The Professional Prince/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII.
Bending forward, a hand on either knee, John Stuart sat on a straight-backed chair and talked earnestly and continuously of the greatest crisis in the history of England.
The eyes of the Princess Frieda were dreamy, but her face wore the thoughtful air proper to one receiving instruction about a great historical event. But in truth the pregnant words of her future husband no longer entered her left ear and rushed hurriedly out through her right. Her ears were now wholly barred to them. She began a yawn in the most unaffected fashion, and awoke in time to smother, by a somewhat violent effort; the rest of it.
The Princess Anne entered briskly in a white tennis frock and shoes, racket in hand, crossed the room quickly, kissed the princess, and said:
“I thought you'd be dressed for tennis already. Do hurry up, dear.” She turned and added: “Good morning, Richard. Good morning, countess. Good morning, Sir Horace.”
Both of the latter had risen; and with some surprise she surveyed John Stuart, who, still absorbed in his burning theme, his mind on a peak far above the region of manners, still sat on his chair, gazing at her with resentful eyes.
“I'll be as quick as I can—if Prince Richard will excuse me,” said the Princess Frieda in a joyful tone. She rose and hurried out of the room.
A scowl from Sir Horace brought John Stuart's mind bumping down from its height. He rose with clumsy haste and blew his nose with the loud, proud blast of one protesting reproachfully against the ruffling of his finer sensibilities.
The Princess Anne gasped, swung around, and gazed at him with amazed, understanding eyes.
“Good gracious!” she murmured faintly.
Sir Horace swore horribly under his breath. John Stuart gazed gloomily at nothing in particular.
The Princess Anne told the countess quickly that they were going to a revue that night, and explained somewhat incoherently the nature of an English revue. As she did so, she kept turning to look at John Stuart with undiminished amazement.
The Princess Frieda entered in her tennis frock, racket in hand, her eyes shining brightly. The Princess Anne took her arm, and led her quickly out of the room.
A quarter of an hour later, the empurpled Sir Horace almost burst into the smoking room of the prince.
“He blew his nose! He blew his nose, highness!” he howled.
“Who blew what nose, my Horace?” asked the prince with amiable calm.
“That oaf! That damned idiot! That John Stuart, highness!”
“And why shouldn't he?” asked the prince, still calmly.
“You should have heard him do it, highness!” howled Sir Horace.
“Heaven forbid!” the prince ejaculated piously.
“It was like a trumpet!” howled Sir Horace.
“What kind of a trumpet?” the prince inquired with a livelier interest.
“A trombone—a bassoon—a large trumpet, highness,” Sir Horace raved on. “The Princess Anne was there! She heard it! She knew at once he wasn't you, highness!”
“And that's that!” said the prince with conviction.
“But what is to be done, highness?” asked Sir Horace, mopping his purple brow.
“The Princess Anne will do everything that is to be done. You can trust her for that. I shall do nothing at all,” said the prince with unruffled serenity. “But I trust I shall take the wigging I shall get with manly fortitude.”
Sir Horace looked at him with despairing eyes.
“I have let your highness down,” he moaned. “I must resign. It is the only course open to me.”
“You will do nothing of the kind.” The prince spoke in a tone of extreme severity. “You didn't let me down at all. You couldn't foresee all the accomplishments of the oaf. How could you guess that he blew his nose like an elephant?” He paused, and then added: “At the same time, you'd better see that he doesn't do it again. Arrange for him to take lessons in the art of nose blowing from one of the nurses of Prince Albert's children.”
The next morning, the Princess Anne awoke sufficiently suspicious to resolve that the only way to recover her peace of mind was to demonstrate the absurdity of her suspicion.
Considering the matter, it grew clear to her that if the prince had a substitute at the palace, he himself must be somewhere else. The likeliest place was the house in Half Moon Street. It seemed to her that she might easily make sure that he was not there, at any rate; and it would be a satisfaction to her to do so.
As soon as she had had her breakfast, therefore, she ordered her motor car, put on a morning hat, and went to the prince's rooms in the palace.
She found John Stuart at breakfast, eating a chop with a very gloomy air. The Daily Wire, open at the leader page, was propped up in front of him so that he might read as he ate. He gazed at her with gloomily impatient eyes, for he resented her withdrawing his attention from the burning words of the leader writer.
She did not stay long with him. She went briskly down to her car, and bade her chauffeur drive her to the house in Half Moon Street.
