"Get into that room or I'll knock your heads off!" I whispered in an
ungovernable rage.
They began to chatter at me but thought better of it and fled; and I
tore the key from their door and locked it on the outside. Then I went
downstairs and out to the stable where I found Raoul and gave him the
key.
"You will take a couple of gallons of sheep-dip," said I, still in a
cold fury, "and you will go up and fill their bathtub with it, and then
you may call me."
"Oh," said Raoul, coolly comprehending, "I can souse them myself,
Monsieur."
"Tell them I'll beat them to death if they stir until I permit it," I
added. "Also be good enough to burn their clothing and bedding, and
fumigate their rooms."
"Give yourself no anxiety, Monsieur," he said, amused.
*XXII*
*PARTICEPS CRIMINIS*
Toward the dinner hour excitement in the house became intense as the
royal circus fussed and pinned and basted and struggled with its
impromptu costumes.
Bells jangled to summon Thusis and Clelia; the Princess Pudelstoff was
too fat to braid her own hair; the Countess Manntrapp required basting
into her boy's breeches; the Queen, desiring to go as the infant
Germania, had pasted tin-foil all over her high Austrian corset, but
still it didn't resemble armor, nor did the oval boiler-lid furnished by
Josephine Vannis particularly resemble a shield.
Otherwise a blonde wig of tow in two obese braids and a shiny fireman's
helmet of 1840 which I discovered in the garret, consoled the queen. To
these properties I rashly added an eel-spear; and then, remembering her
quick temper, I feared for King Constantine, wondering whether, if
fatally prodded, he would name me as accessory after the fact.
As for the men, they continually rang for Raoul who acted as dresser and
as messenger between them and Josephine Vannis who had constructed their
costumes from odd scraps and from such of their own garments as would
serve.
Admiral Lauterlaus was monstrous as a sailor-boy of six; Von Bummelzug,
Eddin Bey, Von Dungheim, and Secretary Gizzler were school-lads in
socks, bare knees, and denim blouses. King Constantine who, it
appeared, rather fancied his own legs, went as a smirking doll in a
costume principally constructed out of his wife's underclothes.
But the most gruesome sight of all was Ferdinand as a youthful
ballet-girl; and he most horridly resembled an elephant on his hind legs
in a stick-out tulle skirt, and his enormous feet, cross-ribboned, went
shuffling and flapping to and fro as he waddled about busy with powder
and rouge.
Raoul laced his stays and tugged in vain to indent his bulk. It was
useless, but we got him into his corsage and left him before a mirror
ponderously prancing in imitation of the pony ballet, and singing
la-la-la! furtively peeping the while at his own proportions with the
unfeigned pleasure of perfect approval.
Really, except for the characters of these impossible individuals, the
jolly noise and confusion they made with their preparations and the
lively excitement that pervaded hall, corridor and stair, resembled the
same sort of delightful uproar one hears at a week-end party in a big
country house under similar circumstances.
The queen's bell had been jangling persistently for some minutes when,
stepping from my room into the hallway to see whether anybody was
answering it, I came face to face with Thusis.
Warm, and delicately flushed with her exertions, she was half vexed,
half laughing now as she cast a prudent glance right and left along the
corridor before slipping through the door into my room. I followed,
locking the door.
"Michael," she began, "the queen says there are not enough women in the
party and she insists that Clelia and I find costumes and join. I was
furious--and she's making a violent row about it now, insisting,
bullying, ordering Clelia about----"
"What! Ordering my servants about!" I interrupted angrily.
"Yes--your servants, Michael," dropping me an ironical curtsey which
brought me back to my senses. We both laughed. And suddenly it occurred
to me how adorable Thusis would be at a baby-party.
"Why not?" I exclaimed. "Why not drop hostilities for an hour and enjoy
the ridiculous? Absurdity always appeals to you, anyway, Thusis," I
added, "and the entire situation is so impossible that it ought to
attract you!"
"It does," she admitted with that engaging and reckless little laugh I
had come to know so well. "Besides, you are my host, Michael, and I am
under your roof. So who your ragamuffin-bobtail guests may be does not
concern me. Clelia and I are not responsible, are we?"
"Not at all," said I. "The ignominy of this royal riff-raff rests upon
my shoulders. Anyway, you do not need to dance except with me," I added
reassuringly.
"Eddin Bey is rather attractive," she mused, letting her glance rest on
me sideways while the innocent pleasure of this discovery parted her
lips in a honeyed smile.
"All right," said I shortly, "dance with him!"
"Michael----"
"Go ahead and dance with him," I repeated, stabbed by the most ignoble
of emotions.
"What an absolute boy you can be," she said. "If I do this thing at all
it is because the tension of months is becoming unendurable. Reaction
from the tragic usually lands one on the edges of the grotesque.... If
you had been a girl, Michael, always sheltered, secure, living a
colorless restricted life, and if you suddenly were cast upon your own
feet with the accumulated responsibility of your race on your
shoulders,--and if, in the very middle of your first years of liberty
and opportunity you suddenly found this wonderful world flaming like
hell all about you, and all its inhabitants at each other's throats, and
all delight in living turned to hate and fear--and if you concluded to
take your fate into your own hands and run away from authority, and, in
your own way, fight the good fight for God and King and Country,--and if
the strain became, for an hour, too great--wouldn't you react--perhaps
to the verge of folly?"
"You bet I would, sweetness," said I, taking her lovely hands in mine.
"I was a school-girl," she said, "when--it devolved upon me, and upon
Clelia, to determine our own futures.... The loss of parents is
a--bewildering thing.... Our mania was travel and education to fit us
for--for what we considered to be our rightful future positions in the
world.... We have been in your country,--I don't mean Chile. We know
England and France--God bless them both. Then, owing deference anyway
if not perhaps blind obedience to the--to a--gentleman in Italy----"
"The King," I said soberly.
