the

PRINCE AND BETTY

 

 

 

 

BY

P. G. WODEHOUSE

 

 

 

 

MILLS & BOON, LIMITED

49 RUPERT STREET

LONDON W.

 

 

 

 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Mike
Psmith in the City
Love among the Chickens
A Gentleman of Leisure

 

 

Published 1912

 

 

 

 

 

TO

ELLALINE TERRISS

FROM

THE HERMIT

 

 

 

 

 

Not in book: links to chapters

Ch. 1Ch. 11
Ch. 2Ch. 12
Ch. 3Ch. 13
Ch. 4Ch. 14
Ch. 5Ch. 15
Ch. 6Ch. 16
Ch. 7Ch. 17
Ch. 8Ch. 18
Ch. 9Ch. 19
Ch. 10Ch. 20

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE PRINCE AND BETTY

CHAPTER I

THE TELEGRAM FROM MERVO

A  PRETTY girl in a blue dress came out of the house, and began to walk slowly across the terrace to where Elsa Keith sat with Martin Rossiter in the shade of the big sycamore. Elsa and Martin had become engaged some few days before, and were generally to be found at this time sitting together in some shaded spot.

“What’s troubling Betty, I wonder,” said Elsa. “She looks worried.”

Martin turned his head.

“Is that your friend, Miss Silver? When did she arrive?”

“Last night. She’s here for a month. What’s the matter, Betty? This is Martin. You’ve got to like Martin.”

Betty Silver smiled. Her face, in repose, was rather wistful, but it lit up when she smiled, and an unsuspected dimple came into being on her chin.

“Of course I shall,” she said.

Her big grey eyes seemed to search Martin’s for an instant, and Martin had, almost subconsciously, a comfortable feeling that he had been tested and found worthy.

“What were you scowling at so ferociously, Betty?” asked Elsa.

“Was I scowling? I hope you didn’t think it was at you. Oh, Elsa, I’m miserable! I shall have to leave this heavenly place. And I was meaning to have the most lovely time. See what has come!”

She held out some flimsy sheets of paper.

“A telegram!” said Elsa. “ItBook had typo:
Its
looks like the scenario of a four-act play. That’s not all one telegram, surely? Whoever sent it must be a millionaire.”

“He is. It’s from my step-father. Read it out, Elsa. I want Mr Rossiter to hear it. He may be able to tell me where Mervo is. Did you ever hear of Mervo, Mr Rossiter?”

“Never. It sounds like a patent medicine. What is it?”

“It’s a place where my step-father is, and where I’ve got to go. I do call it hard. Go on, Elsa.”

Elsa, who had been skimming the document with raised eyebrows, now read it out in its spacious entirety.

 

On receipt of this come instantly Mervo without moment delay vital importance presence urgently required come wherever you are cancel engagements urgent necessity have advised bank allow you draw any money you need expenses don’t fail catch first train London if you’re in the country I don’t know where you are But wherever you are you can catch boat-train to Dover to-morrow night no taking root in London and spending a week shopping night boat Dover Calais arrive Paris Wednesday morning Dine Paris catch train-de-luxe nine-fifteen Wednesday night for Marseilles have engaged sleeping coupé now mind Wednesday night no hanging round Paris shops you can do all that later on just now I want you to get here quick arrive Marseilles Thursday morning boat Mervo Thursday night will meet you Mervo now do you follow all that because if not wire at once and say which part of journey you don’t understand now mind special points to be remembered firstly come instantly secondly no hanging round London Paris shops See SCOBELL.

 

Well!” said Elsa, breathless.

“By Jove!” said Martin. “He certainly seems to want you badly enough. He hasn’t spared expense. He has put in about everything you could put into a telegram.”

“Except why he wants me,” said Betty.

“Yes,” said Elsa. “Why does he want you? And in such a desperate hurry too.”

Martin was re-reading the message.

“It isn’t a mere invitation,” he said. “There’s no come-along-you’ll-like-this-place-it’s-fine about it. He seems to look on your company more as a necessity than a luxury. It’s a sort of imperious C.Q.D.”

“That’s what makes it so strange. We have hardly met for years. Why, he didn’t even know where I was. The telegram was sent to the bank and forwarded on. And I don’t know where he is!”

“Which brings us back,” said Martin, “to Mysterious Mervo. Let us reason inductively. If you get to the place by taking a boat from Marseilles, it can’t be far from the French coast. I should say at a venture that Mervo was an island in the Mediterranean. And a small island—for if it had been a big one we should have heard of it. Isn’t there an Encyclopædia in the library, Elsa?”

“Yes, but it’s an old edition.”

“It will probably touch on Mervo. I’ll go and fetch it.”

As he crossed the terrace, Elsa turned quickly to Betty.

“Well?” she said.

Betty smiled at her.

“He’s a dear. Are you very happy, Elsa?”

Elsa’s eyes danced. She drew in her breath softly. Betty looked at her in silence for a moment. The wistful expression was back on her face.

“Elsa,” she said, suddenly. “What is it like? How does it feel, knowing that there’s someone who is fonder of you than anything——?”

Elsa closed her eyes.

“It’s like eating strawberries and cream in a new dress by moonlight, on a summer night, while somebody plays the violin far away in the distance so that you can just hear it,” she said.

Her eyes opened again.

“And it’s like coming along on a winter evening and seeing the windows lit up and knowing you’ve reached home.”

Betty was clenching her hands, and breathing quickly.

“And it’s like——

“Elsa, don’t! I can’t bear it!”

“Betty! What’s the matter?”

Betty smiled again, but painfully.

“It’s stupid of me. I’m just jealous, that’s all. I haven’t got a Martin, you see. You have.”

“Well, there are plenty who would like to be your Martin.”

Betty’s face grew cold.

“There are plenty who would like to be Benjamin Scobell’s son-in-law,” she said.

“Betty.” Elsa’s voice was serious. “We’ve been friends for a good long time, so you’ll let me say something, won’t you? I think you’re getting just the least bit hard. Now turn and rend me,” she added, good-humouredly.

“I’m not going to rend you,” said Betty. “You’re perfectly right. I am getting hard. How can I help it? Do you know how many men have asked me to marry them since I saw you last? Five!”

“Betty! Who were they?”

“The only one you know was Lord Arthur Hayling. You remember him? He was the last. There were four others before him. And not one of them cared the slightest bit about me.”

“But, Betty, dear, that’s just what I mean. Why should you say that? How can you know?”

“How do I know? Well, I do know. Instinct, I suppose. The instinct of self-preservation which Nature gives hunted animals. I can’t think of a single man in the world—except your Martin, of course—who wouldn’t do anything for money.” She stopped. “Well, yes, one.”

Elsa leaned forward eagerly.

“Who, Betty?”

“You don’t know him.”

“But what’s his name?”

Betty hesitated.

“Well, if I am in the witness-box—Maude.”

“Maude? I thought you said a man?”

“It’s his name. John Maude.”

“But, Betty! Why didn’t you tell me before? This is tremendously interesting.”

Betty laughed shortly.

“Not so very, really. I only met him two or three times, and I haven’t seen him for years, and I don’t suppose I shall ever see him again. He was a friend of Alice Beecher’s brother, who was at Cambridge. Alice took me one May week to meet her brother, and Mr Maude was there. That’s all.”

Elsa was plainly disappointed.

“But how do you know, then—? What makes you think that he——?”

“Instinct, again, I suppose. I do know.”

“And you’ve never met him since?”

Betty shook her head. Elsa relapsed into silence. She had a sense of bathos.

At the further end of the terrace Martin Rossiter appeared, carrying a large volume.

“Here we are,” he said. “Found it first shot. Now then.”

He sat down, and opened the book.

“You don’t want to hear all about how Jason went there in search of the Golden Fleece, and how Ulysses is supposed to have taken it in on his tour? You want something more modern. Well, it’s an island in the Mediterranean, as I said, and I’m surprised that you’ve never heard of it, Elsa, because it’s celebrated in its way. It’s the smallest independent state in the world. Smaller than Monaco, even. Here are some facts. Its population when this Encyclopædia was printed—there may be more now—was eleven thousand and sixteen. It was ruled over up to 1886 by a prince. But in that year the populace appear to have sacked their prince, and the place is now a Republic. So that’s where you’re going, Miss Silver. I don’t know if it’s any consolation to you, but the island, according to this gentleman, is celebrated for the unspoilt beauty of its scenery. He also gives a list of the fish that can be caught there. It takes up about three lines.”

“But what can my step-father be doing there? I last heard of him in America. Well, I suppose I shall have to go.”

“I suppose you will,” said Elsa, mournfully. “But, oh, Betty, what a shame.”

CHAPTER II

MERVO AND ITS OWNER

BY George!” cried Mr Benjamin Scobell. “Hi, Marion!”

He wheeled round from the window and transferred his gaze from the view to his sister Marion, losing by the action, for the view was a joy to the eye, which his sister Marion was not.

Mervo was looking its best under the hot morning sun. Mr Scobell’s villa stood near the summit of the only hill the island possessed, and from the window of the morning-room, where he had just finished breakfast, he had an uninterrupted view of valley, town and harbour—a two-mile riot of green, gold, and white, and beyond the white the blue satin of the Mediterranean. Mr Scobell did not read poetry, except that which advertised certain breakfast-foods in which he was interested, or he might have been reminded of the Island of Flowers in Tennyson’s “Voyage of Maeldune.” Violets, pinks, crocuses, yellow and purple mesembryanthemum, lavender, myrtle, and rosemary . . . his two-mile view contained them all. The hillside below him was all aglow with the yellow fire of the mimosa. But his was not one of these emotional natures to which the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. A primrose by the river’s brim, a simple primrose was to him:—or not so much a simple primrose, perhaps, as a basis for a possible Primrosina, the Soap that Really Cleans You.

He was a nasty little man to hold despotic sway over such a Paradise; a goblin in Fairyland. Somewhat below the middle height, he was lean of body and vulturine of face. He had a greedy mouth, a hooked nose, liquid green eyes, and a sallow complexion. He was rarely seen without a half-smoked cigar between his lips. This at intervals he would relight, only to allow it to go out again; and when, after numerous fresh starts, it had dwindled beyond the limits of convenience, he would substitute another from the reserve supply that protruded from his waistcoat pocket.

 

How Benjamin Scobell had discovered the existence of Mervo is not known. It lay well outside the sphere of the ordinary financier. But Mr Scobell took a pride in the versatility of his finance. It distinguished him from the uninspired who were content to concentrate themselves on steel, wheat, and suchlike things. Ever since, as a young man in Manchester, he had founded his fortunes with a patent powder for the suppression of cockroaches, it had been his way to consider nothing as lying outside his sphere. In a financial sense he might have taken Terence’s “Nihil humanum alienum” as his motto. He was interested in innumerable enterprises, great and small. He was the power behind a company which was endeavouring, without much success, to extract gold from the mountains of North Wales, and another which was trying, without any success at all, to do the same by sea-water. He owned a model farm in the Cotswolds, and a weekly paper in Aberdeen. He had financed patent medicines, patent foods, patent corks, patent corkscrews, patent devices of all kinds, some profitable, some the reverse. He had penetrated to America, and taken money away from Chicago, a crowning triumph.

This man of many projects had descended upon Mervo like a stone on the surface of some quiet pool, bubbling over with Modern Enterprise in general and, in particular, with a Scheme. Before his arrival, Mervo had been an island of dreams, and slow movement, and putting things off till to-morrow. The only really energetic thing it had ever done in its whole history had been to expel his late Highness Prince Charles, and change itself into a Republic. And even that had been done with the minimum of fuss. The Prince was away at the time. Indeed, he had been away for nearly three years, the pleasures of Paris, London, and Vienna, appealing to him more keenly than life among his subjects. Mervo, having thought the matter over during these years, decided that it had no further use for Prince Charles. Quite quietly, with none of that vulgar brawling which its neighbour, France, had found necessary in similar circumstances, it had struck his name off the pay-roll, and declared itself a Republic. The Royalist party, headed by General Poineau, had been distracted but impotent. The army, one hundred and fifteen strong, had gone solid for the new régime, and that had settled it. Mervo had gone to sleep again. It was asleep when Mr Scobell found it.

The financier’s scheme was first revealed to M. d’Orby, the President of the Republic, a large, stout statesman with even more than the average Mervian instinct for slumber. He was asleep in a chair on the porch of his villa when Mr Scobell paid his call, and it was not until the financier’s secretary, who had attended the séance in the capacity of interpreter, had rocked him vigorously from side to side for quite a minute that he displayed any signs of animation beyond a snore like the growling of distant thunder. When at length he opened his eyes, he perceived the nightmare-like form of Mr Scobell standing before him, talking. The financier, impatient of delay, had begun to talk some moments before the great awakening.

“Hi!” Mr Scobell was saying, “I’ve a proposal to make to you, sir, and I’d like you to give your complete attention. Shake him again, Crump. Sir, there’s a lot of money in it for all of us if you and your crowd’ll come in. Money. Lar monnay. No, that means change. What’s money, Crump? Arjong? There’s arjong in it, o’ man. Understand? Silly old idiot! Tell him in French, Crump.”

Mr Secretary Crump translated. The President blinked, and intimated that he would hear more. Mr Scobell relit his cigar-stump, and proceeded.

“I suppose you’ve heard of Moosieer Blonk? Ask the old chap if he’s ever heard of Mersyaw Blong, Crump, the feller who started the gaming-tables at Monte Carlo.”

Filtered through Mr Crump, the question became intelligible to the President. He said he had heard of M. Blanc. Mr Crump caught the reply and sent it on to Mr Scobell.

Mr Scobell relit his cigar.

“Well, I’m in that line. I’m going to make this island hum just like old Blonk made Monte Carlo. I’ve been reading up all about Blonk, and I know just what he did and how he did it. Monte Carlo was just such another dead-and-alive little place as this is before he came. The Government was down to its last threepenny-bit and wondering where the dickens its next Sunday dinner was coming from, when along comes Blonk, tucks up his shirt-sleeves, and starts the tables. And after that the place never looked back. You and your fellows have got to call a meeting and pass a vote to give me a gambling-concession here, like what they gave him. Scobell’s my name. Tell him, Crump.”

Mr Crump obliged once more. A gleam of intelligence came into the President’s dull eye. He nodded once or twice. He talked volubly in French to Mr Crump, who responded in the same tongue.

“The idea seems to strike him, sir,” said Mr Crump.

“It ought to, if he’s got the imagination of a limpet,” replied Mr Scobell. He started to re-light his cigar, but after scorching the tip of his nose, bowed to the inevitable and threw the relic away.

“Look here,” he said, having bitten the end off the next in order, “I’ve thought this thing out. There’s lots of room for another Monte Carlo. Monte’s a good little place, but it’s not perfect by a long way. To start with, it’s hilly. You have to take the lift to get to the Casino, and when you’ve got to the end of your money and want to pawn your diamond pin, where is Uncle? Half a mile away up the side of a mountain. It ain’t right. In my Casino there’s going to be a resident pawnbroker inside the building, just off the main entrance. That’s only one of a whole lot of improvements. Another is that my Casino’s going to be a home from home, a place you can be really cosy in. You’ll look round you, and the only thing you’ll miss will be mother’s face. There’s no need for a gambling Casino to look and feel and smell like the reading-room at the British Museum. Comfort, cosiness, and convenience. That’s my motto. Tell him, Crump.”

A further outburst of the French language from Mr Crump, supplemented on the part of M. d’Orby by gesticulations, interrupted the proceedings.

“What’s he saying now?” asked Mr Scobell.

“He wants to know——

“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. He wants to know how much he and the other somnambulists will get out of it, the blooming old pirate. Is that it?”

Mr Crump said that that was just it.

“That’ll be all right,” said Mr Scobell. “Blong’s offer to the Prince of Monaco was five hundred thousand francs a year—that’s about twenty thousand pounds in real money—and half the profits made by the Casino. That’s my offer, too. See how he likes that, Crump.”

Mr Crump investigated.

“He says he accepts gladly, on behalf of the Republic, sir,” he announced.

M. d’Orby confirmed the statement by rising, dodging the cigar, and kissing Mr Scobell on both cheeks.

“Stop it,” said the financier austerely, breaking out of the clinch. “We’ll take the Apache Dance as read. Good-bye, o’ man. Glad it’s settled. Now I can get to work.”

He did. Workmen poured into Mervo, and in a very short time, dominating the town and reducing to insignificance the palace of the late Prince, once a passably imposing mansion, there rose beside the harbour a mammoth Casino of shining stone.

Imposing as was the exterior, it was on the interior that Mr Scobell more particularly prided himself. And not without reason. Certainly, a man with money to lose could lose it here under the most charming conditions. It had been Mr Scobell’s object to avoid the cheerless grandeur of the rival institution down the coast. Instead of one large hall sprinkled with tables, each table had a room to itself, separated from its neighbour by sound-proof folding-doors. And as the building progressed, Mr Scobell’s active mind had soared above the original idea of domestic cosiness to far greater heights of ingenuity. Each of the rooms was furnished and arranged in a different style. The note of individuality extended even to the croupiers. Thus, a man with money at his command could wander from the Dutch room, where, in the picturesque surroundings of a Dutch kitchen, croupiers in the costume of Holland ministered to his needs, to the Japanese room, where his coin would be raked in by quite passable imitations of the Samurai. If he had any left at this point, he was free to dispose of it under the auspices of near-Hindoos in the Indian room, of merry Swiss peasants in the Swiss room, or, in other appropriately furnished apartments of red-shirted, Bret Harte miners, fur-clad Esquimaux, or languorous Spaniards. He could then, if a man of spirit, who did not know when he was beaten, collect the family jewels, and proceed down the main hall, accompanied by the strains of an excellent band, to the office of a gentlemanly pawnbroker, who spoke seven languages like a native and was prepared to advance money on reasonable security in all of them.

It was a colossal venture, but it suffered from the defect from which most big things suffer; it moved slowly. That it also moved steadily was to some extent a consolation to Mr Scobell. Undoubtedly it would progress quicker and quicker, as time went on, until at length the Casino became a permanent gold-mine. But at present it was being conducted at a loss. It was inevitable, but it irked Mr Scobell. He paced the island and brooded. His mind dwelt incessantly on the problem. Ideas for promoting the prosperity of his nursling came to him at all hours—at meals, in the night-watches, when he was shaving, walking, washing, reading, brushing his hair.

And now one had come to him as he stood looking at the view from the window of his morning-room, listening absently to his sister Marion as she read stray items of interest from the columns of the New York Herald, and had caused him to utter the exclamation recorded at the beginning of the chapter.

 

“By George!” he said. “Read that again, Marion. I’ve got an idea.”

Miss Scobell, deep in her paper, paid no attention. Few people would have taken her for the sister of the financier. She was his exact opposite in almost every way. He was small, jerky, and aggressive; she, tall, deliberate, and negative. She was one of those women whom Nature seems to have produced with the object of attaching them to some man in a peculiar position of independent dependence, and who defy the imagination to picture them in any other condition whatsoever. One could not see Miss Scobell doing anything but pour out her brother’s coffee, darn his socks, and sit placidly by while he talked. Yet it would have been untrue to describe her as dependent upon him. She had a detached mind. Though her whole life had been devoted to his comfort, and though she admired him intensely, she never appeared to give his conversation any real attention. She listened to him much as she would have listened to a barking Pomeranian.

“Marion!” cried Mr Scobell.

“A five-legged rabbit has been born in Texas,” she announced.

Mr Scobell cursed the five-legged rabbit.

“Never mind about your rabbits. I want to hear that bit you read before. The bit about the Prince of Monaco. Will—you—listen, Marion!”

“The Prince of Monaco, dear? Yes. He has caught another fish or something of that sort, I think. Yes. A fish with ‘telescope eyes,’ the paper says. And very convenient too, I should imagine.”

Mr Scobell thumped the table.

“I’ve got it. I’ve found out what’s the matter with this place. I see why the Casino hasn’t got moving properly.”

I think it must be the croupiers, dear. I’m sure I never heard of croupiers in fancy-dress before. It doesn’t seem right. I’m sure people don’t like those nasty Hindoos. I am quite nervous myself when I go into the Indian room. They look at me so oddly.”

“Nonsense. That’s the whole idea of the place, that it should be different. People are sick and tired of having their money raked in by seedy-looking foreigners in second-hand frock-coats. We give ’em variety. It’s not the Casino that’s wrong; it’s the island. What’s the use of a Republic in a place like this? For a little bit of a one-night stand like this you want something picturesque, something that’ll advertise the place, something that’ll stimulate people’s curiosity and make ’em talk. Take this Prince of Monaco. He wanders round in his yacht catching telescope-eyed fish, and people talk about it. ‘Another fish,’ they say. ‘That’s the twelfth bite he’s had this year.’ It’s like a soap-advertisement. It works by suggestion. They get thinking about the Prince and his pop-eyed fishes, and, before they know what they’re doing, they’ve packed their portmanteaux and come along to Monaco to have a look at him. And once they’re there, you can be certain they aren’t going back again without trying to win a bit from the bank. That’s what this place wants. Whoever heard of this Republic doing anything except eat and sleep? They used to have a prince here in ’eighty-something. Well, I’m going to have him back again.”

Miss Scobell looked up from her paper, which she had been reading with absorbed interest throughout this harangue.

“Dear?” she said inquiringly.

“I say I’m going to have him back again,” said Mr Scobell, a little damped. “I wish you would listen.”

“I think you’re quite right, dear. Who?”

“The Prince. Do listen, Marion. The Prince of this island. His Highness the Prince of Mervo. I’m going to send for him and put him on the throne again.”

“You can’t, dear. He’s dead.”

“I know he’s dead. You can’t stump me on the history of this place. I’ve been reading it up. He died in ’91. But before he died he married an English girl, and there’s a son, who’s in England now, living with his uncle. It’s the son I’m going to send for. I got it all from General Poineau. He’s a Royalist. He’ll be all for having a prince again. He told me all about it. The Prince married a girl called Westley, and then he was killed in a motor accident, and his widow went back to England with the child to live with her brother. Poineau says he could lay his hand on him any time he pleased.”

“I hope you won’t do anything rash, dear,” said his sister comfortably. “I’m sure we don’t want any horrid revolution here, with people shooting and stabbing each other.”

“Revolution?” cried Mr Scobell. “Revolution! Don’t talk nonsense! Revolution! Do you understand what sort of a hold I’ve got on this place? Pretty nearly every adult on this island is dependent on my Casino for his weekly salary, and what I say is done—without argument. I want a prince, so I’m going to have a prince, and if anyone raises objections, he’ll find himself sacked.”

Miss Scobell turned to her paper again.

“Very well, dear,” she said. “Just as you please. I’m sure you know best.”

“I’ll go and find old Poineau at once,” said the financier.

CHAPTER III

JOHN

ABOUT the time of Mr Scobell’s visit to General Poineau, John, Prince of Mervo, ignorant of the greatness so soon to be thrust upon him, was strolling thoughtfully along Bishopsgate Street.

He was a big young man, tall and large of limb. His shoulders especially were of the massive type expressly designed by Nature for great deeds in tight scrummages. He looked like one of Nature’s forwards, and had, indeed, played in that position for Cambridge during two strenuous seasons. His face wore an expression of invincible good-humour. He had a wide, good-natured mouth, and a pair of friendly grey eyes. One felt that he liked his fellow-men and would be surprised and pained if they did not like him.

