Читать книгу His Royal Happiness - Sara Jeannette Duncan - Страница 3

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“He’ll be here in a little over an hour now,” said Mrs. Phipps, wife of the President of the United States, putting down her novel. “No—she’s a delightful writer, but it’s not a bit of use. I can’t keep my mind on it. James, you have not changed your tie. James—to please me! You’re never at your best in a brown tie. Though whatever you wear you always look America’s greatest gentleman——”

The President put an apologetic hand to his tie, and gave himself a general corrective shake.

“Too late, my dear; I have a deputation before he comes. The beggars are due in ten minutes, and I shall only just get rid of them in time. Did Calder get off in the auto?”

“Ages ago. He and Hilary and Freddy Howard from the Embassy nearly drove me distracted after lunch, begging for more cards for that wild dance of theirs. We shall be suffocated as it is. I think Captain Howard was a little disappointed that the cavalry weren’t sent to the station dear.”

“Very likely,” said the President, with his hand on the door-handle. “I hope you put the responsibility where it belongs—on the State Department. They wouldn’t hear of an escort till he gets to his own embassy. Pakenham drives him there, with Howard and the rest in a second auto, and then Calder takes him over and brings him here with the troop in attendance. Quite enough for a young man out of employment.”

“Mercy, yes, I know,” said Mrs. Phipps. “And perhaps he won’t mind—if he really is as democratic as they say.”

“Quite a good fellow at Oxford, from all accounts. I understand his friends called him ‘Cakes.’”

“‘Cakes!’ James, what a shame! I wonder it was allowed.”

“Oh, I fancy Oxford is a law unto itself in such matters,” the President told her. “And he’s not bringing much of a suite. An equerry and a valet!”

“Yes, I know. And a great mercy, too. I am sometimes even more worried about Colonel Vandeleur. These English-grown Americans are so critical.”

“The Vandeleurs have been born in England for three generations.”

“Yes, I know, dear. But do go now, James, and get rid of your deputation. Charlie Calder is so feather-headed—I’m just praying that he won’t shake hands in the wrong place or something.”

“I’ve told him he’s on no account to butt in before the ambassador,” replied the President. “No need to worry—Charlie’ll get delivery of the prince all right at the proper time. Hilary isn’t staying to help you receive him?”

“No. I should have loved her to; but—Oh, well, I understand perfectly, James. I think she would feel it, just a little. When one remembers what she was to her father in this house for three long years, and practically mistress of it for the last two—it would be hard for her. And who is to know whether ‘Miss Hilary Lanchester’ would convey any idea to His Royal Highness whatever?”

“She’s staying over for the dance, of course.”

“Of course. James—that dance! When I think of the good old simple times when the president of the United States was not expected to vie with the courts of Europe in entertaining, I could just sit and cry. The very most that would have been expected of the Roosevelts or the Tafts would have been a state reception, or possibly a hop of forty or fifty couples to give the Prince a pleasant evening. But we of all people in the world—plain people like us—have got to be elected to the new ballroom and the state lancers, and the extra aides, and heaven knows what besides—and all the world looking at us to see that we do it. James, we are simply not the people.”

“Maybe not,” said Mr. Phipps, “but I have a sort of feeling that we’ll do as well as anybody else in the meantime. Cheer up, little woman. They might have had me in a uniform, and you, too, for all I know. It was a close call—a mighty close call.”

“The one thing,” his wife told him, “that I wouldn’t have had the least objection to. Gold braid an inch thick is what I’d just adore to see you in, James.”

“Then Hilary is coming to the dance?”

“Oh, yes—she’s coming. And here she is,” went on Mrs. Phipps, as a door opened on the other side of the room. “James, when I think of those Colorado men and the time they will take, my hair goes three shades grayer. Send him away, Hilary. He saw you at lunch. There’s no excuse.”

They laughed at one another understandingly, the President of the United States and the daughter of his old friend and predecessor in office; and the door closed at last upon Mr. Phipps. Miss Lanchester came into the pretty room towards the pretty lady who sat with such dainty dignity, so charmingly dressed, beside a buhl table in the middle of it. There was a silver bowl of roses on the table, and the glass pendants of an old-fashioned chandelier twinkled overhead. It was an agreeable picture, and Mrs. Phipps, with her delicately lined face that still kept its shell-pinkness, and that air of constantly dealing with small decisions of importance which is so marked in ladies of official position, gave ever so pleasant a key to it.

“Well, honey, I see you’ve got your hat on. But you needn’t go yet.”

