Читать книгу His Royal Happiness - Sara Jeannette Duncan - Страница 7

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Meanwhile, Major Calder’s mother achieved her presentation, and Major Calder, who understood the duties of a son as well as those of an aide-de-camp, saw that she had a real talk of three good minutes. Mrs. Calder made the pleasantest impression, and drifted away into the important official circles that ever widened about Prince Alfred and his immediate support, with the happiest grace possible to so large a lady. Other presentations were made with equal form and felicity, while the first extras were merrily danced by young people who felt themselves unlikely to receive that distinction, and to whom, in any case, a waltz was a waltz. The scene had every brilliancy, and seemed to gain a charm, a spontaneity, from being so unexpected and out of season. Distinguished persons stood about in attitudes, in spite of their ease, equally distinguished; stars glittered; uniforms scattered their hint of high duty and gay prestige. A thousand roses broke their hearts upon the air under the flying fans, the orchestra swept like a tide of delight over all. A graceful, whirling world upon the floor before him, a world of influential office and high claims about him, a new world dancing to the old tunes, new flowers blooming in familiar petals—Prince Alfred felt suddenly the gaiety of any young man at a ball, and knew that for the first time in his life he was going to enjoy himself at one. He listened with bent head to the final reminiscence of the old lady who remembered the visit of his father as Prince of Wales, his heart bounding with a glorious sense of enchantment and peradventure. Then he said formally to the President, “May I get rid of my sword, sir?”

Vandy took it, solemnly, and handed it to Major Calder, who in turn confided it to an aide-de-camp, in whose charge it disappeared. The old lady—she was very charming in a lace cap—leant on her ebony stick and touched his arm with her delicate fan. “There’s only one time to dance, Prince,” she advised him, with a smile that printed her face forever in his memory.

There is a royal gesture of the head which creates at once a confidential loneliness. Prince Alfred made it toward his equerry.

“Would it matter, Vandy, if I cut in now?” he said; but Vandy was saved more than a smile of embarrassment. Already the music of the second extra was throbbing to its end, and in another moment the notes of the prelude to the state lancers sent personages looking for the partners conferred upon them, and flung the waltzers into foamy lines and groups along the sides of the room to watch the still new feature of a ceremonial dance in the White House. Prince Alfred gave his arm to Mrs. Phipps, the President sought out Lady Pak, secretaries and ambassadors fell into their places, and in the properest manner, head high and feet that stepped to a strange magic, Prince Alfred danced his first American measure straight across the heart of Hilary Lanchester, where she hid it under a palm at the further end of the room, a spot from which, nevertheless, its guardian, dissimulated in converse with Betty Carroll, had an excellent view of what was happening.

“Oh, Betty,” she moaned, taking it all as a jest, “I adore him—don’t you?” and Betty professed herself in the same case. So they might have adored his painted picture; yet there was a difference, and Betty was much the more composed of the two.

“The Royal Americans! Betty!”

“I know,” said Betty.

Naturally, Miss Lanchester was not allowed to remain undisturbed under the palm, nor even Betty Carroll, whose father held a responsible appointment in the Navy Department, and who, half an hour later, was seen by all the world doing her incomparable two-step with the Prince. Hilary, going from partner to partner, keeping in half willful, half terrified mutiny well away from Mrs. Phipps, from Major Calder, from her dear President, from everybody else in the charmed circle, saw Betty doing her two-step, and gave the dance to young Jiménez of the Spanish Embassy, who was far too much in love with her, because he was the best dancer in the room. The Prince, treading the maze with Betty, treading the maze full of magic that denied him always its center, saw her at last with Jiménez. At last, not at first, because, though his heart was keeping time to his feet, and both knew themselves involved in magic and a maze, he was paying the conscientious attention to his steps suitable to a young Englishman of his rank in life. But at last——

“Shall we stop for a minute?” he said, and they stopped, Betty not wholly sorry to stop, beside another garlanded pillar, where the eyes of all were upon them.

“That,” said he, as Hilary and Jiménez passed again, with the grace of a wave of the sea, “is Miss——?”

