‘It is,’ her father acquiesced. ‘He’s dead,’ he added laconically. ‘I’d have broken it to you more gently had I known. Your pardon, Prince.’ There was a pause.
‘Dimmock dead!’ Prince Aribert whispered under his breath, and he kneeled down by the side of the stretcher. ‘What does this mean?’
The poor fellow was just walking across the quadrangle towards the portico when he fell down. A commissionaire who saw him says he was walking very quickly. At first I thought it was sunstroke, but it couldn’t have been, though the weather certainly is rather warm. It must be heart disease. But anyhow, he’s dead. We did what we could. I’ve sent for a doctor, and for the police. I suppose there’ll have to be an inquest.’
Theodore Racksole stopped, and in an awkward solemn silence they all gazed at the dead youth. His features were slightly drawn, and his eyes closed; that was all. He might have been asleep.
‘My poor Dimmock!’ exclaimed the Prince, his voice broken. ‘And I was angry because the lad did not meet me at Charing Cross!’
‘Are you sure he is dead, Father?’ Nella said.
‘You’d better go away, Nella,’ was Racksole’s only reply; but the girl stood still, and began to sob quietly. On the previous night she had secretly made fun of Reginald Dimmock. She had deliberately set herself to get information from him on a topic in which she happened to be specially interested and she had got it, laughing the while at his youthful crudities—his vanity, his transparent cunning, his absurd airs. She had not liked him; she had even distrusted him, and decided that he was not ‘nice’. But now, as he lay on the stretcher, these things were forgotten. She went so far as to reproach herself for them. Such is the strange commanding power of death.
‘Oblige me by taking the poor fellow to my apartments,’ said the Prince, with a gesture to the attendants. ‘Surely it is time the doctor came.’
Racksole felt suddenly at that moment he was nothing but a mere hotel proprietor with an awkward affair on his hands. For a fraction of a second he wished he had never bought the Grand Babylon.
A quarter of an hour later Prince Aribert, Theodore Racksole, a doctor, and an inspector of police were in the Prince’s reception-room. They had just come from an ante-chamber, in which lay the mortal remains of Reginald Dimmock.