Chapter XVI: The Buried Ray

The Queen lay on a bed to which none had access save the Princess Elizabeth and one maid-of-honour—for Her Majesty would see no doctor. It was nine in the night, a reddish shine, remote from that tumbled bed, shedding through the room a mood of the moon in eclipse, and the Princess at the bedside had on hat and gloves, just come, her gloves grasped in the Queen’s hands, who feverishly said: “Did you lay before him all your latest thoughts?”

“Everything!”—from the Princess.

“And he his to you?”

“Everything. Sir Robert does not think Teddy dead, Your Majesty——”

“Call me mama; say ‘mama.’”

“And he thinks that if he and I only keep on collating and dove-tailing all our latest thoughts, we shall yet discover Teddy.”

With the wild eyes of fever, her palms clasping her forehead, the Queen said: “Yes! _he_ and you—you two—_you_’ll find him! _He_ knows! _He_ is strong!”

A furtive smile curved the Princess’s thin lip, enjoyment in her at the sight of that royal mind which had dominated her now broken and in the dust.

“I told him I would see him to-morrow evening again——”

“That’s it! And what does he say? Does he stoop? Does he look sad?”

“Yes, but Your Majesty should try to sleep”—she kissed the Queen’s hand—“I am doing wrong, I won’t stay another moment.”

“Elizabeth, you leave me?” the Queen called to her.

“Let Your Majesty consider that you have not slept for three days,” the Princess turned her chin to say, “and I, too, am sleepy. I will be with Your Majesty again at midnight.”

Her Majesty now dropped back upon her pillows, and was tossing there with distracted changes of attitude until, all at once, she sat up, stared, pondering, then urgently turned to touch a button, but checked herself, and then with clandestine haste was standing on the floor, staggering, yet grand, a ghost in laces.

In a fever of haste she proceeded to dress herself, delicately treading by an ante-room’s doors beyond which ladies waited, cautiously opening wardrobe doors, quickly selecting, steadily building herself into a state of dress, save when she paused at a mirror to hold up on her palm four grey hairs, at which she gazed with the greatest interest, amazed, gravely amused.

Soon after which she was in flight through a postern behind tapestry, hardly very exquisitely groomed, but careless, to make her way into the Park; and both an amazed Master of the Household and Inspector of the Palace, who chanced to catch the spurt of her escaping skirt at the turn of a stair, felt an impulse to address her, this apparition of her so suggested hectic and ecstasy of mind.

After making her way to the bottom of the Park, she flew from the little gate there, stumbling, to Sir Robert Barrington’s, a minute’s distance away.

Luckily, something in her rap inspired him to open the door himself, and, finding her leaning there, her eyes closed, powerless, like an outcast at his door, he moaned “Come” to her, took her bodily, supporting her to a couch spacious like a bed in a morning-room, he himself very breathlessly agitated at this happening—no longer so young as he had been!

And hand on heart, panting, he stood, saying: “I cannot think that Your Majesty—so ill—has done well——”

A lamentable protest broke from her buried throat, breaking his heart: “Oh, my soul is exceedingly sorrowful in me, Robert Barrington!”

At which his forehead dropped before her, his breath uttered: “God grant me strength.”

“I have had hope,” she said—“you promised——”

But now he was harshly sharp. “No! It is false! I say that it is abominable, that it is unpardonable, if any unfounded hopes are conveyed as from me to Your Majesty. I declare that I am utterly powerless, absolutely in the dark. The Princess Elizabeth may be an interesting, if somewhat fantastic, young woman, but I say——”

“You need not be angry,” the Queen wearily said, raising herself: “I come to you, and you get angry. Why did I come? I am sick of living, and I come to you.”

“Then, I will say now that you did well to come, Ma’am. But Your Majesty is aware, by training, that opinions have no value. My _opinion_ is that Your Majesty’s boy is in the hands of Anarchists, is still living, may yet be discovered; but, then——”

“Then, that is how it is, if you think so! You will find him, and it is exceedingly dear of you to give——” Here her hands were going out to his, but she suddenly saw and snatched them back, with a breath of scare which she sucked in, which sounded like “Ah, take care, don’t let me!”

Then, ten seconds, she sat lost in astonishment, not very sure what she had said, or how loudly; and suddenly, with “let me get away” was tearing angrily out in advance of her arm which he held; and he, too, when he had followed her steps to the Park gate, and was back, sat asking himself in a long reverie: “What, really, was it that she said?”

