The Grand Babylon Hôtel
‘You were over-tired,’ he said, still unconsciously holding her hand.
They gazed at each other. She smiled at him.
‘You kissed me,’ she said suddenly, and he blushed red and stood up
before her. ‘Why did you kiss me?’
‘Ah! Miss Racksole,’ he murmured, hurrying the words out. ‘Forgive me.
It is unforgivable, but forgive me. I was overpowered by my feelings. I
did not know what I was doing.’
‘Why did you kiss me?’ she repeated.
‘Because--Nella! I love you. I have no right to say it.’
‘Why have you no right to say it?’
‘If Eugen dies, I shall owe a duty to Posen--I shall be its ruler.’
‘Well!’ she said calmly, with an adorable confidence. ‘Papa is worth
forty millions. Would you not abdicate?’
‘Ah!’ he gave a low cry. ‘Will you force me to say these things? I could
not shirk my duty to Posen, and the reigning Prince of Posen can only
marry a Princess.’
‘But Prince Eugen will live,’ she said positively, ‘and if he lives--’
‘Then I shall be free. I would renounce all my rights to make you mine,
if--if--’
‘If what, Prince?’
‘If you would deign to accept my hand.’
‘Am I, then, rich enough?’
‘Nella!’ He bent down to her.
Then there was a crash of breaking glass. Aribert went to the window and
opened it. In the starlit gloom he could see that a ladder had been
raised against the back of the house. He thought he heard footsteps at
the end of the garden.
‘It was Jules,’ he exclaimed to Nella, and without another word rushed
upstairs to the attic. The attic was empty. Miss Spencer had
mysteriously vanished.
Chapter Nineteen ROYALTY AT THE GRAND BABYLON
THE Royal apartments at the Grand Babylon are famous in the world of
hotels, and indeed elsewhere, as being, in their own way, unsurpassed.
Some of the palaces of Germany, and in particular those of the mad
Ludwig of Bavaria, may possess rooms and saloons which outshine them in
gorgeous luxury and the mere wild fairy-like extravagance of wealth; but
there is nothing, anywhere, even on Eighth Avenue, New York, which can
fairly be called more complete, more perfect, more enticing, or--not
least important--more comfortable.
The suite consists of six chambers--the ante-room, the saloon or
audience chamber, the dining-room, the yellow drawing-room (where
Royalty receives its friends), the library, and the State bedroom--to
the last of which we have already been introduced. The most important
and most impressive of these is, of course, the audience chamber, an
apartment fifty feet long by forty feet broad, with a superb outlook
over the Thames, the Shot Tower, and the higher signals of the South-
Western Railway. The decoration of this room is mainly in the German
taste, since four out of every six of its Royal occupants are of
Teutonic blood; but its chief glory is its French ceiling, a masterpiece
by Fragonard, taken bodily from a certain famous palace on the Loire.
The walls are of panelled oak, with an eight-foot dado of Arras cloth
imitated from unique Continental examples. The carpet, woven in one
piece, is an antique specimen of the finest Turkish work, and it was
obtained, a bargain, by Felix Babylon, from an impecunious Roumanian
Prince. The silver candelabra, now fitted with electric light, came from
the Rhine, and each had a separate history. The Royal chair--it is not
etiquette to call it a throne, though it amounts to a throne--was looted
by Napoleon from an Austrian city, and bought by Felix Babylon at the
sale of a French collector. At each corner of the room stands a gigantic
grotesque vase of German faïence of the sixteenth century. These were
presented to Felix Babylon by William the First of Germany, upon the
conclusion of his first incognito visit to London in connection with the
French trouble of 1875.
There is only one picture in the audience chamber. It is a portrait of
the luckless but noble Dom Pedro, Emperor of the Brazils. Given to Felix
Babylon by Dom Pedro himself, it hangs there solitary and sublime as a
reminder to Kings and Princes that Empires may pass away and greatness
fall. A certain Prince who was occupying the suite during the Jubilee of
1887--when the Grand Babylon had seven persons of Royal blood under its
roof--sent a curt message to Felix that the portrait must be removed.
Felix respectfully declined to remove it, and the Prince left for
another hotel, where he was robbed of two thousand pounds’ worth of
jewellery. The Royal audience chamber of the Grand Babylon, if people
only knew it, is one of the sights of London, but it is never shown, and
if you ask the hotel servants about its wonders they will tell you only
foolish facts concerning it, as that the Turkey carpet costs fifty
pounds to clean, and that one of the great vases is cracked across the
pedestal, owing to the rough treatment accorded to it during a riotous
game of Blind Man’s Buff, played one night by four young Princesses, a
Balkan King, and his aides-de-camp.
In one of the window recesses of this magnificent apartment, on a
certain afternoon in late July, stood Prince Aribert of Posen. He was
faultlessly dressed in the conventional frock-coat of English
civilization, with a gardenia in his button-hole, and the indispensable
crease down the front of the trousers. He seemed to be fairly amused,
and also to expect someone, for at frequent intervals he looked rapidly
over his shoulder in the direction of the door behind the Royal chair.
At last a little wizened, stooping old man, with a distinctly German
cast of countenance, appeared through the door, and laid some papers on
a small table by the side of the chair.
‘Ah, Hans, my old friend!’ said Aribert, approaching the old man. ‘I
must have a little talk with you about one or two matters. How do you
find His Royal Highness?’
