Yolanda did not move. She, of course, had known the identity of the Black Ghost since we had given her Helena’s message. Maria Lalena sat staring at the ring with eyes that seemed hypnotised. Her face was white, but she gathered all her courage, and lifted her chin to look squarely at him. Her voice trembled a little as she spoke, “Hail, Fakat Zol, Guardian Spirit of Alaria,” she cried.
Prince Conrad looked at her, and lifted his eyebrows. Then he continued deliberately lighting his cigarette, and turned to us. “So you are actually ’ere!” he said, cheerfully. “Men after my own ’eart. If I were the ruler of Alaria I should offer you posts that would tempt you to stay ’ere. This country needs men who can do the impossible.”
“Not impossible at all,” John apologised. “Luck was with us.”
227“That is always true when the impossible is accomplished,” the Prince answered. “I am lucky, myself, and I like to surround myself with lucky men. Luck is a state of mind, and a most useful one. Your Majesty, may I recommend these very excellent and lucky men to your consideration? If you ’ave a use for professional escapers—and we all may ’ave—there are not many men alive who could escape from two arrests in two days.”
“At that,” John said, not too modestly, “it was really four, counting the trouble at the Palace gate, and that at Vorgo.”
“You see?” Prince Conrad said to Maria Lalena. “What did I tell you? It is stupendous.”
“Let us be serious,” she pleaded.
“Certainly,” agreed the Prince. “If you wish. I merely thought to save us all embarrassment, for you will notice that when one is serious in a situation like this, one becomes—dare I suggest such a thing?—just a trifle ridiculous.”
228Yolanda turned towards him disagreeably. “You always see situations so clearly,” she said, “but before we worry about such small considerations, I have a question to ask you. No doubt you will be glad to tell, and I prefer to ask you rather than Count Visichich or any other of your supporters. Who is the man the Visichiches found it necessary to imprison in their manor?”
For the fraction of a second Prince Conrad lost his amused air of authority. He stared at Yolanda in surprise. I could not tell whether he was a little sorry for her or upset for himself. I knew then that the man, whoever he might be, was no monk.
“’ow did you learn there was such a man?” he asked.
“Will you tell me who he is?” she repeated. I knew she must know who he was, she would not have been so anxious not to talk about him if she had been in any doubt. She was marking time, and making him uncomfortable while she did it.
“I prefer not,” he replied gently.
229She shrugged her shoulders. “I merely wanted to make sure,” she said, “whether, as I supposed, you were a party to his imprisonment. I now know you were.” She was smiling; for the first time since I had seen her, showing some human feeling. I heard a footstep in the corridor. A note of triumph came into her voice. “You are right not to answer, our Cousin Conrad,” she said, theatrically. “That was a question whose answer will be most embarrassing to you. No man can be both Prince and bandit forever.”
“Quite true,” Conrad agreed, affably. “The time must come when he will take his rightful place.”
The door opened again, and the servant appeared for an instant to bow low before a monk in a brown habit, with the very unmonklike face we had seen through the ceiling at Visichich manor. The only change was that now he was shaved. Yolanda rose, the other men rose. We followed suit, perforce. Only Maria Lalena remained seated, staring at him as though she were looking at a ghost.
Yolanda’s rich voice almost intoned, “Bela, my son that was dead, is alive again. Bela the King has returned to his throne.” She moved half across the room, giving up her high-backed crimson chair to him. He took it without a glance at her.
“Very good,” he said. “Just the people I wished most to see, and all together, waiting for me. Perhaps, my very hated Cousin Conrad, you will put out your cigarette, since the King has not given you permission to smoke in his presence?”
230With a graceful gesture Conrad dropped the offending luxury into a tray on the desk, and bowed, ceremoniously. Bela swaggered in his sarcasm like an angry schoolboy. If he could have spit fire he would have been pleased to do it, I am sure.
“I was never amused by affairs of state,” he went on, his small boy’s fury mounting, minute by minute, “so we will not spend too much of my time on the matters before us. It would seem that several people wish to rule this small and undesirable portion of Europe. Some of you I have even seen wax quite sentimental over the place. I think it fit for breeding pigs, and it has certainly been used extensively for the purpose.” He stopped a moment to show his fangs while we had time to digest his stupid venom. “I have had three days away from my mother lately, for the first time in eight years, and I really enjoyed them. Also, I did some thinking.”
“Also for the first time in eight years?” Conrad asked in a mild voice.
231“Silence!” Bela ordered angrily. “I have come to a decision. Probably you will all be astonished. I am only sorry that I must please you in this. I can think of no way out of that. According to the constitution of Alaria I am, with a few restrictions, the absolute ruler of this country. I can do everything except imprison men without a fair trial in due course of law. My subjects have relegated that privilege to themselves. They do not even limit themselves to ordinary people who would not be missed. They imprison their King. If it had not been that they are careless, and that Americans are thoughtless meddlers, I should still be languishing in a tower room with a splendid view of the particular mountain where the Black Ghost has his eyrie. I could see the heliograph signals he sent to my very disloyal subjects, the Visichiches.”
“Your Majesty,” Count Visichich bowed, apologetically, “the disloyalty I readily admit, but if the eyrie of the Black Ghost were on the mountain to which you refer we should have lodged Your Majesty somewhere with a less extensive view. The mountain to which you refer is merely a convenient point from which the signals are relayed to a few of his many strongholds.”
