After the supper there were obligations which the Prince, whose sense of
etiquette was always strong, could not avoid. He took Penelope back to
her aunt, reminding her that the next dance but one belonged to him.
Miss Morse, who was an invalid and was making one of her very rare
appearances in Society, watched him curiously as he disappeared.
“I wonder what they’d think of your new admirer in New York, Penelope,”
she remarked.
“I imagine,” Penelope answered, “that they would envy me very much.”
Miss Morse, who was a New Englander of the old-fashioned type, opened
her lips, but something in her niece’s face restrained her.
“Well, at any rate,” she said, “I hope we don’t go to war with them.
The Admiral wrote me, a few weeks ago, that he saw no hope for anything
else.”
“It would be a terrible complication,” the Duchess sighed, “especially
considering our own alliance with Japan. I don’t think we need consider
it seriously, however. Over in America you people have too much common
sense.”
“The Government have, very likely,” Miss Morse admitted, “but it isn’t
always the Government who decide things or who even rule the country.
We have an omnipotent Press, you know. All that’s wanted is a weak
President, and Heaven knows where we should be!”
“Of course,” the Duchess remarked, “Prince Maiyo is half an Englishman.
His mother was a Stretton-Wynne. One of the first intermarriages, I
should think. Lord Stretton-Wynne was Ambassador to Japan.”
“I think,” said Penelope, “that if you could look into Prince Maiyo’s
heart you would not find him half an Englishman. I think that he is more
than seven-eighths a Japanese.”
“I have heard it whispered,” the Duchess remarked, leaning forward,
“that he is over here on an exceedingly serious mission. One thing is
quite certain. No one from his country, or from any other country, for
that matter, has ever been so entirely popular amongst us. He has the
most delightful manners of any man I ever knew of any race.”
Sir Charles came up, with gloomy face, to claim a dance. After it was
over, he led Penelope back to her aunt almost in silence.
“You are dancing again with the Prince?” he asked.
“Certainly,” she answered. “Here he comes.”
The Prince smiled pleasantly at the young man, who towered like a giant
above him, and noticed at once his lack of cordiality.
“I am selfish!” he exclaimed, pausing with Penelope’s hand upon his coat
sleeve. “I am taking you too much away from your friends, and spoiling
your pleasure, perhaps, because I do not dance. Is it not so? It is your
kindness to a stranger, and they do not all appreciate it.”
“We will go into the winter garden and talk it over,” she answered,
smiling.
They found their old seats unoccupied. Once more they sat and listened
to the fall of the water.
“Prince,” said Penelope, “there is one thing I have learned about you
this evening, and that is that you do not love questions. And yet there
is one other which I should like to ask you.”
“If you please,” the Prince murmured.
“You spoke, a little time ago,” she continued, “of some great crisis
with which your country might soon come face to face. Might I ask you
this: were you thinking of war with the United States?”
He looked at her in silence for several moments.
“Dear Miss Penelope,” he said,--“may I call you that? Forgive me if I am
too forward, but I hear so many of our friends--”
“You may call me that,” she interrupted softly.
“Let me remind you, then, of what we were saying a little time ago,”
he went on. “You will not take offence? You will understand, I am sure.
Those things that lie nearest to my heart concerning my country are the
things of which I cannot speak.”
“Not even to me?” she pleaded. “I am so insignificant. Surely I do not
count?”
“Miss Penelope,” he said, “you yourself are a daughter of that country
of which we have been speaking.”
She was silent.
“You think, then,” she asked, “that I put my country before everything
else in the world?”
“I believe,” he answered, “that you would. Your country is too young to
be wholly degenerate. It is true that you are a nation of fused races--a
strange medley of people, but still you are a nation. I believe that in
time of stress you would place your country before everything else.”
“And therefore?” she murmured.
“And therefore,” he continued with a delightful smile, “I shall not
discuss my hopes or fears with you. Or if we do discuss them,” he went
on, “let us weave them into a fairy tale. Let us say that you are indeed
the Daughter of All America and that I am the Son of All Japan. You know
what happens in fairyland when two great nations rise up to fight?”
“Tell me,” she begged.
“Why, the Daughter of All America and the Son of All Japan stand hand
in hand before their people, and as they plight their troth, all bitter
feelings pass away, the shouts of anger cease, and there is no more talk
of war.”
She sighed, and leaned a little towards him. Her eyes were soft and
dusky, her red lips a little parted.
“But I,” she whispered, “am not the Daughter of All America.”
“Nor am I,” he answered with a sigh, “the Son of all Japan.”
There was a breathless silence. The water splashed into the basin, the
music came throbbing in through the flower-hung doorways. It seemed to
Penelope that she could almost hear her heart beat. The blood in her
veins was dancing to the one perfect waltz. The moments passed. She
drew a little breath and ventured to look at him. His face was still and
white, as though, indeed, it had been carved out of marble, but the fire
in his eyes was a living thing.
“We have actually been talking nonsense,” she said, “and I thought that
you, Prince, were far too serious.”
“We were talking fairy tales,” he answered, “and they are not nonsense.
