The Professional Prince/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
The Princess Anne was sitting with her mother in the blue boudoir, a room very richly furnished in the luxuriant vogue of the end of the reign of the good Prince Albert.
They had been silent for perhaps three minutes, during which the Princess Anne had gazed with distaste at the fierce, but anatomically incorrect parrots embroidered in green, red, and blue beadwork on the betasseled fire screen clamped to the variegated brown marble mantelpiece.
Then her mother said in a musing tone:
“The extraordinary thing about it is the suddenness of the improvement in Richard. A month ago, he was consistently frivolous; he took nothing seriously. More than once I was told that he sometimes made jokes about sacred things—the—er—er—bishops in the House of Lords.”
“Perhaps he has fallen in love with some one,” suggested the Princess Anne.
“I'm afraid those novels. you read fill your head with a lot of foolish nonsense,” said her mother sadly. “But it isn't that. When he is in love, it only makes him more frivolous and neglectful of the duties of his station.”
“How do you know that?” the Princess Anne asked quickly, and a look of bright interest illumined her face.
“Oh, he's been in love several times,” said her mother thoughtlessly.
“Who has he been in love with? I never heard anything about it!” cried the Princess Anne, with such an access of interest that she forgot her grammar.
“You wouldn't. As soon as my attention was drawn to the fact that he was paying attentions to a lady, I took measures to secure the lady's absence from our circle for a considerable time,” said her mother with stern satisfaction.
“But how frightfully hard on Richard! And on them, too! They couldn't help falling in love with him, I expect. He is really rather fascinating in his queer way—at least he used to be before he improved,” she added.
Her mother gazed at her with a sudden complete loss of her air of satisfaction. Indeed, she looked surprised and uneasy.
“Has—has Richard ever paid any attentions to you?” she asked sternly.
“Gracious, no!” cried the Princess Anne. “So far, I don't believe it's ever entered his head!”
If there was a faint note of regret in her voice at the prince's obtuseness, or a faint note of hope that it might not last, her mother's ears did not catch it. She breathed a deep sigh of relief.
“I'm very glad to hear it,” she said.
The Princess Anne did not look at all glad.
“I don't think he'll fall in love with the Princess Frieda,” she said thoughtfully. “Her face is scarred.”
“How often must I tell you that beauty is only skin deep?” said her mother. “What's a scarred face?”
“Richard is so frightfully particular. I've noticed it more than once.”
A footman opened the door and announced Prince Richard. John Stuart entered.
“I was just telling Anne for the hundredth time that beauty is only skin deep,” said the stern aunt of the prince impatiently.
“I'm always saying it,” cried John Stuart in swift, almost enthusiastic agreement.
“As if the scar on Princess Frieda's face would make any difference to a man of real intelligence!” The stern aunt of the prince spoke scornfully.
John Stuart hesitated. He knew that a marriage between the prince and Princess Frieda of Scandinavia was in process of being arranged, that she was even now on her way to England; but he knew very little else about it. He must move warily.
“It would make no difference to me,” he said cautiously.
“I knew it wouldn't! I told Anne it wouldn't!” cried the stern aunt of the prince triumphantly.
John Stuart gazed at her with a wooden face for ten seconds. Then he began:
“The government have made the very faux pas we”
“I must get ready to go to the station,” interrupted the Princess Anne, and she rose quickly and made for the door. As she passed John Stuart, she murmured: “You are a humbug!”
The door closed behind her. John Stuart turned and gazed at it with a faintly bewildered air. Then he turned back to the stern aunt of the prince, cleared his throat, and continued:
“As I was saying, the government”
The coming of the Princess Frieda was not a matter for newspaper headlines, only for paragraphs in the court intelligence; Prince Richard's marriage was not an affair of European importance.
The royal party who went to meet the princess arrived at the station to the minute. The train did not. As they waited, the Princess Anne was annoyed by the demeanor of Prince Richard. He was as stolid as a foursquare block of teak. It was like him to be uninterested by the fact that he was about to meet the lady whose heart had been decided by the diplomats of England and Scandinavia to be his, but it was not like him to be so dully uninterested in it. She had expected him to wear the air of very weary boredom with which he awaited the conclusion of any royal function he was attending. Her uncle had once said:
“It was really rather a relief to have Richard present. He's the only man I ever came across who can look as bored as I feel.”
A quarter of an hour later, the Harwich express arrived, and she turned her attention with eager relief to the Princess Frieda. She was at once surprised by the calm of the Scandinavian royal party. She had met at different stations half a dozen princesses during the last two years. Every one of them had arrived bashful and flurried about nothing at all, amid flustered and fussy attendants. But the Princess Frieda descended lightly from the carriage and stood looking calmly round her with beautiful, candid, greenish-brown eyes, as entirely composed as one whose foot is on her native heath.
The Princess Anne looked anxiously at her scarred cheek, to receive something of a shock, a pleasant shock. The Princess Frieda was wearing a veil, and the cheek was powdered. But whereas the dimple near the corner of her mouth was plain enough to the eye, the scar was little more than a shadow on the cheek, hardly a blemish at all.
Since the Scandinavians were not flurried, the presentations proceeded smoothly and quickly. When she was presented to the Princess Anne, the Princess Frieda looked for a moment at her pretty, kind, English face, and then, with a natural, childlike impulsiveness, kissed her.
Then it was the turn of Prince Richard to be presented, and the Princess Anne turned to him eagerly to observe what impression this charming creature had made on him. She was vexed to perceive that he was still stolidity itself.
Then he appeared to awake from a dream—he had, indeed, been buried in serious reflections on the latest political crisis—and his face was distorted by a corpselike grin. He shook hands with the Princess Frieda and said:
“How do you do? Very pleased to meet you.”
Sir Horace Cheatle blushed in hot, guilty discomfort. His apt pupil had failed him. But the Princess Anne was smitten by a pang of genuine horror. The grin, the handshake, the words, the intonation, and the slope of John Stuart's shoulders, all seemed to her so hopelessly wrong that she began to wonder whether he might not be going mad.
Only the flicker of her eyelids marked the Princess Frieda's appreciation of the fact that John Stuart had broken down. She murmured that it was charming of him to say so. Then she looked him over in one swift glance of intense curiosity and interest, forming an abiding impression of him, and lowered her eyes. Much of the childlike expectancy that helped to make them such charming eyes had faded from them.