'Sherry,' was Prince Eugen's curt order.
'And Romanee-Conti afterwards?' said Hans. Aribert looked up quickly.
'No, not to-night. I'll try Sillery to-night,' said Prince Eugen.
'I think I'll have Romanee-Conti, Hans, after all,' he said. 'It suits me better than champagne.'
The famous and unsurpassable Burgundy was served with the roast. Old Hans brought it tenderly in its wicker cradle, inserted the corkscrew with mathematical precision, and drew the cork, which he offered for his master's inspection. Eugen nodded, and told him to put it down. Aribert watched with intense interest. He could not for an instant believe that Hans was not the very soul of fidelity, and yet, despite himself, Racksole's words had caused him a certain uneasiness. At that moment Prince Eugen murmured across the table:
'Aribert, I withdraw my promise. Observe that, I withdraw it.' Aribert shook his head emphatically, without removing his gaze from Hans. The white-haired servant perfunctorily dusted his napkin round the neck of the bottle of Romanee-Conti, and poured out a glass. Aribert trembled from head to foot.
Eugen took up the glass and held it to the light.
'Don't drink it,' said Aribert very quietly. 'It is poisoned.'
'Poisoned!' exclaimed Prince Eugen.
'Poisoned, sire!' exclaimed old Hans, with an air of profound amazement and concern, and he seized the glass. 'Impossible, sire. I myself opened the bottle.
No one else has touched it, and the cork was perfect.'
'I tell you it is poisoned,' Aribert repeated.
'Your Highness will pardon an old man,' said Hans, 'but to say that this wine is poison is to say that I am a murderer. I will prove to you that it is not poisoned. I will drink it.' And he raised the glass to his trembling lips. In that moment Aribert saw that old Hans, at any rate, was not an accomplice of Jules. Springing up from his seat, he knocked the glass from the aged servitor's hands, and the fragments of it fell with a light tinkling crash partly on the table and partly on the floor. The Prince and the servant gazed at one another in a distressing and terrible silence.
There was a slight noise, and Aribert looked aside. He saw that Eugen's body had slipped forward limply over the left arm of his chair; the Prince's arms hung straight and lifeless; his eyes were closed; he was unconscious.
'Hans!' murmured Aribert. 'Hans! What is this?'
25. The Steam Launch
MR TOM JACKSON's notion of making good his escape from the hotel by means of a steam launch was an excellent one, so far as it went, but Theodore Racksole, for his part, did not consider that it went quite far enough.
Theodore Racksole opined, with peculiar glee, that he now had a tangible and definite clue for the catching of the Grand Babylon's ex-waiter. He knew nothing of the Port of London, but he happened to know a good deal of the far more complicated, though somewhat smaller, Port of New York, and he sure there ought to be no extraordinary difficulty in getting hold of Jules'
steam launch. To those who are not thoroughly familiar with it the River Thames and its docks, from London Bridge to Gravesend, seems a vast and uncharted wilderness of craft - a wilderness in which it would be perfectly easy to hide even a three-master successfully. To such people the idea of looking for a steam launch on the river would be about equivalent to the idea of looking for a needle in a bundle of hay. But the fact is, there are hundreds of men between St Katherine's Wharf and Blackwall who literally know the Thames as the suburban householder knows his back-garden - who can recognize thousands of ships and put a name to them at a distance of half a mile, who are informed as to every movement of vessels on the great stream, who know all the captains, all the engineers, all the lightermen, all the pilots, all the licensed watermen, and all the unlicensed scoundrels from the Tower to Gravesend, and a lot further. By these experts of the Thames the slightest unusual event on the water is noticed and discussed - a wherry cannot change hands but they will guess shrewdly upon the price paid and the intentions of the new owner with regard to it. They have a habit of watching the river for the mere interest of the sight, and they talk about everything like housewives gathered of an evening round the cottage door. If the first mate of a Castle Liner gets the sack they will be able to tell you what he said to the captain, what the old man said to him, and what both said to the Board, and having finished off that affair they will cheerfully turn to discussing whether Bill Stevens sank his barge outside the West Indian No.2 by accident or on purpose.
Theodore Racksole had no satisfactory means of identifying the steam launch which carried away Mr Tom Jackson. The sky had clouded over soon after midnight, and there was also a slight mist, and he had only been able to make out that it was a low craft, about sixty feet long, probably painted black. He had personally kept a watch all through the night on vessels going upstream, and during the next morning he had a man to take his place who warned him whenever a steam launch went towards Westminster. At noon, after his conversation with Prince Aribert, he went down the river in a hired row-boat as far as the Custom House, and poked about everywhere, in search of any vessel which could by any possibility be the one he was in search of.
But he found nothing. He was, therefore, tolerably sure that the mysterious launch lay somewhere below the Custom House. At the Custom House stairs, he landed, and asked for a very high official - an official inferior only to a Commissioner - whom he had entertained once in New York, and who had met him in London on business at Lloyd's. In the large but dingy office of this great man a long conversation took place - a conversation in which Racksole had to exercise a certain amount of persuasive power, and which ultimately ended in the high official ringing his bell.
'Desire Mr Hazell - room No. 332 - to speak to me,' said the official to the boy who answered the summons, and then, turning to Racksole: 'I need hardly repeat, my dear Mr Racksole, that this is strictly unofficial.'
'Agreed, of course,' said Racksole.
Mr Hazell entered. He was a young man of about thirty, dressed in blue serge, with a pale, keen face, a brown moustache and a rather handsome brown beard.
'Mr Hazell,' said the high official, 'let me introduce you to Mr Theodore Racksole -
you will doubtless be familiar with his name. Mr Hazell,' he went on to Racksole,
'is one of our outdoor staff - what we call an examining officer. Just now he is doing night duty. He has a boat on the river and a couple of men, and the right to board and examine any craft whatever. What Mr Hazell and his crew don't know about the Thames between here and Gravesend isn't knowledge.'