As he passed along the street he looked a little anxious. Sherlock Holmes—and possibly even Doctor Watson—would have deduced that he had something on his conscience.

At the entrance to a large office-building he paused, and seemed to hesitate. Then, as if he had made up his mind to face an ordeal, he went in.

Mounting to the second floor, he went down the passage and pushed open a door on which was inscribed the legend, “Westley, Martin & Co.”

A girl, walking across the office with her hands full of papers, stopped in astonishment.

“Why, John Maude!” she cried.

The young man grinned.

“Hullo, Della!” he said.

Della Morrison was an American girl, from New York, whom restlessness and the American passion for travel had brought to London, about a month before, with a letter of introduction to Andrew Westley from the firm’s New York agent. She was now Mr Westley’s secretary, and she and John had always been good friends. John, indeed, was generally popular with his fellow employees. His absence had been the cause of discussion and speculation amongst them, and the general verdict had been that there would be troublous times for him on the morrow.

“Say, where have you been?” said Della. “The old man’s been as mad as a hornet since he found you’d quit without leave. He was asking for you just now. Wherever did you get to?”

“Della,” said John, “owing to your unfortunate upbringing you aren’t a cricket enthusiast, but suppose you were, and suppose you got up one day and found it was a perfectly ripping morning, and remembered that it was the first day of a Test Match, and looked at your letters, and saw that someone had offered you a seat in the pavilion, what would you have done? I could no more have refused— Oh, well! I suppose I’d better tackle my uncle now. It’s got to be done.”

It was not a task to which many would have looked forward. Most of those who came into contact with Andrew Westley were afraid of him. He was a capable rather than a lovable man, and too self-controlled to be quite human. There was no recoil in him, no reaction after anger, as there would have been in a hotter-tempered man. He thought before he acted, but, when he acted, never yielded a step.

John, in all the years of their connection, had never been able to make anything of him. At first, he had been prepared to like him, as he liked nearly everybody. But Mr Westley had discouraged all advances, and, as time went by, his nephew had come to look on him as something apart from the rest of the world, one of those things which no fellow could understand.

On Mr Westley’s side, there was something to be said in extenuation of his attitude. John reminded him of his father, and he had hated the late Prince of Mervo with a cold hatred that had for a time been the ruling passion of his life. He had loved his sister, and her married life had been one long torture to him, a torture rendered keener by the fact that he was powerless to protect either her happiness or her money. Her money was her own, to use as she pleased; and the use which pleased her most was to give it to her husband, who could always find a way of spending it. As to her happiness, that was equally out of his control. It was bound up in her Prince, who, unfortunately, was a bad custodian for it. At last, an automobile accident put an end to his Highness’s hectic career (and, incidentally, to that of a blonde lady from the Folies Bergères), and the Princess had returned to her brother’s home, where, a year later, she died, leaving him in charge of her infant son.

Mr Westley’s desire from the first had been to eliminate as far as possible all memory of the late Prince. He gave John his sister’s name, Maude, and brought him up as an Englishman, in total ignorance of his father’s identity. During all the years they had spent together, he had never mentioned the Prince’s name.

He disliked John intensely. He fed him, clothed him, sent him to Cambridge, and gave him a home and a place in his office; but he never for a moment relaxed his bleakness of front towards him. John was not unlike his father in appearance, though built on a larger scale, and, as time went on, little mannerisms, too, began to show themselves, that reminded Mr Westley of the dead man, and killed any beginnings of affection.

John, for his part, had the philosophy which goes with perfect health. He fitted his uncle into the scheme of things, or, rather, set him outside them as an irreconcilable element, and went on his way enjoying life in his own good-humoured fashion.

It was only lately, since he had joined the firm, that he had been conscious of any great strain. Cambridge had given him a glimpse of a larger life, and the office cramped him. He felt vaguely that there were bigger things in the world which he might be doing. His best friends, of whom he now saw little, were all men of adventure and enterprise who had tried their hands at many things; men like Jimmy Pitt, who had done nearly everything that could be done before coming into an unexpected half-million; men like Reeve-Smith, who had been at Cambridge with him and was now a journalist; men like Baker, Faraday, Williams—he could name half a dozen, all men who were doing something, who were out in the firing-line.

He was not a man who worried. He had not that temperament. But sometimes he would wonder in rather a vague way whether he was not allowing life to slip by him a little too placidly. An occasional yearning for something larger would attack him. There seemed to be something in him that made for inaction. His soul was sleepy.

If he had been told of the identity of his father, it is possible that he might have understood. The princes of Mervo had never taken readily to action and enterprise. For generations back, if they had varied at all, son from father, it had been in the colour of hair or eyes, not in character—a weak, shiftless procession, with nothing to distinguish them from the common run of men except good looks and a talent for wasting money.

John was the first of the line who had in him the seeds of better things. The Westley blood and the bracing nature of his education had done much to counteract the Mervo strain. He did not know it, but the Englishman in him was winning. The desire for action was growing steadily every day.

It had been Mervo that had sent him to the Oval on the previous day. That impulse had been purely Mervian. No prince of that island had ever resisted a temptation. But it was England that was sending him now to meet his uncle with a quiet unconcern as to the outcome of the interview. The spirit of adventure was in him. It was more than possible that Mr Westley would sink the uncle in the employer, and dismiss him as summarily as he would have dismissed any other clerk in similar circumstances. If so, he was prepared to welcome dismissal. Other men fought an unsheltered fight with the world, so why not he?

He moved towards the door of the inner office with a certain exhilaration.

As he approached it flew open, disclosing Mr Westley himself, a tall, thin man, at the sight of whom Della became agitated and vaguely busy with her papers.

John went to meet him.

“Ah,” said Mr Westley, “come in here. I want to speak to you. Miss Morrison, I want you to take down a letter.”

John and Della followed him into the room.

“Sit down,” said his uncle. He turned to Della. “Will you take down this letter, Miss Morrison?”

John waited while he dictated a letter. Neither spoke till Della had left the room. John met her eye as she passed. There was a compassionate look in it.

When the door closed Mr Westley leaned back in his chair, and regarded his nephew steadily from under a pair of bushy grey eyebrows which lent a sort of hypnotic keenness to his gaze.

“You were at the Test Match yesterday?” he said.

The unexpectedness of the question startled John into a sharp laugh.

“Yes,” he said, recovering himself.

“Without leave.”

“It didn’t seem worth while asking for leave.”

“You mean that you relied so implicitly on our relationship to save you from the consequences?”

“No, I meant——

“Well, we need not try to discover what you may have meant. What claim do you put forward for special consideration? Why should I treat you differently from any other member of the staff?”

John had a feeling that the interview was being taken at too rapid a pace. He felt confused.

“I don’t want you to treat me differently,” he said.

“I think we understand each other,” said Mr Westley. “I need not detain you. You may return to the Test Match without further delay. As you go out, ask the cashier to give you your salary to the end of the month. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” said John.

At the door he hesitated. He had looked forward to this moment as one of excitement and adventure, but now that it had come it had left him in anything but an uplifted mood. He was naturally warm-hearted, and his uncle’s cold anger hurt him. It was so different from anything sudden, so essentially not of the moment. He felt instinctively that it had been smouldering for a long time, and realised with a shock that his uncle had not been merely indifferent to him all these years, but had actually hated him. It was as if he had caught a glimpse of something ugly. He felt that this was the last scene of some long drawn-out tragedy.

Something made him turn impulsively back towards the desk.

“Uncle—” he cried.

He stopped. The hopelessness of attempting any step towards a better understanding overwhelmed him. Mr Westley had begun to write. He must have seen John’s movement, but he continued to write as if he were alone in the room.

John turned to the door again.

“Good-bye,” he said.

Mr Westley did not look up.

CHAPTER IV

JOHN FINDS ANOTHER SITUATION

JOHN’S first act, on leaving the office, was to proceed to the office of the News and inquire for his friend Smith, the journalist. He felt that he had urgent need of a few minutes’ conversation with him. Now that the painter had been definitely cut that bound him to the safe and conventional, and he had set out on his own account to lead the life adventurous, he was conscious of an absurd diffidence. London looked different to him. It made him feel positively shy. A pressing need for a friendly native in this strange land manifested itself. Smith would have ideas and advice to bestow; and in this crisis both were highly necessary.

Smith, however, was not at the office. He had gone out, John was informed, earlier in the morning to cover a threatened strike somewhere down in the East End. John did not go in search of him. The chance of finding him in that maze of mean streets was remote. He decided to select a hotel, and lunch. To the need for lunch he attributed a certain sinking sensation of which he was becoming more and more aware, and which bore much too close a resemblance to dismay to be pleasant. The poet’s statement that

“The man who’s square, his chances always are the best;
 No circumstance can shoot a scare into the contents of his vest,”

is only true within limits. The squarest man, left suddenly homeless in London and faced with the prospect of earning his living there, is likely to quail for a moment. A gladiator, waiting in the centre of the arena while the Colosseum officials fumbled with the bolts of the door behind which paced the noisy tiger with whom he was to confer, must have had some of the emotions which John experienced during his first hour as a masterless man in the metropolis.

A bus carried him up the Strand. After a quarter of an hour’s ride the Belvoir Hotel loomed up on the left. It looked a pretty good hotel to John. He dismounted.

Half an hour later he decided that he was acclimatised. He had secured a base of operations in the shape of a room on the fourth floor; and he was half-way through a lunch which had caused him already to look on London not only as the finest city in the world, but also, on the whole, as the one city of all others in which a young man might make a fortune with the maximum of speed and the minimum of effort.

After lunch, having telegraphed his address to his uncle in case of letters, he took the latter’s excellent advice and went to the Oval. Returning in time to dress, he dined at the hotel. After which he visited a theatre, and completed a pleasant and strenuous day by supping at a fashionable restaurant, where the vigour of the orchestra effectively banished thought.

A second attempt to find Smith next morning failed, as the first had done. The staff of the News were out of bed and at work ridiculously early; and when John rang up the office between ten and eleven o’clock—Nature’s breakfast-hour—Smith was again down East, observing the movements of those who were about to strike or who had already struck.

It hardly seemed worth while starting to lay the bed-plates of his fortune till he had consulted the expert. What would Rockefeller have done? He would, John felt certain, have gone to the Oval to see the finish of the Test Match.

He imitated the great financier.

 

It was characteristic of John—a trait inherited from a long line of ancestors whose views on finance had always been delightfully airy and casual—that it was only at very occasional intervals that the thought would come to him that one cannot spend one’s days at the Oval and one’s nights in an expensive hotel indefinitely on a capital of forty pounds. Every now and then he would find this truth flickering vaguely for an instant before his mental eye; but he was not a Prince of Mervo for nothing; and he shirked the unpleasant problem of how he was to go on living after his money was gone as thoroughly and effectively as even his father, the amiable Prince Charles, could have done. The future seemed, on the whole, rosy. Everybody appeared to be making quite a comfortable living in this happy city. The only real difficulty seemed to lie in selecting the most congenial job. That, from a prospective employer’s point of view, there were objections to a young man without any particular knowledge of anything, summarily dismissed from his last place, did occur to him; but he dismissed the thought. Life was too pleasant for such morbid meditations. For the first time since he had come down from Cambridge he was thoroughly enjoying himself.

A certain tendency to loneliness was the only real drawback to his holiday. It was not until the fifth day that he met a friend, his old acquaintance, Della Morrison.

They met in the lobby. She was so changed outwardly that, when he first caught sight of her, he did not recognise her. The Della Morrison he had known had been a brisk, business-like figure in a plain blue dress, bounded on the north by a mass of light hair, on the south by shoes of gleaming tan. The girl in the lobby was wonderfully dressed, and the tan shoes had disappeared in favour of less emphatic decorations. But when they met, any lingering doubts John may have had were definitely dispelled by what she said and the way she said it. The alterations in her had been purely external.

She caught his eye, stared, then smiled a huge smile of delighted surprise.

“Well!” she exclaimed.

“This is splendid,” said John. “I was just wondering if I should ever meet anybody I knew again. What are you doing here, Della? You look as if you had come into a fortune.”

“I have come into a fortune. At least, pa did. My head’s still buzzing. Pa and ma arrived from New York in the Lusitania the day after you were fired. They never cabled or anything. The first I knew of it was when they walked into the office, and told me to get ready to quit, because I was an heiress. You could have knocked me down with a feather.”

“And how do you like gilded ease?”

“Gilded ease,” said Miss Morrison with decision, “is the greatest invention since chewing-gum. I’ve had to cut that out,” she added sadly.

“There’s always something,” said John sympathetically.

“Ma says it ain’t lady-like. Say, it’s funny about that. You never met ma, but, believe me, before this happened, you’d have said that she hadn’t a drop of ambition in her. She was just a good fellow, contented to stay at home and look after things. Whereas pa and I were always saying if we were rich we’d do this and that. That was before I came over here. Well, along comes a lawyer’s letter one day for pa saying that my uncle Jim, the old gentleman’s brother, whom we hadn’t heard of in years, and who had quarrelled with ma, and gone off West, and seemed like he’d cut us out for fair, and even when he was with us hadn’t a cent to his name, and had just jogged along pan-handling pa, and that was really what the trouble between ma and him was about—well—say, where had I got to?”

“I don’t know. Start again.”

“Well, anyway, somehow or other he’d made more than a million out West, in Montana or them wild parts, and he’d left it all to pa. And now—this was what I was starting out to tell you—the thing has just scared all the nerve out of pa and me, who were always saying what we’d do if we had money, so that all we want is to sit and think for a spell; but ma, who used to be so quiet, has suddenly begun to show a flash of speed that would make you wonder why something don’t catch fire. She says we’re going into society, all in among all the dukes and earls and lord-high-main-squeezes. We’re going for a trip to Paris first, and then we start in. Say, how do you talk to a king?”

“Oh, any old way. Put him at his ease. Say, ‘What ho, king!’ or something of that sort. Why?”

“Because I’m to be presented at Court. Have you seen an English fellow hanging around here, looking as if he’d bought the hotel and didn’t think much of it? He’s a lord. Hayling’s his name. Lord Arthur Hayling. Well, ma’s got acquainted, and roped him in to be our barker. We’re lunching with him here to-day.”

“Your what?”

“Our barker. Like at Coney Island. Oh, you’ve never been to Coney—well, his job’s to stand in front of us with a megaphone and holler to Duke Percy and Lady Mabel to come in and see us. We’re going to take a fine big house somewhere, and kid Hayling’s promised to see that folks are sociable. He’s gotten a pull among the social headliners over here. If he had been born a year earlier, he’d have been a duke; but his brother got there first. I don’t wonder. He’s a slow sort of guy. Well, he’s going to get me presented at Court, and how I’m to go through it without throwing fits, John Maude, is more than I can tell you. Hello, there’s ma and his lordship, looking for me. Good-bye! Pleasant dreams.”

And the heiress rustled off.

 

That night Mr Crump of Mervo arrived.

John was smoking his after-dinner cigar in the lobby, wondering idly whether the possible pleasure of seeing a musical comedy would compensate for the certain trouble of getting to the theatre, when he was aware that he was being “paged.” A small boy in uniform was meandering through the lobby, chanting his name.

“Gent to see you, sir,” announced the stripling, intercepted. “Business, he says.”

John looked at the card. “Edwin Crump,” it read. The name was strange to him.

“Send him along,” he said.

The boy disappeared, and presently John observed him threading his way back among the tables, followed by a young man of extraordinary gravity of countenance, who was looking about him with an intent gaze through a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles.

John got up to meet him.

“Mr Crump?” he said. “My name is Maude! Won’t you sit down? Have you had dinner?”

“Thank you, yes,” said the spectacled young man.

“You’ll have a cigar and coffee, then?”

“Thank you, yes.”

The young man remained silent until the waiter had filled his cup.

“You will be wondering what my business is,” he said. “I am Mr Benjamin Scobell’s private secretary.”

“Yes?” said John. “Pretty snug job?”

The other seemed to miss something in his voice.

“You have heard of Mr Scobell?” he asked.

“Not to my knowledge,” said John.

“Ah! you have lost touch very much with Mervo, of course.”

John stared.

“Mervo?”

“I have been instructed,” said Mr Crump, solemnly, “to inform your Highness that the Republic has been dissolved, and that your subjects offer you the throne of your ancestors.”

John leaned back in his chair, and looked at him in dumb amazement. The thought flashed across him that Mr Crump had been perfectly correct in saying that he had dined.

His attitude appeared to astound Mr Crump. He goggled at John through his spectacles. He reminded him of some rare fish.

“You are John Maude? You said you were.”

“I’m John Maude all right. We’re solid on that point.”

“And your mother was the only sister of Mr Andrew Westley?”

“You’re right there, too.”

“Then there is no mistake. I say the Republic—” He paused, as if struck with an idea. “Don’t you know?” he said. “Your father——

John became suddenly interested.

“If you’ve got anything to tell me about my father, go ahead. You’ll be the only man I’ve ever met who has said a word about him. Who the deuce was he?”

Mr Crump’s face cleared.

“I understand. I had not expected this. You have been kept in ignorance. Your father, Mr Maude, was the late Prince Charles of Mervo.”

John dropped his cigar in a shower of grey ash on to his trousers, and retrieved it almost mechanically, his wide-open eyes fixed on the other’s face.

“What!” he cried.

Mr Crump nodded gravely.

“You are Prince John of Mervo, and I am here”—he got into his stride as he reached the familiar phrase—“to inform your Highness that the Republic has been dissolved, and that your subjects offer you the throne of your ancestors.”

A horrid doubt seized John.

“You’re ragging me.”

Mr Crump appeared wounded.

“If your Highness would glance at these documents. This is a copy of the register of the church in which your mother and father were married.”

John glanced at the document. It was perfectly lucid.

“Then—then it’s true!” he said.

“Perfectly true, your Highness. And I am here to inform——

“But where the deuce is Mervo? I never heard of the place.”

“It is an island principality in the Mediterranean, your High——

“For goodness sake, old man, don’t keep calling me ‘Your Highness.’ It may be fun to you, but it makes me feel a perfect ass. Let me get into the thing gradually.”

Mr Crump felt in his pocket.

“Mr Scobell,” he said, producing a roll of bank-notes, “entrusted me with money to defray any expenses——

More than any words, this spectacle removed any lingering doubt which John might have had as to the possibility of this being some intricate practical joke.

“Are these for me?” he said.

Mr Crump passed them across to him.

“There are two hundred pounds here,” he said. “I am also instructed to say that you are at liberty to draw further against Mr Scobell’s account at the Lombard Street Office of the European and Asiatic Bank.”

The name Scobell had been recurring like a leit motif in Mr Crump’s conversation. This suddenly came home to John.

“Before we go any further,” he said, “let’s get one thing clear. Who is this Mr Scobell? How does he get mixed up in this?”

“He is the proprietor of the Casino at Mervo.”

“He seems to be one of those generous, open-handed fellows.”

“He is deeply interested in your High—, in your return.”

John laid the roll of notes beside his coffee-cup, and relit his cigar.

“That’s awfully good of him,” he said. “It strikes me, old man, that I am not absolutely up-to-date as regards the internal affairs of this important little kingdom of mine. How would it be if you were to tell me one or two facts? Start at the beginning and go right on.”

When Mr Crump had finished a condensed history of Mervo and Mervian politics, John smoked in silence for some minutes.

“Life, Crump,” he said at last, “is certainly livening up as far as I am concerned. Up till now nothing in particular has ever happened to me; and now you tell me I’m a prince. Well, well. These are stirring times. When do we start for the old homestead?”

“Mr Scobell was exceedingly anxious that we should start immediately.”

“Immediately!”

“You will not be able to settle your affairs?”

“I suppose I can settle my affairs all right. I’ve only got to pack a tooth-brush and tip everyone I can’t dodge. And as Scobell seems to be financing this show, perhaps I ought to do what he wants. But it’s a pity. I was just beginning to like this place. There are duller cities than London, Crump.”

The gravity of Mr Scobell’s secretary broke up unexpectedly into a slow, wide smile. His eyes behind their glasses gleamed with a wistful light. John looked at him, amazed.

“Crump,” he cried. “Can this be so? Crump, I believe you’re one of the nuts!”

Mr Crump seemed completely to have forgotten his responsible position as secretary to a millionaire and special messenger to a prince. He smirked.

“I’d have liked a day or two in London,” he said, softly. “I see there’s a Covent Garden Ball on to-night. I haven’t been to Covent Garden for about five years.”

John reached across the table and seized the secretary’s hand.

“I knew it,” he said, “you are a nut. The moment I saw you, I said, ‘Here comes one of the lads of the village.’ This is no time for delay. If we are to liven up this great city, we must get to work at once. Grab your hat, and come along. One doesn’t become a prince every day. The occasion wants celebrating. Are you with me, Crump, old man?”

“Rather, your Highness,” said the envoy ecstatically.

 

At seven o’clock on the following morning, two young men, hatless and a little rumpled, but obviously cheerful, entered the Belvoir Hotel, demanding refreshment, and on their way towards the dining-room encountered one of the hall porters.

The larger of the young men patted him on the shoulder.

“Just the fellow I was looking for,” he said. “I don’t happen to know your name, but never mind. I appoint you Grand Hereditary Hall Porter to the Court of Mervo.”

Thus did Prince John formally enter into his kingdom.

CHAPTER V

MR SCOBELL HAS ANOTHER IDEA

OWING to collaboration between Fate and Mr Scobell, John’s state entry into Mervo was an interesting blend between a pageant and a Music Hall sketch. The pageant idea was Mr Scobell’s. Fate supplied the rest.

The reception at the quay, when the little steamer that plied between Marseilles and the island principality gave up its precious freight, was not on quite so impressive a scale as might have been given to the monarch of a more powerful kingdom; but John was not disappointed. During the journey Mr Crump had supplied him with certain facts about Mervo, one of which was that its adult population numbered just under thirteen thousand; and this had prepared him for any short-comings in the way of popular demonstration.

As a matter of fact, Mr Scobell was exceedingly pleased with the scale of the reception, which to his mind amounted practically to pomp. The Palace Guard, forty strong, lined the quay. Besides these, there were four officers, a band, and sixteen mounted carbineers. The rest of the army was dotted along the streets. In addition to the military, there was a gathering of a hundred and fifty civilians, mainly drawn from fishing circles. The majority of these remained stolidly silent throughout, but three, more emotional, cheered vigorously as a young man was seen to step on to the gangway, carrying a grip, and make for the shore. General Poineau, a white-haired warrior with a fierce moustache, strode forward and saluted. The Palace Guards presented arms. The band struck up the Mervian National Anthem. General Poineau, lowering his hand, put on a pair of pince-nez and began to unroll an address of welcome.

It was then seen that the young man was Mr Crump. General Poineau removed his glasses and gave an impatient twirl to his moustache. Mr Scobell, who for possibly the first time in his career was not smoking (though, as was afterwards made manifest, he had the materials on his person), bustled to the front.

“Where’s his nibs, Crump?” he inquired.

The secretary’s reply was swept away in a flood of melody. To the band Mr Crump’s face was strange. They had no reason to suppose that he was not Prince John, and they acted accordingly. With a rattle of drums they burst once more into their spirited rendering of the National Anthem.

