“‘Mr. Grey,’ he said, ‘slept here last Wednesday night. He rose about eight o’clock Thursday morning, saying he had an urgent business appointment at the Waldorf-Astoria at ten sharp. He went away in a cab, and I have not seen him since.’
“Grey’s mother, who lives with her sister, Mrs. Hermann Valkenburgh, in Washington Square, North, has been prostrated by the revelations of the past twenty-four hours, and is under the care of her physician, Dr. Elbridge Bond.
“A rumour that Grey was engaged to be married to Miss Hope Van Tuyl, daughter of Nicholas Van Tuyl, president of the Consolidated Mortgage Company, was current yesterday. Miss Van Tuyl when seen last night denied the report.”
There was more of it, much more, all of which Grey read with deep and astonished interest; but it was merely repetition and speculation. When he finished the two columns he turned to the paper of the day following, and found a column there. As Frothingham had told him, the newspapers had kept up the sensation for weeks, and the Herald was as energetic as any. At length came a report that a man answering his description had jumped overboard from a steamer in the Gulf of Mexico and had been drowned before assistance could reach him. There was nothing in his effects to give a hint as to his identity, but the world, with one accord, apparently, had accepted the suggestion that it was the missing Grey, and then the subject was dropped.
He ran through the files for another month, but other matters of more immediate interest had crowded the Grey affair out of the public thought.
He returned the papers to the clerk who had provided them, and went out onto the Avenue de l’Opéra, horrified and perplexed. He was a felon, hiding from the law. And yet never, so far as he could remember, had he harboured a dishonest impulse. He was disguised to escape detection, and the disguise when he had discovered it had been, and still was, more mystifying to himself than it could possibly be to others. Then he began to wonder what his cables would bring forth. He would be arrested, of course, and tried, and in all probability found guilty. The evidence against him as set forth in the newspaper account was not merely strong—it was irrefutable. Against the testimony of Mallory and of the bank officials what could he offer in refutation? To fancy any court or jury would put faith in his asseveration that he was unconscious when the act was committed was to count on the impossible. Nevertheless it was clearly his duty now to return at once to America and do all in his power to make reparation. And then it occurred to him that in spite of his alleged embezzlement he was, apparently, practically without funds. If he had taken the money, as charged, it must, of course, be somewhere, but of its location he had not the faintest idea. That he had disposed of a hundred or even eighty thousand dollars in five months was in the highest degree improbable.
At the corner of the Rue de la Paix is the office of Thomas Cook & Sons, and Grey entered and inquired as to the sailing of transatlantic liners. The Celtic, he learned, was to sail the next day from Liverpool, but he could make better time probably, the clerk told him, by taking the Deutschland from Boulogne, or the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse from Cherbourg, on Saturday. The tide of travel was all the other way at this season and he would have no difficulty in securing a stateroom, even at the last minute.
Resuming his stroll he had very nearly reached his hotel when a young man, pale and evidently much agitated, halted before him, and raising his hat, deferentially, said:
“A thousand pardons, Herr Arndt, but I beg you to make haste. Herr Schlippenbach—he is dying.”
He spoke in German, and Grey noted that in feature and manner he was Teutonic. For an instant the American imagined the youth had addressed him by mistake, but he had sufficient presence of mind to give no sign. A second later he was reassured.