Will the reader permit us to place him somewhere between earth and sky
two days after the events recorded in the last chapter had occurred? From
this exalted position, and provided, as he is, with far-seeing eyes, he
must observe, with more or less interest, that the streets of Rexopolis,
the capital of Rexania, are thronged with crowds of people who move
hither and thither with a restlessness apparently due to constrained
excitement that has not yet crystallized into any set purpose. Around
the palace, he will notice, regiments of soldiers stand on guard,
while, now and then, up or down the avenues of the well-laid-out city
dash squadrons of light cavalry. The sight will suggest to him that
Rexopolis, at the crisis at which he views it, represents a microcosm in
which all that is characteristic of Old-World monarchies finds physical
expression—a restless and discontented people, an army half-hearted in
its defence of the palace and what that building represents, mystery
and misrepresentation and misery inside the king’s abode, and the wild
mutterings of protest and warning outside the sacred precincts of an
anachronistic cult.
But it strains the reader’s eyes to look so far afield. Back across the
wide blue expanse of the broad Atlantic his gaze returns, and straight
beneath him he sees various people who approach each other slowly,
ignorant of the strange fact that the impending upheaval in a minor city
of Europe is to have a marked influence upon their respective lives.
Behold Ludovics, the restless victim of too much patriotism and too
little self-control, pausing in helpless hesitation outside the gateway
of a road-house not many miles above Harlem Bridge. The afternoon has
grown warm, and Ludovics has walked far and fast. Is it strange that he
craves a stimulant?
Look forward, farther eastward. If your eye has not grown weary, you
will observe that a youth and two women are seated on the piazza of
the Country Club, engaged in the harmless occupation of discussing the
adaptability of the weather and the roads to a spin on their wheels.
Unless our impressions are deceptive, the youth is Ned Strong, and one
of the women is his sister. You have not yet been introduced to their
companion, Mrs. Brevoort, but surely you have heard of the beautiful
widow who last season made herself famous on two continents by refusing
to turn over to an English peer her fortune and her liberty. There are
those who say that she was sufficiently eccentric to love her husband and
to mourn him dead, but the impression has prevailed in the Westchester
set of late that what an English duke failed to accomplish Ned Strong
bids fair to compass.
Turning your gaze away from this attractive trio, after you have noted,
perhaps, that an air of melancholy seems to surround the tall, lithe
figure of Kate Strong, you will observe that Norman Benedict has just
left a New York train at the New Rochelle station, and that his face
bears an expression of suppressed excitement kept in check by a set
purpose that may at any moment encounter insuperable obstacles. If you
watch him a moment, you will see that he bargains with the driver of a
light, open carriage, and, after making terms, enters the vehicle and is
driven toward the Sound.
Has your eye grown weary? Surely Prince Carlo is worthy of a little optic
effort on your part. See him seated on the balcony of the ramshackle old
manor house, his cheek resting on his hand as he gazes mournfully across
the restless waves of the Sound and wonders what passes in the palace
at Rexopolis. Could he see, as we have seen, the restless populace, the
armed guards, the busy cavalry, he would know that a crisis in the fate
of his country is at hand, and the look of settled melancholy on his
handsome face would change to an expression of mingled anger and despair.
But Prince Carlo is young, and youth inclines to hope. The beauty of
the scene that lies before him on this bracing autumnal afternoon is
conducive to an optimistic mood, and, in spite of the seemingly desperate
character of his position, the young man dreams rather of love than war,
and the smiling face of a fair-haired American girl comes between him and
the frowning countenance of red-scarred revolution.
Perhaps Prince Carlo is undergoing a temptation different from any that
ever before assaulted a son of kings. It is possible that under the
influence of a caressing environment, lulling his senses by the beauty
of earth, and sea and sky and the gentle kisses of the warm south wind,
he thinks with a shudder of the horrors that surround him in a palace
far away, and longs for the peace that life in a land where it would
be “always afternoon” would bestow. What if his father died and he,
the crown prince, should never return to Rexania? What if, taking to
his heart a wife who would be his queen in a kingdom where no traitors
lurked, he should forever abandon the cares and perils that had made his
father’s existence one long nightmare, to which death alone could bring
relief? It might be that the historians of his country would call him, in
the years to come, a traitor to the cause he had been born into the world
to uphold, the Judas Iscariot of age-end monarchy. But, for all that, his
gain would be peace and love.
Prince Carlo’s temptation was not a mere weighing of abstract
propositions, nor even the natural inclination of an imaginative youth
to take the flower-bedecked path of least resistance. There was an
influence at work to make him subservient to the wishes of the men
surrounding him that none of them suspected and that he himself only
vaguely realized. How great an impression the few hours he had spent in
Kate Strong’s companionship had made upon him he was just beginning dimly
to appreciate. He found himself practically unable to compel his mind to
dwell for any great length of time on the weighty problems that were his
to solve. He would discover, to his dismay, that while mentally in search
of a path that would lead him in honor from the difficulties that beset
him, his mind obstinately refused to confine itself to his immediate
environment and all that was involved therein, and would devote itself to
reproducing for his delight the tones of a maiden’s voice, the gleam of
her eloquent eyes, the fascinations of her gestures and her smiles.
He upon whom rested the destinies of a nation—perhaps the future of
institutions hallowed by time and claiming a divine origin—had become
little more than a love-sick youth, gazing dreamily upon the heaving
bosom of a land-locked sea and longing for the presence of the woman his
young heart craved.
Thus beneath us have we seen a few of the countless millions upon whom
the September sun shone down that day; and we know that in their comings
and their goings they wove unconsciously that web of destiny whose warp
and woof fashion the garment that hides the mystery of life.