Then he was roaming the room with a brutal jaw, breathing between his teeth, “Man, eh? Impotent! Brainless! Vain! The petty pates of apes! A world to lift with a worm’s sinews!” In the midst of which, in an impulse, he sat down and penned a letter to Eulalia:

“I am impelled to express the hope that all is well with Your Royal Highness.... Ever since the Prince’s disappearance I have received not one line, though I have twice written.... A natural anxiety impels me to pray Your Royal Highness to send me a word at the first possible moment....”

• • • • •

Three evenings later when this came to Eulalia’s hand, that was the first she had heard of any “disappearance” of the Prince: for on the day after her discovery of the Six Millions she had had attacks of dizziness, which had caused her to be put to bed in cantonment upon a pair of peasants in Nürnfeld village; and not only had a surgeon-major forbidden any news or letter being given her, but the 2nd and 3rd, after the Battle of the Moselle, had taken up positions thirty miles further into German territory, and had left her; and since her German was not fluent, her conversations with her aged hosts had included no news but news of skirmishes within thirty kilometres of their door.

Then one noon one Sister Darling—a tall strip of uniform under the face of a saint in a painting—had pelted into Nürnfeld to pay the patient an angel’s visit, and Eulalia, seeing that face pale and careworn, had felt so ill at ease, that the next day she had found herself saying, “No, I am going to do my work—not so much Teddy.”

That day she had got up, had dizzied, fainted, gone back to bed; but three mornings after, gathering from rumour that her whole brigade was engaging a garrison of the enemy, she had procured a manure-cart, and, after travelling all day long, had come up with the brigade’s field hospital in a field a league eastward of the Soar.

She found her coming eagerly welcomed, for the enemy that evening had suffered, not merely a defeat, but a rout, and of the crowd of captives left in the British hands sixteen were wounded: so that, with the host of British wounded, the hospital had enough to do.

Eulalia was in a waggon at the bottom of a steep field, the waggon standing beneath a bay-tree by the bank of a brook whose babble among stones, together with a garrulous soprano of grasshoppers, aggravated the silence of a night dark and starless, warm and calm. Outside—the brook, rough scrub, Oyone in an ulster seeking to peep between two waggon-flaps, some lanterns straying among waggons, waggon-shines thrown on the grass, a sound of horses’ jaws which grossly ground and ground in the gloom, a tent, two heaps of stretchers under tarpaulins in corners of the field; and within—sighs, spring beds, splints, lint, a hospital scent of sickness and carbolic, scarlet spots on bandages, and eyes—eyes pining, dying, sightless.

Into which came Sister Darling to throw a busy look from bed to bed, and to breathe “How are you?” to Eulalia.

And Eulalia with a shrug: “I shall pull through.”

“Brave! You are dropping, really, after that terrible journey. You shall have these now as a reward”—she gave three letters out of her pouch.

All from Sir Robert Barrington: and when Eulalia had managed to catch by snatches the sense of them, she called out lamentably to her maimed: “_It is Oyone!_”

At which outcry, Oyone, startled into fancying that she had been noticed, made a motion to run from between the waggon-shafts, but now saw coming a Tommy who led a horse by the mane, and she crouched under the waggon, till he should be gone. But the horse came to a stoppage, and the man also, resting his head on the horse’s neck, like one dead-weary, or asleep.

After a little she hissed toward him: “_Go away!_”

She had been to the wood of the Six Millions, and, though the gold had not been touched, in the dust was a footprint which, she had determined, was not hers. Up to that moment she had more or less believed what she had fiercely hoped, that she had not really been seen; but now she was sure: Eulalia had been there.

At which thing a gang of assassins, of Richards III., of grinning aristocrats, were instantly grinning in her inwards, and she ran to kill as if to catch a ball; but it had taken her two hissing days to seek out the 2nd Somersetshires and then the field hospital—she, meantime, in a state of amazement that Eulalia had done nothing to the hoard, or to her, all these weeks! for surely, she thought, unless Eulalia was weak in the head, she must see now that it was Oyone who had destroyed the air-boats, had shot the Prince in the Strand, and—had the Prince a prisoner now! At this last thought she had felt faint, and had made haste.

When it was well dark she had walked to the hospital, had dodged from waggon to waggon to Eulalia’s, and had been fingering her trigger—for there was little difficulty as to escaping in the dark—when Sister Darling’s coming had checked her; and now she was waiting for the man and horse to pass and not pester her, for it was as if some pestering thing obstructed her.

