The Professional Prince/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
For a day or two, the prince seemed to take it for granted that his instructions were being carried out with efficiency and dispatch. He said no word about John Stuart; but he did not fail to observe that Sir Horace waddled the world with a deeply preoccupied air, and that Bletsoe at times appeared a little worried.
In truth, with all the will in the world to become quickly the accomplished earner of four hundred a year, John Stuart was not an apt pupil. A strong sense of his immense importance in the scheme of the universe and the untiring exhortations of his earnest parents had disposed him from his boyhood to give his attention only to serious things; and the acquisition of the minutiæ of etiquette and of fashionable manners came hard to his strenuous mind. It was a full week before Bletsoe could be sure that he would not shoot his cuffs or, on sitting down, twitch up the legs of his trousers to the level demanded by thrift and not mere comfort.
Then the prince began to take an interest in the lessons in deportment, and seconded Bletsoe's efforts. Above all, he took a great interest in his pupil's smile. He would himself smile the pattern smile for half an hour at a time—he was helped to retain it for so long on his face by the facial contortions of his pupil—while John Stuart labored to imitate it. It was hard for him to find the mean between a corpse-like grin that bared his teeth and the wide, toothless, benignant smile of the Cheshire cat.
The prince was sure that he was doing a good work, and he never tired of it. He caused John Stuart to remove from Sudbury to two rooms on the ground floor of the house in Half Moon Street, and there he would descend on hint at any hour between noon and midnight, and they~would smile diligently at each other. When the smiling muscles of his pupil were plainly aching from this unaccustomed exercise, the prince would allow him to rest for a while, and chat with him amiably on subjects taken from the Daily Wire leaders, John Stuart's favorite reading.
Conversing thus one morning, the prince idly turned the talk on personal matters,
“Have you any relations, Mr. Stuart?” he asked.
“My parents are dead, but I have five uncles, three aunts, twenty-nine cousins, and a sister, your highness,” said John Stuart simply.
“And are they all in the North?”
“All except my sister, and I don't know where she is,” John Stuart frowned.
“Ah, she has emigrated?” the prince inquired politely.
“Worse than that, your highness. She's gone on the stage,” said John Stuart in a tone of stern disapproval, and the frown deepened.
“In musical comedy, doubtless?”
“Yes, your highness,” admitted John Stuart, scowling.
The prince was a little taken aback. Politeness had led him to suggest that the young lady occupied a position on the very peaks of the drama. Now he found it difficult to imagine a sister of John Stuart adorning that height.
“You take an interest in her career?” he asked amiably.
“None at all, your highness. She has been most unsatisfactory.”
“Indeed?” said the prince in a sympathetic tone.
“Yes. I got her an excellent position as a typist in Sheffield at a pound a week. She spent all the money she could save on lessons in elocution and stage dancing, and finally left Sheffield with a theatrical company. It was a blow—a great blow to all of us.” His voice was bitter.
“Perhaps it was her vocation,” the prince suggested hopefully.
“There cannot be a vocation in such matters, your highness,” said John Stuart firmly.
“I have met several ladies who said that there was.”
“It's all vanity—the passion for notoriety, your highness,” said John Stuart with the gloomiest conviction.
“Perhaps—perhaps,” the prince agreed amiably. “Is she very old?”
“No; she's very young, your highness.”
“Young and in musical comedy—strange!” said the prince.
“She's twenty-one, your-highness.”
“I've never met one less than thirty-five,” said the prince. “Do you often see her?”
“I haven't seen her for a year, your highness. I left my address here for her at Sudbury, so she knows where to find me. But I doubt that I was wise. I've always felt that sooner or later she would be a drag on me.”
“Smile, Mr. Stuart! Smile!” the prince ordered sharply. “You're not looking genial.”
“Genial?” said John Stuart bitterly, and by a violent effort he produced one of his most corpselike grins.
The prince shuddered, hastily bade him good day, and went to his club.
The next morning the prince was breakfasting in his dining room at the palace, with Bletsoe in attendance, when Sir Horace Cheatle waddled into the room. The prince greeted him cheerfully.
“Stuart is quite ready to relieve me of some of my duties,” he announced.
Sir Horace received the assertion with a wriggle of discomfort.
“As long as it is something that does not demand any of the more delicate intricacies of etiquette,” he said doubtfully.
“What do you think, Bletsoe?” asked the prince.
“His manners would pass in the provinces, your highness,” said Bletsoe confidently.
