The Certain Hour Part 19

And then--I really don't recall what happened. But there was a general and unqualified deuce to pay with no pitch at a really satisfying temperature."

The stouter man said quietly: "It is a thrilling tale which you narrate. Only, I do recall what happened then. The usurping duke was very much in earnest, desirous of retaining his little kingdom, and particularly desirous of the woman whom he loved. In consequence, he had Monsieur the Runaway obliterated while the latter was talking nonsense----"

The tutor's brows had mounted.

"I scorn to think it even of anybody who is controlled in every action by a sense of duty," Georges Desmarets explained, "that Duke Augustus would cause you to be murdered in your sleep."

"A hit!" The younger man unsmilingly gesticulated like one who has been touched in sword-play. "Behold now, as the populace in their blunt way would phrase it, I am squelched."

"And so the usurping duke was married and lived happily ever afterward." Georges Desmarets continued: "I repeat to you there is only the choice between declaring yourself and being--we will say, removed.

Your cousin is deeply in love with the Princess Sophia, and thanks to me, has now no chance of marrying her until his t.i.tle has been secured by your--removal. Do not deceive yourself. High interests are involved. You are the grain of sand between big wheels. I iterate that the footpad who attacked you last night was merely a prologue. I happen to know your cousin has entrusted the affair to Heinrich Obendorf, his foster-brother, who, as you will remember, is not particularly squeamish."

Paul Vanderhoffen thought a while. "Desmarets," he said at last, "it is no use. I scorn your pribbles and your prabbles. I bargained with Augustus. I traded a duchy for my personal liberty. Frankly, I would be sorry to connect a sharer of my blood with the a.s.sault of yesterday.

To be unpardonably candid, I have not ever found that your a.s.sertion of an event quite proved it had gone through the formality of occurring.

And so I shall hold to my bargain."

"The night brings counsel," Desmarets returned. "It hardly needs a night, I think, to demonstrate that all I say is true."

And so they parted.

Having thus dismissed such trifles as statecraft and the well-being of empires, Paul Vanderhoffen turned toward consideration of the one really serious subject in the universe, which was of course the bright, miraculous and incredible perfection of Mildred Claridge.

"I wonder what you think of me? I wonder if you ever think of me?" The thought careered like a caged squirrel, now that he walked through autumn woods toward her home.

"I wish that you were not so sensible. I wish your mother were not even more so. The woman reeks with common-sense, and knows that to be common is to be unanswerable. I wish that a dispute with her were not upon a par with remonstrance against an earthquake."

He lighted a fresh cheroot. "And so you are to marry the Brudenel t.i.tle and bank account, with this particular Heleigh thrown in as a dividend. And why not? the estate is considerable; the man who enc.u.mbers it is sincere in his adoration of you; and, chief of all, Lady John Claridge has decreed it. And your decision in any matter has always lain between the claws of that steel-armored crocodile who, by some miracle, is your mother. Oh, what a universe! were I of hasty temperament I would cry out, TUT AND GO TO!"

This was the moment which the man hid in the thicket selected as most fit for intervention through the a.s.sistance of a dueling pistol. Paul Vanderhoffen reeled, his face bewilderment. His hands clutched toward the sky, as if in anguish he grasped at some invisible support, and he coughed once or twice. It was rather horrible. Then Vanderhoffen shivered as though he were very cold, and tottered and collapsed in the parched roadway.

A slinking man whose lips were gray and could not refrain from twitching came toward the limp heap. "So----!" said the man. One of his hands went to the tutor's breast, and in his left hand dangled a second dueling pistol. He had thrown away the other after firing it.

"And so----!" observed Paul Vanderhoffen. Afterward there was a momentary tussle. Now Paul Vanderhoffen stood erect and flourished the loaded pistol. "If you go on this way," he said, with some severity, "you will presently be neither loved nor respected. There was a time, though, when you were an excellent shot, Herr Heinrich Obendorf."

"I had my orders, highness," said the other stolidly.

"Oh yes, of course," Paul Vanderhoffen answered. "You had your orders--from Augustus!" He seemed to think of something very far away.