Mr Scobell sawed the air with his arms, but was powerless to dam the flood.

“His Highness is shaving, sir!” bawled Mr Crump, depositing his grip on the quay and making a trumpet of his hands.

“Shaving!”

“Yes, sir. I told him he ought to come along, but his Highness said he wasn’t going to land looking like a tramp comedian.”

By this time General Poineau had explained matters to the band and they checked the National Anthem abruptly in the middle of a bar, with the exception of the cornet player, who continued gallantly by himself till a feeling of loneliness brought the truth home to him. An awkward stage-wait followed, which lasted until John was seen crossing the deck, when there were more cheers, and General Poineau, resuming his pince-nez, brought out the address of welcome again.

At this point Mr Scobell made his presence felt.

“Glad to meet you, Prince,” he said, coming forward. “Scobell’s my name. Shake hands with General Poineau. No, that’s wrong. I suppose he kisses your hand, doesn’t he?”

“I’ll upper-cut him if he does,” said John, cheerfully.

Mr Scobell eyed him doubtfully. His Highness did not appear to him to be treating the inaugural ceremony with that reserved dignity which we like to see in princes on these occasions. Mr Scobell was a business man. He wanted his money’s worth. His idea of a Prince of Mervo was something statuesquely aloof, something—he could not express it exactly—on the lines of the illustrations in the Zenda stories—about eight foot high and shinily magnificent, something that would give the place a tone. That was what he had had in his mind when he sent for John. He did not want a cheerful young man in a straw hat and a flannel suit who appeared to regard the whole proceedings as a sort of pantomime rally.

General Poineau, meanwhile, had embarked on the address of welcome. John regarded him thoughtfully.

“I can see,” he said to Mr Scobell, “that the gentleman is making a good speech, but what is he saying? That is what beats me.”

“He is welcoming your Highness,” said Mr Crump, the linguist, “in the name of the people of Mervo.”

“Who, I notice, have had the jolly good sense to stay in bed. I suppose they knew that the boy orator would do all that was necessary. He hasn’t said anything about a bite of breakfast, has he? Has his address happened to work round to the subject of oatmeal and poached eggs yet? That’s the part that’s going to interest me.”

“There’ll be breakfast at my villa, your Highness,” said Mr Scobell. “My car is waiting along there.”

The General reached his peroration, worked his way through it, and finished with a military clash of heels and a salute. The band rattled off the National Anthem once more.

“Now what?” said John, turning to Mr Scobell. “Breakfast?”

“I think you’d better say a few words to them, your Highness, they’ll expect it.”

“But I can’t speak the language, and they can’t understand English.”

“Crump will hand it on to ’em. Here, Crump.”

“Sir?”

“Line up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s all very well for you, Crump,” said John. “You probably enjoy this sort of thing. I don’t. I haven’t felt such a fool since I sang ‘Hybrias the Cretan’ at the school concert. Are you ready? No, it’s no good. I don’t know what to say.”

“Tell ’em you’re glad to be here, and all that,” advised Mr Scobell, anxiously.

John smiled in a friendly manner at the populace. Then he coughed.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “and more particularly the sportsman on my left who has just worked off his address whose name I can’t remember—I thank you for the warm welcome you have given me. If it is any satisfaction to you to know that it has made me feel a perfect idiot, you may have that satisfaction.”

“ ‘His Highness is overwhelmed by your loyal welcome. He thanks you warmly,’ ” translated Mr Crump, tactfully.

“I feel that we shall get along nicely together,” continued John. “If you are chumps enough to turn out of your comfortable beds at this time of the morning simply to see me, you can’t be very hard to please. We shall get on splendidly.”

“His Highness hopes and believes that he will always continue to command the affection of his people,” said Mr Crump.

“I—” John paused. “That’s the lot,” he said. “The flow of inspiration has ceased. The magic fire has gone out. Break it to ’em, Crump. For me, breakfast.”

During the early portion of the ride Mr Scobell was silent and thoughtful. John’s speech had impressed him neither as oratory nor as an index to his frame of mind. He had not interrupted him, because he knew that none of those present could understand what was being said, and that Mr Crump was to be relied on as an editor. But he had not enjoyed it. He did not take the people of Mervo seriously himself, but in the Prince such an attitude struck him as unbecoming. Then he cheered up. For the purposes for which he needed John, a tendency to make light of things was not amiss. It was essentially as a performing prince that he had engaged him. He wanted him to do unusual things, which would make people talk—aeroplaning was one that occurred to him. Perhaps a prince who took a serious view of his position would try to raise the people’s minds and start reforms and generally be a nuisance. John could, at any rate, be relied upon not to do that.

His face cleared.

“Have a good cigar, Prince?” he said, cordially, inserting two fingers in his vest pocket.

“Good idea,” said his Highness, affably. “Thanks.”

Breakfast over, Mr Scobell replaced the remains of his cigar between his lips, and turned to business.

“Eh, Prince,” he said.

“Yes!”

“I want you, Prince,” said Mr Scobell, “to help boom this place. That’s where you come in.”

“Yes?” said John.

“As to ruling and all that,” continued Mr Scobell, “there isn’t any to do. The place runs itself. Someone gave it a shove a thousand years ago, and it’s been rolling along ever since. What I want you to do is the picturesque business. Get a yacht and catch rare fishes like that Monaco fellow. Entertain swells when they come here. Have a Court, see what I mean, like in England. Go round in aeroplanes and that style of thing. Don’t you worry about money. That’ll be all right. You draw your steady twenty thousand a year and a good bit more besides, when we begin to get moving.”

“Do I, by George!” said John. “It seems to me that I’ve fallen into a pretty soft thing here. There’ll be a catch somewhere, I suppose. There always is in these good things. But I don’t see it yet. You can count on me all right.”

“Good boy,” said Mr Scobell. “And now you’ll be wanting to get to the palace. I’ll tell them to bring the car round.”

The council of state broke up.

Having seen John off in the car, the financier proceeded to his sister’s sitting-room. Miss Scobell had breakfasted apart that morning, by request, her brother giving her to understand that matters of state, unsuited to the ear of a third party, must be discussed at the meal. She was reading her New York Herald.

“Well,” said Mr Scobell, “he’s come.”

“Yes, dear?”

“And he’s just the sort I want. Saw the idea of the thing right away, and is ready to do anything. No nonsense about him.”

“Is he nice-looking, Bennie?”

“Yes. All these Mervo princes have been that, I hear, and this one must be near the top of the list. You’ll like him, Marion. All the girls will be crazy about him in a week.”

Miss Scobell turned a page.

“Is he married?”

Her brother started.

“Married? I never thought of that. But no, of course, he’s not. He’d have mentioned it. He’s not the sort to hush up a thing like that. I——

He stopped short. His green eyes gleamed excitedly.

“Marion!” he cried. “Hi! Marion!”

“Well, dear?”

“Listen. This thing is going to be big. I’ve got a new idea. It just came to me. Your saying that put it into my head. Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to wire to Betty to come over here, and I’m going to arrange a marriage between her and this Prince.”

For once Miss Scobell showed signs that her brother’s conversation really interested her. She laid down her paper, and stared at him.

“Betty!”

“Betty. Why not? She’s a pretty girl. Clever too. The Prince’ll be lucky to get such a wife, for all his ancestors back to the Flood.”

“But suppose Betty does not like him?”

“Like him? She’s got to like him. Can’t you make your mind soar, or won’t you? Can’t you see that a thing like this has got to be worked differently from a marriage between—between a city clerk and the daughter of a Brixton undertaker? This is a Royal alliance. Do you suppose that when a European princess is introduced to the prince she’s going to marry, they let her say: ‘Not for me! I don’t like the shape of his nose’?”

He gave a spirited imitation of a European princess objecting to the shape of her selected husband’s nose.

“It isn’t very romantic, Bennie,” sighed Miss Scobell. She was a confirmed reader of the more sentimental class of fiction, and this business-like treatment of love’s young dream jarred upon her.

“It’s founding a dynasty. Isn’t that romantic enough for you?”

Miss Scobell sighed again.

“Very well, dear. I suppose you know best. But perhaps the Prince won’t like Betty?”

Mr Scobell gave a snort of disgust.

“Marion,” he said. “You’ve got a mind like a blob of wet dough. Can’t you understand that the Prince is just as much in my employment as the man who scrubs the Casino steps? I’m hiring him to be Prince of Mervo; and his first job as Prince of Mervo will be to marry Betty. I’d like to see him object!” He began to pace the room. “By George, it’s going to make this place boom, believe me. It’ll be a grand advertisement. ‘Restoration of Royalty at Mervo.’ That’ll make them take notice by itself. Then, biff! right on top of that, ‘Royal Romance—Prince Weds English Girl—Love at First Sight—Picturesque Wedding!’ We’ll wipe Monte Carlo clean off the map. We— It’s the greatest scheme on earth.”

“I have no doubt you are right, Bennie,” said Miss Scobell, “but—” her voice became dreamy again—“it’s not very romantic.”

“Oh, pshaw!” said the schemer, impatiently. “Here, where’s a telegraph-form?”

CHAPTER VI

YOUNG ADAM CUPID

ON a red-sandstone rock at the edge of the water, where the island curved sharply out into the sea, Prince John of Mervo sat and brooded on first causes. For nearly an hour and a half he had been engaged in an earnest attempt to trace to its source the acute fit of depression which had come—apparently from nowhere—to poison his existence that morning.

It was his seventh day on the island, and he could remember every incident of his brief reign. The only thing that eluded him was the recollection of the exact point when the shadow of discontent had begun to spread itself over his mind. Looking back, it seemed to him that he had done nothing during that week but enjoy each new aspect of his position as it was introduced to his notion. Yet here he was, sitting on a lonely rock, consumed with an unquenchable restlessness, a kind of trapped sensation. Exactly when and exactly how Fate, that King of Confidence Trick men, had cheated him he could not say; but he knew, with a certainty that defied argument, that there had been sharp practice, and that in an unguarded moment he had been induced to part with something of infinite value in exchange for a gilded fraud.

The mystery baffled him. He sent his mind back to the first definite entry of Mervo into the foreground of his life. He had come up from his state-room on to the deck of the little steamer, and there in the pearl-grey of the morning was the island, gradually taking definite shape as the pink mists shredded away before the rays of the rising sun. As the ship rounded the point where the light-house still flashed a needless warning from its cluster of jagged rocks, he had had his first view of the town nestling at the foot of the hill, gleaming white against the green, with the gold-domed Casino towering in its midst. In all southern Europe there was no view to match it for quiet beauty. For all his thews and sinews there was poetry in John, and the sight had stirred him like wine.

It was not then that depression had begun.

Nor was it during the reception at the quay.

The days that had followed had been peaceful and amusing. He could not detect in any one of them a sign of the approaching shadow. They had been lazy days. His duties had been much more simple than he had anticipated. He had not known, before he tried it, that it was possible to be a prince with so small an expenditure of mental energy. As Mr Scobell had hinted, to all intents and purposes he was a mere ornament. His work began at eleven in the morning, and finished as a rule at about a quarter past. At the hour named a report of the happenings of the previous day was brought to him. When he had read it the State asked no more of him until the next morning.

The report was made up of such items as, “A fisherman named Lesieur called Carbineer Ferrier a fool in the market-place at eleven minutes after two this afternoon. He has not been arrested, but is being watched,” and generally gave John a few minutes of mild enjoyment. Certainly he could not recollect that it had ever depressed him.

No, it had been something else that had worked the mischief, and in another moment the thing stood revealed, beyond all question of doubt. What had unsettled him was that unexpected meeting with Betty Silver last night at the Casino.

He had been sitting at the Dutch table. He generally visited the Casino after dinner. The light and movement of the place interested him. As a rule, he merely strolled through the rooms, watching the play; but last night he had slipped into a vacant seat. He had only just settled himself when he was aware of a girl standing beside him. He got up.

“Would you care—?” he had begun, and then he saw her face.

It had all happened in an instant. Some chord in him, numbed till then, had begun to throb. It was as if he had woken from a dream, or returned to consciousness after being stunned. There was something in the sight of her, standing there so cool and neat and composed in the heat and stir of the Casino, that struck him like a blow.

How long was it since he had seen her last? Not more than a couple of years. It seemed centuries. It all came back to him. It was during his last May-week at Cambridge that they had met. A friend of hers had been the sister of a friend of his. They had met several times, but he could not recollect having taken any particular notice of her then, beyond recognising that she was certainly pretty. The world had been full of pretty English girls then. But now——

He looked at her. And, as he looked, he heard England calling to him. Mervo, by the appeal of its novelty, had caused him to forget. But now, quite suddenly, he knew that he was home-sick—and it astonished him, the readiness with which he had permitted Mr Crump to lead him away into bondage. It seemed incredible that he had not foreseen what must happen.

Love comes to some gently, imperceptibly, creeping in as the tide, through unsuspected creeks and inlets, creeps on a sleeping man, until he wakes to find himself surrounded. But to others it comes as a wave, breaking on them, beating them down, whirling them away.

It was so with John. In that instant when their eyes met the miracle must have happened. It seemed to him, as he recalled the scene now, that he had loved her before he had had time to frame his first remark. It amazed him that he could ever have been blind to the fact that he loved her, she was so obviously the only girl in the world.

“You—you don’t remember me,” he stammered. She was flushing a little under his stare, but her eyes were shining.

“I remember you very well, Mr Maude,” she said with a smile. “I thought I knew your shoulders before you turned round. What are you doing here?”

“I——

There was a hush. The croupier had set the ball rolling. A wizened little man and two ladies of determined aspect were looking up disapprovingly. John realised that he was the only person in the room not silent. It was impossible to tell her the story of the change in his fortunes in the middle of this crowd. He stopped, and the moment passed.

The ball dropped with a rattle. The tension relaxed.

“Won’t you take this seat?” said John.

“No, thank you. I’m not playing. I only just stopped to look on. My aunt is in one of the rooms, and I want to make her come home. I’m tired.”

“Have you——?”

He caught the eye of the wizened man, and stopped again.

“Have you been in Mervo long?” he said, as the ball fell.

“I only arrived this morning. I was in England and my step-father— I wonder if you know him—Mr Scobell?”

“Mr Scobell? Is he your step-father?”

“Yes. He wired to me to come here. And I’m glad he did. It seems lovely. I must explore to-morrow.” She was beginning to move off.

“Er—” John coughed to remove what seemed to him a deposit of sawdust and unshelled nuts in his throat. “Er, may I—will you let me show you some of the place to-morrow?”

He had hardly spoken the words when it was borne in upon him that he was a vulgar, pushing bounder, presuming on a dead and buried acquaintanceship to force his company on a girl who naturally did not want it, and who would now proceed to snub him as he deserved. He quailed. Though he had not had time to collect and examine and label his feelings, he was sufficiently in touch with them to know that a snub from her would be the most terrible thing that could possibly happen to him.

She did not snub him. Indeed, if he had been in a state of mind coherent enough to allow him to observe, he might have detected in her eyes and her voice signs of pleasure.

“I should like it very much,” she said.

John made his big effort. He attacked the nuts and sawdust which had come back and settled down again in company with a large lump of some unidentified material, and they broke before him. His voice rang out as if through a megaphone, to the unconcealed disgust of the neighbouring gamesters.

“If you go along the path at the foot of the hill,” he bellowed rapidly, “and follow it down to the sea, you get to a little bay full of red-sandstone rocks—you can’t miss it—and there’s a fine view of the island from there. I’d like awfully to show that to you. It’s lovely.”

She nodded.

“Then shall we meet there?” she said. “When?”

John was in no mood to postpone the event.

“As early as ever you like,” he roared.

“At about ten, then. Good-night, Mr Maude.”

John had reached the bay at half-past eight, and had been on guard there ever since. It was now past ten, but still there were no signs of Betty. His depression increased. He told himself that she had forgotten. Then, that she had remembered, but had changed her mind. Then, that she had never meant to come at all. He could not decide which of the three theories was the most distressing.

His mood became morbidly introspective. He was weighed down by a sense of his own unworthiness. He submitted himself to a thorough examination, and the conclusion to which he came was that, as an aspirant to the regard of a girl like Betty, he did not score a single point. No wonder she had ignored the appointment.

A cold sweat broke out on him. This was the snub! She had not administered it in the Casino simply in order that, by being delayed, its force might be the more overwhelming.

John, in his time, had thought and read a good deal about love. Ever since he had grown up, he had wanted to fall in love. He had imagined love as a perpetual exhilaration, something that flooded life with a golden glow as if by the pressing of a button or the pulling of a switch, and automatically removed from it everything mean and hard and uncomfortable; a something that made a man feel grand and god-like, looking down (benevolently, of course) on his fellow-men as from some lofty mountain.

That it should make him feel a worm-like humility had not entered his calculations. He was beginning to see something of the possibilities of love. His tentative excursions into the unknown emotion, while at college, had never really deceived him, even at the time a sort of second self had looked on and sneered at the poor imitation.

This was different. This had nothing to do with moonlight and soft music. It was raw and hard. It hurt. It was a thing sharp and jagged, tearing at the roots of his soul.

He looked at his watch again, and the world grew black. It was half-past ten. He looked up the path for the hundredth time. Above him lay the hillside, dozing in the morning sun; below, the Mediterranean, sleek and blue, without a ripple. But of Betty there was no sign. He stood alone in a land of silence and sleep.

CHAPTER VII

MR SCOBELL IS FRANK

MUCH may happen in these rapid times in the course of an hour and a half. While John was keeping his vigil on the sandstone rock, Betty was having an interview with Mr Scobell which was to produce far-reaching results, and which, incidentally, was to leave her angrier and more at war with the whole of her world than she could remember to have been in the entire course of her life.

The interview began, shortly after breakfast, in a gentle and tactful manner, with Aunt Marion at the helm. But Mr Scobell was not the man to stand by silently while people were being tactful. At the end of the second minute he had plunged through his sister’s mild monologue like a rhinoceros through a cobweb, and had stated definitely, with an economy of words, the exact part which Betty was to play in Mervian affairs.

“You say you want to know why you were wired for. I’ll tell you. There’s no use talking for half a day before you get to the point. I suppose you’ve heard that there’s a Prince here instead of a Republic now? Well, that’s where you come in.”

“Do you mean—?” she hesitated.

“Yes, I do,” said Mr Scobell. There was a touch of doggedness in his voice. He was not going to stand any nonsense, by George, but there was no doubt that Betty’s wide-open eyes were not very easy to meet. He went on rapidly. “Drop any fool notions about romance.” Miss Scobell, who was knitting a sock, checked her needles for a moment in order to sigh. Her brother eyed her morosely, then resumed his remarks. “This is a matter of State. That’s it. You’ve got to drop fool-notions and act for good of State. You’ve got to look at it in the proper spirit. Great honour, see what I mean? Princess and all that. Chance of a lifetime. . . . Dynasty. . . . You’ve got to look at it in that way.”

Miss Scobell heaved another sigh, and dropped a stitch.

“For goodness’ sake,” said her brother, irritably, “don’t snort like that, Marion.”

“Very well, dear.”

Betty had not taken her eyes off him from his first word. An unbiassed observer would have said that she made a pretty picture, standing there in her white dress, but in the matter of pictures, still-life was evidently what Mr Scobell preferred, for his gaze never wandered from the cigar-stump which he had removed from his mouth in order to knock off the ash.

Betty continued to regard him steadfastly. The shock of his words had to some extent numbed her. At this moment she was merely thinking, quite dispassionately, what a singularly nasty little man he looked, and wondering—not for the first time—what strange quality, invisible to everybody else, it had been in him that had made her mother his adoring slave during the whole of their married life.

Then her mind began to work actively once more. All her life an insistence on freedom had been the first article in her creed. A great rush of anger filled her, that this man should set himself up to dictate to her.

“Do you mean that you want me to marry this Prince?” she said.

“That’s right.”

“I won’t do anything of the sort.”

“Pshaw! Don’t be foolish.”

Betty’s eye shone mutinously. Her cheeks were flushed, and her slim, boyish figure quivered. Her chin, always determined, became a silent Declaration of Independence.

“I won’t,” she said.

Aunt Marion, suspending operations on the sock, went on with tact at the point where her brother’s interruption had forced her to leave off.

“I’m sure he’s a very nice young man. I have not seen him, but everybody says so. You like him, Bennie, don’t you?”

“Of course, I like him. He’s all right. Wait till you see him, Betty. Nobody’s asking you to marry him before lunch. You’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted. It beats me what you’re making such a fuss about. Be reasonable.”

Betty sought for arguments to clinch her refusal.

“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “You talk as if you had just to wave your hand. Why should your Prince want to marry a girl he has never seen?”

“He will,” said Mr Scobell, confidently.

“How do you know?”

“Because I know he’s a sensible young fellow. That’s how. Look here, Betty, you’ve got hold of wrong ideas about this place. You don’t understand the position of affairs. Your aunt didn’t till I explained it to her.”

“He bit my head off, my dear,” murmured Miss Scobell, knitting placidly.

“You’re thinking that Mervo is an ordinary State, and that the Prince is one of those independent, all-wool, off-with-his-head rulers like you read about in the novels. Well, he isn’t. If you want to know who’s the big man here, it’s me—me! This Prince is simply my employee. See? Who sent for him? I did. Who put him on the throne? I did. Who pays him his salary? I do, from the profits of the Casino. Now do you understand? He knows his job. He knows which side his bread’s buttered. When I tell him about this marriage, do you know what he’ll say? He’ll say ‘Thank you, sir!’ That’s how things are in this island.”

Betty shuddered. Her face was white with humiliation. She half raised her hands with an impulsive movement to hide it.

“I won’t. I won’t. I won’t,” she gasped.

Mr Scobell was pacing the room in an ecstasy of triumphant rhetoric.

“There’s another thing,” he said, swinging round suddenly and causing his sister to drop another stitch. “Perhaps you think he’s some kind of a foreigner? Perhaps that’s what’s worrying you. Let me tell you that he’s an Englishman—pretty nearly as English as you are yourself.”

Betty stared at him.

“An Englishman!”

“Don’t believe it, eh? Well, let me tell you that his mother was born in Birmingham, and that he has lived all his life in England. He’s no foreigner. He’s a Cambridge man, six-foot high and weighs thirteen stone. That’s the sort of man he is. I suppose that’s not English enough for you? No?”

“You do shout so, Bennie,” murmured Miss Scobell. “I’m sure there’s no need.”

Betty uttered a cry. That species of sixth sense which lies undeveloped at the back of our minds during the ordinary happenings of life wakes sometimes in moments of keen emotion. At its highest, it is prophecy; at its lowest, a vague presentiment. It woke in Betty now. There was no particular reason why she should have connected her step-father’s words with John. The term he had used was an elastic one. Among the visitors to the island there were probably several Cambridge men. But somehow she knew.

“Who is he?” she cried. “What was his name before he—when he——?”

“His name?” said Mr Scobell. “John Maude. Maude was his mother’s name. She was a Miss Westley. Here, where are you going?”

Betty was walking slowly towards the door. Something in her face checked Mr Scobell.

“I want to think,” she said quietly. “I’m going out.”

