“And I’d like to know what we owe to the Government,” the girl inquired. “I don’t want to be disobedient, father dear, but I can’t promise to control myself under provocation.”
Again Mr. Van Tuyl shrugged his shoulders. His daughter was his idol and he was as yarn in her hands.
When Grey arrived and was told of the plan, he received the tidings somewhat ruefully. He complained that his trunks were still at the Residenz Schloss, and that, in the torn and bedraggled raiment he was wearing, to pose as the object of interest at a dinner party, no matter how informal, was apt to be a little trying, to say the least. But O’Hara, who had driven into town with him, came to the rescue. He and Grey were very nearly of a size, and as he was the fortunate possessor of two evening suits he promptly placed one of them at Grey’s disposal.
Nevertheless, in spite of this satisfactory overcoming of a grave difficulty, Grey was not present when the party sat down to dinner; for, as he was about to join the company, Nicholas Van Tuyl broke in upon him, carrying in his hand a note which had just been delivered by an orderly from the Royal Hospital.
“You’ll have to go, won’t you?” he asked, as Grey ran his eye over the page.
It was from Chancellor von Ritter and was addressed to the banker.
“If you are in communication with Mr. Grey,” it read, “send him here with all speed. The man Lutz can last only a few hours. He is anxious to make an ante-mortem statement, but insists that Mr. Grey shall be present when he makes it.”
And so Grey rushed off in a cab, and as the dinner party took their places at table in the Van Tuyl salon, he was climbing the Royal Hospital stairs to the little white room in which lay dying the young man who had served him faithfully for over two years as valet, only to fall by reason of avarice into the rôle of villain in his life’s melodrama.
The eyes that looked up at him from dark, cavernous depths in a face pale as chalk had in them an appeal that touched a chord of his sympathy, and for the moment he forgot the injuries he had suffered and remembered only the services he had experienced at those hands, which lay limp and waxen-yellow against the spotless white of the coverlet.
The small room was somewhat crowded. Chancellor von Ritter was there with a notary and a stenographer; near the window stood a soldier, whose very presence seemed an irony, which he appeared to recognise in retiring as far as the limits of the tiny chamber would permit; and there, too, of course, was the inevitable nun-like nurse in significantly immaculate muslin and the great flaring headdress of her sisterhood.