The Princess Virginia Part 21

"I travel because you travel, your Majesty," replied the old man. "It is kind of you to tolerate me here, and I appreciate it."

Now, they sat facing each other; and the young man, fighting down a sense of guilt--familiar to him in boyish days, when about to be taken to task by the Chancellor--gazed fixedly at the hard, clever face on which the afternoon sun scored the detail of each wrinkle.

"Indeed?" was the Emperor's only answer.

"Your Majesty, I have served you and your father before you, well, I hope, faithfully, I know. I think you trust me."

"No man more. But this sounds a portentous preface. Is it possible you imagine it necessary to 'lead up' to a subject, if I can please myself by doing you a favor?"

"If I have seemed to lead up to what I wish to say, your Majesty, it is only for the sake of explanation. You are wondering, no doubt, how I knew you would travel to-day, and in this train; also why I have ventured to follow. Your intention I learned by accident." (The Chancellor did not explain by what diplomacy that "accident" had been brought about.) "Wishing much to talk over with you a pressing matter that should not be delayed, I took this liberty, and seized this opportunity.

"Some men would, in my place, pretend that business of their own had brought them, and that the train had been chosen by chance. But your Majesty knows me as a blunt man, when I serve him not as diplomat, but as friend. I'm not one to work in the dark with those who trust me, and I want your Majesty to know the truth." (Which perhaps he did, but not the whole truth.)

"You raise my curiosity," said Leopold.

"Then have I your indulgence to speak frankly, not entirely as a humble subject to his Emperor, but as an old man to a young man?"

"I'd have you speak as a friend," said Leopold. But a slight constraint hardened his voice, as he prepared himself for something disagreeable.

"I've had a letter from the Crown Prince of Hungaria. It has come to his ears that there is a certain reason for your Majesty's delay in following up the first overtures for an alliance with his family.

Malicious tongues have whispered that your Majesty's attentions are otherwise engaged; and the young Adalbert has addressed me in a friendly way begging that the rumor may be contradicted or confirmed."

"I'm not sure that negotiations had gone far enough to give him the right to be inquisitive," returned Leopold, flushing.

The Chancellor spread out his old, veined hands in a gesture of appeal. "I fear," he said, "that in my anxiety for your Majesty's welfare and the good of Rhaetia, I may have exceeded my instructions.

My one excuse is, that I believed your mind to be definitely made up.

I still believe it to be so. I would listen to no one who should try to persuade me of the contrary, and I will write Adalbert--"

"You must get yourself and me out of the sc.r.a.pe as best you can, since you admit you got us into it," broke in the Emperor, with an uneasy laugh. "If Princess Virginia of Baumenburg-Drippe is as charming as she is said to be, her difficulty will be in choosing a husband, not in getting one. For once, my dear Chancellor, gossip has told the truth; and I wouldn't pay the Princess so poor a compliment as to ask for her hand, when I've no heart left to give her in exchange for it.

There's some one else--"

"It is of that some one else I would venture to speak, your Majesty.

Gossip has named her. May I?"

"I'll save you the trouble. For I'm not ashamed that the common fate has overtaken me--common, because every man loves once before he dies; and yet uncommon, because no man ever loved a woman so worthy.

Chancellor, there's no woman in the world like Miss Helen Mowbray, the lady to whom I owe my life."

"It's natural you should be grateful, your Majesty, but--"

"It's natural I should be in love."

"Natural that a young man inexperienced in affairs of the heart, should mistake warm grat.i.tude for love. Impossible that the mistake should be allowed to continue."

Leopold's eyes grew dark. "In such a connection," he said, "it would be better not to mention the word 'mistake.' I'm glad you are here; for now you can learn from me my intentions toward that lady--"

"Intentions, did you say, your Majesty? I fear I grow hard of hearing."

"At least you will never grow slow of understanding. I did speak of my intentions toward Miss Mowbray."

"You would give the lady some magnificent estate, some splendid acknowledgment--"

"Whether splendid or not would be a matter of opinion," laughed the Emperor. "I shall offer her a present of myself."

The old man had been sitting with his chin sunk into his short neck, peering out from under his brows in a way he had; but he lifted his head suddenly, with a look in his eyes like that of an animal who scents danger from an unexpected quarter.

"Your Majesty!" he exclaimed. "You are your father's son, you are Rhaetian, and your standard of honor--"

"I hope to marry Miss Mowbray," Leopold cut him short.

The Chancellor's jaw dropped, and he grew pale. "I had dreamed of nothing as bad as this," he blurted out, with no thought or wish to sugar the truth. "I feared a young man's rashness. I dreaded scandal.

But, forgive me, your Majesty, for you a morganatic marriage would be madness--"

"A morganatic marriage I did think of at first. But on second thoughts I saw it would be ungrateful."

"Ah yes, to the country which expects so much of you."

"No, to the woman who has the right to all or nothing. I will make her Empress of Rhaetia."

With a cry the Chancellor sprang up. His eyes glared like the eyes of a bull who receives the death stroke. His working lips, and the hollow sound in his throat alarmed the Emperor.

"No, your Majesty. No!" he panted.

"But I say yes," Leopold answered, "and let no man give me nay. I've thought it all out. I will make her a Countess first. Then, she shall be made my Empress."

"Your Majesty, it is not possible."

"Take care, Chancellor."

"She has been deceiving you. She has neither the birth, the position, nor the name she claims to have, and I can prove it."

"You are mad, von Breitstein," the Emperor flung at him. "That can be your only excuse for such words."

"I am not mad, but I am old and wise, your Majesty. To-day you have made me feel that I am very old. Punish me as you will for my frankness. My work for you and yours is nearly done. Cheerfully will I submit to my dismissal if only this last effort in your service may save the ship of state from wreck. I would not make an accusation which I could not prove. And I can prove that the two English ladies who have been staying at Schloss Lyndalberg are not the persons they pretend to be."

"Who has been lying to you?" cried Leopold, who held between clenched hands the temper he vowed not to lose with this old man.

"To me, no one. To your Majesty, to society in Kronburg, two adventuresses have lied."

The Emperor caught his breath. "If you were a young man I would kill you for that," he said.

"I know you would. As it is, my life is yours. But before you take it, for G.o.d's sake, for your father's sake, hear me out."

Leopold did not speak for a moment, but stared at the vanishing landscape, which he saw through a red haze. "Very well," he said at last, "I will hear you, because I fear nothing you can say."

"When I heard of your Majesty's--admiration for a certain lady," the Chancellor began quickly, lest the Emperor should change his mind, "I looked for her name and her mother's in Burke's Peerage. There I found Lady Mowbray, widow of a dead Baron of that ilk; mother of a son, still a child, and of one daughter, a young woman with many names and twenty-eight years.

"This surprised me, as the Miss Mowbray I had seen at the birthday ball looked no more than eighteen, and--I was told--confessed to twenty. The Mowbrays, I learned by a little further research in Burke, were distantly connected by marriage with the family of Baumenburg-Drippe. This seemed an odd coincidence, in the circ.u.mstances.

But acting as duty bade me act, I wired to two persons: Baron von Sark, your Majesty's amba.s.sador to Great Britain; and the Crown Prince of Hungaria, the brother of Princess Virginia."