Now, Eulalia, on getting the sense of her letters, had started to run—to abandon her sick, to be off somehow to London; but, as she started, a dying voice called to her in a key which she could not resist: “_Mees_,” it groaned, and she moved back to the waggon-head to bow over a brow that had a bandage aslant about it, hiding the right eye, while already in his windpipe was the whistle of death: yet both Eulalia and Oyone, their ears within three feet of his lips, heard each word when he said: “A favour—service to humanity—my name Hartmann—Russian. Dig up a black box in the back yard of 11 Frith Street, Whitechapel—back yard, right-hand corner, dig it up. Send box to Taska—Bowery—New York—shoe-maker—well known. Tell Taska someone who is lately dead—he will know—gave me secret to pass on. It is the Ray, say—just that—he will know—the Ray—and be careful of the cap, say. This is death—I am going——”

Eulalia hardly waited a few seconds to close his eyes when she flew, nor did Oyone know when she flew, so open-mouthed she sat there on her toes at this wondrous discovery of the Ray. It was in the yard of 11 Frith Street—how marvellous a talisman in those three words!

She had once kept Chinnery three days without drink to force him to make her a new black box like that lost box, and, what was strange for him, he had resisted, asking her “_why do you want it?_” but then had yielded, had got her to get together lots of objects, had commenced to make, but then had failed, or had pretended to fail.

But here it now was: and with the Ray all her terrors were at an end, all her ambitions realised. Chinnery could be forced to show her how to use it with her own hands....

She sprang up, careless now of the man and horse still there, measured her chances swiftly, resolved to act, peeped between flaps more boldly than before: a dresser was in there, but not Eulalia.

Her heart started at the question: “_Does Eulalia know_ the preciousness of the Redlike Ray, of those three words just heard, and has rushed out already to go to clutch it?” She must have rushed very lightly, flyingly!... Whither? Oyone moved to seek her, clambering the field from waggon to waggon, and, on being seen by a running hospital-orderly, who stopped to stare at her, asked him where Nurse Bayley was.

“I think at the staff-waggon,” he answered, pointed, and ran.

But Eulalia was not there, was nowhere in the meadow, and now Oyone moaned, “She _has_ gone,” and flew down to the brook, and up to a pony-trap awaiting her beyond.

Eulalia had, in fact, to the amazement of the staff, gone off in a flutter with her bag, as she could without formality, being still on the sick-list; and after stumbling westward seven miles, she tumbled to slumber some hours with a cow in a hut by a covert.

A comet’s light in the morning sky caused her to start up, and she plodded on, anon conning her map by the shine of a match, anon conjecturing her way toward Nancy, for between Nancy and the front the railway had been destroyed, so that it was not till eleven the next night that she entered a train.

By that time Oyone was at Boulogne: but the Channel boats, requisitioned at intervals for war purposes, were not running regularly, and, having to wait, she lay in the railway restaurant, a desert now, lamenting, thinking of her air-boat, how well if she had it now, visited now by a panic as to the Prince, impeaching herself of dallying and self-pleasing, promising to be prompt as hammer-stroke, if he was not yet dead, telling heaven with accusing looks that Eulalia had taken another route, and already had the Redlike Ray safe....

It was not until the next afternoon that she could look back from the boat upon Boulogne as upon a hell escaped. At about the same hour Eulalia left Dieppe.

They arrived in London within a few minutes of each other, one alighting at London Bridge, one at Victoria, and now Oyone stood two seconds doubtful, still undecided whether to fly home and see things, or to make straight for the Redlike Ray. The latter drew her strongest: she flew and got a cab.

Soon after this Eulalia, too, was in a cab, making for the Horseferry Road, looking out with amaze at the changed air of London—hardly anyone in the streets, save a flock of jackals _en queue_ before a soup-kitchen in Marsham Street, and a crowd round a coffee-stall; and though it was not yet nine in the night she was given a feeling of a London of three +a.m.+

Even the policemen appeared fewer, and looked as if all was up; she saw two rolling a dead woman on a hooded stretcher; and between Victoria and Marsham Street noticed three dead cats, two closed public-houses, and a coster selling red herrings to a drunken man in evening-dress.

At a paper shop she noticed an _Evening News_ poster: “Let Them Come!” and a _Star_: “England Expects!” and a _Pall Mall_: “Sea-fight for To-morrow.”

Then before that darkling old home of Chinnery she alighted, for she remembered to have read that a neighbour’s maid knew “Monty’s” address, so she knocked there, hoping to find “Monty,” and so Oyone. But a woman told her that “Mrs Montgomerry is dead.”

