A Queen's Error Part 17

It was on the fourth day out that I became acquainted with Dolores d'Alta. While I had been lying disconsolately on my cot, St. Nivel had been improving the shining hour by looking after Miss Dolores, who had taken up her position, during the first few days of her trial, in a sheltered position on the promenade deck, in preference to her "stuffy cabin," as she called her state room.

It had been the pleasure, and had become the duty--a self-imposed one--of St. Nivel to see that she was properly wrapped up.

She did not object to smoke either, having, as she stated, been brought up in an atmosphere of smoke at home. Therefore Jack smoked his cigar.

Had I not known that St. Nivel's inclinations were apparently fixed in the direction of bachelorhood, I should have thought he had fallen in love; but I discovered later that he had, to use an expression of his own, "simply taken on another pal." He found her a congenial person in whose society to smoke cigars. But if he had fallen in love, certainly he would have had a most excellent excuse for doing so.

A daintier little specimen of Southern beauty it would have been difficult to imagine than this little Aquazilian aristocrat. To describe her in a few words, she was a beautiful woman in miniature; she was the most perfectly symmetrical little piece of womanhood that I had ever set eyes upon.

A perfectly clear, creamy complexion, yet not without colour of a rose tint; dimples in the cheeks, which were ravishing when she smiled,--and she was very fond of smiling, ay, and laughing too, and showing the most perfect set of white teeth,--black hair, and very dark blue eyes; and there you have her. United to this beauty of person was a most fascinating natural manner; not the manner of a flirt, but that of a light-hearted, pure-minded girl, as gay as a lark released from captivity, and not unlike it in its new freedom, for she had not escaped from a first-rate finishing school in Paris more than six months.

She had spent the intervening period under the care of a sister of her father who had married an Englishman and who lived in good society.

She had had a season in London and had spent the autumn in a round of country visits which accounted for her wonderful _savoir faire_; she was only eighteen. Now she was going home to her dear father, a widower, under the care of her aunt. Hearing her always referred to in conversation as "Dolores," her surname was a revelation when I heard it properly p.r.o.nounced. St. Nivel's idea of foreign names was exceedingly hazy and misleading. As soon as she told me she was going home to Aquazilia, I became very alert and began to ask her questions.

"Yes," she replied to my query concerning her parent's name, "my father is the Senor Don Juan d'Alta; in the old time of our monarchy he was for many years the Prime Minister. He is a very old man is my father,"

she further explained; "he is nearly seventy!"

Looking at her I could understand the old man simply making an idol of this his only child. It appeared to me very marvellous that I should have met her.

Some of the other pa.s.sengers told me that he was a member of one of the oldest and most aristocratic families in the country.

It was very lovely as we steamed farther and farther away from our own cold fogs and got into the warmth of the south; very fascinating to walk on deck with Dolores and talk, under the brilliant stars, of Aquazilia and the extraordinary chance which had made us meet on board both with the same destination in view--the house of her father.

"I don't think, though, it is so strange," she confided to me one lovely moonlight night when we were walking the promenade deck side by side; "it is not an unreasonable thing that we should have taken the same boat, considering that they only run once a fortnight."

"It is certainly not unreasonable," I answered, with a look into her eyes. "It is the most reasonable chance that I have ever come across in the whole of my life!"

"Why?" she answered, with a look of mischief in her dark blue eyes.

"Because," I answered fervently, with a little tremor in my voice, "it has given me the chance of spending three weeks near you!

"Let us go and look at the flying fish," she answered hastily, to change the conversation. "I do so love to see them."

Yes, I was daily becoming more and more attached to her; for the first time in my long career of flirtation I was beginning to find out what love _really_ meant.

I was falling in love with a little divinity twelve years my junior, and from the depths of my knowledge I expected she would very justly make a fool of me--not intentionally, perhaps, but in effect the same--and laugh at me for my pains.

It seemed very bitter to think of as I saw her walking--and laughing and talking too--with St. Nivel who was six years my junior. It seemed to me, in my growing jealousy, an ideal match for her.

I forgot that young ladies never fall in love with the persons they are expected to, but invariably go off on an unknown tangent of their own, in obedience to the same law of Nature, perhaps, which causes an unusually tall girl to lose her heart to a very diminutive--though generally very consequential--little man.

In the contemplation of the varied charms of Dolores d'Alta, I almost forgot my precious casket, confided in fear and trembling to the care of the captain, and locked up by him in the ship's strong room in my presence and in the presence of St. Nivel.