He smiled, with quizzically narrowed eyes such as you may yet see in Raeburn's portrait of the man. "I was remembering, oddly enough, that elm just back of the Canova Pavilion--as it was twenty years ago. I managed to scramble up it, but Augustus could not follow me because he had such short fat little legs. He was so proud of what I had done that he insisted on telling everybody--and afterward we had oranges for luncheon, I remember, and sucked them through bits of sugar. It is not fair that you must always remember and always love that boy who played with you when you were little--after he has grown up to be another person. Eh no! youth pa.s.ses, but all its memories of unimportant things remain with you and are less kind than any self-respecting viper would be. Decidedly, it is not fair, and some earnest-minded person ought to write to his morning paper about it... . I think that is the reason I am being a sentimental fool," Paul Vanderhoffen explained.

Then his teeth clicked. "Get on, my man," he said. "Do not remain too near to me, because there was a time when I loved your employer quite as much as you do. This fact is urging me to dangerous ends. Yes, it is prompting me, even while I talk with you, to give you a lesson in marksmanship, my inconveniently faithful Heinrich."

He shrugged. He lighted a cheroot with hands whose tremblings, he devoutly hoped, were not apparent, for Prince Fribble had been ashamed to manifest a sincere emotion of any sort, and Paul Vanderhoffen shared as yet this foible.

"Oh Brutus! Ravaillac! Damiens!" he drawled. "O general compendium of misguided aspirations! do be a duck and get along with you. And I would run as hard as I could, if I were you, for it is war now, and you and I are not on the same side."

Paul Vanderhoffen paused a hundred yards or so from this to shake his head. "Come, come! I have lost so much that I cannot afford to throw my good temper into the bargain. To endure with a grave face this perfectly unreasonable universe wherein destiny has locked me is undoubtedly meritorious; but to bustle about it like a caged canary, and not ever to falter in your hilarity, is heroic. Let us, by all means, not consider the obdurate if gilded barriers, but rather the lettuce and the cuttle-bone. I have my choice between becoming a corpse or a convict--a convict? ah, undoubtedly a convict, sentenced to serve out a life-term in a cess-pool of castby superst.i.tions."

He smiled now over Paul Vanderhoffen's rage. "Since the situation is tragic, let us approach it in an appropriate spirit of frivolity. My circ.u.mstances bully me. And I succ.u.mb to irrationality, as rational persons invariably end by doing. But, oh, dear me! oh, Osiris, Termagaunt, and Zeus! to think there are at least a dozen other ne'er-do-wells alive who would prefer to make a mess of living as a grand-duke rather than as a scribbler in Grub Street! Well, well! the jest is not of my contriving, and the one concession a sane man will never yield the universe is that of considering it seriously."

And he strode on, resolved to be Prince Fribble to the last.

"Frivolity," he said, "is the smoked gla.s.s through which a civilized person views the only world he has to live in. For, otherwise, he could not presume to look upon such coruscations of insanity and remain unblinded."

This heartened him, as a rounded phrase will do the best of us. But by-and-bye,

"Frivolity," he groaned, "is really the cheap mask incompetence claps on when haled before a mirror."

And at Leamington Manor he found her strolling upon the lawn. It was an ordered, lovely scene, steeped now in the tranquillity of evening.

Above, the stars were losing diffidence. Below, and within arms'

reach, Mildred Claridge was treading the same planet on which he fidgeted and stuttered.

Something in his heart snapped like a fiddle-string, and he was entirely aware of this circ.u.mstance. As to her eyes, teeth, coloring, complexion, brows, height and hair, it is needless to expatiate. The most painstaking inventory of these chattels would necessarily be misleading, because the impression which they conveyed to him was that of a bewildering, but not distasteful, transfiguration of the universe, apt as a fanfare at the entrance of a queen.

But he would be Prince Fribble to the last. And so, "Wait just a moment, please," he said, "I want to harrow up your soul and freeze your blood."

Wherewith he suavely told her everything about Paul Vanderhoffen's origin and the alternatives now offered him, and she listened without comment.