“Don’t say that....”

“Of hunger, I’m afraid”—she closed the door.

What now to do? Her plan had been to go to Oyone, to accuse Oyone suddenly of having killed the Prince, and if the Prince was dead, or if he was living, she would know the whole truth without fail from Oyone’s face, and would then measure strengths with her—a rash thing, for she had no weapon, nor had thought of such a thing, nor knew her Oyone.

However, she had had the prudence to write a statement of the grounds of her suspicions, and had posted it to Sir Robert Barrington, marked “Open After Four Days.”

But as to where Oyone lived she had no notion. The Chinese Embassy occurred to her; her cabman knew where it was; she drove to Portland Place.

Here she was received in a room to the right of the door, where a lean and a portly Chinaman, seated each in an opposite corner, solemnly, hands on knees, kept exchanging glances; and the interview, which should have lasted one minute, lasted twenty. Probably they were dull, and Eulalia an incident: anyway, she had never known anyone who, having once got her, was so reluctant to part from her.

“What person may she want?” Stout ventured to ask mildly, and Lean perused the floor with a weak and troubled brow.

“I only know her as Oyone,” Eulalia said: “but I thought you might know——”

“Is she a friend to you?” Lean thought of asking, to which she lusted to answer “Yes” (knowing now that they knew Oyone), but, dainty in that way (by training), she said: “Not a friend: a matter of business, but very pressing and momentous.”

It was now that one remarked that he thought now that he could guess who was meant, and might telephone, if the lady would mention her name.

This put Eulalia at her wits’ end: to say “Bayley” would be simply to prepare Oyone, and in the end, pushed to say something, she came out with “‘The Nurse’—tell her that.”

Both went out; she heard them at a telephone; and they came back with some bustle, saying: “But you are late! Go if you like, but you will only be in time for the invitation.”

Eagerly she seized a piece of paper that gave the address, with a sob of relief, and was gone, her eyes bright for battle, careless of which “invitation” that was for which she would only just be in time, they urging their reluctant steps to chase and gaze wistfully after her to the last.

By which time Oyone, on her side, was driving home from Whitechapel. She had discovered Frith Street—an alley five houses long, joining two streets—decent little homes of retired seamen, say—No. 11 in darkness, apparently unoccupied, but for curtains at one window on the upper story.

Oyone pressed the latch of a side gate, peeped, went in: no one about: and there, leaning against the house-side, was the very thing which she was wondering how she could get—a spade.

With this she crept on to a strip of back yard planted with some stripling trees, making straight for the Ray “in the right-hand corner”; and the night was so dark, that she was quite in the corner before she became aware that there was a hole already there—square—of the same area as the Redlike Ray—three feet deep.

“She has beaten me”—her forehead dropped forward, and then her knees yielded, and, as if prostrate in prayer, she knelt over the hole, thinking, “she has it, she is more favoured than I, she seems to beat me, to escape me, to be born to molest, and balk, and waylay, and pester me, this woman: but wait: if I kill her, I will kill her twice, and thrice.”

She went back to her cab, and started in haste for home—down Leadenhall Street—by St Martin’s....

By this time Eulalia was there, ringing a bell under leafage at a green gate that had “Ning Shou Kung” painted in yellow letters across its concave top.

A very old Chinaman opened, dwelt upward on her with his eyes, led her inward through darkness to light, to a hall where stood a small woman of fifty, gorgeously gowned, stout and chubby, but grim in some wrinkle about the mouth. She, on seeing Eulalia, crossed her hands and raised them, bending her head—Chinese, not Manchu; and she muttered with reproach: “But you come so late: the going-away (funeral) dress all done.”

Eulalia palely smiled, shrugged, and replied in a shame-faced mutter that she could not come before, discerning that she was being taken for some other nurse; so, to make sure of her entrance, she kept her face as little in evidence as possible—though this proved to be needless, for even if she had been unlike the other nurse in uniform and everything, that would not have mattered, when the Chinese woman was once preoccupied with the idea of identity: for just as to English eyes fresh in India all Indians are twins, so to Chinese eyes that live retired in England each English visage is a pea in a heap.

The light, besides, though abundant—Eulalia felt that some _fête_ must be taking place—was very veiled and restrained, like the vague rainbow, and those soap-bubble veins of opal and mother-of-pearl; so the woman, whose name was Huang, said quite naturally: “No trouble, you come see,” and led Eulalia up to a landing, from which by three steps they entered a death-chamber.

Eulalia’s eyes, meantime, had been keen for any sign of Oyone, but, as she now moved into the room, the woman looked at her to moan with reproach and opening arms: “But no Oyone come!—too bad.”

And now, when Eulalia understood that Oyone was away, there welled in her a question that made her faint: “If he is alive! and here! and I can find out!”—Oyone away—and here, evidently, the head of the place dead, into so splendid a chamber had she been led, and never corpse more gorgeous than A-lu-te, stretched there in lantern-sheen in her phœnix hat, her robe and cloak of state, her badges of rank.

At once Huang led Eulalia to exhibit everything, Eulalia’s knees weak beneath her weight, meantime, at that question that was in her, at her fear of the real nurse turning up at any moment, of Oyone turning up, of something happening, at the consciousness of her precious seconds passing, passing, while she stood there foolishly watching the exhibition, the chemise of white silk, the jacket of grey silk over it, the wadded robe of blue satin, the belt of jade, the abounding outer robe of sable, the badges, the collar of amber, the hair one glow of gold, the astonishing coffin of lacquer, padded with crimson silk and straw.

But she could think of nothing to do, to say; any syllable might betray her; the moment was too pressing for her; she wished to be alone to sit and think; a gorgeous tall Gorgon at the corpse’s feet appeared to keep his eyes tied to her face; and she felt her frame trembling in every limb, like the tongues of little bells that flutter.

Then two more came in, a man and a woman, then the old gateman came, and she helped to bear the body from the bed and lay its head on the red “cock-crow” pillow of satin in the coffin, and then they commenced some ceremony—inviting the dead to rise to heaven: during which she moved away to a window, anguished at the chance she was casting away, asking again and again of heaven, “Oh, my God, what can I do?”

In the midst of which she was touched on the shoulder, and Huang, with one rather cynical eyebrow on high, was saying to her: “You invite A-lu-te go up, may be?”

At which Eulalia shrank—from an instant train of ideas that sprang up in her—ideas that meant desecration of the dead, prevarication, pretence, in recompense for a politeness, for she divined that the request was made more out of politeness to her than for the benefit of A-lu-te, who probably had already gone up at the invitation of the others.

However, as to desecrating the dead, Eulalia had (naturally) much less respect for dead bodies than, say, her mother had, being accustomed to see young doctors throw dead men’s arms at one another’s heads across dissecting-rooms, and bodies cheap as cabbages on fields of battle; and before she knew that she had resolved, she was saying with a bashful and begging grace which she had: “But in the English way.”

Huang shrugged and smiled.

“You must let me drive the devils first from all the corners.”

Huang shrugged and smiled.

“Well, then....”

By this time there were only two in the room with her, Huang and the eunuch; and these strolled with a sluggish and indulgent disgust after her to the four corners, in which she stood with a booing to-do ... boo-boo ... boo-boo-boo....

Then it was out on the stair corners, boo-boo-boo, patiently, one by one, and up, they following, hardly any longer bothering to smile; but at the first stair-top, when she turned into a certain passage, Huang stopped her with “No trouble no more.”

“Oh, I must now,” she said bashfully, beggingly, with that grace which gains everything.

And thenceforth she booed at every door-cornice, managing in the jam of every boo to mix the pill, “_Whose boy are you?_” until she was there in the darksome corner of that passage a door of which had a hole in it, though she did not see any hole; and there, too, she booed a “boo-boo, _whose boy are you?_ boo-boo-boo.”

There was still no reply, and by this time despair was in her, the thing was so trying and vile, her two followers becoming obviously sick of it, and she without any faith now in its success. However, she moved on, away now from that door with the hole, and was now about to boo anew, when, fully half-a-minute after her last boo, a dreadful outcry, pressing, as of one roused in terror out of dreadful depths and dreams, screamed out of that black darkness of the cross-passage: “_I am Eulalia’s boy!_”

The franticness of that cry in the silence, the chasm and extremity out of which it came, its crazy rage, its horrid suddenness, struck Eulalia colourless to the lips, though she just had the wit left to lift her hand with “Hark! a devil!”

“Poh,” said Huang, cross now, “no devil—man-cook sick—you come—all devil gone now.”

“If I must—though I have not finished.”

“No trouble, you come”—and they descended to the death-chamber, where Eulalia, standing by the coffin, glad enough to hide her mottled face, raised her arm to say: “A-lu-te, I invite you to rise to the skies.”

But at the same moment the gate-bell began gabbling outside the house, and Huang, crying to the eunuch, “_Oyone!_” flew out.

From which Eulalia well understood that Oyone was come; and now that she had found, and that the fire to find was extinguished in her, a chill and grisly realisation of peril gripped at her; for, if not killed, she could be imprisoned....

Some moments more and Oyone’s voice was coming up the stair, Eulalia’s escape cut off now, and all lost that had been won, if Oyone once saw her. And since Huang had told her that Oyone did not know that A-lu-te was dead, she felt certain that the death-chamber was the first which Oyone would enter, and now blamed herself bitterly for not bolting out at the bell-sound and stowing herself away somewhere. The only hope now was to look out of a window, and to one she flew....

In some moments Oyone was at the door....

But it was only to cast one flying glance into the room, and she was gone flying up, to dash along the passage to the door with a hole, eager before everything to relieve herself of the evil thing that was hot on her breath.

See her there! stooping at the hole, calling it to the dark, hot, envenomed: “Here I am back! A-lu-te is dead, and your Eulalia, too. Two nights ago—she was in a waggon in a field near Siebenberg—so I crept up—it was quite dark—and pried in through two flaps; and, as she was stooping over a wounded soldier, I gave it her right through the brain, the beast, and she bit a piece of her tongue right off, as she stiffened and kicked. She is well dead. She had been to the wood of the Six Millions, for I saw her footprint, and she had got the Redlike Ray from a dying Russian, but I have it safe now—I shall be sending it to Li Ku Yu to-morrow. I will come again——” she was gone.

Her prisoner, at her coming, had been seated on his bed’s brink, staring, quivering on the _qui vive_, in a craziness of hopes: if she could have seen, she would have seen him tumble back, done for, at her news.

It may be thought, indeed, that he could scarcely believe that Eulalia had been killed when he had lately heard Eulalia’s voice say: “whose boy?” but, on the contrary, he believed every word.

Much bane, in fact, had been mixed with his food on the day before Oyone had left him, and he was aware that his brain was not in a sane state.

All anight his head had been tossed in nightmare on the horns of the question, “which is the yellowest, momentum or energy?” and in the morning he had thought “I am done.”

Hence, on hearing “whose boy,” for some time he had not answered, not believing his ears. That was nothing odd now for him to hear something say “boo-boo, whose boy....”

However, the feet of his saviour were in haste. Eulalia was outside the gate before Oyone was again down, and, running till she found a cab-driver, she said to him between crying and laughing: “Grosvenor Place! The Prince of Wales! he is found.”

He sprang upright.

“Fast, will you? He is found.”

They were away.

But she was not wise to tell, since she wished to be quick, for the man thrice almost stopped to proclaim it, twice to policemen, once to a lady on a lone pavement, and as though his breath bore death and pestilence, the three instantly took to their heels.

And at Grosvenor Place Eulalia had to wring her hands—Sir Robert not at home!

“I mean that Sir Robert is really out,” the man added, “and he may not see you at once when he comes, as another lady—a Princess—is awaiting him.”

“No, he will see me first—you tell him—‘Miss Bayley,’” Eulalia said, and he led her to that large drawing-room where Sir Robert had once interviewed Her Majesty.

This ran at right angles to the stair-head; and parallel to the stair ran a small drawing-room, which opened into the large; in which latter, pacing, was the Princess Elizabeth, fraught with her latest thoughts.

As one of the two sets of folding-doors between the two rooms was open, she could hear the other led in, and, on peeping—started! It was _she_, the bliss-licker! though the Queen had informed her that the minx was at the war. What, then, was she doing here? Her Imperial Highness condescended to the keyhole, peering with no little greed to get a view of that plebeian puss who had proved tastier bait than her own imperial being; nor did Eulalia’s assumed mutiny and raid on dainties make Eulalia a less interesting object to her—on the contrary.

But she was amazed when Sir Robert hurried in first to Eulalia, though he must have known...! She saw Sir Robert bend to kiss Eulalia’s hand like a sovereign’s, or an idol’s, with deference, with reverence; and then what followed was all a reeling dream to her, intensely immense. She was aware of Eulalia panting her passion of tidings, of wine shaking in the baronet’s hand, of the fact that the Prince was found, found by another woman than she, of the words “Oyone,” “Regent’s Park,” “Ning Shou Kung”; and the next thing was that she found herself down and out in her brougham bound for “Ning Shou Kung”—which means “Palace of Unperturbed Old Age,” not of burning, and bursting, and turbulent youth.