The old man saluted, military fashion. ‘Not very well, your Highness,’
he answered. ‘I’ve been valet to your Highness’s nephew since his
majority, and I was valet to his Royal father before him, but I never
saw--’ He stopped, and threw up his wrinkled hands deprecatingly.
‘You never saw what?’ Aribert smiled affectionately on the old fellow.
You could perceive that these two, so sharply differentiated in rank,
had been intimate in the past, and would be intimate again.
‘Do you know, my Prince,’ said the old man, ‘that we are to receive the
financier, Sampson Levi--is that his name?--in the audience chamber?
Surely, if I may humbly suggest, the library would have been good enough
for a financier?’
‘One would have thought so,’ agreed Prince Aribert, ‘but perhaps your
master has a special reason. Tell me,’ he went on, changing the subject
quickly, ‘how came it that you left the Prince, my nephew, at Ostend,
and returned to Posen?’
‘His orders, Prince,’ and old Hans, who had had a wide experience of
Royal whims and knew half the secrets of the Courts of Europe, gave
Aribert a look which might have meant anything. ‘He sent me back on an--
an errand, your Highness.’
‘And you were to rejoin him here?’
‘Just so, Highness. And I did rejoin him here, although, to tell the
truth, I had begun to fear that I might never see my master again.’
‘The Prince has been very ill in Ostend, Hans.’
‘So I have gathered,’ Hans responded drily, slowly rubbing his hands
together. ‘And his Highness is not yet perfectly recovered.’
‘Not yet. We despaired of his life, Hans, at one time, but thanks to an
excellent constitution, he came safely through the ordeal.’
‘We must take care of him, your Highness.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Aribert solemnly, ‘his life is very precious to
Posen.’
At that moment, Eugen, Hereditary Prince of Posen, entered the audience
chamber. He was pale and languid, and his uniform seemed to be a trouble
to him. His hair had been slightly ruffled, and there was a look of
uneasiness, almost of alarmed unrest, in his fine dark eyes. He was like
a man who is afraid to look behind him lest he should see something
there which ought not to be there. But at the same time, here beyond
doubt was Royalty. Nothing could have been more striking than the
contrast between Eugen, a sick man in the shabby house at Ostend, and
this Prince Eugen in the Royal apartments of the Grand Babylon Hôtel,
surrounded by the luxury and pomp which modern civilization can offer to
those born in high places. All the desperate episode of Ostend was now
hidden, passed over. It was supposed never to have occurred. It existed
only like a secret shame in the hearts of those who had witnessed it.
Prince Eugen had recovered; at any rate, he was convalescent, and he had
been removed to London, where he took up again the dropped thread of his
princely life. The lady with the red hat, the incorruptible and savage
Miss Spencer, the unscrupulous and brilliant Jules, the dark, damp
cellar, the horrible little bedroom--these things were over. Thanks to
Prince Aribert and the Racksoles, he had emerged from them in safety. He
was able to resume his public and official career. The Emperor had been
informed of his safe arrival in London, after an unavoidable delay in
Ostend; his name once more figured in the Court chronicle of the
newspapers. In short, everything was smothered over. Only--only Jules,
Rocco, and Miss Spencer were still at large; and the body of Reginald
Dimmock lay buried in the domestic mausoleum of the palace at Posen; and
Prince Eugen had still to interview Mr Sampson Levi.
That various matters lay heavy on the mind of Prince Eugen was beyond
question. He seemed to have withdrawn within himself. Despite the
extraordinary experiences through which he had recently passed, events
which called aloud for explanations and confidence between the nephew
and the uncle, he would say scarcely a word to Prince Aribert. Any
allusion, however direct, to the days at Ostend, was ignored by him with
more or less ingenuity, and Prince Aribert was really no nearer a full
solution of the mystery of Jules’ plot than he had been on the night
when he and Racksole visited the gaming tables at Ostend. Eugen was well
aware that he had been kidnapped through the agency of the woman in the
red hat, but, doubtless ashamed at having been her dupe, he would not
proceed in any way with the clearing-up of the matter.
‘You will receive in this room, Eugen?’ Aribert questioned him.
‘Yes,’ was the answer, given pettishly. ‘Why not? Even if I have no
proper retinue here, surely that is no reason why I should not hold
audience in a proper manner?... Hans, you can go.’ The old valet
promptly disappeared.
‘Aribert,’ the Hereditary Prince continued, when they were alone in the
chamber, ‘you think I am mad.’
‘My dear Eugen,’ said Prince Aribert, startled in spite of himself.
‘Don’t be absurd.’
‘I say you think I am mad. You think that that attack of brain fever has
left its permanent mark on me. Well, perhaps I am mad. Who can tell? God
knows that I have been through enough lately to drive me mad.’
Aribert made no reply. As a matter of strict fact, the thought had
crossed his mind that Eugen’s brain had not yet recovered its normal
tone and activity. This speech of his nephew’s, however, had the effect
of immediately restoring his belief in the latter’s entire sanity. He
felt convinced that if only he could regain his nephew’s confidence, the
old brotherly confidence which had existed between them since the years
when they played together as boys, all might yet be well. But at present
there appeared to be no sign that Eugen meant to give his confidence to
anyone.
The young Prince had come up out of the valley of the shadow of death,
but some of the valley’s shadow had clung to him, and it seemed he was
unable to dissipate it.
‘By the way,’ said Eugen suddenly, ‘I must reward these Racksoles, I
suppose. I am indeed grateful to them. If I gave the girl a bracelet,