"Ai! ai!" young Vanderhoffen perorated; "the situation is complete. I have not the least desire to be Grand-Duke of Saxe-Kesselberg. It is too abominably tedious. But, if I do not join in with Desmarets, who has the guy-ropes of a restoration well in hand, I must inevitably be--removed, as the knave phrases it. For as long as I live, I will be an insuperable barrier between Augustus and his Sophia. Otototoi!" he wailed, with a fine tone of tragedy, "the one impossible achievement in my life has always been to convince anybody that it was mine to dispose of as I elected!"

"Oh, man proposes----" she began, cryptically. Then he deliberated, and sulkily submitted: "But I may not even propose to abdicate.

Augustus has put himself upon sworn record as an eye-witness of my hideous death. And in consequence I might keep on abdicating from now to the crack of doom, and the only course left open to him would be to treat me as an impostor."

She replied, with emphasis, "I think your cousin is a beast!"

"Ah, but the madman is in love," he pleaded. "You should not judge poor masculinity in such a state by any ordinary standards. Oh really, you don't know the Princess Sophia. She is, in sober truth, the nicest person who was ever born a princess. Why, she had actually made a mock of even that handicap, for ordinarily it is as disastrous to feminine appearance as writing books. And, oh, Lord! they will be marrying her to me, if Desmarets and I win out." Thus he forlornly ended.

"The designing minx!" Miss Claridge said, distinctly.

"Now, gracious lady, do be just a cooing pigeon and grant that when men are in love they are not any more enc.u.mbered by abstract notions about honor than if they had been womanly from birth. Come, let's be lyrical and open-minded," he urged; and he added, "No, either you are in love or else you are not in love. And nothing else will matter either way.

You see, if men and women had been primarily designed to be rational creatures, there would be no explanation for their being permitted to continue in existence," he lucidly explained. "And to have grasped this fact is the pith of all wisdom."

"Oh, I am very wise." A glint of laughter shone in her eyes. "I would claim to be another Pythoness if only it did not sound so snaky and wriggling. So, from my trident--or was it a Triton they used to stand on?--I announce that you and your Augustus are worrying yourselves gray-headed over an idiotically simple problem. Now, I disposed of it offhand when I said, 'Man proposes.'"

He seemed to be aware of some one who from a considerable distance was inquiring her reasons for this statement.

"Because in Saxe-Kesselberg, as in all other German states, when a prince of the reigning house marries outside of the mediatized n.o.bility he thereby forfeits his right of succession. It has been done any number of times. Why, don't you see, Mr. Vanderhoffen? Conceding you ever do such a thing, your cousin Augustus would become at once the legal heir. So you must marry. It is the only way, I think, to save you from regal incarceration and at the same time to rea.s.sure the Prince of Lueminster--that creature's father--that you have not, and never can have, any claim which would hold good in law. Then Duke Augustus could peaceably espouse his Sophia and go on reigning---- And, by the way, I have seen her picture often, and if that is what you call beauty----" Miss Claridge did not speak this last at least with any air of pointing out the self-evident.

And, "I believe," he replied, "that all this is actually happening. I might have known fate meant to glut her taste for irony."

"But don't you see? You have only to marry anybody outside of the higher n.o.bility--and just as a makeshift----" She had drawn closer in the urgency of her desire to help him. An infinite despair and mirth as well was kindled by her nearness. And the man was insane and dimly knew as much.

And so, "I see," he answered. "But, as it happens, I cannot marry any woman, because I love a particular woman. At least, I suppose she isn't anything but just a woman. That statement," he announced, "is a formal tribute paid by what I call my intellect to what the vulgar call the probabilities. The rest of me has no patience whatever with such idiotic blasphemy."

She said, "I think I understand." And this surprised him, coming as it did from her whom he had always supposed to be the fiancee of Lord Brudenel's t.i.tle and bank-account.

"And, well!"--he waved his hands--"either as tutor or as grand-duke, this woman is unattainable, because she has been far too carefully reared"--and here he frenziedly thought of that terrible matron whom, as you know, he had irreverently likened to a crocodile--"either to marry a pauper or to be contented with a left-handed alliance. And I love her. And so"--he shrugged--"there is positively nothing left to do save sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings."