carnival week, a year ago, a man draped in the embroidered silks of a
Chinese mandarin, his features entirely concealed by an enormous Chinese
head in cardboard, was standing in the Wintergarten, the big,
dimly-lighted conservatory, near the door of one of the gilt-and-white
reception-rooms, rather a stolid-seeming witness of the multi-coloured
romp within, when a voice behind him said, "How do you do, Mr.
Field?"--a woman's voice, an English voice.
The mandarin turned round.
From a black mask, a pair of blue-gray eyes looked into his broad, bland
Chinese face; and a black domino dropped him an extravagant little
curtsey.
"How do you do?" he responded. "I'm afraid I'm not Mr. Field; but I'll
gladly pretend I am, if you'll stop and talk with me. I was dying for a
little human conversation."
"Oh you're afraid you're not Mr. Field, are you?" the mask replied
derisively. "Then why did you turn when I called his name?"
"You mustn't hope to disconcert me with questions like that," said he.
"I turned because I liked your voice."
He might quite reasonably have liked her voice, a delicate, clear, soft
voice, somewhat high in register, with an accent, crisp, chiselled,
concise, that suggested wit as well as distinction. She was rather
tall, for a woman; one could divine her slender and graceful, under the
voluminous folds of her domino.
She moved a little away from the door, deeper into the conservatory. The
mandarin kept beside her. There, amongst the palms, a _fontaine
lumineuse_ was playing, rhythmically changing colour. Now it was a
shower of rubies; now of emeralds or amethysts, of sapphires, topazes,
or opals.
"How pretty," she said, "and how frightfully ingenious. I am wondering
whether this wouldn't be a good place to sit down. What do _you_ think?"
And she pointed with a fan to a rustic bench.
So they sat down on the rustic bench, by the _fontaine lumineuse_.
"In view of your fear that you're not Mr. Field, it's rather a
coincidence that at a masked ball in Vienna you should just happen to be
English, isn't it?" she asked.
"Oh, everybody's more or less English, in these days, you know," said
he.
"There's some truth in that," she admitted, with a laugh. "What a
diverting piece of artifice this Wintergarten is, to be sure. Fancy
arranging the electric lights to shine through a dome of purple glass,
and look like stars. They do look like stars, don't they? Slightly
overdressed, showy stars, indeed; stars in the German taste; but stars,
all the same. Then, by day, you know, the purple glass is removed, and
you get the sun--the real sun. Do you notice the delicious fragrance of
lilac? If one hadn't too exacting an imagination, one might almost
persuade oneself that one was in a proper open-air garden, on a night in
May--Yes, everybody is more or less English, in these days. That's
precisely the sort of thing I should have expected Victor Field to
say."
"By-the-bye," questioned the mandarin, "if you don't mind increasing my
stores of knowledge, who _is_ this fellow Field?"
"This fellow Field? Ah, who indeed?" said she. "That's just what I wish
you'd tell me."
"I'll tell you with pleasure, after you've supplied me with the
necessary data," he promised cheerfully.
"Well, by some accounts, he's a little literary man in London," she
remarked.
"Oh, come! You never imagined that I was a little literary man in
London," protested he.
"You might be worse," she retorted. "However, if the phrase offends you,
I'll say a rising young literary man, instead. He writes things, you
know."
"Poor chap, does he? But then, that's a way they have, sizing up
literary persons?" His tone was interrogative.
"Doubtless," she agreed. "Poems and stories and things. And book
reviews, I suspect. And even, perhaps, leading articles in the
newspapers."
"_Toute la lyre enfin?_ What they call a penny-a-liner?"
"I'm sure I don't know what he's paid. I should think he'd get rather
more than a penny. He's fairly successful. The things he does aren't
bad," she said.
"I must look 'em up," said he. "But meantime, will you tell me how you
came to mistake me for him? Has he the Chinese type? Besides, what on
earth should a little London literary man be doing at the Countess
Wohenhoffen's?"
"He was standing near the door, over there," she told him, sweetly,
"dying for a little human conversation, till I took pity on him. No, he
hasn't exactly the Chinese type, but he's wearing a Chinese costume, and
I should suppose he'd feel uncommonly hot in that exasperatingly placid
Chinese head. _I'm_ nearly suffocated, and I'm only wearing a _loup_.
For the rest, why _shouldn't_ he be here?"
"If your _loup_ bothers you, pray take it off. Don't mind me," he urged
gallantly.
