King John of Jingalo Part 5

"What is it, dear?" she inquired, "sciatica?"

His answer came from a source she could not fathom.

"No one," he murmured in a tone of deep discouragement, "no one will ever call _me_ 'Jack.'"

III

Three hours later, after dinner, the King and his son, Prince Max, were sitting together in the same room. The King, feeling considerably better for a good meal, had given Max one of his best cigars, and having gone so far to establish confidential relations, was now trying to summon up courage to speak to the young man as a father should.

But here, as elsewhere, he was met by the old difficulty--he and his son were not intimates. They had drifted apart, not for any lack of filial or paternal affection, but simply because in the round of their official lives they so seldom met privately; and since the Prince had acquired an establishment of his own the King knew little of what he did with his daily life beyond the records of the Court Circular.

Max was now twenty-five; he was taller and darker than his father, more handsome and more self-possessed. In his appearance he combined the polish of a military training with the quiet air of an amateur scholar; his forehead was prematurely, but quite becomingly, bald, his mustache well groomed, his figure slight but athletic. He had inherited his father's full lips, but the glance of his eye was of a keener and shrewder quality, and it might be suspected that the eye-gla.s.ses which he occasionally put on were a.s.sumed more for effect than for necessity. Above all, he possessed what the King conspicuously lacked--self-a.s.surance, and with it a sort of moral ease as though any error he might fall into would be taken rather as an experience to profit by than as an occasion for self-reproach. His face showed as he talked that quality of humor which enables a man to laugh at his own enthusiasms, and one could not always be sure whether he were serious or merely indulging in dialectics. To any one out of touch with his intellectual origins, he was a man difficult to know; and the King, being in that matter altogether at sea, knew really very little about him, and was in consequence a little afraid of him.

That fact made a frontal attack difficult; nevertheless, having screwed himself up to speak, he began abruptly.

"Max," said his father, "have you ever thought about marrying?"

Max smiled a little bitterly. "I started thinking about it," he said, "when I was seventeen; and off and on I have thought about it ever since." Then he added rather coldly, as though to warn off mere curiosity, "Why do you ask, sir? Has any proposal been made?"

"Well," said his father, "we might certainly arrange something. I feel, indeed, that we ought to--at your age. I only wanted first to know how you felt upon the matter. You see," he added, hesitating, "people are beginning to talk; and it won't do."

This oblique and cautious reference to his son's private life marked a new stage in their relations: it was actually the first occasion, in all their intercourse as father and son, upon which the s.e.x-question had ever been broached between them. It was no wonder, therefore, that so far they had been rather strangers to each other. Now, however, having decided to speak, the King also decided that he must go on and interfere. It required some moral courage; for he had never failed to recognize his son as the stronger character, and, especially in intellectual matters, his superior.

"I have been told that you have been keeping a mistress," he said, avoiding the young man's eye.

"That," answered Max, "would, I suppose, be the generally received phrase for it."

"Who is she?" queried the King, pushing hazardously on, now that the danger-point had been reached.

"Do you wish to meet her?"

Parental dignity was offended.

"That is a suggestion you ought not to make."

"Then, my dear father, why inquire after her? She and I suit each other: to you she is nothing."

"How long has this been going on?"

"We have lived together for five years."

The King recalled a phrase that he had recently heard authoritatively spoken--"a relationship of long standing. Morally, of course, that only makes the matter worse."

"H'm!" he said aloud. "You started early, I must say!"

"You, sir, at that age were already a father," said Max correctively.

The King made an interjectory movement, but the Prince went on. "I was twenty, and I was still virginal. To speak frankly, I was amazed at myself, perhaps even amused. Yes, even now I am inclined to think that, among princes, my record must have been exceptional. This lady, to whom I owe nearly the whole of my domestic experience, saved me from an adventuress----"

The King lifted his eyebrows.

"One," went on the Prince, "who would have wrung from me in a single year far more, from a merely monetary point of view, than the whole experience has yet cost me."

The King was slightly bewildered. "This person," he said tentatively, "is not, then, of the adventuress cla.s.s?"

"Nor was that other: by cla.s.s she was one of the highest of our aristocracy. I believe that when she is received at Court it is correct etiquette for you to kiss her upon the cheek. The lady who did actually befriend me was her companion and secretary, an Austrian by birth. She had divorced her husband and possessed only a small annuity on which she was unable to live independently in the style to which she had become accustomed. Yet for the first year of our liaison she would accept from me no provision, and we saw each other but seldom. Strange as it may seem she taught me the value and the charm of conjugal moderation and fidelity. Just now she is receiving a visit from her son, on leave from his military services abroad; and respecting the ordinary moral conventions, which happen also to be hers, I do not go to see her while the son's visit is being paid. Yet I apprehend that he cannot be in ignorance of the facts."

"She has a grown-up son?" queried the King, still a little puzzled; and Max smiled.

