The Grand Duke pushed back his chair from the table. His look was so frightful that terror gave speed to Aloyse’s tongue. “I challenged the American, father—and killed him,” he said, the last phrase explosively. “I shot him through the heart.”
Casimir brought his chair close to the table again, lifted his cup of coffee, and drew in several draughts, each with a loud, sucking sound. “Eat your breakfast!” he said, in a sharp but not unkindly tone. “You must be hungry; have one of my peaches.”
Casimir’s peaches were his especial dish. They were grown at great expense under his own eye, and no one else was permitted to have them. In all his life Aloyse could remember only one occasion on which his father had offered to share his peaches; it was twenty years before, when Aloyse, seated in a high-chair at that table, had seen the Prime Minister take one at Casimir’s request; the reason, as Aloyse learned long afterwards, was that the Prime Minister had saved the Traubenheims their title of “Royal Highness,” which was gravely threatened. Though he detested peaches, Aloyse ate the peach greedily, swelling with pride and importance.
Prudence bade him say no more of his achievement; but vanity and a loose tongue impelled him to seek further flatteries from his father. He looked at the old man’s sardonic, yellow face several times before he ventured to speak.
“I ask to be permitted to tell Erica myself,” he said.
His father stopped eating and raised his head from his plate. He seemed to have concentrated all the acidity of his nature in his face. The color rose in Aloyse’s cheeks and mounted his brow until his features were all ablaze and a sweat was standing on his forehead.
“You propose to tell the woman you wish to marry, and whose consent you must get—you propose to tell her that you have murdered her lover.” Casimir said the words slowly, without accent, quietly. Then he put his face down until it was again hovering within a few inches of his plate.
There was a long pause, and Casimir spoke again. “Every day you remind me more and more of your grand-uncle.” Aloyse remembered his grand-uncle—the Grand Duke Wilhelm, a jibbering idiot, who sat all day on the floor in a corner gnawing his nails and his great whiskers.
Another long pause, and Casimir spoke again. “Go to your apartments, and don’t leave them until I summon you. And never permit a syllable about your duel to escape your lips. Deny it; if necessary, swear you know nothing about it. If possible, she must never know how he died or that he’s dead. Be off!”
Later in the morning Casimir read the report of the chief of his secret police on Grafton’s last hours in Zweitenbourg. His secret agents said that Grafton had communicated with no one except an American tourist—an obviously casual acquaintance and talk; that Ernestine had not moved from her home over the bake-shop in Emperor Ferdinand Second Street. And when the chief came to him and in great confusion confessed that his men had lost Grafton between Zweitenbourg and Venice, the Grand Duke was sarcastic but not angry. “Drop the matter,” he said.