"You're extremely good," she responded. "But if I should take off my
_loup_, you'd be sorry. Of course, manlike, you're hoping that I'm young
and pretty."
"Well, and aren't you?"
"I'm a perfect fright. I'm an old maid."
"Thank you. Manlike, I confess I _was_ hoping you'd be young and pretty.
Now my hope has received the strongest confirmation. I'm sure you are,"
he declared triumphantly.
"Your argument, with a meretricious air of subtlety, is facile and
superficial. Don't pin your faith to it. Why _shouldn't_ Victor Field be
here?" she persisted.
"The Countess only receives tremendous swells. It's the most exclusive
house in Europe."
"Are you a tremendous swell?" she wondered.
"Rather!" he asseverated. "Aren't you?"
She laughed a little, and stroked her fan, a big fan, a big fan of
fluffy black feathers.
"That's very jolly," said he.
"What?" said she.
"That thing in your lap."
"My fan?"
"I expect you'd call it a fan."
"For goodness' sake, what would _you_ call it?" cried she.
"I should call it a fan."
She gave another little laugh. "You have a nice instinct for the _mot
juste_," she informed him.
"Oh, no," he disclaimed, modestly. "But I can call a fan a fan, when I
think it won't shock the sensibilities of my hearer."
"If the Countess only receives tremendous swells," said she, "you must
remember that Victor Field belongs to the Aristocracy of Talent."
"Oh, _quant à ça_, so, from the Wohenhoffens' point of view, do the
barber and the horse-leech. In this house, the Aristocracy of Talent
dines with the butler."
"Is the Countess such a snob?" she asked.
"No; she's an Austrian. They draw the line so absurdly tight in
Austria."
"Well, then, you leave me no alternative," she argued, "but to conclude
that Victor Field is a tremendous swell. Didn't you notice, I bobbed him
a curtsey?"
"I took the curtsey as a tribute to my Oriental magnificence," he
confessed. "Field doesn't sound like an especially patrician name. I'd
give anything to discover who you are. Can't you be induced to tell me?
I'll bribe, entreat, threaten--I'll do anything you think might persuade
you."
"I'll tell you at once, if you'll own up that you're Victor Field," said
she.
"Oh, I'll own up that I'm Queen Elizabeth if you'll tell me who you are.
The end justifies the means."
"Then you _are_ Victor Field?" she pursued him eagerly.
"If you don't mind suborning perjury, why should I mind committing it?"
he reflected. "Yes. And now, who are you?"
"No; I must have an unequivocal avowal," she stipulated. "Are you or are
you not Victor Field?"
"Let us put it at this," he proposed, "that I'm a good serviceable
imitation; an excellent substitute when the genuine article is not
procurable."
"Of course, your real name isn't anything like Victor Field," she
declared, pensively.
"I never said it was. But I admire the way in which you give with one
hand and take back with the other."
"Your real name--" she began. "Wait a moment--Yes, now I have it. Your
real name--It's rather long. You don't think it will bore you?"
"Oh, if it's really my real name, I daresay I'm hardened to it," said
he.
"Your real name is Louis Charles Ferdinand Stanislas John Joseph
Emmanuel Maria Anna."
"Mercy upon me," he cried, "what a name! You ought to have broken it to
me in instalments. And it's all Christian name at that. Can't you spare
me just a little rag of a surname, for decency's sake?" he pleaded.
"The surnames of royalties don't matter, Monseigneur," she said, with a
flourish.
"Royalties? What? Dear me, here's rapid promotion! I am royal now! And a
moment ago I was a little penny-a-liner in London."
"_L'un n'empêche pas l'autre._ Have you never heard the story of the
Invisible Prince?" she asked.
"I adore irrelevancy," said he. "I seem to have read something about an
invisible prince, when I was young. A fairy tale, wasn't it?"
"The irrelevancy is only apparent. The story I mean is a story of real
life. Have you ever heard of the Duke of Zeln?"
"Zeln? Zeln?" he repeated, reflectively. "No, I don't think so."
She clapped her hands. "Really, you do it admirably. If I weren't
perfectly sure of my facts, I believe I should be taken in. Zeln, as any
history would tell you, as any old atlas would show you, was a little
independent duchy in the center of Germany."
"Poor dear thing! Like Jonah in the center of the whale," he murmured,
sympathetically.
"Hush. Don't interrupt. Zeln was a little independent German duchy, and
the Duke of Zeln was its sovereign. After the war with France it was
absorbed by Prussia. But the ducal family still rank as royal highness.