At Ning Shou Kung gate she sent in her name, left her lady without as sentinel, and soon in a cosy room had that dark-brown eye of Oyone resting sidewards on her, cold, darksome in meaning, mysterious, teeming with strategic and dangerous statecraft: for when at bay she was ever brave, ready, dexterous, self-protective; while the Princess’s spectacles stared calmly like starlight, speculative, unblinking, noting the movement of Oyone’s bosom, her beauty, her sinuousness, her nose pinched and blanched.

“Your Imperial Highness—honours me?”

“No talk is necessary: conduct me instantly to the Prince of Wales.”

Oyone let slip one half-a-glance toward the gods, and hummed a little.

“Your Imperial Highness thinks that the Prince of Wales is here?”

“No talk is necessary: I know.”

Oyone was up. “How?”

The Princess shrugged. “By deductions from clues.”

“As I hoped!”—Oyone locked the door.

“Oh, that is nonsense to lock the door,” Elizabeth said, _her_ nose, too, paler now, “when others know that I am here, and that the Prince is.”

“But do you suppose I do not see that I have beaten _you_ by locking it?” Oyone looked down upon her with a bitter lip of contempt. “You come here, alone, hurried, after learning from a nurse that the Prince is here, your reason being that you want it to be thought that you have discovered him by your excessive cleverness; and I imprison you as an evidence of your cleverness.”

“That seems a little silly. Others are coming——”

“Precisely. You tell me everything which I wish to know. I will let those ‘others’ get the credit you crave for.”

“Why should you—care?”

“Oh, if you are not so clever as you pretend to the Queen, you are infinitely cleverer than you pretend to me. You see that _my_ liberty is in danger, and _your_ wedding bed. Let us be friends!”

“I have not said that I am unwilling,” said the Princess Elizabeth, up-looking.

Palely they smiled at each other.

“Shake hands!” said Oyone authoritatively.

Their right hands just met, while Oyone, reaching sidewards with the left, unlocked the door.

“Now, how did you know?” she asked: “tell quick!”

“A girl named Bayley, his _bonne amie_, came here, was mistaken for another nurse, heard his voice——”

“It was _she_? _Eulalia?_ She booed——” This made Oyone faint that such a thing should be; her arm searched blindly for a chair behind her; she sat.

“We have no time——” the Princess commenced to suggest, when the other struck her dumb: “She is not his _bonne amie_, I think she is his wife....”

At this Elizabeth blanched as from a slash, as there flashed across her memory Sir Robert Barrington’s manner of kissing Eulalia’s hand. But this was an idea that would take her brain days to receive and believe, and she said with a shuddering hauteur: “That is an impertinent suggestion—you speak of an impossibility.”

“But if the Prince has admitted it to me?” Oyone said. “And you need not care. She will not live long, if _I_ live.”

At which Elizabeth’s eyes dropped, her lips letting out: “One should not be horrid.”

“But you will be delighted if I am horrid? All women are the same! we care much for nothing, except some man. And since you can never get the Prince, not legally, while this girl is alive, then, you wish me to live. You agree? You see? Then, you will let me go first to him, to make him think for a minute that I am releasing him of my own will, on condition that he signs a promise to protect me from consequences; and _you_ will help to protect!” She sprang up, and Elizabeth, too, rose, saying, “On condition that I come with you.”

“Why not?” answered Oyone, eyeing her aside, “are we not allies? Kiss me.”

Elizabeth’s eyes dropped.

“Four men are said to have committed suicide for my lips,” Oyone mentioned.

“You _are_—one admits——”

“Then, you may.”

Elizabeth let slip a peep from beneath sheepish lids, but then shook her head, breathing “Not now.”

Oyone now wrote some phrases in haste, and they ran out, a sense of no little surprise in the Princess to find herself “the ally” of the miscreant whom she had come to smite and quell with her mighty spectacles; and she stood beyond the lantern-shine that stood on the floor by the door with the hole, while Oyone spoke....

The difficulty, however, was to get a signature to the phrases that lay on the iron-lined hole, or any kind of reply from within—and every second so precious.

But when Oyone told her motive—that a naval battle impended, and that Li Ku Yu instructed her to set free, since he did not wish an invasion of England until he invaded, then in a rush a shuddering pen was spluttering, and the thing was done.

