The Terrible Twins Part 25

"Oh, you _are_ nice!" she said.

The Terror's ineffable serenity was for once scattered to the winds.

He flushed and gazed round the wood with horror-stricken eyes: if any one should have seen it!

The princess marked his trouble, and said in a tone of distress: "Don't you like for me to kiss you?"

The Terror swallowed the lump of horror in his throat, and said, faintly but gallantly: "Yes--oh, rather."

"Then kiss me," said the princess simply, snuggling closer to him.

The despairing eyes of the Terror swept the woods; then he kissed her gingerly.

"I _am_ fond of you, you know," said the princess in a frankly proprietary tone.

The Terror's scattered wits at last worked. He rose to his feet, and said quickly:

"Yes; let's be getting to the others."

The princess rose obediently.

But the ice was broken; and the kisses of the princess, if not frequent, were, at any rate, not rare. The Terror at first endured them; then he came rather to like them. But he strictly enjoined discretion on her; it would never do for Erebus to learn that she kissed him. The princess had no desire that Erebus, or any one else for that matter, should learn; but discretion and kisses have no natural affinity; and, without their knowing it, Wiggins became aware of the practise.

He had always observed that the Twins had no secrets from each other; and he never dreamed that he was letting an uncommonly awkward cat out of a bag when during a lull in the strenuous life, he said to Erebus:

"I suppose the Terror's in love with the princess, kissing her like that. I think it's awfully silly." And he spurned the earth.

Erebus grabbed his arm and cried fiercely: "He never does!"

Wiggins looked at her in some surprise; her face was one dusky flush; and her eyes were flashing. He had seen her angry often enough, but never so angry as this; and he saw plainly that he had committed a grievous indiscretion.

"Perhaps she kissed him," he said quickly.

"He'd never let her!" cried Erebus fiercely.

"Perhaps they didn't," said Wiggins readily.

"You know they did!" cried Erebus yet more fiercely.

"I may have made a mistake. It's quite easy to make a mistake about that kind of thing," said Wiggins.

Erebus would not have it, and very fiercely she dragged piecemeal from his reluctant lips the story of the surprised idyl. He had seen the princess with an arm round the Terror's neck, and they had kissed.

With clenched fists and blazing eyes Erebus, taking the line of the least resistance, sought the princess. She found her lying back drowsily against a sunny bank.

Erebus came to an abrupt stop before her and cried fiercely: "Princess or no princess, you shan't kiss the Terror!"

The drowsiness fled; and the princess sat up. Her gray eyes darkened and sparkled. She had never made a face in her life; it is not improbable, seeing how sheltered a life she had led, that she was ignorant that faces were made; but quite naturally she made a hideous face at Erebus, and said:

"I shall!"

"If you do, I'll smack you!" cried Erebus; and she ground her teeth.

For all her Hohenzollern blood, the princess was a timid child; but by a gracious provision of nature even the timidest female will fight in the matter of a male. She met Erebus' blazing eyes squarely and said confidently:

"He won't let you. And if you do he'll smack you--much harder!"

Had the princess been standing up, Erebus would have smacked her then and there. But she was sitting safely down; and the Queensberry rules only permit you to strike any one standing up. Erebus forgot them, stooped to strike, remembered them, straightened herself, and with a really pantherous growl dashed away in search of the Terror.

She found him examining and strengthening the barrier of thorns; and she cried:

"I know all about your kissing the princess! I never heard of such silly babyishness!"

It was very seldom, indeed, that the Terror showed himself sensible to the emotions of his sister; but on this occasion he blushed faintly as he said:

"Well, what harm is there in it?"

"It's babyish! It's what mollycoddles do! It's girlish! It's--"

The Terror of a sudden turned brazen; he said loudly and firmly:

"You mind your own business! It isn't babyish at all! She's asked me to marry her; and when we're grown up I'm going to--so there!"

