A Dash for a Throne

by Arthur W. Marchmont

I joined him in a hot outburst of indignation.

"But the time is past for mere anger," he said presently. "We are resolved to act; and that farce of his shall cost him dear. As to Berlin, so soon as we have driven home the conviction that we are in dead earnest, and that practically the whole country is with us, there will be no opposition. The usual official intimation will be published that the King's health has failed, and the rest follows naturally."

"But you are forgetting the Ostenburg interest."

"I forget nothing, Prince," he replied, somewhat curtly. "I know the public feeling. The very inaction they are showing will make the Duke Marx impossible in the eyes of the people. While the country has been writhing and suffering under the insults and iniquities of this madman, what have the Ostenburgs done? Has one of them raised a finger to help the people or protest against this royal mumming? Has any one of them said a word? And how do you suppose the nation is to interpret that silence and inaction, except as approval of what has been done? They had the better right of succession and a strong following on their side; they have forfeited the one by their apathy and have lost the other as a consequence;" and he went on to give many reasons for this conclusion.

"I admit," he said at the close, "there will be some anxious hours just after the Countess Minna is proclaimed; but, with all the will in the world, they can do nothing. I tell you there is nothing can stay our success nor shake your cousin's seat on the throne when she has once taken it."

I allowed myself to appear to share his convictions, even while I marvelled at the depth of his duplicity, and I then told him the plan of our movements. He listened closely, and made several suggestions which I said we would adopt; and he quite acquiesced in my view that during the time Minna was to be in Munich she should remain in the greatest seclusion, giving audience only to himself and two or three others.

When I left him my task in Munich was practically finished, so far as he was concerned; but he advised me to attend a reception at the palace on the following day but one, the Friday, and I agreed. I felt sure I had left the impression I had gone to create—that their best time for abducting Minna would be at the moment of her return from the palace; and I completed my arrangements on that basis.

Steinitz was waiting for me at the hotel with an important communication from Praga, giving me the particulars of an intended attempt to carry off Minna from Gramberg during the night; and though it seemed to me a mad scheme enough, and pretty certain to be abandoned after my interview with Baron Heckscher, I despatched Steinitz post-haste back to the castle to put von Krugen on his guard. Whether it were abandoned or not, the fact that we had knowledge of it would render it certain to fail, and I felt no great anxiety on that score.

But I soon had cause for anxiety in another direction. The two men whom I had asked to visit Gramberg had not been there, and we were, in fact, perilously short-handed for all the work that had to be done. I was the more anxious, too, to get extra help because of a weak spot in my plans, which I could not remedy without further assistance.

If the Ostenburg agents held the person of the King, and I checkmated them at the last moment by producing Minna and keeping their duke in confinement, there was a chance that they might counter my stroke by bringing the mad King back on the scene, and thus checkmate me in turn. The only means of preventing this would be to secure that those who held the King in custody should be loyal to Minna; and it was for this part of the scheme that I had hoped to make use of the two men, Kummell and Beilager. I set out to find them, therefore.