“I have arranged everything,” he announced, with an air of thorough self-satisfaction; “for the present we will leave the remains here in Paris. Later we can decide whether they shall be brought on to Kürschdorf or sent back to America. I have placed all the details of the obsequies in the hands of the Compagnie des Pompes Funèbres. The temporary interment will be this afternoon at Père-la-Chaise. Will it be the pleasure of Herr Arndt to attend?”
Grey raised his cup to his lips and replaced it on the saucer before replying. He wished to make sure that he could rid his tone of all modulation.
“Yes,” he answered, speaking with great care, “I will go.” If he was to play the game it were better that he played every hand dealt to him.
After a little he asked:
“And the Fraülein von Altdorf? How is she today?”
“Oh, much better,” returned the Herr Captain, his face beaming; “she is more composed, more resigned. She is a wonderful young woman, Herr Arndt; and oh, she is so beautiful!”
“Yes, she is very lovely,” Grey acquiesced.
But his thoughts at the moment were not of her. Lindenwald’s eulogy had set vibrant a chord of emotion, had conjured a picture, had reproduced a dream that seemed a reality. It was indeed difficult for him to reconcile the remembrance of that sleep fantasy, so vivid was it in every detail, with the knowledge that it was not a waking experience. He had sat for hours, it seemed, beside Hope Van Tuyl, gazing into the limpid depths of her sympathetic eyes, listening to the melody of her clear, full-toned voice. They were in a great garden with parterres of gay, sweet-scented flowers—roses and heliotrope and geraniums—and smooth terraces of greensward with marble nymphs and satyrs on mossy pedestals, and above them the kindly, protecting, leafy branches of an old oak. He had, he thought, just found again the girl he loved—found her after a long, long separation, and now she was close within his hungry arms and her lips were always very near his own. He was telling her some fantastic tale, like a bit culled from the Arthurian legends, of how he was a great king, and had only been away to claim his own, and now she was to be his queen and sit beside him on the throne in robes of purple and ermine and help him rule his people with justice and mercy.
Yet here he was sitting in a Paris hotel bedchamber, with a man who was almost a stranger, while the rain was pelting on the window-panes and the room was so gloomy that he could scarcely see the face of his visitor. The recollection of the dream thus contrasted filled him with a spirit of rebellion. He was beset with an impulse to reveal without further delay his true condition and let the culprits, whoever they might be, escape with their object undefined and their plunder unrestored. The craving to see and hold and talk to the woman he adored obsessed him for the moment, and he felt that all else was trivial and futile.
It was in this mood still that Jack O’Hara found him an hour later.