Читать книгу Jeremiah and the Princess - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 6

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Marya greeted her visitor with her usual cold cordiality. The Baroness, who was writing at the open secretaire, waved her hand to him.

“Keep away from me, my dear boy,” she begged. “I am plagued with a letter to write which perturbs me. Soon I shall have finished and then I shall go to bed. Marya has things to say to you. At her age I should have preferred to have said them in the garden!”

“You are over-sentimental, dear Aunt,” Marya remarked. “That is your Austrian blood and associations, I am sure. What I have to say to Mr. Strole, if he cares to listen to it, would be better said within these walls.”

The Baroness finished her letter with a great spluttering of the pen and stuck down the envelope with a formidable bang.

“Generally the world is right,” she said. “Sometimes it is wrong. We Austrians are proud of being considered a sentimental nation. There is too little sentiment in the world. There is too much selfishness. I wish you good night, Mr. Strole. Marya, as usual, you will pay me your little visit before you retire. Adieu, my children.”

Jere was quick on his feet and he was in time to help the Baroness from her chair and place her stick in her hand. He threw open the door. She looked at him kindly.

“Remember,” she warned him, pausing upon the threshold, “Marya is not like others. The boy and girl game with her, it does not go.”

Jere bowed silently and returned to his place.

“Your aunt is quite right,” he acknowledged. “There is not enough sentiment in the world. Just where you are sitting now the moonlight softens your face divinely, but I am beginning to realise how hard your heart is.”

“You know nothing about my heart,” she objected. “I do not think anyone will ever know. Certainly it is not to discuss my heart that I invited you here. Do you wish me to speak?”

“I feel it a great honour that you have received me this evening,” he replied, “and I am only too anxious to hear what you have to say.”

She looked at him for a moment in contemplative silence. The simply made black frock which she was wearing was a marvellously effective background to the dazzling purity of her complexion, her white neck and throat and shapely arms. Her eyes, which seemed to be asking for his sympathy, were luminous. The appeal, although it was an appeal only for understanding, had softened them. There were possibilities even about her mouth.

“You thought it strange,” she began, “that I asked on that first day we met who was the richest young man of the party. I will tell you. I am not a dreamer but I have had dreams. Chief amongst these has been the passionate hope that some day there would come to Jakovia the modern knight of the new romance, the one who should set my country free. Fighting cannot do it. Jakovia fought bravely in the Great War but lost at Versailles. Fighting has been useless for us. Wealth alone will set us free.”

“But surely,” he ventured, “the wealth of any one man, unless he were a Rockefeller or a Henry Ford, could not go far towards paying a nation’s debts.”

“Jakovia owes no money,” she replied. “Every attempt at a foreign loan has been a failure. No one trusts our King, they trust less our Prime Minister. I do not blame them. Here we come to the secret of which I, with two others, have become the inheritor. Properly used it would spell salvation for my country, but to use it properly is very, very difficult. Colonel Grogner’s father is one of the three. That is why I am never allowed to move without being spied upon. The King himself is the third. But of the three of us I am the only one who is in a position to make any practical use of it.”

She paused, and he found his attention wandering into strange places. He admired the shapeliness of her patent shoes and the lustre of her diamond buckles, the gleam of white silk stockings.

“You’d like me to continue?” she asked. “It is not what you expected—to hear me talk like this? It is very difficult, it is very mysterious, and it is a situation which could never have occurred before in the history of Europe.”

“Of course I want you to continue,” he answered energetically. “I do not interrupt because it seems foolish. What I have to say will come later.”

“How and when to use my power,” she went on, “that is what troubles me, for I have no confidant. Even my aunt does not know. Only the time cannot be delayed. There is dissatisfaction throughout the country. No taxes are collected, no public works are attempted, the remnants of the army are without their pay, and all the time there is oil enough under the ground, untouched timber and uncultivated cornfields enough to turn Jakovia into a prosperous and contented country.”

Jere nodded sympathetically.