"A polite way," said he, "of inquiring as to her age. Yes: she is on the verge of forty, and a.s.sures me that she will soon be showing it. You may be interested also to hear that she is a Roman Catholic, has attacks of devoutness which occasionally prescribe separation, and has twice threatened, not in anger but with a most sincere reluctance, to break up our peaceful establishment. I recognize that in the end her love for her Church will probably prove stronger than her love for me--at all events in practice. I have, indeed, some apprehension that her son's visit may result in a turning of the balance, since he has now inherited his father's property and can give his mother the position she has a right to expect. If that should be so, you will find me very attentive to any offer of marriage that any Court of western civilization (which now includes j.a.pan) may have to make. Have I said, sir, all that you wish to know about my feelings in the matter?"

"What I don't understand," said the King, "is your idea about the morality of all this."

"Really," replied the Prince, "I hardly know that I have any. It has gone on so long; and anything that is regular and of long standing tends to produce a moral feeling."

This arrested the King's attention. "You think so?" he interrogated; but Max waived any decisive p.r.o.nouncement.

"Perhaps," said he, "I do not quite know what morality means. I fancy sometimes that its full meaning may be sprung upon me when I find myself in love; or, if I am not destined to undergo that experience, on the day when I learn that I am to become a father without having intended it.

Morality arises out of the proper or improper performance of social obligations; and I have sometimes wondered whether society's most insane treatment of illegitimacy would not have compelled me into a misalliance with my 'mistress,' as you call her, had she ever----"

"Max!" cried the King, "you are outrageous!"

"Is that really how it strikes you?" inquired his son. "I feared, rather, that it was an inexpugnable remnant of my religious training. If the notion is anarchic I can feel more at home with it. But do not forget that I am a doctor of divinity."

"You!" exclaimed the King.

"Had it escaped your recollection, sir? I confess that sometimes it escapes mine. Yes: I became a D.D. before I was sent down from College."

"You were not 'sent down'!"

"Not ostensibly, sir; I should have been. I left to take up my military--accomplishments, for I may not call them 'duties.' But you can hardly forget that I am the only man who ever dared to screw up the Master of Pentecost in his own rooms. While my a.s.sociates were s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the Dean, I was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the Master; it was one of my earliest attempts to be companionable with my fellow-men."

The King sympathized, but was puzzled. "Do you mean--with the Master?"

"No, sir, with my fellow-students, those of my own years, amongst whom I had been placed. But I found that it was impossible. They, for the lesser offense, were actually 'sent down'; I, having finished my thesis and obtained my doctor's degree, was merely pa.s.sed on at a slightly accelerated pace to receive fresh honors. That gave me a lesson which I have never forgotten; no honor that has come to me have I ever fully earned; and no disgrace that I have earned has ever been visited upon me for the public to know. There in a nutsh.e.l.l you have the moral training of the heir to a modern throne. What chance, then, have I to know anything about morality?"

"My dear son," said the King, "don't say these dreadful things. Even if they are true, don't say them. They do no good."

But though he deprecated having to meet such thoughts clothed in the flesh of speech, he was really very much interested to find that Max had them; he was seeing his son in a new light. And meanwhile the Prince went on--

IV

"I often think, sir, of those two medieval inst.i.tutions which we have now lost--I suppose irrevocably--the whipping boy and the court jester.

What a pity that they cannot be revived! The whipping boy, a device to put princes on their honor to be neither negligent nor wanton in the fulfilment of their duties; and the jester to break us of our too self-conscious airs and exhibit to us our follies. See what we have done instead! When our growing sense of priggish decorum and our dishonest ceremoniousness of speech made the jester a figure no longer possible, we subst.i.tuted for him the poet-laureate!--not to persuade us of our follies, but to chant our undeserved praises. And alas, how much more ridiculous, at certain times, he has made us appear--nay, be! With what lecherous sweetness or ponderous grief he has put us to bed with our wives or our ancestors, with what maudlin sentiment he has crooned over us in our cradles! And how poor a show we present when poetry thus tries to make our ordinary human doings appear so different from those of other men! England set us that bad example; and, as usual, we followed her. Only think how far more resplendent might have been her history had the Court of St. James's continued and developed the inst.i.tution of the jester and let the laureateship go. If Pope could only have had the teasing of Queen Anne, and Swift the goading of the earlier Georges; if Johnson could have b.u.mbled gruff wisdom into the ears of number three; and, following upon these, could Sheridan, and Hook, and Carlyle, and Sidney Smith (I pick up names almost at random) have had a really a.s.sured position and full plenary indulgence as commentators on the Court and aristocracy of the Regency, and of the early Victorian period which culminated in that middleman's millennium, the Great Exhibition, with its Crystal Palace so shoddily furnished to celebrate the expurgation of art from industry. If only that could have been allowed, think how England might have been standing now--honest in her faults as in her virtues, a beacon light to the whole world. But there! it is no use wishing such saving grace to a rival nation, when we are so out of grace ourselves."

Prince Max paused for breath. "And then the whipping boy," he went on, "think of him!"