Of course, you've heard of the Leczinskis?"
"Lecz--what?" said he.
"Leczinski," she repeated.
"How do you spell it?"
"L-e-c-z-i-n-s-k-i."
"Good. Capital. You have a real gift for spelling," he exclaimed.
"Will you be quiet," she said, severely, "and answer my question? Are
you familiar with the name?"
"I should never venture to be familiar with a name I didn't know," he
asserted.
"Ah, you don't know it? You have never heard of Stanislas Leczinska, who
was king of Poland? Of Marie Leczinska, who married Louis VI?"
"Oh, to be sure. I remember. The lady whose portrait one sees at
Versailles."
"Quite so. Very well," she continued, "the last representative of the
Leczinskis, in the elder line, was the Princess Anna Leczinska, who, in
1858, married the Duke of Zeln. She was the daughter of John Leczinski,
Duke of Grodnia and Governor of Galicia, and of the Archduchess
Henrietta d'Este, a cousin of the Emperor of Austria. She was also a
great heiress, and an extremely handsome woman. But the Duke of Zeln was
a bad lot, a viveur, a gambler, a spendthrift. His wife, like a fool,
made her entire fortune over to him, and he proceeded to play ducks and
drakes with it. By the time their son was born he'd got rid of the last
farthing. Their son wasn't born till '63, five years after their
marriage. Well, and then, what do you suppose the Duke did?"
"Reformed, of course. The wicked husband always reforms when a child is
born, and there's no more money," he generalized.
"You know perfectly well what he did," said she. "He petitioned the
German Diet to annul the marriage. You see, having exhausted the dowry
of the Princess Anna, it occurred to him that if she could only be got
out of the way, he might marry another heiress, and have the spending of
another fortune."
"Clever dodge," he observed. "Did it come off?"
"It came off, all too well. He based his petition on the ground that the
marriage had never been--I forget what the technical term is. Anyhow, he
pretended that the princess had never been his wife except in name, and
that the child couldn't possibly be his. The Emperor of Austria stood by
his connection, like the royal gentleman he is; used every scrap of
influence he possessed to help her. But the duke, who was a Protestant
(the princess was of course a Catholic), the duke persuaded all the
Protestant States in the Diet to vote in his favour. The Emperor of
Austria was powerless, the Pope was powerless. And the Diet annulled the
marriage."
"Ah," said the mandarin.
"Yes," she went on. "The marriage was annulled, and the child declared
illegitimate. Ernest Augustus, as the duke was somewhat inconsequently
named, married again, and had other children, the eldest of whom is the
present bearer of the title--the same Duke of Zeln one hears of,
quarreling with the croupiers at Monte Carlo. The Princess Anna, with
her baby, came to Austria. The Emperor gave her a pension, and lent her
one of his country houses to live in--Schloss Sanct--Andreas. Our
hostess, by-the-by, the Countess Wohenhoffen, was her intimate friend
and her _première dame d'honneur_."
"Ah," said the mandarin.
"But the poor princess had suffered more than she could bear. She died
when her child was four years old. The Countess Wohenhoffen took the
infant, by the Emperor's desire, and brought him up with her own son
Peter. He was called Prince Louis Leczinski. Of course, in all moral
right, he was the Hereditary Prince of Zeln. His legitimacy, for the
rest, and his mother's innocence, are perfectly well established, in
every sense but a legal sense, by the fact that he has all the physical
characteristics of the Zeln stock. He has the Zeln nose and the Zeln
chin, which are as distinctive as the Hapsburg lip."
"I hope, for the poor young man's sake, though, that they're not so
unbecoming?" questioned the mandarin.
"They're not exactly pretty," answered the mask. "The nose is a thought
too long, the chin is a trifle too short. However, I daresay the poor
young man is satisfied. As I was about to tell you, the Countess
Wohenhoffen brought him up, and the Emperor destined him for the Church.
He even went to Rome and entered the Austrian College. He'd have been on
the high road to a cardinalate by this time if he'd stuck to the
priesthood, for he had strong interest. But, lo and behold, when he was
about twenty, he chucked the whole thing up."