Miss Lanchester smiled, and became at once, for all the world to see, one of the most beautiful people in it. Until she smiled she seemed a tall girl of whom you would say, “How lovely,” and pass on, a creature of perfect grace and deep, happy eyes; but the flash of her smile, if you caught it, promptly turned your head to look again. Her face simply was, you admitted and acclaimed it, among the heaven-sent things in a world not too often remembered by any other—the American papers of her father’s administration had not said a word too much. Indeed, it was doubtful whether they had said quite enough. Looking back through the files of three years before—they seldom mentioned her now—it might be noted that the newspapers trumpeted her far more as the single solace of the most successful president since the Civil War—as the daughter of the man who had taken the chief magistracy from a mob of plutocrats, and held it for a term and a half in the teeth of the biggest bosses the civilized world had yet permitted to exist—as the youngest hostess the White House had ever known. Such superlatives appeared to be her highest honor; nobody seemed to think of describing her at the same time as the most beautiful girl in the United States, because, no doubt, nobody could be quite sure that she was. One remembers the tribute of the Wyoming Messenger the last time the ex-President toured in the west, taking her with him. “Daughter Hilary looks as good to us, in her own way, as Dada. Though we’re not asking any lady to believe that we can’t do just as well right here in Wyoming.”

Mrs. Phipps did not think they could do as well in Wyoming or anywhere else. Mrs. Phipps, childless and loving, gave Hilary the palm a little indiscriminately. I mean for wit as well as for beauty, for culture as well as for grace, for conversation as well as for golf, for example. Hilary had the humor and gaiety of her magnificent health. She had a sweet nature and good brains, and had worked in Paris and in Brussels creditably enough without doing wonders. She talked—well, it will appear how she talked. Her golf was certainly unexceptionable.

Miss Lanchester said that she had sent for a taxi, and that she was due in Dupont Circle in half an hour. Meantime she dropped her person, like a long-stemmed rose, in a corner of a sofa.

“It just worries me to death,” said Mrs. Phipps, “to think of your taking a taxi from this house. But literally every last thing with a wheel to it has gone to the station.”

“I give you my word I can still afford a taxi,” laughed Hilary. “But for the heat and the smell of the asphalt, and the crowd—the Square out there is packed already—I would have gone by the Avenue car. It’s quite convenient. Did you ever know Washington so hot in June? And you, poor darling, with three entertainments this week.”

Mrs. Phipps sighed, a long, gently fatigued sigh, and waved a palm-leaf fan in front of her lace bosom. She tried to smile her sense of official duty, but only her lower lip expressed resignation. The upper one crowned it with complacence.

“Hot, my dear! I remember only one June like it. We were living in Syracuse. I hadn’t been long married, and I was making strawberry preserve for the first time in my life, coming as I did from a home where such things did themselves. What a lot there is in smells, Hilary. This morning a berry on the electric heater on the sideboard, and those self-sealers were all with me again. Partly the weather, no doubt. Well, to think of it! The wheel of time! Doing up my own fruit in a back kitchen in Syracuse, and now waiting for the third son of the late King of England—I did so admire that man—in the White House in my country’s capital. Luckily I have you, Hilary. You are a link. You make it more human.”

“I’ve just heard,” said Hilary, “the most lovely story about him. He really does like us, Mumsie. He specially asked that his commission should be in their Imperial Rifles, why do you think? Because it was once the Royal Americans, and was fighting for the king somewhere in Europe when the Revolution broke out over here—and went on fighting for him. And wears to this day the green that came out of our forests. And it’s a true story, because Commissioner Longworth told me, who had an ancestor in that regiment. Young Longworth, you know, has been taking a post-graduate course at Oxford, and the Prince made friends with him because, he said, he was a fellow-officer of his great-great-grand-dad’s! I think he must be rather a duck, Mumsie.”

“Now isn’t that a sweet story! And the President tells me they called him ‘Burnt Cakes’—no, just ‘Cakes’—at Oxford. I’m sure he’s quite human. But there’s something about royalty—one despises oneself, but there is, Hil. Something alarming. I don’t know why it should be so.”

“The Blue Room,” said Hilary, “is looking its very best. I just poked my nose in. I like the new coverings immensely.”

“The President and I are to receive him there. Then I suppose Major Calder will show him his rooms. He’ll want to wash his hands after the train. Perhaps, being a prince, he’ll require a bath—though it’s only four hours from New York, and he must have had one this morning——”

“He will call it a tub,” said Hilary. “Our English guests always talked about their tubs—and with an openness. They don’t seem to mind. Bath is a sort of vague expression, but tub—well, tub is plain, isn’t it?”

“They are plain, the British. Well, we’re giving him half an hour for his ablutions, whatever he calls them. I hope that will be enough to get the dust of the Republic off him. Then we serve tea in the large drawing-room, and I wish we had decided on having it here, for I’m never at my best in that room in the daytime; and I don’t suppose we shall have him for another moment so much to ourselves. First impressions go so far. But I insisted on making the tea. A state teapot it may be, but I handle it.”

“Darling, it’s an anxious task; but the taxi must be there,” observed Hilary.