 

At half-past twelve that morning business took Mr Benjamin Scobell to the Royal palace. He was not a man who believed in letting the grass grow under his feet. He prided himself on his briskness of attack. Every now and then Mr Crump, searching the newspapers, would discover and hand to him a paragraph alluding to his “hustling methods.” When this happened, he would preserve the clipping and carry it about in his waistcoat pocket with his cigars till time and friction wore it away. He liked to think of himself as swift and sudden—the human thunderbolt.

In this matter of the Royal alliance, it was his intention to have at it and clear it up at once. Having put his views clearly before Betty, he now proposed to lay them with equal clarity before the Prince. There was no sense in putting the thing off. The sooner all parties concerned understood the position of affairs, the sooner the business would be settled.

That Betty had not received his information with joy did not distress him. He had a poor opinion of the feminine intelligence. Girls got their minds full of nonsense from reading novels and seeing plays. Like Betty. Betty objected to those who were wiser than herself providing a perfectly good prince for her to marry. Some fool-notion of romance, of course. Not that he was angry. He did not blame her any more than the surgeon blames a patient for the possession of an unsuitable appendix. There was no animus in the matter. Her mind was suffering from foolish ideas, and he was the surgeon whose task it was to operate upon it. That was all. One had to expect foolishness in women. It was their nature. The only thing to do was to tie a rope to them and let them run round till they were tired of it, then pull them in. He saw his way to managing Betty.

Nor did he anticipate trouble with John. He had taken an estimate of John’s character, and it did not seem to him likely that it contained unsuspected depths. He set John down, as he had told Betty, as a young man acute enough to know when he had a good job and sufficiently sensible to make concessions in order to retain it. Betty, after the manner of woman, might make a fuss before yielding to the inevitable, but from level-headed John he looked for placid acquiescence.

His mood, as the car whirred its way down the hill towards the town, was sunny. He looked on life benevolently and found it good. The view appealed to him more than it had managed to do on other days. As a rule, he was the man of blood and iron who had no time for admiring scenery; but to-day he vouchsafed it a not unkindly glance. It was certainly a beautiful little place, this island of his. A vineyard on the right caught his eye. He made a mental note to uproot it and run up a hotel in its place. Further down the hill, he selected a site for a villa, where the mimosa blazed, and another where at present there were a number of utterly useless violets. A certain practical element was apt, perhaps, to colour Mr Scobell’s half-hours with Nature.

The sight of the steam-boat leaving the harbour on its journey to Marseilles gave him another idea. Now that Mervo was a going concern, it was high time that it should have an adequate service of boats. The present system of one a day was absurd. He made a note to look into the matter. These people wanted waking up.

Arriving at the palace, he was informed that his Highness had gone out shortly after breakfast, and had not returned. The major-domo gave the information with a touch of disapproval in his voice. Before taking up his duties at Mervo, he had held a similar position in the household of a German Prince, where rigid ceremonial obtained, and John’s cheerful disregard of the formalities frankly shocked him. To take the present case for instance. When his Highness of Swartzheim had felt inclined to enjoy the air of a morning, it had been a domestic event full of stir and pomp. He had not merely crammed a straw hat over his eyes and strolled out with his hands in his pockets, without a word to his household staff as to where he was going or when he might be expected to return.

Mr Scobell received the news equably, and directed his chauffeur to return to the villa. He could not have done better, for, on his arrival, he was met with the information that his Highness was waiting in the morning-room.

The sound of footsteps came to Mr Scobell’s ears as he approached the room. His Highness appeared to be pacing the floor like a caged animal at the luncheon hour. The resemblance was heightened by the expression in the royal eye as his Highness swung round at the opening of the door and faced the financier. John wanted news of Betty, and he had come straight to the fountain-head for it. His long wait in the morning-room, following upon that black vigil on the sea-shore, had reduced him to a state of impatience bordering on frenzy.

“I say—” he began.

“Why, Prince,” said Mr Scobell, “this is lucky. I’ve been looking for you. I’ve just been to the palace, and the fellow there told me you had gone out.”

“Where is Miss Silver?” said John.

Mr Scobell looked astonished.

“Do you know Betty?”

“I used to know her in England. We met last night at the Casino. I was to have met her again this morning, but—” he gulped—“but she didn’t come. I thought I should find her here.”

Mr Scobell’s green eyes sparkled. There was no mistaking the tone of John’s voice. Fate was certainly smoothing his way. The thing was working out like a magazine story. If John loved Betty, why, there would be no need for the iron hand after all.

“She’ll be here all right,” he said, consolingly. “I expect she forgot to keep the appointment. Now I think of it, she did seem as if she had something on her mind this morning. I expect she’s worrying about something. But she’ll come back, and——

There was a knock at the door. A footman entered, bearing, with a detached air, as if he disclaimed all responsibility, a letter on a silver tray.

Mr Scobell slit the envelope, and began to read. As he did so, his eyes grew round, and his mouth slowly opened till his cigar-stump, after hanging for a moment from his lower lip, dropped off like an exhausted bivalve and rolled along the carpet.

“Prince,” he gasped, “she’s gone. Betty!”

“Gone! What do you mean?”

“She’s gone. She’s half-way to Marseilles by now. And I saw the darned boat going out!”

“She’s gone!”

“This is from her. Listen to what she says:

“ ‘By the time you read this I shall be gone. I am giving this to a boy to take to you after the boat has started. Please do not try and follow me, to bring me back, for it will be no use. I shall never come back. I am going right away.’

“Prince, this beats me. The girl’s mad.”

John was still staring.

“But why? Why should she go away like that? What could have made her do it?”

Mr Scobell’s mouth had opened to explain, when a prudent instinct closed it. Something told him that this was no moment to reveal to John the scheme in which he was to have figured.

“Some fool-notion, I suppose,” he said. “Girls are like that.”

John had begun to pace the room again. He stopped.

“I’m going after her,” he said.

Mr Scobell beamed approval.

“Good for you, Prince,” he said. “Go to it.”

CHAPTER VIII

BETTY MEETS A FRIEND IN NEED

THE idea of flight had not occurred to Betty immediately. On leaving Mr Scobell’s villa she had walked aimlessly out along the hillside. At first her mind was stunned, but gradually, as blood begins to circulate in a frozen limb, thought had returned, slowly at first, then in a wave that seethed and burned and tortured. She realised now, as she had never realised before, the place John had held in her life. Little by little, in the years that had passed since their first meeting, she had put him upon a pedestal in her mind, and now that her step-father’s words had hurled him from that pedestal, she saw from what a height he had fallen. That it should have been he of all men—that it should have been John who was Mr Scobell’s obsequious employee, the man whom the Casino was paying to marry her, complacently ready to earn his wages by counterfeiting love.

She rebelled against the mad cruelty of the fate which had brought them together again. It seemed to her now that she must always have loved him; but it had been such a vague, gentle thing, this love, before that last meeting—hardly more than a pleasant accompaniment to her life; something to think about in idle moments; a help and a support when things were running crosswise. She had been so satisfied with it, so content to keep him a mere memory. It seemed so needless and wanton to destroy her illusion.

Of love as a wild beast passion, tearing and torturing quite ordinary people like herself, she had always been a little sceptical. The great love poems of the world, when she read them, had always left her with the feeling that their authors were of different clay from herself and had no common meeting-ground with her. She had seen her friends fall in love, as they called it, and it had been very pretty and charming, but as far removed from the frenzies of the poets as an amateur’s snapshot of Niagara from the cataract itself. Elsa Keith, for instance, was obviously very fond and proud of Martin, but she seemed perfectly placid about it. She loved, but she could still spare half an hour for the discussion of a new frock. Her soul did not appear to have been revolutionised in any way.

Gradually Betty had come to the conclusion that love, in the full sense of the word, was one of the things that did not happen. And now, as if to punish her presumption, it had leaped from hiding and seized her.

There was nothing exaggerated or unintelligible in the poets now. They ceased to be inhabitants of another world, swayed by curiously complex emotions. They were her brothers—ordinary men with ordinary feelings and a strange gift for expressing them. She knew now that it was possible to hate the man you loved and to love the man you hated; to ache for the sight of someone even while you fled from him.

And she must fly from him. That decision stood out, clear and definite, in the chaos of her thoughts. She shuddered as she conjured up the scene which must take place if she remained. To meet him, to see the man she loved plunging into shame before her eyes, would be pain beyond bearing. She must go. Where? Anywhere, so that she could escape and hide herself.

Below, across the valley of vineyards and glowing mimosa, the Dome of the Casino caught the sun, and flashed out in a blaze of gold. Beyond it, in the little harbour, lay the Marseilles packet, lazily breathing smoke as it prepared for its journey to the mainland. The sight brought Betty to a practical consideration of her position. She looked at her watch. She would only just have time to catch the boat.

She turned, and hurried back the way she had come.

 

It was not till she was seated in the train that roared its way across southern France that she found herself sufficiently composed to review her situation and make plans. The overmastering desire for escape which had caught her up and swept her away had left no room in her mind for thoughts of the morrow.

She would not go back. Nothing would make her go back. But, that settled, what then? What was she to do? The gods are business-like. They sell; they do not give. And for what they sell they demand a heavy price. We may buy life of them in many ways; with our honour, our health, our independence, our happiness; with our brains or with our hands. But somehow or other, in whatever currency we may choose to pay it, the price must be paid.

Betty faced the problem. What had she? What could she give? Her independence? That, certainly. She saw now what a mockery that fancied independence had been. She had come and gone as she pleased, her path smoothed by her step-father’s money, and she had been accustomed to consider herself free. She had learned wisdom now, and could understand that it was only by sacrificing such artificial independence that she could win through to freedom. The world was a market, and the only independent people in it were those who had a market value.

What was her market value? What could she do? She looked back at her life, and saw that she had dabbled. She could sketch a little, play a little, sing a little, write a little. She had a little of most things—enough of nothing. She was an amateur in a world of professionals.

Her courage suddenly broke. She drooped forlornly; and, hiding her face on the cushioned arm-rest, she began to cry.

Nature never intended woman to pass dry-eyed through crises of emotion. A casual stranger, if he had met Betty on her way to the boat, might have thought that she looked a little worried—nothing more. The same stranger, if he had happened to enter the compartment at this juncture, would have set her down as broken-hearted beyond recovery. Yet such is the magic of tears that it was at this very moment that Betty was conscious of a distinct change for the better. Her heart still ached, and to think of John even for an instant was to feel the knife turning in the wound; but her brain was clear; the panic-fear had gone; and she faced the future resolutely once more.

 

Paris, when she arrived at the Gare du Lyons in the grey of a rainy morning, had much the same effect on Betty as London had had on John during his first morning of independence. She had been in Paris before, but then she had been rich, and the city had smiled upon her. Now, there seemed to her something formidable and menacing in the place. She was frightened. She thought of London with a kind of longing. It would not be home, but it would be better than this. Somehow—perhaps because she was not in it—London began to take on a certain aspect of kindliness, almost of welcome.

Fortunately, there was no need to linger in Paris. The boat-train from the Gare du Nord would be starting in another hour.

She had fled from Mervo with nothing but a few necessaries thrown together in a small grip, and there was nothing to detain her at the Gare du Lyon. She went straight to the Girdle Railway, and found a seat on the first train.

At the Gare du Nord all was movement and confusion. Obvious Anglo-Saxons wandered about like lost sheep, miserably conscious of linguistic deficiencies, or stood guard over suit-cases with almost a truculent air of defence. Red-faced men, warm and agitated, argued in honest London French with politely semaphoring porters. To Betty, comforted with breakfast and strong in the knowledge that her own carefully acquired French was the French of Paris and understandable of the native, the process of getting herself and her grip aboard the Calais train held no mysteries. She surveyed the scene with leisurely interest, and moved to and fro among the groups of exiles, pitying them, yet somehow soothed by the sight of their perplexity. Undoubtedly it gave her for the time being a very comforting sense of superiority, and mitigated the terrors which Paris, revisited, had held for her on her arrival.

Presently a group of four attracted her attention. Three were plainly Americans, a typical doing-Europe family—the father, grey, patient, and a little bent; the mother, flying the brown veil—the Jolly Roger of the travelling American—resolute and unbeaten, but for the moment flustered; the daughter, slim, trim, straight, jaunty, and clean-cut, with that indefinable glitter that stamps the American girl and makes roving foreigners revise their views on charm in woman.

The fourth member of the group was a polite semaphore in a blue blouse, and from the attitude of the three travellers it seemed that the kindly feelings which every good American harbours towards the French in return for benefits received from the late M. Lafayette were, in the case of this particular member of the nation, in danger of being forgotten.

Betty’s heart went out to the exiles. She stopped as she reached them, and hesitated. Then she caught the distracted eye of the lady in the brown veil, and answered its unspoken appeal.

“Can I help you?” she said. “I speak French.” No ship-wrecked mariners, sighting a sail, could have exhibited more animation than did the rescued family. The father’s patient face lit up as if somebody had pressed a switch. His wife’s eyes lost their haggard look. The daughter, who was nearest, seized Betty unaffectedly in her arms and hugged her. After which she drew back and apologised.

“I couldn’t help it,” she said. “Gee, I’d made up my mind we were going to spend the rest of our lives here.”

“Della!” said the lady in the brown veil, reprovingly.

“Eh? Oh! Ma says I must cut out saying ‘Gee,’ ” she explained aside to Betty. “It isn’t lady-like. But, gee! what else could I have said?”

Betty laughed.

“What is the trouble?” she asked. “What do you want me to tell the porter?”

“We want our baggage,” said the patient man, pathetically. “We let ’em separate us from it at the hotel, and that’s the last we’ve seen of it.”

“Oh, that is quite simple. I’ll explain to him in a moment. Are you going by the boat-train?”

“That’s right. We want to get to England, if they’ll let us. Lord, what fools we were ever to come to a country where they can’t understand you if you ask them a plain question.”

Betty explained matters to the porter.

“It will be all right now,” she said. “Just go with him and he will do everything that’s necessary.”

She turned to move away, but a universal exclamation of dismay stopped her.

“Say, you aren’t going to leave us?” queried the head of the family, anxiously.

“You want to take command of this outfit,” said his daughter, “or we don’t stand a dog’s chance. Are you travelling by the boat-train, too? Well, won’t you join us? This country’s got us all scared so that we don’t know what we’re doing. Won’t you be the wise guide? or are you travelling with a party that you have to stick to?”

“No, I’m all alone. If you really think I should be any help——?”

“Help?” echoed the three ecstatically.

“Then, I will,” said Betty. “But there really isn’t anything for me to do.”

“Don’t you believe it,” said the girl. “You’ll save our lives. This is going to put you in the Carnegie Medal Class.”

CHAPTER IX

BETTY FINDS EMPLOYMENT

LET’S get away into another compartment, where we can talk,” suggested the girl called Della, when every obstacle had been successfully negotiated and they had won through to the train. “Ma likes to read on a journey, and the old gentleman will have to have a smoke to steady him after all this.”

They moved down the corridor till they found an empty compartment. Della removed her large hat, settled her hair at the mirror, and sat down with a sigh of content.

“Thank goodness,” she said, as the train gathered speed. “No more Paris for me till I’ve had a squad of professors put me next to the language. It’s a funny thing. I used to tell people I was crazy to go to Paris—and now I guess that I must have been.”

“Didn’t you like Paris?” said Betty.

“Like it! Say, I was there eight days, and I lost my way forty times. Five times a day I used to have to beat it back to the hotel in a cab and start out all over again. I didn’t know how to ask the way, and I wouldn’t have understood if they’d told me. I just wandered on till I lost myself, and then I hailed a cab and said ‘Hôtel Meurice.’ That was all the French I knew. It was fierce. London’ll be better, I guess. They do speak a sort of English there.”

“Are you going to stay in London?”

“Not for long. We— But, say, let’s get acquainted. What’s your name? Mine’s Della Morrison.”

“Mine—” Betty stopped. The thought had occurred to her that she had better change her name. She must leave as few traces as possible if she wished to avoid discovery by her step-father. And these people might know the name Silver, for it had appeared somewhat frequently in the Society pages of the newspapers under her photograph. “Mine is Brown,” she said.

“What’s your first name?”

“Betty.”

“I shall call you Betty. And you call me Della. Say, are you on the stage?”

“The stage? No.”

“I thought I’d seen your picture somewhere. Someone else, I guess. What was I saying before we—? Oh, yes. We’re going to stay in London for awhile, then we’re going to rent a swell place in the country somewhere. A friend of ours is fixing it for us now. Something Castle’s the place he’s trying to get. Fancy me in a castle! Oh, well,” she said resignedly, “it’s all in a life-time!”

“Surely you’ll like the castle?” said Betty, smiling.

Della looked doubtful.

“I’m not so sure,” she said. “You see, it’s this way. We are fighting out of our class, and that generally means the same as asking for trouble.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, it’s like this. I don’t know much about castles, but I do know that we aren’t in the castle class. A month ago the old gentleman was paying-cashier in a bank, and I was keeping one eye on the boss and the other on the pad or playing rag-time on the typewriter. Well, we were as good at our jobs as the next person, but that’s no reason why we should make any particular hit with the effete aristocracy, is it? If you ask me, our team’s going to get the hook before we know what’s hit us. And I haven’t any use for society, either. I’m not saying I’m not glad to be quit of working at the office, but outside that I don’t seem to care much. And there’s another thing.”

“There seem to be a good many things,” said Betty.

“There are. And this is the worst of them all. Just before the news came that pa had had all that money left him, I got engaged.”

She sighed.

“Yes?” said Betty, encouragingly.

“To a boy in the office I was in in New York,” continued Della. “Tom Spiller his name is. He was bill-clerk there. Say, do you like red hair?” she broke off. “In a man, I mean. Tom’s got red hair. You’d like Tom.”

“I wish I could meet him.”

“Gee, I wish I could, too,” sighed Della. “You see, pa and ma don’t know anything about me being engaged. I was getting myself worked up to tell them, and just as I was good and ready, along comes all this sudden wealth. And now I don’t know what to do about it. I daren’t tell them now. Ma’s got such large ideas. She don’t think about anybody lower than an earl these days. If she knew I was engaged to a bill-clerk, she’d throw sixteen fits. But, say, nobody’s going to make me give Tom up.”

“Of course not.”

“If I was good enough for him to marry when I was a stenog., he’s good enough for me to marry when I’m a plute.”

“Of course.”

“But ma won’t see it that way. I guess I’ll have to wait a while, and break it gently.”

“I shouldn’t worry,” said Betty. “Everything’s sure to come out all right.”

Della looked at her affectionately.

“You’re a comfort, Betty,” she said. “I’m mighty glad I met you.” She sat up, struck with an idea. “Say, what are you going to do when you get to England?”

“I don’t know.”

“You aren’t fixed up with visits and things?”

Betty smiled ruefully.

“No.”

“Then, say, you’ve got to stay with us as long as ever you can. In London first, and then in the country. Gee, it’ll be a comfort having you around.”

Betty flushed. It would have been pleasant to accept an invitation so sincerely offered, but she felt that to do so would be to receive hospitality under false pretences. Della evidently imagined her to be a wealthy girl, travelling for pleasure. She shrank from the inevitable explanations.

“I’m afraid—” she began. “I don’t think— I’m afraid I can’t, Della,” she said. “You don’t understand,” she went on nervously. “You think I’m— I mustn’t pay visits, I have got to find some way of earning my living.”

“Earning your living?”

Betty nodded.

“Except for the little money I have with me,” she said, “I haven’t a penny in the world.”

“Gee!” said Della.

She thought for a moment.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know. That’s what I’ve got to think over.”

“You’ve got to look around some?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, that’s all right. Stay with us while you’re doing it. You must stay somewhere. What’s the matter with the castle?”

Betty’s eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, Della, you are a dear,” she said impulsively. “But I couldn’t.”

“For the Lord’s sake! Why ever not?”

Betty shook her head.

“I couldn’t,” she said.

Della sat thinking.

“I’ve got it,” she cried. “Lord Arthur said I’d better have one when I got to England. He’s the guy—the lord I mean—who’s fixing the deal about the castle. He said that I should want a companion—someone to go around with—because ma couldn’t always be tagging along. You’re it!”

“But——

“Don’t make objections. It’s settled. So you’ll come to the castle after all. We’ll have the greatest time. I’ll go and tell ma.”

“Della, are you sure——?”

But Della had gone.

 

Mr and Mrs Morrison received the news with flattering approval. The spectacle of Betty producing order out of chaos at the Gare du Nord and speaking the mysterious tongue of France with the insouciance of a native had left a deep impression on their minds. They endorsed her appointment as Della’s companion with one voice.

“They fell for you right away,” reported Della, returning from her mission.

The rest of the journey passed swiftly for Betty. A great weight had been lifted from her mind. Now that everything was settled, she saw how terrifying the vague future had really been, and how reckless her headlong dash into the unknown. She felt safe.

The Morrisons had engaged rooms at the Cecil. Della, her magnificent energy proof against the fatigue of a journey from Paris, took Betty off to a theatre after dinner, and, on their return, sat on her bed, talking, till Betty’s answers became drowsy and disconnected. Then, having forbidden her to dream of getting up before lunch, she went to her own room.

It was late on the following morning when Betty came downstairs. Inquiring for the Morrisons, she was handed a note from Della, informing her that they had gone off to do Westminster Abbey, but would be back to lunch at one.

With more than an hour to pass, Betty wandered out into the Strand. It was nearly one o’clock when she returned. As she began to mount the hotel steps, a taxi-cab drew up, and a man with a pale moustache emerged. He paid the driver, and turned to enter the hotel. Then he saw Betty, and a look of recognition came into his face.

“Miss Silver!” he said.

It was Lord Arthur Hayling.

CHAPTER X

LORD ARTHUR IS PUZZLED

BETTY took his outstretched hand, and forced a smile, but she was disconcerted. If Lord Arthur was not the one man in the world whom she preferred not to meet, he was not far from being that. Even had her circumstances been other than they were, she would have wished to avoid him, for it had been at their last meeting that she had refused his stately and well-expressed offer of marriage. And though she did not imagine that the refusal had broken his lordship’s heart, still it would have been pleasanter to her had that sentimental passage concluded their relations.

And now, in the altered state of her affairs, when she was anxious to leave no traces in her flight, and had changed her name in order to effect this the more thoroughly, meetings with those who had known her in the life she had abandoned were something more than inconvenient.

Then it struck her that she was disturbing herself unnecessarily. This was nothing more than a chance meeting by the way. A few minutes’ casual talk, and she would go her way and he his; and the probabilities of their encountering each other again were remote. There would be no need to tell him anything.

“This is a most delightful surprise,” said Lord Arthur. He stroked his pale moustache. “Are you staying in the hotel?”

The recollection that her name was entered in the hotel book as Miss Brown checked Betty’s reply for a moment; but she reflected that his lordship was not likely to search the register.

“Yes,” she said. “Are you?”

“I am at my club. I have an engagement to meet some people here for lunch at one. Americans. A Mr Morrison and his family.”

“Morrison?”

“You know them? I should not have imagined that you would have come across them. They are excellent people,” he said, with that sub-tinkle of disapproval which enters the voice of a certain type of Englishman when he mentions persons whose social status is, in his opinion, doubtful, “excellent people in every way, but, don’t you know—hardly . . .” He paused, leaving an eloquent gap. “But, perhaps,” he went on, hopefully, as it were, “these are not the same Morrisons that you know. The name is not an uncommon one. My—acquaintance is a Mr Richard Morrison. He was—ah—employed till recently, I believe, in some bank in New York. He inherited a fortune not long ago. His wife and daughter——

Betty interrupted, speaking rapidly.

