Chapter XXII: A Trip on the Sound

“Good morning, Dad,” said Nitocris, as she entered the sitting-room about half an hour before breakfast the next morning. “What is your opinion of the European situation now?”

“Good morning, Niti; what is yours?” asked her father, looking at her with grave eyes and smiling lips.

“As it was yesterday, only rather more so. In his present incarnation, Prince Oscar Oscarovitch is, I should think, about as black-hearted a scoundrel as ever polluted the air that honest people breathe.”

“I entirely agree with you. And now, believing that, do you still propose to trust yourself to his tender mercies on board his own yacht, surrounded, as you will be, by men who, no doubt, are his absolute slaves?”

“I trust myself to his tender mercies, Dad?” she replied, drawing herself up and throwing her head back a little; “you seem to have got hold of the thing by the wrong end, as Brenda would say. That is only what it will look like. The reality will be that he will blindly trust himself to my mercies--and I can assure you that he will find them anything but tender. No, dear, we shall accept His Highness’s invitation to lunch, and then his offer of the hospitality of the yacht for the trip, which, by the way, I fancy will be more to the eastward than to the northward----”

“You mean, I suppose, Trelitz and Viborg?”

“Not Trelitz, I think, but Viborg almost certainly. That will be the end of the abduction as far as I can see from our present plane of existence.”

“Really, Niti--well, well. Of course, I know that you will be perfectly safe: but what would our good friends on this plane, as you put it, the Van Huysmans, for instance, think if they could hear you talking so calmly to your own father about getting yourself abducted by a man whom you justly think to be one of the most unscrupulous scoundrels on earth! And, by the way, what is to become of me in the carrying out of this little scheme of yours? I hope you don’t expect me to connive at the abduction of my own daughter. I have a certain amount of reputation to lose, you know.”

“Oh, if His Highness is the clever villain that we know him to be, I think we may safely trust him to arrange for your temporary disappearance from the scene. And whatever he does it will be easy for you to play the part of the passive victim for the time being. He can’t injure or kill you, for if it came to extremities you have the means of giving his people such a fright as would probably drive them out of their senses, just as I could if their master got troublesome. Really, from a certain point of view, the adventure will have a decidedly humorous aspect.”

“With a very considerable leaven of tragedy.”

“Yes, the tragedy will be a logical sequence of the comedy--and, as I said last night, it will be tragedy. And now suppose we go to breakfast. I have been up nearly two hours helping Jenny with the packing, and this lovely air has given me a raging appetite. There’s a little more to do yet, and we shall have His Highness here before long to ask for our decision and take us off to the yacht.”

Here she was quite right, for she had hardly left her father to his after-breakfast pipe and gone upstairs to help her maid, than Oscarovitch came into the smoking-room.

“Good morning, Professor Marmion! I need not ask you if you have had a good night. You look the very picture of a man who has slept the sleep of the just. And Miss Marmion?”

“Thanks, Your Highness, I think we have both managed to spend the night to good purpose. The air here is glorious just now. I always think that sound, dreamless sleep is the best sign that a place is doing you good.”

“Oh, undoubtedly, though for some reason or other I did not sleep very well last night. Something had disagreed with me, I suppose. I seemed to have a sense of being pursued to the uttermost ends of the earth and back again by some relentless foe who simply would not allow me to take a moment’s rest. But I didn’t come to talk about the stuff that dreams are made of. I came to ask whether my cruise is to be a lonely one, or whether I am to have the very great pleasure of your company.”

Franklin Marmion, for perhaps the first time in his life, felt distinctly murderous towards a fellow-creature as he looked at this splendid specimen of physical humanity, knowing so well the real man who was hiding behind that fascinating exterior; but he managed to answer pleasantly enough:

“We have talked the matter over, Prince, and we have come to the conclusion that your very kind invitation is really too good to be refused. We know that we are incurring a debt that we shall not be able to pay, but we are trusting to your generosity to let us off.”

“On the contrary, my dear Professor,” said Oscarovitch, without the slightest attempt to conceal the pleasure that the acceptation gave him, “it is yourself and Miss Marmion who have made me your debtor. In fact, if you had not found yourselves able to come, I should have run the Grashna back to Cowes, gone up to London, plunged into a maelström of dissipation, and probably ended by losing a great deal of money at Ascot and Goodwood. Ah, Miss Marmion, good morning! How well the air of Copenhagen seems to agree with you! The Professor has just gladdened my soul by telling me that you have decided to take pity on my loneliness.”