"Yes, the King of Italy. We were expected to return to Rome and defer
to him all questions concerning our future.... And we ran away."
"Why, Thusis?"
"Because we happen to have minds of our own, Michael."
"And you immediately employed them by concocting a plot to kidnap some
kings!" I said. "Oh, Thusis, you are the limit!"
"I know I am," she said naively. "A mind that does not range to its
extremest limits is a rather dull one, isn't it?"
"It is," I admitted, laughing and crushing her hands between my own.
"You are delightfully right, Thusis; you are always deliciously right.
I don't know who you are except that you're the lovely and mysterious
Laughing Girl. What else you may be I don't know, dearest, but you are
doubtless somebody or the King of Italy wouldn't bother his clever head
about you and your sister."
"He _does_ bother, I am afraid," admitted Thusis, smiling. "I'm sorry
we've been obliged to annoy him. But it couldn't be helped, because we
differed, politically, with the King of Italy. And we ran away from
Rome to prove to him that our conception of world-politics was right and
his was wrong. And we expect him, some day, to be very grateful to
us--because we really are, Clelia and I, two of his most loyal
subjects."
She spoke so frankly, so earnestly, that I dared make no jest of what
she said.
However, I think she saw a glimmer in my eyes, for she flushed.
"Nothing," she said, "is sacred to a Yankee. Let me go."
"Shall I tell you what is sacred to a Yankee, Thusis?" said I, retaining
her hands.
"No!"
"I'll tell you all the same: liberty of mind!--liberty within
law!--liberty within the frontiers of conscience."
"Then you do not deny these privileges to me?"
"They _are_ yours, Thusis. No man can deny essential rights and
liberties."
"You believe I have a right to act as my conscience dictates?"
"Absolutely."
"To run away from authority?"
"If your mind approves."
"And--and devote my life--risk it--to free my native land and restore to
my sovereign what once belonged to him?"
"Naxos?"
"Yes."
I said gravely: "If, in your self-dedication to this work there be no
ulterior motive;--if you undertake this unselfishly, and with a heart
clean of all personal ambition--then, Thusis, I say, go on! ... And I am
at your service."
Twice she started to speak, and hesitated. In her clear eyes, so
intently, almost painfully fixed on mine, I saw she was fiercely
pondering my words. Her intense and youthful seriousness in her
concentration held me fascinated. And for a little while neither one of
us stirred.
And it gradually began to appear to me that what I had said to her had
suddenly opened to her young and ardent eyes a totally new view of some
things in the world with which she had, perhaps, believed herself
thoroughly familiar.
She turned from her absorption; and now she was presented to me in
profile with downcast eyes and bitten lip, and a least relaxation of her
slender figure which had been so straight and rigid.
It was becoming evident that she had nothing further to say to me,--no
reply to make to what I had rather ponderously propounded as an ethical
axiom.
But, as responding to the restless pressure, I released her hands, she
turned back and stood looking at me out of painfully perplexed
eyes--eyes that lacked no courage, either, yet doubted, now, almost
wistfully.
Then, not speaking, she unlocked my door and went out.
Smith knocked at the doorway communicating between our apartments, and
came in at my absent-minded invitation.
"Of course _you're_ not in this, are you, Michael?" he inquired.
"We weren't asked. Besides, there are too many men now, and the Queen
wants Thusis, Clelia, and Josephine Vannis to serve dinner in costume
and join the party afterward."
"Are they going to do it?" he asked, surprised and amused.
"I don't know.... Tell me, Smith, whom do you suspect Thusis to be? I
can see you have some theory concerning Clelia--some idea. Haven't
you?"
"Yes, I have."
"Would you care to share it with me?"
"Yes. But I can't."
"Could you tell me why you can't?"
"I think I may tell you that much. The King of Italy requested me to
maintain silence in the possible event of my discovering the identity of
Thusis and Clelia. I am here on the King's service, with certain
definite orders. I shall scrupulously observe these orders. Among
these is his request concerning the identity of these two charming young
girls."
"Just one thing, then. _Have_ you discovered the identity of Thusis?"
"No."
"Of Clelia?"
He reddened. "Yes, I have," he said. "Or rather she has confirmed what
I had begun to suspect."
"Clelia has told you who she is!" I exclaimed.
"She has."
"Isn't that disobedience of orders?"
"She told me before I could stop her. I never dreamed she was going to
tell me. It came out--like a bolt of lightning--while I--I
was--slipping over her finger that ring I used to wear----"
"She wears it!"
"Yes. She was glorious. She----"
"And she's going to marry you?"
"Yes, God bless her."
So I wrung his hand in silence and strove hard not to let any comparison
of his situation and mine taint with the slightest trace of bitterness
my happiness in his good fortune and my cordial recognition of it now.
Thusis was not mentioned between us. He didn't say "buck up, old chap,"
or "go in and win," or any insincere thing of that sort, for I felt that
he believed my case to be hopeless.
Presently he returned to his room and closed the door. And I sat down
at my table and produced pen and paper with a view to further poetry--my
only form of relief from grief.
But rhymes evaded me; and finally I gave it up and rested my head on
both hands, unhappy, unsatisfied, feeling that I was a failure, and
always had been one.
After all what could such a glorious young thing as Thusis see in an
interior decorator from New York?--a profession into which had minced
all the lady-like young men and lisping sissies in Manhattan!
Perhaps, after all, the profession was all right, but the people who
practiced it were weird and incompetent. And as for me I was perfectly
aware that I had no taste, no color sense, no glimmering idea of
composition.
Doubtless my artistic and financial success had been due to my utter
incapacity.