“Yes, those are my Morrisons. I am travelling with them. That is to say——

“Really?”

Lord Arthur’s blond eyebrows rose the fraction of an inch. Although he himself was clinging to the Morrisons with the assiduity of a leech, and had for some time been turning over in his mind the idea of making Della the same handsome offer which Betty had declined at their last meeting, his caste prejudice had remained unaltered. It would have been ideal if he could have had their money without their company; but in this imperfect world, it is seldom that we can secure the jam without the pill: and he put up with their company philosophically as a regrettable necessity. But that Betty, compelled by no such necessity, should be travelling with them astonished him.

Lord Arthur Hayling was, in his curious way, a man of business, and to allow sentiment to interfere with business was a thing he would never have dreamed of doing. He intended to marry money: nothing would make him swerve from that determination: but he would have welcomed a chance to marry a woman who attracted him in a non-business way; and that was why Betty’s refusal had for the moment saddened him. Business and sentiment could have been admirably combined by marrying her. For Betty had aroused in his lordship something nearer genuine emotion than he had ever experienced. He admired her as a woman scarcely less than as a human certified cheque, and to find her on intimate terms with these Morrisons was a surprise to him.

“Really?” he said again. Then, with tactful condescension: “They are most interesting people, are they not? Miss Morrison is charmingly quaint and lively——

“Della is a dear,” said Betty, defiantly, in answer to the sub-tinkle.

“Quite so,” said his lordship.

He stroked his moustache, and Betty flushed. He had the gift of saying more with one stroke than another man could have said in a two-minute speech.

His attitude had the effect of ridding Betty of the nervousness which she had been feeling. She looked forward with a sort of grim pleasure to the effect of the bomb she was about to explode under his lordship’s nose. It would be interesting to see what effect it would have on his gentlemanly placidity.

“When I say I am travelling with the Morrisons,” she said coolly, “I don’t mean as a friend. I am Miss Morrison’s paid companion.”

She was not disappointed. Lord Arthur Hayling, from boyhood up, had been steeped in the tradition that to display emotion is bad form, and one of the things that are not done, but this piece of information cracked the shell of detached calm in which the years had encased him, and for a moment his jaw dropped and he gaped at Betty like any ordinary fellow whose father had been connected with trade. The shock of the announcement completely deprived him of speech for what seemed to Betty, watching him with a rather bitter amusement, quite a length of time; though in reality his lordship recovered himself, considering the circumstances, with heroic promptitude.

He was badly shaken. Though Betty had refused his offer of marriage, he had not entirely despaired of winning her, and, meeting her in the company of mutual acquaintances, he had felt that Fate was working for him. And now, with a firm hand, she had upset his air-castle. It was not surprising that the shock should have produced a temporary dumbness.

He put the natural construction on her statement. If Betty was in the position of having to earn her living as a paid companion, it meant that Mr Benjamin Scobell must have lost his fortune. Such a thing was perfectly intelligible. Though he had not gone closely into the matter, he had known that Mr Scobell was of a speculative turn of mind and given to frenzied finance.

The narrowness of his escape shocked Lord Arthur. Suppose she had accepted him, and then this had happened! That was the worst of these mushroom millionaires. A man couldn’t feel safe. In a dazed kind of way his lordship was conscious of an aggrieved feeling that this was a hard world for a younger son.

Betty stood waiting for him to recover.

“They know me as Miss Brown,” she said. “Will you please remember that I am not Miss Silver any longer?”

“You have changed your name? Just so. Exactly.” That too, struck him as intelligible—indeed, as the obvious step.

“Thank you,” said Betty.

There was an awkward silence. Lord Arthur wanted to find out all about Mr Scobell’s downfall, but it was not easy to start. Sympathy would have been the line of least resistance, if Betty had given him the slightest cue to become sympathetic; but she had not. He was casting about in his mind for an opening, when a taxi-cab drew up beside them, and the Morrison party got out.

“Hello!” said Della. “Do you two know each other?”

Lord Arthur prevaricated smoothly.

“I inquired for you in the hotel, and they told me that Miss Brown was the only member of your party who had not gone out, so we made each other’s acquaintance.”

“She can talk French,” said Della irrelevantly. “Say, I’m starving. Let’s go scare up some lunch. Come along, pa. First call for luncheon!”

During the meal, Lord Arthur was silent. He had not yet adjusted himself to the alteration in Betty. Mentally, he was on the ground taking the count of nine. He stroked his moustache quite an unusual number of times between the hors d’œuvres and the coffee.

Regarding the business negotiations which he had been conducting, he vouchsafed in jerks the information that the arrangements were practically completed. A few necessary formalities, and Norworth Court, in Hampshire, would be at the wanderers’ disposal. It was one of the show-places of England, he went on to explain, quite the stateliest pile in the county, and more to the same effect.

Della and her father were frankly dismayed at the prospect of such magnificence; but Mrs Morrison rose to the occasion with indomitable courage.

“It will be nice,” she said languidly, and, as Della remarked to Betty in a subsequent criticism, without batting an eyelid, “it will be nice to have a little place of our own.”

Even Lord Arthur’s statement that Norworth was pronounced “Nooth” and had been the property of the baronets of that name, since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, failed to unnerve her.

After lunch, his lordship found himself left alone with Mr Morrison for the purpose of discussing those few formalities which he had mentioned.

Having disposed of these, he turned to the subject which was uppermost in his mind. He did not suppose that Mr Morrison was acquainted personally with Mr Scobell, but he knew that the financier had had large interests in America, and Mr Morrison, being a member of the staff of a bank, would probably be in a position to know the cause of the latter’s downfall.

“I wonder if you knew Mr Benjamin Scobell, Mr Morrison?” he said. “Very sad about him.”

“Hey?” said Mr Morrison, nervously. He hated being left alone with Lord Arthur, of whom he stood in awe, and had been hoping to make a rapid retreat. But his lordship had helped himself to another liqueur brandy and lit a fresh cigarette, and was plainly rooted to his chair.

“Mr Benjamin Scobell, the financier,” explained Lord Arthur. “I met his step-daughter some time ago. A charming girl. It must have come as a great blow to her.”

“Great blow?” repeated the other, puzzled.

“When he lost all his money.”

Mr Morrison’s look of bewilderment deepened.

“Lost all his money?”

“I understood that he had become bankrupt!”

Mr Morrison shook his head.

“Not old man Scobell. I know all about him. He banked with us. I guess you’re thinking of someone else. Old man Scobell’s no bankrupt. At least he wasn’t when I left New York. He kept a five-figure account with us, and it was still there when I quit. And I’d have heard of it if he had smashed since then. Why, if Scobell smashed, there’d be a noise like the Singer Building had fallen on to a sheet of tin. You must have gotten hold of the wrong name.”

Lord Arthur stared.

“Very possibly,” he said slowly. “Very possibly.”

He rose from the table in a state of utter bewilderment. If her step-father was still a rich man, what conceivable reason could there be why Betty should be travelling as a paid companion with these Morrisons? The mystery completely baffled him, and continued to baffle him long after he had left the hotel and returned to his club, where he sat in a quiet corner of the smoking-room, chewing an unlighted cigar, all through the afternoon.

He dined at the club; and it was while he was sipping his coffee that his tired brain yielded a solution of the mystery which, however fantastic, seemed to him the only one conceivable.

It was a trick! She was testing him! His faded eyes glowed with excitement as the thing seemed to piece itself together like the scattered sections of a child’s puzzle. It was, he told himself, precisely the scheme which a romantic girl would have devised. She was testing him. He had proposed to her when she was rich. Would she be the same in his eyes when she was a penniless girl, earning her own living. It was to decide that question that she had joined the Morrisons. There were a hundred ways in which she could have found out that he had attached himself to them.

But, he reflected, she had made one miscalculation when she had assumed that he would not ascertain the truth concerning her step-father’s financial status.

He paid his bill and walked out of the club. He was too thrilled with his discovery to sit still. He wandered at random through the streets till, late at night, he found himself, tired and footsore, in a remote neighbourhood which, on inquiry, proved to be Hammersmith. Encountering a roving cab, and having by this time walked off his excitement, he drove back to the club and went to bed.

CHAPTER XI

THE MEETING AT THE THEATRE

AFTER the first day, London depressed Betty terribly.

The little party gathered under the banner of Mrs Morrison at the Hotel Cecil dealt with the city each in his or her own way. To Della, though she had lived in it for some months, London was a strange city, and she and her mother set out to “do” the place with that grim thoroughness which is the peculiar property of a certain type of American visitor. Guide-book in hand, they swooped from spot to spot, devouring like locusts the Tower, London Bridge, St Paul’s, the Zoo, the Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens, the Cheshire Cheese, and the rest, at the rate of two or three a day. On these expeditions they generally took Betty, but Mr Morrison stoutly refused to broaden his mind. He was frankly anti-London. He pointed out, with some justice, that London had had nearly a thousand years in which to make itself into some kind of a town, and it hadn’t got as much open plumbing and real comfort as Portland, Maine.

As for Betty, she passed what was probably the most miserable week of her life. The first excitement of her escape from Mervo was over, and her eyes were looking down the interminable vista of the years to come, a vista of drab greyness, without hope or joy to colour it. London had the effect of accentuating this mood. Della, resolutely determined to enjoy herself, professed to find quaintness where Betty found only squalor; but even Della did not display any regret when Lord Arthur announced one morning that Mrs Morrison’s “little place” was ready for its new tenants, and it was decided that the invaders should move on Hampshire on the following day.

Lord Arthur, during the week, had comported himself like a Galahad. When he exerted himself he could display a considerable charm of manner. He exerted himself now. He was playing for a big stake, and he spared no effort. Towards Betty his manner was such as recalled the old days of chivalry. His restrained devotion was admirable. He was humble, yet protective—a highly effective combination of worshipping knight and guardian angel.

Betty was genuinely surprised. She had fancied that his lordship’s mind was an open book to her. And she had expected that her announcement that she was employed by Mrs Morrison as a paid companion would have had a chilling effect on his ardour. But now a week had gone by, and here he was, apparently unchanged by changing circumstances, more than ever the devout lover. There was no mistaking the subtle difference in his manner towards her and towards Della.

Her feelings began to alter. She was aching for friendship. She welcomed anything that would colour ever so slightly that grey vista down which she was looking. His lordship would have been vastly encouraged could he have guessed how high he stood in her estimation. He did not guess, for Betty, woman-like, felt more than she seemed to feel, and she struck his lordship at this early stage in the proceedings as regrettably unresponsive.

He hoped for better things, however, when the scene should be shifted to Norworth Court. London, he told himself, was no place for his wooing. In London they were never alone except for an odd moment or so during the day; and the pace set by Della and Mrs Morrison in their sight-seeing raids was altogether too swift to give scope for emotional passages. At Norworth it would be different. In those old grassy walks and flower-scented nooks, which had been through the centuries the setting for a hundred love-stories, it would be hard indeed if a persevering suitor with a musical voice and a ready-made reputation for chivalry could not work his will.

 

The opening performance of a new musical comedy was due on the party’s last night in London, and Mrs Morrison had bought a box. Lord Arthur was to meet them at the theatre. The head of the family had decided to remain in slippered ease at the hotel. He had attended five theatrical performances during the week, and that, he held, was sufficient. To-night, he proposed to smoke a quietBook had typo:
quite
cigar, glance through the batting-averages of the National Baseball League for the last ten years, and go early to bed.

Leaving him to carry out this homely programme, the rest of the expedition went off in a taxi-cab.

The musical comedy proved to be much like other musical comedies, of which Betty had seen two that week, and the first act had not been in progress long, when her attention began to wander. She looked at the audience. The house was crowded. She ran her eye slowly over the stalls below.

And then suddenly her heart leaped, and she shrank back quickly into the corner of the box where the hanging curtain hid her. She had seen John.

He was sitting at the end of the ninth row, evidently in the company of the man seated next to him, a light-haired young man with glasses; for as Betty caught sight of him, this young man bent across to make some remark.

He had not seen her. When she looked cautiously from behind the curtain a moment later his eyes were on the stage.

She sat on in a dream. The figures on the other side of the footlights seemed blurred and far away. She felt as if she were choking. The sight of him had quickened into life a host of emotions which till then had been numbed.

She was conscious of a noise of clapping, and realised that the first act was over and that the curtain had fallen. Lord Arthur rose and went out to smoke a cigarette. She moved back further into the corner till her chair pressed against the wall.

Della turned to her with some question that she did not hear, and, as she did so, there was a knock at the door.

“May I come in?” said a voice in the doorway. “I caught sight of you at the end of the act, Della, and came round to see if you would still speak to your old friends.”

Della uttered a cry of surprise.

“Why, John Maude! Mother, this is Mr Maude whom I used to know in the office. John Maude, I want you to know my friend Betty Brown.”

CHAPTER XII

JOHN ACCEPTS AN INVITATION

JOHN had parted from Mr Scobell on the quay at Mervo full of determination, but, as he discovered when he came to consider his plan of action, with only the vaguest ideas as to how he was to find the object of his search. As far as Paris the trail was broad and clear: but there, had it not been that Mr Scobell had placed no limit on the expenses of the expedition, it might well have been lost altogether. Unhampered, however, by financial obstacles, John had been able to make exhaustive inquiries, which had led him to the Gare du Nord, and there the trail had become clear again. Among the scores of employees interviewed by John and a private investigation agent, who acted as interpreter and was inclined at first—till discouraged by the latter’s forbidding attitude—to adopt a slightly roguish manner towards John, was the blue-bloused semaphore who had so harassed Della and her parents. From him the investigation agent, in the course of a conversation which sounded to John like a bitter quarrel between two gramophones with defective needles, elicited the fact that the young lady had left the Gare du Nord in the Calais boat-train in the company of an American family of three, a father, a mother, and a daughter.

It was this clue that had brought John to London. When he first heard it, he had indulged in rejoicings which proved to be premature, and had presented the blue-bloused one with a pourboire which led to his absence from duty for two days. It had seemed to him that his search was as good as finished.

London had corrected this impression. That the party had gone there was practically certain. American travellers, leaving Calais by the ’cross-channel boat, may be presumed to have London as their destination. John had hurried to the metropolis, and there the trail had lost itself again. Observation is not the leading quality of the Londoner, and not one of the porters whom he questioned at Charing Cross could recollect having seen the party in question. He had engaged a room at the Savoy Hotel, and had spent his time wandering through the streets and dining and lunching at the most popular restaurants in the hope of an accidental meeting. London is the city of accidental meetings, but he had not been successful. London is also the city where people may live next door to each other for a year and never meet. Thus, though John and Betty moved for nearly a week in the same orbit, they did not cross each other’s path. John dined one evening at the Carlton. Betty had lunched there that day. One afternoon Betty and her party lunched at the Ritz. That night John took supper at the next table.

He was discouraged. He had no means of knowing whether the Morrisons had remained in London or merely passed through on their way to the country. It was nearing the time when the town began to empty itself. The thought that, while he was patrolling Piccadilly and Regent Street, Betty might be in a house-boat on the river or treading the heather of some Scottish moor did not tend to make his daily ramble through London’s main thoroughfares any the more pleasant.

But London was to live up to its reputation as an engineer of accidental meetings. One afternoon, as he turned into the “Cheshire Cheese” for lunch—it had occurred to him that his party, being Americans, might possibly visit this famous spot: as, indeed, they had done, two days before—he heard somebody call him by name, and recognised the light-haired young man whom Betty was to see subsequently in his company at the theatre. This was Faraday, one of those friends whom, in his Westley, Martin & Co. days, he had envied as living full and interesting lives. Faraday had been at Cambridge with him, and, after trying many professions, was now in charge of the London office of the leading New York dramatists’ representative.

They lunched together, and by the end of the meal John had promised to accompany Faraday to the opening performance of a new musical comedy, for which the latter had been given seats.

“I hear the music’s good,” said Faraday. “And you’ll meet some interesting people.”

John, deep in his own thoughts, could not have testified to the accuracy of the first part of the prediction: but the second portion had certainly been fulfilled beyond his imagining.

Della had begun to speak again as Betty turned, and her breathless monologue served to bridge over what would otherwise have been a notable silence. Betty’s temples were throbbing. She was incapable of speech. And John stood in the doorway, motionless. Him, too, the situation had deprived of words.

“Betty Brown saved our lives in Paris,” said Della. “We shouldn’t have been here if it hadn’t a-been for her. There was a porter guy refusing to understand a word we said to him, and goodness knows we all said plenty, when along comes Betty, and fixes him in about three seconds. Say, you should hear her talk French. We’re doing London. We’ve been through the place with a fine-tooth comb. We’re at the Hotel Cecil. We’re going down to Hampshire tomorrow to——

“We have taken a little place, Mr Maude,” said Mrs Morrison. “A friend of ours, Lord Arthur Hayling. Do you know him? He is a brother of the Duke of——

“I know his name,” mumbled John, his eyes still on Betty, sitting looking at him from the shadow of the curtain.

The door opened.

“Ah, Lord Arthur,” said Mrs Morrison, “I want you to meet Mr Maude.”

Lord Arthur inclined his head in a noncommittal way.

The orchestra had begun to tune up. All over the house people were returning to their seats. John muttered vaguely and opened the door. He was still dazed.

As the door closed, Della jumped up.

“Gee!” she said, by way of explanation, and ran out into the corridor.

John’s back was disappearing round the corner. He stopped as she called to him, and came back.

“Say, John Maude,” said Della rapidly, “I want to see a lot of you. I want all the old pals I can get around me these days. I feel like I was on the edge of a cold pool and somebody going to push me in. That’s how English Society strikes me. I need somebody to hold my hand and see me through this, and you’re the man to do it, John Maude. There’s something kind of solid about you. Say, you’ve got to come down with us to this castle place to-morrow. Will you? Promise!”

She had solved all his difficulties. The news that the party were to leave London next morning had filled him with dismay. He must see Betty again, and talk with her alone, but he had not seen how it was to be managed. This invitation was salvation to him.

“Della,” he said, “you’re an angel. There’s nothing I’d like better in the world.”

“That’s a promise, then. I’ll fix it with ma. Well, I must be going back. Say, Betty’s a pretty girl, isn’t she? I want you two to be pals. She’s a dear. Say, there’s something queer about her. You can see she’s one of the four hundred, but we found her wandering about alone in Paris with hardly a penny, and she took a job with us as my companion. It don’t make any difference to me, though. She’s more of a lady than I’ll ever be in a million years. Oh, there’s the opening chorus. I must be getting back. Come around to the hotel to-morrow. And don’t you go side-stepping that castle proposition.”

 

“Mother,” said Della at supper that night, “I’ve asked Mr Maude to come down with us to stay at the Court to-morrow. He’s all alone here, and I guess he’s lonesome. That’s all right, ain’t it?”

“Mr Maude seems a pleasant young man,” said her mother. “I shall be glad to have him come.”

“Why, Betty,” said Della, “how pale you’re looking. What’s the matter? Ain’t you well?”

“I’m a little tired,” said Betty.

“You look it,” said Della. “You go to bed and get a good sleep. You’ll be feeling good all right to-morrow.”

But it was the thought of to-morrow that was causing that drawn look in Betty’s face.

CHAPTER XIII

NORWORTH COURT

OF the six members of the army of occupation which bivouacked round the tea-table on the upper terrace at Norworth Court two days later, Lord Arthur Hayling was alone completely contented and in tune with the peace of the summer evening.

Mr Morrison was miserable. He was loathing his new surroundings with a wholeheartedness which, though he fancied that his demeanour was one of stoic cheeriness, showed plainly in his every movement. Della was unwontedly silent and out of spirits, and even Mrs Morrison’s courage seemed to be showing signs of failing. On all three the shadow of the Court had begun to fall like a miasma.

To Della and her father the atmosphere of permanence was frightening. They had the feeling of being becalmed in a Sargasso Sea from which there was no escape. Before Della’s eyes rose a vision of Tom Spiller—unattainable Tom—beckoning to her from across an impassable gulf. Across another gulf her father saw tall buildings, bustling street-cars, and heard the faint sound of far-off crowds at the baseball-game—all equally unattainable.

Betty’s emotions were of a different order. The Court did not affect her unpleasantly. In other circumstances she would have loved its old-world calm. But the thought that, postpone it as she might, sooner or later there must come that meeting alone with John, killed her enjoyment. Wherever she looked, she seemed to meet his eyes, hurt and puzzled. A hundred times she had made up her mind to avoid the inevitable no longer, only to alter it at the last moment. She was afraid—afraid of him, afraid of herself: afraid of the pain which she must inflict and the pain which she must suffer.

To John the world had never seemed so bleak. Things had passed completely beyond his comprehension. Betty’s flight from Mervo had been only less intelligible than her avoidance of him now. His mind refused to grapple with the problem. What had he done? How had he offended her? What could have caused her feelings towards him to alter so completely in a single night? His mind kept returning to that meeting in the Casino. Every detail of it stood out clearly in his memory. She had been friendly then. There were moments when he had almost persuaded himself that she had shown signs of being something more. Yet now she was making the most obvious efforts to avoid being alone with him for an instant. Time after time, in the brief period of this visit, she had done it. Sometimes Della was the unconscious buffer between them, but more frequently Lord Arthur.

John cast a furtive glance at his lordship as he sat contentedly sipping tea, and jealousy raged within him. Perhaps, suggested jealousy, it was not merely to avoid being alone with him that Betty attached herself so closely to Lord Arthur.

This identical thought was occupying his lordship’s mind at that very moment, and to it was due his feeling of peace and that appreciation of the world and the summer evening. The plan of campaign which he had mapped out for himself appeared to be succeeding beyond his expectations. At first he had regarded John with suspicion as a possible obstacle to the success of his scheme, but now he had dismissed him from his calculations. Not once, nor twice, but several times had Betty made it plain whose company she preferred. A little more, and the time would be ripe for that second attack which was to carry the position.

He finished his tea, and lit a cigarette. It was the cool of the evening, and the surface of the little reed-fringed lake at the foot of the terraces glittered with the last rays of the setting sun. Mrs Morrison had gone indoors, and her husband had pottered off to smoke a cigar in a part of the grounds where there was least chance of meeting a gardener. Della had just broken a long silence with a remark to John.

Lord Arthur turned to Betty, who was sitting between him and Della.

“Would you care to go out on the lake before the sun goes down, Miss Brown?” he said.

Betty looked round. John was talking to Della. It would put off the moment she was dreading for another day.

“Yes,” she said.

They had reached the second terrace before Della noticed them.

“Where are they going?” she said.

John did not reply. He was watching the pair as they made their way across the turf, absorbed in hard feelings towards his lordship.

“Gee,” said Della, “they’re going out in the punt.”

“It looks like it,” said John.

“Shout to them.”

“Shout? Why?”

“That punt-pole’s on the blink. I tried it yesterday, and it creaked. It’s cracked or something. He’ll go smashing it and falling in.”

“Will he?” said John with grim satisfaction. “Do you object?”

Della looked at him quickly, and laughed.