She stepped out of the car listlessly and pressed the button of the electric bell. Henry Cleveland opened the door and blushed.
“Is his highness up?” asked the Princess Anne, and turned to step back into the car.
“Yes, your highness. He's at breakfast,” was the amazing reply of Henry Cleveland; and he blushed again.
The listlessness fell from the Princess Anne. She swung around and crossed the threshold in one step. Henry Cleveland shut the front door, opened the dining-room door, and announced her. She entered quickly, and found the prince eating a grilled sole.
He rose and greeted her with a charming smile.
She sat down,and gazed at him with a dazed air, asking herself however she had been deceived for a moment by John Stuart's resemblance to him. A single one of John Stuart's corpselike grins should have opened her eyes for good and all. She saw now that no sense of humor, however sinister, could change the charming smile of the prince into one of those grins.
Then she began to grow angry.
“Do you always eat meat before fish at breakfast?” she added in an uncommonly combative tone. .
“No; I never remember doing so,” said the prince, looking at her with suddenly attentive eyes.
“Oh, I thought perhaps you did. At least, less than ten minutes ago, I saw you eating a chop at the palace, and now I find you eating a sole in Half Moon Street.”
The prince laughed gently, and said in a tone of satisfaction:
“I always said that you'd be the first to find me out.”
The Princess Anne gazed at him indignantly. She did not seem mollified by his tribute to her perspicacity.
“It's all very well to joke about it, and in ordinary circumstances I shouldn't have said anything, though you have landed us with the biggest bore in England. But as it is, you've treated Princess Frieda disgracefully,” she said sternly.
The prince was on the point of protesting that he had a constitutional aversion to princesses, because they always smelled of bread and butter; but his cousin's face gave him pause. He suppressed his plaint, and announced with a melancholy air:
“I did it of set purpose. It seems certain that I shall marry her, and I thought it well to begin the affair properly—with a little aversion. All true love begins with a little aversion; the experts are unanimous about it.”
The princess gazed at him earnestly with more than a shade of suspicion in her eyes.
“I don't know whether you're rotting or not” she began.
“Would I rot about the deepest feelings of a strong man's heart?” the prince asked sadly.
“Yes,” said the Princess Anne, without any hesitation. “But you've certainly succeeded in producing that aversion. At least, it isn't aversion; it's indifference. Frieda doesn't take any interest in you at all. She's made up her mind that she's been let in for marrying the stupidest oaf in Europe, and she never means to take any interest in you. She's cheerful enough when she's away from that—that idiot; but I expect when she thinks of what she's in for, she's thoroughly miserable. And it's a horrid shame, for she's really a darling.”
The prince looked at her doubtfully.
“Are you sure? Princess Hildegarde and that Cassell-Nassau girl would simply have jumped at that solid dog. They'd have hung on his thick lips. They couldn't stick me at all because I didn't talk like an animated log about some silly political business. This one doesn't sound like a princess at all.”
“Well, she isn't like a Lippe-Schweidnitz or a Cassell-Nassau. After all, she has chiefly French and Russian blood in her.”
“That's true,” the prince admitted. “You make her sound rather interesting.”
“She is. You'd like her immensely.” The Princess Anne spoke with conviction. “And she has eyes of such a queer green.”
“You make me feel that the process of creating the necessary aversion has gone far enough,” said the prince, smiling. “You've so far shared my feelings about the others so fully that I have implicit trust in your judgment.”
The Princess Anne frowned.
“It's all very well to talk of the aversion having gone far enough,” she said in a tone of considerable uneasiness, “but the question is—has it gone too far? I'm quite sure that John Stuart has not only bored her stiff, but he has wounded all her sensibilities. I don't believe he has shown that he admired her by as much as a single look.”
“Well, I always took it that it would be rather uphill work overcoming that aversion,” said the prince calmly. “It was just a painful necessity.”
“But there's one thing—you must never let her dream that you landed her with John Stuart. It wouldn't only hurt her, but she's proud—really proud, not arrogant like a Lippe-Schweidnitz. I don't believe she'd ever forgive you. I don't, really. Of course I told her again and again that all that boring talk was your sinister humor.”
“That was useful,” said the prince. “Then if she does tax me with the deception, I must swear till I'm blue in the face that John Stuart was I being humorous in a sinister fashion.”
“It's the only thing to do,” agreed the Princess Anne. “It's a blessing that you can make any one believe most of the things you say.”