“Good morning, Prince!” she replied, putting her hand for a moment in the one he held out. “Yes, we are coming, if you will have us. In fact, I have just finished packing.”

“Ah, excellent! Well now, since that is happily arranged, it would be a pity to waste any of this lovely morning. The Sound is like a streak of blue sky fallen from heaven. My gig is down at the jetty, and I have a couple of my men here who will convoy your baggage down. If it is packed, as you say, you need not trouble about it. You will find everything safe on board.”

“Thank you, Prince,” said the Professor. “Then I will go and settle up at the office while Niti puts her hat on. I will have the things sent down, and we may as well walk to the jetty. It will do me good after that big breakfast. Jenny had better get into a cab and go down with the luggage.”

When they reached the promenade along the Sound shore Oscarovitch pointed to a beautifully-shaped, three-masted, two-funnelled white yacht lying about five hundred yards out, and said:

“That is the Grashna, Miss Marmion. I hope you like the look of her.”

“She is beautiful!” exclaimed Nitocris, recognising at once the vessel which had met the Russian destroyer on the early morning of the 7th. “She almost looks as if she could fly.”

“So she can in a sense,” laughed the Prince. “Come now, here is the gig. We will get on board, and you shall see her go through her paces.”

Neither she nor her father were strangers to yachts, but when they mounted the bridge of the Grashna and looked over her from stem to stern, they had to admit that they had never seen anything quite so daintily splendid. They had chosen their rooms, and Jenny was below unpacking. Although, of course, he had a captain on board, the Prince often sailed the yacht himself when he had guests on board. He had a genuine love for the beautiful craft, and he took an almost boyish delight in showing what she could do. She was a twelve-hundred-ton, triple-screw, turbine-driven boat, and, thanks to the space-economy of the new system, her builders had been able to stow away fifteen thousand horse-power in her engine-room, and this when fully developed gave a speed in smooth water of thirty-five knots or a little over forty statute miles an hour.

The anchor was up almost as soon as they got on to the bridge, and Oscarovitch moved the pointer of the telegraph to “Ahead slow.” The quartermaster in the oval wheel-house behind him moved the little wheel a few spokes to starboard, her mellow whistle tooted, and she glided in an outward curve through the other yachts and shipping, and gained the open water.

“Now,” he said, turning to Nitocris, “we can begin to move. It is roughly thirty English miles to Elsinore. If you have never done any fast travelling at sea and would like to do some now, I can get you there in about three-quarters of an hour.”

“What!” exclaimed the Professor, “thirty miles in forty-five minutes by sea! That is over forty miles an hour. A wonderful speed.”

“Yes,” he replied, almost tenderly; “but my beautiful Grashna is a wonderful craft--at least, I think you will say so when you see what she can do. Now, if you will take advice, you and Miss Marmion will go into shelter, for it will begin to blow soon.”

Behind the wheel-house was an observation room, as it would be called in the States, running nearly the whole length of the bridge, and fronted with thick plate glass. They went in, and Oscarovitch turned the pointer to half-speed. There was no increase in vibration, but the shore began to slip away behind them faster and faster, and the northern suburbs of Copenhagen rose ahead and fell astern as though they were part of a swiftly moving panorama. Then the pointer went down to full speed, and the Prince, after a word to the quartermaster, joined them in the bridge-house and closed the door.

“You will need all your eyes to see much of the shore now,” he said; “I have given her her wings.”

Nitocris felt a shudder in the carpeted floor. Looking ahead she saw the bow lift slightly. Then a smooth, green swathe of water curled up on either side. She looked aft, and saw a broad torrent of froth, foaming like a furious, rapid stream away from the stern. The houses and trees on the shore seemed to run into each other, and slide out of sight almost before the eye could rest upon them. The water alongside was merely a blue-green blur. Nitocris involuntarily held her breath as though she had been out on deck.

“It is wonderful, Prince!” she said, almost in a whisper. “That alleged express from Hamburg was nothing to this: and yet how steadily she moves in spite of the speed. I should have thought that it would have nearly shaken us to jelly.”