“Well,” she said, “now that you mention it, I guess I don’t. Say, John, how d’you like him?” She jerked her head towards the lake where his lordship, wielding the suspected pole, was propelling the punt slowly across the water. “I don’t fall for him,” she went on, without waiting for an answer. “And the old gentleman don’t, either. His lordship’s like this place. He gives me cold feet. Does the place get you that way, too? Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve been feeling as if I was some sort of a worm. Pa says the place makes him feel as if he was walking down Broadway in a straw hat in April.” She looked unhappily at the grey walls of the house. “Kind of disapproving it looks, don’t it? Those windows look just like a lot of eyes, staring at you and wondering what right you’ve got sitting around poisoning the atmosphere.”

John laughed.

“You’ll get used to it.”

“Not in a million years. But, between you and Betty, I may manage to bear up. You’re both comforts. What do you think of her, John?”

“Of—of Miss Brown?”

“That’s not her name,” said Della, shaking her head. “I tell you there’s some mystery about that girl. My idea is that she’s cut loose from some swell home for some reason, and is travelling in—what-d’you call it. Incog. Say! I guess her pa wanted her to marry some guy she didn’t love, and Betty said ‘No, sir,’ and beat it.”

John started. Could that be the reason? He had never thought of that. Could he be the man? Then he said that that was impossible, for, when Betty ran away from Mervo, her step-father had not been aware that they had ever met.

“It couldn’t be,” he said.

“Bet you what you like,” insisted Della. “You wait and see if I’m not right. Why, if pa and ma tried to make me marry a guy I didn’t love, I’d be off that quick you’d only see a cloud of dust and a sort of blur.” She rose. “I’ve got to go and write a letter,” she said abruptly.

John remained where he was, his eyes fixed on the party in the punt.

The sun had gone down behind the wood which topped the low hill beyond the lake, and twilight had stolen upon the world. The air was cool with falling dew. A corncrake called monotonously in the distance. On the lake, Lord Arthur had turned the punt, and was making for the shore. John could hear his voice, thinly distinct in the stillness.

He rose from his chair and began to walk towards the house.

He had hardly started when there came from the lake a cry and a splash. He wheeled quickly. The punt was rocking from side to side, and two feet from it, hatless and up to his waist in water, stood Lord Arthur, grasping a fragment of the pole. Della’s suspicions of its stability had been confirmed.

He ran easily towards the water’s edge. There was no danger, for the lake was shallow. He arrived as his lordship, towing the punt with one hand, waded ashore.

“The pole broke,” said his lordship complainingly, clambering on to dry land.

John held the punt steady for Betty to get out.

“Lucky the water wasn’t deep,” he said. “You had better run up to the house and change your clothes. We’ll follow.”

Betty flushed.

“Oh—” she began, and stopped.

“I think I had better,” said his lordship, stepping out of his puddle and starting a fresh one.

He galloped moistly up the terrace. John watched for a moment, then turned to Betty. She had not moved.

CHAPTER XIV

“I’D CROWNS RESIGN——”

FOR many days John had been scheming for just this moment, nerving himself for it, rehearsing the attitude that he would assume; but now that it had come, he found himself unprepared. He was unequal to the situation. She was looking at him, her face cold and pale, and there was that in her look which set a chill wind blowing through the world, and robbed him of speech. He searched his brain for words, and came empty away. He was dumb.

A sense of being preposterously big obsessed him. He was conscious of his bulk as he had never been before. It seemed to set him curiously at a disadvantage. Subconsciously, he felt that she was afraid of him, that she regarded him as something hostile. The thought was torture. He longed for words that would dispel it, but found none.

Lights began to gleam in the windows of the Court. Dusk had changed to darkness. In the distance, deepening the silence, the corncrake still cried its dreary cry. Birds rustled drowsily in the trees. They stood alone together in a world of silence and sleep.

A nightmare feeling of unreality came upon him. How long had they been standing there? The departure of Lord Arthur was like some happening of the remote past. Æons seemed to have rolled by.

Suddenly Betty spoke.

“We shall be late,” she said nervously.

John took a quick step towards her. Somehow the sound of her voice had broken the spell and set him free. The cloud still weighed on his mind, but strength and the power to act had returned to him.

She shrank back as he moved, and he saw that there were tears in her eyes. A thrill went through him.

The next moment—the action was almost automatic—his fingers had touched her arm and closed on it.

She wrenched herself free.

“Betty!” he muttered.

They stood facing each other. He could hear her quick breathing. Her face was dim and indistinct, but her eyes shone in the darkness.

A strange weakness came upon John. He trembled. The contact of her soft flesh through the thin sleeve had set loose in him a whirl of primitive emotions. He longed to seize her in his arms, to be brutal, to hurt her. The black outlines of the tree-tops flickered before his eyes for an instant. He clenched his fists to steady himself.

“I love you!” he said in a low voice. Even to himself the words, as he spoke them, sounded bald and meaningless. To Betty, shaken by what had passed between her and Mr Scobell, they sounded artificial, as if he were forcing himself to repeat a lesson. They jarred upon her.

“Don’t!” she said sharply. “Oh, don’t!” Her voice stabbed him. It could not have stirred him more if she had uttered a cry of physical pain.

“Don’t! I know. I’ve been told.”

She went on quickly, in gasps.

“I know all about it. My step-father told me. He said—he said you were his—” she choked—“his hired man; that he paid you to stay and advertise the Casino. And he sent for me, and was going to tell you that—that you must marry me. . . . Oh, it’s too horrible. That it should be you! You, who have been—you can’t understand what you have been to me—ever since we met. You couldn’t understand. I can’t tell you. . . . A sort of help. . . . Something—something that—I can’t put it into words. Only it used to help me just to think of you. I didn’t mind if I never saw you again. I didn’t expect ever to see you again. It was just being able to think of you. . . . It helped. . . . You were something I could trust. Something strong—solid.” She laughed bitterly. “I suppose I made a hero of you. Girls are fools. But it helped me to feel that there was one man alive who—who put his honour above money——

She broke off. John stood motionless, staring into the shadows. For the first time in his easy-going life he knew shame. Even now he had not grasped to the full the purport of her words. The scales were falling from his eyes, but as yet he saw but dimly.

She began to speak again, in a low, monotonous voice, almost as if she were talking to herself. “I’m so tired of money—money—money. Everything’s money. Isn’t there a man in the world who won’t sell himself? I thought that you— I suppose I’m stupid. . . . One expects too much.”

Her voice was very weary.

He did not move. His mind was occupied with what she had been saying. Gradually he was beginning to understand.

She turned, and went slowly up the terrace towards the house. Still he made no movement.

A spell seemed to be on him. His eyes never left her. He could just see her white dress in the darkness. Once she stopped. With his whole soul he prayed that she would come back. But she moved on again, and was gone.

Then his brain cleared, and he began to think swiftly. He could not let her go like this. He must overtake her. He must stop her. He must speak to her. He must say—he did not know what it was that he would say—anything, so that he spoke to her again.

He ran up the sloping turf till he reached the upper terrace. She was not there.

As he stood panting, there came to him the odour of burning tobacco, and, turning, he saw close beside him the red glow of a cigar.

“That you, Mr Maude?” said Mr Morrison’s voice. His host joined him.

“Time for a turn up the terrace and back,” said Mr Morrison. “The dressing-gong hasn’t sounded yet.”

Every nerve in John’s body seemed to be jarred by the interruption. He could not speak. He fell into step beside the other in silence, and they walked on.

“I saw Miss Brown go into the house a moment ago,” said Mr Morrison. “Seemed in a hurry. Say, it’s a great night.”

The moon had risen above the tree-tops beyond the lake, and the garden below was growing more distinct. The surface of the lake had turned to a dull silver. It was a scene made for silence and thought, and John found himself hating the friendly little man who clung to his side and chattered. He wanted to think. He wanted to adjust his mind to the altered view of himself which Betty’s words had given him.

Presently his thoughts detached themselves. Mr Morrison talked on, but he was not listening. He had begun to think with a curious coolness. It was one of those rare moments in a man’s life when, from the outside, through a breach in that wall of excuses and self-deception which he had been at such pains to build, he looks at himself impartially.

The sight that John saw through the wall was not comforting. It was not a heroic soul that, stripped of its defences, shivered beneath the scrutiny. In another mood he could have mended the breach, excusing and extenuating, but not now. He looked at himself without pity, and saw himself weak, slothful, devoid of all that was clean and fine; and a bitter contempt filled him.

From inside the house came the swelling note of a gong, and Mr Morrison started like a war-horse at the sound of the trumpet.

“Guess we’d better be going in,” he said. “Time to dress.”

In his bedroom, John’s mood of introspection gave way to one of restlessness. He must do something. He must show her that he was not the man she thought him. And then it came to him that there was only one way. If he was to prove that he was not the Casino’s hired man, he must destroy the Casino. Not till he had done that could he face her again and say to her what he wished to say. He would prove to her that her first judgment of him had been the true one, that he was a man who could put his honour above money.

That was the way out. He glowed at the thought.

She loved him. She had not tried to hide it. He would show her that he was worthy of her love.

He must return to Mervo at once. Every moment would be a year till he had made himself a free man.

Betty was not in the drawing-room when the gong sounded for dinner.

“Betty’s not feeling good,” explained Della. “She’s gotten a headache or a chill or something, poor kid. She was looking as pale as a sheet, so I made her go to bed. She’ll be all right there. I’ll go and sit with her.”

John went out on to the terrace after dinner. He felt more keenly than ever the imperative need for instant action. Would it be possible for him to leave to-night? If he could reach London early in the morning, he would be able to catch the noonday boat at Dover.

He threw away his cigar and went back into the house to find a time-table. Yes, there was a slow train that would bring him to London in the small hours of the morning. He went up to his room, changed his clothes, and packed a grip. Then, walking warily by back-stairs, he stole out of the house, and began his five-mile walk to the station.

CHAPTER XV

AN ULTIMATUM FROM THE THRONE

WHILE John, in the little steamer from Marseilles, was nearing the end of his impulsive dash across Europe, Mr Scobell was breakfasting with his sister Marion in the morning-room of their villa on the Mervo hillside. The financier’s days were full now, and he started them early.

A frown of displeasure furrowed Mr Scobell’s brow.

“Marion,” he was saying, “who was the fellow with the Jewish name who made an automaton and got into trouble all round through it? It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

“You mean Frankenstein, dear. He was the hero of a novel by Mrs Shelley. According to the story, he created a monster in the shape of a man, who brought a great deal of trouble and misfortune upon him in various ways. The moral of the story is supposed to be that we should——

“All right, all right, all right,” interrupted her brother rudely. “I know all that. I only wanted to remember the name. Well, I’m Frankenstein and this Prince is the monster.”

“I don’t know why you should say that, Bennie,” protested his sister. “I’m sure he’s a very nice young man.”

“He’s such a nice young man,” said Mr Scobell, “that I’d feel much easier in my mind if I had him tied to a tree by a string, instead of having let him go off all alone to wander around with money enough to buy suppers for all the chorus girls in London for about ten years.”

“I’m sure he’s not that sort of young man, Bennie. He seemed so nice and quiet and pleasant-mannered.”

Mr Scobell snorted.

“Did you ever watch one of those quiet, pleasant-mannered young men when he got moving? I tell you, it’s Prince Charles over again. This fellow’s his son, and, believe me, Prince Charles was one of the lads. No, I’ve been had. That honest, open face of his made such a hit with me that when Betty ran away and he said ‘I’m going after her. Gimme the bank-roll, for I may need to buy a sandwich on the journey,’ I did it like a shot. It was only when he’d been gone a day or so that I began to wonder what made him so bent on going after a girl he hardly knew by sight. He couldn’t have seen Betty more than about twice in his life.”

“Perhaps he fell in love with her at first sight,” suggested Miss Scobell dreamily.

“Pshaw! What he fell in love with at first sight was the idea of a holiday in London with all that money. I’ve been a fool! I can just see him laughing. I bet I was the softest thing that ever happened to him. I bet he’s making himself the life and soul of gay supper-parties, telling the story!”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken, Bennie.”

“Mistaken? Then how do you account for us not having had so much as a post-card from him since he went away?”

“Perhaps he has nothing to report.”

“I bet he’s got plenty to report, but he don’t feel that I want to hear it. I wouldn’t feel easy in my mind if a curate had gone off with all that money in his pocket. And when it’s a case of a Prince of Mervo—! Have you ever looked up the record of these Mervo princes? Believe me, they were a festive lot. There wasn’t one of them that didn’t think that money was made to be spent—especially other people’s money. This one’s a chip of the old block. He’s following in father’s footsteps all right. He’s following the dear old dad! Looking for Betty! I see him at it! Wandering on from one restaurant to another, tired, but full of determination, brave boy, not dreaming of letting up so long as the money holds out. He’s having the time of his life, darn him!”

Miss Scobell murmured something, which fortunately the overwrought financier did not hear, about boys being boys.

“People are beginning to ask questions,” went on Mr Scobell. “Old d’Orby didn’t dare make a fuss when I worked the abolition of the Republic, but he didn’t like it. He wants to be President again, and he’s beginning to get the people stirred up. At least, somebody is, and I think it’s him. These people had all they wanted of absentee princes when Prince Charles was on the throne. They’ve begun to ask themselves what’s the objection to a Republic and why the deuce they should stand this Prince acting the same way his father did. They’re getting ready to start trouble. If he doesn’t come back soon and take off his coat and show them that he’s all right, it’ll be the end of him, that’s all.”

He smoked his cigar-stump fiercely. The recapitulation of his wrongs had disturbed him.

“I’m sure—” began Miss Scobell, when the door opened, and a footman appeared.

“Well?” snapped the financier.

“His Highness the Prince of Mervo desires to speak to you, sir.”

“What! Where is he?”

“His Highness is walking up and down the road before the villa, sir. He declined to enter. He said that he desired to see you alone, sir.”

“All right,” said Mr Scobell. The footman retired. He turned to his sister. “There,” he said. “You see! Guilty conscience! Daren’t come in. He’s come to the end of his money, and is wondering how he can touch me for more. I’ll talk to him! By George! I’ll talk to him!”

“Don’t be too hard on him, Bennie. He’s very young.”

“He won’t feel young by the time I’ve finished,” said Mr Scobell truculently. “He’ll feel about a million.”

During the past forty-eight hours John had had the maximum of mental unrest and the minimum of sleep. His eyes were red and his chin covered with a day’s stubble. His clothes were creased and wrinkled. In other words, he looked like a young man who had just completed the concluding exercises of a prolonged debauch, and Mr Scobell, emerging from the house at the moment when he was prowling past the front door, his shoulders bent and his thoughts far away in England, and coming face to face with him, saw in his appearance the confirmation of his worst suspicions. He glared, and his cigar rose slowly to an almost perpendicular position as his lower jaw protruded.

“So you’ve come back!” he said.

John stopped.

“I wanted to see you,” he said.

The end of Mr Scobell’s cigar approached an eighth of an inch nearer to his left eye.

“Wanted to see me? I bet you wanted to see me. Where have you been? Why isn’t Betty with you?”

John flushed.

“We won’t discuss that, if you don’t mind,” he said. Mr Scobell gasped for utterance. He bit through his cigar. His green eyes glowed dully, and the tip of his nose wriggled, as was its habit in crises of emotion.

Won’tBook had typo:
Wont
—?” he stammered. “Won’t—? Won’t discuss—? Well, I’m hanged! Won’t discuss it!”

He gulped. Then he found connected speech. “Well!” he cried. “Here, you and I have got to have a talk, young man! You seem to have forgotten where you stand. Perhaps your serene, imperial two-by-fourness will condescend to listen for a moment while I explain just whereabouts your Royal, half-portion Highness stands in the scheme of things. Look here. You were to find Betty and bring her back and marry her, weren’t you? Well, why haven’t you done it?”

John stared. Understanding was coming slowly to him.

“I fixed this thing up,” continued Mr Scobell, “and it’s got to go through. I fetched Betty over here to marry you, and she’s got to marry you. I explained the whole thing to her, but, being a fool girl, she tried to get out of it. But she’s got to come back, and I was chump enough to think that, when you went away, you meant to find her and fetch her back. Instead of which you go running loose all over London with my money, and——

John cut through his explanations with a sudden sharp cry. A blinding blaze of understanding had flashed upon him. It was as if he had been groping his way in a dark cavern and had stumbled unexpectedly into brilliant sunlight. He understood everything now. Every word that Betty had spoken, every gesture that she had made, had become amazingly clear. He saw now why she had shrunk back from him, why her eyes had worn that look. He dared not face the picture of himself as he must have appeared in those eyes, the man whom Mr Benjamin Scobell’s Casino was paying to marry her, the employee earning his wages by speaking words of love.

A feeling of physical sickness came over him. He staggered. And then came rage, rage such as he had never felt before, rage that he had not thought himself capable of feeling. It swept over him in a wave, pouring through his veins and blinding him.

A minute passed. Vaguely he heard Mr Scobell’s voice, talking on, but the words had no meaning for him.

Below, a blaze of colour, Mervo smiled up at him; and he found himself loathing its exotic beauty. He felt stifled. This was no place for a man. A vision of clean winds and wide spaces came to him.

Suddenly, his mind began to work quietly and coolly. He looked at the heated financier.

“Wait!” he said, and Mr Scobell stopped in mid-sentence. “I found Miss Silver,” he went on.

“You found her!” The wrath died out of Mr Scobell’s face. “Good boy! Forget anything I may have said in the heat of the moment, Prince! I thought you’d been on the toot in London. So you really found her!”

“Yes. And she told me some of the things you said to her about me. They opened my eyes. Until I heard them, I had not quite understood my position. I do now. You said that I was your employee.”

“It wasn’t intended for you to hear,” said Mr Scobell, handsomely, “and Betty shouldn’t have handed it to you. I don’t wonder you feel hurt, I wouldn’t say that sort of thing to a fellow’s face. Not me. If I’m nothing else, I’m tactful. But, since you have heard it, well——!”

“Don’t apologise. You were quite right. I was a fool not to see it before. No description could have been fairer. You might have said much more. You might have added that I was nothing more than a decoy for a gambling-hell.”

“Oh, come, Prince!”

He felt in his vest pocket.

“Have a good cigar,” he said.

John waved aside the olive-branch.

“I object to being your employee,” he said. “And I object to being a decoy for a gambling-hell.”

“Why——!”

“And I’m going to clear you out of this place, Mr Scobell.”

“Eh? What! What’s that?”

John met his astonished eye coolly.

“There’s going to be a cleaning-up,” he said. “There will be no more gambling in Mervo.”

“You’re crazy,” gasped Mr Scobell. “Abolish gambling? You can’t.”

“I can. That concession of yours isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. The Republic gave it to you. The Republic’s finished. If you want to conduct a Casino in Mervo, there’s only one man who can give you permission, and that’s myself. The acts of the Republic are not binding on me. Since I arrived you have been gambling on this island without a concession and now it’s going to stop. Do you understand?”

“But, Prince, talk sense.” Mr Scobell’s voice was almost tearful. “It’s you who don’t understand. Do, for goodness’ sake, come down to earth and talk sense. Do you suppose that these people here will stand for this? Not much. Not for a minute. See here. I’m not blaming you. I know you don’t know what you’re saying. But you must drop this kind of thing. You mustn’t get these ideas in your head. You stick to your job, and don’t interfere with other folks’. Do you know how long you’d stay prince of this place if you started to play the fool with my Casino? Just about long enough to let you pack a collar-stud and a tooth-brush into your portmanteau. And after that there wouldn’t be any more prince. You stick to your job, and I’ll stick to mine. You’re quite a good prince for all that’s required of you. You’re ornamental, and you’ve got go in you. You just keep right on being a good boy, and don’t start trying experiments, and you’ll do splendidly. Don’t forget that I’m the big man here. I’ve only to twiddle my fingers and there’ll be a revolution, and where would you be then? Don’t you forget it, sonnie.”

John shrugged his shoulders.

“I’ve said all I have to say. You’ve had your notice to leave. After to-day the Casino is closed.”

“But don’t I tell you the people won’t stand it?”

“That’s for them to decide. They may have some self-respect.”

“They’ll turn you out.”

“Very well. That will prove that they have not.”

“Prince, talk sense! You can’t mean that you’ll throw away twenty thousand a year as if it was dirt!”

“It is dirt when it’s made that way. We needn’t discuss it any more.”

“But, Prince!”

“It’s finished.”

“But——!”

John strode off down the road. He had been out of sight for several minutes before the financier recovered full possession of his faculties.

When he did, his remarks were brief and to the point.

“Crazy!” he gasped. “Absolutely cracked!”

CHAPTER XVI

MERVO CHANGES ITS CONSTITUTION

HUMOUR, if one looks into it, is principally a matter of retrospect. In after years John was wont to look back with amusement on the revolution which ejected him from the throne of his ancestors. But at the time its mirthfulness did not appeal to him. He was in a frenzy of restlessness. He wanted Betty. He wanted to see her and explain. Mervo had become a prison. But he must stay in it till this matter of the Casino should be settled. It was obvious that it could only be settled in one way. He did not credit his subjects with the highmindedness that puts ideals first and money after. That military and civilians alike would rally to a man, round Mr Scobell and the Casino, he was well aware. But this did not affect his determination to remain till the last. If he went now, he would be like a boy who makes a runaway ring at a door-bell. Until he should receive formal notice of dismissal, he must stay, although every day had forty-eight hours, and every hour twice its complement of weary minutes.

So he waited, chafing, while Mervo examined the situation, turned it over in its mind, discussed it, slept upon it, discussed it again, and displayed generally that ponderous leisureliness which is the Mervian’s birthright.

Indeed, the earliest demonstration was not Mervian at all. It came from the visitors to the island, and consisted of a deputation of four, headed by the wizened little man, who had frowned at John in the Dutch room on the occasion of his meeting there with Betty, and a stolid individual with a bald forehead and a walrus moustache.

The tone of the deputation was, from the first, querulous. The wizened man had constituted himself spokesman. He introduced the party—the walrus as Colonel Finch, the others as Herr von Mandelbaum and Mr Archer-Cleeve. His own name was Pugh, and the whole party, like the other visitors whom they represented, had, it seemed, come to Mervo, at great trouble and expense, to patronise the tables, only to find them suddenly, without a word of warning, withdrawn from their patronage. And what the deputation wished to know was—What did it all mean?

“We were amazed, sir—your Highness,” said Mr Pugh. “We could not—we cannot—understand it. The entire thing is a baffling mystery to us. We asked the soldiers at the door. They referred us to Mr Scobell. We asked Mr Scobell. He referred us to you. And now we have come, as the representatives of our fellow-visitors to this island, to ask your Highness what it means!”

“Have a cigar,” said John, extending the box. Mr Pugh waved aside the proffered gift impatiently. Not so Herr von Mandelbaum, who slid forward eagerly and retired with his prize to the rear of the little army once more.

Mr Archer-Cleeve, a young man with carefully-parted fair hair and the expression of a strayed sheep, contributed a remark.

“No, but I say, by Jove, you know, I mean really, you know, what?”

That was Mr Archer-Cleeve upon the situation.

“We have not come here for cigars,” said Mr Pugh. “We have come here, your Highness, for an explanation.”