“Lanchester,” Betty told him. “We think her about the most exquisite thing there is. I should just love to know, Prince, how she compares with girls on your side.”

He was watching the floating figures, and Betty thought his expression very critical.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” he said. “I have never seen anything like Miss Lanchester. Who is that foreigner?”

He said it simply, but his tone must have carried some displeasure, for the innocent Betty, an empiricist at conversation with royalty, wondered if she had been snubbed.

“Ought I,” she demanded widely later, “to have waited till he expressed an opinion? From that instant Mr. Prince gave me the marble elbow.”

It is quite true that in the short space that ensued before the dance was over, nothing more was said, and that a moment later she just melted away into a seat, as she said, before his bow.

So he found her for himself, without Vandy, or Calder, or anybody to help him. She was dropping a smile when he found her, upon the old lady in the lace cap, who looked up as he approached, and clasped her hands together in the prettiest ecstasy.

“His Royal Highness, my dear,” she said. It is odd that her name should have been Mrs. Endor. A widow she was—Mrs. Miriam Endor.

Prince Alfred held out his hand and offered Miss Lanchester, blushing, an American formula.

“I’m awfully pleased to meet you,” he said. It was not very sophisticated American, but she understood it well enough, and a little smile bubbled up in her heart.

They looked at one another for an instant with happy curiosity, like two children, and then her eyes fell. She kept them on the many wrinkles of the gloves on the old lady’s hands, crossed in her lap, and, quite at a loss, she said nothing at all.

“I hope you remember,” said Prince Alfred, “that we have already been introduced. But, if not, I have credentials.”

“Credentials!” said Mrs. Miriam Endor, lifting her hands. “Delicious.”

“I was presented to you,” Hilary said, “on Tuesday.”

Prince Alfred straightened himself ever so little, and his lips took the line which fate had given them for the acceptance of honorific formulas.

“May I have this one?” he said.

“How I wish I knew,” said Mrs. Miriam Endor as they left her side together, “what he meant about credentials,” and she hobbled away to find Mrs. Phipps.

Prince Alfred did not dance altogether well. Hilary actually heard him in an instant of diminuendo count “One—two—three.” It made her suddenly feel quite happy and natural. Her embarrassment slipped away; she even forgot to dance gracefully in her desire that the anxious “One—two—three” should beat truly to the music and to their feet. As a partner can, she helped him a little. He was really, she thought, getting into her step when he said suddenly, “I can’t dance, you know, for nuts. They say I’ve got no ear. Let us cut it, and go and talk about my Aunt Georgina.”

He took her, she thought, to the most conspicuous place in the room, in the midst of the notabilities, who stood aside or fell away at their approach in a manner which seemed to cause Prince Alfred no inconvenience, but which struck Miss Lanchester as extraordinarily unkind and disconcerting. Lady Pakenham and old Lord Selkirk, over on business for the Dominion, got up while they were still, it seemed to Hilary, yards away, and definitely left at their disposal two high-backed gilt chairs, which said in every line that they were meant for visitors of state.

“Please don’t move,” Prince Alfred begged them; but they had moved, smiling, quite away, and, seeing that, he led Hilary to one gilt chair, and took the other himself. As they sat there in the natural aloofness of gilt chairs, but bending a little toward one another, she in a white and flowing gown that foamed about her feet, he a trifle rigid in his Rifles’ green, they made a picture that many people remembered all their lives. Mrs. Phipps attracted the President’s attention to it, and he with a smile of pride at once turned his back on it.

“It isn’t so very warm, after all,” Hilary was saying. “The fans are almost too much, near the windows, when one isn’t dancing.”

“No—is it?” he replied. But with mutual, solid ground between them, why waste time upon the temperature? “I have practically, you know, a letter of introduction to you, Miss Lanchester. From an aunt of mine. And messages. That is, if you are an only child, if you lost your mother when you were very young, and if your father was once president——”

Grave qualifications, but they both laughed; the Prince was so pat with them.

“Nothing was said, I suppose, about this,” dared Hilary, touching her face.

“About——”

“The mole on my left cheek?”

“It doesn’t seem much of a mole.” He inspected it, from the point of view of the other gilt chair, carefully. “Perhaps it didn’t show when you were little.”

“Three weeks old I was.” Should she say, “Sir”? Should she say, “Your Royal Highness”? She said nothing.

“Were you really? When my Aunt Georgina——”

“Christened me—yes.”

“Oh! now you’re rotting. Godmothered you, you mean.”

Hilary blushed crimson. It had been a slip. Should she carry it off or confess? She rode at it straight.

“No, I wasn’t—I was confused. I meant the other thing, of course.”

“My aunt didn’t tell me,” said Prince Alfred, looking at her intently, “what you were christened.”

“Hilary Georgina.”

“I like Hilary best,” he said with simplicity.

“It was my mother’s name. So it had to come first, hadn’t it?”

“Of course. Then—what church were you christened in?” he asked earnestly.

“The Episcopalian. You don’t think the Princess would have lent herself to any other rites?”

“I couldn’t say. My aunt is very broad-minded. Episcopalian,” he mused.

“Not Methodist Episcopal. Protestant Episcopalian,” she explained. “It’s what your Church of England calls itself over here.”

“Oh,” he said. “Then you belong, practically, to the same church that I do. But I must not forget the messages. My aunt sent you her love and says she would be very pleased to see you in England.”

“Thank you,” said Hilary. As she spoke a whirling fan sent a rose, loosed from its place in the decorations, through the air to her feet. It was a very perfect red rose, and Prince Alfred picked it up where it lay between them, and presented it to her. He could do no less, and she, perhaps, was equally obliged to lift it to her face.

“It is quite fresh,” said Hilary, and it was. Fate seldom dropped a fresher rose.

“My aunt’s letter was all about you,” he persisted.

“Was it, really?”

“Yes—no,” he corrected. “She did mention one other person.” It is odd that he was driven on to say: “A little German girl. You probably wouldn’t know her——”

“Try me,” said Hilary. “There were some at my school in Brussels.”

“I believe she was at school somewhere—Sophia——”

“Not Sophy Sternburg-Hofstein?”

“You do know her?” Prince Alfred’s tone carried very moderate interest.

“She is only one of my greatest friends on earth! Her mother was a girl friend of my mother—her marriage with the Grand Duke was an immense romance—so Sophy and I just fell into each other’s arms at Mademoiselle’s. How delightful that—that you should have been hearing about Sophy. Then you know her, too?”

“I’m supposed to. But I have the vaguest recollection of her. My aunt tells me I haven’t seen her since she was a Backfisch.”

“We were Backfisches together. Do tell me whether she is going to Scotland?” For all her effort at repose, Miss Lanchester’s words would scamper. “In her letter last week she was dying to, but it wasn’t settled a bit.”

“I understand she is going to Scotland,” said Prince Alfred. “My aunt spoke of our seeing her there.”

“I could just weep for joy. Poor darling—she leads the dullest life; she longs to be back at school. And all day long nothing but intrigues to marry her to somebody. Hates going anywhere for fear of meeting exactly the right person quite by surprise, and then a solemn communication and a scene. It has happened! Really, between the Kaiser and his wicked old Chancellor, Sophy might just as well be living in the Middle Ages. And the abominable tyranny of those two men. She can’t so much as select her own literature, not to speak of her own maid. It’s a medieval situation. Somebody ought to rescue her—Prince.”

“I am sure,” said Prince Alfred earnestly, “somebody will. My aunt leads me to believe that several people have already tried.”

“Not,” said Hilary with emphasis, “the right people. She draws them in her letters—thumb-nail sketches—and I can see that they’re not. You can’t think what it is for a girl who has been at school and all, to be just a pawn for German diplomacy—to be moved, for the good of the Empire, into the married state out of the single.”

He looked at her for a moment without answering.

“It’s not nice for anybody,” he then said; and there was something in his voice that surprised her with a sudden compunction. But Vandy, who hovered never too far away, now came pointedly up.

“Supper, sir, is at the end of this dance,” he said. “The procession will form from the dais. Mrs. Phipps will be near the door into the drawing-room on the right. Miss Lanchester, may I have the honor of taking you in?”