"Ah? _Histoire de femme?_"
"Very likely," she assented, "though I've never heard any one say so. At
all events, he left Rome, and started upon his travels. He had no money
of his own, but the Emperor made him an allowance. He started upon his
travels, and he went to India, and he went to America, and he went to
South Africa, and then, finally, in '87 or '88, he went--no one knows
where. He totally disappeared, vanished into space. He's not been heard
of since. Some people think he's dead. But the greater number suppose
that he tired of his false position in the world, and one fine day
determined to escape from it, by sinking his identity, changing his
name, and going in for a new life under new conditions. They call him
the Invisible Prince. His position _was_ rather an ambiguous one, wasn't
it? You see, he was neither one thing nor the other. He has no
_état-civil_. In the eyes of the law he was a bastard, yet he knew
himself to be the legitimate son of the Duke of Zeln. He was a citizen
of no country, yet he was the rightful heir to a throne. He was the last
descendant of Stanislas Leczinski, yet it was without authority that he
bore his name. And then, of course, the rights and wrongs of the matter
were only known to a few. The majority of people simply remembered that
there had been a scandal. And (as a wag once said of him) wherever he
went, he left his mother's reputation behind him. No wonder he found the
situation irksome. Well, there is the story of the Invisible Prince."
"And a very exciting, melodramatic little story, too. For my part, I
suspect your Prince met a boojum. I love to listen to stories. Won't you
tell me another? Do, please," he pressed her.
"No, he didn't meet a boojum," she returned. "He went to England, and
set up for an author. The Invisible Prince and Victor Field are one and
the same person."
"Oh, I say! Not really!" he exclaimed.
"Yes, really."
"What makes you think so?" he wondered.
"I'm sure of it," said she. "To begin with, I must confide to you that
Victor Field is a man I've never met."
"Never met--?" he gasped. "But, by the blithe way in which you were
laying his sins at my door, a little while ago, I supposed you were
sworn confederates."
"What's the good of masked balls, if you can't talk to people you've
never met?" she submitted. "I've never met him, but I'm one of his
admirers. I like his little poems. And I'm the happy possessor of a
portrait of him. It's a print after a photograph. I cut it from an
illustrated paper."
"I really almost wish I _was_ Victor Field," he sighed. "I should feel
such a glow of gratified vanity."
"And the Countess Wohenhoffen," she added, "has at least twenty
portraits of the Invisible Prince--photographs, miniatures, life-size
paintings, taken from the time he was born, almost, to the time of his
disappearance. Victor Field and Louis Leczinski have countenances as
like each other as two halfpence."
"An accidental resemblance, doubtless."
"No, it isn't an accidental resemblance," she affirmed.
"Oh, then you think it's intentional?" he quizzed.
"Don't be absurd. I might have thought it accidental, except for one or
two odd little circumstances. _Primo_, Victor Field is a guest at the
Wohenhoffens' ball."
"Oh, he _is_ a guest here?"
"Yes, he is," she said. "You are wondering how I know. Nothing simpler.
The same _costumier_ who made my domino, supplied his Chinese dress. I
noticed it at his shop. It struck me as rather nice, and I asked whom it
was for. The _costumier_ said, for an Englishman at the Hôtel de Bade.
Then he looked in his book, and told me the Englishman's name. It was
Victor Field. So, when I saw the same Chinese dress here to-night, I
knew it covered the person of one of my favorite authors. But I own,
like you, I was a good deal surprised. What on earth should a little
London literary man be doing at the Countess Wohenhoffen's? And then I
remembered the astonishing resemblance between Victor Field and Louis
Leczinski; and I remembered that to Louis Leczinski the Countess
Wohenhoffen had been a second mother; and I reflected that though he
chose to be as one dead and buried for the rest of the world, Louis
Leczinski might very probably keep up private relations with the
Countess. He might very probably come to her ball, incognito, and safely
masked. I observed also that the Countess's rooms were decorated
throughout with _white lilac_. But the white lilac is the emblematic
flower of the Leczinskis; green and white are their family colours.
Wasn't the choice of white lilac on this occasion perhaps designed as a
secret compliment to the Prince? I was taught in the schoolroom that two
and two make four."
"Oh, one can see that you've enjoyed a liberal education," he apprised
her. "But where were you taught to jump to conclusions? You do it with a
grace, an assurance. I too have heard that two and two make four; but
first you must catch your two and two. Really, as if there couldn't be
more than one Chinese costume knocking about Vienna, during carnival
week! Dear, good, sweet lady, it's of all disguises the disguise they're
driving hardest, this particular season. And then to build up an
elaborate theory of identities upon the mere chance resemblance of a
pair of photographs! Photographs indeed! Photographs don't give the
complexion. Say that your Invisible Prince is dark, what's to prevent
your literary man from being fair or sandy? Or _vice versâ_? And then,
how is a little German Polish princeling to write poems and things in
English? No, no, no; your reasoning hasn't a leg to stand on."