“Of what?” said John.

Mr Pugh made an impatient gesture.

“Do you question my right to rule this massive country as I think best, Mr Pugh?”

“It is a high-handed proceeding,” said the wizened little man.

The walrus spoke for the first time.

“What say?” he murmured huskily.

“I said,” repeated Mr Pugh, raising his voice, “that it was a high-handed proceeding, Colonel.”

The walrus nodded heavily, with closed eyes.

“Yah,” said Herr von Mandelbaum through the smoke.

John looked at the spokesman.

“You are from England, Mr Pugh?”

“Yes, sir. I am a British citizen.”

“Suppose some enterprising person began to run a gambling-hell in Piccadilly, would the authorities look on and smile?”

“That is an entirely different matter, sir. You are quibbling. In England gambling is forbidden by law.”

“So it is in Mervo, Mr Pugh.”

“Tchah!”

“What say?” said the walrus.

“I said ‘Tchah!’ Colonel!”

“Why?” said the walrus.

“Because his Highness quibbled.”

The walrus nodded approvingly.

“His Highness did nothing of the sort,” said John. “Gambling is forbidden in Mervo for the same reason that it is forbidden in England, because it demoralises the people.”

“This is absurd, sir. Gambling has been permitted in Mervo for nearly a year.”

“But not by me, Mr Pugh. The Republic certainly granted Mr Scobell a concession. But, when I came to the throne, it became necessary for him to get a concession from me. I refused it. Hence the closed doors.”

Mr Archer-Cleeve once more. “But—” He paused. “Forgotten what I was going to say,” he said to the room at large.

HerrBook had typo:
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von Mandelbaum made some remark at the back of his throat, but was ignored.

John spoke again.

“If you were a prince, Mr Pugh, would you find it pleasant to be in the pay of a gambling-hell?”

“That is neither here nor——

“On the contrary. It is, very much. I happen to have some self-respect. I’ve only recently found it out, it’s true, but it’s there all right. I don’t want to be a prince—take it from me, it’s a much overrated profession—but if I’ve got to be one, I’ll specialise. I won’t combine it with being a bunco-steerer. As long as I am on the throne, this high-toned shove-ha’penny will continue a back number.”

“What say?” said the walrus.

“I said that, while I am on the throne here——

“I don’t understand you,” said Mr Pugh. “Your remarks are absolutely unintelligible.”

“Never mind. My actions speak for themselves. It doesn’t matter how I describe it—what it comes to is that the Casino is closed. You can follow that?”

“Then let me tell you, sir”—Mr Pugh brought a bony fist down with a thump on the table—“that you are playing with fire. Understand me, sir; we are not here to threaten. We are a peaceful deputation of visitors. But I have observed your people, sir. I have watched them narrowly. And let me tell you that you are walking on a volcano. Already there are signs of grave discontent.”

“Already!” cried John. “Already’s good. I suppose they call it quick work in this infernal country if they can wake up soon enough to take action within a year after a thing has happened. I don’t know if you have any influence with the populace, Mr Pugh—you seem a pretty warm and important sort of person—but, if you have, do please ask them as a favour to me to get a move on. It’s no good saying that I’m walking on a volcano. I want to be shown. Let’s see this volcano. Bring it out and make it trot round.”

“You may jest——

“Who’s jesting? I’m not. It’s a very serious thing for me. I want to get away. The only thing that’s keeping me in this forsaken place is this delay. These people are obviously going to turn me out sooner or later. Why on earth can’t they do it at once?”

“What say?” said the walrus.

“You may well ask, Colonel,” said Mr Pugh, staring, amazed at John. “His Highness appears completely to have lost his senses.”

The walrus looked at John as if expecting some demonstration of practical insanity, but, finding him outwardly calm, closed his eyes and nodded heavily again.

“I must say, don’t you know,” said Mr Archer-Cleeve, “it beats me, what?”

The entire deputation seemed to consider that John’s last speech needed footnotes.

John was in no mood to supply them. His patience was exhausted.

“I move that we call this conference finished,” he said. “You’ve been told all you came to find out—my reason for closing the Casino. If it doesn’t strike you as a satisfactory reason, that’s your affair. Do what you like about it. The one thing you may take as a solid fact—and you can spread it round the town as much as ever you please—is that it is closed, and is not going to be reopened while I’m ruler here.”

The deputation then withdrew, reluctantly.

 

On the following morning there came a note from Mr Scobell. It was brief. “Be sensible,” it ran. John tore it up.

It was on the same evening that definite hostilities may be said to have begun.

Between the palace and the market-place there was a narrow street of flagged stone, which was busy during the early part of the day, but deserted after sun-down. Along this street, at about seven o’clock, John was strolling with a cigarette, when he was aware of a man crouching, with his back towards him. So absorbed was the man in something which he was writing on the stones that he did not hear John’s approach, and the latter, coming up from behind, was enabled to see over his shoulder. In large letters of chalk he read the words: “Conspuez le Prince.”

John’s knowledge of French was not profound, but he could understand this, and it annoyed him.

As he looked, the man, squatting on his heels, bent forward to touch up one of the letters. If he had been deliberately posing, he could not have assumed a more convenient attitude.

John had been a footballer before he was a prince. The temptation was too much for him. He drew back his foot. . . .

There was a howl and a thud, and John resumed his stroll. The first gun had been fired.

 

Early next morning a window at the rear of the palace was broken by a stone, and towards noon one of the soldiers on guard in front of the Casino was narrowly missed by an anonymous orange. For Mervo this was practically equivalent to the attack on the Bastille, and John, when the report of the atrocities was brought to him, became hopeful.

But the effort seemed temporarily to have exhausted the fury of the mob. The rest of that day, and the whole of the next, passed without sensation.

After breakfast on the following morning, Mr Crump paid a visit to the palace. John was glad to see him. The staff of the palace were loyal, but considered as cheery companions, they were handicapped by the fact that they spoke no English, while John spoke no French.

Mr Crump was the bearer of another note from Mr Scobell. This time John tore it up unread, and, turning to the secretary, invited him to sit down and make himself at home.

Sipping a whisky and soda and smoking one of John’s cigars, Mr Crump became confidential.

“This is a queer business,” he said. “Old Ben is chewing pieces out of the furniture up there. He’s pretty well fed up. He’s losing money all the while the people are making up their minds about this thing, and it beats him why they’re so slow.”

“It beats me, too. I don’t believe these hook-worm victims ever turned my father out. Or, if they did, somebody must have injected radium into them first. I’ll give them another couple of days, and, if they haven’t fixed it up by then, I’ll go and leave them to do what they like about it.”

“Go! Do you want to go?”

“Of course I want to go! Do you think I like fooling about in this musical comedy island? I don’t blame you, Crump, because it was not your fault, but, by George! if I had known what you were letting me in for when you carried me off here, I’d have put myself under police protection. Hullo! What’s this?”

He rose to his feet as the sound of agitated voices came from the other side of the door. The next moment it flew open, revealing General Poineau and an assorted group of footmen and other domestics. Excitement seemed to be in the air.

General Poineau rushed forward into the room and flung his arms above his head. Then he dropped them to his side, and shrugged his shoulders, finishing in an attitude reminiscent of the plate illustrating “Despair” in the Home Reciter.

“Mon Prince!” he moaned.

A perfect avalanche of French burst from the group outside the door.

“Crump!” cried John. “Stand by me, Crump! Look alive! This is where you come out strong. Never mind the chorus gentlemen in the passage. Concentrate yourself on old General Dingbat. What’s he talking about? I believe he’s come to tell me the people have woken up. Offer him a drink. What’s the French for whisky? Come along, Crump.”

The General had begun to speak rapidly, with a wealth of gestures. It astonished John that Mr Crump could follow the harangue as, apparently, he did.

“Well?” said John.

Mr Crump looked grave.

“He says there is a large mob in the market-place. They are talking——

“They would be!”

“—of moving in force on the palace. The Palace Guards have gone over to the people. General Poineau urges you to disguise yourself and escape while there is time. You will be safe at his villa till the excitement subsides, when you can be smuggled over to France during the night——

“Not for me,” said John, shaking his head. “It’s very good of you, General, and I appreciate it, but I can’t wait till night. The boat leaves for Marseilles in another hour. I catch that. I can manage it comfortably. I’ll go up and pack my bag. Crump, entertain the General while I’m gone, will you? I won’t be a moment.”

But as he left the room there came through the open window the mutter of a crowd. He stopped. General Poineau whipped out his sword and brought it to the salute. John patted him on the shoulder.

“You’re a stout fellow, General,” he said, “but we shan’t want it. Come along, Crump. Come and help me address the multitude.”

The window of the room looked out on to a square. There was a small balcony with a stone parapet. As John stepped out, a howl of rage burst from the mob.

John walked on to the balcony, and stood looking down on them, resting his arms on the parapet. The howl was repeated, and from somewhere at the back of the crowd came the sharp crack of a rifle, and a shot, the first and last of the campaign, clipped a strip of flannel from the collar of his coat and splashed against the wall.

A broad smile spread over his face.

If he had studied for a year, he could not have hit on a swifter or more effective method of quieting the mob. There was something so engaging and friendly in his smile that the howling died away and fists that had been shaken unclenched themselves and fell. There was an expectant silence in the square.

John beckoned to Crump, who came on to the balcony with some reluctance, being mistrustful of the unseen sportsman with the rifle.

“Tell ’em it’s all right, Crump, and that there’s no need for any fuss. From their manner I gather that I am no longer wanted on this throne. Ask them if that’s right.”

A small man, who appeared to be in command of the crowd, stepped forward as the secretary finished speaking, and shouted some words which drew a murmur of approval from his followers.

“He wants to know,” interrupted Mr Crump, “if you will allow the Casino to open again.”

“Tell him no, but add that I shall be delighted to abdicate, if that’s what they want. Bustle them, old man. Tell them to make up their minds quick, because I want to catch that boat. Don’t let them get discussing it, or they’ll stand there talking till sunset. Yes or no. That’s the idea.”

There was a moment’s surprised silence when Mr Crump had spoken. The Mervian mind was unused to being hustled in this way. Then a voice shouted, as it were tentatively, “Vive la République!” and at once the cry was taken up on all sides.

John beamed down on them.

“That’s right,” he said. “Fine! I knew you could get moving as quick as anyone else, if you gave your minds to it. This is what I call something like a revolution. It’s a model to every country in the world. But I shall be missing the boat. Will you tell them, Crump, that any citizen who cares for a drink and a cigar will find it in the palace. Tell the household staff to stand by to pull corks. It’s dry work revolutionising. And now I really must be going. Give one of these fellows down there half a crown and send him to fetch a cab. I must rush.”

 

Five minutes later the revolutionists, obviously embarrassed and ill at ease, were sheepishly gulping down their refreshment beneath the stony eye of the major-domo and his assistants, while upstairs in the state bedroom the deposed Prince was packing the royal pyjamas into his suit-case.

CHAPTER XVII

JOHN RETURNS TO NORWORTH

IN moments of emotion, man has an unfortunate tendency to forget the conventionalities, especially if he be a man of John’s temperament. John was single-minded. Any strong impulse that came to him was apt to occupy his thoughts to the exclusion of everything else. Thus, his mind, when he left Norworth Court, had been so full of the idea that he must go back to Mervo and abolish the gaming-tables there that there had been no room in it for the realisation of what was due to his host and hostess. And life had moved so swiftly for him from that moment that it was not till the Marseilles packet, bringing him back stripped of his princely rank but filled with the comfortable glow of the man who has asserted himself and recovered his self-respect, had nearly completed its journey, that he began to consider the position. When he did so, it was borne in upon him with some vividness that he had fallen a little short in the performance of those courtesies which etiquette demands of the departing guest. He who wishes to conform to the manners and rules of good society rarely concludes his visit to country houses by creeping down the back-stairs at ten o’clock at night and sneaking out into the darkness, through the tradesmen’s entrance, without a word of farewell to his host and hostess. John could see this quite clearly now. It filled him with a mild wonder that it had not struck him before. Looking back, he remembered that he had intended to write to Mrs Morrison from London, pleading sudden and urgent business. But he had fallen asleep in the waiting-room at Charing Cross Station, and had only woken up in time to race madly across to the boat-train.

He regretted his absent-mindedness. This was not due merely to conscience and the knowledge that his curious behaviour must have hurt the Morrisons’ feelings. What exercised him chiefly was the thought that he could hardly return now and resume his visit as if nothing had happened. By the time he reached London, he perceived quite clearly that, unless Mr and Mrs Morrison happened to be of an angelically forgiving disposition, Norworth Court was barred to him, and his chances of meeting Betty again remote. A country house can be a fortress.

Della seemed to him his one hope. Her friendship would probably have remained intact even under the trying conditions. He determined to take up a position at the village inn, and see her before attempting anything else.

Accordingly, having arrived at the village, he sent off a messenger to her with a note; and presently, as he waited in the sleepy street outside the inn door, he saw her approaching briskly, her face one note of interrogation.

“I’ll explain everything later,” he said, in answer to her rush of inquiries. “First, how do I stand? With your father and mother, I mean?”

“You’re in mighty bad with ma. Say, why did you want to rush off——

“I meant to write from London. Honestly, Della, I had to go. I’ll tell you all about it later on. Of course, your mother never wants to set eyes on me again?”

“She don’t act as if she was counting the minutes to your return! Say, what did you want to——?”

“Della,” interrupted John, “I’ve just got to get into that house. I’ve got to see Betty——

“See Betty!”

“I’ve something to tell her. I must see her. Della, be a pal, as you always have been. Smuggle me into the house and see that I have five minutes with Betty alone. Couldn’t you manage it to-day? I can’t wait.”

Della regarded him open-eyed.

“Are you in love with Betty, John Maude?”

“Of course I am.”

“Then, for goodness’ sake, what did you want to beat it like that for?”

John shook his head impatiently.

“It’s too long a story to tell now. It was something I had to do before I could see her again.”

“Well, I guess you know your own business,” said Della, doubtfully. “But if I was a man in love with a girl, you wouldn’t catch me going off and leaving her alone with his lordship to prowl around and——

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I may be wrong, but the way it looks to me is that you aren’t the only rubber plant in Brooklyn. I can’t understand it, though. I don’t see his lordship’s game. He’s out to marry for money, but—well, you ought to see him when Betty’s around. He’s Assiduous Willie all right.”

“But, Betty? Does she——?”

“I can’t just make Betty out. Sometimes I think she falls for him, and then again sometimes she acts as if she hadn’t a friend in the world.”

“Della, can you get me into the house this afternoon?”

Della considered. “I guess I could,” she said. “There are doings in the home this afternoon. We’re giving our first garden-party. Say, I’m nervous, John Maude. His lordship has gathered in a bunch of his special pals. They’re just the advance-guard. If we make good with them, as far as I can figure it, the rest of the swells in these parts will O.K. us and come flocking in. It’s up to us. It’s our try-out. If you want to get into the house, to-day’s the day. Everybody will be out helping to whoop things up in the garden, and you can just slip in. Say, I know what you can do. You know my little room next to the drawing-room? Sneak in there, and, when I see a chance, I’ll ask Betty to fetch something from the drawing-room. Then you can go in and talk to her. You’ve got to keep me out of it, though. If Betty is sore at you, I don’t want to have her sore at me, too. You’ve just got to be wandering around there by accident. You’d better be near the back-door at about half after four, and watch your chance to get in. It’ll be safe about then, because we’ll be having tea with the bunch out on the terrace. And all I say is, if you butt into trouble, keep me out of it.”

 

Under other conditions there might have been romance in John’s stealthy entry into Norworth Court that afternoon. But romance is a sensitive plant that winces from the chill breath of the bathetic. And bathos brooded over his movements like a cloud. As he crept through the wood that flanked the Court, it was against prosaic gamekeepers that he was alert, not against armed enemies with designs on his life. The only thing he encountered, that appeared to have designs on his life, was a small yellow dog, which emerged from nowhere as he was entering the wood, and retreated, howling, before a well-directed stone.

He found himself in Della’s sitting-room, hot, uncomfortable, and with much the same emotions as he would have felt if he had managed to elude the conductor on a tram-car and escape paying his fare. He was deeply conscious of being in a thoroughly ignominious position. He was a burglar without any of that compensating thrill of having eluded peril, which, one may suppose, buoys a burglar up on a successful expedition. He had eluded no peril. He was running no romantic risks. If he were discovered, he would merely be coldly ejected. Nothing could make such a situation romantic.

He dabbed at his forehead with his handkerchief. He was acutely miserable. Only the thought that circumstances compelled him to this position, if he wished to see Betty, sustained him during his vigil.

The room he was in was on the second floor. It was small and brightly furnished. Della had chosen it for these qualities. It was a cheerful oasis in a dignified desert. The window looked out on to the lake, and through it, as John stood there, came the sounds of aristocratic revels on the terrace below. Peeping cautiously round the curtain, he had a view of the select company which Lord Arthur Hayling had gathered together to mingle with the invaders. Tea was in progress. The terrace, dotted with summer frocks, presented a gay and animated appearance. So did Mrs Morrison, seated in the centre of it: but John, watching her, doubted the genuineness of her gaiety. She was going through an ordeal such as she had never, he imagined, gone through before. He wished he could have been nearer, to hear the conversation. To one looking down from a second-story window things appeared to be going well and smoothly; but second-story impressions of a garden-party are no criterion.

Official news from the front was brought, a few moments later, by Della. She looked cool and fresh in her light dress as she burst into the room, but her eyes were weary.

“I just came up to cry for a few minutes,” she announced simply, sinking into a chair. “And I don’t want comforting, because that’ll make me worse. If you say one kind word, John Maude, I shall never stop. Promise you won’t.”

“Very well,” said John.

“Then I’ll start in.”

And she proceeded to sob quietly, drying her eyes from time to time, with a tiny handkerchief. After a while she looked up, smiling contentedly.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m all right now. I feel as if I’d had a Turkish bath.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Just nerves. John Maude, do you remember what Sherman said war was? Well, this society game is all that. John Maude, they sit there, and they look at you as if you were something that had been condemned under the Pure Food Law, till you want to tear your hat off and jump on it and scream. The old gentleman looks twenty years over his right age. Ma’s putting up the greatest fight you ever saw, but I can see she’s in pretty bad. Why did we ever start this fool game? It’s all right for Betty. She’s used to mingling with this kind of bunch. Didn’t I always tell you so? She’s handling those duchesses and earls like an animal-tamer. Gee, I admire that kid.”

“And, talking of Betty—” suggested John.

“All right, I’ve not forgotten. I didn’t come up here only to cry. I just looked in on my way to the drawing-room to leave my handkerchief on the piano. In about five minutes, when I’m too busy to leave the tea-table, I’ll ask Betty if she’d mind running up and——

“Della, you’re a jewel. Isn’t there anything I can do for you?”

“Sure. If I freeze to death out there, tell Tom I died thinking of him. Good-bye.”

She went out. John heard her open the drawing-room door. Then she returned and went downstairs, and there was silence.

John resumed his watch from behind the curtain. He saw Della go out on the terrace and return to the tea-table. And then for the first time he distinguished Betty in the crowd below. She was talking to a woman in mauve. Close at hand hovered Lord Arthur Hayling.

The scene now began to be reminiscent of a moving-picture exhibition. Watching it, John could follow all that went on, though no word reached him. Della, busy at the tea-table, spoke to Betty. Betty looked up at the drawing-room window, and began to move towards the house.

And then there was an unrehearsed effect. She had reached the front-door, when Lord Arthur, detaching himself from the throng, moved off in the same direction. John watched him with the keenest disgust. It might be that his lordship was going about some private business of his own, but in John’s mind there was no doubt that he was following Betty.

A few moments later, his suspicion was proved correct. Voices became audible on the stairs, and the two passed the door behind which John stood, and went on into the drawing-room. John sat down and gave himself up to sombre thought. His chance was gone. His lordship’s infernal adhesiveness had undone him.

He sat, waiting for them to pass his door on their outward journey. The moments went by, and still there was no sound in the passage. It was strange. It was not as if Della had hidden the handkerchief. He opened the door cautiously, and listened.

The drawing-room door was ajar, and in the silence of the house, his lordship’s voice was plainly audible, apparently delivering a monologue. Now and then he would pause, to continue again in the same low, earnest tones.

The transition of John’s mind from wonderment to complete understanding took place in an instant. A single word gave him the clue, and then all that had been mysterious grew clear. The monologue became intelligible to him. It was nothing less than one of Lord Arthur Hayling’s well-expressed proposals of marriage. In that cool drawing-room, not twelve feet from where he stood, his lordship was offering Betty his hand and title.

John was not narrow-minded. In a general way his attitude towards the peerage was broadly tolerant. He did not object on principle to lords marrying. If they wished to marry, he held, why, let them. But this was a special case. There was a dead-line for amorous aristocrats, and Lord Arthur Hayling had passed it.

He clung to the door-handle. In the drawing-room the monologue proceeded on its rhythmical way.

He released the door-handle, and moved out into the passage.

In moments of emotion, it has been pointed out, John had a certain bias towards the impetuous. He was a little apt to treat any situation that had in it the elements of delicacy and embarrassment as if it were the enemy’s line in a football-match. Where others might have stepped cautiously around such a situation, it was his practice to rush forward and try to knock a hole through it.

The present was such a situation. Many men, faced by it, would have withdrawn in a quiet and gentlemanly way. John did not even begin to do that.

Getting swiftly off the mark, he covered the distance to the drawing-room in three rapid bounds, and burst in.

CHAPTER XVIII

IN THE DRAWING-ROOM

WHEN John, full of admirable resolutions, had set out under cover of the night to put an end to gambling in Mervo, his abrupt departure had not only offended his hostess, but had been entirely misinterpreted by Betty. She had regarded it as a sign on his part that, if there had ever been any struggle in his mind between wealth and self-respect, he had decided it in favour of the former. He had come, she told herself, to carry out the commission which Mr Scobell had assigned to him, and, having failed, had gone back to his employer. There were moments when she tried to find some other explanation for his departure, but she did not succeed. It was a greyer week that followed his disappearance than even that first week in London. The Court was a haunted place. To realise that he had passed completely out of her life was not easy. She saw him everywhere.

The silent devotion of Lord Arthur Hayling, at first a trial, became gradually, as the days went by, something of a consolation. She was lonely to her very soul, and he was a friend. That he was not a man whose personality could ever grip her did not affect his value as a companion. She was a girl in whose life there could be but one man who really mattered. All others were on a different plane. And on that plane Lord Arthur undoubtedly figured to advantage. He was sympathetic. He could talk well. He had seen much of the world, and conveyed the idea of having read widely. Talking with him, she could check the pain that was always with her.

The part played by his lordship, in fact, was that of a mental opiate. She took to him, as men take to drink, to kill thought.

That his lordship did not diagnose the position in precisely this way is not to be wondered at. It is a singularly modest man who can see himself in such a rôle; and his lordship was not singularly modest. Every day went further to convince him that he was making excellent progress in his undertaking.