CHAPTER XI

AND THE UNREST CURE

Erebus knew her brother well; she perceived that she was confronted by what she called his obstinacy; and though his brazen-faced admission had raised her to the very height of amazement and horror, she uttered no protest. She knew that protest would be vain, that against his obstinacy she was helpless. She wrung her hands and turned aside into the wood, overwhelmed by his defection from one of their loftiest ideals.

Then followed a period of strain. She a.s.sumed an att.i.tude of very haughty contempt toward the errant pair, devoted herself to Wiggins, and let them coldly alone. From this att.i.tude Wiggins was the chief sufferer: the Terror had the princess and the princess had the Terror; Erebus enjoyed her display of haughty contempt, but Wiggins missed the strenuous life, the rushing games, in which you yelled so heartily. As often as he could he stole away from the haughty Erebus and joined the errant pair. It is to be feared that the princess found the kisses sweeter for the ban Erebus had laid on them.

No one in the Deepings suspected that the missing princess was on Deeping Knoll. There had been sporadic outbursts of suspicion that the Twins had had a hand in her disappearance. But no one had any reason to suppose that they and the princess had even been acquainted. Doctor Arbuthnot, indeed, questioned both Wiggins and the Terror; but they were mindful of the fact that Lady Rowington (they were always very careful to address her as Lady Rowington) and not the princess, was at the knoll, and were thus able to a.s.sure him with sufficient truthfulness that they could not tell him where the princess was. The bursts of suspicion therefore were brief.

But there was one man in England in whom suspicion had not died down.

Suspicion is, indeed, hardly the word for the feeling of Sir Maurice Falconer in the matter. When he first read in his _Morning Post_ of the disappearance of the Princess Elizabeth of Ca.s.sel-Na.s.sau from Muttle Deeping Grange he said confidently to himself: "The Twins again!" and to that conviction his mind clung.

It was greatly strengthened by a study of the reproduction of the Socialist manifesto on the front page of an enterprising halfpenny paper. He told himself that Socialists are an educated, even over-educated folk, and if one of them did set himself to draw a skull and cross-bones, the drawing would be, if not exquisite, at any rate accurate and unsmudged; that it was highly improbable that a Socialist would spell desperate with two "a's" in an important doc.u.ment without being corrected by a confederate. On the other hand the drawing of the skull and cross-bones seemed to him to display a skill to which the immature genius of the Terror might easily have attained, while he could readily conceive that he would spell desperate with two "a's" in any doc.u.ment.

But Sir Maurice was not a man to interfere lightly in the pleasures of his relations; and he would not have interfered at all had it not been for the international situation produced by the disappearance of the princess. As it was he was so busy with lunches, race meetings, dinners, theater parties, dances and suppers that he was compelled to postpone intervention till the sixth day, when every Socialist organ and organization from San Francisco eastward to j.a.pan was loudly disavowing any connection with the crime, the newspapers of England and Germany were snarling and howling and roaring and bellowing at one another, and the Foreign Office and the German Chancellery were wiring frequent, carefully coded appeals to each other to invent some plausible excuse for not mobilizing their armies and fleets. Even then Sir Maurice, who knew too well the value of German press opinion, would not have interfered, had not the extremely active wife of a cabinet minister consulted him about the easiest way for her to sell twenty thousand pounds' worth of consols. He disliked the lady so strongly that after telling her how she could best compa.s.s her design, he felt that the time had come to ease the international situation.

With this end in view he went down to Little Deeping. His conviction that the Twins were responsible for the disappearance of the princess became cert.i.tude when he learned from Mrs. Dangerfield that they were encamped on Deeping Knoll, and had been there since the day before that disappearance. But he kept that cert.i.tude to himself, since it was his habit to do things in the pleasantest way possible.

He forthwith set out across the fields and walked through the home wood and park to Muttle Deeping Grange. He gave his card to the butler and told him to take it straight to Miss Lambart, with whom he was on terms of friendship rather than of acquaintance; and in less than three minutes she came to him in the drawing-room.

She was looking anxious and worried; and as they shook hands he said: "Is this business worrying you?"