On which Oyone’s lips brushed Elizabeth’s cheek with the whisper, “I’ll write—the key,” and she flew, scattering gold over the hands of two whom she met, with “fly! fly! for a time: all lost!” then was wild-handed at a glass, disguising as a Cockney coster-girl, and within six minutes was out, raining sables and bags into the air-boat, which she ever kept in petrol, then was heaping a beseeching Chinnery in, then was wiping her brow, sighing, high behind brown clouds....

Meantime, the Princess was labouring under the Prince’s weight, staining her rose-satin mantle, broderie anglaise and arum lilies with that shirt-front and dirty evening-dress—she eager, with “poor Teddy, try now,” he slow with “It will be well—wait one tick,” during fifteen minutes from prison door to brougham.

But it was ten minutes more before Sir Robert Barrington, who had been delayed by communications with Scotland Yard, arrived with a force of men—to find in “Ning Shou Kung” no one but A-lu-te.

London, meantime, had pricked the ear, and was up, so that as the Prince drove from street to street, his forehead on the Princess’s shoulder, he was conscious of commotion each moment increasing, newsboys who flew hooting the rumour, ten o’clock editions, populous windows, footsteps of runners that sent echoes of running, as when there is a fire in the night, and London sends out runners and echoes.

And from Hamilton Place there was some trouble: the carriage doors were opened, many pressing to shake hands, the police failing to reach him, and the Princess preaching continuously that he was ill, so that she was in a condition of exhaustion before they could get to the Park gate.

Just there, at that end of Constitution Hill, some man, seeing Eulalia straining and fainting to see, snatched her up, and she saw a nose beyond the Princess’s shoulder, to console her during her night-ride to the coast. As to how the Princess came to be with him, and not Sir Robert, was beyond her comprehension.

But if she could have waited, she would have seen him better, for later the Queen would have him be seen by the people, and he was supported to the balcony by the King and Elizabeth.

It was now first that the Palace was wrapt in a rapture of sound; and crowds were still coming to eye its windows almost all the night long.

And the wings of the wind bruited that thing through Britain that night: the dead was alive again, and somehow through the wonderful wit of that wonderful Princess Elizabeth, when all the tecs had long despaired. The heart of England softened toward Germany.

But none the less, England with all its heart longed that the next day’s battle should be lost by Germany, and with its whole heart wrote its hope that night, its demand—in nine million letters that drove crazy the Circulation Office of the London Postal Department—that none but the Prince should be the British strategist in that battle.

But of this the Queen would not hear, for seeing him on a bed strangely before her sight, she meant to keep him, sharing her eyes, meantime, between him and Elizabeth.

Elizabeth had calmly led him to her, saying: “Your Majesty, I have brought you your son.”

Willy nilly, she _had_ now to be a charlatan, and it was willy, for by heredity and nature this German girl was a greater charlatan and farçeur than Cagliostro or Casanova: so, having some genuine dexterity, she entertained Her Majesty half the morning in showing how clue on clue had finally led her to the gate of “Ning Shou Kung”; nor had the Queen’s feverish happiness the time to spy shaky spots in the chain.

Also Elizabeth related how, having gone to share with Sir Robert her final thoughts, she would not wait, as he had been engaged with some lady; an untruth which Sir Robert, on hearing of it, knew to be an untruth, though now, of course, he was discreetly mum; so that the Queen, and the Prince, remained unconscious that, not one, but _two_, rescue parties had gone to “Ning Shou Kung” that night.

What the Queen, or no one, could definitely gather was _why_ the Prince ever went to “Ning Shou Kung,” or its inmates’ motive for imprisoning him! for the Prince, under contract to Oyone, refused details—the motive was “political”; and though a mob sacked some of the rooms of “Ning Shou Kung” the next day, its inmates were soon back in it unpunished—to the wonder of public and police. Only Oyone lived no more there, having no confidence in the Prince’s promise; and with her were Chinnery and the air-boat.

But to the Queen’s fever details were of little importance for the moment; there he lay safe; his saviour was her favourite and elect for him; and “All, all, Teddy,” she said that morning, “you owe to this dear and knowing head.”

At which the Prince lifted himself, bowed, kissed the Princess’s hand in a particular manner. The Princess’s forehead rushed into a blush, her eyes blazed. The Queen’s bent head dropped a tear. It was an engagement.

Some moments later, though, the Prince again raised his head to say: “I fancy, Your Majesty, that I shall be well enough for the fight”—and she started! knowing that tone of her son.

He, for his part, had it in him that Eulalia lay dead of Oyone’s hand, and, on the whole, thought well of wars.