And, in a sense, he was not wrong. Unremitting kindness and chivalry cannot but have their effect in such a situation. A woman who has ceased to hope for her own happiness may come to regard herself as remaining in the world merely to give happiness to others—or to one other. And there were times when this feeling came to Betty. Della Morrison had the gift of reaching the heart of things and laying it bare with a flippant phrase, and no lengthy description or stippling in of details could have added anything to her summing up of Lord Arthur as “Assiduous Willie.” He was precisely that. Gently, humbly, and unceasingly he wooed Betty, giving her to understand in a thousand subtle ways that she was all the world to him. She could not help but be affected by it. Her heart was sore, and cried out for comfort; the atmosphere of the Court, the old oak-panelled rooms, the shady walks, all lent force to his words; and she did not know that in his time he had said very much the same words in exactly the same vibrating voice to several other heiresses.

A woman’s instinct prompts her to sacrifice herself for others. Gradually, faintly at first, then more definite, there grew in Betty’s mind the idea that it would be a great thing to do, to give herself to a man to whom she was of such vital importance. Her own life must remain for ever empty, but she could make his full and happy.

It was a thought that tended to become an obsession, for she was shaken and in a state to receive distorted ideas. Sometimes a sudden and vivid memory of John would sweep over her mind, and she would see clearly the impossibility of what she contemplated: but the thought would return, and she would weaken once more.

It was in one of these moods of weakness that Lord Arthur had found her as she was setting out in quest of Della’s handkerchief. His lordship’s practised eye perceived it, and he knew that the moment was ripe for which he had been preparing, when he should put into words what till now had been mere hints.

He felt no trepidation. Words of the kind he intended to speak were his specialty. He was no raw novice at proposing marriage. He did it often and he did it well. He had planned this situation as a general plans a campaign. Here he would make an effective pause; here he would lower his voice to a murmur; there, maybe, he would take her hand.

He had anticipated everything—except an interruption. And, rightly, an interruption should have been impossible. Everybody who had any right to be in the drawing-room was out on the terrace.

He embarked gracefully on his declaration. He neither stammered nor spoke too rapidly. Words proceeded from him in an easy, musical flow.

And then, at the very climax of his speech, the door flew open, revealing John.

His entry coincided with a point in the harangue where it had been his lordship’s intention to pause; and he did so. He stared at the intruder dumbly.

Betty rose to her feet, white and startled. And for an instant the silence in the room was so profound that the voices on the terrace sounded clear and distinct, and the ticks of the clock over the fire-place were like blows.

“Betty,” said John.

He stopped, and in the pause his lordship found speech.

“What—what the devil—? What the devil are you doing here?”

“I want to speak to you, Betty,” said John. “I want to speak to Miss Silver,” he said, looking at Lord Arthur.

His lordship did not move.

“What are you doing here?”

His immobility maddened John.

“Beat it,” he said tersely.

It is possible that his lordship did not understand the expression, for he made no movement towards the door, and was about to speak again when John gave way to that impetuosity to which he was such a victim. He sprang forward and picked his lordship up in his arms.

The window of the drawing-room, like most of the windows at Norworth Court, was broad and massive and set well back in the thick wall, leaving outside a ledge some two feet in width. At present it was open, to allow the evening breeze to cool the room. The sight inspired John. He moved towards it.

Betty uttered a little cry of horror. For a moment the thing had taken on the aspect of tragedy. A horrible fear seized her that John had gone mad. He had reached the window and was bundling Lord Arthur bodily through it. Already the other was on the ledge, calling noisily for help.

John’s designs, however, were not homicidal. Holding his lordship now in a sitting position on the ledge, he reached up a hand, and began to draw down the heavy sash.

“I shouldn’t struggle,” he advised. “You won’t fall. At least, you’ll have to get out of your coat to do it,” he added.

And, pulling the tails of his lordship’s coat into the room, he wedged the sash down tightly upon them. Then he stepped back, and rubbed his fingers.

From outside the window, curiously muffled, came the voice of his lordship, raising itself in a general appeal for help.

John crossed to the door, and locked it. Then he turned to Betty. She had not moved from where she stood. She did not move as he approached her.

“They’ll be coming in a moment,” he said, “so I must talk quick. Betty, I’ve come back to explain. All those things you said to me that night were true. But there was one thing you thought of me then, though you didn’t say it, which wasn’t true. I may have been a steerer for a gambling-hell, but I wasn’t that!

He stopped.

“I wasn’t that,” he said. Footsteps sounded in the passage outside, running. Hands beat upon the panels. Excited voices made themselves heard.

“I had no suspicion,” he went on. “Perhaps I ought to have seen, but I didn’t. It never occurred to me. When I followed you from Mervo, I hadn’t a notion what was wrong. Then you told me, and I saw. I had never thought of my position in that way before. But I knew you were right, and I knew I couldn’t see you again till I had squared myself. I ought to have stopped and told you what I meant to do, but I couldn’t face you till I had put things right. I went straight back to Mervo, and there I saw your step-father, and he told me—what he had told you. . . . And then I closed the Casino.”

Betty looked at him without speaking. Her heart was beating quickly. The rapidity with which he had spoken and the distracting noises in the passage outside confused her. As yet she did not fully comprehend.

“I abolished the gaming-tables,” he went on. Then she understood, and she trembled with the sudden rush of happiness that filled her. It was as if some physical change had taken place. A heavy weight seemed to have been lifted from her heart.

She made an impulsive movement towards him. She was conscious of a passionate longing to be near to him, to feel his arms round her.

She could not speak, but there was no need for words. She saw his face light up. And then he had gathered her into his arms and was holding her there, clutching her to him fiercely. Her own, about his neck, tightened convulsively, forcing his head down until his face rested against hers. And so they stood, until at length her grip relaxed, and her hands dropped slowly to her sides.

She leaned back against the circle of his arms and looked up at him. He met her gaze silently, with glowing eyes.

She raised a small, cool hand to his face, and gently stroked his cheek. She performed it almost unconsciously, this half-formal gesture with which woman, from the days of Eve, has taken possession of the man she loves.

“I want you,” she said simply.

And, as she spoke, a half-forgotten speech of Elsa Keith’s flashed back into her mind. Yes, Elsa had been right. It was like coming back on a winter’s night and finding the house lit up, and knowing that you had reached home.

She pressed more closely against his arms. They were strong arms, restful to lean against at the journey’s end.

CHAPTER XIX

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

MEANWHILE, as was not unnatural, the sudden appearance of Lord Arthur Hayling on a second-story window-sill had had a marked effect on the dignified revellers on the terrace. His frantic demands for help disposed of the idea that he had assumed the position for his own amusement, and the phenomenon occasioned, in consequence, considerable mystification.

But Mrs Morrison’s guests quickly recovered their poise. The well-bred Briton has two methods of coping with the unusual, and if one fails the other is always successful. His first step, when faced with any situation that promises to be embarrassing, is to ignore it. If it will not be ignored, he simply goes away.

The guests at the garden-party adopted the latter method. The former was plainly out of the question. The best-bred person cannot go on for long ignoring a man who is shouting for help from a high window-sill. They did not attempt the feat. Even as Mrs Morrison, her gallant spirit broken by this last misfortune, rose from her seat and gazed wildly at the apparition, there was a general movement, and the air became full of polite farewells. By the time the rescue-party arrived, the tide had begun to ebb, and the terrace was emptying itself.

The advance-guard of the rescue-party, which had arrived almost immediately after his lordship had been sighted, consisted of Della, the butler, one of the footmen, and a small boy who cleaned the knives and boots of the establishment and had no business to be upstairs at all—a fact which was pointed out to him a moment after arrival by the strong right hand of the butler.

Della, with her private information respecting John’s movements, was the only member of the party not surprised at the fact that the door would not open. The butler and the footman acknowledged themselves baffled by it. Plain men of common-sense, they could not fathom the motives which could have led a sane member of the peerage to lock the door of a room and then go and sit on the window-sill and call for help. They stared mutely at each other.

The footman was the first to speak.

“Mr Briggs,” he said deferentially, “I fancy I can ’ear somebody talkin’ inside.”

The butler listened.

“You’re right, Henry,” he said. “I can hear him plain.”

He listened again.

“Distinct,” he added, clinching the matter.

He rattled the handle briskly.

At first Della had had that leaden sense of irretrievable disaster which oppresses the soul when matters have passed out of our hands and are running amok. She had deduced what must have taken place. She had had a moment of apprehension when she caught sight of Lord Arthur following Betty to the house, and, if she could have stopped him, she would have done so.

She did not blame John. In the same circumstances she would have wished her Tom to behave in the same way. But that did not alter the fact that he had completely spoiled the party. The polite self-effacement of the guests was merely temporary. When they had gone, they would discuss the matter. It would be talked about at fifty dinner-tables. The story would permeate the county like an epidemic. And that the victim should have been Lord Arthur Hayling was the final tragedy.

Then her thoughts took another turn. Quite suddenly it struck her that, from her own point of view, this was likely to prove to be the most fortunate thing that could possibly have happened. She was thoroughly home-sick. She had begun to think of America as, towards the middle of his voyage, Columbus may have done, conscious vaguely that it existed somewhere far away, but hopeless of ever reaching it. And this thing might be a social Waterloo from which they could never rally, and which would compel the abandonment of the campaign and instant retreat to New York.

Mr Briggs, the butler, was hammering experimentally on one panel of the door, footman Henry on another. Both were shouting “Hi!”

There came the sound of the key turning in the lock. The door opened, and John appeared.

At the sight of him both the butler and the footman stood paralysed. His eccentric disappearance in the silence of the night had been the cause of much argument in the servants’ hall; and though no satisfactory conclusions had been arrived at as to his motives in the matter, it had been generally agreed that he had certainly gone for ever. To find him at large in the house, and in such remarkable circumstances, was a shock to Mr Briggs and his colleague.

Their paralysis was not of long duration.

In the matter of tactful disappearance, the British servant is to the British guest as professional to amateur. Curiosity urged them to linger awhile and observe the development of this very promising situation. But all their training and traditions told them that they were better away. Butlers—and, in a lesser degree, owing to their comparative youth and inexperience, footmen—neither walk nor run in such a crisis. They shimmer. Mr Briggs and Henry shimmered now. Silently, and with unruffled calm, they faded away in the direction of the staircase.

“John Maude,” cried Della, “what in the name of goodness have you been doing? What’s his lordship——?”

“By George! I’d completely forgotten him! Della,” he said ruefully, “I’m awfully sorry this should have happened.”

“You aren’t the only one! Aren’t you going to pull him in?”

“I suppose I’d better.”

“I guess you had.”

John turned to the window.

There are moments in life too poignant for speech. Such a moment occurred when John, raising the sash, pulled Lord Arthur off his perch and deposited him on the drawing-room carpet. It was a situation to which no words could have done justice, and his lordship did not attempt any. Under considerable disadvantages, for his face was red and his clothes soiled, he maintained an impressive dignity. Ignoring John, who had begun in friendly fashion to dust him down, he stood, stiffly erect, pulling his moustache.

It was one of those situations to which it seems at first sight impossible to add any further touch of embarrassment. This, however, Della contrived to do.

His lordship had not observed her presence for a moment, but now, catching sight of her, he turned sharply, and prepared to speak. Until her mother should appear, she represented authority, and he proposed to lay his complaint before her. Such, however, was the overwrought state of his mind that he hesitated, marshalling his thoughts, for an instant. And it was in that instant that Della did the unforgiveable thing. She laughed.

Defending her conduct later, she said that the laugh was hysterical. It may have been so, but to the uninformed listener there is no substantial difference between a hysterical laugh and one of the more ordinary kind. Lord Arthur was no connoisseur of guffaws, able to note and classify. To him, a laugh was a laugh. And Della’s ringing out in the silence, conveyed but one impression to him—namely, that he amused Della.

He started. And then with a stiff bow, he walked abruptly out of the room.

“Oh, Della!” said Betty.

Della leaned against the piano, giggling helplessly.

“I didn’t mean to! I couldn’t help it! Honest, I didn’t mean to!”

She dried her eyes.

“I guess that’s put the lid on it,” she said. “It’s too bad about me! Making that kind of a break! Oh, well!”

Further sounds of movement came from the passage outside. Mr and Mrs Morrison entered. There was a strained look on the latter’s face. She sank down in a chair and covered her eyes with her hands. The others looked at her in silent consternation.

Della crossed quickly to her side, and put an arm affectionately round her.

“We met his lordship on the stairs,” explained Mr Morrison briefly. “He’s madder than a hornet. He’s beaten it. Never coming back.”

Della gave her mother a remorseful hug.

“I’m sorry,” she cried. “I am sorry, dear! Oh, gee!” she wailed despairingly, “can’t I ever learn to act like a lady!”

Mrs Morrison was sobbing quietly. She put out a hand, and patted Della’s arm.

She began to speak, her voice coming in broken gasps.

“I can’t!” she said. “I can’t do it. I thought I could, but I can’t. It’s too much. It’s killing me. Della, honey, I know it’s a hard thing to ask you, after letting you try it, and all, but I must. I know it’s hard on you and father. You had set your minds on mixing in good society. I’ve heard you say it so often. Often I’ve sat and listened to you talking of what you’d do if you were rich, and then all this money came, and—I did try, honey! It was hard, but I don’t think you ever guessed how hard it was. I didn’t want to spoil your pleasure, and I did try for your sakes to act as if all this society life suited me as much as it suited you. But—but——

“Ma!” cried Della. “You don’t mean——

“Yes, honey. I know it’s hard on you. I know how disappointed you’ll be. I’d go on if I could, but I can’t. I’ve tried and tried not to hate it, but I can’t help it. It’s killing me. I can’t stand it. I knew I couldn’t the moment the folks began to arrive for this party, and when I saw Lord Arthur s-sitting on the w-w-window——

Della sprang to her feet.

“Ma! Do you mean to say you want to quit—to go back to America?”

Mrs Morrison nodded miserably.

“I know it’s a disappointment for you, honey, but——

She broke off. Della had flung herself upon her, and was hugging her rapturously.

“You dear! You darling!” she cried. “You angel!” Mr Morrison had begun to execute a species of dance. He revolved slowly, snapping his fingers and uttering weird cries. And Betty and John, skirting round him, passed unnoticed from the room.

 

Besides disappearing tactfully when the occasion seems to demand it, the British servant has another habit. Immediately after any domestic upheaval, he invariably resigns his place in the establishment. After happenings like those which had shaken the old-world peace of Norworth Court, no self-respecting butler, footman, housemaid, cook, chamber-maid, scullery-maid, tweeny, or knife-and-shoe-boy could hesitate for a moment.

After dinner, at which meal he officiated without the slightest deviation from his normal high-priestly manner, Mr Briggs, the butler, requested an interview with his employer.

Mr Morrison received him in the library.

“Well?” he said.

Hitherto he had cringed before the bulging eye of the real master of the house; but since his wife’s astounding revelations in the drawing-room, his manner had undergone a change. His chin protruded firmly. His shoulders, resolutely squared, rested easily against the mantelpiece. His eyes were the eyes of a man to whom the fourth of July is a date of significance.

“Well?” he said. “What is it!”

“Begging your pardon, sir, I wish to ask you on behalf of the servants’ hall to accept our notices, sir.”

“How’s that? You want to quit?”

“After what has happened, yes, sir.”

“All of you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr Morrison’s manner became charged with a sinister calm.

“Say,” he said, “tell me. I’m not altogether wise to what’s customary over here. You want to leave at the end of the month, is that it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Isn’t there some stunt about paying you a month’s wages instead? I seem to have heard of it.”

“You could do it, sir,” said Mr Briggs with a faint smile.

Mr Morrison’s eye gleamed.

“I will do it,” he cried. “By George, you couldn’t suggest a better way of rounding off a happy evening. Send the whole bunch up here, and I’ll pay them off. And tell them that they all go to-morrow by the first train.”

The butler’s jaw fell slightly.

“But, sir—” he began.

Mr Morrison pointed to the door.

“Slide, Kelly, slide,” he said.

CHAPTER XX

CONCLUSION

ON the following day, John wrote to Mr Scobell, informing him of his engagement to Betty. It was a curt letter, and contained no suggestion that the writer regarded the financier’s approval or disapproval as in any way affecting the matter in hand. Only the feeling that, if war was to be waged, it must be waged openly and after due declaration, made him write at all.

An era of the deepest peace had now set in at Norworth Court. Lord Arthur was in London, at his club. The servants had left in a body, as requested, on the day after the garden-party, and the little band of survivors were living, with vast content, a picnic life, supporting themselves, when they did not go to the village inn, on meals cooked by Mrs Morrison. The night when, for the first time in its centuries of existence, hot biscuits appeared in the dining-room of the Court, was one that lingered long in the memory of the party.

It was a peaceful, happy time. With the raising of the standard of revolt, the depressing spell of the Court seemed to have vanished. The gardeners still infested the pleasant grounds, touching their hats as sardonically as of yore, but they had no longer any terrors for Mr Morrison. He acknowledged their salutes with fortitude, and even contempt.

Mrs Morrison, relieved of the burden of her social duties, had become a different woman. And Della was radiant. She had broken the facts in the case of Tom to her parents during the first moments of the revolution, and Mr Morrison, having pointed out, in a speech which Patrick Henry, in an unusually inspired mood, might have equalled, but could not have surpassed, the various ways in which the American young man was superior to every other known variety of young man, had given his approval without a murmur of dissent.

John and Betty spent the days wandering about the grounds or exploring the little lake in the punt, for which another pole had been provided in place of that which had broken with such far-reaching results on a memorable occasion.

Betty, happy though she was in the present, was inclined to touch on the future more frequently than John liked. In these dreamy days the future was an uncongenial topic to him.

His views were unvaryingly optimistic.

“Leave it to me,” he said. “I’ve got about forty pounds. What more do we want? Rockefeller and all those fellows started with about twopence. We’ll go to America with the Morrisons. I’ll get a job of some sort, if it’s blacking boots. And I’ll hold it down, too, if I get boot-black’s cramp. I understand the beauty of honest toil now all right. I’ll black those boots as nobody’s ever thought of blacking them before. My polish will be the talk of New York.”

But Fate had arranged a different destiny for him. Towards the end of the week he was strolling back along the main street of the village, whither he had been to buy tobacco, when from a window on the ground floor of the inn, a voice spoke.

“Hey!” said the voice.

It was Mr Scobell, smiling amiably from behind a cigar-stump.

John had wondered sometimes, when he did not happen to be thinking of anything else, what Mr Scobell’s move would be on receipt of his letter. He had been a little surprised at not hearing from him. That he would come to Norworth he had not anticipated. And still less probable had it seemed that, if he came, he would smile amiably when they met.

“Come along in, Prince,” said Mr Scobell. “I want to have a talk with you. I like this place. I’ve a good mind to stop on and liven it up. Build a hotel, see what I mean, and a shop or two, and all that. These people have got no enterprise.”

John found the financier seated amidst the remains of a late breakfast, still smiling and plainly resolved to let bygones be bygones.

“First,” he began, “about you and Betty. Go right ahead. I’ve no objection.”

“That’s very good of you,” said John. “I thought that, after what had happened——

“Oh, pshaw!” interrupted the other. “That’s all a thing of the past. There’s no hard feelings about that. Why, Prince, do you know that fool-game of yours, stopping the tables and all that, was the best thing that could possibly have happened. If we’d tried for a million years we couldn’t have thought of a better advertisement. The revolution got into the papers, and all the funny men in Paris and London have been writing the place up in a way that would surprise you. Haven’t you seen it?”

“I haven’t seen a paper since I left Mervo.”

“Well, take it from me that the place has had a bigger advertisement than we could have got for it by working our heads off in any other way. The tables are booming. I bet those Monte Carlo fellows aren’t feeling as if somebody had kicked them in the face, no! Why, if it goes on like this, we shall have to hang out the standing room only signs.”

John laughed.

“Well, if the world’s so full of fools,” he said. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t have your share of them. So long as I’m not mixed up in it, you can do all the business you please.”

Mr Scobell regarded him curiously.

“Look here, Prince,” he said, “it beats me, what you did. Do you mean to say you gave up twenty thousand pounds a year just because you didn’t like the way they were made? You’re a wonder! And I’ve got a proposal to make to you.”

“You aren’t going to try to restore me to the throne again, are you?”

“Not a bit of it. Mervo’s going as strong as Standard Oil with a Republic. Besides, you wouldn’t stand it.”

“You’re right there.”

Mr Scobell leaned forward.

“Prince,” he said, “you’ve got no fixed ideas about what you’re going to do from now on, have you?”

“I’ve thought of one or two things. Blacking boots was the last. But I’ve settled nothing.”

“Good. Then this is where we talk business. Did you ever hear the story of the fellows who were making a bet and the fellow who offered to hold the money and then they wanted to know who was going to hold him?”

“When I was a baby, I kicked my nurse for telling me that story.”

“Well, it’s that way with me. You know I’ve got a heap of interests over in America? Well, I’ve got a heap of fellows watching those interests for me. What I want now is someone to watch those fellows. See what I mean? I want someone honest, someone I can trust. He needn’t be a financial genius. All he wants to be is honest, and I’m going to offer the job to you. And I’ll pay you well.”

“What,” said John. “You’re going to do that?”

He drew in his breath slowly.

“This sounds pretty good to me,” he said.

“It’s yours if you’ll take it.”

“There’s no catch this time? You won’t want me to run a gambling-hell as a sideline?”

“No. It’s a square deal. Do you come in?”

John leaned across the table, and extended his hand.

“I do,” he said. “And thanks for saving my life. I never did think much of that boot-black scheme.”

He sat back and looked at Mr Scobell.

“What you’ve done with your wings and harp, I can’t think,” he said meditatively. “It’s a wonderful disguise.”

 

John and Betty were married quietly—or as quietly as the village organist, a lusty performer, would permit—two weeks later at Norworth Church. The bride was given away by Mr Scobell, who, with a delicacy of feeling of which few who knew him would have deemed him capable, refrained from smoking during the ceremony. The wedding breakfast was held at the Court, after which the newly-married pair set off in a motor-car, the gift of the bride’s step-father, for their honeymoon tour.

It was while the chauffeur was cranking up the machine that Mr Benjamin Scobell exhibited the only trace of sentiment with which history credits him.

Betty was already in the car, and John, buttoning his motor-coat, was about to follow her, when the financier drew him aside.

“Hi!” he said. “Jest a moment, Prince.”

John bent an attentive ear.

“Prince,” said Mr Scobell, puffing earnestly at his cigar and keeping his eyes fixed on the distant hills. “I’ve got something I want you to do for me.”

“Yes?” said John. “What’s that?”

Mr Scobell continued to inspect the distant hills.

“I wish you’d name him Benjamin,” he said softly.

Him?” said John, puzzled. “Who? . . . Great Scott!”

He looked fixedly at the financier. His face wore a somewhat dazed expression.

“The papers call you Hustler Scobell, don’t they?” he said at last.

Mr Scobell blushed with pleasure.

“Why, yes. That’s so. They do.”

John nodded thoughtfully.

“I don’t wonder,” he said. Book omitted opening quotation mark.I don’t wonder. Good-bye.”

He walked slowly to the car.

 

 


 

Notes:
Words in magenta typePop-up explanation above indicate either a printer’s error in the UK first edition (Mills & Boon, May 1912) or a word that differs from the reading in other editions. Hover your mouse pointer over the colored text without clicking, and a pop-up explanation will appear. (A quick finger-tap on a touch-screen phone or tablet should work as well.)