The prince went to the telephone and rang up Sir Horace Cheatle.
“Look here! You must get Stuart away from the palace at once,” he said, when he heard Sir Horace's anxious voice at the other end of the wire.
“Where shall I take him, then?” asked Sir Horace in a flustered tone.
“I don't know. Take him to some safe place. But for goodness' sake, get him away at once, or the fat will be in the fire and socially you'll be a ruined man! Then come round here in time to go with me to my morning visit to the Princess Frieda. You've no time to lose.”
“Very well, highness—I'll do it at once,” said Sir Horace quickly, in a tone of tremulous determination.
“Right!”
The prince rang off and sat down again at the table.
Sir Horace motored to the palace in a panic that softened the rich red of his round face to a quiet rose pink, and made haste to the prince's suite of rooms. He was very short and urgent with John Stuart, who was now making a summary of the leader in the Daily Wire and was loath indeed to be torn from that entrancing occupation.
He was disposed to take his time about his departure; but Bletsoe, sternly cold, came to the help of Sir Horace, and between them they hustled him, with a kit bag full of clothes and the Daily Wire, down to the car in less than seven minutes.
Sir Horace ordered his chauffeur to drive to his brother's house at Richmond, and told John Stuart that he was to stay there till the prince needed his services again. He added that he thought and hoped that the prince would not need them for some time.
John Stuart, already gloomy enough, became yet gloomier.
“It's most unfortunate that I should be taken away just at the very height of the crisis,” he said heavily. “I have strong reasons for believing that my views on it were filtering through to the highest quarters and strengthening the opposition to this iniquitous business.”
“I believe myself that, you've done a great deal,” said Sir Horace in a more sympathetic tone. “In fact, I shouldn't wonder if you'd done about as much as you could do.”
At Hammersmith Broadway, Sir Horace stopped the car, bade John Stuart never to leave his brother's house for longer than an hour at a time, in case the prince should suddenly need him, and stepped out onto the pavement. Then he bethought him to assure John Stuart that he would find his brother quite as sympathetic a listener as Sir Horace himself to sagacious views on the greatest crisis in the history of England. John Stuart's face brightened a little at the information, and he said that he was very glad to hear it. Sir Horace bade his chauffeur drive home, and himself hailed a taxicab and drove to the house in Half Moon Street.
The prince set out for the palace, wearing a melancholy air, but he was conscious of an excited expectancy that he had not felt for several months at the prospect of meeting a lady. The Princess Anne had awakened in him an uncommon interest in the Princess Frieda.
He bade Sir Horace make the talk at first, till he himself should have found his feet.
As the door of the Princess Frieda's drawing-room was opened by the footman, they heard her say in tones of firm conviction:
“Well, I think Wellington Croft is perfectly charming.”
Wellington Croft was the leading young man in the revue she hag attended the night before.
Then the footman announced them, and as he greeted her and the Countess Fersen, the prince saw the light of animation die out of the Princess Frieda's face, and the hand she gave him might have been made of wood.
On the instant he was on his mettle. It was plain, indeed, that, through the services of John Stuart, he had secured her aversion, and it gave him no pleasure whatever. While Sir Horace rattled on in a tactful and agreeable fashion about the weather and the revue, the prince surveyed her with melancholy eyes. Undoubtedly her photograph had done her no justice at all; indeed, he was inclined to believe it the worst photograph in the world. He felt injured, deeply injured. That photograph had deceived him wholly; it was a fraud of the worst kind.
He not only felt deeply injured; he felt annoyed—deeply annoyed. The princess did not so much as glance at him. Truly, that stupid oaf, John Stuart, had filled her with aversion.
He coughed gently.
She turned to him and seemed to shrink into herself with a faint look of apprehension; the interminable, boring flood of instructive discourse was about to flow.
He said nothing, and she saw that he was gazing at her with melancholy eyes. She looked at him closely—with the faintest light of interest; it was the first engaging expression she had ever seen on his face.
The Countess Fersen was also looking at him with interest. It was the first engaging expression she had ever seen on his face.
Sir Horace babbled tactfully about the dog days and the prevalence of hydrophobia in his youth.
Then the prince began in mournful tones:
“Talking of the dog days, wouldn't it be cooler and pleasanter in the gardens?”
Before she knew what she was doing, the Princess Frieda was on her feet and smiling at him; it was the first intelligent suggestion she had ever heard fall from his lips.
