Читать книгу His Royal Happiness - Sara Jeannette Duncan - Страница 5

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“Prince, I want to have you meet at the dance to-night,” said President Phipps at the breakfast table, “the loveliest girl in the United States of America.”

The President covered a neat mound of griddle-cakes with maple syrup, clipped the silver jug on the last drop, and looked round the table in a manner which challenged contradiction. It came promptly from an accredited source.

“James, you are perfectly ridiculous about that child. Probably His Highness won’t think so at all. And, besides, he has met her.”

“I mean Hilary,” said Mr. Phipps, with a slightly daunted eye, at which a laugh went round the table, much enjoyed by the aides-de-camp.

“Of course, you mean Hilary,” Mrs. Phipps retorted. “Who would dream that you meant anybody else, you poor, infatuated person! Prince Alfred met Hilary the day of his arrival—the moment of his arrival! When you weren’t there, but irrigating in Colorado—and it’s a mercy it didn’t get into the papers.”

“A tall girl—” put in Prince Alfred.

“You see, he remembers himself.”

“He could not forget,” declared Colonel Vandeleur. “I shall remember to my dying day. Awfully fit, too, she looked. Might have ridden to hounds all her life.”

“She has,” said Mrs. Phipps, “in Long Island. At all events, since she came back from school at Brussels.”

“I don’t seem to have met her in town,” said Vandeleur.

“You would not,” the President told him dryly. “Miss Lanchester is the daughter of my predecessor here, and since she grew up she’s had very little time for foreign travel.”

“But, of course,” exclaimed Colonel Vandeleur with self-reproach, “Lanchester—of course. Wonderful fellow, Henry Lanchester! You must have been proud to succeed him, sir.”

“I was,” said Mr. Phipps, “and I wish I could feel comfortable in any of his clothes. But Henry isn’t stock size.”

“James,” said his wife warningly. “‘Filberts.’ I say, ‘Filberts’”—she addressed the table—“when the President is disrespectful to the Chief Executive in favor of that great man, Henry Lanchester. But it doesn’t matter what I say, he will go on doing it.”

“You should try ‘chestnuts,’ Mrs. Phipps,” said Major Calder slyly, and the laugh was again at the President’s expense.

“I hear,” said Prince Alfred, accommodating Mrs. Phipps’s big Persian cat more comfortably on his knee, “that Mr. Lanchester’s health is much better than it was. That breakdown of his—people were awfully anxious about it in England. He was very much admired on our side, besides the feeling that, in one or two matters which you, sir, will know more about than I do, he gave us an awfully square deal.”

The President inclined his head as if the compliment were a personal one.

“Lanchester was fortunate in his opportunities, Prince,” he said. “If I weren’t forbidden to talk politics at breakfast, I could tell you something about the courage with which he took them. His health is practically re-established. That summer in Alaska last year did the business. Marvelous country for camping. He’s up there again just now, looking after a silver mine he put his foot into last year. Pretty deep mine too, and pretty high grade. I’m afraid Henry will roll out a good deal too well plated.”

“Struck it rich, has he?” asked Vandeleur. “But what’s the objection?”

“Too valuable to his country plain, Colonel. A good many people hope to see him back some day where he was before.”

“I don’t believe that will ever happen, James,” asserted Mrs. Phipps. “Sharif! Prince—that cat is giving you no peace. Henry Lanchester may be all you make him out to be, but the United States of America isn’t favorably disposed to third-term presidents. Too——”

“Too—” repeated Prince Alfred mischievously.

“Too discouraging for the other aspirants, Prince,” Mrs. Phipps saved herself. “We have so many, you know.”

Mrs. Phipps and her guest laughed together in the happiest understanding. Prince Alfred stroked Sharif with the consciousness that he had never felt more at home than in this gay and impulsive little lady’s house.

“Henry Lanchester,” said Mr. Phipps heavily, “has only been elected once. To succeed to a post made vacant by the act of God, such as poor Allingham’s apoplexy, doesn’t count in this country.”

“But why should Mr. Lanchester’s silver mine prevent his returning to office?” asked Prince Alfred. “With us I think it would be rather a recommendation.”

“Ah, well—there’s the difference,” Mr. Phipps told him. “You consider that the possession of wealth frees a man’s mind for public duty—and it’s up to us to acknowledge that yours is the logical view, and the dignified one. But this country has a liking for poor men in politics. Too many rich men out of them, I expect. We put a fellow in here to watch the bosses—we’ve no time to waste watching him. The camel and the needle’s eye is a workable proposition compared with an American multimillionaire and any sort of public office.”

“That’s awfully queer,” reflected Prince Alfred, peeling a banana.

“So the old Siwash woman who led Henry to the spot where the lump came from may not have done him such a good turn as she thought, or the country either,” went on the President. “There’s one comfort—such things take time up there. Financing, road-building, operating—it runs into years before you know where you are. I’ll allow him to get it in good shape to leave to Hilary.”

“Hilary’s not badly off already,” remarked Mrs. Phipps.

“Every cent of it from her mother,” asserted the President with an emphatic hand upon the table. “Till he went to Alaska, no man alive could prove money on Henry Lanchester. He simply had no room for it in his clothes.”

The President leaned his large bulk back in his chair and looked round his household with a smile. It was a heart-warming smile, and took the place of many things that he might have said.

Thus disarmed he made an easy target for his wife.

“He probably had more room in them than the man who came after him, anyhow,” she let fly, and Mr. Phipps’s broad frame shook with acknowledgment.

“Well,” he chuckled, as they left the table, “I shall ask your opinion to-morrow, Prince, when you’ve seen my little girl among the other American beauties on the floor to-night. I promise you shall meet her—I’ll see to it myself.”

