Two hours after this statement was made, if the populace could have got hold of young Harry Beachman it would have torn him to pieces; for it was then discovered that the drowned man was no less a person than this Herr Axel von Ziegelmundt, and that they had not only spent the greater part of that particular day shut up in the former's room in the Portsmouth hotel, but had been together up to the very moment when the excursion steamer had started on its moonlight trip to Alum Bay and to the bringing about of that providential accident which had prevented the State affairs of an unsuspecting nation from being betrayed to a secret foe.
What followed was, in the face of this, of course, but natural. John Beachman was suspended immediately, and his son's arrest ordered. It served no purpose that he denied indignantly the charge of being a traitor, and swore by every sacred thing that the hours spent in his room at the hotel were passed in endeavouring to master the intricacies of the difficult German card game, Skaat, and that never in all their acquaintance had one word touching upon the country or the country's affairs passed between Axel von Ziegelmundt and himself, so help him God! It was in vain, also, that Greta Hilmann--shouting hysterically her belief in him and begging wildly that if he must be put into prison she might be taken with him "and murdered when you murder him if he is to be court-martialled and shot, you wretched blunderers!"--it was in vain that Greta Hilmann clung to him and fought with all her woman's strength to keep the guard from laying hands upon him or to tear her from his side; the outraged country demanded him, and took him in spite of all. Nor did it turn the current of sympathy in his direction that, crazed when they tore him from her, this frantic creature had gone from swoon to swoon until her senses left her entirely, and the end was--tragedy.
The full details were never forthcoming. The bare facts were that she was carried back to Beachman's house in a state of hysteria bordering close upon insanity, and that when, under orders from the Admiralty, that house and all its contents were impounded pending the fullest inquiry into the dock master's books and accounts, the Admiral Superintendent and the appointed auditor entered into possession, her condition was found to be so serious that it was decided not to insist upon her removal for a day or two at least. A nurse was procured from the naval hospital and put in charge of her; but at some period during the fourth night of that nurse's attendance--and when she, worn out by constant watching, slept in her chair--the half-delirious patient arose, and, leaving a note to say that life had lost all its brightness for her, and if they cared to find her they might look for her in the sea, vanished entirely. She could scarcely have hit upon a worse thing for the evil repute of her lover's name or her own. For those who had never known her personally were quick to assert that this was proof enough of how the thing had been managed. In short, that she, too, was a spy, and that she had adopted this subterfuge to get back to Germany before the scent grew hot and the law could lay a hand upon her. Those who had known her took a more merciful view so far as she was concerned, but one which made things look all the blacker for her lover. What could her desperation and her utter giving up all hope even before the man was put on trial mean if it was not that she knew he was guilty, knew he would never get off with his life, and that her suicide was a tacit admission of this?