He smiled at her, the most charming smile. Her eyes opened wide in a distinct stare; her lips parted a little. The smile was so surprising in its utter unlikeness to the corpselike grins of John Stuart that it was a veritable shock to her.
The Countess Fersen, who had risen, was also staring at him with eyes full of bewilderment.
The prince saw what he had done and made haste to look melancholy again. He told himself that he must move slowly.
The Princess Frieda took the arm of the countess hastily. It was almost as if she sought protection.
They went down into the gardens and strolled down the big lawn abreast—the Countess Fersen, the princess arm in arm with her, the prince, Sir Horace.
Sir Horace began to set forth at length the regulations for the quarantining of dogs imported into the United Kingdom.
He paused, and the prince said bitterly:
“It's just my luck!”
There was another pause. Then the princess asked:
“What's just your luck?”
“Wellington Croft,” said the prince, still bitterly.
The princess shot a quick glance at him and flushed ever so little. Then she looked straight in front of her with an expression of almost incredible demureness.
“Why should Wellington Croft be perfectly charming and I be planted with this ancestral mug?” the prince inquired, yet more bitterly.
“What is 'ancestral mug?'” asked the Princess Frieda.
“My face—my corrugated face,” the prince explained.
The princess hastily turned her eyes up to it, and he looked down into them. His eyes assuredly were of a darker blue than they had been. She removed her own from them, and looked at his nose and lips and chin. His nose was certainly on the rugged side; but she liked his lips, so strangely curved. They were thinner than they had been yesterday.
“But I don't suppose the actor is wise and clever like you,” she said in a soothing tone.
The prince uttered a short, sharp cry, and struck himself on the chest after the manner of an Oriental mourner. All three of the others jumped; he had done it with some violence.
“What is wisdom compared with good looks?” he wailed.
The princess was taken aback. It was not at all the kind of sentiment she had ever expected to hear from him.
The Countess Fersen, who had been shooting sharp, keenly scrutinizing glances up at his face across the princess, set her lips tight and looked straight in front of her, wearing an expression of startled enlightenment. She let the princess' arm slip out of her own, stopped at a rose tree, and smelled the roses.
“What is this rose, Sir Horace?” she asked.
Sir Horace turned and went to her. The prince and princess strolled on.
“This is a pretty trick you've been playing us!” said the countess in a low voice, but very fiercely.
Sir Horace's face set in an expression of quiet obstinacy.
“Trick? What trick, madam?”
“Who was that hideous, stupid, absurd young man you brought yesterday and the day before and many days before?” demanded the countess.
“I don't know what you're talking about, madam,” denied Sir Horace, gazing at her with obtruding, but obstinate eyes.
“You lie well,” said the countess in a tone of no approval. Then she added, in fiercely indignant tones: “Do you know what would happen if I were to tell her highness? She would go home at once—to-day.”
“Well, I don't know what it is you could tell her. But in that case, I shouldn't do it,” said Sir Horace.
“Some disgraceful intrigue!” the countess snapped.
“I'll be shot if it was!” cried Sir Horace in the plain accents of the truth. “The prince isn't that kind of man at all!”
The countess' face cleared a little.
“But why did you do it?” she asked.
“We didn't,” said Sir Horace firmly; then he added in a careless tone, addressing apparently a small clump of rhododendrons on their left: “His highness is a man of strange ideas. He believes what some poet or other—he's always reading poetry; what he finds in it I can't think—said about aversion being necessary to true love.”
“But what has that got to do with it?”
“Well, no one would be likely to feel aversion for his highness,” said Sir Horace.
The countess' eyes opened very wide in sheer amazement; then she laughed a short, rather breathless laugh, and cried:
“Mon Dieu! But it is true! You English are mad—quite mad!”
“Not mad at all!” said Sir Horace huffily. “Some of us are a bit eccentric.”
The countess paused, her brow furrowed by a perplexed frown.
“I don't know what to do,” she pondered.
“When you don't know what to do, it's generally best to do nothing at all,” Sir Horace suggested sententiously.
The countess shrugged her shoulders with a rather helpless air.
The prince and the princess had strolled out of sight of Sir Horace and the countess. The prince looked back, saw that they were out of sight, turned sharply to the left, and quickened his pace a little. He led the princess through shrubberies and across smaller lawns, pointing out this and that charming nook to her, and at last brought her into a delightful arbor beside a pond covered with the broad leaves of lilies.