“That would be awfully good of you,” responded Prince Alfred. “I had the honor, as Mrs. Phipps says, but in case Miss Lanchester does not remember me——”

Mr. President Phipps very nearly dug England’s third son in the ribs. Instead, he reflected inwardly, “Pretty good—for manners.” Then he glanced at the Prince, and as the shrewd amusement twinkled out of his eyes, said to himself, “I’m blessed if he didn’t mean it.”

As they went up the stairs to their quarters, Colonel Vandeleur, with one hand on Prince Alfred’s shoulder, turned back to the President.

“If you really want to show him something he hasn’t seen before,” said the unprincipled Vandy, “produce a plain-looking girl.”

There were bundles and bundles of English letters, the first mail in since their arrival. Very much like anybody’s letters, only so many of them, fat ones and fashionable ones, and bills, advertisements of aeroplanes and motors, circulars from wine merchants, bucket-shops, and money-lenders, a brief epistle signed “Yours affectionately, John”; another not so well spelled from the man in Farnborough who was looking after Your Royal Highness’s dog. There were some newspapers, too, his Popular Science Weekly that he always took in, and the Times, his Aunt Georgina’s copy, with the Financial Supplements taken out to save postage, addressed to him by her own hand. There was a letter, too, from the Princess, one of the fat ones. It had “Kensington Palace” boldly stamped across the flap, and was the first Prince Alfred opened. His Aunt Georgina was the most faithful letter-writer in the family. No one in absence could escape her, and Prince Alfred always opened her letters first, to be kept in touch and get it over.

It began very brightly and chattily, as the Duchess of Altenburg’s letters always did. She bent first to the consideration of public affairs; her pen did its duty by the events of the week in due recognition of their claims to notice. The weather had suddenly turned wet and rainy, very bad, she feared, for the poor farmers, whose interests she always felt to be the special charge of Providence. Alfred must have been appalled, as they all were, by the shocking colliery disaster at Rhonndha. Had he seen dear John’s extraordinarily plucky behavior in the papers—going down with the first party of rescuers in spite of all that was very rightly said to deter him? Nobody could be more thankful than she that John had inherited his father’s priceless gift of sympathy with the afflicted, but there were lengths to which he should not permit it to carry him, and she was glad to see that the dear old Times had given him a good scolding. There was a word about the fall of the French Ministry, for which she was perfectly certain that poor, unfortunate M. Pinaud was far from responsible, whatever they may say, and then the Princess passed on to just the echo of a whisper of gossip from St. Petersburg, which she disbelieved absolutely, and only mentioned lest it should reach her nephew from some other source. It had to do with the projected union of one of the Russian Grand Dukes with the little Archduchess Sophie Ludovica of Sternberg-Hofstein—“my dear little friend Sophie, to whom I have been attached since she was a flaxen-haired tot of five....

“Most unsuitable. He is fifty, she twenty on her next birthday, and young at that in appearance, though with quite a modest stock of cleverness in that sleek little head. You will perhaps hardly remember her—she was in the Backfisch stage when you saw her last, though even then showing character and ideas of her own to an extent that surprised one in a German girl. I remember laughing at her sturdy remark that she ‘would prefer not to marry at all, but if it was necessary’ she ‘would choose an Englishman, as they made the best husbands.’ It was an amusing preference, but I have better reasons than that for believing that there is nothing whatever in the Russian report. By the way, I have had a charming letter from Sophie, full of her studies and her fresh young impressions of the life about her, and I think it not improbable that she may accompany her cousin, Princess Königsmark, to Scotland this autumn, where the Princess has taken Clavismore from the Maccleughs—you remember frowning, battlemented Clavismore? No bad refuge from a pursuing Grand Duke, say I.”

Inquiries and recommendations as to her nephew’s health filled two good pages, after which the Princess exclaimed that she must not forget his kind hosts the Americans, and inquired cordially after them. She was sure that by now Alfred would be impressed, as he could be nowhere else in the world, with a sense of gigantic enterprise and “go.” The Americans more than any other people had the genius of great undertakings—one imagines the royal lady achieving this phrase as both true and quotable. They quite worked one up—at least, that was her recollection. Princess Georgina grieved to think that although her remembrance of dear America and her delightful visit was so vivid, she could think of no dear American who could reasonably be expected to remember her. Time and distance—alas! Yet there was one upon whom she considered that she had a special claim, if not to remembrance at least to recognition. Did Alfred know that the Princess had a goddaughter in America? Where, she grieved to say, she knew not—yet it was not altogether like a needle in a haystack, for the poor baby’s father had since achieved presidential distinction—Lanchester his name was. Only ceased to be president, to the best of the Princess’s recollection, three years before; but she confessed she had neither the brains nor the memory—(“The tall girl!” exclaimed Alfred, and did not skip another line)—for American politics. Be that as might be learned, the baby was just a little motherless relative, when the Princess became its sponsor, of a former ambassador to St. James’s, an old dear, long since dead. A sweet little episode, and she had often felt compunctions, and been meaning to write; but somehow she was afraid it had just remained a little episode. For one thing, people usually came, and the little Lanchester never had—shy, perhaps. At all events, should Alfred meet a Miss Lanchester—stranger things have happened—an only child whose father was once president, and who had lost her mother when she was very young, he might just say a kindly word, and hint that if she should find her way to London her godmother would be very pleased to see her, and possibly to present her at court. And, remembering as she did what an excellent impression that little act of kindness made, the Princess strongly recommended that, should any similar opportunity present itself to her nephew, he should not let it go by. “The ceremony,” added Aunt Georgina, “is very brief, and the mug is nominal.”