“I’m not much up in the banking business,” he admitted, “but I do know just enough to be able to understand that a Jakovian loan might be difficult. Why can’t the Government, though, lease some of the timber lands and oil fields to a foreign syndicate and accept a royalty?”

“The great difficulty is the King,” she confided. “He has behaved badly before. His word is not trusted.”

“But surely even in a monarchy,” Jere ventured, “the King can’t interfere in a deal like this.”

“The King claims the right,” she replied. “He claims that a million acres of marvellous timber woods and nearly the whole of the oil-bearing territory are Crown lands. A great English and American syndicate a short time ago came together and the King himself entertained them. They approved of the possibilities, but they refused to deal with the King. They would have dealt with any constituted authority. They were quite right. They would probably have lost their money.”

“Some sort of a tangle, isn’t it?” Jere observed.

“There is a way out,” she said quietly. “It is connected with the secret. If I could find some honourable person, someone trustworthy, who could also be induced to trust, who would come to Jakovia with the command of, say, twenty million dollars in American money, it would be enough to make a start in opening up the country.”

“But how about the King?” Jere asked. “If he wanted to grab the lot, I don’t see that the country would be any better off.”

She moved her head in slow approval.

“I am glad to realise that you are at least clear-headed,” she approved. “It is true. I, however, have means of curbing Phillip’s rapacity. I am next in succession to the throne of Jakovia, and I have an interest in the Crown lands. You see, it comes to this, Jeremiah Strole. What my country needs is the loan or investment of money to the extent I have spoken of—not from a syndicate or company of men with terms and particulars to be printed upon a paper, but from someone who is willing to trust me until the time comes when it is no longer necessary.”

Jere smiled cheerfully.

“There are some details I don’t quite understand,” he admitted, “but as the trust in you goes, I don’t see that they matter very much. I believe I am worth, roughly speaking, about twenty-five million dollars. Put five millions on one side for a rainy day, and that leaves me with twenty.”

He hesitated. She was listening to him intently, and beneath the filmy black lace of her frock he could see the rise and fall of her small bosom.

“Twenty millions would be the sum you spoke of,” he went on slowly. “There it is. It’s all I have to offer beside myself and the fact that I love you more than anyone else in this world could ever love you. If you could marry me, we’d pull your old country round somehow, and I should be the happiest and proudest man in the world.”

He caught his breath as he finished. His arm was on the back of her chair. He was leaning towards her. His heart was thumping. It seemed as though the world stood still. His eyes were fixed hungrily upon hers, waiting for that one quiver of yielding. She was trembling, but in her eyes there was a light which reminded him of a time he had gone trapping too successfully as a boy in Canada.

“I love you so much, Marya,” he murmured. “Won’t you——?”

The moment had passed. He always fancied, even in his most dejected moments afterwards, that she had felt its tensity even to the very borderland of indecision. She laid her fingers quietly upon his arm and pushed it away from her chair.

“That would not be possible,” she said gravely. “I am sorry. I was afraid—yes, I was afraid that something like that might come into your mind. I have tried to make you see that it was not possible.”

He stepped backwards and she drew a breath of relief.

“You don’t care for me at all then?” he asked.

“I like you very much,” she said. “I have very pleasant feelings for you. Marriage, however, would be impossible.”

“Why impossible?” he demanded, his voice hardening. “According to you, then, marriage must always be a bargain. You barter your rank for another man’s rank. You add up your grandfathers and grandmothers to see that they come out level, and you’re content to give yourself to a man you probably don’t care a bit about and who very likely doesn’t care for you, just for the sake of—posterity!”

“Don’t!” she cried.

There was a flame in her eyes, a passion in her monosyllable which dried up the words upon his lips.

“Well,” he went on, “we’ll leave that. I simply say that mine is just as good a bargain. I offer you my share of the fortune which my father and grandfather have made, and more of it to come, for the restoration of your country. You can use the money as you will. All I want is you. Ours wouldn’t be such a one-sided bargain, after all, because one of us would love and perhaps in time the other.”