232And I had wasted an hour’s sleep drawing a picture of that peak.
“Indeed?” Bela shivered with temper, and slapped a book down on the desk before him so hard that it bounced up again a full two inches. “These children’s games,” he went on, “are of very little importance. I do not even seek to punish you, since I am not permitted your license, and I have no stomach for the slow law. If I could see a way to clap you all into tower rooms and dungeons, I would leave you to rot there. My ancestors devised excellent and most suitable tortures for disloyal subjects. I should enjoy reviving them but I have more important things to occupy me. I have made two momentous decisions. Momentous for Alaria. The first concerns my too competent and intriguing mother, the most ubiquitous Queen in Europe. Just what part she played in my imprisonment I do not know. I was trying to make her tell me when this girl,” he made a motion toward Maria Lalena, “started such a hullaballoo outside this door that I retired until the matter should have been attended to. Something about a bomb and a riot at the gate. My suspicion remains unsatisfactorily denied. It does not matter. She was, in any case, far too ready with a substitute for me.” He turned to Yolanda insolently. “You,” he said. “While I thought you devoted to me, I could forgive your assumption of power, but now that I know that your devotion was only to your own place in the world I do not forgive you anything. While I can still issue commands you will leave Alaria, never to return. Go now. I have ordered a car and four soldiers to accompany you. Your maids can follow with your personal belongings. You are to leave immediately.” He banged hard at the bell on the desk. When the servant answered he spit two words at him, and an officer appeared. Yolanda was staring at him unbelievingly, but his large wet mouth was curled back in so ugly a snarl that she read the answer to any plea she might make without further words.
233“The devil take you!” she cried, letting her anger mar her carefully built-up theatricalism. “I hope you fail as ignominiously as you would have done many times during the last eight years if I had not guided and protected you. I provided against all contingencies, not your death alone. I foresaw this also, and provided against it with good American government bonds. Quite a lot of them. I shall live very comfortably in Switzerland or England or anywhere else that shall please me, and I hope you all may have as bad luck as my ungrateful son will surely bring upon himself.”
234She swept out of the room without any other farewell, her long crepe veil brushing against the son for whom she had donned it a little prematurely.
Bela laughed as the door closed. Then he turned back to Prince Conrad. “Now I shall really surprise you,” he said. “I have decided to do what I have always wished, and what now seems to have become a necessity if I am to have any pleasure at all. I have decided to abdicate. You will be so glad of that that you will pay me four million francs a year for the rest of my life.”
Four million francs—about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars. A generous income, but not really an exorbitant price to pay for the peaceful removal of this dangerously petulant and vindictive young man.
235“Four million francs.” Conrad was evidently considering the bargain seriously.
“Four million francs,” Maria Lalena gasped, “why that would build the new hospital—”
“Be quiet,” Bela snarled at her. “I have named my terms. The alternative is that I stay and throw the lot of you into prison on charges of conspiracy and treason, of which you are most certainly guilty. You might not be convicted, but there would inevitably be civil war. This way I agree to remain dead to Alaria.”
“Oh, we accept your terms without question,” Conrad said, calmly.
“Good,” Bela cried. “Then I leave you now to struggle with this mare’s nest as best you may. I hope you get into a lot of trouble, but that you remain in power, since, if you do not, my allowance will cease, and I have made no provision for the future as my mother did. If I had known that, I should not have been so firm with her.”
“In the matter of offence,” Conrad said drily, “it may be more profitable to receive than to give.”
236Bela shrugged his shoulders. “Nevertheless I enjoyed sending her away,” he said, “and if it may have been costly, a King’s enjoyment should not be niggardly. And you will be prompt in your payments to me, for if you should not be you will know that I will come alive again, and gladly see you all torn apart by the populace.” He pushed back the high throne chair roughly, and walked to the door where he stopped to deliver a last thrust.
“I leave you that girl for a legacy,” he announced, “and I hope you never discover whether she is the Princess or not.” He slammed the door and was gone.
After a moment Maria Lalena spoke. “You will discover immediately that I am not,” she said in a small, tired voice. “I tell you so. My mother rushed me into this and gave me no time to think. It was something she and Queen Yolanda devised. I believed the whole thing until I had time to think, then I knew I could not be the Princess, since I remembered my life at Waldek before she was killed.”
“Still,” Conrad interrupted, “I ’ave publicly proclaimed you Maria Lalena and Queen of Alaria. If I now declare I made a mistake—it is awkward.”
237“Very,” she agreed. “I throw myself contritely on your mercy, and beg that since you have committed sins yourself, posing as the Black Ghost, and imprisoning King Bela, you will pardon and help me.” She turned on him her melting glance, but this time it did not remind me of Parisian pastry. It was sweet, but honest.
“I will most certainly pardon and ’elp you,” he promised, going over to her. “But the sins you ’ave named will always be my greatest pride. They ’ave saved my country from revolution. Shall I explain? It might be as well, I think. We are all friends ’ere and even Count Visichich is ignorant of a few things that ’ave taken place. Not that I keep anything from ’im, but that there was no time for explanations.
“First, I will state that I am the only man in Alaria who can see the country through this storm. You ’ave discovered that I ’ave been the Black Ghost. That was my idea, but the part ’as been played by all of us, even by the Countess Kate............