Chapter 24: Raoul

Raoul looked up, thoughtfully, playing with his pistols, and said to King Constantine in an unaccented and conversational tone:

“After all, who were you to rule Naxos?—you cheap, treacherous, yellow dog!”

That partly cleared the king’s muddy mind and he lurched to an upright position and began to take notice.

“You sold Greece to the boche,” continued Raoul in his serene, even voice, toying idly with his pistols. “What else you did—what else you are—is a trifle too vile to repeat aloud——”

He turned and looked at the Tzar of all the Bulgars whose ungainly bulk as he sat on his chair was now agitated by visible tremors:

“Murderer and coward,” mused Raoul aloud. “Every time you hire your gun-men to kill an enemy you hurry away to establish an alibi, don’t you? You cheap peddler of duped people—you made a rotten bargain this time, didn’t you? When your treacherous pal, Tino, betrayed Serbia, you swindled your own people, didn’t you?”

He shrugged, dangled his pistols, glanced at Gizzler, —or rather through Gizzler as though, the wretched creature were not there, —and his eyes encountered the interested jet black orbs of Eddin Bey.

Both smiled, Eddin in the face of death; Raoul with the generous grin of a man who recognizes in his enemy a peer.

“Eddin Bey,” he said, still smiling, “the Osmanli fight fairly. Ask the British Tommy ... And your fool of a Sultan is dead. And what do you think of affairs at present?”

“They are not any too gay,” replied Eddin Bey, laughing, “especially in the Alps.”

The half smile on Raoul’s face flickered and faded:

“You’re about done for, you Turks,” he said quietly. “You bet on the wrong horse, too. And now Enver Pasha keeps running to Berlin to ask why the all-highest doesn’t make him Khedive of Egypt as he promised. And Taalat is scared, and the butcher Djavid is in the dumps. Oh, I know it was not you Osmanli that set the Kurds and Bashi-Bazouks on the Armenians. That butchery of a million souls, men, women, children, babies, was conceived by the Berlin government and superintended from the Yldiz Palace.”

Raoul turned and looked contemptuously at the Germans:

“You square-heads,” he said, “have achieved one thing, anyway. Never before in history has a nation been indicted, and it was supposed it could not be done. But it has been done in your case. And for the first time also in history an entire race is spoken of and known to civilization only by a revolting nick-name—boche!

“Do you know what it means? There have been disputes concerning the origin of the term boche. The French say it means a stupid fellow—a clown; the Belgians think that it is a vulgar term for ‘blockhead.’ But I shall tell you what it really does mean: it means, in South African Dutch, an unclean and degraded species of wart-hog; and it has been in use for fifty years!”

He lifted one pistol and sat idly twirling it around his fore-finger.

“I know why you came here to Schwindlewald,” he said, “to put that back on the throne of Greece!”—he nodded toward Tino.

“In Berne you live luxuriously and wastefully in the midst of famine. You eat as usual; your bread is white; there are no restrictions for you in the matter of food amid a hungry people. You maintain a court there with flunkies, stables, motor-cars—every necessity and luxury which is now forbidden by Swiss law and by the law of decency you violate daily!”

He looked at the queen:

“Your effrontery, madame, is of course, in keeping with Hohenzollern tradition. But things are happening now—now, madame, —at this very moment! And I’m wondering just how long the Swiss are likely to endure your behavior in Berne.”

He sat silent after that for a little while, twirling his pistols and whistling softly to himself:

“Crack-brain-cripple-arm——”

Suddenly Eddin made a quick motion and Raoul shot the leg off his chair letting him down with a crash.

The startling crash of the pistol-shot brought them to their feet.

“Sit down!” said Raoul sharply, “or it will be a living leg next time; and the time after that a wooden head!” He sat watching Eddin getting to his feet with a shame-faced laugh:

“No use,” said Raoul in a friendly voice, “it can’t be done, Colonel.”

“I notice it can’t,” remarked Eddin, laughing. “Well sir, you have entertained us very pleasantly with your historical inappropos. Is there to be a denouément perhaps?”

“Did you expect one?”

Eddin shrugged: “A firing-squad, possibly. But of course I don’t insist.”

Raoul shook his curly head: “No, Colonel Eddin; no firing-squad. No Turkish atrocities, no Bulgarian murders, no boche bestialities.” He turned contemptuously on Constantine:

“You laid plans in Berne to entrap the leaders of the Ægean League. You forged instructions sent to me by Monsieur Venizelos. You attempted to foment an uprising in Naxos because you foresaw the trouble it would bring between two of the Allied powers—between Italy and Greece!

“Also you conceived and encouraged a plot to attempt the capture of yourself and your wife because you believed that Greece, although now rid of you, would resent such an attempt; and that chivalrous America would be shocked at the kidnaping of a woman—even such a notorious one as your Hohenzollern wife.”

He eyed him for a moment: “You are the cheapest back-stairs scullion who ever grafted, Tino,” he said. “But remember this little couplet the next time you go gaily grafting:

“‘Grecian gift and Spanish fig

Help the fool his grave to dig!’”

“That’s the motto of the Ægean League!” burst out the queen in a white hot fury.

“It is, madame,” returned Raoul, pleasantly.

Then he placed the other foot on the floor and got up leisurely from his seat on the table.

“You’re all free to go,” he said carelessly.

A moment of suspense, then the boche herd scrambled to its feet and rushed for the nearest exit. And Raoul came over to where I stood beside Thusis with Smith and Clelia beside me.

“All their weapons are locked up in the cellar,” he said, laughing; “let them look for them. Also I have all their documents packed up. We’re through with them,” he added, smiling at Thusis.

But there was a thunder cloud on her white brow: