighing the evidence, he reached the conclusion that if she had a place in the scheme of his enemies it was most assuredly without her ken or connivance. It was nevertheless clear that she must be innocently aware of much that he wished eagerly to know, and, as they wandered over the palace together, from the sumptuously decorated Salles des Croisades, reflecting in picture, trophy and souvenir the conquest of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, to the magnificent Galerie des Glaces, with its many high-arched windows and glittering, gilt-niched mirrors, he ponderingly strove to outline some course of procedure that would yield him what he desired and yet not reveal his own delicately fragile position.
It was not, however, until they had finished their inspection of the palace and had passed out116 into the gardens by the Cour des Princes that an opportunity offered to make trial of the plan he had conceived. They had strolled under the orange trees beside that long stretch of velvet lawn towards what is known as the basin of Apollo and had found seats on the marble coping of the fountain. As they sat there facing each other amid the perfume of the flowers and the spice of the shrubbery, the balmy breath of summer fanning their cheeks and the genial glow of a tempered June sun bathing them, the girl’s eye fell for the first time upon the ring on Grey’s little finger, and she gave an involuntary start of surprise.
“Oh, is it you, then?” she cried, and there was something of awe in her voice, though her eyes were smiling. “But no,” she added, quickly, “that cannot be. I do not understand, Uncle Max.”
“Nor I, child,” Grey replied, smiling back at her. He had not observed her glance, and her exclamation had startled him. She took his hand in her long, white, rose-tipped fingers and held it up before his eyes, the ring glinting in the sunshine.
117 “That!” she said. “What does it mean, your wearing it?”
“Mean?” he hesitated, wondering. “Why should it mean anything? Has not a gentleman a right to wear a ring if his fancy runs that way?”
“Oh, yes, of course; some rings; but no ordinary gentleman has a right to wear that one.”
“But suppose I am not an ordinary gentleman?” he pursued. “Suppose I have a title and bear arms, have I not a right to engrave those arms upon gold and wear them on my finger?”
She looked at him very seriously from out her deep-set, long-lashed eyes of purplish blue, and then she said:
“But it is the ring of the Crown Prince. And you are not the Crown Prince. If you were you could not be my uncle.”
Grey’s heart leaped. His decision had been confirmed. She was not trying to put him on a throne to which he had no more right than those workmen who were repairing the stone margin of the great canal a hundred yards away. Yet, at the same time, she had filled him with a new perplexity.118 It was evident that the ring was quite familiar to her. Therefore it could hardly be von Einhard’s, and Lindenwald’s assertion must not only have been false but knowingly false, and with an object. If the Fraülein von Altdorf knew the ring as the Crown Prince’s ring, Lindenwald must also have known it as such. It was for that reason he did not wish Grey to keep it. He feared, probably, just such a revelation as had come about. These points were plain enough, but the whole intricate problem was growing more and more involved. Its likeness to a maze again recurred. With every effort to extricate himself he seemed to get further and more bewilderingly entangled. And once more he was tempted to leave the path, which seemed to turn and turn again on itself, and to cut his way through thicket and underbrush regardless of consequences.
“What a wise Fraülein it is!” he replied, after a pause. “What you say is very true. If I am the Crown Prince I am not your uncle, and if I am your uncle I am not the Crown Prince. Now which would you prefer to have me?”
“Oh, for your sake,” she answered, quickly,119 “I’d rather you were heir to the throne; but for my sake I’d rather you were my uncle.”
“But not being able to be both, suppose you should learn that I am neither?” he queried, laughing.
“But you are,” she protested, with conviction. “You are my uncle, that is a fact.”
“How do you know?” Grey asked. The situation was growing interesting; disclosures were imminent, and they were coming quite naturally without his having had to resort to the plan he had mapped out.
“How does one ever know such things?” she replied, a little annoyance in her tone. “You were my Great-uncle Schlippenbach’s nephew and I am your niece. I call you Uncle Max and you call me Minna.”
“Ah, yes, that is very true,” Grey went on, banteringly, and he remembered what O’Hara had told him of how they had met in London a week after his setting foot on English soil; “but you never saw me in your life until two months ago. Do you remember how we first met?”
“I have a very vivid recollection of it. It was120 at dinner at the Folsonham, in London. I wore a pale green frock. And poor Great-uncle Schlippenbach said: ‘Minna, my dear, this is your Uncle Max, who hasn’t seen you since you were a baby.’”
“And what else did he say?”
“Oh, I don’t remember all the conversation.”
“Did he say anything about where we were going, and what we were going for?”
“I don’t think he said anything then. But you must remember. You were as much there as I was.”
“Ah, but I was not listening,” Grey pleaded, his eyes a-twinkle. “I had something better to do.”
“What was that, pray?”
“I had my pretty niece to look at.”
The rose in Minna’s cheeks deepened and her eyes fell shyly.
“Now you are teasing me again,” she said.
Grey turned an uninterested gaze for a brief space on the sun-god and his chariot which, surrounded by tritons, nymphs, and dolphins, rose in heroic proportions from the centre of the basin.
121 “I never knew much of my Uncle Schlippenbach,” he ventured, after a little; “tell me about him.”
“You should know more than I,” the Fraülein returned. “You were in New York with him while I was in England.”
“Yes, I know,” her companion went on, as he took a cigarette from his case and struck a match, “but I don’t mean intimately, personally. Tell me a little of his history.”
“Everybody knew he was eccentric.”
“Of course.”
“Otherwise he would never have left Budavia. Just think of what he gave up!”
“That’s just it,” Grey interposed, eagerly. “What did he give up? I’ve heard stories, to be sure, but I don’t know that I ever had the truth of it.”
“Oh, I’ve heard it a hundred times,” Minna responded, digging the point of her parasol into the gravel. “You see, he was tutor to the Court. He had taught King Frederic about all there was to teach, and when His Majesty outgrew sc............