“I daresay that might happen,” she admitted. “Believe me, Jeremiah Strole, I like you very much indeed. I will even permit myself to say—do not move, please—that I should be very happy if what you suggest were possible, but it is not. With these others in Europe who have made morganatic marriages, the succession was not near. With me it is very near indeed, and though I know that you must be gently born, that is not enough to enable a son of yours to sit with dignity upon the throne.”

“But are you likely ever to succeed?” he asked. “The King is a young man. He may marry at any moment.”

“I do not believe,” she said, “that there is one of the eleven available princesses of Europe who would marry Phillip. I shall ask you to believe me when I tell you that I am not an intriguante. I do not wish for the throne of Jakovia for my own personal sake, but it would break my heart if the socialists were to triumph and Jakovia were to become a republic. You must already have read of the discontent in the capital. If things get no better, the one thing which we fear is that King Phillip will be forced to abdicate and be banished from the country. If that should happen I should succeed at once unless I had forfeited my right to do so.”

“By marrying me?”

“By having married anyone not of royal blood. You see, it would be Parliament at the instigation of the people who would insist upon Phillip’s abdication, and if I were not there in the minds and hearts of my people they would most certainly set up a republic.”

There followed a silence. It seemed to Jere that everything had been said that could be said. The issue was plain enough. She had made her meaning almost brutally clear. Yet, for some unaccountable reason, he was not so depressed as he had feared. Her shiver, something which seemed to lie almost behind her eyes, an atmosphere which had existed only for seconds, kept hope alive.

“I looked for that book,” he told her. “They haven’t one here. Won’t you please tell me—how old are you?”

“I am twenty-one.”

He rose to his feet.

“That is young,” he said, “very young to be making up your mind upon matters as important as this. Much too young to rule over a wild country like Jakovia without a strong man by the side of you.”

She smiled.

“But to me it is not a wild country,” she reminded him. “They are my people and I love them. I think too that they love me. Do you know why I am not there all the time? Of course you do not. I will tell you. Whenever anything happens, whenever Phillip has done something to displease the people, they come and cheer outside my palace, they come and bring flowers and fire sham salutes on fête days. The real palace, King Phillip’s, they never go near. That is not right, of course. I do not encourage it. On national days I visit my cousin and I come out with him to greet the people, or else there would be no people there.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised from what I’ve heard of the fellow,” Jere muttered.

There was a touch of the old manner in her tone.

“Would you please remember,” she begged, “that Phillip is the sovereign of my country and is my cousin.... Now, I think it is time that you went.”

“May I call on you in New York?” he asked.

“Do you think it is wise—for your sake, I mean?”

“Certainly I do. The more we see of one another the better. Besides, we shall probably be crossing on the same boat anyway.”

“Crossing where?” she asked breathlessly.

“Why, to Europe, of course—en route to Jakovia.”

“You’re not going to Jakovia!”

“I certainly am,” he assured her. “You know,” he went on earnestly, “it wasn’t altogether a bargain I was proposing to you, Princess. I’d like to make you happy if I could—my own way. If I can’t do that, I’d still like to do anything that brought you happiness. I’m going to look your country over. It’s just the time, from the banker’s point of view, to put money into new enterprises. The old ones have all been over capitalised and worn out.”

“You are very generous,” she sighed.

“I shouldn’t say so,” he replied. “I am very stubborn.”

“But what can I do for you?” she asked. “Supposing you do great things for my country, how could I reward you?”

“Couldn’t you make me a prince or something?”

“We don’t do that in Jakovia,” she answered, with a tinge of scorn in her tone. “New titles are never granted.”

“There is that morganatic business,” he reminded her.

She gave him her hand.

“You are inclined to be a little too frivolous about serious things,” she complained.

“My volatile temperament,” he assured her, “not my lack of reverence. You see,” he went on, looking at her earnestly out of his steady grey eyes, “when I want a thing so badly that life doesn’t seem worth having without it, I never lose hope. What hotel did you say?”

She hesitated for several moments before she answered him.

“We shall probably be staying at the Ambassadors,” she told him, “but my aunt often changes her mind. My secretary shall send you a message.”