"Oh, I don't mind its not having legs," she laughed, "so long as it
convinces me. As for writing poems and things in English, you yourself
said that everybody is more or less English, in these days. German
princes are especially so. They all learn English, as a second
mother-tongue. You see, like Circassian beauties, they are mostly bred
up for the marriage market; and nothing is a greater help towards a good
sound remunerative English marriage, than a knowledge of the language.
However, don't be frightened. I must take it for granted that Victor
Field would prefer not to let the world know who he is. I happen to have
discovered his secret. He may trust to my discretion."
"You still persist in imagining that I'm Victor Field?" he murmured
sadly.
"I should have to be extremely simple-minded," she announced, "to
imagine anything else. You wouldn't be a male human being if you had sat
here for half an hour patiently talking about another man."
"Your argument," said he, "with a meretricious air of subtlety, is
facile and superficial. I thank you for teaching me that word. I'd sit
here till doomsday talking about my worst enemy, for the pleasure of
talking with you."
"Perhaps we have been talking of your worst enemy. Whom do the moralists
pretend a man's worst enemy is wont to be?" she asked.
"I wish you would tell me the name of the person the moralists would
consider _your_ worst enemy," he replied.
"I'll tell you directly, as I said before, if you'll own up," she
offered.
"Your price is prohibitive. I've nothing to own up to."
"Well then--good night," she said.
Lightly, swiftly, she fled from the conservatory, and was soon
irrecoverable in the crowd.
The next morning Victor Field left Vienna for London; but before he left
he wrote a letter to Peter Wohenhoffen. In the course of it he said:
"There was an Englishwoman at your ball last night with the reasoning
powers of a detective in a novel. By divers processes of elimination and
induction, she had formed all sorts of theories about no end of things.
Among others, for instance, she was willing to bet her halidome that a
certain Prince Louis Leczinski, who seems to have gone on the spree some
years ago, and never to have come home again--she was willing to bet
anything you like that Leczinski and I--_moi qui vous parle_--were to
all intents and purposes the same. Who was she, please? Rather a tall
woman, in a black domino, with gray eyes, or grayish-blue, and a nice
voice."
In the answer which he received from Peter Wohenhoffen towards the end
of the week, Peter said: "There were nineteen Englishwomen at my
mother's party, all of them rather tall, with nice voices, and gray or
blue-gray eyes. I don't know what colours their dominoes were. Here is a
list of them."
The names that followed were names of people whom Victor Field almost
certainly would never meet. The people Victor knew in London were the
sort of people a little literary man might be expected to know. Most of
them were respectable; some of them even deemed themselves rather smart,
and patronized him right Britishly. But the nineteen names in Peter
Wohenhoffen's list ("Oh, me! Oh, my!" cried Victor) were names to make
you gasp.
All the same, he went a good deal to Hyde Park during the season, and
watched the driving.
"Which of all those haughty high-born beauties is she?" he wondered
futilely.
And then the season passed, and then the year; and little by little, of
course, he ceased to think about her.
* * * * *
One afternoon last May, a man, habited in accordance with the fashion of
the period, stopped before a hairdresser's shop in Knightsbridge
somewhere, and, raising his hat, bowed to the three waxen ladies who
simpered from the window.
"Oh! It's Mr. Field!" a voice behind him cried. "What are those cryptic
rites that you're performing? What on earth are you bowing into a
hairdresser's window for?"--a smooth, melodious voice, tinged by an
inflection that was half ironical, half bewildered.
"I was saluting the type of English beauty," he answered, turning.
"Fortunately, there are divergencies from it," he added, as he met the
puzzled smile of his interlocutrice; a puzzled smile, indeed, but, like
the voice, by no means without its touch of irony.
She gave a little laugh; and then, examining the models critically,
"Oh?" she questioned. "Would you call that the type? You place the type
high. Their features are quite faultless, and who ever saw such
complexions?"
"It's the type, all the same," said he. "Just as the imitation
marionette is the type of English breeding."
"The imitation marionette? I'm afraid I don't follow," she confessed.
"The imitation marionettes. You've seen them at little theatres in
Italy. They're actors who imitate puppets. Men and women who try to
behave as if they weren't human, as if they were made of starch and
whalebone, instead of flesh and blood."