In due course we came to Coruna, or Corunna as we more commonly call it, and there I had the delight of strolling about the old fortifications all alone with Dolores and showing her the tomb of Sir John Moore, while St. Nivel obligingly took charge of her aunt, and solicitously kept her out of earshot. The old lady had lived long enough in England to appreciate the attentions of a lord, and he a rich one, without designs on her niece's fortune.

Yes, that fortune was my stumbling-block; I learned of it from old Sir Rupert Frampton, our minister to Aquazilia, who was travelling back to his post on the _Oceana_.

"I really don't suppose," he said, one evening in the smoking-room, nodding his head sententiously, "that old Don Juan d'Alta knows what he is worth; neither do I suppose that he cares much, for he is a man of the simplest tastes, living on the plainest food, and having but one hobby and object, in fact, in life."

"His daughter?" I suggested at once, Dolores, of course, being the uppermost thought in my mind.

"No," replied the old gentleman crisply, with the smartness of the _diplomat_; "reptiles!"

"Reptiles!" I exclaimed in disgust; "what reptiles?"

"Princ.i.p.ally snakes," replied the old man, shifting his cigar in his mouth; "he has a regular Zoological Gardens full of them--all kinds, from boa-constrictors to adders. He makes pets of them."

"Not about the _house_?" I suggested.

"No, not exactly," Sir Rupert replied, "unless they stray in by themselves. He's very eccentric and I don't think has been quite himself since the queen abdicated. They say he was in love with her, notwithstanding the fact that she was a confirmed old maid."

"Indeed," I replied, curious to keep the old man talking, for I was desirous of hearing as much as I possibly could about Aquazilia and its capital, Valoro, "it sounds quite romantic."

"Well, it _was_ romantic in a way," he proceeded, glad to have a listener, as old men are; "there's always a certain amount of romance about the court of a reigning queen. Of course you know that the Salic law did not prevail in the kingdom of Aquazilia when it _was_ a kingdom. Yes, it was a splendid court was that of Valoro when Her Majesty Inez the Second reigned over it. I just remember it thirty-five years ago when I went out to it as a young attache on one of my first appointments and took such a fancy to the lovely country."

"Then it _is_ lovely," I ventured; "the reports of it are not exaggerations?"

Old Sir Rupert replied almost with emotion--

"It is superb. It is the loveliest country in the world!"

"In those days I am speaking of," he proceeded, "Valoro was a place worth living in. In many respects it outshone some of the courts of Europe, with which, by the bye, it was in close contact. Queen Inez, as you no doubt know, was a Princess of Istria; the royal line of Aquazilia was simply a collateral branch of the great Imperial House of Dolphberg. And there were those that said that Queen Inez despite all her resistance of the many endeavours to induce her to enter the married state--and her offers had been abundant--was not only a queen and a rich one, but she was also a very beautiful woman."

"Your account of Queen Inez, Sir Rupert, is absolutely fascinating," I said. "I am almost inclined to fall in love with her. Where is she now?"

The old man paused and a sad look came over his face.

"She is dead, poor woman," he answered sadly; "they say she died of a broken heart."

"At losing the throne?" I queried.

"I don't know, I'm sure," he said slowly, throwing away the end of his cigar. "Some say she was glad to get rid of the responsibilities of it, and quite content to retire to a castle she had in Switzerland not far from the Lake of Lucerne. She was a woman of very simple tastes."

"It seems a pity she did not marry," I suggested, "as far as one can judge."

"Well, it is highly probable," he answered, "that she would not have lost her throne if she had had a husband to stand up for her. She was no match for Razzaro."

"Who was Razzaro?" I asked.

"Well, he was the sort of adventurer," the old diplomat answered, "that South America seems especially to breed. He was a man of great talents and abandoned to unscrupulousness. I believe he would have sold his own mother, if he could have got a good bid, and would have haggled with the purchaser whether the price was to include the clothes she stood in."

"A thoroughly honourable, straightforward gentleman," I suggested ironically. "I can imagine a lady such as you describe Queen Inez to have been being peculiarly unfitted to deal with such a man!"

"Yes," agreed Sir Rupert; "and her Prime Minister, or Chancellor as they called him, Don Juan d'Alta, was not much better. He had the misfortune to possess the nature of a modern Bayard, and believed in everybody, until he found out too late that he had been deceived. That is how Queen Inez lost her throne. Razzaro was slowly but surely sapping the Royal power for years, right under d'Alta's nose, and he never really found it out until the whole country burst into revolution."

"What happened then?" I asked.

"Nothing happened," replied Sir Rupert. "When the Queen discovered that the voice of the people was in favour of a Republic she simply abdicated. She would not allow a drop of blood to be shed in her behalf. An Istrian warship which had been waiting for her at the coast took her to Europe with her devoted lady-in-waiting, the Baroness d'Altenberg."