“Oh, no—they’ll tell you. Very likely they’ve had to telephone—there were none on the rank this morning. And, Oh, my dear—talk of fatigue—what do you think? He insists on coming down to breakfast! Which means, I suppose, that I must and will, though the President forbids it.”

“Well,” said Hilary, “I wouldn’t mar my married life for him if he were the heir to the throne, which he isn’t.”

“Oh, yes, you would, dear, if it were a case of doing the proper thing or not doing it. I won’t have him writing home to Queen Alma Patricia that the hostess of the White House spends most of her time in bed. I’ll struggle down.”

“They say he isn’t strong himself,” said Hilary. “I should make him breakfast in his room, if I were you.”

“Anything but! Very anxious, people about him have always been. And apparently one can’t ‘make’ him do anything whatever. Oh, dear,” sighed Mrs. Phipps, “I confess I sometimes wish he were here and away again.”

“I suppose you’ve got some idea of his habits from the Embassy. I remember we heard privately, when the Russian Crown Prince came.”

“We inquired, naturally. Apparently, he doesn’t wish to be indulged in any way. That’s why he’s so firm about breakfast. If he only knew! Wishes to conform to the ways of the family in every respect, Sir Arthur said. I wonder if he’d enjoy my raw fruit luncheon. It’s doing me such a world of good, Hilary! Hilary—tell me—what relation exactly is your godmother to this young man?”

“Aunt!” said Miss Lanchester, with an eye that brightened in spite of itself.

“I thought so. Aunt! I wish I were aunt to his godmother. I mean I wish his godmother were my aunt—it would be something to talk about. I envy you, Hilary. And you can say quite naturally, ‘How is my godmother?’ when it would be liberty to say, ‘How is your aunt?’ She is your godmother, all right, all right. You have that much definite property in the Family. And how exactly did it happen? Recount me the tale, because I don’t mind telling you, dear, I’m relying on it myself. When conversation absolutely fails, I can say, ‘We have here a young person who is goddaughter to your aunt, Georgina, Duchess of Altenburg.’”

“She wasn’t the Duchess of Altenburg then,” laughed Hilary. “She was Princess Georgina, the late King John’s eldest sister, and she was over here with her uncle, who was governor-general of Canada, and they were staying with my uncle, Ralph Russell in New York, and so was I, being at that time three weeks old and half an orphan. My uncle, you know, had been ambassador over there.”

“Indeed I do. The loveliest man and greatest master of American prose of his generation. Are we likely to forget him? Go on, chicken. The Princess cooed over you in your poor little cradle, and——”

“That’s as much as I remember. But there was a private christening, and I’ve always been told she held me, and that my behavior was beautiful.”

“And you’ve got your silver mug. I’m sure I’ve heard a silver mug mentioned.”

“Father’s got it. He considers it his trophy—I’m sure I don’t know why. That taxi is running into dollars; but before I go I must tell you—there’s an immense discussion——”

Mrs. Phipps dropped her fan. “About what in the world now? I thought we had settled everything, Hilary. I can’t reopen——”

“Nothing like that. But not a living girl in Washington except me seems to know—whether she wants to curtsey to him or not.”

“What utter nonsense! We Americans don’t curtsey, and never did.”

“Oh, yes, mumsie, once we did. To our own governors, in the streets of New York.”

“Well, all I can say is we’ve learned better. What utter nonsense!”

“I don’t know—it’s a pretty custom. They used to make us do it at Mademoiselle’s in Brussels. And I always feel like curtseying to the President. But that’s because I love him.”

“Then you think it ought to be done. You want to do it.”

“No, indeed! I’m the only one who is quite sure she won’t. Margery Passmore, and Betty Chase, and the Carroll girls, who have been presented in England, are at the bottom of what I call a perfectly ridiculous fuss. Kate Carroll says the Queen curtseys to King John every time she leaves the table, and that all royalties expect it, and that she isn’t going to be guilty of any rudeness. But I say with you, darling, what is that to us?”

“If Prince Alfred expects it,” began Mrs. Phipps firmly, “he will just——”

A sound struck through to them from the world outside, a sound of cheering, a sound that grew louder and louder.

“Hilary—it’s the Prince! He’s before his time! Ring! Send for the President. Quick! Oh, where is James? I will not appear in the Blue Room alone. No, don’t go. Wait till James comes, ducky——”

But the President in his library was still besieged by the deputation from Colorado, to whom the ear of the chief executive was of more importance than the whole of any imperial person on earth. Arrival by automobile is also a very rapid process, and no doubt Major Calder, A.D.C., was a little flurried at finding the Blue Room empty. At all events, a moment later the door of Mrs. Phipps’s private drawing-room opened to admit, not the President, but a group of heated-looking young men, one of whom stood half a head taller than the rest, and was smiling, eagerly, delightfully——

And there was Mrs. Phipps, all alone but for Hilary, giving the most charming American welcome imaginable to Prince Alfred of England, and presenting Hilary. And there was Hilary—who curtsied!