“Good! He shall relieve me of my provincial work,” the prince declared in a tone of great satisfaction.
“It will be good practice for him, your highness,” said Bletsoe.
“There's my visit to Ledford the day after to-morrow. I forget what I'm going to open. I don't want to travel to Ledford in June, or see its hardy citizens perspiring freely. You know how frightfully hot a town gets whenever I open anything in it. I'm sure, too, that it's the kind of work that appeals to John Stuart's sterling worth.”
“He could do it as far as his manners are concerned, your highness,” said Bletsoe.
“And the etiquette is quite simple,” put in Sir Horace.
“Then he goes,” the prince decided.
John Stuart started for Ledford in the high spirits of a man who has really come into his own. Both Sir Horace and Bletsoe went with him, and he was affable to both of them in a large, royal way. It was unusual for Bletsoe to travel in the same compartment with the prince. But the prince had bidden him travel in the same compartment with John Stuart lest Sir Horace should upset him by too many final, flustering instructions. Sir Horace was, indeed, in a condition of nervous fussiness for which there was no reason whatever.
John Stuart perceived it, and spent some time making it clear to Sir Horace that there was no cause for nervousness, since he was about to discharge a function natural to his character. Then for an hour he read the Daily Wire earnestly, while Bletsoe read the Morning Post and Sir Horace the Daily Telegraph.
When John Stuart had finished reading, he said with a somewhat superior, challenging air:
“I believe the Daily Wire to be the most up-to-date paper in England.”
“I shouldn't wonder,” Bletsoe assented carelessly.
“I prefer the tone of the Daily Telegraph,” said Sir Horace.
Thereupon, John Stuart talked to them seriously, heavily, out of the Daily Wire, giving them all he could remember of its leaders' as his own reasoned opinions, telling them scraps of news they had already read in their own papers. He seemed now able to talk without any help at all from them. Indeed, he seemed an insistent talker. They had never suspected it. In his effort to soften his voice to the tone of that of the prince, he had acquired a somewhat monotonous intonation. They found that so much of it had a soporific, even a slightly dazing effect. But Sir Horace was impressed; he thought John Stuart an uncommonly well-informed young man. The more skeptical Bletsoe suspected the origin of his wisdom.
After he had exhausted the fount of his inspiration, John Stuart fell silent. Both of them were careful not to set him talking again.
As the prince's valet, Bletsoe was able to be on hand to keep a watchful, studying eye on him at lunch and to note several slight improvements that might be made in his table manners. He did not like the gusto with which John Stuart took his soup, since a good appetite is a human weakness that royal personages seldom permit themselves to reveal at public banquets, and he was a little alarmed by the uncompromising vigor with which his charge punished the wines and the liqueurs of the corporation; he feared their effect on the coming speech, though he was forced to admit that they relaxed the muscles of the pseudo prince's face so that he could smile a smile that was merely moderately stiff.
He observed that the mayor, to whom John Stuart talked throughout the lunch, appeared troubled in spirit. It was not, in the circumstances, to be wondered at. Perceiving clearly that he was in a position of vantage, that both etiquette and loyalty compelled the mayor's closest attention, John Stuart seriously and heavily poured into his ear the reasoned opinions on the burning question of the week that he had gathered from the leader in the Daily Wire.
Unfortunately, the mayor's mental sustenance for over thirty years had been the wisdom and the wit of its gentle rival, the Daily News. This strange, strong fodder was quite unpalatable to him, and that evening, in the bosom of his family, after lauding the charm and bonhomie and intelligence of John Stuart to the skies, he observed that it was nevertheless fortunate for the country that Prince Richard was not in the direct succession to the throne, since his political views were far from sound.
Bletsoe need have been in no fear as to the speech. John Stuart delivered it with such an air of being pleased with himself, his occupation, his company, his surroundings, that every loyal citizen of Ledford who heard it was convinced that he must be the greatest royal orator in Europe.
After it, John Stuart admitted that it and the heat had made him very thirsty; but two whiskies and sodas refreshed him so that he left Ledford smiling stiffly without an effort.
There being no longer any reason why Bletsoe should be in the same compartment, he traveled peaceably farther down the train, whiling away the journey with the excellent cigars of the Corporation of Ledford. But Sir Horace congratulated John Stuart warmly on his success. He was again proud of having discovered him.
John Stuart received his congratulations affably for about a mile; then of a sudden his face was clouded with gloom, and he said in a bitterly aggrieved tone:
“It ought to have been my prerogative to knight that mayor!”