Do not you ever read the history of your country as it was many hundreds
of years ago, before this ugly thing they call civilization weakened the
sinews of our race and besmirched the very face of duty? Do you not like
to read of the times when life was simpler and more natural, and there
was space for every man to live and grow and stretch out his hands
to the skies,--every man and every woman? They call them, in your
literature, the days of romance. They existed, too, in my country. It
is not nonsense to imagine for a little time that the ages between have
rolled away and that those days are with us?”
“No,” she answered, “it is not nonsense. But if they were?”
He raised her fingers to his lips and kissed them. The touch of his
hand, the absolute delicacy of the salute itself, made it unlike any
other caress she had ever known or imagined.
“The world might have been happier for both of us,” he whispered.
Somerfield, sullen and discontented, came and looked at them, moved
away, and then hesitatingly returned.
“Willmott is waiting for you,” he said. “The last was my dance, and this
is his.”
She rose at once and turned to the Prince.
“I think that we should go back,” she said. “Will you take me to my
aunt?”
“If it must be so,” he answered. “Tell me, Miss Penelope,” he added,
“may I ask your aunt or the Duchess to bring you one day to my house to
see my treasures? I cannot say how long I shall remain in this country.
I would like you so much to come before I break up my little home.”
“Of course we will,” she answered. “My aunt goes nowhere, but the
Duchess will bring me, I am sure. Ask her when I am there, and we can
agree about the day.”
He leaned a little towards her.
“Tomorrow?” he whispered.
She nodded. There were three engagements for the next day of which she
took no heed.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Come and let us arrange it with the Duchess.”
Prince Maiyo left Devenham House to find the stars paling in the
sky, and the light of an April dawn breaking through the black clouds
eastwards. He dismissed his electric brougham with a little wave of
the hand, and turned to walk to his house in St. James’s Square. As he
walked, he bared his head. After the long hours of artificially heated
rooms, there was something particularly soothing about the fresh
sweetness of the early spring morning. There was something, it seemed
to him, which reminded him, however faintly, of the mornings in his own
land,--the perfume of the flowers from the window-boxes, perhaps, the
absence of that hideous roar of traffic, or the faint aromatic scent
from the lime trees in the Park, heavy from recent rain. It was the
quietest hour of the twenty-four,--the hour almost of dawn. The night
wayfarers had passed away, the great army of toilers as yet slumbered.
One sad-eyed woman stumbled against him as he walked slowly up
Piccadilly. He lifted his hat with an involuntary gesture, and her laugh
changed into a sob. He turned round, and emptied his pockets of silver
into her hand, hurrying away quickly that his eyes might not dwell upon
her face.
“A coward always,” he murmured to himself, a little wearily, for he knew
where his weakness lay,--an invincible repugnance to the ugly things
of life. As he passed on, however, his spirits rose again. He caught a
breath of lilac scent from a closed florist’s shop. He looked up to the
skies, over the housetops, faintly blue, growing clearer every moment.
Almost he fancied that he looked again into the eyes of this strange
girl, recalled her unexpected yet delightful frankness, which to him,
with his love of abstract truth, was, after all, so fascinating. Oh,
there was much to be said for this Western world!--much to be said for
those whose part it was to live in it! Yet, never so much as during
that brief night walk through the silent streets, did he realize how
absolutely unfitted he was to be even a temporary sojourner in this vast
city. What would they say of him if they knew,--of him, a breaker of
their laws, a guest, and yet a sinner against all their conventions; a
guest, and yet one whose hand it was which would strike them, some
day or other, the great blow! What would she think of him? He wondered
whether she would realize the truth, whether she would understand.
Almost as he asked himself the question, he smiled. To him it seemed a
strange proof of the danger in which a weaker man would stand of
passing under the yoke of this hateful Western civilization. To dream of
her--yes! To see her face shining upon him from every beautiful place,
to feel the delight of her presence with every delicious sensation,--the
warmth of the sunlight, the perfume of the blossoms he loved! There was
joy in this, the joy of the artist and the lover. But to find her in his
life, a real person, a daughter of this new world, whose every instinct
would be at war with his--that way lay slavery! He brushed the very
thought from him.
As he reached the door of his house in St. James’ Square, it opened
slowly before him. He had brought his own servants from his own country,
and in their master’s absence sleep was not for them. His butler spoke
to him in his own language. The Prince nodded and passed on. On his
study table--a curious note of modernism where everything seemed to
belong to a bygone world--was a cablegram. He tore it open. It consisted
of one word only. He let the thin paper fall fluttering from his
fingers. So the time was fixed!
Then Soto came gliding noiselessly into the room, fully dressed, with
tireless eyes but wan face,--Soto, the prototype of his master, the most
perfect secretary and servant evolved through all the years.
“Master,” he said, “there has been trouble here. An Englishman came with
this card.”
The Prince took it, and read the name of Inspector Jacks.
“Well?” he murmured.
“The man asked questions,” Soto continued. “We spoke English so badly
that he was puzzled. He went away, but he will come again.”
The Prince smiled, and laid his hand almost caressingly upon the other’s
shoulder.
“It is of no consequence, Soto,” he said,--“no consequence whatever.”