The Professional Prince/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
What time Thelsmere and Agatha Stuart were comparing their careers in the Piccadilly tea shop, John Stuart was studying, with his wonted earnestness, the Daily Wire leader, committing to memory such powerful phrases in it as appealed strongly to his vigorous intelligence.
He had come nearly to the end of his grateful task when the door opened and the Princess Anne entered briskly. Flushed and smiling, she looked the very embodiment of the fair freshness of the summer morning.
“Good morning, Richard. Good morning, Sir Horace,” she began quickly, “I just ran in to tell you that you're in for a first-class wigging, Richard. It seems that you weren't satisfied with pulling all our legs at lunch yesterday, but went off to the club and pulled the leg of Peter Augustus. Why ever did you tell him that you would try to get him the post of triangle player in a street band? You know how touchy he is, and what a fuss he always makes about your damaging his royal dignity.”
“But-b-but I never” gasped John Stuart, stopped short, and ground his teeth.
The wretched frivolity of his employer had shattered the fair intellectual edifice he was rearing ere he had finished the first story.
Fortunately the tact of Sir Horace rose to the occasion. Resolved to give his apt pupil breathing space to adjust his mind to this new idea, he said loudly and firmly:
“His highness will have his joke, you know. It's his failing, and allowances should be made for it.”
The Princess Anne sat down on the edge of the table and swung a pair of very small feet thoughtfully to and fro. “That's all very well,” she said gravely. “But I'm sure mother won't make any allowance for it this morning. Peter Augustus nearly cried. And the worst of it was that the more furious he got, the more like a triangle player he looked. I had to slip away or I should have laughed. What are you going to do?”
John Stuart had not recovered sufficiently from the shock of the shattering of his edifice to make an intelligible reply. Sir Horace came to his aid.
“It's a great pity that Prince Peter Augustus lets his touchiness grow on him,” he said in a tone of fine impartiality. “It was only a joke, and, after all, what is a joke?”
John Stuart took the cue. He said in his harshest voice:
“A man without a sense of humor is deficient.”
He was scowling fiercely.
“But Peter Augustus hasn't one,” said the Princess Anne in a tone of certainty. “I'm afraid mother will insist on your apologizing.”
“I won't apologize,” John Stuart announced dourly.
“I was afraid you wouldn't.” She sighed; then added: “And, after all, I don't see why you should. Peter Augustus is always insufferable. I expect he brought it on himself. But I must be going. I don't want mother to find me here. She'd know I'd been warning you,”
With that, she slipped off the table, bade them good-by, and went.
“Here's a pretty kettle of fish!” cried Sir Horace, as the door closed behind her.
“Just when I'd begun so well, too!” John Stuart groaned.
But the Princess Anne's suggestion that Prince Peter Augustus had probably brought the joke on himself had shown Sir Horace a possible way out. He waddled quickly to the telephone in the hall and rang up the Earl of Bastable.
Fortunately he found that the ingenuous young peer had risen and was at breakfast. He came at once to the telephone and gave Sir Horace a full account of the infuriating of Prince Peter Augustus. Sir Horace learned the one fact he wanted—that Prince Peter Augustus had first, and for no reason, been offensive.
He hurried back to John Stuart with the news, and begged him to drop the subject of Prince Augustus' deficiency in humor and keep the fact of his being the aggressor well to the fore. John Stuart agreed to do so the more readily that he had the poorest opinion of the sense of humor and of jokes. When, then, the prince's stern aunt came into the room with slow and very severe dignity, he was quite ready to hold his own, or, rather, the prince's own, and a little more.
The prince was at a disadvantage in these painful interviews with his aunt; he had been used since his ninth year to being scolded and punished by her, and for the most part the scoldings and punishments had been well deserved. John Stuart was hampered by no such memories. Moreover, he was greatly strengthened by his stern Northern conviction, not of the inferiority of woman, but of the superiority of man. The sex of the prince's aunt was well to the fore in his mind.
He listened to her with patient, but stern indulgence. He had learned in his youth and in the bosom of his uncompromising family that it is best that a woman should be given her full say without interruption.
But when he did begin, he began with the manner of one who would not himself brook interruption, and he did not brook it. His theme was the offensiveness of Prince Peter Augustus. He was not eloquent on it—he could hardly be eloquent on a subject that the leader writer of the Daily Wire had not treated—but he was verbose and frequently violent.
Sir Horace gasped, and his eyes bulged from a purple face. John Stuart, with unabated vigor, went on to discuss the matter of Prince Peter Augustus' lack of a sense of humor. He said that that lack made him a disgrace to the family. In the end, it became quite clear that the really burning question was not whether he should apologize to Prince Peter Augustus, but whether Prince Peter Augustus should apologize to him. That was what the prince's stern aunt understood when she went away, hurriedly and rather dazed.
Sir Horace was still purple and gasping when the door of John Stuart's sitting room closed behind her. After a pause, he said in a broken voice:
“Well—I never in all my life—heard—such infernal cheek!”
John Stuart gazed at him in mild wonder.
“Why, what did I say?” he asked.
“Say?” howled Sir Horace, with a sudden grateful fullness of breath. “Do you realize whom you have been speaking to? It's monstrous! Perfectly monstrous! If ever it comes out that you're not the prince, England—England will be too hot to hold me!”
John Stuart frowned upon him.
“Whoever she may be,” he said, “a woman is a woman, and it's a man's duty to set her right.”
With a thoughtful scowl, he returned to what was, for the time being, the main interest of his life, and began to rearrange that morning's leader in the Daily Wire and to bridge over the slight gulf between it and the leader of the day before in such a fashion that the ideas they contained should flow smoothly and consistently from his tongue on the first occasion that offered.
It offered sooner than he expected. A footman came from the prince's aunt to invite them to lunch with her. Sir Horace could not believe his ears. He stared at the footman and he stared at John Stuart.
John Stuart accepted the invitation, a well-merited tribute, with calm dignity.