“But how charming!” she said, as she sat down on the cushioned seat. Then she added in a somewhat perfunctory tone: “I suppose the countess will find us.”
“Oh, yes; in time,” the prince agreed carelessly. “In fact, I feel sure that Sir Horace will bring her here—if he knows the way.”
“At home it would be quite irregular that we should be alone together. My sister Hilda and Friedrich were never once alone together till they were actually married,” said the princess, in the tone of one wholly unruffled by the irregularity.
“Then your unfortunate sister escaped a good deal of weariness, for of all the bores I ever met, Friedrich is the worst,” said the prince with deep conviction.
“He did talk a great deal about German politics and the socialist crisis. He said it was the greatest crisis in the history of Germany—many times.”
The prince looked at her quickly. She was gazing through the doorway of the arbor at the lily pond with limpid eyes.
“You had me there,” he laughed gently. “But I'll never talk about politics any more—unless you ask me to.”
“That is not likely. I don't understand them,” said the princess.
The prince took his cigarette case from his pocket, opened it, and held it out to her.
She looked at him in extreme surprise.
“B-b-but I thought we were never allowed to smoke,” she protested.
“I always consider it a friendly bond,” he said, smiling at her. “Besides, you do smoke, you know.”
The princess hesitated; then she smiled.
“Ever so privately—only with my brother Karl,” she confessed. “The countess doesn't know. How did you know?”
“I divined it. I have, for all my ancestral mug, a sympathetic nature.”
Each took a cigarette from the case, and he lighted them. She blew a little cloud of smoke with an air of great enjoyment.
“But this is so nice!' she said, smiling at him.
He found the dimples, which were an integral part of the smile, uncommonly attractive.
“It's so much nicer for me.”
“Why?” asked the princess.
“You have only the beauties of nature to enjoy.”
She smiled again, looked at his face with grave consideration, and said:
“I don't know why you should be discontented with your—ancestral mug. He was so much more interesting than most kings.”
“He was certainly a hard walker and a hard worker,” said the prince. “But, oh, his character!”
They smoked for a little while in silence. The prince looked at her all the while; and now and again she looked at him. Finally she said:
“You look more like your ancestor to-day than you did yesterday.”
“Was I looking very repulsive yesterday?” he inquired anxiously.
She laughed gently, but did not answer. He found her laugh charming.
“By the way, about that photograph. Why did you have that photograph printed? It's the worst photograph that was ever taken of any one. You know quite well that it is,” he said earnestly.
She flushed faintly and touched her cheek with a nervous gesture.
“The scar is there,” she murmured.
“Oh, if one had a magnifying glass! But in the photograph, it's enormous. It—it throws a dark shadow all over your face. It distorts it. But actually it's no more than a beauty spot.”
The flush deepened in her cheeks, for he spoke with warm animation and conviction.
“The photographer said that the light caught it like that. It was an accident.”
“But why did you have that particular photograph printed? Why did you send it to my aunt?”
“The scar is there,” she repeated, touching her cheek with the same nervous gesture. “I didn't wish to—to—have it hidden—to—to—what is your phrase?—to sail under false colors.”
He understood how sensitive she was about the disfigurement, how it had weighed on her, filling her with a perpetual doubt of her attractiveness, exquisitely painful to a girl. A wave of pity swept over him.
“My dear child, you're wrong about it—absolutely wrong!” he said earnestly. “There isn't any scar at all, really. It's no more than an extra dimple—it isn't really.”
She looked at him with grateful eyes, but she shook her head.
“But I give you my word of honor!” he cried. “Look here, this is perfectly absurd! I shall have to convince you, I shall really. But—but—of course, I can't to-day. It would be too—too precipitate, don't you know?”
She flushed again, smiling at his heat. Then she said in a low voice:
“Perhaps—if anybody could—you might be able to.”
A sudden light shone in his eyes.
“I've a jolly good mind to prove it to you here and now!”
She quivered at his look and tone; and then, ringing from the other side of the lily pond, came the voice of the Princess Anne crying:
“Richard! Richard!”
“Here we are!” called the prince; and, rising, he added in a lower tone of deep conviction: “I will prove it to you—so there!”
She looked up at him with luminous eyes.
“Were you joking yesterday or to-day?” she asked softly.
“Yesterday—yesterday,” said the prince.